Comment by flomble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flomble | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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