Could Have Done Otherwise - What does it mean exactly?

[moving finger]

I never said your theory is wrong *because* it is naturalistic. I do not believe any theory of free will can be both coherent and complete, because I do not believe the concept of free will itself is a coherent notion.

The naturalistic concept of free will, or the supertnatural one ?

As I said, I do not believe the concept of free will is coherent. By this I mean libertarian (as opposed to compatibilist) free will, free will which entails UR. UR is an incoherent notion. The supernatural “explanation” for free will avoids the incoherency by pushing the explanation beyond the bounds of rationality and logic (basically “and then a miracle happens”). The naturalistic “explanation” cannot do this, thus it fails to be either complete or coherent or both.

I believe the main problem with your theory is that it is not in fact a theory of free will - it does not explain how free will differs from a simple mix of determinism and indeterminism.

I don't see why I should have to. I am also not in the habit of explaining why steel differs from a mixture of iron and carbon.

The important issue is that steel DOES differ from a simple mixture of iron and carbon, and no metallurgist would suggest that we could create steel by simply stirring together carbon granules and iron filings in a bowl.

Of course you don’t have to explain your model at all. But if you want anyone to take your model seriously then you will need to go to some trouble to explain why you think it qualifies as a mechanism for free will, and defending those ideas. If you don’t wish to go to that trouble, then you shouldn’t be surprised if people like myself dismiss your ideas as idle flights of fancy.

Your only reason for rejecting the "mixture" approach is the supernaturalism -- which neither of us actually believes in.

Untrue. I reject any approach to explaining libertarian free will because I do not believe in UR. I believe the notion of UR is incoherent. And without UR you cannot have (libertarian) free will.

But is all “rational yet unpredictable behaviour” necessarily indicative of Free Will?

Yes. why not ?

I can (in principle) easily program a computer which behaves rationally yet unpredictably. Does it follow that the computer necessarily possesses free will?

I am using the following definition of free will

"the power or ability to rationally choose and consciously perform actions, at least some of which are not brought about necessarily and inevitably by external circumstances".

This definition does not explicitly include UR. (Rational and conscious behaviour does not entail UR, and indeterministic processes do not entail UR). Are you suggesting that free will does not entail UR?

And everything in my model of FW fulfils the conditions implicit in that.

Your model does not include consciousness. Your model only addresses the “rational” and “indeterministic” criteria – but it does not follow that an entity which includes rational and indeterministic criteria necessarily possesses either free will or UR.

If "coherent" means anythig, it mean *internally* consistent.

Which causa sui is not

As Nietzsche said :

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness……

Bringing in *external* defintiions of FW does *not* demonstrate incoherence.

What external definition of free will are you referring to?

Do you deny that UR is a necessary condition for libertarian free will? If we agree it is, then it surely must figure in any definition of free will.

Indeed, you do not even attempt to analyse what you think might be the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for Free Will

Yes I do: AP. UR, rationality.

UR I agree with – but you missed this critical component from your above definition. And I think UR is not only necessary, but by itself is sufficient for free will. But that simply begs the question : What are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for UR? In your Darwinian model you do not show that the model possesses either UR or free will.

The libertarian would doubtlessly claim that only the model with the iRIG has access to “alternate possibilities”, the model with the dRIG (being completely deterministic) “cannot do otherwise” than what it does, and it is this difference (according to the Libertarian) which ensures that the iRIG version is acting with Free Will, whereas the dRIG version is not. But the two models are completely indistinguishable, both to external observers and internally to the models themselves!

That doesn't follow

Please could you show why you think it doesn’t follow? I am claiming the two models are indistinguishable – if you consider that my claim is incorrect then please do show how we might be able to distinguish between the two models.

Some people claim it is impossible in principle to empirically detect the difference between real, intrinsic randomness and pseudo-randomness. Whilst initially plausible, this is in fact doubtful as sophisticated procedures like the Aspect experiment show.

The Aspect experiment shows nothing of the kind.

Even if it is true, the main thrust of the argument is that a free will is possible if determinism is possible, not that indeterminism-based free will is actually true.

No, the thrust of the argument is EITHER free will does not entail indeterminism, OR free will is epiphenomenal.

The possibillity of indeterminism-based free will is thus established even if the truth of indeterminsim based free-will is epistemically inaccessible. "it is not necessarily true" is no rebuttal to "it is possible".

Anything that does not entail logical contradiction is logically possible – but that is no reason to believe that things exist in our world simply because they do not entail logical contradiction – on this basis I would believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Leprechauns, Tokoloshes and all manner of weird and wonderful things.

As ever, it should be born in mind that the claim "naturalistic libertarian free will is possibly true" is not contradicted by scenarios the claim naturalistic libertarian free will is possibly false", only be the claim that it is actually false.

Naturalistic libertarian free will, if it entails UR, entails an infinite regress. An infinite regress is certainly “possibly true”, but would not be given much credibility as an explanatory theory of anything.

To say that our thesis might not have been true does not mean it is actually false. And in any case, it is only a claim to the effect that something is possible

I could suggest a thesis which says leprechauns (but only green ones) are psychic, except in the presence of Santa Claus, but their psychic powers are boosted when in the presence of the Tooth Fairy. My thesis might not be true, but you cannot prove it false – and that places my thesis in the same category as your thesis. But I wouldn’t expect anyone to take me seriously.

You've said this and many things like this. I was trying to imagine some way that determinism and random causal actions might be seen as inapplicable to nature in some way. If that were the case, CHDO might take on a new meaning. It might be that CHDO is the mental state acting in some downward causal way on the physical state. Perhaps the physical state is ontically indeterminate, which I believe means it is genuinely random, not just unknowable. Feel free to correct my terminology there. So if the mental state or domain is the cause to the physical state, is there any reason to suspect these states are separate and distinct?

Depends on whether one believes physicalism, or some version of physicalism, is true of not. But even if mental states are distinct and different from physical states, we can still ask whether mental states are internally regular (ie mental states cause mental states) or irregular (ie some mental states arise in an indeterministic fashion ).

I am not saying that indeterminism is false, I am saying that indeterminism does not create ultimate responsibility.

For some reason, I intuitively feel there must be some way around the issue of CHDO or 'free will' being based solely on deterministic and random causal actions. The paper by Campbell & Bickhard is really a critique of J. Kim's book and in so doing, it does a decent job of reviewing some of the arguments for and against downward causation and also ties in mental and physical domains. It seems as if these concepts would have something to do with rephrasing the determinism/random argument and 'free will' or CHDO but I can't yet put my finger on what it is.

Neither can I. The paper focuses on emergent phenomena and downward causation, but it does not (as far as I can see) claim that either of these phenomena imply or entail either indeterminism or lack of determinism.

One interesting issue the paper does raise, is if a mental state can equal a physical state. I don't think they're equal, though I don't think even a computationalist thinks they're equal. So this says, that any subjective experience, any thought, at any time, can not be determined by the physical state.

I disagree. But it’s a very long paper – can you point to where in the paper it says this?

The only strongly emergent phenomena that can be taken seriously in any way though must emerge at a molecular level. Being a reductionist I can't see any way complexity on a classical scale can give rise to anything that might be defined as 'strongly emergent'. The reason is not so clear unfortunately, but in short, any classical system is affected only by local causal actions. In engineering for example, I can't think of a single phenomena which can't be modeled that way, and of course they are modeled that way - as small, local chunks known as control volumes, finite elements, free body diagrams, and many other terms.

Let me give one example. Think of the “effect” that the appearance of a gleaming new red Ferrari has on a crowd of onlookers. The impact (effect) that this car has on the crowd has nothing to do with the micro-physical make-up of the vehicle (it could be made from a number of different materials), and it has nothing to do with local causal actions. The impact on the crowd is an emergent property of the vehicle which is based on the large-scale structure and organization of the components, and is largely independent of microphysical structure and local interactions. I used to be a reductionist too – and I think reductionism is very powerful for understanding local effects – but emergent properties are all about global or long-range effects which are not linked directly to any particular local properties.

To get back to the point, if strongly emergent phenomena exist, the substrate they emerge from is a molecular level chunk of matter (ex: DNA). If a molecular chunk of matter is affected in any way by the phenomena it produces, and if we can say this affect is 'downward caused' (which seems more like 'upward caused given the strongly emergent phenomena is based at a molecular level) then it seems that if we want to maintain any kind of physicalism <not sure if that's the correct term> then we need to postulate additional dimensions that are in principal, not measurable from the physical domain and would appear random, and similarly from the mental domain, affects in that domain might appear random, but if one were to cause the other in some way, is that deterministic?

I don’t see that we need postulate additional random dimensions. The impact (effect) that the red Ferrari has on the crowd is in a way an example of “downward causation” (it is not an effect that can be analysed in simple reductionist terms of breaking down the Ferrari into it’s individual components), but it does not involve any other dimensions, and there is no reason to think that the effect is not deterministic.

I think at that point, determinism and random depend on what basis you are using. Both the physical and mental domains would have random elements from the perspective of their own domains, but when viewed from the opposite domain they may be deterministic. The problem with all this is one could still ask (as you have), is the entire system deterministic or random? Anyway, seems like a difficult question to try and think clearly about, perhaps because it is entirely counterintuitive to our own experience.

I just do not see what additional explanatory power we get by postulating indeterminism. Libertarians are committed to believing that indeterminism is their salvation (because they believe that free will is a coherent notion which entails alternate possibilities) – but if you ask any libertarian to explain just HOW indeterminism is supposed to “create” free will where free will does not exist in absence of indeterminism, they cannot do it. Either they appeal to a supernatural “explanation” (which is not an explanation), or they indulge in simple hand-waving of the kind that Tournesol does, without actually showing (in the end) that free will emerges at all from their explanation.

An event cannot be proven random, to my knowledge, because to suggest something is random is to suggest it has no cause. If it has no cause, how to you prove it is random when it is occurring? Magic?

But if we cannot prove an event is random, then it also follows that we cannot necessarily distinguish between an entity which is operating randomly and one which is operating deterministically. If a deterministic entity can perfectly imitate a random entity, then randomness provides no effective advantage to the entity – randomness would be an epiphenomenon, making no discernable difference to the operation/properties/behaviour of the entity. The notion that we need randomness in order to be free is thus hollow and incoherent. The only value of randomness to the libertarian is that it allegedly allows “alternate possibilities”, but if there is no way to tell the difference between a random entity and a deterministic entity, what possible use is randomness?

Premise 1: Random events occur.
Premise 2: Events are caused.

Result: If an event is occurring, it cannot be random because it must be caused.

No alternative explanation to causation has been given as I doubt there can be an alternative explanation. Perhaps one can refute causation, but I am lost when it comes to how.

I would say that Premise 2 may be false. I don’t think we can know either way. My argument against indeterminism is not that indeterminism is necessarily false, but that adding indeterminism to the world adds nothing in particular – everything can be explained on the basis of determinism. So why add indeterminism?

Something like this must be happening in some cases, assuming QM is a correct description of the micro-world, or there would not even be an appearance of a deterministic macro-world. Since deterministic classical physics is partially correct, there must be a mechanism that makes the QM micro-world at least approximate to the classical description.

You are assuming that the quantum world is indeterministic. This is an assumption, and may be false.

However, it it were the case that all macroscopic objects behaved in a 100% deterministic fashion, there would be no evidence for QM in the first place -- since all scientific apparatus is in the macro-world ! A geiger-counter is able to amplify the impact of a single particle into an audible click. Richard Feynman suggested that if that wasn't macroscopic enough, you could always amplify the signal further and use it to set off a stick of dynamite! It could be objected that these are artificial situations. This is rather desperate, however, because there is a well-known natural mechanism that could do the same job: classical chaos.

None of this shows that the quantum world is indeterministic, only that it is indeterminable, which is a different thing altogether.

Thus any chaotic system that you can actually encounter, such as a weather system, is only approximately classical. It has no underlying determinism. At the most fundamental level it is a quantum system -- because everything is.

Again, you are assuming quantum indeterminism, which is not necessarily true.

In fact, this is not just theoretical. Conventional big-bang theories generally require an input of quantum indeterminism to provide the large-scale structure of the universe. A singularity exploding according to classical laws would expand evenly in every direction, leading to a boring universe consisting of an evenly dispersed cloud of gas. So when you look at the night sky, you are seeing evidence for macroscopic randomness!

Unsound. You are assuming that determinism entails the Big Bang singularity must have been perfectly uniform, this does not follow at all. Determinism does not exclude the possibility of boundary conditions.

Best Regards

 

[Mickey]

CHDO is a claim based on imaginative possibilities. For every case that moving finger mentioned, the one making the claim CHDO is working from a reality model consisting of options that one could have done and the circumstances that would have permitted them.

CHDO works from after the fact and not before or during. Therefore, it's meaning should be interpreted in this imaginative context independent of the actual event. CHDO claims are useful for imagining similar options in similar circumstances that could occur again. They may also be useful for making other imaginative models more cohesive and creating new ones altogether.

Rather than being a claim of free will, CHDO is primarily an act of theorizing.

 

[Q_Goest]

MF said to Tournsel: Anything that does not entail logical contradiction is logically possible – but that is no reason to believe that things exist in our world simply because they do not entail logical contradiction – on this basis I would believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Leprechauns, Tokoloshes and all manner of weird and wonderful things.

Similarly, because determinism does not entail a logical contridiction does not mean it is impossible. Determinism and cause and effect are models of the world, not necessarily real world phenomena.

Regarding mental state = physical state. If one believes seeing red for example is a subjective experience brought about by some mental state which can only be created from a single physical state, then since my brain's physical state is different than yours, different than it is tomorrow or yesterday, and different from any computer's physical state, then I must assume the mental state when seeing red does not have a 1 to 1 correspondence with some physical state. There is no 1 to 1 correspondence between a computer's physical state, my physical state, your physical state, etc… so if we all see a color 'red', and if we call this subjective experience a mental state, then there is no 1 to 1 correspondence between a mental and physical state.

I think this can be gotten around if we avoid assuming symbols are all that are necessary to produce a subjective experience. The result would be a 1 to 1 correspondence between a physical state and a subjective experience.

MF said: Let me give one example. Think of the “effect” that the appearance of a gleaming new red Ferrari has on a crowd of onlookers. The impact (effect) that this car has on the crowd has nothing to do with the micro-physical make-up of the vehicle (it could be made from a number of different materials), and it has nothing to do with local causal actions. The impact on the crowd is an emergent property of the vehicle which is based on the large-scale structure and organization of the components, and is largely independent of microphysical structure and local interactions. I used to be a reductionist too – and I think reductionism is very powerful for understanding local effects – but emergent properties are all about global or long-range effects which are not linked directly to any particular local properties.

The impact (effect) that the red Ferrari has on the crowd is in a way an example of “downward causation” (it is not an effect that can be analysed in simple reductionist terms of breaking down the Ferrari into it’s individual components),

Here is what bothers me about the philosophy of emergence and especially strong emergence and downward causation. Let's assume computationalism for this example. The automobile is not an example of a strongly emergent phenomena. It is made of and operates at the local causal level. The light reflecting off the vehicle enters the eyes of the crowd. Up to this point, there is no strongly emergent phenomena, only weakly emergent. The people in the crowd however have subjective experiences of the vehicle. If computationalism is true, then those subjective experiences can be reduced to the actions of the computer's components which also only interact at the local level.

Note also that a computer's components don't need to be explained in terms of strong emergence. Certainly there is no downward causation anywhere within this system of car and crowd, even the subjective experience is alleged to occur because of the local interaction between computational elements within the computer. There is no room for downward causation anywhere in this system. If anything can be said to be strongly emergent in the entire system, we would have to claim that subjective experiences are. Unfortunately, such a strongly emergent phenomena, if it exists, has no causal efficacy and no ability for downward causation. The ability is only upward in the sense that each computational element is deterministically controlled at the local level. No portion of the computer can 'act' because of the red Ferrari, they only act at the local level because of an interaction with some immediate causal action. (ex: a switch in a computer only acts when power is applied, they act for no other reason.)

My appologies for that paper I proposed you read, I had my head up my ass. I don't like the paper much and find the examples he gives of strong emergence to have the same fault as you've made above. Anyway, I WOULD however suggest reading Bedau on weak emergence. I'll attach the paper. I found it on the net but I'm having a hard time locating it so I'll just attach it instead. I'm sure its on the net somewhere. I think it does a much better job of defining emergence and shows that weak emergence is all that is necessary to understand such things as a crowd looking at a red Ferrari.

I just do not see what additional explanatory power we get by postulating indeterminism.

I would agree.

but if you ask any libertarian to explain just HOW indeterminism is supposed to “create” free will where free will does not exist in absence of indeterminism, they cannot do it.

I'd agree that indeterminism hasn't shown any more promise than determinism in it's ability to "create" free will. Determinism doesn't "create" it either though. I think what has come out of all of these discussions is that you can't argue for or against the existence of any phenomena such as free will, or any subjective experience for that matter, based only on determinism or indeterminism.

 

[moving finger]

Regarding mental state = physical state. If one believes seeing red for example is a subjective experience brought about by some mental state which can only be created from a single physical state, then since my brain's physical state is different than yours, different than it is tomorrow or yesterday, and different from any computer's physical state, then I must assume the mental state when seeing red does not have a 1 to 1 correspondence with some physical state. There is no 1 to 1 correspondence between a computer's physical state, my physical state, your physical state, etc… so if we all see a color 'red', and if we call this subjective experience a mental state, then there is no 1 to 1 correspondence between a mental and physical state.

It seems that you believe “your mental state of seeing red” is identical with “my mental state of seeing red”. But why? How do you know that your mental state of seeing red is anything at all like my mental state of seeing red? How could we possibly find out? If your mental state of seeing red is simply similar to, but not identical with, my mental state of seeing red then there is no problem with mental states being associated 1 to1 with physical states.

I think it does a much better job of defining emergence and shows that weak emergence is all that is necessary to understand such things as a crowd looking at a red Ferrari.

I have no problem with the idea that this is an example of weak emergence. What exactly was the problem we were discussing?

I'd agree that indeterminism hasn't shown any more promise than determinism in it's ability to "create" free will. Determinism doesn't "create" it either though. I think what has come out of all of these discussions is that you can't argue for or against the existence of any phenomena such as free will, or any subjective experience for that matter, based only on determinism or indeterminism.

To my mind, free will entails ultimate responsibility. But ultimate responsibility is an incoherent notion – it’s an impossibility (except via some supernatural realm).

Best Regards