What is it that you are claiming to observe? Because free will is generally taken to be more than a sensory observation or feeling. After all you have to verify that an observation is actually of the thing you want to prove. I mean let's consider two possibilities.
1) What you observe is something like: whatever you decide to do after deliberation is something you can choose to do. If you think 'i'm going to raise my arm' you observe that you do in fact raise your arm.
But at best you merely observe that you can do what you decide to do which it no way shows you could have decided otherwise. So it's not an illusion just not an observation of the claim you want to support [1].
Ultimately you could point to all sorts of other observations you have but unless you directly experience a counterfactual they can never actually be of the fact that you could have done differently and you can't say they actually instantiate what you mean by free will. At some point what you mean by the word has to be brought into play.
2) Maybe you observe that you strongly agree with the sentence "I have free will"? But that's only an observation that you believe you have free will not that you have it. That makes no more sense than claiming to directly observe the truth of field theory.
---
To put it in slightly different terms, is it possible to directly observe that you are a cool dude? You can observe that you feel cool or you can observe that you judge yourself to be cool. However to actually determine if you are cool we first need to determine what it means to be cool and check if you satisfy. Since neither feeling or judging yourself to be cool are what it means to actually be cool you can't just insist that you are cool by introspection.
--
1: If you abandon the claim you could have done something else and merely retreat to the compatibllist claim: had I decided to act differently I would have then it might be evidence for that.
I am still early in the book by Cate Hall but it struck me as odd that her three years of drug addiction in search of God or religious enlightenment or whatever were framed as low agency.
It may have eventually reached that point but the premise is comically high agency and basically what folks like the Buddha did.
Yeah, came here to say this. She was literally tilting her lance at what she considered gods, in direct contravention to what they told her to do. Archetypical high agency hero stuff.
- you are charismatic enough to convince strangers to help you
- etc etc
Your agency only allows you to act on the opportunities that are available to you. I think people like Cate Hall overestimate the opportunities that are available to people who are not them.
> if you can dismiss my constant observation with “That’s just an illusion,” you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion.
Any observation *could* be an illusion/hallucination. But some observations and styles of observation are consistently backed up. When you look at a leaf and see that it's green, you can confirm that by many processes, e.g. checking that other people see it is green, confirming the wavelength with a spectrometer, confirming that plants need chlorophyll to absorb sunlight which is also green, etc.
Some people strongly observe the presence of God in their life. They see His signs everywhere, and also just feel a constant observation like you that God is real. They feel pretty specific things to their specific religion and doctrine too, many of which are mutually contradictory, so we can say with certainty at least some people's constant observations are dead wrong.
If you can provide a stronger empirical/logical argument for free will, many people will be happy to hear it. But just saying "I observe it" is insufficient evidence.
I figure free will is meaningless. Everything that happens, has happened, and will happen, can be explained either way. It's unfalsifiable. Others will say otherwise. That distinction is also unfalsifiable.
I suppose one could say the proof of being unprovable is that no one has yet come up with any proof of either proposition.
I often describe addiction as choosing one problem over having to put up with every other one. Hall feeling imprisoned by a drug reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple's incisive book Admirable Evasions which is named after a Shakespeare quote "it's an admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star". I'm also annoyed when drug addicts speak as if some inanimate object(their drug) is a puppeteer as if they have no agency. But under determinism kinda entails they are, & under physicalism the disease analogy is apt; to me this is a reductio.
Side note: I'm cracked out as I write this which is the main reason I'm posting it because it's quite a quwinkidink that I read an article on addiction after I've just finished my 4g of street "ketamine". I should be ashamed for wasting my money, health... & space in this thread.
Drug abuse has even less of a excuse than other forms of abuse. You can simply not consume drugs for that very first time, and thereby avoid the entire issue. The main exception being patients who get into serious accidents and prescribed painkillers.
I have high neuroticism and find his style of thinking to be totally incomprehensible. The optimism, the positivity about the future, the total embrace of unfettered capitalism (I am not a socialist but would prefer a stronger safety net)...it's just so foreign to me.
And, the few risks I've taken really haven't gone well. Doing the 'practical' thing has gotten me into the low-mid seven figures in net worth, if not love or happiness. So, maybe high agency isn't for me.
I'm kind of puzzled by this too. Lots of high-neuroticism people also have high conscientiousness. That yields people who do indeed deserve high agency: they are the often the world's Cassandras, worrying - against the crowd - about what can go wrong. They often deserve more power, not less.
This is the most fun substack article that I’ve read in a while. I’ve spent my life surrounded (in part) by people telling me what I can’t do, and if I have friends that do it, that’s because they aren’t normal people.
At my age now, people seem to see me as some sort of magical being who is allowed to violate all the rules and yet things work out.
Most people don’t want to say “yes” to opportunity. I’m in late middle age right now, but if I got an email with an amazing job offer in another state or country, I’d almost certainly say yes and feel thrilled.
However, I think Sam Harris makes intriguing points.
Do you control your own dreams?
How do “thoughts enter your head”?
“All of nature’s cumulative randomness since time immemorial + the culmination of human neurobiology up to this point in time resulted in your decision to walk into Starbucks at this particular moment” is difficult to fathom….but I’m not sure it’s not due to the limits of my imagination.
Michael Huemer argues that, at minimum, free will is the view that at least some of the time, one has more than one course of action that they can perform. So this view of free will may be compatible with not being able to control one's dreams or not being able to control thoughts entering their head.
As I understand it, it is not the number of possible actions but that one can judge between different actions and thus choose on basis of this judgment.
Do animals have the capacity of "more than one course of action that they can perform"? If not, why not?
Our entire legal system, and society at large, only functions because of the presumption that YOU (and not the deterministic universe) are responsible for your own decisions and actions.
Use of the term ‘free will’ in a legal context is different from how the term is used in debates about the nature of volition. In legal documents, ‘free will’ refers to a decision that wasn’t made under duress. The philosophical debates arise when considering behaviour that’s motivated by reward instead of threat of punishment.
What influences is the will supposed to be free from before it can be considered free? What is the difference between free will and plain old will?
Agency is the capacity to respond to incentives. When I describe agentic action, I’m describing behaviour that’s under the control of incentives.
An agent that acted randomly might be more free from the control of antecedent circumstance than a deterministic agent, but would it be any more willful than a set of dice? Many proponents of non-deterministic free will claim that the will is neither deterministic nor stochastic.
The presumption is not arbitrary but corresponds to something real. That we are actually free in the sense not possessed by inanimate and other animate bodies.
Off topic: I don't read graphic books, for two reasons: the text is not searchable, and the font is not controllable except by magnifying the entire image.
"I observe my free will via introspection in every waking moment, and if you can dismiss my constant observation with 'That’s just an illusion,' you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion."
Don't threaten me with a good time.
But no, good piece. Even if we didn't have free will, people who believe in it - sorry, the people who determinism has "decided" believe in it - seem a lot happier than those don't. And your acknowledgement that going for broke might, well, leave you broke is a valuable one.
The barrier to exit comment is sort of funny given the book title. You Can Just Do Things except divorce apparently
Barrier => Friction
Why concern ourselves with such frictions? We can just do things!
Yes, you can. And you can also pay the costs of doing those things. "Why concern ourselves with the cost?"
This has gone a little further than I envisioned, it’s just a mildly humorous tension, not life advice
What is it that you are claiming to observe? Because free will is generally taken to be more than a sensory observation or feeling. After all you have to verify that an observation is actually of the thing you want to prove. I mean let's consider two possibilities.
1) What you observe is something like: whatever you decide to do after deliberation is something you can choose to do. If you think 'i'm going to raise my arm' you observe that you do in fact raise your arm.
But at best you merely observe that you can do what you decide to do which it no way shows you could have decided otherwise. So it's not an illusion just not an observation of the claim you want to support [1].
Ultimately you could point to all sorts of other observations you have but unless you directly experience a counterfactual they can never actually be of the fact that you could have done differently and you can't say they actually instantiate what you mean by free will. At some point what you mean by the word has to be brought into play.
2) Maybe you observe that you strongly agree with the sentence "I have free will"? But that's only an observation that you believe you have free will not that you have it. That makes no more sense than claiming to directly observe the truth of field theory.
---
To put it in slightly different terms, is it possible to directly observe that you are a cool dude? You can observe that you feel cool or you can observe that you judge yourself to be cool. However to actually determine if you are cool we first need to determine what it means to be cool and check if you satisfy. Since neither feeling or judging yourself to be cool are what it means to actually be cool you can't just insist that you are cool by introspection.
--
1: If you abandon the claim you could have done something else and merely retreat to the compatibllist claim: had I decided to act differently I would have then it might be evidence for that.
I am still early in the book by Cate Hall but it struck me as odd that her three years of drug addiction in search of God or religious enlightenment or whatever were framed as low agency.
It may have eventually reached that point but the premise is comically high agency and basically what folks like the Buddha did.
Yeah, came here to say this. She was literally tilting her lance at what she considered gods, in direct contravention to what they told her to do. Archetypical high agency hero stuff.
You can just do things... if
- you have access to capital
- you have connections in the right places
- you are charismatic enough to convince strangers to help you
- etc etc
Your agency only allows you to act on the opportunities that are available to you. I think people like Cate Hall overestimate the opportunities that are available to people who are not them.
Start small, with what you have available to you.
If you convince yourself that you can't, you are right - you can't.
Capital, connections, charisma are things you can *get*.
Your circumstances can change. But nothing is guaranteed, even if you play your best hand.
Correspondingly, many people with options only see barriers, as they have an external locus of control.
> if you can dismiss my constant observation with “That’s just an illusion,” you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion.
Any observation *could* be an illusion/hallucination. But some observations and styles of observation are consistently backed up. When you look at a leaf and see that it's green, you can confirm that by many processes, e.g. checking that other people see it is green, confirming the wavelength with a spectrometer, confirming that plants need chlorophyll to absorb sunlight which is also green, etc.
Some people strongly observe the presence of God in their life. They see His signs everywhere, and also just feel a constant observation like you that God is real. They feel pretty specific things to their specific religion and doctrine too, many of which are mutually contradictory, so we can say with certainty at least some people's constant observations are dead wrong.
If you can provide a stronger empirical/logical argument for free will, many people will be happy to hear it. But just saying "I observe it" is insufficient evidence.
I figure free will is meaningless. Everything that happens, has happened, and will happen, can be explained either way. It's unfalsifiable. Others will say otherwise. That distinction is also unfalsifiable.
I suppose one could say the proof of being unprovable is that no one has yet come up with any proof of either proposition.
Free will is a philosophical concept or category and not really an empirical matter. It can not be empirically verified or falsified.
I'm talking to Bryan Caplan, who does think he's verified it for practical purposes through observation
" but I observe my free will via introspection in every waking moment"
This is not an empirical or objective observation.
I often describe addiction as choosing one problem over having to put up with every other one. Hall feeling imprisoned by a drug reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple's incisive book Admirable Evasions which is named after a Shakespeare quote "it's an admirable evasion of whoremaster man to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star". I'm also annoyed when drug addicts speak as if some inanimate object(their drug) is a puppeteer as if they have no agency. But under determinism kinda entails they are, & under physicalism the disease analogy is apt; to me this is a reductio.
Side note: I'm cracked out as I write this which is the main reason I'm posting it because it's quite a quwinkidink that I read an article on addiction after I've just finished my 4g of street "ketamine". I should be ashamed for wasting my money, health... & space in this thread.
Drug abuse has even less of a excuse than other forms of abuse. You can simply not consume drugs for that very first time, and thereby avoid the entire issue. The main exception being patients who get into serious accidents and prescribed painkillers.
If neuroticism is the problem, how would you build society to help people with high-neuroticism?
I don't think he thinks about it that hard.
I have high neuroticism and find his style of thinking to be totally incomprehensible. The optimism, the positivity about the future, the total embrace of unfettered capitalism (I am not a socialist but would prefer a stronger safety net)...it's just so foreign to me.
And, the few risks I've taken really haven't gone well. Doing the 'practical' thing has gotten me into the low-mid seven figures in net worth, if not love or happiness. So, maybe high agency isn't for me.
I'm kind of puzzled by this too. Lots of high-neuroticism people also have high conscientiousness. That yields people who do indeed deserve high agency: they are the often the world's Cassandras, worrying - against the crowd - about what can go wrong. They often deserve more power, not less.
This is the most fun substack article that I’ve read in a while. I’ve spent my life surrounded (in part) by people telling me what I can’t do, and if I have friends that do it, that’s because they aren’t normal people.
At my age now, people seem to see me as some sort of magical being who is allowed to violate all the rules and yet things work out.
Most people don’t want to say “yes” to opportunity. I’m in late middle age right now, but if I got an email with an amazing job offer in another state or country, I’d almost certainly say yes and feel thrilled.
Every year I become convinced about “increase your surface area for luck” (aka life is a number games).
Free will?
What is "will" first and what does the qualifier "free" add to it?
And are there wills that are unfree?
So, Are You Jewish? You Sound Jewish!
I believe in free will.
However, I think Sam Harris makes intriguing points.
Do you control your own dreams?
How do “thoughts enter your head”?
“All of nature’s cumulative randomness since time immemorial + the culmination of human neurobiology up to this point in time resulted in your decision to walk into Starbucks at this particular moment” is difficult to fathom….but I’m not sure it’s not due to the limits of my imagination.
Michael Huemer argues that, at minimum, free will is the view that at least some of the time, one has more than one course of action that they can perform. So this view of free will may be compatible with not being able to control one's dreams or not being able to control thoughts entering their head.
But can one perform the action freely?
As I understand it, it is not the number of possible actions but that one can judge between different actions and thus choose on basis of this judgment.
Do animals have the capacity of "more than one course of action that they can perform"? If not, why not?
This is the rub, isn’t it.
Our entire legal system, and society at large, only functions because of the presumption that YOU (and not the deterministic universe) are responsible for your own decisions and actions.
Actually our legal system would function approximately the same if it was based on determinism.
Since we could not choose to administer it any differently.
And punishment still serves a role in a deterministic world
Use of the term ‘free will’ in a legal context is different from how the term is used in debates about the nature of volition. In legal documents, ‘free will’ refers to a decision that wasn’t made under duress. The philosophical debates arise when considering behaviour that’s motivated by reward instead of threat of punishment.
What influences is the will supposed to be free from before it can be considered free? What is the difference between free will and plain old will?
Agency is the capacity to respond to incentives. When I describe agentic action, I’m describing behaviour that’s under the control of incentives.
An agent that acted randomly might be more free from the control of antecedent circumstance than a deterministic agent, but would it be any more willful than a set of dice? Many proponents of non-deterministic free will claim that the will is neither deterministic nor stochastic.
The presumption is not arbitrary but corresponds to something real. That we are actually free in the sense not possessed by inanimate and other animate bodies.
Interesting. I have his “Progressive Myths” on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to read. Does he have a book where he discusses free will?
Off topic: I don't read graphic books, for two reasons: the text is not searchable, and the font is not controllable except by magnifying the entire image.
Bryan, you need to use your high-agency chops to quit your job since you think higher-ed is a waste of taxpayer monies and become an uber driver.
"I observe my free will via introspection in every waking moment, and if you can dismiss my constant observation with 'That’s just an illusion,' you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion."
Don't threaten me with a good time.
But no, good piece. Even if we didn't have free will, people who believe in it - sorry, the people who determinism has "decided" believe in it - seem a lot happier than those don't. And your acknowledgement that going for broke might, well, leave you broke is a valuable one.