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Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have conscious control over.

E.g.

Q. Why do you deserve your money?

A. I work hard.

Q. Why do you work hard?

A. I have a good work ethic.

Q. Why do you have a good work ethic?

A. My parents raised me that way.

Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way?

A. I didn't.

I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control.

Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose.

This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.

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With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything. We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born. Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful.

We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.

A few things to unpack here:

- People still do things and decide things, they are just not the conscious author of those actions and decisions

- This makes no claims about determinism, the universe could still have e.g. quantum randomness and nothing would change about this statement, as we have no conscious control over that randomness.

- This also makes no claims about the morality of punishment/reward. My statement is an "is" statement, and, as I agree with Hume, you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.

> as I agree with Hume, you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.

Nitpick: that's not what Hume said. He did not say that one cannot derive "ought" from "is", he merely pointed out that philosophers had this curious habit of starting arguments making reasonable factual "is" statements, and suddenly transitioning into "ought" statements as if the factual statements entailed these "oughts", but that this was a non-sequitur without justification.

> you can't go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement.

It's funny when you apply this idea to itself. There may be no path from "is" to "ought", but that doesn't imply we shouldn't make it.

> People still do things and decide things, they are just not the conscious author of those actions and decisions

Nothing you have said supports this claim. It's perfectly possible for you, the way you are today, to be largely the result of processes you didn't choose and didn't control, and also for you to do things and decide things that you are the conscious author of.

If you reflect closely enough on your own thinking process, you will realize that every thought you consciously observe seemingly comes from nowhere. You don't get choose your thoughts.

Consider I give you the task "think of a color". You choose blue. How did you choose blue? Did you consider the color lavender? If there are some colors you considered, how did you choose what to consider? And why wasn't lavender one of them? Did you choose not to consider lavender?

In reality, I give you the task "think of a color" and some thoughts of colors come into your consciousness via some unconscious process.

I think "red, blue, orange, red, oh wait I already thought of red, green, purple, red, why do I keep thinking of red, yellow, hmmmm ok I pick blue I guess."

I wasn't deciding which thoughts were going to come into my conscious view. They just appeared. When I had those thoughts of internal monologue about thinking of red so much, I wasn't choosing to have those thoughts either. I was just observing them as they appeared in consciousness.

When I settled on blue, I knew I wanted to avoid red because I had thought about it so much. But when did I choose to have that want? I didn't. It just appeared.

> If you reflect closely enough on your own thinking process, you will realize that every thought you consciously observe seemingly comes from nowhere. You don't get choose your thoughts.

Perhaps this matches your experience. It doesn't match mine. Some of my thoughts might work like this, but not all of them.

More generally, the fact that none of us get to choose everything about our lives or our mental processes (which as a general claim I agree with, even if I disagree about a specific case as above) does not justify the claim that we choose nothing.

You are simply focusing on particular cases and then making invalid generalizations from them.

Can you provide an example of a thought that recursively asking things like "why did you think that thought" or "why did you choose to think that thought" doesn't eventually get to an unconscious cause?

You are getting things backwards. Consciousness is not some magic dust that gets sprinkled over certain thoughts. Consciousness is part of the process of having thoughts. The fact that we don't have conscious access to all of our thoughts does not mean we cannot consciously choose anything about our thoughts.

Similar remarks apply to "free will". "Free will" is not some magic property that some of our mental acts get endowed with. It is part of the process of our thinking and acting. The fact that we don't and can't freely choose everything about that process does not mean we cannot make choices at all.

Do you believe that thinking is a physical process (that it’s embodied as or is the outcome of chemical/electrical activity)?

Do you believe that the initial state of all the particles in your body (including brain) exists? If so, what leads you to conclude that thinking is anything other than an on-going electro-chemical reaction that we’re just observing the outputs of and concluding that we’re controlling it somehow?

> If so, what leads you to conclude that thinking is anything other than an on-going electro-chemical reaction that we’re just observing the outputs of and concluding that we’re controlling it somehow?

These are not mutually inconsistent options, that's your mistake. Thoughts are some kind of (likely deterministic) information process, and thoughts counterfactually determines downstream actions and thoughts, ie. earlier thoughts determine later thoughts. If I choose to lift my arm, I only lifted my arm because I chose to do so. The fact that I was determined to choose to lift my arm doesn't seem relevant to whether the thought caused my arm to lift.

> The fact that I was determined to choose to lift my arm doesn't seem relevant to whether the thought caused my arm to lift.

It is relevant to the moral implications, however. If you agree that the process that led to an action was deterministic, then it's entirely unreasonable to use punishments as vengeance, for example. It may still be morally tolerable to use them for rehabilitative or preventative means, but if you accept that they had no agency in the decisions, then applying more restrictions than the minimum needed to protect society seems to create another victim.

> If you agree that the process that led to an action was deterministic, then it's entirely unreasonable to use punishments as vengeance, for example.

I disagree, punishment could still be justified if it were effective at deterring or altering future behavior, particularly if it were more effective than any other alternative. You can make a straightforward utilitarian calculation for this, for example.

In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.

You say you disagree, but what you describe is not what I meant.

My point is exactly to argue that if people could not have acted differently, punishing people for the sake of causing them suffering in retribution rather than for another purpose such as rehabilitation or deterrence is no morally different than enacting the same on someone who had not carried out a crime.

> In any case, the matter of justice is separate from the question of free will. Once you have free will, you still require further assumptions to argue for punitive or restorative justice.

It is partially separate. I agree that if free will (in the non-compatibilist sense) was possible, it does not automatically justify vengeance. But it's linked in that if free will does not exist, then it is meaningless to assign responsibility in any less abstract sense than we might talk of a piece of code being "responsible" for a crash. Someone might be "responsible" in the sense of being the most proximate cause, but given they could not have chosen differently, inflicting harm on them for the choices they could not have made differently is no morally different than inflicting harm on any other random person who only did the only things they could.

To me, then, given I find free will nothing more than an illusion, the near total lack of focus on rehabilitation and minimising harm to prisoners makes our "justice" systems some of the largest organised brutal and immoral criminal enterprises. Most judges have done vastly more immoral harm than anyone they've ever convicted, for example. Of course they could not have chosen differently either, so I don't think punishing them for it would be any better. But changing the system would be (and yes, I do believe that this too is not a free choice, nothing more than cause and effect playing out, giving us an illusion of making decisions we can not make differently)

> You say you disagree, but what you describe is not what I meant. My point is exactly to argue that if people could not have acted differently, punishing people for the sake of causing them suffering in retribution rather than for another purpose such as rehabilitation or deterrence is no morally different than enacting the same on someone who had not carried out a crime.

If it wasn't clear, I was disagreeing that "punishment as vengeance" is the primary motive for punitive justice, while pointing out some grounds typically used to justify it (deterrence mainly). I think reducing punitive justice to vengeance is largely a strawman.

Furthermore, I'll just note that Fankfurt refuted the principle of alternate possibilities decades ago, so I don't find this particular quality you ascribe to free will meaningful.

I think you read "punishment as vengeance" quite differently from how I read it.

I read "as" as "for the purpose of". With that reading, "Punishment as vengeance" would be undesirable if people's actions were pre-determined. "Punishment as deterrence" would still be desirable (via whatever mechanism allowed for a deterrence effect to exist in a world where actions were pre-determined).

Yes, this is exactly it.

> If it wasn't clear, I was disagreeing that "punishment as vengeance" is the primary motive for punitive justice, while pointing out some grounds typically used to justify it (deterrence mainly). I think reducing punitive justice to vengeance is largely a strawman.

I did not say it was the primary motive for punitive justice. I said using punishments for vengeance would be unreasonable. And vengeance clearly is a motive in a lot of punishment, or the pushback against treating prisoners nicer or shortening sentences where the evidence shows both works just fine would focus on the evidence rather than the emotions relating to whether prisoners deserve to be treated a certain way.

> Furthermore, I'll just note that Fankfurt refuted the principle of alternate possibilities decades ago, so I don't find this particular quality you ascribe to free will meaningful.

I'm not remotely compelled by the notion that Frankfurts arguments against PAP makes any difference whatsoever here, because the point is that a strict determinism makes the very concept of moral responsibility meaningless, in that if one accepts determinism then no entity had any ability to deliver another outcome, and the person holding the gun had no more control over the outcome than the gun or the bullet.

What then makes the person and not the gun or bullet, or any other entity that was a part of the cause and effect chain more morally responsible?

Moral responsibility to me rests with a minimum the possibility of choice as a starting point, and I reject that there's any evidence to suggest such a possibility exists.

Finding someone responsible in the abstract sense and for the sake of considering whether a deterrent or rehabilitation is necessary for the sake of wider society is fine, with the caveat that many entities and events can have a causal responsibility of various degrees and if we genuinely care about this we'd more often look past the individual that is the proximate sentient cause and to e.g. addressing underlying contributing societal conditions. This, to me, is another piece of evidence that the concern is often vengeance rather than deterrence.

Seeking to assign a moral responsibility for the sake of blame or vengeance, on the other hand, would to me in itself be immoral. Doesn't mean I'm immune to assigning responsibility - we're wired to do so and the illusion of free will is strong and it's hard to see past it.

> And vengeance clearly is a motive in a lot of punishment, or the pushback against treating prisoners nicer or shortening sentences where the evidence shows both works just fine would focus on the evidence rather than the emotions relating to whether prisoners deserve to be treated a certain way.

That too can be chalked up to deterrence. If prison were not unpleasant, why would it be a deterrent? Edit: unpleasantness has limits of course.

> I'm not remotely compelled by the notion that Frankfurts arguments against PAP makes any difference whatsoever here, because the point is that a strict determinism makes the very concept of moral responsibility meaningless, in that if one accepts determinism then no entity had any ability to deliver another outcome, and the person holding the gun had no more control over the outcome than the gun or the bullet.

This isn't the point of the Frankfurt cases. The point was that they are still responsible if they wanted to make that choice, regardless of whether or not they effectively had no other choice in terms of outcomes. That's exactly the case under Compatibilism.

> What then makes the person and not the gun or bullet, or any other entity that was a part of the cause and effect chain more morally responsible?

The simple fact that the person can learn to do better and make a different choice in the same circumstances in the future, where the bullet and the gun cannot. This is why mental competence is a factor in moral responsibility. Systems with minds that process moral content can and should be held morally responsible.

> That too can be chalked up to deterrence. If prison were not unpleasant, why would it be a deterrent? Edit: unpleasantness has limits of course.

You missed this part:

> where the evidence shows both works just fine

The evidence is clear that prisons can be far nicer without affecting the deterrence.

> This isn't the point of the Frankfurt cases. The point was that they are still responsible if they wanted to make that choice, regardless of whether or not they effectively had no other choice in terms of outcomes. That's exactly the case under Compatibilism.

And I'm saying I don't find this compelling at all. It's an utterly idiotic argument in the face of determinism, because them wanting to make the choice in a deterministic interpretation is itself beyond their ability to control.

> The simple fact that the person can learn to do better and make a different choice in the same circumstances in the future, where the bullet and the gun cannot. This is why mental competence is a factor in moral responsibility. Systems with minds that process moral content can and should be held morally responsible.

In a deterministic interpretation they are learning only in the same way a computer updating a weight in a decision graph or neural network does, so replace the bullet with a program firing a weapon then, which by your description are morally responsible.

> And I'm saying I don't find this compelling at all. It's an utterly idiotic argument in the face of determinism, because them wanting to make the choice in a deterministic interpretation is itself beyond their ability to control.

But that's irrelevant. There is no "them" beyond the entity that determinism constructed, and the entity that determinism constructed wanted to make that choice, therefore that entity should be held responsible so it learns right from wrong and that it can do better in the future.

It's really hard to understand exactly what the issue is. It seems you agree with all of the following:

1. The entity with a functional mind is the proximate cause of the outcome in a long chain of deterministic causes.

2. The entity's mind contains moral content and so understands the moral ramifications of its choice.

3. The entity wanted to make that choice and was not coerced by another entity.

4. Moral blame for wrongdoing and praise for ethical choices shapes future behaviour of entities.

Yet you somehow disagree that this process of moral feedback matches how humans apply moral responsibility, and so step 3 matches what we've been calling a "freely willed choice".

> In a deterministic interpretation they are learning only in the same way a computer updating a weight in a decision graph or neural network does

Yes.

> so replace the bullet with a program firing a weapon then, which by your description are morally responsible.

If the program is mentally competent just like a human, ie. capable of learning and making decisions considering moral factors like we do, then yes, holding it responsible makes perfect sense. Bullets aren't that.

Exactly what holding a firing program responsible means can be different than how we hold humans responsible, but the process by which we assign responsibility is the same.

> an on-going electro-chemical reaction that we’re just observing the outputs of and concluding that we’re controlling it somehow?

Who is the "we" in that sentence, that is not in control?

The portion of the chemical reaction that "thinks" of itself as having some kind of consciousness that's somehow non-physical rather than just reactions in a blob of salty tapioca.

But what if it thinks it is the tapioca, and that it gets to choose? Would that not be correct?

To its own way of thinking, in its own made-up frame of reference, it could appear to be. In the actual, physical universe, it would still not be. Physics and chemistry do not care about our feelings and emotions.

OK, so the "we" that is observing the outputs and the "we" that thinks it is in control are both the tapioca. But the tapioca is wrong about being in control, because actually it's just physics and chemistry. Where is all that physics and chemistry happening? In the tapioca. So the tapioca controls the whole show, right? Which is it?

When an iron bar sitting in salt water rusts, is it controlling the whole show? If it is, then yes, the tapioca is equally in control.

It certainly governs the rate flakes of oxide are released into the water and so on--what else could be said to?

Of course if you think the rusting bar is conscious, you should probably look at the tapioca a little more closely...

The notion that we freely choose anything is absurd on the face of it, as it'd mean a process where the outcome neither follows deterministically from the inputs, nor is random, nor any combination of the two.

Find me a logically coherent definition of free will that does not reduce it to an illusion, and you could write it up and have a great shot at a nobel prize in physics, maths or both.

> The notion that we freely choose anything is absurd on the face of it, as it'd mean a process where the outcome neither follows deterministically from the inputs, nor is random, nor any combination of the two.

You're just imputing a meaning to "free will" which is not how people typically use the term. People don't mean a free choice to be free of antecedent causes, because that would be absurd: you choose to eat when you're hungry, you choose to sleep when you're tired, you choose a job based on what salary you want and work/life balance which are preferences shaped by your experiences, etc.

When people say someone made a choice of their own free will, they mean the choice was not coerced, and so that choice was consistent with their values rather than forced to conform to someone else's values. That is, it's an expression of their "will".

This is the view on free will known as "Compatibilism", because it's compatible with determinism, and it's basically the view we see in the legal system: if you are mentally competent to make a choice, and you were not coerced, you are held responsible for that choice.

And this matches will with how laypeople reason morally: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

This entirely sidesteps the issue, which is that if you employ a compatibilist notion of free will (in other words: a "free" will that is merely an illusion of agency), then you have no actual agency, and so assigning you moral responsibility for the actions taken is fundamentally unjust and in itself wildly immoral: You had no actual control of the choice taken.

I'd also strongly content that you're wrong, and that if you actually dig into peoples beliefs about free will deeply enough to ensure they understand what you're suggesting, you will find most people get annoyed, agitated or outright angry at even the notion that they don't imbue outcomes with some magical fairy-dust agency they can't define.

Getting people to superficially agree with compatibilism is easy. Getting people to agree with it once you present them with the logical consequences of it, is not.

At least it's consistently been my experience with this over decades of having this discussion: The exceedingly rare compatibilists I come across tends to be a small subset of the exceedingly few people who read philosophy papers.

EDIT: I'd love to see a survey ask people if they think a purely deterministic process, e.g. a suitable program running on a computer, can ever be said to have free will. If people say "no" to that, they are rejecting a compatibilist definition of free will.

You can see the strong emotions that brings up in play if you look at the discussions over AI art right now, with the number of people angrily rejecting not just the current iteration of such tools, but the very notion that AI can ever be more than deterministic automatons, with the implicit belief in that being that humans are not.

> This entirely sidesteps the issue, which is that if you employ a compatibilist notion of free will (in other words: a "free" will that is merely an illusion of agency), then you have no actual agency, and so assigning you moral responsibility for the actions taken is fundamentally unjust and in itself wildly immoral: You had no actual control of the choice taken.

Except that's irrelevant. The fact that a murderer had no "ultimate" control over becoming who he is, is irrelevant to the fact hat he felt justified in committing the murder, and the entity that feels justified in murdering has made an unethical choice, and so that entity requires correction. This is the inescapable question free will addresses: who is responsible for a choice?

And this addresses your claim here:

> This entirely sidesteps the issue, which is that if you employ a compatibilist notion of free will (in other words: a "free" will that is merely an illusion of agency)

So this is not an "illusion of agency", this is exactly the kind of agency people care about: if your thoughts and feelings counterfactually determined your choice free of coercion, and if that choice was wrong, your thoughts and feelings require correction via feedback, which is holding you morally responsible.

> I'd also strongly content that you're wrong, and that if you actually dig into peoples beliefs about free will deeply enough to ensure they understand what you're suggesting, you will find most people get annoyed, agitated or outright angry at even the notion that they don't imbue outcomes with some magical fairy-dust agency they can't define.

You can contend strongly all you like, I cited empirical evidence that was part of a series of studies undertaken over years which tested to see whether people have Compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. People agreed strongly with Compatibilism after it was properly explained to them, which is the opposite of what you claim.

> The exceedingly rare compatibilists I come across tends to be a small subset of the exceedingly few people who read philosophy papers.

Well then you're in for a shock, not only from the paper I linked above, but also because a comfortable majority of philosophers who actually read and write philosophy papers for a living are Compatibilists:

https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

EDIT for your edit:

> I'd love to see a survey ask people if they think a purely deterministic process, e.g. a suitable program running on a computer, can ever be said to have free will. If people say "no" to that, they are rejecting a compatibilist definition of free will.

We already know the answer to this: anthropomorphization is a near universal cognitive bias, by which humans assume a mind behind phenomena, particularly phenomena that exhibits complex behvaiour. This is why people are polite when conversing with chatbots like ChatGPT.

If there's a mind that's responsive to moral feedback as I described above, then it makes perfect sense to hold it responsible, and I am 99.9999% certain this is how most people would treat this question.

> We already know the answer to this: anthropomorphization is a near universal cognitive bias, by which humans assume a mind behind phenomena, particularly phenomena that exhibits complex behvaiour. This is why people are polite when conversing with chatbots like ChatGPT.

That does not give us the answer to what I wrote at all. Yes, people will casually treat computer systems as thinking entities. I wrote my first chatbot that fooled people ~28 years ago or so. It was not a good chatbot: All it took to fool people into long conversations was to continuously pick random responses from a set of only 4-5 or so.

But that does not tell us whether or not they would think that a computer exhibits free will, nor whether they think it ever could. Assuming this cognitive bias equals a belief that is maintained when probed deeper is something I've seen many times when discussing this with compatibilists. It's easy to assume a compatibilist view on free will if you look at surface level indications; people are not consistent, nor do most think carefully through unstated implications. We - me included - will often act as if something has agency and/or is a fully thinking being with a meaningful form "magical" free will even when we know full well the entity in question isn't even an advanced automaton.

Case in point: the trivial chatbot mentioned above. Some people would pour out their life story. Some would get angry at it for repeating itself. Some would tell it they thought it was probably a bot, and still talk to it as if it was a sentient being afterwards. Does that mean they have thought it had agency anyway since they treated it as if it did after "outing" it as a bot? Of course not.

It meant that in that context it met some immediate desire or need of theirs to treat it as if it was another mind they could connect with, because it was a convenient fiction.

Compatibilist free will is a convenient fiction. And so if you were to ask me whether I agree that "free will" as defined by compatibilists exists, I'd say yes. I just don't find it to have any moral implications, and I see it as no more than an illusion and a smokescreen. And so if you were to ask whether I think "free will" exists, I say no. It's an absurd notion. There's nothing "free" about the compatibilist notion of free will.

Failing to account for this ability to buy into a fiction like this on a contextual basis makes any investigation into what people actually think of something like free will entirely meaningless twaddle (and to be clear, most of what I've seen from non-compatibilists in this respect is also meaningless twaddle). Trying to dig into this with short surveys without multiple questions aimed at determining inconsistencies in the answers that signal lack of understanding of implications is a big red flag.

> If there's a mind that's responsive to moral feedback as I described above, then it makes perfect sense to hold it responsible, and I am 99.9999% certain this is how most people would treat this question.

Even if we posit that people would treat it that way, it does not mean it makes perfect sense or is justified. If that what people do believe, it would just tell me that most people are just as immoral, cruel and callous as they consider criminals to be. Personally, if one consider it moral to apply a corrective system to attempt to reduce crime (and I do, at least for crime that actually has victims), then I'd consider it equally moral to apply the same form of corrections to people engaged in that harm against others as part of current "justice" systems. Participating in the oppression of the huge number of people being punished in ways that do not serve a corrective purpose the way prosecutors, judges and police do amounts to horrifying levels of immorality from the point of view that the people they inflict harm on could not have acted differently.

> Except that's irrelevant. The fact that a murderer had no "ultimate" control over becoming who he is, is irrelevant to the fact hat he felt justified in committing the murder, and the entity that feels justified in murdering has made an unethical choice, and so that entity requires correction. This is the inescapable question free will addresses: who is responsible for a choice?

If most people genuinely saw it like this - a matter of correction rather than vengeance -, the justice system would look fundamentally different. If the goal was indeed correction, sentences would follow evidence of risk, and imprisonment would focus on rehabilitation. Every evidence we see of how people act and respond to sentencing show that people see prison as to a large extent punitive, an attitude that is wildly immoral if the "entity in question" could not have chosen differently given the same inputs and the same state.

> So this is not an "illusion of agency", this is exactly the kind of agency people care about

Irrespective of whether or not it is "the kind of agency" people care about, if that is what people care about, then people are using compatibilism to justify to themselves allowing harm to people who had no ability to choose differently. If that is the kind of agency people care about, that does not make it better. It makes people worse for understanding that they are harming people who can't choose differently.

> if that choice was wrong, your thoughts and feelings require correction via feedback, which is holding you morally responsible.

The first part is a utilitarian argument for minimally invasive rehabilitation, not for punishment that does not achieve those goals. The latter part is a smokescreen - if you could not possibly have made a different choice, there's nothing moral about holding you responsible, and punishing you without trying to minimise the impact on you is itself inflicting immoral harm.

This is one of those things that tends to get people very agitated when you dig into this. If you accept a purely materialistic universe, then the current "justice system" is nothing of the sort. You can reasonably argue that correction is necessary, but there's certainly no justice in applying further harm to people who had no ability to choose otherwise.

> You can contend strongly all you like, I cited empirical evidence that was part of a series of studies undertaken over years which tested to see whether people have Compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. People agreed strongly with Compatibilism after it was properly explained to them, which is the opposite of what you claim.

I see no evidence of this in the paper you linked to. What these kinds of discussions tends to show me is that you can make all kinds of superficial statements like the ones referenced in the paper, and get people to make seemingly coherent assessments when you give people the "escape clause" that however much you tell them otherwise they think there's some neubulous special thing about humans that give us an ability to decide otherwise, but once you start digging into it people tend to get very upset when you suggest their ability to make decisions is computationally equivalent to a computer (hence my edit, which I realise you might not have seen when you replied to my post above).

> Well then you're in for a shock, not only from the paper I linked above, but also because a comfortable majority of philosophers who actually read and write philosophy papers for a living are Compatibilists

How is that shocking? The proportion of people who read and write philosophy papers are a tiny little proportion of people. I'm totally unsurprised at the number of people who read philosophy papers for a living come to this view - it's hard to reconcile a strongly materialistic view of free will with living in a society that you then necessarily will see as brutally immoral and without any semblance of justice.

Given the array of visible thoughts, I can choose to direct attention at some thoughts and ignore others.

So that's a variety of choice that has the effect of conditioning the thought-stream.

(But yes, thoughts just arise. Like sights and sounds. Only our power to arrange them seems special)

Even that is not clear to me.

When you are focusing on a problem, and then catch yourself distracted daydreaming, when did you choose to direct your attention away from the problem and towards the daydream?

It's not obvious to me at all that I consciously author the choice of where to direct my attention. And even in the cases where I do think "Ok, I am going to think about X", did I author that thought? On down recursively.

Thoughts appear, and I notice them, but I never choose to notice them. It's all quite mysterious.

The nature of attention-direction, the way it moves and such, be it a choice or otherwise, is indeed mysterious.

One phenomenon that you might consider is that when you direct your attention at one thing (be it a thought or whatatever) you become blind to other things. And this blindness is proportional to the intensity of the attention-directing.

The thought that I had to go to the bathroom after waking up certainly, absolutely came from somewhere I can identify.

Sounds like someone read Sam Harris' essay on free will.

Which has been rebutted by a number of philosophers in the field. See, for example, this by Daniel Dennett:

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/reflections_on_...

Dennett just redefines free will. He says:

> The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.

Sam Harris would say that having the "consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined" is exactly what he means when he says we don't have free will. If you can consciously choose from a menu of thoughts, but you don't consciously choose the contents of the menu, is that free will in a meaningful sense?

Furthermore, the act of selecting from the menu of decisions is itself another decision. This is the recursive "choosing to choose" I've referred to in comments in this thread. How do you choose to choose? How do you choose to choose to choose? At some point, the recursion must stop at some unconscious decision.

> Dennett just redefines free will.

So what? The fact is that the "free will" you appear to want to talk about does not and cannot exist, whereas the "free will" Dennett is talking about does exist and has important real-world consequences. So, to be blunt, why should I care about your preferred definition? What's the point of going on and on about something that doesn't and can't exist? Who cares?

There's a good footnote in Dennett's paper that speaks to this point:

''I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. (p42S) -Lee Siegel, Net of Magic

I'd rather talk about free will that can actually exist, than complain about free will that doesn't and can't exist.

> If you can consciously choose from a menu of thoughts, but you don't consciously choose the menu, is that free will in a meaningful sense?

It's certainly better than not being able to choose anything--or worse, being forced to suffer the consequences of the bad choices of others.

Dennett makes a comment in one of his books on this topic: "There are very real threats to our freedom, but they are not metaphysical." Telling people that they don't have free will, in real terms, amounts to telling them to suck it up while the evil, predatory people in the world, who know perfectly well that they do have free will and have no compunction about exercising it at others' expense, take all their goodies, instead of choosing to fight back. Sorry, not buying it.

> So what? The fact is that the "free will" you appear to want to talk about does not and cannot exist, whereas the "free will" Dennett is talking about does exist and has important real-world consequences. So, to be blunt, why should I care about your preferred definition? What's the point of going on and on about something that doesn't and can't exist? Who cares?

Because it's a poor rhetorical tactic, one used quite often in this and other topics, that confuses the subject rather than adding clarity and mutual understanding. Redefining the subject of a debate in the middle of such a debate is a recipe for talking past one another (which these two have done at length multiple times and never seem to quite understand how much they're talking past one another, or at least never acknowledge it so as to "win" more) rather than coming to a better understanding. Neither one can be wrong or right because neither really acknowledges the other, they're just sort of talking about related (but different) subjects at the same time using the same term in different ways, to the consternation of passer bys who end up joining one camp or the other not realizing they can easily be in both.

> Telling people that they don't have free will, in real terms, amounts to telling them to suck it up while the evil, predatory people in the world, who know perfectly well that they do have free will and have no compunction about exercising it at others' expense, take all their goodies, instead of choosing to fight back.

That's not what it tells them at all, and indeed this is a common point of confusion that could be alleviated without all the talking past one another. A better synthesis would be:

- Acknowledge one does not directly author one's own thoughts (either by way of the vast literature of neuroscience or simply closely observing the nature of thought)

- Acknowledge the vast role of forces outside our direct individual control in our understanding of ourselves and others

- Acknowledge our ignorance of full causation of any given thought or action and the scoping differences of emergent systems

- Acknowledge regardless of the first two and because of the third at an individual and societal level there is very real meaning to responsibility and attribution of action to a locus of control (be that individual or grouping of individuals)

Compatibilism (of which Dennett is a proponent) more or less just says the 4th is actually compatible with the 1st. And that's completely reasonable, but we'd save a lot of time in these debates by taking great pains to acknowledge the difference in scope and context as opposed to arguing which one we want to call "free will."

> And that's completely reasonable, but we'd save a lot of time in these debates by taking great pains to acknowledge the difference in scope and context as opposed to arguing which one we want to call "free will."

Except Dennett's use is compatible with how laypeople seem to reason morally [1], and it further agrees with centuries of legal precedent that accounts for free choice, so there is a good justification for defining this as free will.

I also reject the framing that free will already had a definition that Compatibilists are trying to redefine. The whole debate is about what qualities free will has that can make sense of choice and responsibility. This debate didn't start with "free will must have qualities X, Y or it's not free will", it started with discussion about what sorts of control we may have over choices and what this entails about our responsibility, and free will is the descriptor for the kind of choice that entails responsibility.

Compatibilism provides a coherent definition that largely matches how people talk about and reason about this topic, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us all to understand that this is free will?

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

This seems to me like more of the same talking past this subject is rife with. I didn't purport to frame any such definition as "first," the context of my reply was referring specifically to a Dennett rebuttal to a Harris essay, which is by definition not first.

To me the semantics of what one wants to call free will really don't matter and aren't worth much discussion, yet they seem to be primarily what gets discussed. What matters is clarity and context (context being do you want to talk about how minds and the universe works or do you want to talk about moral or societal responsibility), and trying discuss which one ought to be called free will seems to me to be yak shaving.

I'd agree the debate is actually fairly largely settled for now, as I pointed out in my bullets in the previous reply. There is still much to figure out about neurology and the origin of thought, and about societal cohesion, but the fundamentals there seem pretty solid for as long as we're mostly human. I add that last caveat because I think these concerns actually do start to merge once a mind is capable of fully experiencing and conceptually recognizing causal lines (physical, chemical, or otherwise), which certainly seems to be not in the cards for us biologically and may even be theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't rule out just yet. In such a world with such minds things would look quite a bit different, and there would be much less daylight between every day morality and mechanistic functions underlying the minds a play.

> To me the semantics of what one wants to call free will really don't matter and aren't worth much discussion, yet they seem to be primarily what gets discussed.

It matters quite a bit I think, because otherwise it's an impediment to communication. Just look around at all the pushback from unnecessary changes to language due to so-called "wokeness". If a term has a coherent conception and is mostly well understood and commonly utilized by people, I don't see the value in trying to change that language.

In this context, Harris is just one in a long line of people leveling this accusation that Compatibilism is changing the definition of free will, where it seems instead that it empirically matches how people actually use this term.

This is not to say that you specifically were making this argument, but it's been implicit (and sometimes explicit) undercurrent in this whole thread.

> It matters quite a bit I think, because otherwise it's an impediment to communication.

It sounds like we agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. I would argue most of the impediment to communication on this subject is exactly because people are trying much too hard to brand a certain conceptualization "free will" and trying to delineate different contexts and scenarios far too little. It's absolutely worthwhile to clarify what context one is referring to when using the term. It's absolutely a waste of time to try and assert this context is the only correct context to do so.

I agree that we can find broad agreement on the facts if we replace "free will" with baggage-free terms, but this still leaves open the question of what people actually mean when they hold someone responsible for a freely made choice, and whether this is justified. Under Compatibilism it is, but otherwise it mostly isn't.

In my experience, everyone arguing about brains and the universe is trying to justify something like the Consequence Argument, in which I think my insistence on a Compatibilist definition of free will is justified.

> everyone arguing about brains and the universe is trying to justify something like the Consequence Argument

That hasn't been my experience at all, usually I see claims about the brains and universe being made from epistemic grounds, and indeed they are valuable in of themselves even if purely academic. The nature of our reality is worth discovering on its own merit, rather than just discarding in favor of saying that's not what we're really talking about (when indeed some of us are talking about that!).

All the more reason to be clear about context.

I agree that investigation into how the brain and the universe works is valuable. I was saying that whenever they are brought up in the context of a discussion of free will and moral responsibility it's because they're building up to a type of Consequence Argument. If you still disagree, then perhaps you can provide an example of what you mean because I'm not getting the distinction you're trying to make.

> it further agrees with centuries of legal precedent that accounts for free choice, so there is a good justification for defining this as free will.

Of all possible reasons to argue for compatibalism, I would not choose this.

Historical precedent is often wrong, and often horribly so. This particular issue happens to be one that leaves us mostly in the dark while many of the provably incorrect historical precedents have been addressed by growing scientific knowledge.

As neuroscience progresses and converges with philosophical thoughts on the subject, I think philosophers will have stronger ground to build on. Until then, I’m not looking to historical precedent for answers, on a topic that seems very incompatible with such a source of wisdom.

> Compatibilism provides a coherent definition that largely matches how people talk about and reason about this topic, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us all to understand that this is free will?

“Religion and the existence of god provides a coherent framework that largely matches how people talk and reason about existence and morality, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us to all understand that this is our origin?”.

This is a sentence that would not have raised very many eyebrows at one time. It seems that you are arguing for compatibilism on the basis that it matches how people currently make sense of our notions of free will?

Accepting “good enough” approximations, especially when examining issues of ethics and morality seems extremely problematic and likely to create blind spots.

> “Religion and the existence of god provides a coherent framework that largely matches how people talk and reason about existence and morality, so exactly why should that not settle the debate and require us to all understand that this is our origin?”.

Except that's wrong. Theism is not a coherent framework at all, and it doesn't at all explain our origins in a way that's compatible with observation. By contrast, Compabitilism is a coherent framework in which to reason about choice and responsibility, and it agrees with how people intuitively approach this as tested empirically, and it agrees with one of the greatest ethical equalizers we've found: law.

You can crap on the law all you want, but it was the first great step towards social justice that tore down the power of monarchs and divine rule and started the process of treating all people on equal footing. Science has an equally storied history of mistakes, and yet you clearly value its current state, and so I'm saying don't be so dismissive of progress and precedent in law. It too has been shaped deep of philosophical debate among tens of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Don't fail to learn the lessons of the past.

> Except that's wrong. Theism is not a coherent framework at all, and it doesn't at all explain our origins in a way that's compatible with observation.

This misses the point, and I'd ask that you reframe how you read my statement as a thought experiment. Saying this is wrong is a claim you can now confidently make within the context of a system of understanding that has advanced far beyond the confines of what religion could explain. The inherent limits of religion necessitated some better explanation.

Prior to the existence of that new understanding, and during the time in which that new understanding was brand new, appeals to "how people talk and reason" were appeals to religion, and the arguments for it perfectly coherent given the tools of thought available at the time. As science introduced new tools, consensus thinking shifted accordingly.

My point is that an argument for compatibilism that appeals to the common vernacular as a primary point of validation is not a very convincing argument.

> You can crap on the law all you want, but it was the first great step towards social justice...

This is a binary mindset, and I'm not crapping on the law - it is both valuable and necessary. Finding issues with certain laws or modes of thinking about law are not an implication that laws are not useful. The point is that laws are just a tool, and are not by themselves an indicator of enlightenment or the best possible solution. We know this to be true by looking at the reform of immoral/unethical laws over time. The underlying frameworks of understanding used to author laws within the legal system are just as important as the legal system itself (see: abortion, slavery, segregation...).

If we only used the good things law has achieved to justify the existence of other laws, gay marriage would still be illegal, most states would still be incarcerating people for smoking weed, and segregation would still be alive and well.

> Science has an equally storied history of mistakes, and yet you clearly value its current state, and so I'm saying don't be so dismissive of progress and precedent in law.

I don't think I'm dismissing any progress or precedent at all. I'm saying we should not use precedent to stop us from making progress. This is something science is better at than some disciplines, but even science remains susceptible to dogma and binary thinking.

> Don't fail to learn the lessons of the past.

As a form of argument about philosophy, this is a problematic conclusion. At a minimum, you would need to explain why some lessons are better to learn than others, and on what basis they are better or worse.

But setting that aside, and in the context of our understanding of the science of human consciousness, why is there any implication at all that exploring the true nature of free will is incompatible with learning from the past?

Better to have SOME definition than spend eternity going back and forth with "we DO SO have free will" "nuh-uh we don't" "yuh-uh we do!" "NUH-UH WE DON'T" without ever actually defining what we mean by it, which is how 99% of discussions of free will seem to end up.

And then someone says "wait what does this term even mean" and gets piled on with "oh so we're just going to quibble about definitions, are we?"

> Dennett just redefines free will.

I really detest this "rebuttal", because it assumes some authoritative definition of free will exists. It does not. The whole point of the free will debate is come to an understanding of what free will actually is, that makes sense of our language and moral reasoning around choice and responsibility.

Guess what? Sam Harris' definition of free will will (incompatibilism) is inconsistent with how most laypeople seem to reason morally, while Dennett's (Compatibilism) is on the money:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

> Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful.

While you speak of utility in terms of behaviour, I also question its utility in a philosophical and spiritual sense.

Strict determinism (and according lack of free will) has been around since at least the 1600s in more or less its current form. Though we tend to use computer rather than clockwork metaphors for it these days. Precursor concepts, like fates immutable and determined before birth, are truly ancient ideas. As is the notion of the lottery of birth, that any one of us could have been born as someone else.

Many, maybe most people, for thousands of years, have been familiar with the idea. Many think it to be true. And yet, it doesn't feel true. I experience life under the delusion that I have free will, that I make my choices. Aside from a few Buddhist-inspired types who claim to free themself from this delusion from time to time, everyone suffers from it. (I am not very skeptical of such claims, but they only manage it as a side-effect of the even more unsettling realization that the self, with its thoughts and decisions, does not exist in the first place. That may be true too, but it sure doesn't feel true most of the time.)

What can you actually do with a literally unbelievable truth?

Strict determinism is physically impossible. By physically, I mean you cannot reconcile it with quantum physics.

However, the luck we're talking about is not random chance, it is comparable to a set of overlapping games with stacked odds. The result is still a chaotic system, that means it will typically tend to end up in one or more attractor states.

This is how both inheritance and culture work. Going against the culture, physical or mental inheritance, or pushing to a different attractor state requires overcoming a vast amount of inertia. Within and without. And sometimes help too.

Certain initial states have much more leeway in shaping the particular trajectory one would take than others.

And yes, ultimate choice of free will is to roll the dice, try something new or create. Determinism is incompatible with that.

I got hung up on your first paragraph. How is strict determinism incompatible with quantum physics? I would have said the opposite, that it was required by quantum physics. Unless somehow your consciousness reaches its fingers in from outside physics to change quantum interactions.

I agree about strict determinism being false. It was more of a tangent off my point.

There is a subjective experience of being. We think we have a mind, that acts on the world. Both dualists and monists, of all kinds, experience reality with this feeling, I think. The questions I have are: is this an illusion? Is there a mapping between the subjective being that experiences, the mind on the inside, and the apparent order of events in reality? Would our experienced slice of time and space be different, if we had chosen differently? Could we have?

That's how I understand the problem of free will. It seems to be something no one has really figured out. There's all sorts of conjectures. Christians say something like that, through some divine process the soul which is related to our mind, is linked to our body and we are given the choice to act. Monadic materialists say the mind is part of reality through some physical or metaphysical process, and thus we, as in our minds, do at least effect changes on the world. About as convincing as the Christians, in my mind. We can say the mind itself is sort of an illusion, but that's even more irritating, isn't it? Because it doesn't feel like one, at least to me.

Maybe I misunderstand the problem and the questions are not properly formed.

>Strict determinism is physically impossible. By physically, I mean you cannot reconcile it with quantum physics.

This is complete BS, given that there are many aspects of quantum physics that still elude our comprehension. Just because we fail at determining its nature, doesn't necessarily mean its nature is indeterministic. Just like how a pseudo random number generator may generate numbers which appear to be random or indeterministic, but instead are actually the results of an entirely deterministic and predictable process.

On the contrary, if luck decided everything, why shouldn't the luckier reap the rewards of their luck? Pagan religions put a great deal of emphasis on fortune and very little on one's own moral choices. They believed that the fortunate have a moral obligation to rule the unlucky. That's why new emperors were hailed with "Felicior Augusto".

Does someone deserve a position of responsibility, say a military command, just because life has been unfair to them? What if you give him a command and his bad luck continues? It would doom not only him, but his soldiers as well.

Similarly, why should a fortunate man share his wealth with the less fortunate? If life is just one big casino, would you share your chips with someone in the middle of a losing streak?

It's interesting how most modern attempts to redefine morality, in order to supposedly screw it in the favor of the poor, so often end up resurrecting the ethical systems of times and places, where the poor would fight to the death for the entertainment of the rich.

I think the notion of "everything is luck" and "what should we do about that" are totally orthogonal. One is an "is" statement, the other is an "ought" statement, and it is entirely unclear how to go from one to the other (and I don't attempt to do so). Referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

> They believed that the fortunate have a moral obligation to rule the unlucky.

Hardly. It's just that they can, and it feels good to rule over others, so why shouldn't they? You aren't really a "bad pagan" if you decide to do otherwise. You're just possibly a foolish one. The only "pagan sin" is hubris, thinking that you're more powerful than you are and gaping over too much.

I agree that there's a tendency to recreate all that stuff.

>> With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything. We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born. Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful.

I don't see any reason to believe what you say is wrong. Is there evidence we have free will? It's hard to find in physics. Could i have done differently that what i did? I don't think so. I don't control my thoughts, i don't think them before i think them. I'm not sure how i could do differently.

I personally choose to believe that "free will" is actually just a desire to do what you want, and exercise change for that purpose. Maybe that was predetermined by the simulation (as all things are), but people have varying degrees of willingness to reach for their desires, especially if they would have to proactively create change in their lives in order to do so.

Even if everything you do was predetermined by the simulation... the simulation is simulating you, so even inside it, you will do what you would have done otherwise.

-Emily

What is desire, and where does it come from?

Desire is chemicals in the brain, I think.

I would say the following argument proves too much: if desire is worthless because it's part of the simulation, and therefore any impression of "free will" is not even free because your ability to express said "free will" was decided upon by the simulation and not yourself... then nothing is worth anything and you have to back up (unless you want to become a nihilist).

-Emily

And if chemicals in the brain are responsible for creating the feeling we experience in consciousness and label desire, what is responsible for the accumulation and mixing of those chemicals?

None of the line of reasoning I'm teasing at requires one to conclude that desire is worthless. Many involuntary appearances in consciousness map directly to causal factors and provide clear evolutionary benefit, e.g. pain is an early warning system that helps us avoid many kinds of death.

Why would nihilism be the natural conclusion here?

desire is not at all worthless, it's very important, its just that i find it hard to claim that my conscious self is the cause of that desire.

It is useful. Robert Owen said man cannot be a proper subject for praise and blame. If he was right then of course that has implications.

Isn't it suspicious if you used to use a desert argument ("we pay this guy because he chose to work hard and so deserves it"), then you move to a utility argument ("we pay this guy because paying people like him more leads to good for all of us"), and miraculously the right payment works out to exactly the same?

> With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything.

I mean yes.

> We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born.

If you believe in Einstein theory, yes. QM is a bit more complicated since there is the possibility you took all the paths that are out there. But let's not get into that?

> We punish people for doing the wrong things

No, we don't. Most cultures and countries just put them in jail. In modern times, it can be a psychiatric institution.

> even though they didn't chose to do them

No one care. People also usually don't care much if it's "them" who did these things.

> but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen

No, it doesn't. Crime rates are not determined by the severity of your laws but rather the circumstances of the country, families and culture. See?

> we give rewards to people who worked hard

No we don't. Reward are distributed most randomly but sometimes through privilege. Few tech and other people make their money by merit.

> if we just handed out money evenly to everyone

That's communism. It did actually quite well until it collapsed. It seems some countries have a bias for it, while it doesn't work well in others.

"The wrong thing" is not a crime. Society punishes any life move that does not maximize profit. Every little choice can reduce the chance buffer between food and a roof and falling off the cliff.

> but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen

In general, yes. And that's the justifiable for reason for punishing people for crimes. Which is different from saying that they "deserve" it

What is your definition of deserve? Google’s definition is:

> do something or have or show qualities worthy of (reward or punishment).

That seems to fit punishment for committing a crime.

I think they mean that punishment's main purpose should not be retaliation but deterrence.

In general, I think that’s not established to be true at all. Going to prison raises the risk of future crimes, compared to e.g community service.

Have randomized controlled trials been held on this point?

I think we can all imagine dozens of confounding factors among the people assigned to community service vs prison if the assignment is done via an element of human judgment.

Yes. Here's one, for example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229989870_Does_Comm...

This meta-study pulls together RCTs and experimental programs and covers non-custodial (which includes a range of options besides community service) v custodial, and finds them to be at worst equivalent for recidivism https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.4073/csr.2015.1

Thanks for the link; I will read the full paper later today. At a reading of abstract, I don't know how much I worry about recidivism for the criminals facing prison sentences of no more than 14 days. Those are people charged with some ticky-tack offense and probably not the people who are disproportionately likely going to go on to carjack or murder someone in my family.

In this way of thinking, no one deserves anything.

I make the point in your last paragraph often. There is a quote I recall reading somewhere, that contrasts with “I think, therefore I am”. Rather: “the thought chooses the thinker”.

You make an excellent case for nihilism, but I must say…

> Why did you choose for your parents

… you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.

I'm not sure if it's a case for nihilism, but it is definitely a case for humility, patience, and non-hatred (is there a word for this?).

Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid.

One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera.

Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.

I owe you an apology. I was reading quickly and thought you were making a very different point than you were making. I’m sorry for my abrupt and dismissive response.

I agree with you. I’d owe you the same apology for misreading you if I came to disagree. But I do agree. And I’m glad you were thoughtful in your reply, which I probably didn’t welcome enough.

For what it’s worth I do think there’s still a case for nihilism in there! Just the good kind.

People are not just the product of their environments. They make choices; those choices have consequences.

People are more constrained by their environment than they often think. They choose less often than they think they do. At the same time, your post goes too far the other direction. People have more choice than that. And they have responsibility for those choices.

Can you provide an example of a choice that one can not keep asking "why" to and get at a cause that was not consciously authored by that person? I have had this conversation many times and have never encountered such an example, but would be interested to hear one.

Maybe I can.

If you start from a materialist position (including from the modern scientific position), then you are inevitably faced with some kind of reductionism, and even far stronger reductionism than you are arguing. If all that exists is matter and the laws of physics, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics - nothing more. You're just a collection of atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, assembled into molecules that obey the laws of biochemistry, assembled into neurons that obey the laws of neurology.

There is no room for choice in that view. But equally, there is no room for love. (Especially love in the highest sense, of choosing to do what's best for the other, because you can't choose anything. But even in the sense of attraction, that's just neurons and biochemicals doing their thing.) There is no room for beauty as a real thing - it's just what hits our neurons a particular way. There is no room for truth as truth. (There are things that we find convincing, in our hardware that evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, rather than to find actual truth or to do pure logic correctly.)

There is not even room for personality. All you can be is the impersonal plus complexity - that's all "personality" can be. There is nothing more for "personality" to be but the artifact of complexity.

But that doesn't match our experience. We all experience love, even though the logic of our position says that love doesn't exist. We all make choices, even though logic says we don't actually choose. We all experience beauty and we all long for truth. And we all long for personal contact - to touch each other as persons, not just as complicated machines. We can try to live within the logic of the materialist position, but it doesn't actually fit who we are as human beings.

It's kind of like when you put a t-shirt on backwards. It covers all the places that need to be covered, but it doesn't fit right. And no matter how much you try to wiggle it around and adjust it, it just doesn't fit.

I suggest that the materialist position doesn't fit who we are as human beings, and that the lack of fit is telling us something. Either we are the products of random chance, thrown up in and by an impersonal universe, with aspirations of personality that can never be fulfilled, or we are not actually what our philosophy says we are. And I think it's the latter.

So I invite you to consider the alternative to the materialist position. If the beginning of it all was someone, rather than something impersonal, then it is possible that we could be truly personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Then we also could be able to make real choices, and to really love, and to know real truth and beauty. We could be what humans have always thought we were. But you can never have that as long as you hold to the purely materialist view.

But if you can't step out of the materialist view and consider the alternative, then no, I can't give you the example that you're asking for.

For a much longer and better treatment of this, see the first chapter of He Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.

Why do you love your mother?

Because, you do :)

This is why Western individualism is stupid. We're constituent parts of families, and operate most effectively in that way, yet all modern taxation, government policy and a lot of culture attempts to break that bond, in favour of an all-powerful state.

Q. Why do you work hard?

A. Because you choose to.

Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.

You can ask why you chose, and when you gave the answer that you choose to do so because you choose to do so you're begging the question. What gave you that work ethic? Either nature or nuture, both outside your control.

For you to have any kind of real agency rather than being the product of cause and effect beyond any control of yours would upend both logic and physics (in other words: free will is nothing but an illusion).

My point, which you missed, is not that you can't ask why, but that you aren't obligated to ask why. Saying that you made a choice (repeatedly) to work hard is enough of an answer to the question of why you had some benefit in your life accrue to you due to your hard work. If you want to ask why you made those choices, you would have to give an answer for each one, but the fact is that you made them.

Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it?

>Free will is no more an illusion than the qualia of red. If what you think is outside your control, then who is the "you" that is not in control? Where is it?

If you can't choose to swap the color red to blue, then what makes you think you have any other choice with other things in your mind?

Do you experience the qualia of red as a choice? If so, you cannot trust your senses any further than your own choices. But if you experience, for example, before taking an important call, that you have a choice to make, then you have a choice to make. The fact that the laws of physics may underwrite your experience has no bearing on this.

the color red is a matter of perception, not a "law of physics"

But do you choose to have that perception, or is it simply a consequence of looking at something that happens to be red?

I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?

Attributing everything to luck is:

A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.

B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.

You can't see the luck in having a life experience that motivated you to become financially successful? I mean, I know financially successful people and they go around judging poor and middle class people for their bad financial decisions, and I'm just thinking--well, maybe they did not have the education to help them do that, or they did not have a life experience that woke them up, because it is actually possible to be perfectly content with being poor/middle class or for it to never occur to themselves to question their circumstances?

Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.

Luck determined the circumstances I grew up in, I didn’t control than. My choice to lift myself out of that environment has nothing to do with luck at all, that was explicitly a deliberate choice I made. My mechanism for accomplishing it had nothing to do with luck either, I moved out of home (and subsequently removed myself from that environment) by getting a job as a bartender.

It's still luck that you had:

1. The ability to move out of your house. There are places in the world where people don't have as much freedom of movement because they are not as democratic as countries in the west.

2. Been hired as a bartender. Need I say that this is not a choice that you made, but by your then-employer, or that it was possible for such a job to exist in the first place because you found another town with enough economy to create such jobs, while many other places in the world are not as fortunate?

Good for you wherever you are in your life right now, but I hate to break it to you buddy--you didn't do everything yourself, and you were lucky to have an environment that enabled your growth and to have other people to play a part in your success.

I have worked across many places in the developing world, and every place I’ve been to (apart from perhaps North Korea) has opportunities for people who want to improve their own lives. In many places the path would look different than it does in the west, but I know hundreds of people who have pulled themselves into the middle classes of emerging economies simply through hard work and commitment.

Getting a basic, entry level, no skill job has barely anything to do with luck. I guess I’m lucky that I was born, and that my mind and body works. But that’s all the luck you need to attain that level of success, nearly everywhere in the world.

If you can call working many hours, creating nothing, earning just enough to get by a success. It also ignores others - human relationships.

This is why so many people push it back onto their children to have it better, but it typically does not work for either them or their kids.

Having minimal means to survive, including health, is but a necessary condition for being a whole, successful person.

That’s a rather smug and ignorant way of looking at somebody pulling themself out of what was basically a ghetto. Being able to take financial responsibility for myself was a tremendous success for me at the time, and it was an absolutely essential first step for me to take in building a much better life for myself.

Yes, it is essential, but it is not a success.

It is averting abject immediate failure at best. Definition of success for more people would be starting a family or helping theirs out. Which you almost certainly cannot do these days with even copious amounts of hard work, not you can build something just ever slightly more with that.

Savings? Don't exist really, are subject to every whim and throw of economy. Use a calculator and multiply how much of forever you will have to work to establish basic stability.

As is your boss of that gastronomic business, even in North Korea. Owning an actual place to live that will not be taken from you on a whim, hmm?

Even farmers are subject to a degree of luck they're not always allowed to play around...

You're just pushing goal posts. And „basic stability“ in many parts of the world is much simpler than westerners look for. Savings to keep roof over your head and food on the table for next few months in many cases is success.

There's no objective way to determine what is success. It depends a lot on one's background.

It seems to me your definition of luck is unfalsifiable, therefore useless.

Pretty much at every stage of your life involves luck. You can't merely escape it by exercising any agency, only make some outcome more probable than others.

Everything is up to chance if you take such a reductivist view. But if you choose to do the things that increase your chances of success, and choose to avoid the things that decrease your chances of success, then success is merely a matter of time.

> must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did

And they are. I see a lifetime of people making choices.

That's amazing.

But luck is still important. I have a non tech background and got my first tech job through a friend I knew from a completely unrelated hobby. Less than a year later, our startup was acquired, making my unvested options well in the money, and within five years I had earned more money than many if not most Americans earn in their lifetimes. Many people working at startups never get the kind of windfall I got within a year (and given the length of my tenure, I can hardly claim any credit for the company's success at the time of acquisition). I probably would have made good money eventually, but it easily could have taken far longer or not happened at all had I not known my hobby acquaintance.

Of course luck isn't the only reason for anyone's success or failure, but it plays a huge role.

Yet you chose to take the risk of joining that startup.

Why does it always have to be this binary choice (Hence the "everything" qualifier I guess)?

You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.

I've always attributed hard work to basically buying more chances to play. Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.

I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).

> Why does it always have to be this binary choice (Hence the "everything" qualifier I guess)?

My theory: the mind works in binary by default - it is a quick and dirty (and low energy) heuristic to make predictions, and reality/causality/etc from the perspective of an observer is fundamentally prediction based.

If you think that's weird, you should see all the other sub-perceptual weirdness going on in this thread.

> You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.

Technically, it does kinda/plausibly take something away from hard work in that you are attributing the causality of outcomes to luck vs hard work, based on unacknowledged speculation.

> Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.

Technically, you are necessarily speculating here, perhaps while criticizing the speculations of others for being speculative?

> I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).

And not only that, there are other approaches available to humans, like cooperation, which has a dependency on communication and other things. Unfortunately, there seems to be more than a few unrealized bugs in the stack so outcomes are (presumably) less optimal than is possible. My hope is that we try to change this some day, but I do not anticipate this happening.

Because luck has almost nothing to do with success. Luck might play a role in any particular event, but over time if you do the things that are conducive to success (including, but not limited to, hard work), and avoid the thing that are conducive to failure, then you will become successful.

The comment I initially replied to attributed success to the luck having a good childhood, and several people have chimed in saying I was also lucky and should attribute my own success to having a miserable one. All of this is clearly just unfalsifiable, post-facto rationalization to support the insane luck hypothesis. Your life is far too long to be governed by luck. If you have goals, then simply being dedicated to them over a period of time essentially eliminates the influence of luck (unless your goals are specifically highly luck dependant).

I, too, hate the hand-waving away of any success as being based entirely on "luck". I often find those who make that argument are just as you say, using it as a rationalization to not even try.

I would still disagree with your point, though. There are swathes of people who worked their ass off and got nowhere. My own successes in life (if I'm to be honest) have had their roots in an off-chance break or what not. I suppose you could attribute that to hard work and being set up for success, but nothing in life guarantees that if you try 100 times you are owed success.

I think in the nitty gritty of life, it doesn't make a difference what your philosophy is. Just work hard and count your blessings. Those that subscribe to no luck will work hard and if they fail, would probably never blame it on bad "luck" anyway. Those that blame luck as a reason to not try would probably would not have done anything even if luck wasn't a factor.

> If you have goals, then simply being dedicated to them over a period of time essentially eliminates the influence of luck

This is the just world fallacy in a nutshell. Are you consciously saying that every parent in history who watched their children starve to death was just not dedicated and hard working enough? Perhaps didn't have 'feed my children' as a clear enough goal?

Why doesn’t every kid raised in your situation react the same way?

Good on you. I have often wondered how much genetics plays into success and personal discipline (which I would argue can increases ones _odds_ at various points in life). I come from a lower-class background, but am doing quite well today in my late thirties by most metrics. I can easily recognize some turning points in my life where luck played a role. At the same time, I easily recognize times in my life where good luck was a result of earlier decisions and sacrifice.

All this is only interesting though when I compare my life to my siblings. I have talked about this with my parents to some extent. Some of my siblings just seem to be terrible decision makers, and seem to not have any ability to think forward. My older brother's life is a complete disaster, and it is hard to piece together why, because all macro things considered, we were dealt the exact same cards--yet he seems incapable, and always has, of practicing self discipline or instilling any ambition.

In short, I think luck definitely plays a major role, but I also wonder if genetics is more at play than people are willing to admit. If such is the case, it could make conciliation extremely troublesome in some circumstances.

> I think luck definitely plays a major role, but I also wonder if genetics is more at play than people are willing to admit.

I certainly include genetics in the 'luck' component of life, and I am under the impression most people do. ADHD and autism, for example, are extreme examples of genetic impact on executive function, which is commonly confused with willpower and other 'personal decisions'.

> I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?

Being born to a drug dealer is the lucky part.

Is this a serious comment? If you imagine she had a lot of money, you’d be wrong. All the drug sales proceeds went to fund the drug addiction.

I am being sincere, yes.

> If you imagine she had a lot of money, you’d be wrong.

And that’s not what I meant.

What could your rationale for that possibly be?

> One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around.

It motivated you to pursue your little success story. So it was lucky.

So all of the children out there who currently live in poverty, surrounded by drugs and violence are actually lucky to have such a good source of motivation on hand? And all of the children out there who are currently growing up in stable environments are also lucky to have a home conducive to positive development? So who is not lucky? It seems to me, by this standard, everybody is lucky. Or do you need to wait and see who is successful before you decide which circumstances are lucky, and which are unlucky?

It's not the environment based on which luck is determined. Luck is if the environment stimulates the intrinsic or initial programming of the brain in a way that result in a positive outcome.

Well,

1. You were born in a rich country.

2. You were born in an age where the phrase "financially successful" even makes sense. You could have been born in the stone age, for example.

3. You were born as a human. You could have been a mosquito (16,000x higher odds, actually)

Well we’re all humans, and we’re all alive at the same time, so we’ve got a perfectly level playing field there. And no, I wasn’t born in a rich country.

It's hardly a perfectly level playing field. Some people inherit millions. The older generations own all the housing.

Living at the same time means very little. Try entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds have been played, and see how your chances of winning drop to almost 0.

> A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.

That’s some confirmation bias I think.

How many people grow up like that and never get out of it? Is it just because they are all weak willed?

Some of them certainly, but not all of them. I think you need the right combination of both will and circumstance to improve.

Isn’t it just purely sad that some people will never improve because they just haven’t been born with that drive?

> "one of the reasons"

and some of the others were having the opportunity at the right time, making the right connections at the right time, and the other hundreds of things that went right for you and might not have.

Not crediting at least some of your success to random factors that you had no control over is a mistake, too.

There are people out there who worked as hard as you but failed because of those random factors.

Hardly rationalization. It's a recognition that some people are in fact born with silver spoons in their mouth, or maybe something less fortunate.

What are you going to do about it?

Move to America where you have opportunity to choose a path to a better life.

And what if you can't?

I'm afraid fixing your country is up to you and your countrymen.

Nobody made you write that post. You chose to.

I wrote the post because I wanted to, but I didn't choose to want to.

Perhaps you didn't choose to want to, but that doesn't mean nobody can ever make choices, or even that nobody can ever make choices that can affect their wants.

People certainly make choices, and choices are important to you future and to people around you's future. The question is, did your conscience being have control over the choice you made, or did the meat sack make it.

The conscious being is the meat sack: they are the same thing. So your question is based on a false premise.

I agree. I see the conscious as part of the meat sack that acts as a witness, a journaller of what the rest of the meat sack does. I only say that because for many people, they believe that consciousness has some control over what you do and what you think. That the conscious mind is what makes us "special". it makes us different than animals, for instance. And yes, perhaps our consciousness is more developed than animals in that we can notice what are meat sack does and journal it in a better way, but i see no evidence that it is in charge of anything.

> I see the conscious as part of the meat sack that acts as a witness, a journaller of what the rest of the meat sack does.

That's not what our best current science about consciousness tell us. It tells us that consciousness is part of the process of what "the rest of the meat sack" does; that it's not possible to separate out a "witness" part that "journals" what the rest does. It's all one process.

you can certainly separate what your ears and eyes are doing. You can separate what your conscious is doing to.

Maybe you didn't want to write it, but only wanted to earn the karma? But of course you didn't choose to want to earn the karma either.

You chose to write the post. You're not a hapless victim of your wants.

To quote a song I like[1]: "Physics makes us all its bitches".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjKlXGSve0

That is some weird metaphysical shit. Or a weak excuse for a lack of impulse control.

What is impulse control?

The ability to make choices about actions based on some more adaptive criteria than the initial impulse itself.

What is a choice in this context? A thought about weighing the costs of possible choices relative to their outcomes.

What is lack of impulse control? Just a different thought, or the absence of the “right” thoughts.

What are the right thoughts? Thoughts that we’ve formed thoughts about and “assigned” a particular status (by thinking).

There is nothing metaphysical here and it all boils down to a really simple question: from where do thoughts arise?

Scientists have observed activity in the brain that is associated with decision making firing up to 10 seconds before the subject became consciously aware of the decision. At a minimum, this raises serious questions about the nature of the decisions we make, and is understandably uncomfortable to consider.

They didn't make an excuse for lack of impulse control at all, they simply claimed responsibility for the action while not taking responsibility for the thought, which is a perfectly reasonable, rational, and adaptive perspective.

Tell me what

Can you claim?

Not a thing

Not your name.

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