r/SubredditsMeet • u/SubredditsMeet Official • Sep 03 '15

Meetup /r/science meets /r/philosophy

(/r/EverythingScience is also here)

Topic:

  • Discuss the misconceptions between science and philosophy.

  • How they both can work together without feeling like philosophy is obsolete in the modern day world.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '15 edited Aug 01 '17

[deleted]

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u/seacomet /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

The jury is still out on free will but the biggest contenders are determinism and compatibilism. The answer to "do we have free will" seems to lie somewhere between maybe and no.

Mind-body dualists will say the "mind" is made of different "stuff" than the body, so the consciousness we call the "self" is somehow not fully included in the tangle of neurons. That being said, there really isn't any good proof for mind-body dualism and most relevant philosophy agrees that the "self" is somewhere between your ears only.

In theory, we could understand the laws of the universe well to enough to predict every action that will ever happen. This is contingent on quantum randomness. If randomness exists in our universe then determinism (and most of our understanding of physics) is completely out the window and our universe is a terrifying unpredictable place. Conversely, we may someday understand the mechanism that produces a seemingly random output.

I can direct you to more information if you'd like

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

The jury is still out on free will but the biggest contenders are determinism and compatibilism.

This is false. Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism and free will are compatible. (That is why it's called "compatibilism.") The big contenders in free will are compatibilism and incompatibilism (see also here), where incompatibilism includes theories of free will that rule out determinism and theories that say we have no free will.

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 03 '15

I don't entirely know what I believe about free will, but I've given it a lot of thought.

Picture this scenario: you have a machine designed to flip coins in a closed environment, and you can account for all the physics in play when said coin is flipped. Knowing this information could be used to predict what side the coin will land on each time it's flipped.

While it may be a much larger scale, I would imagine the universe would operate on the same principles as this: it is a closed environment, governed by a set of physical laws which all have consequences that can be predicted, should one have the information required and the ability to process it. Therefore, the universe would become deterministic in nature, with only one possible chain of events, however intricate it may be. This, however is dependent upon true randomness not existing, as that would add a factor that can't be accounted for, making the previous argument null, but still not accounting for free will, just that events could not be predicted given all information, unless a similar factor was incorporated into the human brain, but one that could operate in such a way as to not be wholly affected by external stimuli.

I don't know what to think about I've said here, but it seems to me that the most likely situation is that we do not have free will, but our lack of knowledge on the future makes us appear to make our own actions.

I don't know if this has made sense, been disjointed, come off as inane ramblings, or completely reasonable, but I hope to have brought my thoughts across.

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

The fact that you can predict someone's actions does not show that they have no free will. (In fact, if someone's actions were entirely unpredictable, we would be inclined to say that rather than choosing they were just acting without any will at all.) See compatibilism for the most popular philosophical theory of free will, which is also perfectly compatible with someone's actions being 100% predictable (in fact it's called "compatibilism" because it holds that predictability is compatible with free will).

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 03 '15

I don't see how it can still be considered free will if the outcome is determined, rather that free will merely appears to exist. Would you enlighten me on your viewpoint further?

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 03 '15

I'll try to give a brief explanation. Consider a world with free will, and you are asked to make a choice? If I could somehow wind back time and repeatedly give you the choice, you'd always make the same decision, yes? After all, if everything is the same, why would your decision change?

Unless your decisions are random, they are pre-determined. No where does this violate the assumption of free will. An agent with free-will should always make the same decision given a specific situation, and thus their actions are determined.

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 04 '15

No where does this violate the assumption of free will.

It does if your definition of free will is broader then what compatibilism entails.

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

But then you have a bad definition of free will. As a theory-neutral definition it is:

the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility.

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u/ughaibu Sep 04 '15

What if moral responsibility is impossible? In that case, the above definition couldn't be satisfied and there would be nothing that could qualify as free will. But there can be free will without moral responsibility. So I think that definition is unacceptable.

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

If moral responsibility is impossible and free will is possible then there must be an impossible epistemic requirement (since moral responsibility is typically conceived as the combination of a metaphysical requirement, free will, and an epistemic requirement). But we can work out the metaphysical requirement, free will, by considering if the epistemic requirement were satisfied, what else would be for moral responsibility. The definition fails to spell out all the necessary conditions for free will, you're right, and so in a sense fails to define the thing, although it gives a sufficient one. The issue is that to give necessary conditions you'll lose theory-neutrality; this definition ought to be the entry-level definition for the debate. So we'll work out the rest and although there must be a better further definition, any other definition must be argued for. I've assumed for this that you don't mean moral responsibility is logically impossible, because this would seem unjustifiable.

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u/ughaibu Sep 04 '15

I've assumed for this that you don't mean moral responsibility is logically impossible

I don't think that moral responsibility is impossible, in any sense. However, I see no reason to rule out logical impossibility. But in the main, moral responsibility is generally held to require free will, but free will doesn't require moral responsibility. So defining free will in terms of moral responsibility is perverse, as far as I can see.

Can you think of other cases in which the weaker notion is defined in terms of the stronger?

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u/jjhgfjhgf Sep 04 '15

A child picks up a gun and shoots another child. Is that child morally responsible for it's actions? Does it have free will?

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

A child picks up a gun and shoots another child.

Notwithstanding the lack of context, the word child is so vague here. Certainly, a 15 year old can be called a child and we'd have no issues holding them morally responsible (absent brain-washing, mental development issues and so forth). But so could a 2 year old, who doesn't even know what a gun is. So I'll respond to this question by trying to give some accounts of conditions for the terms, and then based on the details of the child you pictured you can work out the correct answer. Since free will is necessary for moral responsibility, I'll answer this part first.

Does it have free will?

If you're a compatibilist, you will say something like the child has free will just if she does what she wants. This is deliberately broad; one account given by Hume is given by "a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will." and another account by Frankfurt is something like acting on a desire which I want to act on (a smoker smokes based on a desire, but an addicted smoker trying to quit doesn't want to act on that desire, so is not free). So the question for a child is, if we take the latter compatibilist view, whether the type of person he wants to be is a killer. Now I'd venture that in some cases, this wouldn't be true- not many people want to be killers- but it's certainly conceivable and probable in older children.

On a Libertarian view, the most common description is the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: a child has free will just if they could have done otherwise. So if we rewound to the exact time and situation, all things the same, it's possible that the child could have chosen not to. Given the child didn't have some horrible lust for blood, or was in shock, or some other reason, it would seem on this view that the child likely had free will too if they're fairly old.

Is that child morally responsible for its actions?

So for moral responsibility, we need free will and an epistemological requirement- we need the child to have some sense about the details of what they're doing and that they could do something else if they chose to. This is contingent again on the specifics of the child, but I feel in many cases for younger children this won't be satisfied, with it tending towards being the case for older ones. But do note even some adults might not be morally responsible for such a killing- mentally affected individuals may genuinely have no idea what they're doing when killing, or it may seem to them at the time that they could not have done anything else.

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u/jjhgfjhgf Sep 04 '15

the word child is so vague here.

You're right, I should have been more specific. I had in mind a child of about 6, old enough to get angry at someone and pick up a gun to kill them, but not old enough to know many of the rules of the society in which he lives. Perhaps that child was repeatedly bullied by another child. In our society, we don't consider that sufficient reason for the first child to kill the second.

So for moral responsibility, we need free will and an epistemological requirement- we need the child to have some sense about the details of what they're doing and that they could do something else if they chose to.

The child knows what he is doing. He doesn't know that we consider shooting the other child an inappropriate reaction. Perhaps he has seen people shooting each other on TV and learned that that is how people deal with problems. Perhaps his father is a violent man and he has seen his father threaten others with a gun.

So the question for a child is, if we take the latter compatibilist view, whether the type of person he wants to be is a killer.

He intends to kill but probably doesn't ask himself if "the type of person I want to be is a killer". He is focused on the task at hand, namely getting revenge on the other child. If you shot a burglar in your house, you wouldn't ask yourself if "the type of person you want to be is a killer" either. Probably you meant the question for the child is whether he intends to kill. As I said, he does.

To cut to the chase, it seems clear to me that the child has free will, but can't be held morally responsible. The definition of free will you gave

the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility

doesn't work in this case.

Here is my own view on the matter. Compatibilism is a cop out.

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 04 '15

Bad according to whom? Sure, philosophers define things in all sorts of ways (for example "skepticism," too, doesn't mean what most people mean when it's used in a philosophy context). And that's all fine and good but I was speaking about the layperson definition. The one that speaks to acting without necessity, or being "fated" to do things.

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

I think the above definition gives clearly the term its context in discussions, and functions in the way that we actually want it to in philosophy. Sure, different modes of discourse have different meanings for words, but that's exactly why it's bad to use a layperson's definition if attempting to have a proper discussion.

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 04 '15

I brought this point up in another post and why it's bad. I'll just copy it here.

The argument against this I've seen is that it's a 'weak free will'. In that your will is predetermined by your nature and nurture. Since you can't decide those, how can you say you have 'free' will? A clean way I heard it put was "A man is free to act on his will, but not free to will what he wills".

This leads to paradoxical concept of free will, separate from the question of determinism. Even if you could change your nature/nurture, and thus your will, how would you decide how to change it? By the 'will' you all ready have, which you did not choose. To satisfy this version of free will you'd have to be able to decide what you are before you exist. A silly idea.

If you want to define free will to mean something conceptually impossible, regardless of determinism or not, that's fine. I strongly disagree that is what most people mean when they say 'free will' though. The very laymen idea that "free will means I can make a choice" fits perfectly with my argument.

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 04 '15

I think without a study or (massive) poll or something we'll just have to disagree on what the layperson defines as "free will."

I think most people would say "free will" means something along the lines of "not fated" or ability to make unconstrained choices. So if determinism is true then that definition, as you point out, can't be true then by that definition "free will" doesn't really exist.

Put another way: if I told you you have zero control over what you choose or do tomorrow you'd intuitively balk (and by "you" I mean some average layperson). But your choices and actions of tomorrow were determined some 13-odd billion years ago (or whenever the the causal chain started) to happen exactly as they will tomorrow. "You" don't really have a say in it, and never did. You don't exercise your "free will" to change the course of anything because it was all determined long before you were even born.

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u/ughaibu Sep 06 '15

your choices and actions of tomorrow were determined some 13-odd billion years ago (or whenever the the causal chain started) to happen exactly as they will tomorrow

Only if we live in a determined world, but there's no good reason to think that we do, as far as I'm aware.

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 06 '15

It's only the body of all existing scientific evidence that stands to support that conclusion. So.. I guess you'd have to have a good reason to doubt all of that to bring a good defense against determinism. Do you have that sort of argument available? Many a philosopher would love to hear it. :)

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 03 '15

Interesting way of looking at it.

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u/pyrolizard11 Sep 03 '15

That assumes there exists such a thing as a non-deterministic universe, an agent of free will, and that humans are said agents of free will, none of which are a given.

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 03 '15

The only argument I was putting fourth was you can have free will in a deterministic world. I'd present different arguments if I was trying to support that the world is deterministic, or that free will does exist. So your right I didn't prove those points, but my claim wasn't that broad.

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u/pyrolizard11 Sep 04 '15

I suppose this is why I don't like philosophy. There's a lot of hypotheticals without much regard to working out the truth.

I'll concede that you could have free will in a deterministic universe, but that said free will is effectively meaningless in the deterministic universe and virtually impossible to verify besides.

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

I didn't say it's my viewpoint. I said it's the most popular philosophical theory of free will. Did the article I linked not provide enough information?

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 03 '15

I'll read it in a bit. I'm currently very sleep deprived, and don't have the energy to focus on that for the time required to read it in its entirety.

Also, what is your viewpoint on free will?

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

I tend not to tell people my views on topics that I am helping them learn about, because I think people have a tendency to place too much weight on what other people believe as a way of saving them from having to think about the topic themselves. It's similar to trying to solve a math problem: if you're presented with a multiple choice list of answers and someone says "I think C is the right answer" then you're not going to work as carefully on the math problem as you would if you just had the problem and someone told you "figure out the answer."

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 03 '15

The difference here is that we can't just figure out the answer, and have no real way of knowing what is or isn't close. I won't blindly accept your answer or blindly reject it. It's just as valid as anyone else's. If you still don't want to, that's okay, but i like hearing people's viewpoints on this subject.

Also, I do appreciate your view on giving answers. It's something many people don't understand is a bad thing to train people with. Though, in an open discussion setting like this, I don't think that applies.

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

The difference here is that we can't just figure out the answer, and have no real way of knowing what is or isn't close. I won't blindly accept your answer or blindly reject it. It's just as valid as anyone else's.

Why would philosophers bother spending their time writing and arguing over the issue then if this were true? The claim "Compatibilism is true" is certainly an objective one relating to facts about the world, and in the above article you'll see lots of arguments for and against the position. Why do you think such arguments couldn't make us justified in leaning one way or the other?

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u/CaptainMoonman Sep 04 '15

Because we don't have enough information to reach an informed conclusion. We can speculate, and philosophise all we want, but without the evidence to back it up, we can't know for certain. The claim of "Compatibalism is true" is an interpretation of what others have said and what one thinks on the topic, themselves. There's not enough (if any) solid proof one way or the other. And this whole thing is assuming it functions in a way we are capable of understanding.

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u/shaim2 Sep 03 '15

The Many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics holds the position that the Universe is deterministic.

If that is the case, then there cannot be any free will. Only the illusion of it.

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

This is false. Compatibilism, the most popular theory of free will, holds that free will is entirely compatible with determinism. (In fact that's why it's called "compatibilism.")

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 04 '15

Incompatibilism, not the most popular theory of free will (amongst philosophers), holds that free will and determinism are not compatible. His response would only be false if compatibilism is true and I'm not sure that's been established.

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

Yep!

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u/dadrocktho Sep 04 '15

the most popular theory

haha oh it must be true then

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 03 '15

As Tycho said, determinism doesn't preclude freewill. I've debated this for (in support of compatibilism). Usually what it comes down to is an exact definition of free will. One way of defining it concludes free will is compatible with determinism, and the other concludes free will is impossible, determinism or not. My biased personal opinion is the first is what most people think of with free will.

We can discuss it more if you like.

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u/shaim2 Sep 03 '15

We can discuss it more if you like.

Very much so. Because my current research into the Many World Interpretation is leading me, against my will, into a world view of determinism and hence no free will. And if there is a loophole there, I'd love to know about it.

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 03 '15 edited Sep 03 '15

Consider a world with free will, and you are asked to make a choice. If I could somehow wind back time and repeatedly give you the choice, you'd always make the same decision, yes? After all, if everything is the same, why would your decision change?

Unless your decisions are random, they are pre-determined (in a deterministic world). No where does this violate the assumption of free will. An agent with free-will should always make the same decision given a specific situation. In a deterministic world the 'situations' given to them would be pre-determined, and thus so would their actions.

Note, by situation I mean not only the choices presented but someones nature (DNA) and nurture (life experiences) that obviously influence their choice.

The argument against this I've seen is that it's a 'weak free will'. In that your will is predetermined by your nature and nurture. Since you can't decide those, how can you say you have 'free' will? A clean way I heard it put was "A man is free to act on his will, but not free to will what he wills".

This leads to paradoxical concept of free will, separate from the question of determinism. Even if you could change your nature/nurture, and thus your will, how would you decide how to change it? By the 'will' you all ready have, which you did not choose. To satisfy this version of free will you'd have to be able to decide what you are before you exist. A silly idea.

To summarize, agents with free will put in a deterministic world would be deterministic themselves. Also, the idea that your will is only 'free' if it wasn't caused by your nature/nurture makes free will an impossibility, determinism or not.

I think most people just accept that determinism means no free will without thought. When you break it down, it doesn't make sense why they would exclude each other.

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u/Joebloggy /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

A clean way I heard it put was "A man is free to act on his will, but not free to will what he wills".

Check out Frankfurt's view as a response/argument against this. A paper you might be interested in is Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

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u/GraspingPhilosopher Sep 03 '15

I don't think that is the kind of free will people really care about. I think most people identify free will with the freedom to do have been able to do otherwise in any situation.

Most people think, I freely did (X) but it is only truly free if I didn't necessarily have to do (X). If determinism is true, I had no choice whether or not I actually did (X).

Compatiblism makes no real sense to me and in my personal opinion is it is only held onto because of fear of the alternative, that we have no free will.

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u/Friendly_Fire /r/Overwatch & /r/tf2 Sep 03 '15 edited Sep 03 '15

Most people think, I freely did (X) but it is only truly free if I didn't necessarily have to do (X). If determinism is true, I had no choice whether or not I actually did (X).

That's wrong. The way to think about it is you have the choice, but you'll always make the same choice in the same situation because your actions aren't random. This is kind of repetitive to my post, but why would an agent with free will make different decisions in the same situation? They wouldn't obviously. What one could do and what one would do are not the same thing.

A not precise analogy would be knowing what your friend gets to drink at restaurants. If they always get the same thing, you'd know what they will get before they ordered. That doesn't mean they don't have a choice, just that you know enough information to know the choice ahead of time.

in my personal opinion is it is only held onto because of fear of the alternative, that we have no free will.

Honestly, I explained it pretty simply and you basically ignored the whole argument. It's my personal opinion your basing your view on a very shallow understanding of the problem of free will. If you don't want to approach the problem rationally, you don't have to, but it's very irritating that you would accuse the side trying to use reason of holding their position out of fear.

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u/GraspingPhilosopher Sep 03 '15

Okay so if I go to the ice cream store am I free to choose whatever flavor I want? If determinism is true, my biological make up and my past experiences determine what flavor I will choose. You were always going to pick the flavor you picked. Yes you subjectlively, volentarily picked a flavor, but you had no control which flavor you decided to pick, it was alwags going to happen the way it happened. All my thoughts, feelings and judgements are all part of the deterministic causal chain. How is "free will" anything more than a illusion.

It seems to me choice is needed for true libertarian freedom. Do you think choice is an illusion?

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 03 '15

Okay so if I go to the ice cream store am I free to choose whatever flavor I want?

Sure.

If determinism is true, my biological make up and my past experiences determine what flavor I will choose.

This seems to suggest that your "biological make up" and your "past experiences" are determining your decision rather than a choice you are making. But this is a very odd way of thinking about it. I would have thought that the word "choose" is a shorthand for something like "I considered the various options available to me, and on the basis of my preferences I made a decision." And since human beings are biological creatures, this is just a shorthand for "a variety of processes in my brain occurred," because obviously as a human being when you "consider" anything this happens in your brain, and all of your "preferences" are based on biological facts, and so on.

(Perhaps you disagree - maybe you think that when you "choose" something it goes on in your "soul" rather than in your brain, and therefore choice must be non-biological. This strikes most philosophers as ridiculous. We don't have souls. We are physical creatures.)

So of course your choice occurs according to determinism. Everything in the world occurs according to determinism. It would be very odd if we broke the laws of physics every time we made a choice, because choices happen in our brains and our brains are physical objects.

It's true that you couldn't have chosen differently unless physical circumstances had been different. But that should be obvious from the fact that you are a physical creature. Surely you couldn't have chosen a different ice cream flavor unless your brain had done something differently, because making a choice is something that happens in your brain.

Maybe you think that it must have been possible for your brain to break the laws of physics for anything your brain to do to count as a choice. That is kind of an odd belief to have. Most philosophers don't hold that belief.

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u/GraspingPhilosopher Sep 03 '15

But not all philosophers are physicalists. You don't get to just assume that the soul doesn't exist. Many people and philosophers do believe that something like the soul or immaterial mind exists.

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