Memories, for instance -- where might they fall on the "willful" spectrum? — J

Memories seem to play a part in dreams, but they are not exactly correct memories of the past. You might just see something you have had experience with in real life, but in a totally different context. There would be no thoughts or reasonings happening in dreams. You get what is unfolding in your dreaming without your choice in totally unpredictable manner.

Even if you get to see the images and in some cases the situations happening albeit without any context, reason or history, you still have feelings and willful motivations which make you angry, sad, or joyous, and you might even act to defend yourself if you feel you were in danger even in your dreams. It tells us even when we are asleep, some part of our mind is semi conscious, and a lot might be happening in there.

I don't believe it is a causal relationship between dreaming and actions while in sleep, but more likely contingent or random reactions due to the mental activities happening during sleep, because there is no constant regularity or necessity between the contents of dreaming and the reactions during dreaming. And it doesn't affect the majority of folks in the same way, but looks to be some random and contingent reactions to the dreams in some folks.

For whatever it's worth...

As a youth, I had a couple of recurring very unpleasant dreams. Someone told me that although I was sleeping, I had the ability to recognize that I was in the dream again. By doing this, I could also just wake myself up out of the dream by counting to 3 and telling myself to wake up.

It worked.

There were a couple of other dreams that I could also 'control' my 'dream self' in. Flying around like Peter Pan was one. I'm pretty sure that it was only after I began waking myself up from the most unpleasant one, that I began this sort of realizing and 'controlling' my dream self.

Fast forward several years, add to the life mix a massive head injury, and now I very very rarely remember anything I dreamed the night before. Just a few times in 40 years.

I think that's over general...

......if people report that coercion impacts their ability to choose... that's an empirical connection between choice as a construct and an event. If you end up believing that choice isn't inferentially connected to anything that occurs? — fdrake

Yes, you're right. Of course we are influenced by our environment and our human nature. That kind of influence is addressable by empirical methods. But I stick with my judgment the overall question of determinism and free will is metaphysical. I wrote this earlier in the thread in a response to @Hanover.

Of course, that only applies to the metaphysical question. At a human-scale, everyday, psychological level, of course our decisions are influenced by things outside of us, usually without our awareness and you might say without our control or intention. Because my father didn't love me, I have an obsession with beating Donald Trump Jr. with a stick. — T Clark

Yes, you're right. Of course we are influenced by our environment and our human nature. That kind of influence is addressable by empirical methods. But I stick with my judgment the overall question of determinism and free will is metaphysical. I wrote this earlier in the thread in a response to Hanover. — T Clark

I think you misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that if someone has some metaphysical idea, and if that idea tells you something about how stuff happens, how stuff happens then must influence what they will believe about that metaphysical idea.

Eg "Humans always can choose otherwise, regardless of circumstance"
+ "An addict's capacity for choice can be eroded so much it can be unfeasible for them not to take their drug of choice" = "Maybe what I think about how humans can choose needs to change, maybe how I understand can, there, isn't about practical possibility"

What I'm saying is that if someone has some metaphysical idea, and if that idea tells you something about how stuff happens, how stuff happens then must influence what they will believe about that metaphysical idea. — fdrake

[PEDANTRY WARNING] Metaphysical ideas don't tell you about how stuff happens, they tell you how to talk about how stuff happens.

Eg "Humans always can choose otherwise, regardless of circumstance"
+ "An addict's capacity for choice can be eroded so much it can be unfeasible for them not to take their drug of choice" = "Maybe what I think about how humans can choose needs to change, maybe how I understand can, there, isn't about practical possibility" — fdrake

Maybe I still don't understand. I'm making a distinction between metaphysical free will and regular old my daddy beat me and now I can't help but beat my own kids free will. The idea of metaphysical free will grows out of a materialistic view of the world. If the world is a machine and everything is caused, then the future can be precisely predicted given an adequately accurate and detailed knowledge of current conditions. In that case, all human decisions and actions can be predicted and are, therefore, determined in advance. Thus - no free will.

Regular old everyday free will is called into question by regular old everyday determinism, which is a product of human biology, psychology, and social conditioning.

I apologize for this post.

Metaphysical ideas don't tell you about how stuff happens, they tell you how to talk about how stuff happens. — T Clark

Yeah. And it surprises me that you believe how stuff happens has no bearing on how we can, or should, talk about how stuff happens. It's an incredibly incautious claim, that things which happen necessarily don't influence how we talk about stuff in the abstract. A defeater of the claim would be a single example of something which possibly can have this influence. And there are examples.

Physics example - determinism vs beta decay. Which lets you refute the antecedent of your conditional statement below:

If the world is a machine and everything is caused, then the future can be precisely predicted given an adequately accurate and detailed knowledge of current conditions. — T Clark

Since beta decay isn't caused in anything like the billiard ball sense. It just kinda... happens... at some point. Spontaneously. There's potentiating conditions but no immediately antecedent, distinguishable, determining event to serve as a proximate cause. The connection between a thing which has happened to an allegedly independent realm of claims undermines the necessity of their independence.

Modally though, the mere possibility of a dispute between this interpretation of a physical process is enough to undermine the idea that the metaphysical is closed off from the way of things. It's a paradigmatic case of the possibility that how things are constraints how we may talk about them in the abstract. It thus undermines the claim that we necessarily cannot relate metaphysics and how stuff happens, by providing the possibility of a relation.

In my view it's much more metaphysically gluttonous, principle hungry, philosophically un-conservative, to believe in the independence of metaphysical theses from the stuff they concern. It is, ironically, an incredibly strong constraint on the relationship between reasoning, metaphysics and what occurs.

I'm not ignoring your post, just thinking through an answer. And also tending to my hurt feelings because you called me incautious and metaphysically gluttonous.

And also tending to my hurt feelings because you called me incautious and metaphysically gluttonous. — T Clark

I called your idea it. I have plenty of ideas like that. Sorry for hurting your feelings.

This is a good, thoughtful response. You're making me work. Thanks.

Yeah. And it surprises me that you believe how stuff happens has no bearing on how we can, or should, talk about how stuff happens. It's an incredibly incautious claim, that things which happen necessarily don't influence how we talk about stuff in the abstract. A defeater of the claim would be a single example of something which possibly can have this influence. And there are examples. — fdrake

I'll give an example, which doesn't address your quantum mechanics comments. I got this from "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt which I recommend. Forgive me if I don't get the details right. The metaphysics of scholastic science, which is what they call it from ancient Greece up through the end of the Middle Ages, focused on human involvement in the world. The universe revolved around the Earth - us. The principles of science were focused on human involvement and logical connections. Explanations were teleological in terms of human purpose. Here's what Burtt had to say:

In particular it is difficult for the modern mind, accustomed to think so largely in terms of space and time, to realize how unimportant these entities were for scholastic science. Spatial and temporal relations were accidental, not essential characteristics. Instead of spatial connexions of things, men were seeking their logical connexions; instead of the onward march of time, men thought of the eternal passage of potentiality into actuality. — E.A. Burtt

In the 1500s and 1600s, scientists started to focus on different factors. I was really impressed by Kepler. He was one of the first to identify and focus on the mathematical nature of the world, in particular cosmology. He also was one of the first to propose relativity, i.e. we don't have to stand on the earth or use a human perspective. Things we know and see can be studied from any perspective. This again from Burtt.

Instead of treating things in terms of substance, accident, and causality, essence and idea, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, we now treat them in terms of forces, motions, and laws, changes of mass in space and time, and the like. Pick up the works of any modern philosopher, and note how complete the shift has been. To be sure, works in general philosophy may show little use of such a term as mass, but the other words will abundantly dot their pages as fundamental categories of explanation. — E.A. Burtt

So, metaphysics gives us the words to talk about how the world works. I'm going to leave it at that for this post so it doesn't get too long. I'll be back to talk about your quantum mechanics examples.

Modally though, the mere possibility of a dispute between this interpretation of a physical process is enough to undermine the idea that the metaphysical is closed off from the way of things. It's a paradigmatic case of the possibility that how things are constraints how we may talk about them in the abstract. It thus undermines the claim that we necessarily cannot relate metaphysics and how stuff happens, by providing the possibility of a relation. — fdrake

And now for the hard part. To start - and I don't think this is directly related to my argument - if you look on the web you'll find that opinion is about evenly split over whether quantum mechanics is deterministic. I have a hard time following the arguments. It seems that some interpretations are and others aren't. That underlines my thoughts that the interpretations are metaphysics and not science. That will be true unless someone can find a way to distinguish among them empirically.

Now the hard hard part. Let's look at the instance you discuss - beta emissions. Does that mean that if the whole world reran that things would have worked out differently - a particular particle would not be emitted at the same time? It's not clear to me that it does. Again, I don't think that's really important. If I understand correctly, the idea of strict determinism had already been undermined in the late 1800s before QM arrived by thermodynamics and engineering mechanics, i.e. considering the behavior of matter and energy as statistical macroscopic phenomena rather than microscopic. Bertrand Russell wrote a paper in 1912 - "On the Notion of Cause" - which called into question the value of causation as an organizing principle. Engineering mechanical explanations are what allows quantum mechanics to be applied to the world as we know it.

So, where does this leave us? Well... when we use science, we still have to be able to say "If I do this, that will happen." You can talk about uncertainty, but physicists can make incredibly precise predictions about how the world works at atomic scale. It's not the strict billiard ball determinism of pre-QM days, but it's still determinism. So - strict determinism is and has always been bonehead metaphysics, but loosey goosey determinism makes the world work.

@fdrake

I'll give an example, which doesn't address your quantum mechanics comments. I got this from "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt which I recommend. — T Clark

I was looking for something in Burtt's book and came across something that I think explains what I was trying to say in my first post better than the quotes I gave you.

For the dominant trend in medieval thought, man occupied a more significant and determinative place in the universe than the realm of physical nature, while for the main current of modern thought, nature holds a more independent, more determinative, and more permanent place than man. It will be helpful to analyse this contrast more specifically. For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him and his eternal destiny. Toward this conviction the two great movements which had become united in the medieval synthesis, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, had irresistibly led. The prevailing world-view of the period was marked by a deep and persistent assurance that man, with his hopes and ideals, was the all-important, even controlling fact in the universe. — E.A. Burtt