Yes, I do.
Both are determinists, but I don’t think they also accept randomness.
Valentini accepts hidden variables and rejects locality, i.e., he allows faster-than-light causality (remember all the Bell experiments proved was that there are no *local* hidden variables; if you reject locality you can explain the experimental results with hidden variables).
Many world theories say that quantum randomness is only apparently random. All the possibilities are deterministically realized in parallel worlds. The results look random to us, but that is because we only see the result that obtains in our world.
Thinking about many-worlds theory got me onto a really disturbing line of thought. It goes like this:
One thing people are wont to point out is that, if many-worlds is right, then there is a simply unimaginably large collection of parallel worlds. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. It is therefore statistically certain that in at least one of those alternate worlds, I am president.
But, by the same measure, it is also statistically certain that in a bunch of those worlds, I murdered my children.
It makes me sympathize with Nietzsche’s madness.
Robert I was being a bit puckish. I did say that I liked the current discussion. It’s just that usually in these kinds of conversations there is at least one person who wants to defend the standard free will viewpoint. I might have a go at it myself. In debate class at Zebulon Pike Barber College I was taught that I should be able to articulate an opposing position as clearly as my own.
…if many-worlds is right…
We’ll never know, right? Because each “world” is inaccessible to all the rest, correct? But this kind of hair-raising idea is why I always laugh when I hear someone accuse “reductionist” science of robbing nature of its wonder.
Well it wouldn’t be an attempt to “prove” free will so much as an attempt to articulate a coherent concept of free will.
I think I could give a decent defense of free will, in the sense that a compatibilist will accept.
Then please do so. It will count as 50% of your final grade.
Okay, here goes:
The thesis I will defend is that free will as we experience it is real and not illusory.
The “as we experience it” is carrying a lot of weight and is meant to distinguish the common experience of free will from the common, naive philosophical explanation of that experience of free will–but more on that later.
The common experience of free will (or free choice, which I will take to be the same thing) is that we (sometimes) act based on our desires informed by our knowledge. In other words, we do what seems to us best (given what we know and give what we want at the time).
There are all sorts of acts we, in some sense, do that we do not experience as free. When I fall down the steps, that act is not (usually) a result of free will. It is a result of clumsiness and the laws of physics. My heart beating is not experienced as a free act (although I might be able to regulate the rate freely with some work). When I take a transvestite home from the bar, although taking someone home from the bar might be free, that that person is a man is not free but a result of my ignorance of a particularly, shall we say, “salient” fact. When I act under pressure, when I’m half-asleep, when I’m drunk out of my mind, when I’m in a rage or in desperate fear of my life I experience my acts as less free. In short, I largely subscribe to the traditional moral theologian’s understanding of which acts are free and which are “semi-deliberate” or “in-deliberate” and I think it pretty well describes our human experience of free choice and moral responsibility for those choices.
There is a lot more that could be said to tighten all this up and make it rigorous, but what I mean is roughly that our experience of deliberation–both about what to do and also about what to want–really does causally determine what we do and what we want at least in those cases where we generally think it does. The experience is accurate.
Now moving to distinguishing free choice as experienced from free choice as naively explained: While I think we can efficaciously deliberate about and chose what to desire for lower order desires, I think there are certain desires that we cannot chose. There are primitive desires that are not objects of choice but the motives for all choice. This is in some ways parallel to knowledge and ignorance: We can choose to investigate facts we don’t know so that we can make better choices, but at the end of the day, we decide what to investigate based on what we already believe. We can be invincibly ignorant (not only ignorant but ignorant of the fact that we are ignorant).
I can choose to act in order to learn things that will let me make better decisions about what to do, but that choice to investigate depends on prior knowledge that first led me to believe there are things I need to know before acting. So too, I can choose to desire things: I may realize that in order to get one thing I need something else (money would be an obvious example, but there are many others), and so decide that I will desire, value, and pursue that second thing for the sake of the first.
At any rate, in all free choice, all deliberate choice, we chose a means for the sake of some end. That chain of choosing means for ends must terminate in certain ends–values, desires, goals–that are given. That sort of chain of x for the sake of y cannot go on to infinity it must reach a starting point that is not subject to deliberation. And if it isn’t subject to deliberation it isn’t at all clear to me how it could be subject to free choice.
And on interrogation, I think that is how things work with us. If you start asking why you want the things you want, why you do the things you do, you eventual get back to certain things that you just value. You get to a point where it is no longer possible to argue with someone about what is the best thing to do. You can have a reasonable argument about how to achieve your goals, but when it comes to the most basic goals themselves: De gustibus non disputandum. The point is that those most fundamental goals, ends, values can not be subject to deliberate choice.
These might be basic and beastial desires: food, sex, survival. They might be very abstract and human: justice, integrity, authenticity, aesthetic experience, understanding.
Indeed there must be some sort of rank ordering of these foundational desires that is also given. To what could one appeal as a reason to favor one over the other if they are all foundational? If I have to choose between understanding the deepest mysteries of the world or living a long life, what could I appeal to to discriminate? What could you offer to convince me I’d made the wrong choice?
To make the conclusion explicit, if we trace our choices all the way back to their most remote foundations, I think they were contained implicitly in the givens. We are born with certain desires, our experiences influence those desires. We do what we want to do, what we decide to do, but at root, the most remote bases for our decision determined what we would want and what we would decide.
But the choices are still ours. We still did what we wanted to do. Perhaps we might say those givens defined me as an agent: they determined what I was going to want.
Now for the defense of this sort of free will, I will make three brief points:
First, it is in accord with our experience, both of ourselves and of those around us. All of my experience shows that I can chose to do what I desire to do based on my deliberation. Likewise my experience of others. I have lots of expedience making choices. I have lots of experience interacting with other people making choices. All of that experience overwhelmingly points to deliberation being efficacious. Unless we are dealing with addiction (or something else that lessens voluntariness), if I convince you that something is a bad idea, you aren’t going to do it.
This experience isn’t logically conclusive, but to entertain as an open possibility that it is an illusion requires a level of skepticism that goes well beyond “how do I know that there are other conscious minds?”
Second, I see no evidence to suggest that my experience of choosing isn’t veridical.
Third, Nature does nothing in vain. We do certainly deliberate, and therefore we clearly have the faculty to deliberate. Sometimes we spend a lot of time and energy deliberating. Some of us, in extreme situations, actually worry ourselves into sickness. Now, you might be uncomfortable with the Aristotelian axiom, but even from an evolutionary standpoint, it is not credible to suggest that evolution has left us wasting huge amounts of energy deliberating about what to do if our deliberations do not inform our actions and thus confer an evolutionary benefit.
So back to the thesis: our experience of deliberating and choosing what to do is an accurate perception.
Sorry, I lose track of where I have had certain conversations–I’ve had a few dialogues on the topic in a few venues recently.
Yes, what I wrote here and what I wrote there are defending substantially the same position.
I don’t want to argue semantics, but what I wish to draw attention to is that I do think the account I outlined does do justice to our experience of free will.
Yes, at the end of the day, what I do is ultimately determined by various givens which I don’t get to choose, so my position is deterministic.
But I would not admit that what I am defending is a mere illusion of freedom, and I think it gives more than lip-service to the experience. I think our experience of freedom is accurate. I think the common account of freedom goes wrong in the further implications it naively draws from that experience of free choice. Indeed I would argue that those commonly assumed further implications lead to internal incoherence. (I think that was Daniel Dennett’s point, by the way: What people usually think of freedom as entailing is internally incoherent.)
By the way, as I read over my most recent reply, 95% of it, including some of the bits that seems most controversial in this crowd, come straight out of Aquinas.
That choice concerns only the means, never the end.
That there are ends given by nature–things we desire by nature and don’t get to choose to want.
That free acts are those informed by knowledge.
If you just take Aquinas’s account of free choice, I think you can make a very strong case for compatiblism as the necessary conclusion.
Let me add why that is interesting to me:
First of all, I see Aquinas standing in a long line of reasoning about free choice. A line that goes back through the scholastics to John Damascene, Boethius, and Augustine, and past them to Aristotle and Cicero (and of course, he was bringing in a lot of insight from the early medieval Islamic world too). There is not a lot of novelty in the parts of his account of free will that interest me. I see him as, in many ways, standing on the shoulders of giants, and a great deal of his value is as a collector and summarizer of the insights that have withstood the test of centuries of scrutiny. It isn’t just Thomas dixit, but more Thomas, drawing to a conclusion a very very long line of thinking including many diverse viewpoints, puts it thus . . .
Second, I think Aquinas is very circumspect in his discussion of freedom. He leaves a lot of questions unanswered. He observes a sort of Wittgensteinian silence–that is, I am convinced, a big part of why there has always been so much controversy about how to interpret him on the issue of providence and predestination–I’ve never accepted that he was a Banezian (and I’m not alone in that conviction; there are some high profile Thomists who agree).
It always bothered me, as a libertarian working on Aquinas’s moral thought, that what he said about the will and its freedom could be interpreted (at the time, I thought wrongly) in just the way I now am interpreting it. The thing that bothered me even more was that I couldn’t find a clear and pithy way of saying what he should have said to rule out the sort of account I am now defending.
For example, Aquinas says an act is voluntary if it comes from the will; and the will he defines as the rational appetite (i.e., the capacity for desire that is responsive to the apprehension of the world through reason). That fits perfectly with what I am defending. It isn’t obvious to me what more could be added.
As I see it, I am in some sense just now admitting what I’ve always sort of recognized was the obvious conclusion.
If our experience is that we have indeed made some non-determined free choices, then I don’t understand why you would not say that experience is illusory.
I don’t think that is precisely what we do experience. I think what we experience is being able to choose what acts to perform to attain the things we want.
Story time with Porphyry:
I remember being at a pot-luck dinner, talking to an Episcopalian Calvinist minister, who was defending determinism. In a frustrated attempt to refute him, I pointed to a 1.5 litre bottle of cheap wine someone had brought and insisted, “If I wanted, I could perfectly well chug that bottle right now.” And his reply, if I recall, was something to the effect of, “And yet you won’t.”
What we actually experience is the ability to act based on our knowledge and desires. I was correct; if I’d wanted to, I perfectly well could have chugged that bottle of wine. That is my experience of freedom. But, if we go a step deeper, I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to because of the desires and beliefs I held. Was it actually in my power to change those desires and beliefs that ultimately accounted for my not wanting to? That isn’t part of my experience. What I experience is the fact that I can do what I want to do.
We can say I might have decided at the moment that winning this argument was sufficiently important to me to suffer the embarrassment and hangover, but I didn’t. And it isn’t at all clear that I was able to change the basic calculation that I did in reaching the decision that it wasn’t actually worth it. (And in really, even if I had done it to win the argument, I wouldn’t have. It only would have proven to him that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.)
This is, I believe, what you are getting at here, I think we can sometimes freely choose one value or goal over another and thus participate in creating the type of person we are becoming.
I do think we can will to will many many things, we can desire to desire. I can make a conscious choice to devote myself to certain things, or to prioritize certain things, or to be a certain sort of person. But every act of the will is predicated on some antecedent desires. And that includes the desire to desire. So I can choose to want things, but even the will to desire some things is itself predicated on yet more fundamental desires that motivate the desire to desire; that chain of willing to will might be very very long, but at some point that chain must necessarily end in desires that are not themselves subject to choice. Every time we choose we chose for a reason. Every time we chose we chose because we are motivated by something. I have no experience of choosing without some antecedent motive. I do, however, have an experience of simply and spontaneously desiring things. And that spontaneous desire is not incompatible with freedom because I can act on those desires, even if I didn’t chose them.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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