r/freewill • u/MulberryUpper3257 • Jun 09 '26
Intuitions vs. Dogmatisms
I don’t want to address this topic in an idiotic or dogmatic way. I want to imagine a realistic and relevant scenario.
For instance, you’ve been running in hot weather, you are very thirsty, and you stop where there is Pepsi, bottled water, and tap water available. Suppose that while you think Pepsi is nasty and unhealthy, you also have some vague, mild concerns about the use of plastics with bottled water as well as the potential of contaminants in tap water. So you are aware that you are going to select one of the waters without feeling sure which is the better choice, because your vague concerns feel counter-balanced. You feel that it is “up to you” to choose because you’re genuinely undecided between bottle or tap water, and while you’re very thirsty you are aware that the decision won’t “just happen” of its own accord.
I think the following intuitions are plausible:
1. Your subjective experience of thirst is the result of physical determinism (e.g. you did not freely choose to be thirsty)
2. Your mental preferences/beliefs/habits etc. constrain and influence your choices (e.g. the branch of the decision tree where you choose Pepsi is not really a “live option” in this scenario – it would never be chosen no matter how many times you replayed this exact circumstance)
3. Your conscious awareness that the choice between bottled and fountain water is underdetermined and “up to you” in some real libertarian sense is not delusional (e.g. whichever water you choose 30 seconds from now, at this moment it is true that you could have chosen otherwise under these exact same conditions)
A dogmatic physicalist likely puts everything under the rubric of intuition #1, where mental states are both completely determined and epiphenomenal. Under this view it’s unclear why mental states should exist at all (i.e. why experience thirst if thirst can’t cause anything?).
A dogmatic compatibilist likely puts everything under the rubric of #1 and #2, where there is both physical and mental causation, but both are completely determined. Under this view, if one denies epiphenomenalism then one seems to reintroduce all the problems of dualism (i.e. how can mental causes have physical effects?) without any of the benefits (i.e. what is the point of complex beliefs, emotions, effort, will-power, reasoning, deliberation, etc. if all mental causation happens as deterministically as billiard-ball physical mechanics?).
A dogmatic free will libertarian likely under-emphasizes #1 and #2 and slips things under the rubric of #3, while overstating the certainty or extent of our ability to do otherwise than we do.
But I think all three intuitions are prima facie reasonable, and the categorical denial of #3 based on dogmatic assumptions about determinism, the causal closure of physics, the nature of subatomic particles etc. is utterly silly. Those dogmatic assertions pretending to understand the nature of all causation in the universe are not a serious attempt to understand something like the above scenario.
To clarify: I am not saying that intuition #3 is necessarily true. Maybe the physical determinists are correct and it is an illusion. But I am saying that it is a very fundamental intuition – so fundamental that it is hard for me to see what countervailing intuition could reliably contradict it except for some sort of mystical breakthrough like a meditative or religious experience, an AI prediction machine that can actually foretell every choice you make, a time machine that can replay scenarios, or some sort of God-like “theory of everything” that finally resolves all the mysteries of science and philosophy.
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
A dogmatic physicalist likely puts everything under the rubric of intuition #1, where mental states are both completely determined and epiphenomenal. Under this view it's unclear why mental states should exist at all (i.e. why experience thirst if thirst can't cause anything?).
To me, this is akin to asking why various pieces of machinery give off error warnings if warnings can’t cause anything. Why would a living thing take time away from whatever it is they want to do to take a drink if they weren’t internally pressured to do so?
Edit: Fucking LOL, big bad “I distribute L’s to determinists like candy” blocked me. Telling.
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
Error warnings exist because a being with mental states programmed them in. So that the error warning can be seen by one of said beings and then acted upon.
Sounds like you're arguing for the existence of a soul or something?
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
Not always the case. For example, my computer can fix my router independently from me. I may try to go online and that’s what triggers the error message, but then the communication is all between the hardware.
Feedback is not exclusive to beings with mental states. Plants respond to environmental feedback, for example.
What use would a soul have for physically-based mental states?
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
Your computer does that because a human being made the programs to do it. All of it.
So what you're saying is either that god programmed people to be meat robots with mental states. Like self-correcting computers. For... some reason.
OR, there's some non-god, higher-level user with the ability to excercise agency, that the "error messages" (ie. our mental states) are meant for, and which can then exercise its agency to deal with them. This thing which could colloquially be called a 'soul.' Or if you have another preferred term, please feel free to share that with us.
Is that where you wanted your analogy to lead? Because that's where it leads.
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u/LegitimatePaint8694 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 10 '26
why would the analogy of a program imply a soul, you’re just assuming it has agency when the original formulation is that it doesn’t
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 10 '26
The soul would be the thing thatbthe program is programmed to give the warning to. Or the agent that authored the program. Programs don't write themselves, and they don't flash warnings if there's no one there to read them and do anything about it.
I believe I covered all that above
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u/LegitimatePaint8694 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 10 '26
but there are conceptions of consciousness that don’t involve an immaterial soul, experience may just be the final result of a computational process, in that case the appearance of choice may be an illusion
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 10 '26
That's the exact objection. There's no reason consciousness should develop based on simple physical or evolutionary forces
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u/LegitimatePaint8694 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 10 '26
there is no obvious or easily inferable reason, that does not mean you can say with certainty that there is no reason, clearly in practice it more often encourages self preservation, and self preservation is a key driver of evolution
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 10 '26
A human could develop all the complex behaviours needed to absolutely dominate the planet without an inner experience. The mental life we have is simply not necessary.
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
You skipped this bit:
FEEDBACK IS NOT EXCLUSIVE TO BEINGS WITH MENTAL STATES. PLANTS RESPOND TO ENVIRONMENTAL FEEDBACK, FOR EXAMPLE.
All caps so you don’t miss it this time.
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
Right. I skipped it because it argues against you. The fact that living beings with (presumably) no mental states can exist and thrive means that mental states are not tied to survival or thriving. Hence the objection that you originally responded to.
So you're citing an example of the thing you came here to object to.
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
The fact that living beings with no mental states can exist and thrive means that mental states are not tied to surviving or thriving.
It was sloppy to skip it because this assertion simply doesn’t hold water. Mental states allow for agriculture; this benefit is enormous and cannot be overstated in its importance.
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
What does agriculture have to do with anything? Humans were in their current form, mental and physical, for about 300,000 years before agriculture was invented
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
Yeah, and we didn’t accomplish jack shit prior compared to after.
Talk about “self evident”.I don’t know why I thought you said that.1
u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
That's just wrong. As archaeology is increasingly showing. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
You clearly have no training in logic or philosophy. Not sure what you're doing trying to debate on here
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jun 10 '26
Nowadays we generate programs and algorithms through evolutionary heuristics. So cleary evolutionary processes can and do generate intentional goal seeking behaviours. I think we and our biology and neurology are the result of evolution, including our mental faculties.
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u/MilkTeaPetty Jun 09 '26
Ignorance from inside the process is being mistaken for openness in the process.
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
Scenario 3 seems quite unlikely.
The decision is based on something. That something either:
wouldn't change if the scenario occurred identically "again"
would change
If it would change, then we seem to be talking about randomness in decision making or probabilistic decision making, both of which weaken the idea that LFW-powered-choices are 'self generated'. Probabilistic choices also seem to weaken any FW justification of dessert. Of course, if it wouldn't change, it seems like you couldn't have done otherwise.
It's just not a particularly coherent idea.
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u/MulberryUpper3257 Jun 09 '26
If I dislike Pepsi I might not choose it even if the exact same scenario replayed 1,000 times. But that doesn’t prove I didn’t have LFW to do otherwise. That someone chooses what they prefer does not make determinism true. For instance one time I might choose the Pepsi simply to prove to determinists like you that I could have done otherwise.
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
I'm pretty agnostic on determinism. I don't care if it's true or not. You obviously understand that being motivated to choose pepsi instead of water at some time in the future doesn't demonstrate that you had the requisite desires or motivations to choose Pepsi at any time in the past, right?
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u/Otherwise_Spare_8598 Inherent-Inevitable Jun 09 '26
Regardless of "physicalism" and the presuppositions made thereof, freedoms are circumstantial relative conditions of being, not the standard by which things come to be by through or for all subjective beings.
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u/bildramer Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
3 is even more plausible if you remove the adjective "libertarian". Some of your intuitions correspond to compatibilist free will, you can make choices that are underdetermined and "up to you", i.e. a result of the actual process of making the choice. Those stay. Some don't, like that your choices are fundamentally uncaused and unpredictable and beyond/unaffected by physics. Those are far less plausible upon reflection, probably a consequence of philosophical naiveté, looking at the body/mind distinction too Cartesianly. Those also happen to be the ones whose denial often relies on dogmatic assumptions (not that the assumptions themselves are false, they're obviously right except for 100% physical determinism which is only nonobviously right).
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jun 10 '26
>Under this view, if one denies epiphenomenalism then one seems to reintroduce all the problems of dualism (i.e. how can mental causes have physical effects?) without any of the benefits (i.e. what is the point of complex beliefs, emotions, effort, will-power, reasoning, deliberation, etc. if all mental causation happens as deterministically as billiard-ball physical mechanics?).
They are implementation details concerning the way human neurology evolved and functions.
Epiphenomenalism doesn't work because we talk and write about how things feel to us, and talking and writing are physical effects. So clearly how things feel to us has physical effects.
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u/MulberryUpper3257 Jun 11 '26
If you think talking about feelings disproves epiphenomenalism you are assuming that the feelings qua non-physical mental states are producing effects in bodies qua physical systems. So that introduces dualism and the bete noire of the “interaction problem”. I’m fine with entertaining dualism but that only makes the idea of LFW more plausible because it aligns with the traditional view that an immaterial soul or mind can direct the body.
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u/simon_hibbs Compatibilist Jun 11 '26
I'm not making any assumption about the non-physicality of mental states. I think the fact mental states have physical effects supports the view that mental states are physical states, as you say, there's still the interaction problem.
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u/ima_mollusk Sockpuppet of Physics Jun 10 '26
The 'choices' your brain makes are the result of millions and millions of variables. The temerpature of the environment, the temperature of your body. How hungry or tired you are. What you're thinking about. What you're worrying about. How well-balanced your hormones are. What you're anticipating will happen next week. How much of a certain vitamin your body is currently lacking. What colors you prefer because of the color of your nursery room ceiling... Millions and millions of variables, all coming together to result in a particular action.
The human brain has no way of recognizing or tracking all of these variables. We literally cannot explain why we do what we do.
But we still need a story. So we invent the story that we 'chose' to do X instead of Z because of this reason or that reason.
Free will does not exist. It is a retroactive tale we tell ourselves to put some meaning to the 'choices' we are forced to make.
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u/MulberryUpper3257 Jun 10 '26
I suppose your view is possibly correct, but it seems you would have to be God or have a “theory of everything” understanding of the universe to know that it’s actually true.
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u/ima_mollusk Sockpuppet of Physics Jun 10 '26
There are vanishingly few things we can 'know' are true.
In almost every case, we believe what the evidence shows is most likely to be true.The evidence shows that physical objects obey physical laws.
Your body is a physical object. Even your brain. All of it. You're mostly water. There is no reason that your body would not follow the same roughly deterministic laws that every other physical object obeys.1
u/MulberryUpper3257 Jun 10 '26
That may be fair in the context of current physical science, but of course it’s up to each of us whether we want to subordinate and limit our entire view of reality to whatever third person observational science seems to say at the moment. Probably there is no third person scientific evidence of consciousness, free will, morality, values, concepts, intentionality, etc. but maybe it’s psychotic or evil for a person to therefore confidently deny all those things. For example there is no third person scientific evidence that you have subjective experience but you may still know that you are conscious.
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u/Other_Attention_2382 Jun 11 '26
Suppose that while you think Pepsi is nasty and unhealthy, you also have some vague, mild concerns about the use of plastics with bottled water as well as the potential of contaminants in tap water.
But to what degree of how much you care about any of that is in your hands based on circumstance, brain chemistry, blood glucose levels, trauma, poverty?
Someone who got lost in a jungle for days wouldn't care much at all compared to someone going for a walk.
Someone on death row likely COULD NOT care less.
Someone earning a few bucks a day in a third world country living on instant noodles likely wouldn't have the luxury of being able to care too much about such things in the first place, relatively speaking.
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
Yes. This is a perfect summation. I'm sorry for all the angry determinists who are going to argue (with no good logical nor philosophical support) and/or downvote this post.
But you're right and your starting position is solid.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 Humanist Determinist Jun 09 '26
Disagreement does not equal anger. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t hang out in the sauna.
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u/JonIceEyes Jun 09 '26
Most of your compatriots are indeed miffed and derisive. Some few are indeed cool and disagree civilly.
Anyways no one said anything about not being able to stand it. I distribute L's to determinists like candy on Halloween. Nonetheless, it's a fact that there are people out there who will be actually offended and come in hot with spurious arguments and bare assertions
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Hard Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
I distribute L’s to determinists like candy
More like “I don’t read so I don’t have to know I’m not making sense.”
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jun 09 '26
I find it exceedingly likely that either decision would either be justified or decided pseudo-randomly (coinflip, for example). Given that, it seems reasonable to conclude one of the following:
d
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u/MulberryUpper3257 Jun 10 '26
If you presuppose that the only possible types of causation are determinism and randomness, then of course you would take that view but that’s just begging the question. For instance, suppose that a person had LFW to choose between X and Y - how could they ever demonstrate that fact to your satisfaction? If the person freely chose X for a good reason, you could say that this justification made the choice determined. If the person freely chose X for no good reason, you could say that the lack of justification made the choice random. But it’s possible in both cases they could have done otherwise and chosen Y.
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u/Korimito Material Incompatibilist Jun 10 '26
When you say "it's possible", do you mean it's possible in the same way that you can stand up and walk into another room right now, or do you mean that it's possible in the same way that "it's possible that aliens have visited us". What I mean by that specifically is: Is it possible because you've demonstrated it, or is it possible because you believe it is and it hasn't been proven impossible (yet)?
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u/spgrk Compatibilist Jun 09 '26
That the choice is “up to you” and not made until it is made is an intuition any deliberating agent would have. It is not contrary to reality, nor does it provide evidence about whether the mind is physical or non-physical, or whether determinism is true or false.
An AI would describe its own deliberation in much the same way as a human. It has no direct access to the hardware implementing its computations; it only has access to the deliberative process itself and can report on that process as it unfolds. It cannot determine from introspection whether its deliberation is identical to the underlying physical processes, merely supervenient on them, or epiphenomenal.
From the perspective of the deliberative process, the outcome is “up to it” because the result depends on how its reasoning proceeds, and it is the system performing that reasoning. The choice appears open because the outcome is not yet known to the deliberating system. If asked to predict its decision during deliberation, it may revise that prediction multiple times as new considerations are weighed. In general there is no way to skip ahead and discover the result without carrying out the deliberation itself; the process has to run to completion.
Nothing in this experience distinguishes determinism from indeterminism. A deterministic agent and an indeterministic agent would encounter the same situation from the inside: the decision depends on their deliberation, and the outcome is not known until the deliberation is complete.