Looks like you had this page open for a while before replying. I edited my post a few minutes ago. — Michael

No trouble. I must however retract what I just said. I hadn't actually said "both impossible" originally, but rather "not the case that they're both possible". It is the latter that is the correct paraphrase from the right hand side of my revision of your formula, and it is the proposition that I take to follow from the left hand side thought the correct application of De Morgan's law.

Your own "IMPOSSIBLE(A ∧ B)" also follows indirectly, but it follows from modal logic rather than propositional logic.

From ¬(◇A ∧ ◇B) you can indeed infer ¬◇(A ∧ B) since if

(1) it is not the case that ((there is a possible world where A) and (there is a possible world where B)),

then

(2) there is no possible world where both A and B.

I think "they're both possible" is ambiguous here. Do you mean "A is possible and B is possible" or "either A or B is possible"? I'm saying the second, not the first. — Michael

I was paraphrasing you formula and interpreting '¬◇' as "impossible". I meant "both impossible" also as a paraphrase for "¬◇A ∨ ¬◇B".

¬◇A ∨ ¬◇B. Which, again using De Morgan's theorem, just entails ¬◇(A ∧ B), — Michael

It rather seems to me that applying De Morgan's law to ¬◇A ∨ ¬◇B yields ¬(◇A ∧ ◇B).
If either A or B are impossible, then it's not the case that they're both possible.

But epistemic possibility necessarily has to do with the individual's beliefs re possibility, no? — Terrapin Station

What epistemic possibility "has to do with" is rational people's consistent sets of beliefs, and what they are about is specific propositions in relation to those prior sets of beliefs. The content of those propositions can concern ordinary empirical claims, claims of temporal modalities, alethic modalities, mataphysical modalities, or even other epistemic modalities (or anything else that one can intelligibly believe or disbelieve).

For instance, I may claim that, for all I know, for all Donald Trump knows, he will be remembered at the greatest president ever. This could be formalized thus: EPPN(EPDT(P)), where EPPN is the epistemic possibility operator relativized to my own present epistemic perspective, EPDT is the same operator relativized to Trump's epistemic perspective, and P is the proposition that he will be remembered at the greatest president ever.

Well, the epistemic sense is about what I believe. So if I believe that it's not in fact possible for A or B to have obtained--I believe that it's only possible for one of them to have obtained and the other was always impossible (even before one obtained), then how does my saying "I don't know" imply a belief that both are possible? I rather explcitly believe that one was never possible; I simply don't know which one was possible. — Terrapin Station

You are freely mixing up metaphysical and epistemic possibility operators in this paragraph, so the question seems ill posed. I already mentioned that epistemic possibilities don't entail other sorts of possibilities. If you believe that only one among two 'possibilities' can be actual, due to the conjunction of them being nomologically impossible, then this could be formalized thus: EP(◇A xor ◇B), where EP is the epistemic possibility operator, '◇' is a different sort of possibility operator.

Getting to the won't answer a simple question point. Nice. — Terrapin Station

But I did answer it, didn't I? You're just complaining that it took more than 10 minutes, due to my being busy answering other posts of yours!

Don't you ever have time available where one wouldn't have to wait ten minutes for a response in a conversation? — Terrapin Station

You can't possibly be serous. Just listen to yourself. I am patiently replying to your rapid fire quibbles over a simple notion (epistemic possibility) that you could have gotten acquainted with easily on your own with a Google search. We didn't come to a prior agreement that this exchange, which has spanned a few days, ought suddenly to become be a no-break-allowed conversation.

Maybe post when you're not so busy, so that it doesn't take so long to get a simple yes or no answer? — Terrapin Station

Really? You can't wait ten minutes? Should I take an appointment with your personal secretary, next time? I am allowed more than one bathroom breaks in a day?

If I believe that I don't know if A or B is the case, does it follow that I believe that it's possible that either A or B are the case? — Terrapin Station

Yes, if you are using 'possible' in the epistemic sense; no, if you are using it differently. If I don't know whether or no my girlfriend is home, that doesn't entail that I believe that she is some sort of a Schroedinger Cat living in an unsettled state of both possibly being or not being at home. Mere epistemic possibilities don't logically entail other sorts of possibilities.

An epistemic sense has to do with individuals' beliefs, right? — Terrapin Station

Of course! I said that from the very beginning. It is relative to the body of beliefs of a person at some point in time.

What??? You didn't seem to understand if we're only. If we're only saying that "I don't know," then we're not saying "that's possible," right? Because "that's possible" is not ONLY "I don't know." — Terrapin Station

If the person isn't badly confused, and she genuinely doesn't know, this tends to imply that she doesn't know or believe something on the basis of which the proposition or its negation can be deduced. (Although this raises issues regarding the logical closure of knowledge, not very relevant here). That means that for all practical purposes, claims of ignorance are equivalent with claims of epistemic possibility. They have logical implications governed by the logic of epistemic modalities.

If I'm only saying I don't know, it doesn't follow that I believe it's possible. — Terrapin Station

If it means that both the proposition and its negation are consistent with everything that you know (or believe to be true), then that's 'possible' in the epistemic sense. Nobody ever suggested that epistemic possibility implies other sorts of possibility. But when people make use of the word "possible" in ordinary contexts, what they mean satisfies the definition of epistemic possibility, and what they say is often true.

This comment suggests that you didn't really read or understand the comment you're responding to. — Terrapin Station

I was just trying to be helpful in providing links to the commonly discussed issues (in the free will literature) that I had mentioned and that you claimed not to be familiar with. There is no obligation for anyone to make use of them. They're just there for the taking in case anyone is interested.

If we're ONLY saying "I don't know if she's home or not" how are we talking about possibility? — Terrapin Station

Because it an extremely common and everyday use of the words "possible" and "impossible" (Did you know that P? I don't know, that's possible, for all I know.) And also because those uses of the words possible and impossible (and necessarily) in an epistemic context obey the very same rules of modal logic as alethic or metaphysical modalities. Which is why, of course, it is natural to use those words in epistemic contexts, since they obey the same logic and hence licence the same forms of inference.

If you believe that I'm saying that the definition has it as an illusion you're misunderstanding my comment. I'm saying that what the definition is describing would be an illusion, if determinism is true. — Terrapin Station

You still seem to be missing the point of the concept of epistemic possibility. If when I am claiming that for all I know my girlfriend may (epistemic 'possibly') still be at home, I am saying nothing more than that I dont know. I don't know because both the proposition and its negation are consistent with everything that I do know or believe falsely. In what sense would this seemingly justified claim of ignorance be illusory, and what is the relevance of determinism to it? Maybe I know that she is home and have temporarily forgotten due to some distraction? So I can be brought to remember that knew it already? That would by one way to interpret your claim that a statement of epistemic possibility can be mistaken. But determinism has nothing to do with it.

Re the other comments, I'm not that familiar with Van Inwagen's argument (and not that fond of the fact that it seems to be made strictly as a formal logical argument, due to my belief about what logic is, etc.). I'd have to go more into detail just what the issue would be there. Re the "luck" and "intelligibility" issues, for one, will seems to bias probabilities. There's no reason to believe that different possibilities are equiprobable. And the bias can be near 100% in some cases. — Terrapin Station

Getting acquainted at least with an informal statement of van Inwagnen's consequence argument (also credited to Carl Ginet) is useful because it has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for many decades now, and it brings into focus many of the incompatible commitments that ground the accounts of the libertarians, the compatibilists and the hard determinists.

The "intelligibility problem" for for libertarian free will is a very old objection that has been raised for it and that has been much discussed by one of the most prominent contemporary libertarian: Robert Kane. See page 23 in Four Views on Free Will, which you can preview for free on Google Books.

The "luck objection" is closely related to the intelligibility problem but it is most often raised in the context of the libertarian accounts of the "possibility to do otherwise", i.e. the libertarian way to simultaneously satisfy the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) and secure "agent control" over the choice actually being made. Maybe you can just Google "agent", "control", "luck" and "PAP". It is also mentioned in the SEP article mentioned above (search the word "luck" in the page).

Yes it is on my view. The definition of epistemic possibility that you give describes an illusion--something that one is mistaken about re how the world really is (or a false belief). Namely that it's possible that C can obtain consequent to A, in the scenario where there is only one possibility that can obtain consequent to A, B. — Terrapin Station

You are misunderstanding the definition. It's not an illusion, it's a claim of ignorance. Saying that P is an epistemic possibility (always relative to the consistent body of beliefs of an individual or some community consensus) just means that it isn't inconsistent with this prior body of beliefs. If I am coming back home and I don't know if my girlfriend is home already, that means that either (1) her being home already or (2) her not being home already are propositions that both are consistent with everything that I already know or believe (truly or falsely). This is what it means that both propositions are epistemic possibilities from my perspective.

??? That's not my view. There is no "epistemic possibility" where there is no ontic possibility. An "epistemic possibility" with no ontic possibility is otherwise known as a false belief. — Terrapin Station

I was using the term "epistemic possibility" in the way it is commonly used in philosophy. From Wikipedia: "In philosophy and modal logic, epistemic possibility relates a statement under consideration to the current state of our knowledge about the actual world: a statement is said to be:
epistemically possible if it may be true, for all we know..." (my emphasis)

So, a claim of epistemic possibility regarding a proposition that is (unbeknownst to one) metaphysically, historically or nomologically impossible isn't the expression of a false belief. It is more akin to an avowal of ignorance.

My own account of free will doesn't rely at all on epistemic modalities. They are rather irrelevant to it. The reason why the issue came up is because you (and also John) were charging me with conflating epistemic and ontological issues when I was attempting to distinguish two different sorts of possibilities for the future, neither one of which is epistemic on my view.

However, it seems to me, the tendency to conflate those two sorts of 'necessities' (the duals of the corresponding 'possibilities') often leads philosophers into a dilemma. Compatibilists who deny the principle of alternative possibilities are embracing one horn of this dilemma (and face problems in dealing with van Inwagen's consequence argument), whereas many libertarians (including traditional agent-causal theorists) are embracing the other horn (and face difficulties in dealing with the luck and intelligibility objections). My suggestion is that when the proper distinction is made between the two sorts of modalities that are relevant to the metaphysics of agency (neither one of which is merely epistemic) then there appears a third path between the two horns of the traditional compatibilist/libertarian dilemma.

Thanks for expressing your view regarding my 'room-escape' thought experiment. I'll comment further on your response later on.

Paper : http://www.academia.edu/4309985/Epicurus_refutation_of_determinism — FreeEmotion

Thanks for that. It would be interesting to compare this exegesis/reconstruction of Epicurus's account to Chisholm's, Clarke's or Kane's more recent libertarian accounts of free will and see if it suffers from the same limitations (such as the problems from luck and intelligibility).

What is the importance of the free will debate, in your eyes? In mine it is one of responsibility- the metaphysics only interest me insofar as they inform the notion of responsibility. If responsibility is the main focal point, then one can be a compatibilist even if determinism is false because the free will the compatibilist is concerned with is one of responsibility, not metaphysics. — Chany

I agree with you that the topic of responsibility is centrally important to the 'free will and determinism' debate.

Some philosophers, such as Helen Steward, defend the thesis of agency incompatibilism, according to which determinism isn't compatible with animal agency in general, and not just incompatible with free rational agency. (See her A Metaphysics for Freedom). This may be true, and if it is true it would entail that free will isn't compatible with determinism since free will characterizes just one particular sort of animal agency.

But while we recognize non-rational animals such as cows, dogs and finches to be agents, we don't ascribe then free will. They are, in a sense, irresponsible, since they aren't able to take ownership of their own natural and/or conditioned tendencies. So, even if it is the case that the bare metaphysical inquiry into possibilities for the future, as it applies to the natural powers of substances and of non-rational animals, is undoubtedly relevant to the free will issue, it remains the case than an inquiry into the topic of specifically rational agency (which includes questions about the philosophy of 'moral psychology') remains centrally relevant.

Our understanding is irrelevant to whether possibilities or free will obtain.

And our understanding of what we are intentionally doing can be part of the cause of what we are doing where either (a) only one possibility exists in any given situation and there is no free will, or (b) at least two possibilities exist in at least some situations and there is free will. — Terrapin Station

On your view, in a world where microphysical determinism obtains in such a way at to enable an ideal Laplacean predictor to foresee all future events (on the basis of his knowledge of all the present physical conditions and of the deterministic laws of physics), there are two senses in which a future occurrence can meaningfully be said to be 'possible' -- epistemic possibility or ontological possibility -- where the latter doesn't depend on an agent's perspective at all.

I think this leads you to paper over an important metaphysical distinction regarding possibilities for the future (though you hardly are alone in doing this). Imagine the following two cases.

Case 1: Suppose an agent is placed in a room with only two doors leading out. The agent is informed that the room will be flooded in ten minutes. At that time, both doors will lock down automatically. The agent must thus exist the room within ten minutes in order not to drown. Furthermore, the agent is informed that there is a wild tiger behind the first door and that there are a dozen venomous snakes laying on the ground behind the second door. The agent is, as of yet, indecisive about what to do, except that she is quite certain that she must exit soon. Until such a time when she will have made up her mind what kind of beast(s) might be more manageable or least dangerous, she doesn't know what door it is that she will open. (But the Laplacean predictor knows what her eventual choice will be already).

Case 2: Consider now a variation on the previous scenario where one (and only one) of the two doors is locked from the very beginning, and the agent is informed of this also, though she isn't told which one it is. However, if the agent would first try to open the door that happens to already be locked, there will be no penalty. She would then be allowed to walk to the other door and open it (provided the ten minutes time limit hasn't elapsed already). Now, the agent still doesn't initially know what door it is that she will eventually manage to open and what sort of beast(s) it is that she will confront. But there is no point in her losing time pondering over the issue since in any case only one of the two doors is unlocked. She might as well try out one door (chosen at random) and thereby find out as fast as possible which one is unlocked, and then confront the tiger, or snakes, on the other side, whatever the case may be.

On my view, in the first case, before the ten minutes have elapsed, and before the agent has made up her mind which door it is that she will try to open first, *both* options are open to her (and hence represent possible future outcomes) from her own practical perspective, and this not merely a matter of epistemic limitation, or so I would argue.

In the second case, only one option is open, and it is indeed merely a matter of epistemic ignorance which one is open from the practical perspective of the agent. The agent only has one exit option but doesn't yet know which one it is.

On your view, though, there is only one 'ontological possibility' in the Case 1 scenario. And the fact that the agent doesn't yet know (prior to making up her mind) which door it is that she will open is a case of epistemic possibility, just as it is in the Case 2 scenario.

My question to you, then, is this: Why is it that the agent, in the first scenario, wouldn't be justified to just try one door at random and forego any prior deliberation regarding the potential threats (tiger versus snakes), just as it would make sense to forego such pointless deliberations in the the first scenario when she knows that only one door is unlocked anyway. Why is there any practical point in her prior deliberating what choice to make when, on your view, there actually just in one real (ontological) possibility that already has been set by the past state of the universe and the laws of physics; and her 'feeling' that there are two options really (ontologically) open to her reflects nothing more than mere 'epistemic possibilities'?

It's not the case that it's not nonsense ontologically just because a lot of people are talking about it. — Terrapin Station

No, of course not. But you were suggesting that the idea of top-down causation doesn't have any "correlate" in the real world. So, I thought you rather seemed unfamiliar with the very idea of top-down causation, which refers to an abundance of phenomena in both the natural and the social sciences. But, in any case, I offered an argument why the idea isn't nonsensical at all, can be defined with a scientifically sound criterion for the existence of causal relations. You've ignored my explanations.

It's not that I'm stumping for "low level causality" as you seem to believe. The whole "level" idea is nonsense. It's simply an artifact of how people are choosing to think about this stuff.

This is like saying that the very idea of "rabbits" is nonsense. "Rabbits" just is an artifact of how biologists are choosing to think about lumps of biological stuff.

What makes it an epistemological issue is that you're talking about explanations, understanding, what our physical laws can do, etc. — Terrapin Station

That's because in the case of rational agency, our understanding of what we are intentionally doing is normally part of the cause of our doing it. Just because epistemically relevant concepts are mentioned in the context of the discussion of human cognitive powers hardly means that no real causation can be involved. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are two radically different manners to know that something will happen. The first one is to learn about a sufficient causal antecedent. The second one is to choose to make it happen (when it is within our powers to do make it happen). The second one is a reliable means for us to know many things that will happen that doesn't depends on us our knowing, or ignoring, any other causal antecedents of those happenings.

Aren't you the user Streetlight under a different name by the way?

Certainly not. I only have one single account and my handle is my real name.

"Top down" and "bottom up" are nonsensical ontologically. They might make sense re how some people think about causal relations, but they'd have no correlate in the external world. — Terrapin Station

They are multitudes of correlates in the real world. You should keep up with recent literature on the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of chemistry and the philosophy of physics. (Search "top-down causation on PhilPapers). Nobody seems to deny that externally triggered changes in high-level features of organized systems seem to reliably produce systematic effect on low-level features (and this matches up with traditional interventionist accounts of causation: if manipulation of A produces systematic change is B, then there is a causal relationship between A and B). So, the only issue that separate strong emergentists from skeptics on that issue is the question of the potential reducibility (or 'eliminative' analysis) of those prima facie real cases of inter-level causal efficacy into low-level constituent causal processes. The chances for that seem bleak and only to be motivated by die hard reductionist or physicalist tendencies.

Which means that you're not a compatibilist. — Terrapin Station

Indeed, I am not. But I do share with compatibilists the commitment to the idea that free will and responsibility are compatible with the causal closure of the physical domain. As for the question of the determinism of fundamental physical laws, I also share with compatibilists the belief that it is irrelevant to the question of free will. So, my position is intermediate between traditional compatibilism and traditional incompatibilist libertarianism.

What you're addressing in this passage is an epistemic issue. That's why you're conflating an epistemic and an ontological issue. Whether possibilities and free will obtain has nothing to do with our ability to explain anything, our understanding of physical laws, what physical laws can say about anything, etc. — Terrapin Station

Causal explanations for sure address our explanatory needs, but to single then out for that reason doesn't turn them into merely epistemological issues. There is a tight conceptual connection between causation and explanation (as there is, also, between causation and natural laws and/or natural powers, and between causation and counterfactual dependence). So, when I'm suggesting that, the fact that some bodily motions happen to realize, in some specific practical contexts, some specific sorts on intentional actions, is explained by the intelligible source of the intention of the agent (i.e. her reasons for acting in that way precisely in contexts of that sort), I am not merely pointing to the fact that she may believe, truly or wrongly, that this fact is causally relevant to the production of her action. I am suggesting that it is explanatory by virtue of its being causally relevant.

The alternatives to the reality of those real instances of rational-causation are either causal-overdetermination or something like pre-stablished harmony (à la Mallebranche or Leibniz). But the only alternative explanation of the fact that those bodily motions come to constitute the specific form of intentional action that they do constitute, the allegedly determinative neurophysiological (or microphysical) causal entecedent of the bodily motions, doesn't actually explain the fact at all. It is a very poor candidate cause. On the other hand, the rational-causal explanation makes perfect sense in light of the fact that human brains have have evolved over phylogenetic time frames, and then continue to adapt through learning over ontogenetic time frames, precisely to sustain the practical rational powers of mature human beings. But it is enough to account for the dependence of rational abilities on underlying neurophysiological structure to cast the latter as enabling-causes of cognitive function, and not as determinative causes of our specific exercises of practical and theoretical rational powers.

OK, so it seems to me you are saying that microphysical processes, including I would assume, cellular processes, do not exhaustively determine (at least some) macro phenomena, including human decision and thought. — John

Sure, I am saying that but this is something traditional incompatibilists proponents of agent-causation have been saying for a long time. But what they have been saying also always had seemed incredulous to the vast majority of philosophers because traditional agent-causalists (such as Roderick Chisholm and Randolph Clarke) thought that since free agents control their own bodies, then the only way for agent-causation to be irreducible to neural-causation is for agent to be able to control their own neural processes, and thus, in some mysterious way, initiate new causal chains in their own bodies at the neurophysiological level that are not themselves initiated by earlier neurophysiological events. Hence, those intentional "acts of volition" are "contra-causal" in the sense that they are "uncaused causes" of neurophysiological events.

This is indeed incredible and it is not at all what I am saying.

If this is correct then we have no argument and there is also no need for you to hold a compatibilist position it would seem, because you are rejecting determinism, at least as I understand it.

Indeed, I am rejecting determinism. But unlike traditional libertarians, and unlike traditional agnent-causalists, I am not denying causal determinism and causal closure at the level of neurophysiology and "raw" (physicalistically described) bodily motions. Rather, I am adducing results in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of emergence to explain how the specific internal causal structure of 'higher-level' intentional actions, and their integration with our mental lives, make them dependent on their neurophysiological underpinnings in a way such that those underlying processes are merely enabling of our rational powers of agency and not determinative of our responsible decisions.

I still doubt that it is possible to offer any coherent explication of the 'relationship' between so-called "bottom up' and 'top-down' causalities, though.

I've explained how I construe top-down causation (which is somewhat different from the standard interpretations in the literature on emergence) in a previous post. Bottom-up causation, on the other hand, mainly is a manner of the functional organization of our brains being such as to enable our rational powers of theoretical and practical reasoning. How and what those powers are actualized, is another matter entirely, and it isn't determined from the bottom-up. Processes of top-down and bottom-up causation, though, both are irreducible to deterministic causal explanations that only look down at the causally closed level of neurophysiology and 'raw' bodily motions.

One apparent difficulty with my approach concerns the reconciliation of the possibility of top-down causation with the causal closure of the lower level. But this only seems impossible when we assume the token-identity, and hence a one-to-one mappings, of mental-events with neurophysiological events. But I am denying the existence of any such psycho-physical parallelism. Brain events aren't mental events at all. Brain structures and processes enable basic cognitive functions, but our mental lives are a matter of the dynamical actualization of those functions in a rich context of social embedding and scaffolding of our behaviors. This social context consists in a formative preexisting linguistic community and a meaningful environment rich in rational-behavioral affordances.

So do you think you could manage an executive summary of the argument? I spotted bits of it here & there in your posts, but I couldn't possibly reconstruct it.

I think it might help make your position clearer. A change of scenery. Anti-reductionism is more or less a lemma for you, so maybe if you just presented the lemma separately, that would be tidier. (I was going to say something about people not having entrenched views about meteorology, but ...) — Srap Tasmaner

I think anti-reductionism may be more of a default position for me rather than a lemma. It is actually a position that is shared by many of the philosophers that I am arguing against. When it was the main topic of the thread, I was happy to straddled myself with the burden of defending anti-reductionism. I did it in this thread, starting on the third page, in a protracted discussion with Frederick KOH. (I may have made some comments, along the way, about the irreducibility of rational-causation and/or mental-causation, and how they operate quite naturally and non-mysteriously).

However, the relationship between reductionism and the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) is extremely complex. My main beef with the manner in which most compatibilists, libertarians and hard determinists alike seem to dismiss the compatibility between PAP and micro-physical determinism is their main motivation for dismissing the possibility of this compatibility, and this seems to be their inchoate acceptance of actualism. (The 'new dispositionalists' who I mentioned mostly are compatibilists, but they explicitly argue against actualism: the thesis that only what is actual is possible, even in a deterministic universe). The rejection of actualism requires a radical shift from a Humean metaphysics of event-causation to a metaphysics of substances and powers. Since substances have causal powers that are irreducible to the causal powers of their material constituents, that is one step in the argument where reductionism is at issue.

What complicates matters is that, as already mentioned, most contemporary compatibilists reject PAP -- i.e. maintain that free will and responsibility don't require genuine alternative possibilities for the agent to chose from -- and yet they do so (rejecting PAP) on the basis of their uncritical acceptance of actualism in spite of the fact that they aren't committed to nomological reductionism at all.

Indeed, Jaegwon Kim's argument for causal exclusion only explicitly relies on the thesis of the supervenience of the domain of mental events over the domain of physical events. Yet, Kim is an self-avowed non-reductive physicalist who even endorses a weak form of emergence. The reason why, though, he is led to a belief in the causal exclusion of the mental, on the basis of the alleged causal sufficiency of the the causal efficacy of the (broadly deterministic) physical supervenience base, is the lack of attention that he pays to the irreducible principles of individuation of mental phenomena (something multiple-realizability is relevant to) and also to the fact that the causal efficacy of the mental isn't at all a matter of event-event causation. I've also already commented on Davidson's endorsement of the principle of the nomological character of causation. Davidson't also believes mental events to by anomalous (qua belonging to mental types) in spite of them being token identical with physical events. I don't think this is perspicuous at all, but it's not mainly reductionism that is the source of the mischief, since Davidson, just like Kim, isn't a reductionist. Rather, the problem again is the reliance on a narrow Humean conception of event-event nomological causation.

So, the core of my argument consists in showing how an overly narrow conception of event-event nomological causation leads to actualism and why the replacement of this metaphysics with a more Aristotelian metaphysics of substances and their natural powers (and of peoples' 'second-natural' powers of rational deliberation) enables the principle of alternative possibilities to be endorsed consistently with determinism and causal closure both having complete reign at the level of their atomic material constituents. Much of this argument, though, consists in reminders about commonly known facts of ordinary life (and of ordinary scientific practice) and the debunking of commonly endorsed metaphysical prejudices mistakenly believed to be obligatory components of the modern scientific picture of the world. One of the most important reminders is that we don't truthfully withhold ascriptions of powers to ordinary objects, even just temporarily, on the mere ground that the conditions of exercise of those powers aren't currently realized. But I'll have to say more about that because the temptation for believing so in the case of human agency (especially in the context of the free will and determinism debate) seems irresistible to many.

It might help if you could sketch the case against reductionism-- I remember finding Fodor's argument pretty convincing in that paper about special sciences, but it's been way too long since I read it. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, this paper by Fodor has had a significant impact on my thinking also, as well as Putnam's 'square peg through the round hole' argument (in his Philosophy and our Mental Life paper). Both papers are anti-reductionist classics. I also have been helped a lot in overcoming my old physicalist prejudices by John Haugeland's Truth and Rule Following and Wiggins' Sameness and Substance Renewed. Those two works elucidate in two different ways how different levels of material organization relate to one another in a way that accounts both for their ontological independence and their undeniable mutual dependencies.

OK, I read that, but it just seems to me to be saying that the Laplacean 'perspective' ( which is really the God's eye 'view from everywhere') is different from the subjective (limited human epistemic) view. If subjective intentions, purposes, plans and understandings are limited perspectives on our decisions and actions, that ( necessarily) do not include the complex microphysical events that determine them, then what reason do we have to think that they are not merely epiphenomenal rationalizations? — John

Our intentions, and the practical reasons on the basis of which we act are causally efficacious, as are, in a different sense, our episodes of practical deliberation. (Those are instances of rational-causation and mental-causation, respectively. They are complementary forms of explanation. The first one cites the reasons of the agent as causal antecedents whereas the latter cites psychological 'states' such as beliefs or desires). But the sorts of causal explanation that they provide have different forms from the causal explanations (nomological causation) that subsume isolated physical events under universally quantified laws. The belief that all causation is nomological causation is what led Davidson to assert his principle of the "nomological character of causality", which is a principle that has no basis in science and merely seems to be a wild inductive generalization from familiar modes of explanation that focus on classical Newtonian physics (and classical electrodynamics) and ignore the actual scientific explanatory practice that have currency in almost every other fields, including chemistry, biology and modern physics.

When you explain the occurrence of an event with reference to the normal function, or natural power, of an object, or living organism, then the form of causality at issue is substance-causation (of which rational agent-causation is a special case) and those explanations aren't reducible to processes of event-causation neither do they disclose causal antecedent that belong to the same category as the objects and events which obey the laws of physics belong to. A philosophy that argues on the ground of some inchoate reductionism (or flawed supervenience arguments) that the causal efficacy of our intentions are preempted by the causal efficacy of our material constituents is no more prima facie plausible than a philosophy that argues that our perceptions of the external world constitute a veil between us and the way the world is in itself.

Also "1)" could not be a subset of "2)" because if subjective intentions are exhaustively emergent form microphysical processes which are rigidly deterministic then they are not causal of any of those objective microphysical processes, but only of decisions, actions etc understood from the subjective perspective.

What you are gesturing at is an argument for causal exclusion. Such arguments are based on supervenience relations between high-level descriptions of agents described in intentional terms and low-level realizations of those actions in terms of non-intentional bodily motions and their neural causal antecedents. Such arguments (such as Jaegwon Kim's) typically fail due to their overlooking issues of multiple realizability, among other things.

The two are correlated; and as Spinoza points out it would not be proper to say that one is causal of the other at all.

Spinoza also was arguing for the epiphenomenalism of mental phenomena on the basis of causal exclusion at the level of material embodiment. Kim attempted to make such arguments more rigorous but failed, on my view.

BUT, the microphysical is understood by determinists to be the prior determining matrix,

Yes, that seems to be the dogma, but it is poorly argued for and it goes beyond the thesis of microphysical determinism. There is more to what many macroscopic objects (such as artifacts and living organism, and even some inanimate natural entities such as stars, candle flames and hurricanes, than their material constituents and the laws that govern those constituents. There are emergent principles of organisation and individuation that are only weakly constrained by the laws that regulate the constituents.

and we are back to the position that our decisions only seem to be free from our necessarily limited subjective perspectives. Laplace's Demon should be able to see all our reasons as well as the physical causes that they are rigidly correlated with.

We only get back to this position if we accept the arguments for bottom-up causal exclusion that purport to establish it. It's not a default position in contemporary philosophy of science anymore. Even theoretical physicists like Michel Bitbol and George Ellis now are arguing against this position and in favor of strong emergence instead. And there is nothing magical or unnatural about it. Modern cognitive science, evolutionary biology, chemistry and even physics all have superseded the old metaphysics underlying the Cartesian/Newtonian/Galilean/Laplacian world view.

Also, your account does not seem to explain how it is possible for something utterly deterministic to give rise to something really free (undetermined). Waving towards complexity only explains why our actions would nonetheless seem free to us in a deterministic world; it cannot explain how freedom could be an actual reality.

I think it's a common misreading of the thesis of strong emergentism that deterministic processes "give rise" to non-deterministic processes. Maybe this is encouraged by a narrow focus on diachronic emergence where new forms of organisation of matter arise that didn't previously exist, as a result of evolution or change in boundary conditions. But focus on cases of inter-level synchronic emergence, where both the deterministic and non-deterministic processes characterize simultaneously two separate levels of organization, and thereby two different domains of entities, provide a more conspicuous picture of what is going on and why causal exclusion arguments are problematic.

I am not a determinist, by the way. I believe in freedom but I also believe it is irreducible; which means it cannot be explained in terms more basic than itself. All our objectivist explanations are produced in terms of causality; but to explain freedom in terms of causality would be to contradict it; to deny its reality.

I agree. But I don't think microphysical determinism constitutes a threat to freedom. It doesn't even entail determinism simpliciter.

If freedom is impossible to explain without contradicting it, then explaining how freedom could be compatible with determinism is obviously impossible. I think the fact is that the human intellect can understand its own logics of determinism and freedom; which apply properly to the space of causes and the space of reasons respectively, but the two cannot be made compatible, because those logics contradict one another; they are mutually exclusive.

John McDowell has proposed that the space of reasons and the space of laws are disjoint, but the space of causes intersect both. Human intentional actions (and their beliefs) are disclosed within the space of reasons. Human neurophysiology is disclosed, at lest partially, within the space of laws. But it is only excessively narrow conceptions of causality that make problematic the top-down and bottom-up causal relations between the two levels.

You say there is compatibility, but you provide no account of how it could be so. I'll believe it when I see a clear, convincing explanation of how microphysical processes which are completely deterministic could give rise to macro events that are really somehow free from that microphysical determination not merely in the epistemic sense (for us), but in the ontological sense (absolutely). I would want to know what that "somehow free" consists in, and how it could emerge from the "definitely not free". — John

I did provide such an account in this post.

I am yet to see any arguments; all I've seen are vague assertions. — John

Well, it's true that I haven't presented a full blown and fully argue defense of my thesis, but I have also been lambasted for my posts being too long. I have explained what appears to me to be the weak links in the arguments for the traditional forms of (anti-PAP) compatibilism and agent-causal incompatibilism, and provided links to the relevant literature where those positions are criticized. I've also provided several pointers to the theses that underlie my own position, with more references to the relevant literature. You may think it's too sketchy, but I've mainly been laying my cards on the table and answered all the requests for clarification.

Do you have any reading recommendations on that topic? — Mongrel

From a compatibilist perspective, Anthony Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility, is a favorite of mine, and it is written in an engaging style. From an incompatibilist perspective, Michael Ayers, The Refutation of Determinism is hard to beat but it is both difficult and hard to find (though there might be cheap second hand copies available). You will easily find papers by Michael Smith or Kadri Vihvelin online. (See for instance Vihvelin, Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account). Erasmus Mayr's Understanding Human Agency is excellent but not cheap. Also quite relevant, and excellent, are two papers by Don Levi: Determinism as a Thesis about the State of the World from Moment to Moment and The Trouble with Harry (this last one is available online and is especially relevant to the principle of alternative possibilities).

The question is though, whether those who claim compatibility between free will and determinism really mean to say both that the world is causally closed and causality is not probablistic at all but rigidly deterministic, and that free will of the kind that could justify attributions of praise and blame must be sui generis in a way that would deny either that the causal order of nature is closed or that our decisions and actions are completely determined by it. — John

One problem is that the thesis of nomological determinism seldom is precisely defined. It is often equivalent to the claim that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic laws, and that physics is somehow "complete" in the sense that all the other sorts of "high-level" weakly emergent features of the world somehow supervene over the totality of the underlying physical facts. This thesis of the completeness of physics can be denied consistently with the acceptance of the fact that everything is materially constituted by physical stuff (e.g. particles and fields and whatnot). When the possibility of strong emergence is acknowledged (as it increasingly tends to be in contemporary philosophy of physics!) then one can be both a compatibilist and an incompatibilist in two different senses: that is, one can hold that freedom of the will is compatible with microphysical determinism and the causal closure of the physical domain and also is incompatible with nomological determinism at the strongly emergent levels of psychology and intentional action.

If clear, unequivocal, easily comprehensible answers cannot be given to these questions by compatibilists, of whatever stripe, then I would say they are practicing some form of obfuscation or sophistry. They don't want to face the logical consequences of their own beliefs, and they are wriggling like crazy, but making no sense at all.

There is also the possibility what you don't fully understand the structure of the arguments that seem sophistic to you, or that your own strongly held metaphysical beliefs generate blind spots.

All this seems to say, without acknowledging that it is saying it, is that free will is really an illusion caused by our lack of knowledge and understanding of all the ("fine-grained") forces determining our behavior. In other words free will and moral responsibility are inevitably "real for us" even if the world is really inexorably deterministic. Spinoza made that claim, and acknowledged it, some 350 years ago. — John

When I am arguing explicitly that a thesis is false, and propose arguments that purport to show the thesis to be false, that hardly is a way of saying that the thesis is true! I am arguing that the fine-grained description of the physical particles making up your body, which may or may not amount to deterministic processes, aren't relevant to the determination of the intentional action type that, together with the bodily motions that they cause, they happen to realize, then the issue of the real "cause" of them coming to realize a specific (multiply realizable and irreducible) action type remains unsettled from the microphysical perspective.

I was also interested in first-person data, subjective experience... is there a compatibilist perspective that considers that kind of thing? — Mongrel

I think the philosophical accounts regarding free will and determinism propounded by Michael Ayers, Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Erasmus Mayr are especially sensitive to the causal relevance of irreducible features of the first-person perspective of rational agents (and their characters, values and motivations). I am especially partial to the accounts of Ayers and Mayr, myself, but all four are illuminating. Consider Alfred Mele, also, though the specifics of his account are less congenial to me.

This sounds like obfuscation. The point is not that the ability was not actually exercised, but that, in a deterministic world, if it was not exercised then it was never actually (as opposed to merely logically) possible that it could have been exercised. — John

What you call "the point" is actually a substantive philosophical thesis that is in need of a rational defense however obvious its truth may seem from the standpoint of traditional compatibilist reasoning.

The traditional distinctions between logical, epistemic and nomological necessity/possibility are actually too crude to settle this question. That's because possibilities for action aren't equivalent to any of those three kinds of possibility. If an option still is open to you as a possibility for action, then it is both logically possible and epistemically possible that you will do it, but those possibilities for a range of different actions isn't simply a matter of your being ignorant of all the relavant facts regarding the (alleged) nomological possibility of only one of them. (It is 'nomologically possible' in the intended sense if its occurrence is consistent with already settled physical facts that you don't have any power over anymore at the time of practical deliberation in conjunction with the laws of physics).

If it were the case that the nomological necessity of just one determinate action implied a lack of alternative possibilities for other actions then, when faced with several choices for action and asked what it is that you will chose to do, it would make sense for you to reply: "I don't know yet, let's wait and see". (This would be a rationally justified answer if you were to accept the validity of van Inwagen's 'consequence argument'). But the sensible answer rather is: "I don't know, I haven't decided yet; what ought I to do?" And when you are deliberating what it is that you ought to do, you aren't inquiring about already settled facts that unbeknownst to you will cause you to act in a determinate manner, but rather about what it is that makes it reasonable for you to select one possible option in preference to the alternatives in your current situation.

This is simply a conflation of epistemological and ontological issues. — Terrapin Station

No, it's a metaphysical issue. It's a consequence of multiple realizability and of the falsity of nomological reducibility (of psychology to physics). That a given fine-grainedly characterized physical history of the set of material particle temporarily making up a human body happen to realize some specific form of intentional action of a person isn't determined by any level of physical details of this motion anymore than the value of a dollar bill is determined by the physical motion and structure of the atoms making it up. That you cannot know the value of the dollar bill on the basis of the knowledge of its material constitution isn't a matter of epistemic limitation regarding your precise knowledge of the latter, but rather a matter of the latter being insufficient to determining the former, in a metaphysical sense of "determination". This may be true even if the economic facts of the world supervene on the physical facts; and so might it be in the case of the psychological facts in relations to the physical facts that they supervene upon, or so even many non-reductive physicalists such as Jerry Fodor and Donald Davidson have convincingly argued.

Your exeternal observer is an external ideal observer, right?--Hence Laplacean. So how can it be the case that both there is only one possibility to the Laplacean observer but really and not just mistakenly from a phenomenal/belief perspective, more than one possibility open to the agent? How is that not contradictory? — Terrapin Station

It would be contradictory if both senses of "possible" were the same. But I've already taken care of distinguishing them.

The agent who deliberates among several open options ('possible-2') knows that only one of them will eventually become actual. What it is that determines which one will become actual is the reason this agent will disclose, through practical deliberation (which may include a process of rational assessment of her own conflicting desires, values and prior commitments), for making this intelligible choice. It is true that the 'ideal' Laplacean observer is able to foresee the necessity of just one among those outcomes being realized (and hence the only one being 'possible-1'. But what it is that the Laplacean observer thereby sees to be necessary is not the intelligible action itself but rather the fine-grained physical realization of this action through bodily motions that are caused by antecedent physical/neurophysiological events. The explanation why those particular motions happen to be realizing a specific sort of intentional action (characterized in high-level purposive terms) isn't supplied by any sort of understanding of physical laws since physics can say nothing about the way practical reason and intentions relate to intelligible action types. It is the deliberation of the agent that makes this determination; which is another way to say that the agent is the cause of her own actions. This is what agent-causation amounts to. What makes it the case that only one among several 'possible-2' actions is executed is that the agent herself determines what sort of purposive action her own bodily motions (whatever their deterministic causes may be) will come to realize.

If you can't communicate like you're having a conversation rather than someone with some sort of logorrheic disorder there is something wrong with you. It's not indicative of "deep thought" that you type a lot, especially when a lot of it has been unfocused, gobbledy-gooky word salad. — Terrapin Station

The best I can do is keep explaining as best as I know how what it is that you think is unclear and ignore the gratuitous insults. I can't do any better. I've already explained why twitter-style discussion isn't an option for me.