Haunted by the ghosts of materialism
blog.coredump.cx
blog.coredump.cx
Sure, but the deterministic chaos [1] arising within classical physics says that any predetermined actions depend on upon effectively unknowable aspects of initial conditions. Nothing probabilistic required.
Easiest example is anything dependent on turbulent fluids, which are found everywhere in the atmosphere and the oceans. Another place with turbulence is the human heart [2]. There's deterministic chaos lurking behind the oxygenation of every cell in your body.
Predetermined actions from a chaotic system are indistinguishable from free will. Occam's Razor suggests free will, being simpler and just as predictive, is the better model for human behavior.
Just because it's fun: Why is the universe like this? The anthropic principle [3]! Without fluid turbulence the other available diffusion mechanisms are too slow to evolve creatures like us. Literally, either turbulence is a classical physics PITA or you don't exist [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
[2] https://cvphysiology.com/hemodynamics/h007
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
[4] Things one observes when procrastinating on a turbulence-related dissertation.
Right, and determinism seems likely to me to be correct, but I don't see the issue. Whether we'd like things to matter has no impact on whether they really do, but the obvious conclusion along the same lines that "saves" us is that you should act as if you believe in free will (e.g. enacting punishments) even if you don't. Either there is free will, so you behaved correctly, or there isn't, so you didn't really decide how to act anyway.
For most people, given that they are part of a species who's superpower is collaboration at planet scale and who evolved accordingly, the hedonic pleasure of acting morally congruent and being embraced by a community, as well as hard wired tendency towards empathy does the rest of the trick. How you grow up and what trauma shaped your intellectual and emotional development will affect who you consider worthy of empathy and care ofc.
If there really were such a thing as free will, whatever that means, then by acting like there is, you were acting correctly.
It's sort of like how in math, when you're dealing with an if statement, a false premise gives your conclusion for free. You only need to consider the case that you have a choice in the first place when deciding how you should act. Therefore you should act as if free will exists, even if deep down you really don't believe it does.
Basically "I should choose to act as if I have free will" really expands to "if I can choose how to act, then I should choose to act as if I have free will," which is then straightforward basic logic.
1-We do have machinery that performs a resolution of next action/thought/belief (based on external input, current state, etc.) and we possibly just sense that action as "choice"
2-It seems pretty unlikely that the resolution process could be cleanly deterministic and repeatable given quantum stuff, meaning some step in the resolution process hovering on the edge of two options could go either way depending on the brain's electromagnetic soup's current state.
3-Our emotions are critical for our survival, driving choices that help us short and long term, and it seems that one of those core drivers is a sense of agency. Even if we don't have free will in the magic sense of causing electrons (or whatever) to suddenly turn left to support our choice, it would still be critical for us to have a sense that our actions and efforts all matter, so those feelings are probably built into the system.
Note: This assumes there is no special magic somewhere that defies our current understanding of the universe and it just hasn't been figured out yet.
Which is sad, because philosophy of technology does exist and is a young discipline in philosophy.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?
What does choice even mean in this context?
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.
It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?
Even when one claims “I chose x over y because I felt like it”, there will be reasons why they felt like it. There is always a next “why” to ask, unless you put it down to pure randomness.
I don’t see how you can escape this. There are either causes, aka determination, or pure randomness, or a mix of both. Neither gives you free will in the naive or metaphysical-libertarianism sense. (Which is also why the probabilisticity of quantum mechanics doesn’t offer a way out.)
This isn’t specific to materialism, it’s a matter of logic.
It’s worth reading Shopenhauer on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.
One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.
The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.
A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
If as you say you take a set of causes and contemplate a weight distribution on them that determines the outcome, then that weight distribution is just another thing that either has reasons for why it is the way it is, or it doesn’t and then is just random; or a mix of both.
> Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
How so?
I actually don’t think of causation as a fundamental notion, but as an emergent one. What’s fundamental are the consistency constraints that adjacent events are subject to.
> A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
I don’t agree that (a) logic is necessarily finite, and (b) if it is finite, that it would limit reality in any way that contradicts our observations.
How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?
You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.
I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.
edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.
Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.
My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.