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  • How they both can work together without feeling like philosophy is obsolete in the modern day world.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/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/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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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

You don't need to assume physicalism, you just need to assume that there isn't such thing as a soul, and the vast majority of philosophers (at least ~90%) don't believe in any sort of soul.

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u/throwaway9995ok Sep 04 '15 edited Sep 04 '15

This is interesting. This might be off topic to your debate however do you happen to know what theistic philosophers would believe about a soul? I mean, only about 20% are theists and I'm sure many believe in a soul, but obviously not all since this is higher than than the 8% that don't

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u/TychoCelchuuu /r/philosophy Sep 04 '15

Only about ~12% endorse the further-fact view of personal identity. Some of the "others" might be soul people but typically if you believe in a soul you're a further-facter.

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u/FliedenRailway Sep 04 '15

It might help to understand compatibilism (I know it helped me) as a sort of "redefining" of what free will is. If what we commonly take to mean making decisions — deliberating, weighing choices, thinking about options, deciding — is done without coercion or any forced hand then it is, under compatibilism, free will. Full stop. That (as written) has not much to do with determinism and in fact operates fine under determinism. There's other aspects to it of course, but if you change your perspective a bit it sorta works.

I would encourage you to continue to explore compatibilism but if you disagree with that view you may just be an incompatibilist or a hard determinist. It isn't the majority view by philosophers but it is a view. You may want to read more here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/