Good post.

" From what I can see the issue is foundational to everything and yet no one has a definitive answer."

I think because free will seems impossible in either a deterministic or indeterministic universe. Inwagen talks about this. But yet the intuition that we are freely making choices is one of the strongest we have. So there's tension between the idea that, in this type of universe, free will seems impossible and yet we all act like we have it.

I can see that choice is part of your argument and from what I've observed it's a key piece of the puzzle. Let's take a more general viewpoint and not just science. Are choices and the ability to make them really evidence of freewill.

I would say that freedom of choice is a necessary condition for free will, but not a sufficient one. If you can establish that we really are making free choices, it wouldn't establish free will, per se, but you would be very close to it.

That said one thing worth mentioning is awareness has a big role in freewill. We've all had the experience where we resist our urges which I take as weak evidence for freewill and a requirement for this ability is that we must be aware of the influences that compel us to act in a certain way. If for a moment we let our guards down we're back to behaving like an animal - instinct driven and machine-like.

Yes, the idea that we are biological robots run completely counter to the rich inner life we all have. That is the last thing you would expect a machine to have. The existence of consciousness is a huge problem for those who regard us as automatons. I think it's catastrophic.

I generally agree with this, most of the objections you've got stem from an interpretation of the word 'choice' different from yours (you're obviously referring to free choices here, which a deterministic machine isn't able to make).

Yes. The ability to choose is impossible in a deterministic universe (see Inwagen's argument).

However as someone mentioned, if people's actions were predetermined then it was also predetermined that what we call science would evolve the way it does, so science "moving forward" does not imply free will, however in order to believe in the absence of free will we have to leave plenty of coincidences unexplained.

I briefly talked about this. It's likely we evolved to be the kind of beings who mostly come to rational conclusions (even in a deterministic world); the irrational ones were selected against long ago. That has some merit, and I don't have a good counter to it yet.

We had a functioning democracy before Gettier. Maybe consciousness will finally be figured out. Although, if it was going to be, it probably would have already happened by now.

What is important is if philosophy is meaningful to people. Plato, Socrates and Aristotle are meaningful to a lot of people. We still quote them, thousands of years later. Gettier isn't. It doesn't matter except to a small group of people if knowledge is a true belief or justified true belief. It doesn't make a difference in their lives and it doesn't cause them to wonder about things.

That is not true!

For example, defining knowledge as a justified true belief is clearly unsustainable.

Edmund Gettier famously breached the stalemate in 1963 with his counterexample cases. The entanglement phenomenon also decisively breaches the classical JTB definition. The problem is now completely up in the air, even on the empirical side of things.

Furthermore, only empirical knowledge could possibly ever be correspondence-theory "true" and therefore JTB knowledge. Axiomatic fields such as mathematics, which are never correspondence-theory "true", are not knowledge in that approach. So, what are they then?

None of that is important. I think it is, because my degree's in it, but anyone else would be bored to tears. I've tried to explain the brilliance of Gettier's paper, and people get it, but the inevitable reaction is "so what?"

I think because people recognize what Gettier was getting at, clever as he was, was just a version of the old "how do we know what's real?" argument.

Oh, and whenever we philosopher undergrads would talk about Gettier, we would get so jealous!

Maybe. I don't think anyone's done anything really important since Turing, and he wasn't even a philosopher. I think you'll see computation was the last bit of progress doing philosophy the old-fashioned way could achieve.

I thought it was a rule that if infinite sets are countable, they're equal. No exceptions.

Informative post!

Yes, you can restate principles and there's value in that, but all the foundational level work has been done.

I think everyone should have to take a couple of intro-level philo courses. My son is going into Computer Science, and he could care less about philosophy, but they're making him take it. I told him, "it's good for you. It teaches you to be critical and think abstractly."

RA, just a thought, would it make better sense to ask …"Can you do science without a strong sense of wonder"?

No, because I don't think a sense of wonder is a necessary condition for doing science. The ability to weigh/evaluate evidence is.

In other words, if we were to use logic, one could argue that a 'synthetic a priori' proposition is essential in science for moving the thought forward, as well as realizing the resulting discovery and uncovery of such things... ?

Are there any scientific synthetic a priori propositions?

So I suppose the 'choice' to be curious or having a strong sense of wonder, along with being glass half-full to the spectrum of possibilities is some of what you are getting at...

No, I was trying to show that science is impossible without the ability to freely choose, and since science is clearly moving forward, we have the ability to freely choose. From there, it's a short hop to "we have free will".

Where's the part on consciousness?

I brought up Inwagen because the person I was responding to wasn't getting what I was saying (I was making a point about choice being impossible in a deterministic universe due to lack of options).

Inwagen said it much better than I could.

I don't understand what Van Inwagen's argument has to do with what you are presenting here. Van Inwagen's argument is about the necessity of moral responsibility, and the incompatibility of that with determinism. It makes (as far as I recall) no mention whatsoever of judgement of correspondence with reality, which is what are required to make scientific decisions.

3.1 No Forking Paths Argument
The No Forking Paths argument (van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Ekstrom 2000) begins by appealing to the idea that whenever we make a choice we are doing (or think we are doing) something like what a traveler does when faced with a choice between different roads. The only roads the traveler is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road she is already on. By analogy, the only choices we are able to make are choices which are a continuation of the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature. If determinism is false, then making choices really is like this: one “road” (the past) behind us, two or more different “roads” (future actions consistent with the laws) in front of us. But if determinism is true, then our journey through life is like traveling (in one direction only) on a road which has no branches. There are other roads, leading to other destinations; if we could get to one of these other roads, we could reach a different destination. But we can’t get to any of these other roads from the road we are actually on. So if determinism is true, our actual future is our only possible future; we are never able to choose or do anything other than what we actually do.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/#TwoReasForThinFreeWillIncoDete

"And then it chooses between them. It is also entirely determined."

These two sentences contradict each other. I'm going to just drop this part of the discussion and recommend Peter van Inwagen's book "an Essay on Free Will".

"How are there not options in a deterministic universe? Deep Blue chooses, yet everything is determined. What is the issue?"

Circular reasoning. If Deep Blue is choosing, then there have to be options, and there have to be options because Deep Blue is choosing.

"Of course. You are determined to eat the apple But you still had the option between apple and pear."

Not in a deterministic universe. How are there any options in a deterministic universe?

AND, even if there are options, how are you navigating between those options, as making a choice requires, in a deterministic universe?

Your point doesn't work on two levels.

I'm going to try and simplify my argument a little.
Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
4. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
5. The universe is deterministic.
6. Therefore, the ability to make choices is impossible.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.

We're getting bogged down in semantics, but I'll address this: "There is an apple and a pear. Two choices. I choose the apple. The determinist says: the choice was not one freely made."

In order for there to be choices, there have to be options. In a deterministic universe, there are no options. Everything's already been set. You are determined to eat whatever. It appears you have a choice, but if you end up with the apple, in a deterministic universe, you were always going to eat that apple. The pear was never an option. No options, no choice.

"Ok, but your OP doesn't talk about choices 'feely made'. It says merely that science requires that choices be made."

No, I said science requires the evaluation of evidence, and the evaluation of evidence requires the ability to freely make choices about things like "is this a good or bad piece of evidence?". So, if you can't freely make choices, then you can't evaluate evidence, and if you can't evaluate evidence, you can't do science.

What part of that chain do you take issue with?

"The determinst simply has to reply that of course choices are made all the time - only that those choices are not freely made."

I have no problem with that. My question to the determinist is: if there's no free will, how are we able to do science? If science IS impossible without free will, and we're DOING science, then we have free will (or, more narrowly, we are freely making choices).

""3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices."

Is false.""

You can make choices without free will? How does that work? You can be determined to do an action, as we would be in a deterministic universe, but that is not the same as choosing. Choosing requires there to be at least two options. How are there any options if everything is already determined?

My point is an epistemological one: I'm not claiming good science isn't going on. I'm saying, how do we know that what we're doing is good science or not?

You could argue that, if we're compelled to make choices, evolution would have weeded out those of us who made bad choices, and that works for things like "should I pick those berries or not?". It doesn't seem to work so well for more esoteric stuff, like "Is Mercury's eccentric orbit strong evidence for relativity, or, since it was known before Einstein developed his theory, is it an example of ad hoc reasoning?" That also requires a choice, and I don't think evolutionary pressures can explain how we would get that one right, if we were simply compelled to believe what we believe.

"But surely free will isn't merely the ability to 'make choices'. It surely turns instead on the nature of choice made: is the choice itself freely chosen, or itself 'determined'."

If we have free will, then our choices are being freely made. That is a necessary condition for free will. If your choices aren't being freely made, then you obviously don't have free will.

If so, the fact that science requires 'choices' to be made says nothing about the necessity of free will to underpin science. What matters is how 'choices' are to be understood, not weather or not they occur in the practice of science. The equation of free will with choice seems to be a mistake.

If science involves the evaluation of evidence, which it does, then choices are occurring in science. For example, in order for Pasteur's flask experiment to confirm germ theory, one must first decide whether Pasteur's experiment was good evidence or not. I see no way around this.

Suppose someone tells you your house is on fire. Let's call that evidence (A). Now you have to update your belief in the hypothesis "my house isn't on fire". How can you do that if you can't even choose whether to believe the person is reliable or not? Is lying or not? Is in a position to know about your house or not? Those are all choices you have to make before you can even begin to assess (A)'s impact on the hypothesis.

"IOW if one's evaluations are utterly determined they may not be based on what we think they are based on. We would also be compelled to think we are rational, though not necessarily at all because we are rational and because of what we think is evidence of it."

Yes.

How can you evaluate evidence if you can't freely determine whether it's good evidence or not? If you're simply compelled into believing a particular piece of evidence supports a hypothesis, you don't know if it actually does support the hypothesis. You just have to hope that what you were compelled to believe is right, but how would you ever know?

"You are acting as though the lack of free will means no action can take place."

No. In a deterministic universe, action still takes place.

Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/

Here's the argument:
1. The ability to make choices is a necessary condition for the evaluation of evidence.
2. Evaluating evidence is a necessary condition for science.
3. Without free will there is no ability to make choices.
4. Without the ability to make choices, evaluation of evidence is impossible.
5. If evaluation of evidence is impossible, science is impossible.
6. There is no free will.
7. Therefore, science is impossible.

What about calling in bomb threats to schools? Should that be legal?

Government. Should there be laws regulating what adults can say to kids, or does anything go?

Should adults be allowed to say anything they want to children?

Do you think death threats/threats of physical violence/extortion should be legal?

Suppose we developed a machine that zaps your qualia away. You'll still function the same but just without any conscious experience.

Would eliminative materialists actually use such a machine? Even if you paid them a lot of money? Or would they view it, as I do, as the equivalent of death? I think, when push comes to shove, you'd have to drag them to it, kicking an screaming.

"I think the interesting question is: why is this taken seriously? Why is it considered a philosophical argument?"

I think things like "consciousness is an illusion/consciousness doesn't exist" are taken seriously because people are emotionally invested in a materialistic model of reality and don't want to give it up.

Also, if materialism isn't true, then some type of dualism or idealism is true, and that has very profound implications. Maybe people don't want to go there.

"Ask yourself this question - what does eliminative materialism eliminate? Unless you want to beat around the bush, the answer is one word: mind. The word ‘mind’ doesn’t correspond to anything real: what we take to be ‘mind’ is simply the snap, crackle and pop of billions of neural connections programmed by Darwinian algorithms for the sole purpose of propagation of the genome. That’s all there is to it."


That is one of the absurdities I was talking about. Denying the existence/reality of minds or conscious experience is a losing move from the start. There are very few things I can be completely sure about, but here are two: I'm not mindless, and I have conscious experience. I can't be mistaken about that.

I've met materialists who have insisted they were p-zombies. That's how crazy it can get.

Materialism's inability to explain how consciousness can arise from matter is catastrophic, imo. Every materialist explanation for consciousness I've seen has either been absurd or eventually leads to an absurdity.

"It’s not illegal to yell fire in a crowded theatre. The principle in current first amendment theory is “immanent lawless action”."

I notice you ignored my point about death threats being illegal. If words don't trigger anything, why do we outlaw certain kinds of speech?

What do you think would happen if Trump tweeted "We're now at war with N. Korea"? You don't think that would trigger anything? Of course it would.

Ah, but suppose there is something unique to our little sector of the galaxy which makes it the only habitable place for advanced life. In that case, two alien civs bumping into each other wouldn't seem so remote. Is this little patch of the Milky Way we're in that special?

If you can't determine if the other person even exists, it's going to be hard to determine whether they're being honest or not.

"Words trigger nothing, because they do not have the capacity to move matter. That’s sorcery."

If words don't trigger anything, why is it illegal to make death threats? Or yell "fire" in a theater?

Try again.

I do love me some Bayes. Not everyone is a Bayesian, though, so maybe that's where DingoJones is coming from.