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Comment by Emma_Goldman | Hacker News Reader

>"The mind could only be free if independent from what encompasses it."

No it could be an emergent property that arises from physical processes but is not reducible to them (emergentism). It could be that the mental and the physical are not independent substances but different elements of the same thing, and thus one does not need to be reducible to the other (neutral monism). Or you could be a dualist and claim that the mind really is separate from the physical world.

Or, more sensibly, you could be agnostic because we lack any solid grounds for belief in any theory of the mind.

And again, as I just said, this ontological problem is separate from the phenomenological problem with which the existentialists were concerned. For what the mind is, ontologically, makes no difference to our subjective experience as radically free beings without a predetermined essence.

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I want to jump in because while I agree with the separateness of the ontological from the phenomenological problem of free will, I also want to point out it's not necessary to have a determinist stance to point out that ontologically, free will is an incoherent idea.

Taking physicalism to be true, imagine that determinism is false. What is non-determinism but randomness? And how can one's actions being partly random be called "free will"? So regardless of whether one's actions are pre-determined or not, they're not "free" because that notion breaks down under close examination. Either actions are determined or they are wholly or partially random. This is the case if you're a physicalist, but also if you're a dualist. If the mind exists in some realm other than the physical world, that realm operates either deterministically or partly or wholly randomly. The same line of argument applies to neutral monism.

Emergentism is the only one that works differently, but I don't put much stock in gesturing vaguely at the morass of mind and matter and saying "the explanation is somewhere in here". In any case, if an emergentist can give a description of a component of mind that isn't reducible to matter, the same argument will apply to it.

As I stated I am agnostic on the matter because I don't think we are close to understanding the mind well enough to give any particular theory of mind much credence. I only raised the theories of neutral monism, emergentism and dualism to advert to the fact that physicalism isn't the only possible way of understanding the mind, and that the person to whom I was talking cannot simply assume that free will is an illusion.

My sense of what you have said is that you're simply making a distinction between two kinds of physical causation, one which is predictable and one which is not. Saying that any theory of mind must conform to one of these two modes of explanation simply begs the question: the question is whether our normal understanding of causation based on the physical world applies to the mind in the first place.

The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjustified.

I'd say that the way I conceived of it, I was making a distinction between events that were determined by antecedents (physical or otherwise) on the one hand and events whose outcome was uncaused, or random, on the other. In my mind the two are dichotomous and exhaustive.

>"I'd say that the way I conceived of it, I was making a distinction between events that were determined by antecedents (physical or otherwise) on the one hand and events whose outcome was uncaused, or random, on the other."

I don't pretend to understand randomness on any sophisticated level, but it is my understanding that a phenomena being random does not mean that it is uncaused. It simply means that it cannot be known ex ante.

>"The idea of a system to which causality doesn't apply is interesting. My intuition is that that doesn't make sense, and my secondary intuition is that the first intuition is unjustified."

Materialism is the paradigmatic way of understanding the world today. It is the basic ontological assumption of the scientific revolution over the last several hundred years. So it is natural to think that anything which deviates from it is implausible, or even inconceivable. But given that, from within this paradigm, we lack even the most basic understanding of what the mind is, it is at least possible that it can only be understand from without it. Of course, it could also be that we simply lack sufficient understanding from within materialism. My point is that we simply aren't in a position to know.

I would also point out an area that we already know of where causality seems to break down: the physical constants. For materialists, this is simply were the explanatory buck stops.

You're interpreting my definition of what makes the mind different than your own. I consider the mind to be free if independent from what encompasses it. Meaning the ability to choose how life plays out. That's not truly fitting of free will either because even then a person will desire whatever the first experiences force them into desiring. Everything is predetermined. Cause & effect.

No, I am not. The three substantive positions that I described - emergentism, neutral monism, dualism - reject the idea that mental activity is reducible to antecedent physical processes. Agnosticism suspends belief about the mind. Existentialism recasts this as a phenomenological issue; about our subjective experience of radical freedom.

In other words, every one of these positions rejects the idea that we are imprisoned by a physical nexus of 'cause & effect'.

Those three positions are substantive? How so.., I assume if you're that loose with the word.. the most widely shared definition of free will should be substantive to you. Even one could say free will rejects the idea that we are imprisoned by a physical nexus of 'cause & effect' and typically what people follow from reading the bible. Evil fairy tales that delude a person. Anyhow I wish I knew of cause & effect very young because then I wouldn't have been grossly taken advantaged of and I assume is the reason the majority of people are conditioned to stay deluded.

I am struggling to understand what you are saying. Your views are not clearly stated or elaborated, and they are not obviously related to what I said.

I called them substantive because they are worked out philosophical theories, as opposed to agnosticism, which is simply the suspension of belief.

Maybe email me at alizeebellerose @ icloud .com and we can have a better discussion. I was temporarily banned from HN for conversing about this topic. In any case the discussion would be better by email or elsewhere. I'm agnostic in the sense of purpose but I enjoy neuroscience enough and with physics that I cannot see real control existing in reality. Although, I would love to have someone explain to me how they see otherwise.

Even if every possible event had a particular root cause it could be reduced to (and I think that assumption itself is oversimplifying things vastly), the relationship would not mean any given event is predetermined. You are ignoring the effects of randomness and aggregation of randomness. Your view is equivalent to assuming that if a coin was flipped and has landed tails, it has always been so predetermined, but we know that the chance of that has always been 50%. It seems to me that if we take your view to it’s logical extreme, there would be no motion in the universe, no change even on subatomic level, no evolution or growth - it would be an inert static thing, as there would be no initial root cause to trigger any change that would cause further reactions.

(on a personal level, if you seriously feel this way and want to talk, feel free to email me, aeontech at gmail).

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