So you're saying the world can be deterministic and you can still have free will? That would mean you would have to believe in something like souls then, right? Something outside of this physical world that influences your physical existence? I'm not questioning your views just trying to understand.
We consider free will important because we like to think we make our decisions based on our own individual identity, rather than physical properties of the universe that predetermine what we will do.
Even if free will exists, our mechanism for arriving at a decision to do one thing over another thing pretty much needs to be context-dependent - i.e. we make that decision based on some line of reasoning (whether correct or not).
At the same time, everything we've experienced and consider to be part of our own individual identities, the stuff that defines our free will, is incorporated as a part of that context. So many people argue that free will and determinism are still pretty much compatible.
Nevermind all the other crap we like to pretend doesn't influence our decisions like whatever crazy hormones happen to be elevated at the time.
To me, this argument is a strong defense of the "self", but does not address the "free" part at all. It is like saying that a rock is free to weigh more than a marshmallow because of the complicated history that lead it to being this rock.
I believe we keep telling us stories about a "free will" because we're afraid of that thought because we misinterpret it. Most people answer unreflected things like "that would be like living in a prison". Also we have learned to judge everything and everyone. How can we expect people to completely drop all kinds of judgement?
Because nobody has been able to show "free will" is more than just another belief (as in religion) and it is therefor no basis for rational discussion. And if free will does not exist, our concepts of "merit" (on the positive side) or "guilt" (on the negative side) are worthless and should be abolished.
That's why there should be no judging at all.
(Note: No judging does not mean nobody goes to prison for crime. It simply means we must redefine "punishment" as "a neutral sanction" or better: "protection from happening again".)
All there needed to be was for the handful of initial variables that were set at the "beginning of our universe" to have such values that their interaction over time would lead us to rational thinking and therefor our understanding that there is no "free" will.
Simply put: If I explain to you why free will is an illusion and you stop judging, then it wasn't a "free" will. It was a cause-and-effect situation.
My explanation would be only 1 variable in your system (out of an infinity of others, if you assume that you can always continue to "zoom in").
Now, if that 1 variable does anything to your decisions or not depends on all the other variables as well, i.e.: You may have gotten a very religious education which may lead you to accept beliefs put forth by other as "the truth", without questioning. Since one major point of religion is "free will", I'm not sure "my explanation" would do anything to your decision making.
If there is no free will, then all we do is predetermined and arguing is pointless, because, by definition, it cannot change anything because everything is predetermined.
The arguing is just 1 variable in the system. It was bound to happen because it was caused by other variables (i.e. us being online, someone posting the article, etc.) and it will interact with other variables to lead to some amount of change. It's not something that "we control". (Our brains do, but they are the result of other variables, such as our genome, environment, etc.)
I don't get that - with predetermination, there are no variables at all. Its all a mechanism set in motion at the big bang, turning inexorably toward ultimate entropy. We're just some predestined middle state right now, with no choice and no say.
All that would mean is that you were incorrect before when you had some mystical idea of what choice meant. Choices still matter (in the most literal sense: they are material). If complete determinism is true, the choices we make and the things we say are part of the causal stream that leads to other actions, even if that stream could only ever go one way.
On top of that, how would choice make more sense in a random universe?
Mystical? I think the meaning of 'choice' is well-understood. I believe philosophers have reinvented the meaning so they can put it into their wholly imaginary framework of doubletalk.
If you mean choice as something external to whatever deterministic/indeterministic framework we use to understand physical systems, it is mystical. If you mean choice as in "I wanted to do something and then I did it", which is the commonly understood meaning of choice, there is literally no conflict with determinism.
If somebody explains you the reason why judging does not make any sense and you understand it and apply it to your life, then it wasn't "free will". It was causality - you're doing it because of a "variable" (the explanation) that was part of your "system". Obviously, there is a huge number of other variables participating in your decision, not just one, and you could track them on a micro level (molecular) as well as on an macro level (i.e. your family, friends, wealth, etc.).
But without free will nobody can decide to tell you something and influence your future decisions. If there is no free will then watching the universe over time is just like playing back a movie, maybe with some unpredictable plot twists due to randomness. Me writing this comment was predetermined - at least with some probability - since the big bang. All the things humans have done, from fighting wars to writing all the books to inventing and building all the human made things in the world, are predetermined. And while I think that there is no free will trying to imagine that everything around me is the result of a mindless process is more than my poor brain can do and therefore in everyday life I just keep pretending I have free will.
> If there is no free will then watching the universe over time is just like playing back a movie, maybe with some unpredictable plot twists due to randomness.
Yes, rational thinking dictates exactly this conclusion (the apparent randomness being introduced by our current understanding of quantum physics).
> And while I think that there is no free will [...] in everyday life I just keep pretending I have free will.
Well, Rome wasn't built in one day. Our whole culture was built upon the illusion of "free will" (same goes for other beliefs like magic, gods, etc). It's a good exercise to remind oneself about this when we get all worked up over something or somebody.
As discussed, it would mean, for example, that we cannot judge anyone (and at the same time claim to be rational).
To give an example: The death penalty should no longer exist, because it is solely "justified" by judgement along the lines of "person X is evil and therefor doesn't deserve to live". There are no evil people, only people who do what they have to do, given the variables in "their system". That means there should be no "punishment", but emotionally neutral measures to prevent the suffering from happening again (i.e. locking the person up). It's pretty clear to me that a much more humane society will be the result of this understanding. And who wouldn't want that?
> If there is no free will, then it is spurious to claim anyone is 'rational'. That loses all meaning.
No, it doesn't. I mean, the rational actor model is evidently false for lots of other reasons, but its a purely mechanistic model but for the utility function (on whose nature it is completely neutral), so rationality is just as compatible with the non-existence of free will as it is with the existence of free will (in fact, rationality requires either that there be no free will or that it be confined entirely within the utility function.)
If the rock told me that it intuitively perceives itself as being free to weight more than a marshmallow (and I didn't otherwise have reason to believe I was hallucinating), then I would have little trouble conceding that the rock is free to weigh more than a marshmallow.
A conception of 'free will' that is considered to be impossible if the universe is deterministic has a difficult question to answer: how does non-determinism enable it?
Suppose I'm making up my mind whether to buy some item. There is some last-nanosecond non-deterministic quantum event that causes a neuron to fire, that wouldn't otherwise have fired, and I buy the item. What was 'free' about my decision if that quantum event was not caused or influenced by 'me'?
Non-determinism informally says that some things in the universe may be unpredictable. If my decisions depend on unpredictable events in the universe, how are they 'free'? It sounds like 'at the mercy of random events in the universe'.
So it's not that the world can be deterministic and you can still have 'free will', it's rather that if the world was non-deterministic, you still couldn't have that sort of 'free will'.
Oh jeez, there's no happy way of looking at this is there.
Seriously though -- this is extremely depressing to me, it's literally giving me terrors right now. It's reducing all that I love and value to nothingness. How do you guys deal with this?
An important thing in what I wrote is that it only applies to certain sorts of free will. The sorts of free will it applies to include the idea of 'free will' that many scientifically educated (and usually philosophically untrained) people have. Let's call it the 'natural' or 'naive' idea of free will. In that view, free will and determinism are incompatible.
However, as others have pointed out in parallel answers, there are 'compatibilist' views in which free will and determinism are compatible. The sorts of 'free will' that those views apply are different from the naive idea of free will and the important point to take away from that is: it may not be clear to you or me what the phrase 'free will' actually means.
I do not subscribe to compatibilist views, because they define 'free will' as something that I do not believe is worth wanting. However, that begs the question: what is a definition of 'free will' that I do believe is worth wanting? And I have found that I cannot answer that question: I cannot define it satisfactorily in a way that is amenable to philosophical analysis, while all definitions that can be analyzed are unsatisfactory.
So it boils down to this: I believe it is important to have 'free will', but I cannot define what it means to have free will. As I cannot become unhappy about not having something that I do not understand clearly enough to reason further about, my life is effectively no different from never having thought about 'free will' at all.
So that's how I deal with it. In a way that is unsatisfactory to many people, because it seems to allow for a bit of 'insert magic here' just to satisfy my emotional need for the existence of some intuitive notion of free will. To which all I can say is: yes, I believe that believing "I don't understand" and being happy is better than believing "the best answer we can come up with is depressing" and not being happy.
I personally go with a computability/compatability argument. If 'you' are some sort of process analogous to a computer program, you can be totally deterministic yet unpredictable. You can't predict in advance the outcome of running some program, c.f. halting problem, without simply running the program slightly faster. Running the program slightly faster is identical to the initial process anyway, since it must get exactly the same inputs. Hence, you are a computational process experiencing itself, everything you feel is valid and no-one can take that away from you :)
There are varieties of compatibilism (the view that determinism and free will are compatible) that do not require the existence of souls. I'd suggest taking a look at Daniel Dennett's _Elbow Room_ for one example.
Compatibilists redefine free will, similarly to those who redefine "god" as "nature" or "the universe". Sure, anyone can define any term the way they want, but it simply causes confusion to the majority of people who don't hold such definition. Rather, it's best to abandon some terms as fiction, and create new ones surrounding the concept you are looking to address. Better books on the topic are Sam's _Free Will_ or Trick's _Breaking the Free Will Illusion_.
i never had the patience to follow that mind juggling, or "word jugglery" as Kant calls it.
For me as a programmer free will would mean something like:
var a:Int = 2
var b:Int = 3
println("\(a+b)")
>> 42
where transistors take the place of neurons
Other people have answered this well, but I think that the question of determinism vs. indeterminism is essentially the question of an ordered universe vs. a random one (or picking a point between those two extremes). If that's the case, then what we are usually talking about when we speak about somebody acting freely or having free will has little to do with that discussion.
To get to your question about what free will would be then: I'm not a huge fan of a pure concept of free will, though we talk about people acting more or less freely often enough that it's worth thinking about. I think then that a useful definition of "free will" might simply be a measure how much somebody's actions are able to be in accord with their desires. How an outside observer would ever gauge that as well as what actions, desires, and the two being in accord would mean are obviously murky philosophical territory, but it's pretty late.
To answer at least one obvious rejoinder, actions and desires can certainly be reduced to particles and the like, but they are phenomena that have qualities we wouldn't ascribe to particles. For instance, it makes little or no sense to say that a particle has a nice smile. In much the same way, we generally mean something different when we say a person wants to do something and a particle wants to do something.
Is there any good definition of free will at all? Given somebody is in situation X and has options A and B then the choice to do one or the other can either be completely at random or on the other extreme depend completely on the situation X (including the person with the brain and all the memories and the complete environment). Or it may be a mix of both where the situation affects the probability distribution. But none of these scenarios matches what I would call free will, making a choice that is neither random nor a deterministic consequence of the situation, but I can not even think of any mechanism outside of the spectrum from randomness to deterministic consequence.
This issue you're running into is why I think trying to think about free will in that context is a category error. The concept doesn't make sense when it's something that depends on randomness or determinism. Instead, I think it's useful to think about how we use it in actual practice, which is generally something like, "is a person more or less self-directed" where self-directed means that their actions are consistent with their observed character and expressed desires. That's not particularly satisfying if you're raised in a culture that puts a lot of value on free will as a concept, but I think it may be the best we can do.
The world can be deterministic and still allow free will with respect to a real observer. In some sense it doesn't matter if a person's actions are in principle predictable when there is no observer who can actually make those predictions. You'd have to measure and simulate the entire universe to predict a single particle's future.
But it would just be an illusion no? If the discovery were made that the universe is entirely deterministic it wouldn't matter whether any one person could, or any number of people, could produce accurate meaningful predictions. The truth alone would VERY disruptive.
The great Australian philosopher David Stove was of the opinion that the main function of philosophers is to save the rest of us the trouble of thinking about these sorts of things.
When a useful professional in another field such as you or I starts wondering about these sorts of issues, he can simply pick up a philosophy book, note that a bunch of smart people have already thought this issue through, put labels on every possible position, argued through the consequences of each, and still failed to come to any consensus about it. And then we can say "Whew, glad someone's already taken care of that" and get back to our useful lives without worrying our pretty little heads about it too much.
So if you do find yourself worrying about free will, I suggest reading the vast amount of pre-existing literature on the subject and unburdening yourself of feeling like you should be making progress on it.
It does matter, because determinism generally (but not always) depends on causation. People making (determined) predictions would still influence the (determined) future actions of other people. Punishing people who acted in a (determined) way would still affect the (determined) actions of other people. Lived experience allows for the possibility of a number of different ontological theories, which is a large part of why there are so many different and conflicting ones.
I suppose you could call it an illusion, but I don't think that needs to be considered a bad thing. By the same token, your senses are an illusion. That doesn't mean it's unreasonable to say that we do have senses, and it doesn't mean our senses aren't often extremely useful.
it would just be an illusion? no, not necessarily. consider that the deterministic particles in the universe could be receptors and the actual thing that has free will exists outside the universe and sends signals to those receptors in some way. this is where the concept of souls would come in, and that would make determinism and free will compatible.
In your model, the "deterministic" particles do not actually behave in a deterministic way, unless the thing sending them signals sends those signals in a fully deterministic way. But in that case, there's no reason to bother including it in the model.
Um, no. The model suggests that particles would be entirely predictable unless acted upon by an outside force. It doesn't matter at all if "signal-sending things" are deterministic or not. This "free will" wouldn't exist in the physical world, it's metaphysics.
If the pool table were the universe, the course of the billiard balls is predetermined until the shooter shoots. No shooter, no change.
If the solar system were the universe, the planets would be deterministic until the aliens blow up Jupiter. Aliens don't exist? Then the planets would be entirely deterministic for the full course of their lifetime.
If the universe were the universe, all particles are completely deterministic, unless spooky ghosts make magic. Whether the spooky ghosts are real is a question of gullibility.
The idea that free will is compatible with determinism (this position is called, shockingly, compatibilism) is actually the most popular view in the philosophical debate about free will, and has nothing to do with mind-body dualism.
Some ways folks have tried to defend compatibilism (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ for discussion of what follows): motivating the idea that free will is grounded on choice on the basis of one's desires, or on choice that makes sense given one's values. There are other ways, linked to the idea of it being possible that you had chosen otherwise, and on a metaphysics of modality (i.e., of what it is for something to be possible, or necessary) compatible with determinism.
