So it seems the crux of the matter is how we regard the process of a person making a decision.
A compatibilist would say that for the purposes of discussion we describe this event as the exercising of will, even though from a physics perspective the outcome could be predetermined.
Is that correct?
If so that seems similar to a recent discussion on Bohr's view of the irreducibility of biology to physics.
That's not compatibilism - as long as "will" can influence the physical world, you have a non-materialist philosophy. Nothing wrong with that, but it's very strange to call it compatibilism.
For what it's worth, I don't see any reason to imagine that hard decisions are of any other quality than easy decisions. It's part of my history and experience just as much that I prefer to eat salty foods than sweet ones as it is that I sometimes abstain from eating that pizza to try to manage my waistline, or refuse that job offer because I don't want to work for a company I don't find ethical.
I find the most satisfying version of compatibilism one where an agent is mostly determined by 'state' (genes/experiences etc), but the subjective experience of expending mental effort (e.g. when overcoming an addiction) is the agent nudging the wave function collapse this way or that. Add in the ability to influence future 'states' and one has a model much more consistent with the subjective experience of making difficult choices.
Basically its all physics rules how particles interact and the energy flowing through. Now am "I" in control of making decision to do one thing and not the other? Or was it inevitable that the decision was made as that was the only possible outcome of particles inter acting in my brain at that moment? I am stuck with that thought
I hear what you're saying, but I'm still not sure that consciousness over a decision is what determines whether it was done of free will. Conscious or not, it was your brain making that decision. Not someone else telling your brain what to think.
Your brain thought about it, considered the options, made a decision, and then informed your consciousness of it. That doesn't undermine the idea of free will, it just changes how we think about consciousness.
> They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clear conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.
The only thing this shows, IMO, is the mental gymnastics human are willing to go through in order to keep a feel-good notion that it is, in fact, some you that makes the decision. Since you are the entirety of your physical being, which extends via physical interactions into the rest of the universe (and thus has a very fuzzy border), of course there is some fuzzy, handwavey definition of "you" which could be said to have "made" the decision.
That doesn't bring us any closer to having the kind of agency people have traditionally ascribed to the term "free will".
I think we just have an unbridgeable gap of beliefs here: one of you believes that they are the ultimate author of their own words and actions, that their experience of making decisions should be taken as strong evidence that they are in fact making decisions, and that any theory that denied this fact would be in need of revision. The other believes that the scientific enterprise has conclusively disproven the possibility of actual free will, and therefore agency is merely an illusion.
Lately I’ve been siding with the first stance, but I can understand both. It comes down to the strength of your faith that Science understands (for the most part) all of the essential features of reality, and also your trust in your immediate experience.
With every decision you will then randomly fall into one (aided by QM or not).
»Making a decision« is not a coherent concept. Your actions can either be a function of the current state of the universe or they can be independent of the current state of the universe, they can be either deterministic or random. Or some combination of the two.
»Making a decision«, at least that is the way I understand it, means choosing one of several different possible actions and this choice is neither random nor determined by the current state of the universe. As far as I can tell such a thing can not exist, random means not a function of the current state, a function of the current state means not random, there is no room for a third option.
And if you think carefully about it, you will notice that »making a decisions« really makes no sense despite the fact that we use the phrase all the time. Just think a bit about a thing that is neither a function of the current state nor random, it just makes no sense. If it existence, then we are currently missing something extremely fundamental about the world.
So every person can and should be encouraged to cultivate their pathway network, which is what an open society based on discussions and science already does.
We will probably do this but it is fundamentally an illusion without free will and as I just said I am pretty certain it is. Without free will things like encouraging people are meaningless, things just happen, whether deterministically or randomly. I am as stuck as everyone else with the belief that I can make decisions and go down one path or another, but it is an illusion.
We will probably keep talking as it were not for the foreseeable future, we will encourage people to do this or that, we will decide to do one thing instead of a different thing, we will be happy or disappointed or angry that someone decided to a specific thing. We will continue to ignore that all this is not in my or your or anyone's control. Not that we could change it, outside of our control, too.
It's important to distinguish choice/will and consciousness. Conscious experience can happen in an entirely deterministic context..they are orthogonal concepts.
That depends on the person defining it. Why can't it be the outcome my brain has determined for me to take which I subjectively understand as a self-chosen action? That may well depend on my history--my emotions, memories and all the things that shape me--but those are more reasons than constraints.
Isn't that like saying I want to fly, so I don't have free will if I can't?
I think the commenter's point is that it isn't enough for one to simply choose not to alter the future once they are aware of it. If they have the ability but do not exercise the ability, you've still introduced a logical contradiction.
From that perspective, framing action as "performative" is at best hand-wavy. You can reduce the claim to, "An individual can know the future without creating a paradox by choosing not to alter it." But you either have the ability to make decisions or you don't; you can't solve the paradox by introducing a phenomenon that in effect surrenders choice while holding on to the ability to make a choice.
That, like every argument of compatibilism I've seen, attempts to "have one's cake and eat it too" in an incoherent manner. When you reduce the dressings down to the base premises and conclusion, it's a matter of redefining terminology for a semantical victory. That's exactly like the sort of thing Wittgenstein used to criticize, because the conclusions aren't meaningful.
What would it actually mean for someone to somehow have the ability to know the future with certainty, while also retaining the ability to change the future? The ability to express that idea grammatically and to create a compelling narrative revolving around it doesn't make it logically coherent. Simply having the ability in principle means that there is a logical paradox.
That said, I deeply enjoyed the story. I just interpreted it as a story about humans being exposed to the reality of determinism and the process of coming to peace with it over generations, starting with Louise.
We're getting deep into philosophy here, but I'm not sure that, if you froze the state of the universe right before someone made a decision and replayed it, they'd make the same decision every time. I guess that's the whole difference.
I don't think it's even refuted. It's just redefining what 'decision' is and using that to somehow make the case for free will.
Previously they were saying that the start of the neural activity was when a decision was made, and now they are saying that the decision is only made when a particular threshold is reached, but either way the decision is a result of neural activity that began before the person was consciously aware of it. They're just redefining terms to reach the result they wanted.
A compatibilist would say that for the purposes of discussion we describe this event as the exercising of will, even though from a physics perspective the outcome could be predetermined.
Is that correct?
If so that seems similar to a recent discussion on Bohr's view of the irreducibility of biology to physics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18104508
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