I think the causal closure thing is a red herring. Strong emergence only seems to violate causal closure in the context of systems that have already begged the question regarding reductionism.

Barnes and others have made this case. We can reformulate causal closure in terms of elements of the world that are fundemental. Strong emergence is said to violate causal closure precisely because it is assumed that "basic physics" is the only thing that is fundemental, that higher level emergence cannot, by definition, be a fundemental principle because things must be decomposable into their parts. But all that is just a convoluted way to beg the question re strong emergence.

If strong emergence is a property of the "physical" universe, then by definition it doesn't violate the causal closure of all that is physical. It would not be a non-physical cause.

In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have pure physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim,[1] or that "physical effects have only physical causes" — Agustin Vincente, p. 150.[2]

These don't say anything about strong emergence until the added (and IMHO unsupportable) premises about what is "fundemental" are added in.

Given Hume's critique of induction, I find myself wondering if the larger problem in the Guillotine isn't that "is statements" shouldn't also be "ought statements."

Take: "The glass is fragile, if you drop it, it will break."

We can expand this to "based on all my knowledge of the glass, observations of past glasses, etc. and my knowledge of how the world works more generally, glasses ought to be fragile. If you drop this glass, it ought to break."

That is, fact statements can be seen as statements about what "ought" to happen (what would be the "correct" outcome) if our model of the world is correct. We can, and are, frequently wrong about "is" statements, which only makes this more plausible. Then, consider Hume's attack on induction. This seems to require that a great majority of "is statements," really reflect something like: "if induction is valid, and given x observations, y ought to occur." That is, they are statements about the correctness of possible future observations given our model of the world. This would seem to expand to all of Hume's "matters of fact," but not his "relations of ideas."

That aside, it seems like we can make plenty of factual statements related to morality anyhow. "If poverty was alleviated more human flourishing would occur," is a fact statement. "Flourishing is good for the individual," is likewise a fact statement. I would tend to agree that the facts of the matter that can ground and drive on the development of morality are "out in the world," and that these principles tend to get instantiated in human institutions.

Well, there is absolutely no problem in making fact claims about the values human institutions instantiate from what I can see. It might be hard to make the argument that they are, indeed, instantiating those values through historical processes, but that doesn't preclude such an argument being successful. That being the case, morality can be described in an "is" sense completely separate from the "oughts" that institutions impossible on individuals.

From your own sources:

Russian officials said Moscow's demands included Ukraine's recognition of Russia's hold on Crimea, independence for the separatist-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as "de-militarisation" and "de-Nazification".

The ultimatums Ukraine refused were tied to its"demilitarization," and mechanisms that would ensure it, which would amount to laying down their arms before an enemy that had just invaded them. The "de-Nazification" in practice, was a demand that Russia be allowed to pick who could remain in Ukraine's government.

The claim that there was ever and "offer for peace in exchange for not joining NATO," is patently false. Russia has continued to include these demands relative to neutering Ukraine's ability to resist future invasions and the right to select who can hold political office in the country.

Second, the seriousness of Russia's desires for a merely "independent Donbass" is belied by the fact that they officially annexed those regions, and southern Ukraine not long after.

The credibility of Russia in a deal predicated on "giving up Ukraine's means of self defense," strains credulity considering how they had just vociferously denied that they were going to invade Ukraine, calling the build up for the invasion "military exercises." I recall Lavrov declaring how the West would be "embarrassed" by the fact that all the Russian soldiers would simply return to their barracks, and blamed the US in particular for "building up hysteria" about a possible invasion. That was, in retrospect, obviously just patent lies.

There's also video of Zelensky going and trying to order the Nazi's about, saying he's the president and so on, which they just openly defy him about. Nazi's who explicitly say they want a larger war with Russia.

The side (singular) with Nazis. :roll: I have already shown you in this thread that Wagner operates an explicitly Neo-Nazi unit for recruitment and that a senior leader in the group has an SS tattoo across his chest. Funny how Nazism is such a threat, and yet armed Neo Nazis operating within Russia proper can be tolerated so long as they do the bidding of Putin. He only seemed to sour on such things when a former caterer was forcing him to flee his capital (hasn't the war made Russia safer!?)

Aside from the, it's hard to see how Duginism isn't fascism. Is it the Swastika that makes the fascist?

I find explanations of emergence in terms of computation quite convincing. "More is different" seems ostentatiously true in terms of the "Game of Life" or very simple cellular automata being able to run through every computable function.

I agree that popular attempts to explain models of strong emergence in terms of superveniance are unsatisfying. I think this has more to do with the idea of superveniance though. The problem has been that the opponents of strong emergence have to some degree defined "a model of strong emergence that makes sense," as "one that works with superveniance."

The other thing I would add is that there are very, very many phenomena we study that have not been successfully reduced. Chemistry is not a new field, it is mature, and yet we still have serious questions about whether molecular structure can be reduced. This should give us serious pause when deciding that denying strong emergence should be our default position. Is it our default because we can find no phenomena we can't reduce? Absolutely not. Is it our default because of popular metaphysical assumptions? That seems to be more true.

It seems to me like "purpose" is all over the modern sciences. Functional explanations in biology are filled with references to the purpose of organelles, organs, etc. All of the social sciences have purpose deeply bound up with their explanations of phenomena.

When I teach introductory economics courses, I am constantly talking about the goals of individuals and organizations. It would be impossible to teach introductory college classes in a whole host of fields without references to paradigm grounding theories based around purpose. E.g., in social psychology, "cognitive dissonance," and "the fundemental attribution error," make no sense without reference to purpose.

To be sure, you have some biologists who run around telling everyone that appeals to function "can only ever be short hand for describing truly purposeless events," but not everyone buys what they are selling. In any event, such arguments always seem to be more grounded in philosophy, than empirical evidence. I don't see how it could be otherwise. We observe our own purposes all the time. Arguments that they are illusory tend to go back to "elemental building blocks," — i.e. making ontological claims about what essentially "is," and then use ontological claims to radically reinterpret empirical data.

"Purposelessness," as some sort of "bedrock idea" seems to me to be more a historical - philosophical moment, starting with the decline of idealism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and letting up more recently. What's the rock solid argument for purposelessness that doesn't rest on the idea that all phenomena can be explained in terms of (apparently) purposeless smaller parts?

It seems to me like the most common scientific response to largely philosophical claims about the essential and apparent meaningless and purposelessness of "the world" has been to shrug, say "well that's just philosophy," and to go right on assuming purpose exists in theories. Only is biology does this become a flash point. Physics and chemistry don't deal with things that seem to have purposes and the social sciences don't seem to take the "no purpose" claim seriously (how could they?)

I'm just going to throw it out there that the worst parents I've known also tended to not care about things like "needing a license."

Things like: "don't drive with a suspended license," "don't drive around uninsured," "don't drive around drunk with your child in the car," and "don't drive around drunk, high, uninsured, in an unregistered vehicle, with an illegal fire arm and an open container, taking a 'short cut' the wrong way down a one way street directly in front of a cop," etc., that sort of thing.

Adding one more "license" they are supposed to have is going to do exactly nothing, barring some sort of draconian enforcement mechanism.

The tenacity. The mental and physical toughness.

lol, makes me think of the current thread on affectation. I don't think you could blame the monks who ended up beaten to death in fights over nominalism versus realism of being guilty of affectation. Even less the people who were tortured to death over questions surrounding transubstantiation. Given how academic philosophy is today, it's sort of comical to think of Pythagoras starving himself to death or Bruno and Polycarp accepting being burnt at the stake over the same ideas.

“I have wild animals,” the proconsul said. “I’ll throw you to them unless you change your mind.”

“Call them in,” Polycarp replied, “for we are not allowed to change from something better to something worse.”

A Platonist until the end!

Immediately they began to pile the wood around him. They were going to nail him to the stake as well, but Polycarp said, “Leave me the way I am. He who gives me power to endure the fire will help me to remain in the flames without moving, even without being secured by nails.”

It depends. If "sticking your head in the sand" works well enough, then you never have an incentive to go out and try to learn more. People tend to be, in economic parlance, utility satisfiers, not maximizers. They look for "good enough" in a lot of things. At a social level, this might be how peoples end up in "low level equilibrium traps" of sorts. E.g., in Why Nations Fail there is an anecdotal story of some Roman emperor, I forget which, being presented with a scheme for mass producing glass. He was impressed, but thought it might disrupt the labor force, and so ordered that the process be banned rather than leaning into the innovation.

Against this tendency to stick with what works, there is that drive to "know what is really true," that Plato talks about. However, this tendency seems to manifest in individuals, and then reverse when it comes to people, plural.



:up:

Right, and I agree there are more supportable versions of pragmatism. I was thinking of the rather primitive versions, Pascal's Wager in particular.

Better yet, how can we know that the entire universe, along with all our memories and "evidence," wasn't created an hour ago? And how can we know that our sense of certainty re certain deductions and logical truths isn't simply the result of a malfunctioning cognitive system?

I think such considerations can, occasionally be useful in philosophy. For example, when considering if the multiverse actually fixes the Fine Tuning Problem, such a thing might be relevant since such universes might be part of the set of mathematically describable universes and outnumber "law-like" universes. Another example would be Plantinga's argument about grounding our beliefs when we have no good reason to suspect that our cognitive equipment is set up to find truth (Donald Hoffman makes a similar argument, although in favor of idealism instead of God).

However, in general I think such radical skepticism is pretty goofy. Saint Augustine's "Against the Academics," is a pretty good takedown of this way of thinking. Or as Jay Bernstein says in his Hegel lectures: "who doubts everything is real except for their own perceptions? Someone experiencing psychosis."

But if you want a completely logical way to ground the empirical sciences, you can always try Hegel's Greater Logic if you haven't. It creates a bridge between first principles and the world of observation, and it shows how the external world exists through this. Whether you find the argument convincing or not sort of requires going through it though. It's like an 800 page thought experiment.

Anyway, the earth rotating the Sun was purely found out by the Mathematical deduction, not empirical observation.

Uhh... I'm not sure about that. Unless the proof started with:

"Let there be astronomical observations equivalent with the empirical observations we have made....

For one, the idea of first person experience being strongly emergent, rather than molecules having their own phenomenal experience. Panpsychism seems implausible to me, and denying that consciousness "really exists" seems downright silly.

Second, strong emergence is in no way precluded by a process centered metaphysics. This has more to do with undermining the evidence against the the possibility of strong emergence that providing support for its existence. Nonetheless, its worth pointing out that arguments against strong emergence are largely based in philosophy in the first place.

Across a wide array of fronts, the natural sciences have concluded that process, not substance, explains a host of phenomena. E.g., heat as average motion instead of the substance caloric, combustion as a process instead of the substance phlogiston, life as a far from equilibrium thermodynamic process instead of there being a "vital substance," particles as part of an ever changing field instead of being discrete fundamental "building blocks," etc. The unification of the EM force and weak force also lends credence to the idea of there being no truly sui generis substances at work, that physics can be unified. Support for process as fundamental is support for a framework where strong emergence is possible. This is important because arguments against strong emergence are largely grounded in the fact that the philosophical framework in use precludes it.

In terms of positive evidence, we could consider variations on Robin Hendry's argument that molecular structure is strongly emergent. I recall seeing a poll that at least most chemists do not think their field can be reduced to physics. The heat carry capacities of metals would also be an area that suggests strong emergence. There are also a variety of arguments that quantum mechanics itself displays strong emergence, e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03831, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12716/1/Emergence%20revised.pdf

I mentioned Davies' proof, and there are other, similar information theoretic arguments for strong emergence that I am less familiar with.

Then there is the wide popularity of pancomputational conceptions of physics, which would allow for strong emergence, although they also hinge on the speculation that the universe is "computable."

I would also consider the philosophical problems in defining superveniance to be evidence against reductive physicalism, even if they are not arguments in favor of strong emergence. That is, the concept itself that under girds popular forms of fatalism seems to have coherence issues, and I'm not sure if they can be ironed out.

Where have you been the last two years lol? Of course they were wildly over confident. They accidentally published the articles they had prewritten about the collapse of Ukraine's government and were continuing to publish ridiculous maps like this until the week they decided to declare the advance on Kyiv a "feint."



Oh look, eastern Ukraine has been encircled and cut off, it's over! The only saving grace is that they didn't decide to actually launch their clearly suicidal amphibious assault on Odessa. But they still published reports about how they were "contesting it"

Maybe the Earth only turns round when we look at said evidence and is flat the rest of the time? :nerd:

It only seems like apples and oranges in retrospect. In 2014, Russia saw a good deal of defections from the UAF and meaningful local collapses. There was plenty of reason for them to think that it would be the same just 8 years later. One of the reasons for them to expect this is that Western train and equip missions had a fairly mixed track record at actually building decent militaries.



Almost certainly. The whole blitz on Hostomel and rush to Kyiv makes sense in the context of a "decapitation strike" that crushes the resolve of the enemy. But, being poorly planned and executed, it instead turned into a massive stalled out convoy north of Kyiv, the decimation of the VDV sent ahead in air assaults, and eventually the entire collapse of that axis.

The most telling thing about what Russia expected to happen is the fact that what were essentially police units, armed with riot control gear and small arms alone, moving in thin skinned trucks, were sent towards the front of the advance on Kyiv and Kharkiv. This is what you move in if you think you'll mostly be dealing with unrest and protests. Instead, their advance was a disaster because they ran right into still very much active military formations with tanks and artillery.

What is this "rock solid evidence," that no form of freedom can exist?


Consider this: If volition has "no effect" on behavior, i.e., it is epiphenomenal, then why did natural selection select for consciousness in the first place? If consciousness and the sensation of volition has absolutely no effect on behavioral outputs, it shouldn't be selected for. It must be an accidental byproduct.

But epiphenomenalist claims seem to be making huge assumptions here based on scant empirical evidence (indeed, I would say work in psychology tends to falsify epiphenomenalism in its more robust forms).

The most common arguments for fatalism I am familiar with do not rely on any direct empirical evidence that "volition has nothing to do with behavior." Rather, they rely on the claim that reductionism and smallism are true. That is, "facts about any living organism are reducible to facts about atoms and molecules. Atoms lack a will, and so volition must have no real effect on behavior."

There is a problem here. Reductive physicalism's claims hinge on the proposition that "there is no strong emergence in physics", that all physical change is reducible facts about "elementary" particles. This is an increasingly unpopular opinion in the sciences for several reasons.

-First, because it clashes with processed based, computational views of physics.

-Second, because it would seem to make it impossible to explain how first person experience emerges (an example of strong emergence), unless you embrace panpsychism, the view that everything, including atoms, have some level of phenomenal awareness.

-Third, you have things like Paul Davies' proof, which claim to show that the information processing capabilities of the universe are incapable of accounting for the complexity biological life unless there is strong emergence (and thus data compression). The last of these is probably the least convincing, the second probably the most.


Aside from that, the argument that "people only prefer compatibalism because it makes them feel better," makes no sense if epiphenomenalism is true. If our feelings and volitions have absolutely zero influence over our behavior, then it is simply a mistake to say that anyone's feelings have anything to do with what they do or say about anything. Feelings would be merely an accident caused by certain arrangements of feelingless molecules. But of course, such psychological arguments are so compelling precisely because they make sense in causal explanations, which should lead us to question epiphenominalism. So to, there is the problem of why our feelings should seem to sync up so very well with our actions if they actually have no direct causal interaction.

Further, the whole argument for epiphenominalism and fatalism from smallism ("everything can be explained in terms of atoms") crashes to the ground if we allow strong emergence to account for first person subjective experience. If some strong emergence is possible, why delimit it to only epiphenomnal consciousness and not a consciousness that affects behavior (in which case, organisms can be self-determining to varying degrees). Certainly, a consciousness that has causal effects makes more sense it terms for it having been widely selected for across complex organism.

Which is all to say, I find compatibalism more convincing because the evidence for strong emergence seems far more convincing.

Like the Afghan National Army? Or the Iraqi Armed Forces in the face of ISIS? Or the South Vietnamese Army? Those three all received significantly more aid than the US had provided to Ukraine before the invasion. The US had not particularly provided all that much by means of lethal aid before the war, whereas it had fully outfitted the Iraqi military with aircraft, artillery, tanks, IFVs, stuff the US still won't give to Ukraine or has only given to them in token numbers. And the Iraqi military had way more recent combat experience than the Ukrainians, with veterans of the war with Iran, Kuwait, the Gulf, and the civil war. But collapse they definitely did.

ISIS blitzed Mosul, Kirkuk, and besieged Baghdad with a quite small force because resistance collapsed, despite plenty of Western aid and training. Less well equiped Peshmerga and Shia militias actually preformed a good deal better (partly due to essentially facing the threat of genocide).

Quality of equipment and quantity of $ aid means very little if morale collapses, or if you have effectively bribed commanders to "throw open the gates," for you. Russian intelligence operations, bribes/pressure did help them gain Kherson City easily, due to collusion. They expected that to happen in many more places?

The Gulf War campaign had about a million coalition troops. The Iraqi Army was no longer considered nearly as well supplied or competent in 2003. Sanctions and the collapse of the USSR as an arms provider had crippled their military, as had a decade of a US enforced no fly zone. During the Gulf War, the US essentially defacto partitioned a whole third of Iraq, which was under Kurdish control and rule after.

When the US invaded in 2003, it has 60,000 Kurdish Peshmerga supporting their operations, and essentially started with a third of the country under their control. It still invaded with an overall coalition of about 600,000.

Another comparison might be Vietnam. South Vietnam had about half the population of Ukraine but the SVA and US forced for COIN operations there peaked at 1.4 million.

However, in general, the size of military deployments has been decreasing. Modern warfare has shown a definite trend towards quality beating quantity. Military hardware is significantly more expensive when adjusting for inflation than during WWII and soldiers now require more training.

Russia's invasion was largely predicated on the prediction that Ukraine's would collapse. The low troop numbers represent Russia's (over)confidence in this collapse, over confidence in the effectiveness of bribes they had paid to Ukrainian leaders, corruption (they thought they had more men than they did, there have been multiple trials over under strength formations and "ghost soldiers"), and general poor planning skills, more than anything relative to their war aims IMO. That and their relative inability to mobilize and support a much larger force. After all, they couldn't support the men they went in with. Having more unsupported columns wouldn't have helped them.

Interesting. I get what you're saying; I'm not sure if I understand the circularity of it though. But is there an example like this that doesn't involve infinites or infinitesimals? Would this be a problem for finitists or intuitionists? I could see the claim that this says more about our idea of infinites than probability.

Because, if physicists are correct that the world is computable (and there is a huge amount of supposition there, it's just speculation) then we wouldn't be dealing with true continua.

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?

There is widespread agreement on many of the properties of water, its identity as H2O, its boiling point, etc. But there is also widespread disagreement about many of its properties on some levels. For example, questions around the nature of chemical bonds, quantum effects, measures of entropy, etc.

This being the case for basically every topic (once you get deep enough into it, you reach the fringes of consensus), it seems to be the case the objectivity breaks down to a certain degree. In specialized, highly technical debates, there might be only a few viewpoints and they can be quite incommensurate (e.g. quantum foundations). It would seem to me that objective facts are only established once this sort of contradictory plurality is resolved.

But I think your judgement here is correct. We want our morality to be as apparent as "water is H2O." I think it actually is this way on a number of points. "Do not torture people for pleasure, do not molest children," are pretty much taken as concrete. Do people violate these precepts? Of course, but people often also agree that they act immorally. Do some people disagree? Sure, but some people also think the Earth is flat, so we shouldn't lose too much sleep over not convincing everyone. What justice means to the emergent whole of society is probably the more important thing.

You are assuming a compatibilist free will as truth here. I'm saying there's no such thing. The "will to align yourself to your internal logic" which is a core part of the compatibilist framework is in itself a deterministic feature. There is no free will to being with.

I'm not assuming it. I am saying, if compatibilism is the case, the problem you bring up is not a problem. But I do find compatibilism more compelling in general, due to problems in libertarian theories that probably aren't relevant here.

However, people seem unable to imagine a world in which we put most effort into preventative measures, meaning, we understand that years of causes determines a person's actions and that if we make sure that our entire society aligns towards making sure all inhabitants do not end up in such causality, then we have mitigated the majority of crimes in society.

Certainly crime prevention is a worthy goal. I see problems with making it the primary goal though. It seems to run into the problem Hegel points out, of treating other people as animals to be trained into proper behavior, rather than people to be lifted upwards into self-determining freedom. That is, if people are to be free, they have a right to be punished, to pay the costs of restoring right if they violate it. This doesn't mean that crime prevention, recidivism, etc. can't be part of the policy conversation, it just means that merely shaping human behavior towards ideal outcomes cannot ground justice.

This is true even if we take a very narrow definition of freedom as: "doing what you want to do and not doing what you don't want to do," which seems like a state that even a fatalist can allow a person might be in. That is, the self-actualized person's preferences are commensurate with the law. They accept following the law as a duty, as part of their identity, rather than them responding to surface level incentives not to break the law.

I tend to agree with Hegel's view, and I suppose Kant would say something similar re treating human choices as merely means to an end vis-a-vis aggregate behavior. Assuming fatalism seems to lead to something like Strawson's morality, which reduces justice into something akin to breaking a horse.

For instance, in a deterministically guided society we would need much better social securities. Especially for parents and their kids. Parents would need to also raise their children as part of a community and be more transparent about their family life since any problems for children need to be addressed before they manifest as psychological damage. Families would probably have a supporter who constantly council their day to day challenges and there would need to be a greater openness among neighbors and people living close to them since everyone to some degree would be part in the upbringing of the children. This prevents parents who are unfit as parents to damage their children's childhood creating a cause for their later lives in which such causes can manifest as everything from depression, anxiety, social problems, or criminal activity, murder etc.

I agree on the policy ideas, but wouldn't this be beneficial even if there is some sort of acausal libertarian free will? Obviously, people's upbringing greatly effects their adult behaviors vis-a-vis criminality.

For starters, the idea of justice as retribution or "evening the balance" needs to be removed. While feelings of retribution are strong emotions and hard to overcome, the justice system needs to stop focusing on punishment. "Restoring the balance" can still lead to emotions of retributions and a causality chain that leads to vengeance rather than preventing harm from spiraling out of control.

I agree that "vengeance" isn't helpful. However, restoring right is not equivalent to fulfilling an emotional need for vengeance. Crime is an infringement of other's rights, and of right as a whole. It is the denial of mutual recognition. “The restoration of right” consists in what was infringed being reasserted and reaffirmed by society. Crime is a negation of right and punishment is the “negation of the negation."

This doesn't entail retributivism. In a mature moral relationship, there must be "space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others." This could result in something along the lines of restorative justice.

"The goal of restorative justice is to bring together those most affected by the criminal act—the offender, the victim, and community members—in a nonadversarial process to encourage offender accountability and meet the needs of the victims to repair the harms resulting from the crime."

Victims' and society's emotional need for retribution only comes up to the extent that a form of punishment will help bring criminals back into harmony with the ethical community, i.e., the criminal is seen as "having paid their debt to society." Punishment then is an expression of the rationality and freedom inherent in the legal and ethical order of a society. It represents the authority of the state and the collective will of the community in upholding the ethical norms. In this sense, punishment is not a mere act of vengeance, but an institutionalized expression of the community's commitment to justice.

Whereas, if we only care about "getting people to not do crime" (training behavior), we might not care about restorative justice. Why sit the criminal down with the victim and try to facilitate repentance and forgiveness if it doesn't boost outcomes re recidivism? But, if we think that criminals have a right to be free, and to develop such that they freely choose to join the ethical community, then we have an obligation to shape their punishment such that it (hopefully) results in them seeing it as a duty to the community -- one they accept. And this is not unthinkable, sometimes people admit that they deserve to be punished.

That said, I can see what you describe looking quite like what I've described when it comes to policy implementation. The difference would lay in the concepts underpinning the justice system.

I'm focusing on the lack of universal meanings, objective meanings. Those are not what you find for yourself, those are objective. The specifics here are essential for the argument I made. And the argument had to do with how most people try to find some objective morality, i.e some rules that exist as universal truths. Such objective rules require a meaning that exists as a universal truth, a universal meaning.

See my and other's earlier replies. I don't think it's at all useful to say that "objective" is a synonym for "universal," or "of itself." Like this:

Yes, this is a problem of language. Objective can mean externally objective, i.e objective in the eye of the universe, cold dead objectivity.

IDK about the usefulness of "internal" and "external" objectivity; I've never come across it before. It would seem to make it easier to conflate the concept of "objectivity" with the idea of "noumena" and "in itselfness," which is quite common. I think it comes out of the positivist idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit; more objective = more true." Positivism has fallen out of favor, but this idea has a zombie legacy. I would just consider whether it's a useful way to think about objectivity in the first place, since it would seem that "external objectivity" doesn't have anything to do with the possibility of subjectivity.

The rest, I agree with. I'd probably go even further and say that, rather than there not being "evidence" for some sort of universal meaning, the concept itself is fatally flawed. And biology, in the ways that it is able to clearly define harm, and to a lesser extent, flourishing, does seem to have paramount importance in grounding morality. Although, I would also add that the social sciences would seem to have plenty to say here.

This is the type of morals that religion tries to impose on us.

I am not sure about this, although I don't think it's all that relevant. This seems to bring up Plato's Meno Paradox. Are things good because God loves them or does God love good things because they are good? If the latter, as often claimed by religions, then it would be the case that religion's authority when it comes to morality simply stems from the fact that the religion has been the recipient of divine revelations, special knowledge. Why does this revelation have authority? Because, presumably, God knows much more than us about the world, and has a better handle on justice. No "universal meaning" is required. It can be the same sort of "objective morality" we could create, just better formulated.

"Good" and "bad" can still be guided by commonalties between humans regardless of culture. And there has to be a guiding principle underneath. There's no point in discussing what is more punk or not if you don't have anything informing what "punk" actually is in the first place. Or you cannot debate the atomic weight of lithium if you don't have a definition of what "atom" means...

The only common ground that actually functions as a universal objective fact, is our biology, our human nature. This has to be the foundational ground that guides our moral thinking, from which we extrapolate ideas about what is "good" and "bad" for us. Only by accepting this can we start to form principles to live by and moral principles to be discussed about.

And it's this that I mean is measurable. Our human nature exists as an objective thing, and it is measurable. Anything disregarding this foundation when trying to produce moral facts fails.

:up: agreed

I found that post quite hard to follow TBH. But you seemed to be talking about the problem of first cause, and a self-determining will somehow solving that? I assumed this must be "universal" in that it doesn't seem like any of our personal wills could possibly account for causation going back before we were born.

But IDK how that solves the problem of a will that isn't affected by the past, memories, desires, etc. either. My will being "mine" doesn't make sense to me if said will remains undetermined by any of my memories, desires, knowledge, etc.

It occurred to me the other day that one of the difficulties with Aristotle's other causes is that they don't make sense without the concept of potentiality. Yet, since potentiality can't be observed, we've ditched it with essences (only to work it back in through a variety of metrics). It's a problem for empiricism in general. You only observe the things you observe and only what actually happens happens. Even if potentials are needed to explain the world, they remain tricky.

This seems definitional/tautological, or else plain false. But an example can give the sense of it, I think:

Experiment: take an uncapped bottle of water and invert it, creating an analogue of the temperature inversion of the atmosphere; the water wants to fall out and the air has to get in. The result is a chaotic series of "glugs" as first some water comes out an then some air gets in. Time how long it takes to reach the stable lower energy of the water all in the sink and the bottle full of air. Now repeat the experiment but this time as the bottle is inverted, give it a swirling shake to initiate a whirlpool effect. The bottle will empty smoothly and much faster. The dynamic system of the whirlpool increases the entropic energy flow, by introducing a dynamic system of order. the whirlpool once initiated is self sustaining as long as the potential energy of water in the bottle persists.

Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature gives some good examples of these sorts of phenomena, building off less complex examples to more complex ones like the auto-catalyses that must have been involved in the formation of early life. One of the simple ones he gives is how boiling oil will form hexagonal convection cells. The hexagonal form is a constraint, but it exists because of a thermodynamic gradient that this form discharges more efficiently. You see the same thing with frost heaves in the arctic, or cracking dry soil, although the arctic version is more impressive because you can end up with almost perfect hexagons stacked across an area.

Anyhow, I like his terminology for this:

Orthograde changes are caused internally. They are spontaneous changes. That is, orthograde changes are generated by the spontaneous elimination of asymmetries in a thermodynamic system in disequilibrium. Because orthograde changes are driven by the internal geometry of a changing system, orthograde causes can be seen as analogous to Aristotle's formal cause. More loosely, Aristotle's final cause can also be considered orthograde, because goal oriented actions are caused from within.

Contragrade changes are imposed from the outside. They are non-spontaneous changes. Contragrade change is induced when one thermodynamic system interacts with the orthograde changes of another thermodynamic system. The interaction drives the first system into a higher energy, more asymmetrical state. Contragrade changes do work. Because contragrade changes are driven by external interactions with another changing system, contragrade causes can be seen as analogous to Aristotle's efficient cause.

This is largely speculative, if not mere wishful thinking. This is as good as it seems to get:

IDK, while less "hard science," I can certainly think of evidence to support this in the political science, military science, and business literature. The idea that open endedness and innovation are adaptive are extremely strong there, and there is definitely a case to be made for selection-like effects on the "evolution" of states, businesses, languages, programming languages, etc.

Re the problem of "self destruction," I would think this represents an equilibrium trap, a valley is the landscape so to speak. But chaotic systems exhibit that sort of reversal all the time.

There is also to consider the fact that a "tendency to x" doesn't mean that a system necessarily achieves x. Contingencies still exist.

It all reduces to the fact the principle of cause and effect cannot be denied, and at the same time but under different conditions, it cannot be used

I am not convinced that we cannot use the concept of causation to good use. Nor do I see how substituting a "universal will" as a sort of first mover fixes any of the problems I've mentioned about personal freedom. If a cosmic will starts all causes and effects, it's still the case that for my actions to be mine they have to have something to do with my memories, emotions, knowledge, etc.

It does not remove "us" from the will. As I explained, it inverts the relation so that "us" is attributed to the will rather than "will" being attributed to us. Attributing "will" to us, as you do, actually removes "us" from will, in order to have an autonomous self which has a will as a property.

I don't understand how this is supposed to fix things. It's still the case that our thoughts, beliefs, memories, rational decision making process, knowledge, etc. all pre-exist our choices. And they also seem to determine our choices. If they determine our choices, then our choices are "determined by" the past. Laws of nature have nothing to do with it, that's just one specific flavor of determinism. I'm just talking about determinism in the sense that "everything has a cause" and "what comes before dictates what comes after, causes pre-exist their effects."

If those things don't determine our choices, then it's hard to see how our actions are "free. Moreover this seems to fly in the face of phenomenological experience and the social sciences as well. E.g., I am generally hungry before I decide to go make lunch, my past sensations determine my current actions in that case.

It is not compatibilist because the will is not necessarily constrained by determinist 'laws of nature' which is what is inherent to determinism.

Determinism is just the view that: "events are determined by previously existing causes." The Principle of Sufficent Reason gets you there by itself. Ideas of determinism, e.g. Stoic Logos Spermatikos and cause, predate anything like modern science, and are a more basic (and IMO even more empirically and logically supportable) description of determinism.

The free will act is not determined by anything in the past.

So why is any choice more likely than any other?

When we do not understand the cause of an act, we might be inclined to say that the act is random. This is due to our failure to understand, and it does not necessarily mean that the act is truly random in any absolute sense, it may just be that we do not have the ability to understand the cause. The determinist will say that if the cause is not a determinist cause then it must be truly random, because the reality of a freely willed cause, as a true cause, is not allowed by the determinist.

But if the act isn't determined by anything in the past what is determining it? If you say "your will," does this will involve your memories, desires, preferences, etc.?

If it does, well those things preexist our choices and influence/determine them. If you say "no" then it's completely unrelated to anything, which makes it impossible to explain why people act in the predictable ways they do.

Surely, the reliable way in which drugs and hormone injections affect behavior suggest some relation between past events and actions, no? Drinking alcohol changes how people decide to act.

Or consider traumatic brain injuries that radically alter someone's personality and short term memory? Why do these effect how people act?

Sure, but the will to learn allows one to learn how to read, and then read War and Peace. So it is not true to say that if you do not know how to read you will not ever read War and Peace, because you can learn and then do it. And the choice to learn is freely willed, therefore not determined by the past.

This is an example of past choices dictating future choices. Hence, not consistent with "free will that unaffected by the past." Our past choices affect our future choices, and how they do so depends on how they have affected us and the world around us. That is, past choices determine future choices.

MU, I can't say I understand your position. But I believe I understand the Count's. I believe he's saying that, if things in my past aren't causing my decisions in the present, then my decisions are random. So, for example, I will not have chosen chocolate ice cream over vanilla for any reason more significant than a coin toss. In fact, the fact that I don't like, or am allergic to, strawberry will not make it any less likely that I will choose strawberry than either of the other options.

Exactly. Or, even if they are somehow not random, they aren't free. I mean, it seems to me that I proposed to my wife because of all the experiences I had while dating her, not because a will that is totally unrelated to past events acted through me. And if my will is unrelated to past events, it doesn't really make sense why I have gone years without reversing my decision to be married to her. After all, my relative happiness or love for her could have nothing to do with my actions now, those are all things that occured in the past.

My position is that my past does have bearing on my present decisions. However, it doesn't determine them. I could have chosen vanilla. But I didn't. Obviously, there's no way to prove that I could have done other than I did. But that's what I believe

The concept of potentialities seems like something that can go to the side when considering free will. It's a bit of a red herring.

Muscle spasms are actions of our body, but they aren't what we'd generally like to call "free actions." Same with our heart beat. Rather than focusing on potentialities, I think it makes more sense to consider which of our actions "we" decide, and which are effects from causes we do not control and may not even fathom. If I am guided by drives totally alien to me, that I don't understand, it doesn't seem like I'm free.

Determinism plays a role on allowing us to make choices though. Our actions need to have predictable effects for them to instantiate our will. If the world was random, if water sometimes cleaned your child, sometimes dissolved then, you couldn't make meaningful choices. That we have some idea what our actions will entail re changes in states of affairs is also a prerequisite of freedom.

This doesn't require absolute determinism, and neither does freedom. But any stochastic element also doesn't seem to make us any freer because it can't be based on our reasons for choosing different actions.

Thanks! I have read all of those enough to recommend them. I haven't finished all of them cover to cover. I have a long reading list and get distracted easily, although the ones that made it in the list are generally all ones I've read all or most of.

I'm most likely to stop reading science books because they tend to make their case early on and then just keep hammering home evidence, and they can get a bit repetitive. This is risky though. I recall talking to Wayfarer about Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality," a scientific argument for idealism (roughly, the belief that the idea of a distinctly "physical" universe doesn't make sense) and not buying that Hoffman was advocating idealism. Well, it turns out I was wrong! Hoffman just waits until the last chapter to make this argument.

That and in introductory texts I sometimes skip the chapters on ideas I'm fairly familiar with. That said, I do find I get more out of surveys going back to them later. You can see how everything fits together with more in depth knowledge about everything being referenced.

Books lead to books. I wanted to read Pope John Paul II because a blend of Thomism and phenomenology sounded interesting, but then I ended up going to the Routledge intro on phenomenology because I realized I didn't really understand it. But then I realized I didn't really understand Thomism that much either lol, so my one book has become three.

Smallism is the claim that all facts about larger things are reducible to facts about small things (parts). QFT says that facts about the smallest things are actually only/best describable as facts about completely universal entities. This is a reversal. The universe isn't what it is because of the properties of its most "basic" parts, but rather the properties of "basic parts" are driven by what the entire universe is.

To be sure, QFT has been made to fit with smallism, because smallism is still popular, but it at least creates a wedge. The larger motivation for abandoning smallism is a switch from a substance based view ("things are the way they are because of differences in the types of stuff that makes them up") to a process based view ("change is fundemental and things are what they are because of the processes underlying them"). Computation is a popular model here and computation isn't reducible in the same way as the substance view.

A classical substance view would be that Na + Cl = salt. Keep adding more salt and you have more salt, but it's always the same thing because of the parts that make it up. In process, more can be different. Nest a formula like PRIME(x*3) and adding more x gives you something different. X = 1 results in a prime, and the output will be 1 (1 = "yes, this number is prime"). Adding more X always makes a number divisible by 3, and so any other value for x will result in a 0 ("no, not prime").

Apparent substances then are just long term stabilities in process. And indeed, our "basic particles" do appear to "come into being" and "decay out of being," rather than being "essential building blocks."

Certainly. It's still the dominant view it would seem, although this is more by inertia than anything else. But if you look back to the 20th century it was quite dominant; now this is less and less the case.

I think more than 50% (but certainly not all) people especially in physics would agree with this statement in particular.

Maybe it's just selection bias, but smallism actually seems less popular in physics, most popular in neuroscience and cognitive science, or amongst the laity (which makes sense because it was dominant until recently). In physics, the success of QFT, and the ideal of fields (wholes) being fundemental, not part(icles)s, and the rise of pancomputationalism both seem to have hit smallism quite hard. Just thinking of writers in physics who would not appear to be smallist, there is: Vedral, Tegmark, Davies, Lloyd, Wilzek, Rovelli, Deutsche, etc. A sort of "who's who" list of people writing popular theory.

Many of the things one might argue one's will is influenced by, another could argue are part of one's will. The circumstances that influence one's will... Is that a threat to freedom of one's will, or is that just decision-making? So many different understandings of "will", and on what "free" would mean, and what things "will" must be free from.

This is Plato's point in the Republic when he discusses the parts of the soul and how they can be set against one another. Saint Paul describes something similar in his Epistle to the Romans, describing how he is a slave to desire and instinct, at "war with the members of his body."

Plato's solution, picked up by the Patristics, Hegel, and others, was to posit that the unification of the will requires that all these elements, Nietzsche's "congress of souls," be ruled over by reason.

Why reason? In part because it can weigh and balance desires, but also because it's the "part of the soul," that allows us to figure out how to actually achieve any goals. But more importantly, reason has authority because in its desire for truth and "what is truly true/good," not just "what appears to be so," reason routinely transcends itself. It goes beyond the finite limits of what a person currently is. Other desires, per Plato, don't do this, and lacking this transcendent quality, they are more contingent, less necessary, and so less deserving of authority because they are less fully themselves. That is, they are effects from "without." But if we want to be free, we need to be self-determining, which means we seek the transcendent cause from within.

Against this view, Hume posited that reason should only be "the slave of the passions," but I don't recall Hume ever actually taking down Plato's argument re transcendence and the ability to bring unity. The dismissal is more grounded in the lack of a "unified ego," to rule. But of course, this is the same thing that Plato actually allows and starts with. If we were unified, we wouldn't need the rule of reason.

My understanding of such studies are that it is community and being with people for a common cause promotes flourishing. I don’t think this is deniable. The theistic part of it is likely to be moot, but in today’s atomised culture, it is generally only sporting clubs or religious groups that still encourage and build community and no doubt people benefit. Has nothing to say about the truth of those beliefs - it’s likely more about the power of conformity (shared values) and tribalism.

Yes and no. All groups help promote common metrics of well being. Religious association has a larger effect size than most though.

But there are fairly reasonable explanations for this that naturalists might find convincing. First, religious organizations attract different types of people, particularly older individuals and women, who are far less likely to engage in crime in the first place or to suffer financial crises, so this is a major confounding variable. Second, a big part of most religions is time spent in prayer or meditation, which shows its own robust benefits for well being, even when placed in a secular context. Third, most religious traditions provide attendees with moralizing lectures or "pep talks," each week, commanding and encouraging them not to fight with people, to let grievances go, etc. This might have good effects even in a secular context, and then only certain people are going to stick around for that sort of thing (more selection effects).

Sports clubs don't have the same selection effects or elements. Moralizing is a big part of religion. If a deacon or imam gets bagged for some sort of crime, say a DUI, it is a scandal. If it happens to someone on a bar soft ball league, their membership doesn't make their behavior particularly scandalous. So there is a change in pay offs too.

But I think you could also say that being a Nazi in Germany in the 1930’s seemed to boost metrics of flourishing (for most) too. All that community building, sport, collaboration, infrastructure. Shared values and the promotion of a strong culture certainly seemed to benefit most of the citizens.

That's still a common conception at least. The power of Nazi propaganda and the need of the US to "build up" the myth of Nazi power to justify their alliance with the Soviets during the Cold War is probably the main culprit here. That and "building up images of Nazi competence and power," also helped to assuage critiques of the initial French and British performance in the war.

In reality, the Nazis trashed German standard of living. Even using the Nazis own cooked statistics, Richard Evan's "Third Reich Trilogy" and Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction," (just on the economy of the Third Reich) show German real wages crashing by about a third even before the war began. Rearmorment caused massive distortions in the economy, such that there were regular shortages of refined flour and animal fats, basic food stuffs, even before the invasion of Poland.

Nazi forced labor schemes turned out to be horribly inefficient, and the focus on making girls into "future mothers of the Reich," and regularly taking boys out of classes for indoctrination and military style training hurt educational attainment.

Germany's status as the center of physics and other scientific fields was already shattered before the war began by official harassment and discrimination on ethnic, political, and religious grounds, paired with political dogma being inserted into the sciences (e.g. quantum mechanics being branded "Jewish physics).

All this occured despite running absolutely massive deficits that would have caused a financial crisis if the war hadn't come. The Nazis certainly succeeded at building a very competent (if horribly under equipped relative to the US) military, and some impressive public works, but the rest of the "development" was more of a shell game. Even their military competence is sort of overblown. Once the Western Allies arrived in force large battles routinely had 4-8:1 casualty rates, not in the Wermacht's favor, and shifting veteran formations over from the Eastern Front didn't do much to make up for the Western Allies massive artillery, air, and mechanized transport superiority.

But this would lead into supposing some form of animism/panpsychism, which I so far can’t make sense of. To accept? I’d so far say “no”

I don't see how that's the case. It's maybe something more along the lines of Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics. It doesn't suppose any sort of first person perspective or mind tied to perspective, just a context specific frame for information.

I'm curious. If you have an ontological understanding of what physical objectivity consists of, as I presume you do, how do you go about demarcating the notion of "the objective world"?

I don't think objectivity should have anything to do with ontology directly. It's a mistake to turn it into another word for "noumenal." Objectivity is about what things are like with specific perspective biases removed, not "what things are like without a mind," or "what things look like from everywhere."

By contrast, a postmodern view of science rejects “the dualism of scheme and content, or context and content, altogether. There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.

This just seems like Kantian subjective dualism with some linguistic turn language sprinkled in to me. I don't see how such a free floating language comes to exist in the world in the first place. I think people make way to much of the fact that language can't be neatly formalized and is protean — this doesn't make it totally sui generis and cut off from causation.

Yet an objective rock will hold the same spatiotemporal properties to all humans, cats, and dogs; to all coexistent beings that happen upon the same rock in practice.

Let me throw this thought experiment at you from Scott Mueller's "Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information."

You have two seemingly identical diamonds and you're trying to figure out which diamond belongs to which person. You use all the tools commonly employed by jewelers, plus some chemical tests. As best you can tell, these two diamonds are 100% identical. They are indiscirnible from one another given a whole host of physical interactions (your measurements).

But then an assistant comes in with a mass spectrometer. It turns out one diamond actually has a significantly higher concentration of carbon isotopes, something that would make no difference for a whole host of physical interactions. This does make the two diamonds different though (one is now more valuable than the other for one).

He runs through similar examples of how some enzymes are "blind to differences" while others or not.

Does this give us any reason to suppose that "perspective" of some sort is relative to all physical interactions? It seems to us that a rock is just a rock for all things. Splash an assortment of liquids on an assortment of rocks and it's all the same interaction. But then depending on the rock, it might dissolve when some liquids are poured on it but not others, a sort of relative discerniblity in terms of "differences that make a difference."

His point was that the information content of things varies by context, even at a very basic level. The relevance here is that discoveries about the natural world sometimes require looking into interactions that only a handful of individuals are ever going to see, because they only occur in contrived lab settings, so they won't be part of most people's experiences.

Yet it is still "that actuality which, in being equally actual to all, is perfectly impartial to any one psyche or grouping of these", in this sense being (individual) mind independent. An objective reality we as individual minds perceive intra-subjectively via our inter-subjective filters of interpretation. Physical objects as those physically objective givens that invariable stand before us as subjects irrespective of our wants and desires as individual minds or collections of these.

That makes some sense to me. But then there is still the role of experiments, specialized equipment, etc. When we're trying to describe the natural world, we do a lot of very clever things to find out about it that other animals are simply incapable of. For them, the differences we find will never make a difference (until they result in some much larger scale effect). I'm not sure if that becomes a problem or not, but it does seem like advanced instrumentation can help create a more authoritative view on "what there is," even if most people aren't privy to using or understanding it.

The other problem is that the majority of any sort of "community" can obviously be wrong about facts, which gets at the idea of "justification" of claims. So maybe "everyone would agree on x if given the same data," not "everyone agrees about x." Historically, there are well accepted "objective facts," that it has nonetheless taken time to discover and satisfactorily demonstrate.

The resulting abstraction, born out of intersubjective consensus then becomes the empirically real object, the identical one affecting all of us equally ( even though the phenomena we constitute into what we call the object is never given identically to all of us, nor to any one of us).

I like this one too.

We don't talk about "love" or "friendship" or "democracy" etc. on the level of cells and tissues, as if "love" etc. would exist on the level of biochemistry. But why do this when it comes to free will?

IMHO, it's the prevalence of smallism in modern explanations of determinism.

Old way of explaining determinism: the world follows the Principal of Sufficient Reason, "everything has a sufficent cause." Causes come before effects. Causes determine effects. We can consider several types of causes (substance, essence, form, telos, etc.)

Modern Way: X are the ways in which physics and chemistry are deterministic. Everything reduces to facts about chemistry and physics, thus the world is deterministic.

And then this is used to support fatalism. "If all facts about people are reducible to facts about atoms, and atoms aren't free, then freedom can never enter the equation (see: Hume, Jaegeon Kim)."

To my mind, this is problematic because there is much more evidence for a broad concept of causation than smallism. On the balance of evidence, I would say smallism sounds quite unlikely, while some concept of cause seems necessary to explain the world (and likely PSR as well).

Gotcha. Personally, I don't think freedom can be reduced to "the feeling of volition." At the very least, such a view would seem to require multiple disjunct types of freedom. Slaves presumably experience the sensation of volition the same way as non-slaves, and yet there is still an important sense in which they aren't "free" in the same ways. The same goes for alcoholism, drug addiction, etc., which don't have any effect on the sensation of volition.



That seems plausible to me. But even if some sort of substance dualism were the case, it would still seem to me that what determines our choices must exist before we choose in order for our choices to be truly "ours." So, even if I entertain the idea of "nonphysical souls," compatibalism seems more right.

Sure, there is obviously some bracketing here. The "closed" sign on a store objectively means "the store isn't open for business," but that doesn't mean that such a meaning is accessible from the viewpoint of a passing cat or dog. There is a context that is relevant.

Determinism makes our sense of justice problematic. Much our moral thinking relies on ideas of free will. But without free will we have to understand that no one acts without a previous cause, that many people are set on rails towards immoral actions due to reasons of nature and nurture. So without free will we end up with a moral system that relies and focuses on preventing people from doing immoral actions rather than punishment for their actions.

This only seems to be a problem if we assume:
A. "Uncaused" libertarian free will is the only type of freedom that can make justice coherent; and
B. Punishment can't function as primarily a means of "restoring right," by taking away the benefits of immoral action (deterrence can be important too).

I don't see any problem here as far as compatibalist free will is concerned though. I don't even think "uncaused" free will ends up being coherent. If we're "freely choosing" an act then who we are "determines our action."

When it comes to universal ideas of meaning, there's nothing that points to any meaning in the universe

Sure. Meaning is always relational. Things don't have "meaning," or information content for that matter, "of themselves." So I agree, it's silly to try to search for a "universal meaning" in this sense.

But there is no evidence of any meaning in the universe? Surely this has to be qualified. I find things meaningful all the time. I assume other people do to. I am in the universe; so are other people. Thus, the universe seems to produce heaps of meaning and values. The fact that an idea of some sort of universal, Platonic meaning that floats free of the world doesn't cash out doesn't mean the universe lacks meaning.

Nor is meaning precluded from being objective. A sign on a store that says "closed" objectively means the store isn't open. That is, the sign has the same meaning to anyone who can read it, even when correcting for differences between multiple perspectives.

To form a moral system that can be universalized between humans, we need to look at our actual experience and lives that we have, all that we are right now, nothing else. And through that we can extrapolate biological hints towards a functioning moral system for all humans.

I agree with all this. I just don't agree that the parts above preclude "objective" moral standards. Somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects.

Socially constructed things can be observed objectively. Good and bad are no more amorphous than terms like "Japanese" or "punk rock," and we can certainly talk about the extent to which a piece of furniture or a TV show shows "Japanese-style/influence," or which rock bands are "more punk." Is it hard to operationalize such measurements? Sure. But objective facts remain, e.g. "the Moody Blues are less punk than the Ramones or the Clash." People can disagree with that statement; that doesn't make it not objective. People can also disagree about the atomic weight of lithium or the shape of the Earth.

That doesn't matter, because free will isn't wisdom, omnipotence, or omniscience.

Not sure what the relevance of this is.

Of course it's possible that with more knowledge, more resources, one would make different choices. But this has no bearing on whether one has free will or not.

So what does have bearing on free will?

Did the shift in Western culture that allowed women to start being educated in large numbers not affect their freedom? Does being raised in a religious cult not effect freedom? Are the characters in 1984 not made less free by the omnipotent manipulation of information by the state?

Clearly. How do we find out that we are mislead? By other empirical observations. You have to trust some observations to conclude that you've been led astray in the first place.


Right, we could adopt the pragmatist view, which is that we can accept positions based on the benefit they grant to us. In this way, beliefs don't have to be justified by their truth status, but rather by the benefits that accrue from holding them. Hume didn't have access to this line of reasoning though.

The problem with the purely pragmatic view IMO, is that, while it certainly works for justifying the use of induction, it also seems like it could be used to justify sticking your head in the sand on all sorts of issues because "it feels better." But how can we know if sticking our head in the proverbial sand will actually maximize our benefit? For that we need to know the "truth of the matter," and so we come back to where we started.

Plus, I don't think it's the case that "people only care about the truth to the extent that such knowledge can benefit them." At least not in any direct sense. It seems to me that understanding truth is an essential element of freedom and self-determination, insofar as we aren't being led around by illusions and lies if we know the truth, and this leads to truth being sought for its own sake (Plato). Aristotle would say that, as the "rational animal," our telos/purpose is to discover truth, and it is in fulfilling this authentic purpose that we "flourish." In either take, which seem to get at something important, benefit comes from truth, not the other way around.

Consider the fact that the definition of chance appears to be circular - ordinarily, chance is taken to mean "to not be determined", where to be "determined" is taken to mean "to not be subject to chance".

I think there are definitely problems with the main ways of defining probability, particularly frequentism, but I don't think circularity is one of them. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/probability-interpret/

The classical and logical views don't seem to be as much a problem for metaphysical potentialities as for epistemology and the idea of rational credence.

One way out of this circularity is to consider determinism and chance to be relative to perspective, by taking inspiration from game-theory in which "chance nodes" are understood to refer to states of a game in which it isn't the player's turn to move, but someone else's.

Non-classical compatibilism that is based on this logic, can take metaphysical "free choice" as an axiom that is true for every player of the game, whose actions impose constraints on both the possible futures and possible 'pasts' of every other player. This position can be regarded as "compatibilist" to the extent that it can successfully reduce the empirical observations of modern theoretical physics in terms of a set of laws, whose 'determinism' is considered to be relative to the frame of reference used.

Transactional QM seems to be the closest theory in this regard.

That's an interesting idea. Any tips on a place to read more?

I agree, it's asking for a contradiction. That's why libertarian free will makes no sense. The idea of "us" choosing in a way that is autonomous from the past - our experiences, memories, desires, past thinking, etc. removes "us" from the will.

To say that such a "free will," "isn't actually totally free, that it's constrained by (determined by) all sorts of things like past experience, memory, desire, physics etc." is to simply grant the main claim of compatibilism. This is what I mean by "libertarianism turning itself into compatibilism."

If you say "no, only most of our decision making is pre-determined, there is an extra bit of free floating free will that isn't determined by anything in the past," then I'd just repeat the same question: "what does such a will have to do with me?"

It basically comes down to this; "If something is not determined by anything in what way is it not random?" The uncaused is random, and there is no reason anything uncaused should tend towards any choice and not another. It seems incoherent to me to say "our wills are determined by our past experiences, thoughts, desires" but then also that there is also an "extra bit" that isn't determined by any of these. Ok, even if this is true, it doesn't result in more freedom, it just makes my actions partly random and unfathomable. If I can't possibly know what determined my actions, how am I to become free?

I do not understand this criticism. Learning is attributable to the combined and unified will of both teacher and student, with the unified goal of education. If the will for education was only on one side, as you portray, there could be no education.

The point isn't about whose will is involved, it is that, in every such instance of positive freedom the past dictates what we are free to do in the future. I have no problem saying that "past free choices influence future free choices." But this is still the past determining the future.

If you don't learn to read, you're not free to read War and Peace. This is past states of the world determining freedom of action.

Ok, that still doesn't answer how such decisions are "mine" in they aren't determined by my rationality, beliefs, desires, instincts, etc? What exactly is this free floating will that isn't determined by anything that comes before? You can declare by fiat that free floating "will" is ours, but what exactly does it have to do with us if it isn't determined by our feelings, memories, etc?

And incompatibilism runs in to even more problems explaining how it is that people in France might be, in important ways, "more free" than people in North Korea. Or how is it that a prisoner can be "less free" due to their imprisonment? Do we have to posit a different, sui generis type of freedom here? It seems to me like we would, since otherwise the free floating freedom of individuals turns out to be exactly the sort of thing that is influenced by prior circumstances.

Further, we can consider positive freedom. In key ways, things like education seem to empower or freedom. We are not "free to become a literary critic" if no one will teach us how to read. We aren't "free to become an engineer," without training in mathematics. But these are, like political liberties and rights, tied to the prior state of the world. I am not free to become a lawyer if only the nobility can practice law, etc.

Then there is the whole issue of how any will can possibly effectively work to bring about states of affairs it prefers, and prevent states of affairs it does not prefer, if its actions lack determinant effects. If my showing my son books might make him forget how to read, how am I free to teach him to read? I am only free to do this because I know that specific acts help with the acquisition of literacy (acts have determinant, predictable consequences)

Finally, consider the alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict, sufferer of OCD, or "rageoholic" They are influenced by internal causes outside their control in a way many who suffer these conditions liken to "slavery." But how can we explain this sort of internal bondage if our freedom isn't determined by our personal history?

I agree, compatibilists are generally people who do not want to think out the problems, so they insist there is no problem.

Because there doesn't seem to be a problem if freedom is grounded in "self-determination." It doesn't seem like much of a definition stretch to say that we are free when "we do what we want and don't do what we don't want," and that "we are the cause of our own actions."

Such a definition doesn't clash with determinism. The definition which clashes with determinism is: "we are free if we can do other than we actually do,"which just seems like a bad definition since, by necessity, we only ever do what we actually do. The freedom we care about lies in how we make our actual choices, not metaphysical potentialities re choice, so this ends up being a non-sequitur. Not to mention that free will as self-determination makes it much easier to define how we can be relatively more or less free, which certainly seems to be the case (freedom is not bivalent, we can experience gradations of coercion).

If we offer hungry people two dishes of food, one fresh, and one rancid, we are probably justified in expecting 100% of them choose the non-rancid food. Were they unfree? It doesn't seem so. Was their choice determined by what came before - the rancidity of the one plate? It seems so.

We do know that if someone could take detailed knowledge of the antecedent state and correctly predict the resultant state (the decision) 100% of the time, most, including myself would take that as proof of Determinism and a refutation of the concept of Free Will.

This is a statement of the position known as "incompatibilism." "If things are determined, then there is no freedom." Claiming that we universally "know" this is simply to beg the question re compatibilism.

But there is a reason incompatibilism is no longer a dominant position in debates free will. It's arguably incoherent, as I've tried to point out. If I'm "free" when I act according to my desires, preferences, and rational decision making process, then it is also clear that all of those must preexist my acts.

You say this makes us somehow unfree, by virtue of our rationality, desires, knowledge, and preferences pre-existing our actions. My question is: what doesn't preexist our making a choice that is meaningfully "us," such that this non-prexisting force has anything to do with us and thus can be an extension of our will? The demand that some core element of "what is doing the choosing," not pre-exist our choosing seems to preclude that any
of the freedom described is actually "ours."

And then what determines how this special choosing part chooses? If it has nothing to do with our knowledge, desires, etc. then it doesn't seem to have anything to do with us. We are acted upon by ghosts outside our understanding.

That is, the metaphysical problem of "where is this will in space time," is only part of the challenge to incompatiblist free will. The other problem is that it seems to deny that "we," who pre-exist our choices, could be what determines those choices.

Certainly, advocates of libertarian free will still exist (e.g., Thomas Pink), but IMO they all seem to either turn libertarianism into compatibilism, or handwave the issues away with semantics by claiming "freedom just IS the act of chosing that organisms do," (Pink).

Determinism does not entail reductionism. It doesn't entail that our choices reduce to "the states of all the atoms that make up our body before we choose," or anything like that. It simply means, "what comes before dictates what comes after." We come before our choices. This seems to be a prerequisite for freedom in that we have to come before our choices to affect them. Determinism doesn't preclude "self determination." Only determinism wed to smallism claims that actions reduce to physical states in phase space or something like that.

Determinism proclaims that while the process of pondering is real, that one can actually choose either vanilla or chocolate is an illusion.

Again, this is the position of incompatibilism, not determinism. Leibniz came up with the Principal of Sufficient Reason in part to explain why it was necessary for freedom, not how it precluded it.

I share your preference for embodied cognition, but unfortunately I will have to echo the young men here, since I do not have a clear way to unpack what you have said in the remainder of your post.

Basically, what I was pointing to is how cognitive science, neuroscience, etc. look at "explaining experience" on a basic level. Consider the experience of seeing a tree. We start with a person in front of a tree

Well, our current sciences that try to explain experience say "how the light bounces off the tree, how it ends up entering the eye, that's not our business. That's physics. We don't need to care about that. Our explanation starts with action potentials firing down the optic nerve."

The problem is that there, off the bat, we've already removed the possibility of an explanation of sensation that is going to include the object of experience in any direct way.

My point would be that people don't see trees in a vacuum. A human body in a vacuum becomes a corpse, and corpses don't appear to do any experiencing.

It seems to me that an accurate view of experience can't start and end at the boundaries of an individual body. If it does, then of course you're going to end up with concerns about "how experiences can be about objects." You end up having to talk about "representations of trees," because you've already chopped the tree out of your explanation at the outset.

But physics would seem to suggest no such hard line between discrete systems. The causal chain of light waves, tree, retina, and brain all flow seemlessly into each other, and that's the process that generates the experience of "seeing a tree." It's a system that includes tree and person, a relationship between person and tree (not person and "representation.")

This isn't a flaw in the science, but more how it gets used in metaphysical discussions.



It does seem to make it hard to explain how something could ever wake one up, that's for sure.

In his "History of Theology," lectures for the Great Courses, the philosopher Phil Cary points out that today, in the shadow of the Holocaust, we tend to worry about "becoming machines." Whereas in ancient philosophy, the top concern was more than we would "degenerate into beasts."

Looking at myself, the people I know, and the world around us, I think we flatter ourselves in worrying about becoming "too rational." I think the ancients had it (more) right — that the biggest threat to our personal sovereignty is generally that we become slaves to our own disordered drives, desires, and instincts.

That said, I've always tended towards the romantic side. I don't think it has to be an either or. Rationality and self-discipline/self-government need not mean a sterile and robotic life. Rather, when we are most in control of ourselves, we are most able to love and help others. Our love is more ours in this case, less an effect of external causes.

Plato, Augustine, and Hegel are both very much "be ruled by reason," types, but then they also write more about love and the family than other major philosophers I can think of.