Speaking of circling back......hope you don’t mind. — Mww

Nope, glad to be talking about things other than just emergence!

Does your statement “indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense” meant to indicate a metaphysical sense of free will? In which case, the statement then becomes.....indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will. — Mww

Yes.

If so, does it follow that indeterminism is no threat to the metaphysical sense of free will because (or, iff) the will is taken to be free to make determinations of its own kind, by its own right, in a metaphysical sense? — Mww

It's not clear to me what "make determinations of its own kind, by its own right" means, other than that the being in question causes or necessitates things to happen, but is not itself caused or necessitated to do so; i.e. it has an output that does not depend on its input.

If that's all you mean, then yes, but NB that that is just the same thing as indeterminism, which is the same thing as randomness. So indeterminism (or randomness) is not a threat to "free will" in the metaphysical sense of the term, because the metaphysical sense of the term just means "indeterminism (or randomness)".

But it doesn’t follow from that, that your “that sense just is freedom from determinism”, which if indeterminism is no threat because determinism is the case, contradicts itself. Indeterminism is freedom from determinism, but the metaphysical sense of free will makes determinism necessary, so indeterminism IS a threat to the metaphysical sense of free will. — Mww

I'm having trouble understanding this bit here, so I'll just try to clarify what I was saying before, in case that answers anything:

The metaphysical sense of free will doesn't make determinism necessary. (The psychological sense requires "determinism enough", but that's a completely different thing).

The metaphysical sense of free will just is being undetermined.

Therefore indeterminism is not a threat to free will in the metaphysical sense. (It would be a threat to it in the psychological sense, but that's a completely different thing).

Ok, so.....indeterminism is no threat because....or, iff....the will is free as a determining functionality. How, then, does it follow that the metaphysical sense of free will is not a useful sense of the term? How is it that the metaphysical sense is not the only possible sense of free will there can be, without getting involved in that damnable “....wretched subterfuge of petty word-jugglery...” (CpR, B1,C3, Para 45, 1788)? — Mww

Having trouble understanding that first sentence there still, so I'll just try to clarify my position with regards to the rest of it again.

There are several different things that we might want to talk about regarding a person's decisions and behavior:

- Did they do the behavior that they wanted to do under their own motor power, and not because something physically pushed them to do something or physically restrained them from doing otherwise?

- Did they do the behavior they wanted to do without being threatened or otherwise coerced into doing it?

- Did they do it because they thought about what the best thing to do was and decided that that was it, rather than doing something they they thought was the wrong thing to do but they just felt like they couldn't help themselves? (Like an addiction, compulsion, phobia, etc).

- Did they do something that was not necessitated by prior states of the universe?

A "yes" answer to any of these questions is something that someone has called "free will" at some point or another.

The first one is today generally called "freedom of action" instead, but some people like Hobbes said that that's all it takes to have "free will".

The second one is today generally called "political liberty" instead, but is also sometimes called "free will", at least in a casual sense.

The third one is what I'm calling the "psychological sense" of free will, and is what contemporary compatibilists like Frankfurt and Wolf mean.

The fourth one is what I'm calling the "metaphysical sense" of free will.

I say that the fourth one is not useful because all kinds of things "have free will" in that sense, but we wouldn't normally care to talk about whether or not those things have free will; I gave the example of radioactive decay, which is not determined, and therefore is "freely willed" in this sense, but nobody cares whether or not a uranium atom "has free will".

The third one is useful, because that's the kind of thing that determines whether it makes any practical sense to praise or blame, reward or punish, someone for their actions, i.e. it's the kind of thing that makes them morally responsible. If someone already agrees that what they did was bad, and regrets doing it, but felt like they just couldn't help themselves, telling them that they're bad for doing it or making them suffer to drive home that point is useless; they already agree! They intended to do otherwise but that intent was not effective in making them do otherwise; therefore, their will was not free.

The second and first ones are also useful things to care about, but they're different kinds of freedom with their own names, and so don't have to be addressed until the topic of "free will" specifically.

Isn’t there a need to distinguish kinds of determinism? If physical determinism is not true with respect to the metaphysical sense of free will, I don’t agree indeterminism is therefore true, under the same conditions. Given the metaphysical sense of free will, it is logically consistent that the sense of determinism should itself be metaphysical, in which case, determinism must be true if it be the case that the metaphysical sense of free will abides exclusively in its law-giving functionality. I don’t think it is reasonable to suppose that because a metaphysical sense of determinism is not susceptible to inductive support in the same way as physical determinism, that the conception is therefore inherently flawed. — Mww

I'm not clear what you mean here, but it sounds like you're talking about determinism in the physical world versus determinism in some kind of non-physical world that interacts with the physical world. I deny that any such non-physical world could possibly exist in the first place, but even if it did, that wouldn't solve any problems with regard to free will.

The non-physical agent would still either make the decisions it makes on the basis of prior facts (about some combination of the physical and non-physical world), in which case its decisions are determined by those facts; or else it makes its decisions without regard to the facts, at random, in which case its decisions are undetermined. There's no clear reason why we would want our decisions to be random, or any way that that makes us "free" in any useful sense, even though it's freedom from determinism.

On the other hand, the kind of process by which the facts of the world are considered and factored into the decisions that get made and the actions that get performed can be a useful kind of freedom, a freedom to do what you think you should do (and an ability to correctly assess what you should do), instead of doing things regardless of whether or not you think you should.

Correct, like all philosophy, like all art and all science... Like cars or computers, or zillions of other things. — Olivier5

Cars and computers and other physical objects that we make are made out of the stuff of the universe, and so follow whatever rules the stuff of the universe follows. They can only be strongly emergent if the universe already has such strong emergence in it: we can't just decide that e.g. if we arrange some bits of metal in a certain way it creates new energy that wasn't present in the bits of metal. We'd have to discover that the universe already had that strongly emergent feature to it, and then take advantage of that.

But we can write stories, come up with rules of games, etc, for imaginary things that exist only inasmuch as we pretend that they do, and stipulate that there's strongly emergent things in those imaginary worlds. We can stipulate that in some game, if you get five separate points all at once that batch of points gets doubled to ten points, whereas five separate points gained one at a time don't double like that. That would be a strongly emergent feature of the game world, but that wouldn't prove anything about reality, any more than writing a story about a unicorn proves that unicorns exist in reality.

Is there space inside objects like planets? If so, do we see an increase in the size of the planets over time? — SimpleUser

There is space yes, but we don’t see small things (where even a galaxy is “small” for these purposes) expand because on small scales the forces holding those things together completely dwarf the force of expansion. It’s only on huge intergalactic scales that there is enough space relative to matter that the expansion of space outpaces the attraction of matter to itself.

But the argument is NOT about what language SAYS but about how it WORKS. — Olivier5

And the way that it works is something that we made up. We decided to make languages where words mean more than the sum of meanings of their phonemes etc. That structure cannot be found in the sounds or scribbles themselves; it exists only in the stories we tell ourselves about what those sounds and scribbles mean, in the rules of the games we play with them.

Space isn't added between galaxies. All of space is expanding so the fabric of space between galaxies is stretching. — T Clark

He didn't say specifically between galaxies. New space is being added everywhere. That's what it is for the fabric of spaced to get stretched: a length of space gets transformed into a greater length of space. There is now more space, so space was added.

You could quibble that it's really more like it's multiplied, but when you multiply positives the result is always the same as adding something would be. In any case, the amount of space -- everywhere, and so also between any two things -- is increased.

It's like saying: if consciousness happens in humans, it must have a precursor in the animal kingdom. It cannot stem from nothing. — Olivier5

That is, ironically, a very anti-emergentist line of argument; it's basically the line of argument that underlies my panpsychist position on phenomenal consciousness. Whatever besides ordinary physical behavior (if anything) is involved in human consciousness, some precursor of it must exist in everything, because otherwise there would be some point in the construction of a human from more fundamental things where suddenly a property that wasn't built out of (and so reducible to) more fundamental properties just appeared from nowhere. That can't happen -- that's strong emergence -- so whatever property we're talking about either doesn't exist at all even in humans or else some precursor of it exists in everything.

But language is real. If strong emergence is a fundamental characteristic of all human language, where does it come from? How did strong emergence emerge? — Olivier5

Stories are real, as in, people really to tell stories. Things happen in stories that can't happen in real life. If they can't happen in real life, how can they happen in stories? zomg big philosophical mystery? No.

We make up things all the time that doesn't mirror reality. Language is a thing we made up. It's real inasmuch as we really do make up and use languages, like stories are real. But like I said, you can't learn about a language just from studying sounds and scribbles -- you have to study how people use (and so implicitly think about) those scribbles and sounds. The facts of the language are actually facts about human thoughts (with regards to those scribbles and sounds), and those thoughts can be about things with structures that don't actually exist in reality.

Personally, I don't buy the distinction between weak and strong emergence. I see the latter as a sum of many small (weak) emergence events. — Olivier5

Then what you're calling "strong emergence" is not the same thing I'm talking about. You're still just talking about weak emergence. It's fine if you think strong emergence is a useless idea -- I do to, that's why I'm against it. But don't take me saying I'm against that useless idea to mean I'm against something normal and mundane that so far as I know nobody is against.

The whole point of bringing up strong vs weak emergence is that you take me to be arguing against something I'm not arguing against. I'm trying to say what the thing I am arguing against actually is. If you just deny that there's any difference between them, then you're taking my words to mean other than I mean them, and counter-arguing against a straw opponent whose position is not mine.

It's possible that the senses of the terms I'm using aren't the only once, but in those senses as I learned them, your second example would still be weak emergence, because in principle you can still get chaotic weather behavior from just modelling a whole frickin' lot of air molecules as such (it's just that, since it's chaotic behavior, a tiny chance in some of the molecules in your model will produce a big change in the aggregate behavior, which makes building a model that predicts reality really hard). You don't have to specifically add some extra property of "weather" to the model, you can (in principle) get by with just modelling a bunch of molecules.

I don't know that rainfall would count as any kind of emergence, but maybe you can explain further why it would.

Basically, the distinction as I understand it is that weakly emergent behavior is still reducible in principle to the behavior of the 'simples' as you say, while strongly emergent behavior is not reducible.

That's like saying "but if magic can happen in stories, it can happen outside of them too".

We can make up anything we want for things that exist only in our minds. Letters, words, and sentences don't intrinsically mean anything that you could discover by studying just scribbles or sounds etc; they only mean things to people, and we find out what they mean by studying the people.

It's like any social construct: something "is money" not because of any properties of the thing, but because of how people treat it; to find out what is or isn't money, you don't investigate the things themselves, you investigate what people think about the things.

People can choose to assign meaning to a word that is not a composite of the meanings of the letters, as we obviously do, but that doesn't mean that there's any actual strong emergence in the real world, only in the stories and games we make up and tell each other.

To come back to money for analogy: we could decide that 100 cents together as a unit count as more (or less) than 100 times the value of a cent, if we wanted to do things that way. That doesn't tell us anything about the properties of pennies or dollars or whatever; that only tells us about the stories and games we've made up about pennies and dollars etc.

was observed as we are doing in this discussion, conceptually, then that relative position would see two objects moving away from each other faster than the speed of light? — James Riley

In a sense, yes.

Another question: If everything is flying away from everything else (or, if space is growing between), isn't the relative experience of any one of those things that of stasis? What direction could one be going from anything without going toward something? To have space grow between, wouldn't it have to be still? and everything was flying away (as in space was growing between). Now this is going to probably sound stupid, but if, in your example of looking into space, aren't we seeing the same thing if we run around to the other side of the planet and look in that different direction into space? Or from any point on Earth into space? I guess what I getting at here is this: can we or are with between two different things with space growing between us and them in opposite directions? If there are no directions, wouldn't that make us the center of the universe? — James Riley

Everything in space would observe itself as seeming to be at rest and at the center of the expanding universe; so yes, we do too, but not because of anything special about us.

is there a distinction with a relevant difference? — James Riley

Yep. For instance, if space is expanding at a steady rate (say doubling in size every unit of time), the two objects will get farther and farther away from each other at an "accelerating" rate, but neither will experience any acceleration: both will feel like they're coasting in an inertial reference frame, and actually if you tied them together such that they had to stay the same distance apart despite the expansion of space, then they would experience an acceleration (it would feel like there was antigravity pushing away from their common center, because they're basically being accelerated toward each other, but despite that are remaining the same distance apart).

Aren't those two things moving apart faster than the speed of light, if only by the addition of space? — James Riley

Yes, but that doesn't violate the laws of relativity, because those laws are only about things moving through space, not about space expanding.

We can see this in practice just looking out into space: farther away things are receding away from us faster than closer things, because space is still accelerating and a multiple of a long distance is much bigger than the same multiple of a small distance, and far-enough-away things are therefore receding so fast that light from them will never reach us (because it's not fast enough to cover more space than is being created in the time it takes to cover that), and that threshold is the edge of the observable universe.

Nothing can move through space faster than light, but new space being created does not count as things moving through space. During the inflationary epoch, new space was added between all the things in the universe at a rate that made them much farther away from each other in much less time than it would take light to travel that same distance. But nothing actually moved through that space faster than light.

If eternal inflation is true, then that inflationary epoch is the normal state of the universe, which is consequently MUCH much bigger and older than the part of it we’re familiar with. The universe as we know it is just a temporary little blip in that enormously larger universe, a tiny part that very briefly slowed down at random, dumping some of that enormous inflationary energy into all the other fields that the universe as we know it is made of. And over time, this part of the greater universe is gradually speeding back up and dissolving back into the rest of it, which has still been expanding at breakneck speed this whole while.

Show up = emerge. — Olivier5

Weakly, yes, but that’s not in question.

Okay, so strong emergence happens, I suppose... — Olivier5

If we make up something with rules where it happens, sure.

The question is whether the universe follows such rules or not.

we may only be able to come up with opinions, but that some opinions are far more knowledge based than others. — Jack Cummins

This is more or less my conclusion as well. Something or another is the completely correct answer, but we can never be sure that any particular option is that. We can, however, be sure that one option is further from that than another, and so get arbitrarily close to that completely correct answer over time.

I’m not at all denying structure. If you simulate or model a house, it is enough that you simulate or model the bricks etc that it is made of — arranged into the structure of a house, of course, but you don’t then have to model properties of the house specifically, just the properties of the bricks etc, and when they are put together like that the properties of the house show up automatically.

Your language examples are a bit beside the point, because we make up the rules of language and so can make up strong emergence in them if we want. We could also make a simulated universe where when constituent come together the right way new rules start applying, in addition to the aggregate of all the rules applying to the constituents. We can make up whatever we want for abstract things we invent. The question is whether the real world behaves in that way.

It's a question of whether the new behavior is an aggregate of the behavior of the constituents (weak emergence) or not (strong emergence).

E.g. if you modeled or simulated a bunch of particles and had no concept of "temperature" baked into your model, just the motion of particles, you would see temperature phenomena just show up in your model or simulation automatically (for large enough ensembles of particles), because it's just a direct product of the properties of the particles. That's weak emergence: you could just pay attention to the constituents and you would get the aggregate behavior out of it anyway whether you paid any attention to it or not.

In contrast, to model or simulate a strongly emergent phenomenon, you couldn't just model the behavior of the constituents and let it happen on its own; you would need to add some extra logic to the model or simulation that says that when a certain type of collection of constituents get together this certain way, start doing this new kind of thing.

So in that way, "nothing new" happens in the weakly emergent model, you don't have to specify anything other than the behavior of the constituents to automatically get the "new" behavior of the aggregate; while on a strongly emergent model, something "wholly new" happens in aggregate, in that if you just model the behavior the constituents, you miss out on modelling the "new" behavior of the aggregate entirely; your model wouldn't behave like the supposedly strongly-emergent reality would, if your model only modeled a bunch of constituents.

Rejecting strong emergence means rejecting that there's anything in the universe that can't in principle be fully modeled just by modeling the behavior of the constituents, because you'd always automatically get the same behavior of an aggregate of them in the model as you would in reality; nothing ever strictly needs to be added to the model to handle the behavior of aggregates.

(Of course, for practical purposes, we often only care about the aggregate, and can ignore the constituents, and use simpler models of the aggregate behavior while ignoring the behavior of the constituents. That we can and often want to do that is different from a case where we have to because modelling the constituents just wouldn't do it).

The solution is to reject the implicit premise: justificationism.

The concept of emergence does not imply that magic things happen between elements when they arranged a certain way. — Olivier5

Specifically strong emergence does, and as I've repeated at least three times now, including right in the OP, that is the specific kind of emergence I'm against. Weak emergence is fine, but also trivial; nobody is opposed to that, so there are no problems (caused by the lack of it) that it would solve.

So I really want to know what you are up to and what you are thinking about. — Athena

I've been doing a long series of threads about it here for over a year now, following the list of topics from my aforementioned book (which is really more a series of essays, link in my profile). The basic (abbreviated) outline of the project is:

- An overview of the definition, aims, methods, faculties, practitioners, and usefulness of philosophy, that then necessitates...

- Pragmatic arguments to adopt general principles that could be summed up as saying that there are correct answers to be had for all meaningful questions, both about reality and about morality, and that we can in principle differentiate those correct answers from the incorrect ones; and that those correct answers are not correct simply because someone decreed them so, but rather, they are independent of anyone's particular opinions, and grounded instead in our common experience.

- A groundwork philosophy of language, as well as specific aspects of its structure (math/logic) and presentation (art/rhetoric), that enable everything else that's going to come to make literal sense.

- An account of the criteria by which to judge something as real, that boils down to satisfying all sensations (observations).
- An account of the mind that has those sensations and does the judging of them.
- An account of the methods by which to apply those criteria to attain knowledge.
- An account of the social institutes to apply those methods and spread that knowledge, i.e. education.

- An account of the criteria by which to judge something as moral, that boils down to satisfying all appetites (pain/pleasure, enjoyment/suffering, etc).
- An account of the will that has those appetites and does the judging of them.
(This is where am right now on the series of threads here, though the rest are prepared already).
- An account of the methods by which to apply those criteria to attain justice.
- An account of the social institutes to apply those methods and spread that justice, i.e. governance.

- An end-cap account of how to inspire curiosity and understanding ("enlightenment") so that people will use those methods of knowledge and establish and support those educational institutions, how to inspire courage and acceptance ("empowerment") so that people will use those methods of justice and establish and support those governmental institutions, and how knowledge and justice combine to guide action in all aspects of life, and how such enlightenment and empowerment can enable us to find meaning in that life and overcome doubts and fears in the face of the apparent futility of learning or achieving anything.

The answer to that last question might depend on everyone's education. — Athena

I agree completely, and it's no mere coincidence that my political philosophy is modeled on my philosophy of academics, and in both I treat governance as analogous to education. In my view, governance properly understood is basically a form of moral education, and it therefore needs to be founded in a properly conducted form of moral research; and in contrast, states declaring by fiat (even majoritarian fiat, i.e. democracy) that something must be just because they say so and don't you dare question it, is as backward a way of doing things as religion. States and religions both operate on the principle of "because ___ says so", and that's no way to do anything; yet we still need governance and education. We've mostly solved the question of how to educate without ever falling back on "because ___ says so"; and my project is to come up with a way to govern likewise.

It has no meaning at their level. — Olivier5

Sure, but that's not relevant to the point at hand. One cannot meaningfully give the temperature of a single particle, only an ensemble of particles, yet nevertheless the temperature of that ensemble consists of nothing more than an aggregate of properties of the particles: it's not like there's the kinetic of energy of every single particles plus the temperature of the ensemble as a separate thing; the temperature of the ensemble just is an aggregate of the kinetic energies of the individual particles.

Likewise, a human being doesn't do some separate thing of "reproduction" that then somehow relates to a bunch of separate nanoscopic molecular actions that lead to the construction of a new human body atom by atom; the act of human reproduction just is all of those nanoscopic molecular actions in aggregate.

Like I said, you're talking about weak emergence, which is not anything I'm opposed to. I'm only against strong emergence. See for explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Strong_and_weak_emergence

And I repeat: reproduction is a product of things atoms can do.

The point is that this thing can reproduce, while an atom cannot. It can decide to fight or flee. It can sleep. It can eat and drink. It can observe, and it can think. — Olivier5

All of which can in principle be broken down to complex arrangements of behaviors of atoms, without requiring that anything happen besides what those atoms could already do.

You’re talking about “weak emergence”, about which there’s really no debate; weak emergence is still reducible. I’m against strong emergence, as I already specified in the OP.

I didn’t mean that I aim for philosophy itself to come up with answers about specifically what to do, but rather to provide a better general means of figuring out what such specific answers are. The exercise of those means would be an activity outside philosophy, just like the physical sciences are outside of philosophy but employ means that depends on philosophical conclusions about epistemology, ontology, etc.

:up: Thanks :cool:

:up: Very clear explanation of details that are actually new to me. :smile:

1. A philosophical book is just an arrangement of words. If there is nothing new in philosophical books, why write them? Why read them? — Olivier5

For the same reason that we collect a variety of goods and organize them on shelves in the same building called a "store": it's much nicer to go to one place and find all the things you need, than to have to wander far and wide trying to find each one who-knows-where out there. The same is true of discoveries (in any field, not just philosophy) as it is of goods: it's an improvement to have them all organized in one place for anyone to browse, than for everyone to have to go find them all over again.

2. A steam engine is just an arrangement of steel, water and fire. And yet when it was invented, it was pretty revolutionary. And if there's nothing new in a steam engine, how come the pharaohs of antiquity didn't think of building a Memphis-Thebes railroad? — Olivier5

Because they hadn't discovered that possibility yet. The possibility was always there, like all the discoveries we collect in books as above, they just didn't know about it yet.

3. A living organism is just (supposedly) an arrangement of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen etc. And yet a living organism can reproduce, which an atom cannot do. To be precise, to reproduce an atom would mean very little, because what is reproduced in life is the (complex, biological) structure of the organism, the shapes the molecules make with atoms, not the atoms themselves. So the concept of reproduction has a clear meaning in biology but not in physics. — Olivier5

This gets most to the point: reproducing a living thing is an aggregate of a whole (frickin') lot of ordinary mechanical processes that atoms already do. A multicellular organism like a human is assembled molecule-by-molecule by (?)illions of tiny nano-machines, which like all machines are just physical things that transform flows of energy through them. A human being is an absolutely insanely complicated thing, but when you analyze one sufficiently it turns out to be an aggregate of a (whole frickin') bunch of simple molecular reactions.

Doesn't seem like threadcrap to me, seems like a perfectly natural segue from the OP through @Athena's question to our discussion: what's the point of doing philosophy? (And back to the OP: is the pursuit of that point the essence of philosophy, and is someone who works toward that point a 'real philosopher'?)

Anyway, the ultimate concern for me is to lay out a better way of figuring out what to do, especially in matters that affect all of us, than what we currently have; in precisely the same way that modern physical sciences are evidently better ways to tell what the world is actually like than religion was.

To put it in the terms of @Nikolas's (reference of Socrates') helm of a ship: we've already gone over why a wide variety of methods of settling on who to helm a ship all fail spectacularly, and now we're at the point of either settling on the first and worst option (go with whoever the half-blind strongman captain picks), or else standing around doing nothing as the ship runs aground. Since obviously neither of those are acceptable options, we're left asking "well what do we do then?" Answering that is the ultimate concern.

We have serious global problems and what value does philosophy have if it does not help us resolve those problems? But perhaps we need to ask new questions that are relevant to today? What are the best economic choices we can make? What political choices should we make about working with the rest of the world? — Athena

There are fields of philosophy that do already address political and economic questions, like political philosophy. Many of the questions of political philosophy depend on more foundational ethical questions, so ethics more broadly is instrumentally relevant to that. And a lot of questions in ethics depend on epistemological, ontological, and even linguistic questions, so all of that stuff is also instrumentally relevant to the really important stuff.

My big project, in my book you've surely heard me talk about already, is basically to go over all of the ontological, epistemological, etc, topics in a way that ends up pretty much just building up to the conclusion that, as regards academic institutions and their investigation of questions about what is, the physical sciences that have largely displaced traditional religion in that domain are the right way to do things; and then, starting from the same principles as that process, go through all of the ethical, etc, topics in an analogous way, to come up with the groundwork for "ethical sciences" that should likewise displace traditional states in the domain of political institutions and their investigation of questions about what ought to be, hopefully answering those questions about morality much more effectively, just as the physical sciences have been much more effective in answering questions about reality.

I merely saw your own message here:

An interesting debate on 'compatibalism (limited free will) vs incompatibilism (no free will)': — 180 Proof

...and was surprised that you would give such inaccurate glosses of those two terms. I was going to offer a correction myself, replete with that surprise, when I saw that Bartricks had already given an accurate one.

Actually clicking that link now, I see that the disputants' actual positions are accurately described both as 'compatibilist' and 'limited free will' on the part of Dennett, and both as 'incompatibilist' and 'no free will' on the part of Caruso. But the way you phrased it sounds like you're saying that 'compatibilist' means 'limited free will' and 'incompatibilist' means 'no free will'.

Caruso seems to be what Derek Pereboom calls a "hard incompatibilist", which is not just someone who is an incompatibilist in the usual sense (someone who thinks determinism and free will are incompatible) but additionally someone who thinks indeterminism and free will are also incompatible, and thus free will is impossible either way.

Yeah Bartricks' definition is technically correct, but for the compatibilist accounts proposed by Dennett and cogni sci folks, they are a kind of "limited free will" in terms of the scientific parameters they’re trying to set right? — Saphsin

Dennett specifically I would say yes, but I think that his notion of free will is more in keeping with the incompatibilist sense of the term than the usual compatibilist sense of the term (discussion of hard indeterminism at that link as well). I can't speak for "cogni sci folks" generally, but the archetypes of modern compatibilism as I'm most familiar with it are people like Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf, who hold that free will has nothing whatsoever to do with how (in)determined or (un)predictable anybody is, but instead everything to do with the specific kinds of functions that our minds do (which do of course, like every function of everything, depend on at least adequate determinism to have any reliable functionality to speak of at all).

Compatibilism is not the view that we have 'limited free will' (it is the view that free will is 'compatible' with causal determinism - hence the name). And incompatibilism is not the view that we have no free will (it is the view that free will is 'incompatible' with determinism...hence the name).

Neither are views about whether we have free will. They're views about what free will is or is not compatible with. — Bartricks

This is correct, and I’m very surprised to see @180 Proof get it so wrong.

Someone's character, just before she acts, isn't an external constraint on what she can do. It's rather part of what she is at that time, and what her intentional action will therefore reveal her to have been. — Pierre-Normand

:up: :100:

If there is a random element in nature, which allows for an open future, it doesn't follow that our actions are random; it merely allows for real self-determination, which would be impossible if all our acts were rigidly determined by antecedent causes. — Janus

It sounds like you are separating the human agent from nature, i.e. assuming a non-physicalist philosophy of mind. But even if that were the case, the logic of causation is still the same regardless of the ontological substrate in question: if there is a non-physical thing steering the motion of the physical body within the range allowed by an only-partially-determined physical world, we still have to ask if that non-physical thing behaves deterministically or not; and if the answer is "not", then the absence of determination is still exactly what "randomness" means, so to the extent that some non-physical agency drives our physical behavior, it's still some mix of determination and randomness, and it's still not clear what about mixing those two things produces meaningful freedom.

This is incorrect; people ordinarily do praise and blame people because they think people are responsible for their actions barring mental illness. — Janus

That's exactly what I just said. I just gave an elaboration of what it means to take responsibility for your actions: it's to reflect on the reasons to do one thing versus another thing, and based on that decide that one or the other thing is the right thing to do. If you decide correctly, you deserve praise, and if you decide incorrectly, you deserve blame. If you don't make any decision at all and something just ends up happening without any intent from you involved, then you're not responsible for what happened, and don't deserve any praise of blame.

Your actions happening in a way less dependent on the facts of the world, i.e. less deterministically, more randomly, makes you less responsible, because it reduces your ability to make any decision at all.

The presumption behind ordinary talk about moral responsibility and praise and blame is based on the assumption of libertarian free will. — Janus

It's based on the assumption of free will, certainly; but "libertarian free will" is another of those technical terms like "hard determinism", that means the combination of free will with incompatibilism. Ordinary people don't always have opinions on compatibilism vs incompatibilism, and when they do have some intuition about it, they don't all side with incompatibilism. A lot of people's intuitive opinion is something like "of course determinism is true, but of course we have free will; incompatibilism is crazy because that would mean we have no free will since determinism is obviously true". (i.e. they view it as a choice between hard determinism and compatibilism, and see metaphysical libertarianism as such nonsense it's not even a consideration). I'm not saying that as an argument for compatibilism, but just contesting your claim that ordinary people are all metaphysical libertarians.

So, as I see it we are either fully determined by natural forces or we are not. and to the extent that we are not we are free. — Janus

Sure, in the sense of "free" by which a uranium atom is "free" to decay at any time, i.e. a sense that means undetermined, or random. In that sense of "free" my view called pan-libertarianism above is that everything "has free will". That just illustrates what a useless sense of "free will" that is, though. Certainly you don't think a uranium atom is morally responsible for its decay, just because its decay was not determined? Assuming you agree it's not, that then leaves us with the question of what does make one morally responsible, that a uranium atom lacks? And I gave an account of that across several posts above.

So we can tell who is best to helm the ship by looking for someone who professes to have no idea how to helm the ship?

What if they were telling the truth, and honestly, truthfully know even less about helmsmanship than the people who say they do but probably don't?

Or, maybe, the conclusion is that nobody can accurately be assessed as the most apt helmsman? Do we then go unhelmed(?), or do we have to somehow figure out between all of us how to navigate the ship, knowing that none of us can be fully trusted as the certainly best helmsman on board?

hard determinism — Janus

NB, FYI, that the term "hard determinism" refers specifically to the combination of determinism with incompatibilism. It doesn't just mean "full determinism with no indeterminism".

If hard determinism were the case, then all acts and events would be predetermined, in which case it seems obvious there would be no freedom. If indeterminism were the case then all acts and events would be only probablistically deterministic, and that leaves room for freedom. — Janus

And to the extent that determinism is not true, indeterminism is true, which then makes the argument for hard incompatibilism: one way or another free will is impossible.

The problem with that argument is that it conflates two different senses of the term "free will". Indeterminism is a threat to the usual, useful, psychological sense, because if you just do things at random, you're obviously not choosing what to do. But indeterminism is not a threat to the metaphysical sense, since that sense just is freedom from determinism, which just is indeterminism. And then we circle back around to indeterminism not being a useful kind of freedom... which just goes to show that the metaphysical sense of the term "free will" is not a useful sense of the term.

We understand natural events in terms of causation, so we shouldn't expect to be able to understand freedom in those terms, because if a free act were (exhaustively) caused by anything other than the actor it would not be free at all. Also if the nature of the actor were fully determined by anything other than the actor then the actor would not be free on that account either, but could only act as their fully determined nature caused. — Janus

Something behaving in a way independent of causal effect on it just is what "randomness" means. A person who sprung into being with a character uninfluenced by anything about the world prior to their creation and who behaved in ways uninfluenced by anything about the world prior to that behavior would be a randomly-generated person doing random things. You could imagine instead a person whose character and behaviors are somewhat influenced by the prior states of the world, but now you're just adding a little determinism to that randomness.

You can keep adding more determinism until the person's character and behaviors are completely necessitated by prior events, or take more away until they're completely random again, but where in there does some mix of determinism and randomness amount to "freedom" in any useful sense? The random person is in a sense "free" from prior influences, sure, but doing things at random is not really what we usually mean when we say that someone did something of their own free will.

But the fact of whether control is achieved or not would be fully determined, meaning that those who lacked it cannot be blamed for doing what they do, and those who were able to exercise it could not rightly be praised. If humans are fully subject to the causation of nature then there is nothing to rationally justify the idea of moral responsibility, or praise and blame. — Janus

In the way we ordinarily talk about free will and moral responsibility, we do say that someone who lacks that self-control cannot be rightly blamed or praised for their actions, precisely because they lacked that self-control. The person who was able to exercise such self-control, conversely, can be praised or blamed for their actions. It's not that self-control is supposed to be praiseworthy and lack of it is supposed to be blameworthy. It's that self-control is what makes anything either praiseworthy or blameworthy, and lack of it absolves one of any praiseworthiness or blameworthiness.

Because the function of praise and blame is to reinforce or alter people's decision-making patterns: if someone makes the right choice, we give them positive feedback to let them know to make choices like that in the future, and if someone makes the wrong choice, we give them negative feedback to let them know to not make choices like that in the future. Whereas if someone did not make any choice at all, but just ended up doing something without really intending to do it, then there's no point praising or blaming them for it, because there was no choice to be made either correctly or incorrectly.

If someone's behavior was completely undetermined, they could not engage in any kind of reflective process of evaluating their own behavior, because that process would have to depend on information about the state of the universe. So completely undetermined behavior could not be freely-willed, in the sense of warranting praise or blame. That doesn't mean that their behavior has to be completely determined in order for them to have free will in that sense, but it needs to be determined enough at least that being praised or blamed will actually influence their future decisions, and it could be fully determined without undermining that requisite functionality at all.

And sure, then it wouldn't be "metaphysically free", but we already established above that that's a useless kind of freedom.

I agree with all that. What I meant was that it would be great to actually have a leader who is wise, to be able to rely on a truly wise person for direction and guidance. The rest of what I wrote that you didn’t quote was about the difficulties of being sure that that’s what we’re really going to get from someone.

Oh I see, you’re confusing is and ought, and trying to ask if the things I prioritize are actually important as though that was a description question about what is real.

Also you’re still not distinguishing objectivism as universalism from objectivism as transcendentalism. Only the latter entails dogmatism.

I'll be back with more comments. I just wanted to congratulate you for the very well crafted OP! — Pierre-Normand

Thanks a bunch! This is perhaps the most positive response I've ever received to any OP here -- it's exactly what I always want, "I like what you're trying to do and I have some ideas on how to do it better" -- so I'm looking forward to your further comments!

had very much enjoyed Susan Wolf's Freedom Within Reason, and read it two or three times. You seem to also have gained much from it, or, at least, to find common ground with her. — Pierre-Normand

To be honest, I haven't actually read Wolf herself, I've just read about her, when someone else compared the views I'd independently come up with to hers. The biggest actual influence on my views would probably be Frankfurt, but from what I understand Wolf's views are probably closer to mine than his.

That would be a sensible interpretation of just his quoted bit out of context, but given the full context it's clearly not what's meant:

If you don't believe in God, then the presumed, claimed, or factual actions, qualities etc. of God are none of your business and none of your concern. — baker

The presumed, claimed, or factual actions, qualities etc. of God are a factor in deciding whether to believe such a God exists. — Pfhorrest

Why do you want to "decide whether God exists or not"? — baker

Same reason I want to decide the truth of any other claim: I want to believe only things that are true, and avoid believing things that are untrue. — Pfhorrest

You do realize how immensely impractical this is, do you? I'm sure you do.

I also doubt you practice it consistently. You aren't all that concerned about the truth about the half-life of radioactive isotopes that exist only on Triton or the vaginal system of fleas, are you? — baker

“Only things that are true” doesn’t mean “all the things that are true”... but yeah, knowing all the things would be cool too, though of course I have higher priorities in daily life. — Pfhorrest

And how do they match "how things really are"? — baker

So I have things that I have to prioritize above investigating just every little question that piques my curiosity, though it would still be cool to have the answers to all those things if I could; but even in light of not being able to believe all the truths, I still want to believe only truths, among the proposed answers to questions I actually have need or free time to investigate. And since I have the free time to be here talking about believing (or not) in the existence of God, I care to be sure that I only believe things that are true, to which "the presumed, claimed, or factual actions, qualities etc. of God" are relevant.

In light of all that, the last quote above makes no clear sense as a question.

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Thank you.

So there must be more people maintaining farm equipment today than there used to be people farming then, no?

It's not so black and white. Antecedent events may influence events, not necessarily exhaustively determine them. — Janus

You can have a mix of determinism and randomness, sure, not just 100% of one or 100% of the other. But still the only thing you've changed about the fully deterministic picture is to add some randomness to it, which doesn't really seem like it makes anyone more free in the sense that matters to us, a morally relevant sense. "I only did it because prior events determined that I would" and "I only did it because as random chance would have it that's what I ended up doing" both sound just as bad, and "I only did it because it was the one out of several possibilities allowable by prior events that I randomly ended up doing" is no better.

The problem is that we have no way of judging who on the ship is an able helmsman independent of the opinions of those on the ship, who all think themselves able helmsman. That’s not to say that there is no such thing as able helmsmanship or that it is not better that the ship be helmed by someone who is able rather than someone who merely thinks he is but isn’t. It’s just to say that everyone on the ship reckons that they are the most able helmsman and so on account of that the one who most deserves the helm.

IOW an actual philosopher-king would be great, but everyone equally reckons that they themselves would be that philosopher-king, and so anyone who stands up and says “away with all your mere opinions, I am the one with true knowledge!” is most likely just yet another fool who thinks himself wise, his supposed knowledge just more opinion.