A little while back, my friend UnkleE suggested that I should consider some questions that he believes are problematic for atheism as a worldview. He listed 5 questions, and I want to take them one at a time, so they can each get the focus they deserve.
That said, my initial responses to each of these questions may not be very long. Instead, I’d like to use each of these posts as a launchpad for discussion. I know these are issues that UnkleE (and probably many of you) have thought about at length, and I’d like to consider those arguments as fully as possible without subjecting everyone to my own rambling preamble. So, here’s question 1:
Do we have free will? If so, how? If not how can any choice be based on evidence rather than brain processes?
I don’t know.
I’m aware that a number of physicists and other scientists sometimes argue that free will is an illusion. That was shocking to me when I first heard it, but I now realize what they’re saying.
Imagine you could go back in time to a point where a decision was made on something seemingly insignificant. In 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash. It’s said that another musician, Tommy Allsup, was going to be on the plane instead of Ritchie Valens, but they flipped a coin for it, and Valens “won.” If you could go back in time and witness that coin flip without interfering, would anything happen differently? Whoever came up with the idea of flipping for it thought of that for very specific reasons that would still be the same if it happened over again. Allsup flipped the coin at a specific level of force, and it flipped through specific atmospheric conditions. Those things would still be the same if you were watching it happen. Valens called “heads,” which he did for specific reasons, even if they were subconscious. In other words, every single thing that happened, even though they were seemingly random, happened in particular ways for particular reasons. If you could replay it over, there’s no reason to think anything would play out differently.
And every decision you’ve ever made, you made for specific reasons, even if the decision was close. If you went back in time and made the decision over again, but only knew the same things you knew at that moment, could you have made any other decision?
There’s no real way to test this, but the thought experiment leads many to conclude that true “free will” is not really possible.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I do think that if you could replay decisions, it’s unlikely they would ever change. But that’s not really what I think of when I think of free will. Just because I made all my decisions for specific reasons and was “powerless,” in a way, to do anything different, that doesn’t mean that I had no control over the decisions. Thought processes were still firing in my brain as I calculated a number of factors, considered past experiences, estimated probabilities, and tried to predict possible outcomes. I might always come to the same conclusion in the same circumstances, but my mind is still very active in the process.
[H]ow can any choice be based on evidence rather than brain processes?
I think any choice — any good choice — should be using both. Brain processes deal with information, and that’s all that evidence is, so I see them as being very closely related.
Ultimately, I don’t see how this question causes a problem for atheism. I may have more to say about it in the comment thread, but I’ll need to see the case against atheism filled out a bit more before I can really weigh in on it.
Finding Truth 
Hi Travis,
That post (and the discussion which followed) of yours opened up some old memories! I enjoyed reading through the discussion again, and I feel even more strongly than I did then that your comment here and the post don’t actually address the dilemmas I am raising.
Your blog post was titled “A pragmatic approach to free will”, and that’s an accurate description. Rather than try to argue either that (1) we do have libertarian freewill, or (2) that we don’t, but we can still resolve the dilemmas of moral responsibility, rationality and illusion, your argument seems to be that:
1. Choice can “arise through causative factors outside of our awareness”.
2. Our consciousness is not a unified thing but “multifaceted, distributed and interdependent”.
3. We should believe in freewill because it is better that way (for a range of reasons).
4. Our experience of life wouldn’t be different whether libertarian free will or compatibilism was true. “Is this not sufficient?”
I personally don’t see how 1 & 2 are germane to the questions I have asked, so I won’t pursue them. And I agree with 3. My problem is with 4, which you have echoed in your comment here when you say: ”The subjective experience of choice is compatible with both LFW and determinism.”
So I don’t see anywhere that you have actually answered how we can have moral responsibility, rationality and freedom from illusion (the three dilemmas I outlined). Instead you have offered the view that we can avoid these dilemmas by acting as if we have libertarian freewill (”the rational thing to do is to believe that we actually possess this freedom”).
So I cannot see, having said that, that you should be able to say ”I definitely reject the suggestion that to not accept LFW is to live an illusion or consciously embrace delusion, though I suspect that was more rhetoric than argument.”
I was not “just” being rhetorical, I was making a genuine observation. The dictionary defines “illusion” as “an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience, a deceptive appearance or impression, a false idea or belief”. If naturalism implies no libertarian freewill, but you advise believing there is freewill anyway, then anyone who follows this advice has embraced illusion under that definition.
I have had many discussions with atheists over the years, and read many articles and blogs by atheists. One of the common features is the critique of religion that it is an illusion, a crutch. They often recognise that atheism takes away the crutch and leaves one exposed to a more austere world without the comforts of religion or teleology, but they say living according to the truth is worth it.
So I am surprised that you would take this view to embrace a feeling that actually isn’t true.
Now I reckon your response might be: ”You may not understand the compatibilist position if you think that libertarian free will is the only option that corresponds with the “virtually universal human experience” of free will. The compatibilist embraces the subjective experience of choice and sees that this is sufficient even if determinism is true.”
But this is missing the point as I said at the start. I agree that we may not be able to distinguish experientially the difference between compatibilism and libertarian freewill, but I am not disputing that. I am discussing the actual truth of the situation, not just how it feels. You seem to be choosing to address the dilemmas by ignoring them and being satisfied with what feels OK.
So I’d be interested if you have a way of providing a logical and evidence-based argument that disarms those three dilemmas in truth rather than just subjectively.
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Eric,
Based on your response I think I can say that you did not receive the message I was intending to get across with my previous comment (and the old post). I consider the compatibilist position to be an honest assessment of reality. I am not advocating that we embrace something we know to be false and just pretend for the benefits. I’m instead advocating a rejection of the charge that free will must be libertarian and an embrace of the validity of compatibilism.
Now, with regard to your dilemmas, you claim that I have missed the point and am ignoring the problems which arise from the objective truth of the situation by resting on what feels OK. Of course I disagree and think it is just the opposite – that is is you who have missed the point by insisting that free will is only possibly meaningful if it is the libertarian variety. So if you think that the existence of free will avoids your dilemmas (though to be honest I don’t think that any kind of free will is important to the claim of rationality, as previously noted) then I am interested in your explanation of why it must be libertarian. Is that you simply reject the validity of compatibilism?
Lastly, I find your closing comment to be revealing an interesting assumption:
To me, this implies that you think that the libertarian position is logically and evidentially supported and is not subjectively grounded. Do you believe that? If so, on what basis?
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Hey UnkleE,
I’m sorry that you think I’m being dismissive — that’s really not my intent. I just don’t see how naturalism creates the problem you’re describing. As I understand compatibilism, I think it adequately explains our experience of free will. In fact, I find it much more likely than libertarian free will.
When I make a decision about something, it’s definitely tied to a causal chain — I would expect nothing less. But choice is still happening. I’m still a “free moral agent.”
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Eric,
I woke up this morning feeling like my previous comment just threw the ball back into your court without adequately trying to revisit your objections, so I wanted to add something that more specifically deals with the concerns you raise. Though I am still interested in your explanation for why our conception of free will must be libertarian and not compatibilist before it can satisfy these concerns, here’s a more direct attempt to explain my perspective on those issues.
1) Moral Responsibility: Let me first grant that our intuitions about moral responsibility are deeply tied to agency. We find people less culpable when we perceive that they held less ownership over their actions. Setting aside the debate about whether this is a proper intuition in the first place, I argue that the compatibilist view can satisfy that intuition. If, as you acknowledged, the subjective experience is indistinguishable between LFW and compatibilism then we can agree that in either case, we are all able to recognize the phenomenal difference between intentional and unintentional or coerced action. It is this recognition which matters. We care whether a party consciously acted with intentions of malice, not whether they possess an uncaused faculty. Moral agency is sustained by the recognition of intention even if that is a subjective phenomenon.
2) Rationality: I’m largely just rephrasing my prior comments on this, which have little to do with free will, but hopefully I can provide some additional clarity. Formal systems (e.g., logical reasoning or mathematics) rest on axioms and rules. One could presuppose that these axioms and rules are transcendent entities in the universe (or God’s mind), or one could posit that the regularity of the interaction of matter-energy at the human scale has led to the evolution of neurology which interprets those interactions through the lens of the formal systems we employ. I grant that we don’t actually know whether these formal systems are truly representative of the nature of reality, but we can pragmatically observe that they do what we need them to do and so accept them as the best option we have. If this evolved faculty is thus intricately coupled to the formal system itself then there is no disconnect – the neurological activity that takes place within our self-perception is itself a source and expression of the formal system we call logical reasoning.
3) Illusions: Again, let me first grant that some naturalists are content to apply the ‘illusion’ label to just about everything subjective, but I find the “who’s experiencing the illusion?” retort to raise a legitimate issue with that view. In this case you seem to be taking the stance that if something is known subjectively and we cannot precisely explain it in objective terms, then the acceptance of an objective description renders the subjective experience an illusion. This is the hard problem of consciousness in a nutshell. That we cannot adequately capture the full subjective experience in objective terms is not a surprise to me, but that does not entail that the objective description is thus wrong, nor does it entail that this inadequacy is evidence of something which transcends the ontology provided by the objective description. This is only evidence of two perspectives: an internal (or self-referential) perspective and an external perspective, both of which I take to be equally real and capable of offering valid descriptions of reality.
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Hi Nate,
I don’t want to make accusations about intent – that would be unfair and arrogant – but I think that just noting compatibilism isn’t enough to explain the problem. Let me have one more go at explaining why, given physicalism, I don’t believe you can say you are a free moral agent.
1. You agreed before that our choices are determined by physical causal chains, and you seem to still agree with that. If the physical is all there is, then physical causal chains explain everything that happens (except for random events, if there are any, which cannot be seen as choices).
2. Libertarian free will has two requirements – (1) the choice occurs within our own brains (i.e. it isn’t made externally to us), and (2) even given all the causal and physical process realities, we could have made a different choice than the one we made – we have some physically uncaused component of the self which can direct our decisions, at least sometimes. But compatibilism requires only (1), and it denies (2). Under compatibilism, there is no uncaused component, ever.
3. Therefore, if compatibilism is true, the decisions we make are not forced on us from the outside, but we still could have made no other in the given circumstances. The choice may feel the same but the reality in our brains is very different.
4. Thus you are a choosing moral agent, but you are not free to choose differently, you can only choose differently if the brain states and inputs are different. This is a crucial conclusion, and I wonder whether you accept it? If you don’t accept it, where in my reasoning to you disagree?
I’ll leave it there for now. I think we have to be clear if we both understand compatibilism the same before I can go on to argue that compatibilism present significant problems. Thanks.
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Hi Nate, thanks for the second comment, it helped a lot. Before I have a go at responding, I wonder if you could check out my comment to Nate (above) please. There I outline what I understand to be the basic difference between libertarian free will and compatibilism. It would be good to check whether we are agreed on that before I attempt a response. Thanks.
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@Nate
Good grief! Why on earth are you sorry?
He is largely dismissive of your deconversion and considers it was primarily your ”wrong” sect that was responsible for you walking away from god-belief, and likely has a similar lack of regard for every other deconvert..
He is ever-so-politely dismissive of practically every single writer here and elsewhere that does not agree with his perspective, (”Oh no, I’ll bet Ark is going to mention the arse-roasting he received from Bernard over Nazareth again” )
He regularly uses statements such as ”consensus” and blithely dismisses other ”consensus”.
”I guess it’s fair to say I’m disappointed in that response.”
Yes, well, the feeling is ever mutual,believe me.
He is very very careful never to commit himself on any issue that might just expose him and his silly worn put apologetic arguments, but he is Viper-fast with a retort where he thinks he can cut the legs from under your argument and many a time it looks like he has constructed a comment or reply to d exactly this.
He cherry-picks his way through doctrine and scholars, dismissing what and who he doesn’t regard relevant proceeding to poke holes in anything and everything like a Catholic priest with a pin in a Contraceptive factory.
And as had been noted on numerous occasions, when he finds his backside about to be handed to him on a plate he will extricate himself and disappear until the next time he reckons there is a topic he can slither back and leave another bucketful-of-bollocks.
So please, Nate. Never apologise for being dismissive towards our Favorite Moderate(sic) Apologist..
Remember, he believes an invisible, genocidal monster watches over us and deserves to be worshiped.
If such garbage does not deserve to be dismissed I don’t know what does.
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UnkleE/everyone,
I don’t understand the point.
Are you suggestion that to really have freewill, one should be able to make a free choice without any influence of wants, desires, hopes, or any other external factors? If so, that’s just stupid.
Also, God doesn’t remove, fix or help that. So what’s the point?
of course we make decisions and choose options based on what we want, what we hope for, what we think is right, or rewarding in some way, etc, etc… Of course we do. And to say that the choice you made, based on such things, wasn’t really a choice, because you’d always make the same choice if you could repeat the scenario over and over is also ridiculous, because it’s just an un-testable assertion. AND, God doesn’t fix that either.
So IF we don’t have “freewill” now, then we still don’t under any god.
But to say that we don’t have the ability to choose between options sounds too much like an excuse, and too much like an effort to try and dismiss the idea of the bible’s point on freewill or free moral agents, and is really moot since we cant actually test it.
An untestable idea is probably not the best proof for another untestable idea.
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Yeah, I think I agree with this.
Here’s why I don’t really find it problematic:
Shortly, we’ll be able to look back on this comment and say that I was never “free” to respond in any other way. Yet as I type it, I have deleted and rewritten the response several times. I even had to backspace and correct typos in “respond”, “rewritten”, and “backspace” that could have been left as typos if I had been watching my fingers rather than my screen while I was writing it. Throughout this commenting process, I’m making decisions. I’m considering possible ways of responding and selecting what seems to be the best path forward at the moment. These decisions are based on a number of factors: our past conversations, my knowledge of English grammar, the overall points that I’m trying to get across, my current mood, the fact that I currently have power and internet access, etc. But I’m still the one making these decisions. Yes, they’re based on a long causal chain of events that I’m not entirely in control of — but I’m still at least partially in control of these specific decisions right now and the specific decisions that I’ve made in the past. This is evident to me in that I can think of different ways of responding. I obviously can’t respond in each of those ways simultaneously, so I must make decisions about which way to go. And I bear responsibility for those specific decisions.
We live in a universe built around cause and effect. It’s natural, and a necessity, that the things we do are related to causal chains. That doesn’t completely remove our culpability in the things we do. Sometimes we’re victims of circumstance, but typically, we still bear responsibility for the things we do.
I’m curious as to how it could be otherwise. How could there be some part of us completely removed from cause and effect? How would that work?
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Eric,
I agree with this, with the crucial clarification in #4 that “you” subsumes the “brain states”, so that it effectively says that “you could only choose different if you and inputs are different”. I make this clarification because there is a subtle inference in your language that the self is something separate. For example, by saying “you are not free to choose separately” you have painted a picture in which we see ourselves being forced against our will, but obviously that is not the actual experience.
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Hi Nate, I’m glad we seem to be agreed on definitions, and what we each believe is true. But there is one matter I need to check please.
“But I’m still the one making these decisions. Yes, they’re based on a long causal chain of events that I’m not entirely in control of — but I’m still at least partially in control of these specific decisions right now and the specific decisions that I’ve made in the past.”
We need to be very clear here. According to physicalism, our thoughts and beliefs are epiphenomena, mental states that are by-products of our brain physical processes. According to compatibilism, there is no “you” outside of those processes, and no “you” to control those processes. Those processes and epiphenomena are “you”. They occur inside your brain, which is my (1) requirement, but they could not be any different granted the previous brain states and inputs (my (2) requirement).
So any “control” you exercise is limited to the processes going on in your brain. There is no ability to change them from what the previous states and inputs determine. That is what you have agreed with if you still accept my last comment. If you think you do actually control them, then we have to go back and discuss determinism again, but if this was just your way of describing (1), then we are good to go on.
It remains true, of course, that it feels like you are making choices, but if compatibilism is true, that feeling is just another epiphenomenon and isn’t the actual case. But it does show how persistent the illusion of free agency is if compatibilism is true, or else it is evidence that compatibilism is false.
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Eric,
That last paragraph clearly demonstrates that you are not considering compatibilism on its own terms. You require choice and freedom to be libertarian, define the subjective state as epiphenomenal (i.e. secondary) to the objective state (versus being two sides of the same coin) and suggest that the experience of free choice (i.e. having the sense of the choice originating with the self) as evidence against compatibilism. None of this accords with the compatibilist position.
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Hi Travis,
Re your first comment: I certainly don’t want, and didn’t intend, to suggest that the self is something separate. I was trying to help Nate to see exactly the opposite! My point was that if our brain states are us, then there is no separate “us” to interfere with the brain processes.
Re your second comment:
1. Leaving aside my alleged misunderstandings of compatibilism, do you agree with my view, against Nate, that compatibilism doesn’t allow him to exercise control in sense 2 (there is some physically uncaused component of the self that can change the course of brain events), but only in sense 1 (the choice occurs within our own brains, not externally)? This is the crucial point for my last comment.
2. I don’t require choice to be libertarian, I am simply describing the differences between libertarian and compatibilism, which I did in terms of 2 requirements, libertarian requiring both but compatibilism requiring 1 and denying 2. I understood you to agree with that. Is that not so?
3. The matter about epiphenomenalism is peripheral, but I’ll explain what I was getting at. Under physicalism, objects cannot initiate events; events are initiated by other events. For example, a billiard ball doesn’t initiate the movement of another billiard ball. Rather, the event of the first ball moving with momentum initiates the movement of the second ball. And the second ball has no choice in the matter, the laws of physics require it to move with calculable momentum. Philosophers say that, under physicalism, there are no active powers (the ability to initiate action), just passive liabilities (the ability to react to another event which is impinging).
In our brain, the physical processes are primary, they are all passive liabilities. None of them are active powers under physicalism. Now the thoughts and beliefs are either epiphenomena or they are nothing more or less than the brain states. Either way, there is no active power, no agent causation, just passive liabilities. Do you agree?
I chose to simplify to epiphenomenalism because I thought it was likely to be closer to what Nate intuitively believed than believing our thoughts and beliefs simply WERE brain states. So I agree with you that there are two ways compatibilists can view the relationship between thoughts/beliefs and brain states, but neither of them allow agent causation.
So I hope we are agreed that physicalism & compatibilism allow (1) internal choice but not (2) agent causation and active power. If that is still accepted by the three of us, I will next comment begin to argue more fully than I did before that my three dilemmas are real and unresolved.
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Is it just me, or is this stuff only a problem for naturalism if two conditions are met? They seem to be: (1) everyone actually has Free Will™ ; and (2) Free Will™ must require a supernatural thing (like a soul, a spirit, or some ethereal being).
If this is the case, wouldn’t a supernaturalist need to demonstrate or get agreement that these two things are met? I think that absent this, a conversation is just going to go around in circles.
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Eric,
Straight to the points:
1) Compatibilism is defining agency without reliance on something uncaused. So while I agree with the distinction you make from LFW, I disagree with the claim that there is no agency. The brain (and probably more) as a system can be seen as an active agent.
2) OK. If you aren’t requiring LFW for choice then don’t say things like “it feels like you are making choices, but if compatibilism is true, that feeling is just another epiphenomenon and isn’t the actual case”.
3) Energy stored within a system can be used by that system to do work. Such systems are not passive and the fact that the system was established through the input of energy from the outside does not change the fact that the system exists and now has the capacity to be a causative force. If we are such a system then our current state can be seen as both caused (by prior states) and a cause (of future states).
PS: I am traveling and internet access will be off and on for the next week, so my participation here will be spotty.
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Hi Travis,
Take your time, I don’t mind approaching this less intensely. And have a good trip!
1. I didn’t say “agency” but “agent causation” and “active powers”. To my mind that is a significant difference.
2. When I said “feels like making choices” I was referring to being an active power. Perhaps I should have been more precise, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry of I am sometimes less precise than I need to be but I am grappling with complex ideas here and trying to keep my language simple. I certainly don’t want to misrepresent compatibilism, but I also want to prevent any libertarian sounding ideas come in.
Thanks.
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@Sirius Bizinus.
Of course!
For the average naturalist the response would generally be, ”Eh?” or ”Seriously, who cares?”
For the Unklee Clan everything is about making a case for the presuppositional belief of everything and everyone being Maker-Made.
As Gary pointed out some time ago, little more than Mental Masturbation.
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A billiard ball doesn’t initiate any action on its own, because it’s not conscious. We are.
This is not a subject that I’ve investigated as thoroughly as UnkleE and Travis, so some of the terms go over my head a bit. But much of it seems to be overcomplicating the issue. I’ll keep reading along, because I do think the discussion is interesting, but I’m not sure how often I’ll offer input.
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Hi Nate, I’ll reply now, but then we can both wait (if we want to) until Travis is able to reply.
”A billiard ball doesn’t initiate any action on its own, because it’s not conscious. We are.”
Obviously that’s true, but it’s not the point. The point is that under physicalism, as I understand it, no thing (object) can initiate a new course of events (actions), only other actions can. This is clear if everything is physical only, because everything happens in response to laws of physics, so something new can only happen if something changes. So your brain (an object) cannot initiate a new action, only existing processes in your brain (events which conform to and are determined by the laws of physics) can initiate actions. Thus under physicalism there can be no agent causation, only event causation. And so everything becomes a series of sequences of events all determined by physics.
So compatibilistic free will only requires the decision to occur in your brain. It does not require, and does not allow, agent causation in your brain so that a new chain of events is begun that wouldn’t have occurred if they weren’t determined by previous brain processes and inputs. I know this is hard to grab hold of, but as far as I can understand it (and Travis can correct me) that is what compatibilism entails. If you believe in agent causation in our brains, then I think you are a dualist, not a compatibilist.
In my next comment I’ll try to outline more fully why compatibilism (and determinism) have difficulty explaining rational thought.
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Eric,
Just like Nate, I don’t have all the right words to discusd such complex topic and don’t pretend to be an expert. But i think this applies to you too, and all of us here. The main reason being that ‘we’ are the topic here. We’re talking about what it means for us, people, humans, to have free will.
So my question to you is this: how do you make choices? More specifically, how does the agent ‘you’, the part that’s not just your brain, makes choices? How exactly do you exercise that freewill you believe you have?
In other words, if we’re “just” physical minds, what happens is that your brain gets inputs; you read words, you hear something, or you do nothing at all. In all cases, your brain generates thoughts, feelings, experiences something.
Basically, there is first an uncontrolable reaction, some reflexes, followed by more complex thoughts. In turn, you have reactions to these and can, somehow, focus on those thoughts that make you feel right, that make sense to you, that follow from what was going on the instant before. You are thinking about what your body wants you to think about, first, and then you, the agent “you”, somehow can influence the next steps a little bit, just enough to steer the ship. But that steering comes second, because you’re a physical human being, not a mental soul inhabiting a body. You are your body, you are your thoughts. You experience them a lot than you currently realize.
And why was ‘somehow’ used here? Because I dont know how we can do that steering, even if minimal; nobody knows, yet.
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Very interesting and intelligent discussion. Personally, I find it a bit odd to list the question of free will as “a difficult question for atheists.” It’s a difficult question, period.
It seems to me that framing the question this way only encourages some theists’ charming habit of pointing to difficult questions (Can epistemology be pulled by its own bootstraps? What’s the origin of life? What happened before the Big Bang? How does consciousness arise? etc.), claiming that atheists don’t have adequate answers to these questions, and then jumping to “theism must have better answers,” or “theism must be true.” The problem is that theism doesn’t have adequate answers either, and (at the risk of sounding trite) pointing to a gap without offering a positive case, does not constitute an answer.
In fact, I think it could be argued that the question on the existence of LFW is more problematic for (Christian) theism than for atheism, as the theological implications can be troubling no matter the answer. If there is no LFW, the free-will theodicy is no more, there may problems with the doctrine of original sin and the need for vicarious redemption, etc. If there is LFW, this brings questions about God’s omni-properties, whether there’s free will in heaven, whether God has violated free will during the Iron Age (not so much now), etc.
Atheism, by contrast, doesn’t seem to suffer much from whether there is LFW or not, since LFW’s existence has little bearing on God’s existence. At most, LFW might threaten naturalism–or our current understanding of it–without necessitating theism.
Regardless of the consequences of LFW towards atheism vs. theism, neither atheism nor theism addresses directly the existence of LFW, only the existence of a god. Just because atheism and theism take mutually exclusive positions of belief in the existence of gods, does not mean that they can be recruited to offer mutually exclusive positions on every other question.
This reminds me of Alex Malpass’s serious yet humorous refutation of Matt Slick’s “Transcendental Argument for God (TAG)” (the humor was unwittingly injected by Slick, who’s far from being representative of sophisticated theists).
It goes something like this: The disjunctive tautology “Either a god exists or it is not the case that gods exist” is quickly substituted with the false dichotomy “Either God’s existence explains X or God’s nonexistence explains X,” followed by the unsound conclusion that “Since God’s nonexistence cannot explain X then God’s existence must explain X, therefore God exists.”
Having just said how difficult the question of free will is, I think that, in the last few decades, science–specifically physics and neuroscience–has come down overwhelmingly against LFW. I also think that science is agnostic w.r.t. compatibilism, as compatibilism revolves around nuances of definitions of free will. Depending on the operative definition of free will, it may be said to exist (while, under its usual definition, LFW is highly unlikely).
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unkleE: Greetings, I hope you don’t mind if I interject myself into your interesting conversation.
If by “physicalism” you mean that “only the physical exists” I won’t defend physicalism, as I think it’s a bit restrictive. I’d be more comfortable with something like “methodological naturalism.” But frankly, I generally don’t like “isms” or labels like, “oh that makes you a [blank]-ist” only because I don’t always know what other baggage–besides the arguments at hand–I’d be taking on. For these reasons, I prefer to stick with arguments and evidence instead of labels. While clear definitions are important, “ism” and “ist” labels, after all, are not particularly relevant to whether the LFW that you’re defending here can be said to “exist” or not.
But, speaking directly to your points (sans “ism” labels) there is nothing in the laws of physics that prohibit an “action” from following a “non-action.” In fact, inert objects spontaneously initiate “actions” all the time. Think of a neutron sitting outside of a nucleus. It can “sit there” (exist) for an indefinitely long period of time, unchanged. Or, it can, spontaneously, decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron neutrino. These three by-products fly off away from the original location of the neutron and can have interactions with other particles, etc. No “willful agent” required. While one can make statistical predictions as to the probability of decay within a given time interval, there is no way to tell exactly how long (if at all) the decay will take for a particular neutron (one can only speak in terms of statistics with large numbers of neutrons). There is no identifiable cause, and the new particles did not exist anywhere prior to the event (they weren’t inside the neutron or anything like that, they spontaneously formed).
The same thing can be said about an atom emitting a photon. There was no photon inside the atom before the emission of the photon. Initially you have an atom in a higher energy state, then a photon is spontaneously emitted (the exact time when this event happens cannot be determined, nor is there an identifiable cause), and then you have an atom in a lower energy state and a photon flying off at the speed of light. In any region of space you have virtual particles being spontaneously created and annihilated continuously. You can in fact “pop them into existence” by using two oppositely charged metal plates, and measure how much new matter you’ve created out of “nothing.”
Just about every process at the fundamental level is like this.
I think we should be careful when we talk about “causality.” Causality is a very tricky concept that philosophers have been wrestling with for a very long time without a very satisfactory resolution. In science causality is not considered a fundamental concept. At the fundamental level, we don’t speak of A causing B. We talk about evolution of states. If you give me the initial state of a system, I can tell you what that state will evolve into using, say, the field equations of Quantum Mechanics. There’s no “cause” invoked anywhere.
I’m pretty sure (given your arguments for LFW “from intuition” here) that you will find this extremely hard to swallow because it is so counter-intuitive, but here it goes anyway: Time is not a fundamental quantity that flows independent of space and “agents.” It is nothing like what we intuit. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have blown our intuitions out of the water. We simply cannot rely on our intuitions to apprehend the fabric of reality. You may think that event 1 precedes event 2 and another observer may see 2 preceding 1, and neither of you is wrong! If you don’t believe me, then please explain how the GPS in your smart phone works, while relying precisely on these concepts which are built into it. Why am I going on about time? Because for our working “intuitive” definition of “causality” requires time to make “sense” to us.
When you say billiard ball A causes billiard ball B to move, this is merely a heuristic shorthand, as there are many fundamental processes involved, and stopping at any level is simply an arbitrary shorthand. It assumes that you observe the billiard balls shortly before and shortly after the collision. If I played you a movie of A striking B backwards, you would think that B caused A to move. In fact, the laws of physics are completely symmetrical to the “flow” of time at the fundamental level. On the other hand, if I showed you a movie of an egg falling and breaking and played it backwards you would immediately be able to tell that something was wrong. This is because of the fantastically low statistical improbability of the egg assembling itself spontaneously, which corresponds to our experience and we can intuit it. Our sense of the arrow of time is a statistical emergent property. And so is causality.
At a more intuitive level (macroscopic scales like brains or human beings) systems that contain energy and are in highly organized states have the potentiality to spontaneously “cause” actions without any violations to any conservation principles. This does not require a “ghost in the machine.”
One more example. A machine can initiate actions in response to its internal state and its external stimuli. Think IBM’s Watson when it was playing to become the Jeopardy! world champion (by a landslide). While I’m not claiming that Watson has self-awareness, morality, or consciousness or other human-like higher functions, it is, nevertheless, capable of initiating actions and it is, in some sense, an agent.
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G’day AR, I have no objection to your interjecting!
”If by “physicalism” you mean that “only the physical exists” I won’t defend physicalism, as I think it’s a bit restrictive. …. I prefer to stick with arguments and evidence instead of labels.”
Labels save a lot of words if we can agree on their definitions – but that doesn’t always happen. In this case, I think the labels are useful. We understand the labels atheism and theism, even if we may disagree about exact definitions. Atheism generally means that the person believes only what can be empirically established, which generally leads by a process through naturalism to physicalism.
But it is easy to clarify. Do you think there are things and processes other than those described by physics?
”there is nothing in the laws of physics that prohibit an “action” from following a “non-action.”
I disagree. The laws of conservation of momentum and energy tend to prevent a nothing state turning into a something state. There may be exceptions, but those laws are pretty universal.
”In fact, inert objects spontaneously initiate “actions” all the time. Think of a neutron sitting outside of a nucleus. It can “sit there” (exist) for an indefinitely long period of time, unchanged. Or, it can, spontaneously, decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron neutrino.”
The difficulty here is that none of those initial states are “inert”. Atoms are composed of electrons that are orbiting and even the nuclei are vibrating. If you read about quantum theory, you find that everything is moving – particles are fluctuations in quantum fields, etc. So at the quantum level, nothing can ever sit there unchanged.
But all that is at the quantum level, not at the human level. We have discussed that already, and I don’t think anyone thinks that things that apply at the quantum level can be taken to apply at the human level. But even if they could, they would show randomness but not allow choice.
”Causality is a very tricky concept that philosophers have been wrestling with for a very long time without a very satisfactory resolution. In science causality is not considered a fundamental concept.”
Yes, I’ve read some of the discussion son that. Some agree with you, some don’t. But causality is a useful label. If you think the problems with the concept of causality are germane to the discussion of compatibility, then I’m interested to see what you have to say.
”Our sense of the arrow of time is a statistical emergent property. And so is causality.”
Yeah, I’ve read a bit about time too. The fact that mathematics can calculate something doesn’t make it real. But again, if you think time and causality have a bearing on compatibilism, I’m happy to listen.
”it is, nevertheless, capable of initiating actions and it is, in some sense, an agent”
Again, I think this is a misunderstanding. Someone had to build the thing and program the thing. Someone even had to press the on button. Everything it does is in response to those actions. It would be very freaky if it was able to plug itself in, switch itself on and then program itself!
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Eric,
Just a moment to follow-up. You’re trying to “prevent any libertarian sounding ideas” from coming in and I’m trying to prevent the libertarian framework from hoarding all the words we use to describe the subjective experience, but I think we both actually know what is meant by each position, so let’s go ahead with exclusively assigning “agent causation” to that thing which distinguishes LFW from non-libertarian accounts and get on with the explanation for why that is necessary for the issues you raised.
It’ll be a couple days before I check-in again.
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Unklee wrote:
Hallelujah!!! Can I get a frakking Amen, please? Somebody …. Anybody ?
And like the maths example, just because you state that your god communicates by Divine Revelation and you have personally experienced it does not make it real!
Phew ….At last!
Ark.
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