> In this view, our actions are predetermined too.
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
Pre ... choose? No, you can choose. You are a thing that chooses. Why is everybody so hung up on determinism? What do you want choice to mean? Really I think it's just because "deterministic" sounds like "determined for you", but it doesn't mean that. Everything is deterministic, including things that choose, by which I mean people. You are a fully paid up (and incidentally deterministic) person with the (also deterministic) freedom to make choices.
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
The only way your choices can be non-deterministic is when there is no cause for why you chose x over y. A lack of cause means that the choice was random; there was no reason why you chose x over y. But that’s not what people generally mean by free will: they want their choices to have been made for a reason (even if the reason is just “personal preference” or “I felt like it”). Reasons mean causes, so we are back to the choices being determined by those causes.
Even when one claims “I chose x over y because I felt like it”, there will be reasons why they felt like it. There is always a next “why” to ask, unless you put it down to pure randomness.
I don’t see how you can escape this. There are either causes, aka determination, or pure randomness, or a mix of both. Neither gives you free will in the naive or metaphysical-libertarianism sense. (Which is also why the probabilisticity of quantum mechanics doesn’t offer a way out.)
This isn’t specific to materialism, it’s a matter of logic.
It’s worth reading Shopenhauer on this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
I’ve read Schopenhauer but this is not complete in my view. He actually advocates for the will as a transcendental, escaping this dilemma.
I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.
One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.
The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.
A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think of causes as discrete things, just like physical fields don’t consist of discrete strands in time; nevertheless the field equations completely determine what happens from one moment to the next.
If as you say you take a set of causes and contemplate a weight distribution on them that determines the outcome, then that weight distribution is just another thing that either has reasons for why it is the way it is, or it doesn’t and then is just random; or a mix of both.
> Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
How so?
I actually don’t think of causation as a fundamental notion, but as an emergent one. What’s fundamental are the consistency constraints that adjacent events are subject to.
> A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
I don’t agree that (a) logic is necessarily finite, and (b) if it is finite, that it would limit reality in any way that contradicts our observations.
Beginning at the end of your comment and working backward, what do you think of Gödel Escher Bach or even Logicomix? It isn’t really a matter of debate that you cannot use logic as a universal construction toolkit for a rational reality, it has already been proven. Gödel vs Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead etc.
How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?
You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.
I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.
edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.
Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.
My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.
card_zero · · focus · HN ↗
> But if we have no agency, nothing matters.
This is, listen carefully, just bollocks. More precisely it's a non sequitur because "predetermined" doesn't mean "no agency". That's what it would mean, sure, if your actions were predetermined by an evil puppetmaster. But ask two questions:
1. What are your actions predetermined by? It's you. That's what.
2. What, if you find this too constraining, do you want? What do you mean by free will, if not your actions being determined by your own mind? Exactly, you don't know, so stop complaining about nothing.
Yes, the universe is deterministic, boo fucking hoo. This doesn't mean you're some sort of robot slave, because it's your mind that is deterministic, and your mind, deterministically, probabilistically, makes choices. These are the only kind of choices that can possibly exist, which is why, to resume my starting theme, when you try to come up with any alternative thing a choice could be, you must necessarily talk bollocks.
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?
What does choice even mean in this context?
card_zero · · focus · HN ↗
I thought of another aspect, which I'm going to edit in here since it's gone quiet. People might be having misapprehensions about knowledge in the context of "predetermined". I mean to say that rather than thinking "puppetmaster" you might think "written in the stars", and that you're tied to a fate that could be discerned, divined, from the starting conditions. But nobody can do that. If you and the universe around you are a program, the only way to find out what the program does is to run the program. Then you think intelligently, weigh preferences, have gut feelings, and all that jazz, and that's how the outcome becomes apparent. Nothing is written legibly in the stars.
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.
It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?
layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
Even when one claims “I chose x over y because I felt like it”, there will be reasons why they felt like it. There is always a next “why” to ask, unless you put it down to pure randomness.
I don’t see how you can escape this. There are either causes, aka determination, or pure randomness, or a mix of both. Neither gives you free will in the naive or metaphysical-libertarianism sense. (Which is also why the probabilisticity of quantum mechanics doesn’t offer a way out.)
This isn’t specific to materialism, it’s a matter of logic.
It’s worth reading Shopenhauer on this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Freedom_of_the_Will. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.
One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.
The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.
A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
If as you say you take a set of causes and contemplate a weight distribution on them that determines the outcome, then that weight distribution is just another thing that either has reasons for why it is the way it is, or it doesn’t and then is just random; or a mix of both.
> Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.
How so?
I actually don’t think of causation as a fundamental notion, but as an emergent one. What’s fundamental are the consistency constraints that adjacent events are subject to.
> A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.
I don’t agree that (a) logic is necessarily finite, and (b) if it is finite, that it would limit reality in any way that contradicts our observations.
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?
You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.
I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.
edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.
Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.
My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.