The way people talk about it makes it sound indistinguishable from “random will”. If you believe in the existence of a “self” in any form, be it the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer, you must believe in one of you believe in that self having free will.
Say you were to run a scenario many times on the same person, perfectly resetting every single measurable thing including that person’s memory. If you observe them doing the same thing each time then they don’t have this quality of free will? But if you do different things each time are you really “yourself”? How are your choices changed in a way that preserves an idea of a “self” and isn’t just a dice roll? Doesn’t that put an idea of free will in contradiction with itself?
Edit: I found this article that says what I was trying to say in much gooder words
the chemical signals and electrical impulses in your material brain, or a ghost existing outside of space and time controlling your body like a puppeteer
Functionally I don’t see how it would make any difference one way or the other in this argument. I’m not a big philosophy guy I’m sorry if I’m saying something reductive or ignorant here.
Agreed, I mostly commented this because I see these models as fully compatible with reality. Sorry I don’t have more to contribute. I don’t think you’re being reductive, but I do feel that modeling freedom of will by repeatedly experimentally observing an actor in a fixed context and condition and summarizing the distribution of their choices doesn’t capture some ideas I intuitively associate with the notion of free will (assuming it is not entirely an illusion, though there are results in neuroscience that show that in certain cases, people only become aware of a stimulus after their motor cortex has commanded their muscles to respond to it, so in some cases, free will is either illusory or absent):
-an individual in the experiment may be exercising significant mental effort to prevent an autonomic or habitual response to a repeated stimulus, and if they succeed every time, their sequence of decisions is constant, but it is also constant if they fail every time
hardly. if you can’t measure or observe something it existing or not becomes equivalent and therefore we shouldn’t assume wildly complex things incongruent with all our other observations.
can’t measure or observe something
maybe we’re talking about different things, but here’s where I’m coming from: modern experimental neuroscience has developed and continues to churn out new ways of probing self-organizing patterns in neural activity that have meaning encoded in them
I’m thinking of the ghost as neural signals themselves and not their representations in a brain, where I’m modeling a conscious being as the pairing of the representations of said patterns and the feedback loops that perpetuate them, which is physical in the sense that it’s implemented in a physical machine, but is non-physical in the same way that these words have meaning in your mind: they’re signals.
sorry if I’m being ambiguous/imprecise
i guess i don’t think trying to use “ghost” language for physical phenomena is clarifying or helpful when a huge proportion of people are still dualists and/or believe in magic spirits and use the analogy’s terms literally.
The signals are still some physical thing with electrons and shit
I find the religious argument of free will to be silly. God knows every action you’ll commit. But you also have the power to change. Basically, god knows every variation of your choices, including the variation that will actually be your life and not hypothetical
This is really more of aporia about selfhood than a proof by contradiction against free will. I mean it is also the latter, but as a side effect.
Anyways the reason I’m saying this is that it has been discussed outside the West (where “free will” in itself is important, especially in Christian theology). For example, the entirety of the Indian philosophical traditions could be described as the questioning the nature of the self.
Buddhism is especially important here. The nature of the self is a tricky question with seemingly vague and contradictory answers. The self neither exists, doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist and not exist both, nor neither… rather it’s a question not to even be answered.
I like these kind of aporetic topics. I believe that in Buddhism the real solution is to experience the truth of a matter personally ie. through meditative insight and enlightenment. Or maybe getting high.
Another way to put it is that it is a linguistic or cognitive issue that requires a perspective shift…maybe Wittgensteinian? That the concept of a self or free will is a limiting one that will lead to holes and contradictions in systems of logic, and are really more useful as a conventional marker for an abstraction. But not reality itself in itself
Do you have a recommendation for something I could read for more information? I do know a very little bit about Buddhist non dualism (think two video essays or so)
I’ll open it up to anyone to follow up on recommendations because I might be a little over the top with it…I like to read the old texts in the original or plain translation. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by Nāgārjuna is what I was thinking of when I wrote up my comment.
I would say to find a translation and commentary (the wiki page has a list), and maybe also watch some video lectures before starting because the Buddhist philosophical tradition is its own beast that you would need context for
I’ll see if I can follow up with some video links later
I tried making this same argument on once, of course no one understood what I was saying.
Eh I think we easily confuse word games with meaning.
Language is necessarily ambiguous, some abstraction of reality that allows us to communicate facts about reality in a simplified abstracted manner. So when we probe the spaces and limits of that abstraction all we find is ambiguity.
It’s like trying to work out how atoms work by repeatedly zooming in on google maps.
The idea of “I have free will” works fine enough for communicating a basic idea of human autonomy but trying work out what “free” really means, or who even is “I”, etc, we aren’t actually finding out anything profound. We are really just reaching to limits of an abstraction and the model stops working.
So you’re saying I can safely when someone talks about it?
Regardless it feels like people wouldn’t talk about free will so much if there wasn’t anything to say about it, would they? It feels like a waste of energy, yet I see it discussed all the time.
Yeah basically.
Being a bit more rigorous about it, I think philosophically speaking there is some kind of error in the logic and that error gets smuggled in via the ambiguity of the language.
Like, “I” assumes some singular decision making entity exists but if you really want to zoom in to the level of chemical and electrical impulses in the brain and say ahah well there goes your “free will”, well you’ve broken the model because at this zoom level there is no singular decision making entity. There’s some network of synapses etc that fire quasi-independently.
But “I” still exist at a higher level of zoom as some emergent phenomena from those synapses. But “I” am more than just those synapses, I have an experience that cannot really be described by those synapses even if it is emergent from them.
So the error is to confuse levels of abstraction. To deny properties of “I” by zooming down to a level where “I” doesn’t exist anymore and then trying to draw conclusions about what “I” am.
Does this make sense?
Basically the entire concept of me and a self exists at a certain zoom level, and my will or the qualia of my existence only make any sense at all at a certain zoom level.
So zooming in further down to the point of electrical actions is an error. It’s like trying to figure someone’s birthday by studying the atoms they’re made of. It’s nonsense.
Or to skin this cat another way, and remain at this level of abstraction you can still describe the inputs into my decisions at the same level of abstraction at which “I” exist. Like, you can say I’m aggressive because my dad was toxic when I was a child or whatever some quasi-deterministic social factor that influences my behavior, right?
But what am “I” if not the sum of my experiences? By saying that I am controlled by my past experiences and therefore that I can’t make independent decisions, well this is just the same as saying that “I” exist somehow independently of my past. But that’s also nonsense, but here the nonsense is by secretly introducing via sleight of hand another level abstraction which is the metaphysical “I” which transcends my physical existence.
Basically, the question “what does it mean to have free will” always involves some shifting frame of abstraction and it’s the way this frame of abstraction shifts that, I think, is the philosophical error in asking the question.
It’s required by Christians to resolve The Problem of Evil. There must be some sort of volitional agency that moral actors have that separates them from the deterministic world, otherwise their omnibenevolent god is responsible for anyone sinning and going to hell.
It’s a non-sensical solution to a non-sensical problem.