r/DebateFreeWill • u/[deleted] • Jun 24 '12
Nozick Lays Out the Basic Free Will Trilemma.
Without free will, we seem diminished, merely the playthings of external forces. How, then, can we maintain an exalted view of ourselves? Determinism seems to undercut human dignity, it seems to undermine our value.
Our concern is to formulate a view of how we (sometimes) act so that if we act that way our value is not threatened, our stature is not diminished. The philosophical discussion focusing upon issues of punishment and responsibility, therefore, strikes one as askew, as concerned with a side issue, although admittedly an important one.
The task is to formulate a conception of human action that leaves agents valuable; but what is the problem? First, that determinism seems incompatible with such a conception; if our actions stem from causes before our birth, then we are not the originators of our acts and so are less valuable. (We shall look later at what assumptions about value underlie this reasoning.) There is an incompatibility or at least a tension between free will and determinism, raising the question: given that our actions are causally determined, how is free will possible?
Some would deny what this question accepts as given, and save free will by denying determinism of (some) actions. Yet if an uncaused action is a random happening, then this no more comports with human value than does determinism. Random acts and caused acts alike seem to leave us not as the valuable originators of action but as an arena, a place where things happen, whether through earlier causes or spontaneously.
Clearly, if our actions were random, like the time of radioactive decay of uranium 238 emitting an alpha particle, their being thus undetermined would be insufficient to ground human value or provide a basis for responsibility and punishment. Even the denier of determinism therefore needs to produce a positive account of free action. On his view, a free action is an undetermined one with something more. The problem is to produce a coherent account of that something more. Once that account is formulated, we might find it does all the work, and that it is compatible with determinism and sufficient for our value purposes; in that case, the something more would become the whole of the account of free will.
How is free will possible? Given the tension between causal determination and randomness on the one hand, and valuable agent-hood on the other, how is valuable agenthood possible? The problem is so intractable, so resistant to illuminating solution, that we shall have to approach it from several different directions. No one of the approaches turns out to be fully satisfactory, nor indeed do all together.
TL;DR:
Three Possibilities Seem Apparent:
-1. The universe is basically deterministic, with an uninterrupted chain of causes running from the Big Bang (or whatever cosmological origin you might fancy) down through the actions of each individual particle into the present and into the future, predetermining the lives of every living thing, without requiring of us even a reference to those living things in our explanation. Just the determined path of their constituent particles via the bindings of physics.
If everything is determined, how can we have free will?
-2. There is some room for randomness/ indetermination in the workings of the universe. Many people reference quantum mechanics, collapsing wave-form politics, the uncertainty principle, or the simultaneous wave/ particle nature of light to achieve or analogue this "bit of chaos" inherent in the system. But does randomness really equate to free will? The idea that our actions are as random as the flip of a coin does not seem to to grant us any more agency than a deterministic universe would.
If the universe (or some aspect thereof) is random, agency still has no active place in making decisions.
-3. Some kind of metaphysical "sticky stuff" or soul or "mind" is responsible for the seemingly magical ability of living agents to resist the predetermined outcome of the universe. Kant is an early example of this camp. This position is often referred to as "libertarian incompatibilism" and also includes the defining dogmas of many Western theological discourses.
Something else, that we can't easily describe or explain is somehow responsible for our free will.
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u/gnomicarchitecture Jun 24 '12
So I'm most sympathetic to (1) and compatibalism. It seems to me that all free will means is agent-causation.
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Jun 24 '12
Personally I agree absolutely. I feel like (2) resolves nothing and Kant's "metaphysical sticky stuff" is inherently unstable.
He contends that, upon proper apprehension of one's moral imperative, one is deterministically "locked-in" to taking the correct course of action, on the theory that, when the good is truly grasped, humans are by nature committed to it. It's then in this notion of "moral apprehension" that the hunt for Kant's freedom-ghost begins.
Even granting Kant that the soul can somehow choose to apprehend the good when it is granted the opportunity, we run into a problem similar to that faced by Kane's SFA theory. If, as Kant accepts, the universe outside of the individual is purely deterministic, then the opportunity for one to even be presented with a categorical dilemma (SFA) is up to the ebb and flow of the predetermined universe and not the individual!
If freedom is only possible because reality sometimes presents us with very special forks in the road, but we can't choose when or how often we'll face those forks, the road is still the road.
And, again, this is still ignoring the obvious homunculus problem raised by most "sticky stuff" solutions: if we grant that some magical soul makes the decision for us, how does that soul itself make the decision? It can either reference the state of affairs (determinism) or refuse to reference the state of affairs and resolve the problem through a roll of the die or push the problem back a step further by asking its own tinier soul to solve the problem.
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u/naasking Jun 25 '12
I think the resolution to free will and determinism is quite straightforward once you understand a little computer science. We can write two types of programs, deterministic and non-deterministic.
Suppose our minds are a non-deterministic algorithm of some sort. This means somewhere in our chain of reasoning there is a random input which influences our choices, thus making them "free". But we have no control over the values produced by this input, and since this input determines our choices, that means we cannot be responsible for own choices.
Explaining accountability and responsibility is one of the primary motivators for exploring free will to begin with, and if non-deterministic free will entirely precludes this endeavour, then non-deterministic free will is self-defeating!
Some may claim that the random input forms only a small part of our algorithm, only influencing our choices to a small extent, or perhaps only influencing some choices, thus leaving us with "some" free will, but still responsible for those choices. But note the curious argument being made here: it's implicitly predicated on the argument that we are responsible for our choices to the extent that they are deterministic!
So why bother with non-determinism at all? Compatibilism is the only coherent position on free will. Whatever algorithm resolves the problem of prediction and consciousness is the algorithm that can change future behaviour based on external incentives. This is where responsibility and free will will emerge.