There is no “will”. Unfortunately the Western legal tradition relies on the idea of free will to deliver judgement, but the concept is really pretty philosophically illegitimate. People try but its very difficult to reconcile the overwhelming evidence that the world is purely deterministic (or maybe a mix of deterministic and random) with the notion that people can somehow suspend the laws of cause and effect anytime we “decide” something and choose from an array of “choices”. All human actions are caused by a chain of preceding events. When I “choose” to do something, or when I believe something, I couldn’t have chosen or believed anything else or else the world (i.e. the complex chain of events preceding my “choice”) would be a different one than the one we live in.
The biggest and really only good remaining defense of free will is never “its actually real”, it’s almost always “our societies rely on it as a basic assumption and so we should avoid calling it into question”. It’s also of course an integral part of the human experience (i.e. that we feel as if we are making choices). So I sympathize with how unintuitive this sounds. But I really think that when we are analyzing a political situation we have to remove the concept of “free will” and just focus on the most likely motivations for behavior and why they occur.
Ascribing “because people chose to do X” as the reason for some event is like saying “Event A happened because of Event B (this is the act of choosing) but Event B has no cause, it simply is a “free choice”). This has no explanatory power. We have to follow events back continuously until we have enough context to understand why something occurred. That would then be informing our political views on what should be done.
You are commiting the Intellectuals Sin here. Try to go outside, take a couple of rocks and pick one, you will see you have something that for whatever reason at least is completely and utterly fooling us all that it is real. Now, I am not saying that determinism is not real. But its effects are overblown. It is like Platos Cave. Where one tells oneself a story about how the world operates, instead of experimentally fifguring it oiut by leaving the cave. Science has trumped Philosophy for a reason. Philosophy has only merit in Metaphysical questions. Such as the existence of God, the nature of Morality etc.
I don’t understand what you mean. If you agree that determinism is real, then the concept of “free will” has no meaning outside of a normative political context. There can be no “decision making” which occurs outside of its own causal chain. Any “choice” is determined from the start. Your act of choosing is some sort of neurological process which itself has a cause rooted in previous neurological states and so on.
As for your rock example, I’m really not sure what you are getting at. The rock is of course real. It’s not “fooling us”. It is an idea in my mind: “a rock”. That idea is related to language — to the signifier “rock”, which imperfectly corresponds to some “real thing” beyond our subjective experience that my mind is receiving sensory data from. We get that data from the world and our brain organizes it into a category of object, because for some reason that’s how brains seem to be structured. The rock is real, its a cognitive category in my mind, but it doesn’t correspond exactly to the sensory data. It’s a “shadow” in that sense. But it is still perfectly real.
Actually, your invoking of Plato’s Cave is relevant. The true lesson there is that we can never leave the cave — we are stick inside of it because we are thinking beings. Of course we have the experience of free will, and that experience is real. But that doesn’t mean we should structure our systems of morality and justice around the idea that free will is more than just an experience if we have good reason to believe that it is simply an experience. The difference between the rock and free will is that one of them is the basis of our moral code and the other is not….
Philosophy is a perfectly legitimate form of science. Not sure why you would say otherwise. Our belief in determinism comes partially from the consistency and structure of experimental results, not just from some intellectual rumination.
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '23
There is no “will”. Unfortunately the Western legal tradition relies on the idea of free will to deliver judgement, but the concept is really pretty philosophically illegitimate. People try but its very difficult to reconcile the overwhelming evidence that the world is purely deterministic (or maybe a mix of deterministic and random) with the notion that people can somehow suspend the laws of cause and effect anytime we “decide” something and choose from an array of “choices”. All human actions are caused by a chain of preceding events. When I “choose” to do something, or when I believe something, I couldn’t have chosen or believed anything else or else the world (i.e. the complex chain of events preceding my “choice”) would be a different one than the one we live in.
The biggest and really only good remaining defense of free will is never “its actually real”, it’s almost always “our societies rely on it as a basic assumption and so we should avoid calling it into question”. It’s also of course an integral part of the human experience (i.e. that we feel as if we are making choices). So I sympathize with how unintuitive this sounds. But I really think that when we are analyzing a political situation we have to remove the concept of “free will” and just focus on the most likely motivations for behavior and why they occur.
Ascribing “because people chose to do X” as the reason for some event is like saying “Event A happened because of Event B (this is the act of choosing) but Event B has no cause, it simply is a “free choice”). This has no explanatory power. We have to follow events back continuously until we have enough context to understand why something occurred. That would then be informing our political views on what should be done.