Free Will and Determinism

[Jaxb]

[shunyadragon]

sounds like a version of compatiblism.

Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism.

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[fm93]

The position for which you're arguing is called compatibilism. If I may offer some brief comments:


-You seem to be presupposing that there indeed ARE actions for which people can be held morally responsible, when that assertion is very often the issue being disputed.

-Your definition of determinism as "the idea that every event including human behavior has a sufficient cause other than itself" is unusual.

-You don't seem to have defined exactly what you mean by "one's true self."

-Regarding your rebuttal of Taylor, what's your response to the suggestion that the process of deliberation itself is determined?

[HumbleThinker]

I am by no means a trained philosopher, so do not give my words any more weight than your average shlub.

As others have pointed out, what you are arguing is termed compatiblism. In that vein, I might suggest altering condition 1) to read "desires" (which you note in a later paragraph) instead of "true self" as the former is more specific and less abstract than the latter. I understand that you may have wrote it this way as an attempt to counter the "mad scientist" rebuttal, but it is far too vague, at least as defined, to be helpful to your argument.

I'm a little unclear on your usage of praiseworthy and blameworthy. Praiseworthy seems to be based on an act being rewarded. The condition for being blameworthy does not seem to be explicitly stated, but would I be correct in assuming that it would be based on an act being punished? If so, these two conditions don't seem to offer a method of differentiating a free act in the compatiblist sense from a purely determined act. What is stopping a purely determined praiseworthy act from being rewarded and a purely determined blameworthy act from being punished?

Also, I think your definition of determinism is outmoded. This excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may better explain why than my own words would:
In sum, sufficient causes alone don't properly differentiate between a free act and a determined act, but only a radically free act (an act made with no causes external to the will of the actor) and a non-radically free act, which encompasses both a subset of free acts and determined acts. Defined this way, determinism isn't a particularly powerful or explanatory process.

I've personally always found the process of deliberation problematic for at least some forms of compatiblism. On the one hand, if the deliberation process is itself determined by external causes, then it is simply a middle-man process that leads to the same conclusions as hard determinism. Yet on the other hand, if the deliberation process itself is not determined, then what guarantee is there of reaching the supposedly inevitable conclusion? If there is no guarantee, then what is different between this and all but the most radical notions of free will? Most have us making decisions by some form of reasoning. So in what way is an act determined in this case?

The issue of capability also seems arbitrarily defined to support the compatiblist position. Why should a person be blamed or praised for an act they had not volitional control over? If there is a causal connection between desire and action, which there seems to be in your position, then having no control over the efficient cause means you have no control over the act, which leads right back to hard determinism. If I have no desires other than those that I happen to have at any given moment and cannot do otherwise than those desires, then we are no different than programmed robots.

Overall, I think it is a finely written paper. It presents your position in a coherent manner and anticipates counter-arguments. My biggest suggestion would be to tighten your language up a bit since philosophy, being rooted in language, lives and dies on terminology.

I've had a discussion on a similar form of compatibilism before, though it devolved eventually because we both tried addressing too many points at once. With that in mind, I debated how many points to bring up against your paper, but decided on more critique. If you wish to discuss the above points, feel free to only talk about a couple at a time and come back to the others later if at all if that would be better for you. Either way, keep studying philosophy; it's pretty fun.

[Jaxb]

sounds like a version of compatiblism.

Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism.

© Copyright Original Source

That's right. It is compatibilism.

[Jaxb]

The position for which you're arguing is called compatibilism. If I may offer some brief comments:


-You seem to be presupposing that there indeed ARE actions for which people can be held morally responsible, when that assertion is very often the issue being disputed.

-Your definition of determinism as "the idea that every event including human behavior has a sufficient cause other than itself" is unusual.

-You don't seem to have defined exactly what you mean by "one's true self."

-Regarding your rebuttal of Taylor, what's your response to the suggestion that the process of deliberation itself is determined?

I meant one's deepest commitments when I said "one's true self."

Do you think it would be better to define determinism as the view that every event including human behavior is guaranteed to take place given that certain conditions are met?

If the process of deliberation is not determined, then one's choosing of X instead of Y would be arbitrary or random.

[fm93]

I meant one's deepest commitments when I said "one's true self."

Eh, that's still kind of vague.

Do you think it would be better to define determinism as the view that every event including human behavior is guaranteed to take place given that certain conditions are met?

That's closer to the definitions I've seen.

If the process of deliberation is not determined, then one's choosing of X instead of Y would be arbitrary or random.

Technically, that may be a false dichotomy. But (and my apologies if I've misunderstood you somehow) that doesn't seem to answer my question. You wrote:

Even though a person is determined to buy a particular car, he can still go through the process of deliberation.

You seem to be saying that the action of buying a particular car might be deterministic, but the process of deliberation is not. But how would go about proving this? How would you refute the suggestion that the process of deliberation is ALSO deterministic, and that each step and conclusion of your deliberation process was pre-determined?

[Jim B.]

Nicely written and argued. Good job. A suggestion: instead of "true self" which as Humble Thinker points out, is somewhat vague, what about referring to the person's "beliefs and desires arrived at free of outside interference"? That has potential problems too. Oh well...

I've always had trouble making sense out of compatibilism, but then again, every position related to free will has serious problems, imo! It's hard to reconcile my coming to a decision that's "up to me" and freely arrived at that's also necessitated by prior conditions. If decisions are only a matter of weighing the relative merits and demerits of various reasons in light of a given set of beliefs and desires, then it's hard to see how the sense that it's up to me is anything more than a 'user illusion', in which case, hard determinism is really the case.

[HumbleThinker]

Nicely written and argued. Good job. A suggestion: instead of "true self" which as Humble Thinker points out, is somewhat vague, what about referring to the person's "beliefs and desires arrived at free of outside interference"? That has potential problems too. Oh well...

I've always had trouble making sense out of compatibilism, but then again, every position related to free will has serious problems, imo! It's hard to reconcile my coming to a decision that's "up to me" and freely arrived at that's also necessitated by prior conditions. If decisions are only a matter of weighing the relative merits and demerits of various reasons in light of a given set of beliefs and desires, then it's hard to see how the sense that it's up to me is anything more than a 'user illusion', in which case, hard determinism is really the case.

Perhaps I'm committing a common sense fallacy, but I personally haven't had an issue thinking of our choices in compatiblist terms for a while, just not in the classical compatiblist sense as the OP does. It seems consistent with experience and what we know of our brain that non-deterministic process limit our choices at any one time, perhaps even theoretically to a single choice, and that we freely choose from that. Our choices, our biology, the events that happen to us because of or without relation to our choices, and other impacts I didn't list all seem to impact our ability to choose in a future moment, whether in the short-term or the long term, just in a non-deterministic manner.

[Jim B.]

Perhaps I'm committing a common sense fallacy, but I personally haven't had an issue thinking of our choices in compatiblist terms for a while, just not in the classical compatiblist sense as the OP does. It seems consistent with experience and what we know of our brain that non-deterministic process limit our choices at any one time, perhaps even theoretically to a single choice, and that we freely choose from that. Our choices, our biology, the events that happen to us because of or without relation to our choices, and other impacts I didn't list all seem to impact our ability to choose in a future moment, whether in the short-term or the long term, just in a non-deterministic manner.

I have no problem with the idea that our choices are limited, even severely limited, and that there are all sorts of constraints on our thoughts and actions. One question I have is: If I am "free" to make only one possible choice in any given situation, in what sense am I morally responsible for that choice? I can "endorse" that choice as being one that falls in line with who I am, i.e. my beliefs and desires up to the moment of that choice, but that just pushes the question of ultimate responsibility back one step further, since I wouldn't be responsible for my beliefs and desires, etc. The subjective sense that I have that my choice was "my" choice, one that I as a conscious subject could have chosen differently about given the same conditions, would be a "user illusion" along with the whole concept of moral responsibility. Those things would be nothing more than "stances" as Daniel Dennett would say.

[Jim B.]

The big question is the relationship of consciousness and the free will question. Is consciousness epiphenomenal or does it really have causal impact? There are good reasons to think that it's not a physical process, even if caused by physical processes. If that's the case, how could this non-physical thing have an impact on physical processes? If it's selected for, then what is its selectional advantage, other than the ability to make choices?

[shunyadragon]

The big question is the relationship of consciousness and the free will question. Is consciousness epiphenomenal or does it really have causal impact? There are good reasons to think that it's not a physical process, even if caused by physical processes. If that's the case, how could this non-physical thing have an impact on physical processes? If it's selected for, then what is its selectional advantage, other than the ability to make choices?

The selective process surely can be the ability to make choices. In fact it is likely not simply the ability to make choices, but the increased ability to make choices as the intelligent omnivore homo sapien evolved. Other primates and higher mammals makes choices also. but on a simpler scale.

There is not good evidence that consciousness and the mind are not a product of the brain. Many animals other than homo sapiens and primates have demonstrated that they consciousness. I do not see any difference between being a product of a physical process and being a physical process. All the present evidence we currently have at hand indicates that the mind and consciousness are product of the brain.

[Jim B.]

The selective process surely can be the ability to make choices. In fact it is likely not simply the ability to make choices, but the increased ability to make choices as the intelligent omnivore homo sapien evolved. Other primates and higher mammals makes choices also. but on a simpler scale.

There is not good evidence that consciousness and the mind are not a product of the brain. Many animals other than homo sapiens and primates have demonstrated that they consciousness. I do not see any difference between being a product of a physical process and being a physical process. All the present evidence we currently have at hand indicates that the mind and consciousness are product of the brain.

So it seems that you are not an epiphenomenalist? Do you believe in libertarian free will? If consciousness is purely a physical process, then it must conform to event causation (assuming that quantum indeterminacy gets cancelled out at macro scales) which would be strictly deterministic.

I can think of things that, even if they are the "products of physical processes," wouldn't be physical processes: mathematical objects, the ideas that I'm expressing right now as I type these keys, ...

[shunyadragon]

So it seems that you are not an epiphenomenalist? Do you believe in libertarian free will? If consciousness is purely a physical process, then it must conform to event causation (assuming that quantum indeterminacy gets cancelled out at macro scales) which would be strictly deterministic.

Your drawing conclusions that are false concerning the relationship between quantum indeterminancy and cause and effect events in the macro world. Quantum indeterminancy is only a cause and effect relationship in the Quantum level of existence. Absolutely no such relationship can be inferred. No, libertarian free is not a viable assumption that would make us robotic.

Actually, the relationship of cause and effect relationships in the real world and the relationship and function in brains in both humans and animals, as well as ALL of our macro existence is a fractal relationships as described in Chaos Theory. This in and of itself would preclude any possibility of a robotic deterministic nature of everything including the relationship and nature of the brain and the mind.

I can think of things that, even if they are the "products of physical processes," wouldn't be physical processes: mathematical objects, the ideas that I'm expressing right now as I type these keys, ...

All this remains the product of physical processes that are obviously manifest in the physical world. The distinction is artificial without a clear boundary.

[seer]

There is not good evidence that consciousness and the mind are not a product of the brain. Many animals other than homo sapiens and primates have demonstrated that they consciousness. I do not see any difference between being a product of a physical process and being a physical process. All the present evidence we currently have at hand indicates that the mind and consciousness are product of the brain.

Is the rational human spirit that does make choices a product of the brain Shuny?

The essential identity of every human being is a rational and immortal soulIt is through the exercise of the powers of the soul that human progress is achievedhttp://www.bahai.org/beliefs/life-spirit/human-soul/

So it is the immaterial rational soul that governs the physical brain.