When I prompt ChatGPT, I observe the text it outputs. But I don't observe the process that generated that text. For all I know, the process is deterministic, even if *I* can't see why it couldn't have generated some other text.
When I think to myself "Should I cook or order in?" I'm aware of the choice I end up making (I'll cook, let's say) but similarly, I don't observe the underlying neural process that generated that choice. So even if, for all I can tell, in that exact moment I could've made a different choice, that's no more evidence that my brain processes are genuinely indeterministic than it is with ChatGPT.
And the same thing can be said about the "prompt" of asking myself what to have for dinner. I'm not aware of any deterministic processes that caused that to be the question that popped into my head when it did. But it's a total non sequitur to conclude that, therefore, none exist.
Basically, I don't see why you think the evidence of introspection bears one way or the other on the question about the nature of the underlying processes that ultimately determine (or merely influence!) what makes it into consciousness.
Yes. There seems to be a confusion between “I can’t determine (lack of info about myself)” vs “it cannot be determined.” It seems obvious that lacking information on a system makes it look like it has free will.
This is what introspection does to our own sense of choices since our unconscious doesn’t communicate the full thought-process to us.
The default observation is therefore not that we scientifically observe Free Will in ourselves but that we cannot predict our thoughts. This is actually a necessary property of complex systems with predictive power and is totally compatible with a deterministic worldview.
All complex predictive systems are unable to fully predict their inner workings. It’s an adapted corollary of Gödel’s theorem.
The process we “observe” is also our deliberation between what choices we will make. We don’t just observe us making one decision. We also have an experience of deciding whether to cook or order in.
We’re also not denying that there are underlying neurological factors that influence our decisions. We just deny that there’s sufficient reason to think that these are deterministic, so it’s ad hoc to assume it is when we have introspective evidence otherwise. Also, as Caplan has noted, biological and environmental effects are together insufficient to explain human decision making, which is surprising given determinism. https://www.betonit.ai/p/free_will_and_bhtml
"The process we “observe” is also our deliberation between what choices we will make. We don’t just observe us making one decision. We also have an experience of deciding whether to cook or order in."
Yes, but it remains completely unclear how this experience would contradict determinism. No one has worked out in detail the implications of determinsism for subjective experience. So, how do you even know that there is a contradiction?
"We just deny that there’s sufficient reason to think that these are deterministic, so it’s ad hoc to assume it is when we have introspective evidence otherwise."
There is a big difference between "there is insufficient reason for X" and "X is much crazier than Solipsism". Also, determinism is not ad hoc. It was not invented as an argument against free will. But given that all fundamental physical laws seem to be deterministic (I'm including Quantum Theory here, because "quantum randomness" seems to be beside the point anyway) one is somewhat justified in adopting it as a default hypothesis. It could even help clarify some other aspects of subjective experience, e.g. Grey Walter's "precognitive carousel". (If it is real.) I don't dismiss introspection or subjective experience as evidence. But I think these kinds of experiments can show that one has to be careful about generalising from everyday experience.
Do the laws of physics explain subjective experience, as the qualia felt by humans, and also animals (it is quite likely that animals have qualia)?
This is, of course, the hard problem of consciousness and as long as this remains the hard problem, it can not be maintained that physics is all-explaining,
I'm not sure I believe in the Hard Problem of consciousness. But I didn't claim that physics is all-explaining. I just think that physics (and science in general) makes determinism a reasonable default hypothesis, and even in light of my subjective experience it seems far from crazy.
The point is we don't have introspective evidence one way or the other. If the underlying process were deterministic, how would things feel any different at the level of consciousness?
Maybe the idea is that we'd be more predictable if the underlying processes were deterministic, but in that case, i strongly disagree. Sufficient complexity is enough to get you unpredictability without indeterminism. Nobody thinks the weather has free will, but it's de facto unpredictable once you're on a long enough time horizon.
I wouldn’t expect to feel like I have the ability to deliberate between more than one option. It’d feel like I was sleepwalking awake, like someone was controlling my actions. A league of evil scientists trying to trick me into believing that I’m not a brain in a vat might predict similar experiences to what I’m having right now, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the more plausible perspective!
The behavioral genetics evidence works regardless of complexity. The studies measure the effects of genes and the environment even if we don’t know all the specific genes or environmental factors. That’s the point of them: learning why we make certain decisions using e.g. twins who have 100% of the same genes, even though we don’t know what every gene does.
It seems like you're conceptualizing determinism as a force acting against your conscious choices, so you want to do something, but laws of physics stop you from doing that and force you to do something else. I can see why you'd think that would feel like someone else controlling your actions.
But that's not the deterministic picture at all. Rather, it's that you have no conscious access to the level of description at which your choices are deterministic. It's not like I can tell what microphysical state my brain is in. So I deny that it seems introspectively that my brain could've been in exactly the same microphysical state and yet I made a different choice; introspection just doesn't tell me anything about microphysical states of my brain.
I'm not sure what point you're making about behavioral genetics. Is the idea that if determinism were true, behavioral genetics would have more predictive power than it does? In that case, I disagree; there's tons of info about the environments people face that we don't have, and can't quantify, and can't use as a basis for prediction. Think about all the different life experiences identical twins have. There would still be plenty of de facto residual unpredictability if determinism were true.
I like the reference to Godelian theory implying agents cannot predict themselves. Similarly, a model in which I "will" my actions into existence begs the question of whether my "willing" itself constitutes an action that I would need to further "will" in an indefinite regress.
My introspection suggests that my actions and inner dialogue come from nowhere accessible to my mind. I didn't "ask" for any particular thoughts to appear. They just appeared. I can characterize my personality and thought patterns, but I didn't really ask for those traits either, and they are not that predictive of any individual thoughts or actions. The fact that my thoughts are experienced as intricately tied to my person is immaterial; I didn't ask for that experience of locus of control either.
No, your mistaken. I’m not necessarily conceptualizing determinism in this way. Of course, under determinism, I could feel like that. But that’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that I wouldn’t feel like I was deliberating between different decisions. Or, I’d feel like I did during the times of my life where I had the least control of my actions (say, under medical drugs). Not like I felt trapped, but I wouldn’t even know how to deliberate between different courses of action, kind of like a bug wouldn’t know how to drive. I would just go about my life only making one decision without thinking about making another because I wouldn’t have a conception of that.
As far as your microphysical brain state argument, I will just return to the brain in a vat case. “I don’t have access to the vat or the scientists, so they must be explaining all of my visual experiences.” I just don’t find that compelling. I’m still able to deliberate between different decisions, so that’s super surprising given determinism.
As far as your comments on behavioral genetics, what you’re saying is simply implausible given what we know about the research in my view. If what you’re saying were the case, then parents would have a much higher influence on people’s outcomes than what the data shows as they are perhaps by far the biggest environmental influence on people’s lives, yet they are only 0-10% of people’s life outcomes. People’s environmental experiences simply don’t have much effect on their life outcomes (parents, peers, schools, etc.). All of the biggest influences!
I still don’t see why determinism should change how deliberation feels, given that the mechanisms behind it—whether deterministic or not—aren’t accessible to introspection. Maybe the question to ask is: what does it feel like to be in control of your actions, and would that feeling be surprising (or misleading) if determinism were true?
Here’s a how I’d describe the difference between impaired and normal deliberation. Under drugs or confusion, I might do things without understanding why, and without recalling deciding to do them. In contrast, under normal conditions, I’m not surprised by what I’m doing: I maintain a coherent narrative of where I am, what I'm doing, and what I'm thinking about, and my judgments about what I should do tend to guide my actions and attention. That’s what deliberative control feels like.
I don’t see why determinism would make my whole life feel like the drugged case. Maybe you're assuming that determinism implies epiphenomenalism—where conscious thought doesn’t affect behavior? If so, I agree that would be troubling. But determinism doesn’t require that. If you're a phyiscalist, you'll probably think conscious deliberation is causally efficacious. It matters whether your deliberative capacities are intact or compromised. So yes, you have control—but that doesn’t require indeterminism.
In fact, your contrast—between conscious control and “autopilot”—makes perfect sense within a deterministic framework. I think the situation is like Wittgenstein’s (apocryphal?) quip about the Earth’s rotation, in response to somebody who said it looked like the earth was stationary and the sun was rotating around it: what would it have looked like if it had instead looked like the Earth was rotating? Similarly: what would deliberation feel like if it was the product of deterministic processes? I think it's a lot harder than it at first seems to explain why it would feel any different than it does.
I'm still not following you on behavioral genetics. What do you think the field would look like if determinism were true?
What you seem to be presupposing: that you have simply observed that you have done one thing when you could have done another, with all conditions being exactly the same. I.e., that you have simply observed a modal fact, in the way that one might observe a desk or a drop of rain. I would dispute that you have observed any such thing.
I do agree that you have observed yourself making genuine choices. But to assume that this is evidence for libertarianism is just to assume that compatibilism is wrong. That’s the subject of much debate, with most philosophers thinking that assumption is false, and almost no philosopher thinking it is something that one can just assume without detailed argument.
Doesn't PvI sort of argue like this? I mean, contra Caplan in this post, he spends a ton of time arguing that compatibilism is wrong, and then, when it comes to the case for free will, he's just "well, I'm more confident that I am morally responsible for at least a few things [his so-called "state occasions"] than I am confident that determinism is true"?
That seems fair. PvI, as I recall, does more or less assume that we have free will. That may be unfair to the free will skeptics in the world, especially those that argue for their skepticism by arguing against compatibilism and then arguing that determinism, or something close enough, is what we get from physics. But I mostly bristle at Bryan simply ASSUMING that compatibilism is false, especially since that's my position!
I'd say that Caplan just isn't in the weeds enough to lose at least some of his incompatibilistic confidence, but then I think of Mike Huemer, who knows the literature well, and I think he's just as confident that compatibilism is obviously false. FWIW, I'm an incompatibilist, but I'm not that confident about it.
Well, if you are still an incompatibilist, then you obviously have not read my 2016 book! (To be clear, that is a joke, in the sense that I know that no single work of philosophy actually lays the issue of free will to rest for all rational people who have read it. But I am also shamelessly plugging a real book: “Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account.”)
Well, I'm partial to Balaguer's view, but I'm also open to whatever completely insane metaphysics is necessary for Kant's incompatibilist compatibilism to work.
Wouldn't linguists be better experts rather than philosophers to ajudicate whether compatibilism is true? And why do you need a book in the first place to decide a semantic question, don't we all understand English here?
I beg you to read Dennett's *Freedom Evolves*. His compatibilist position on free will and determinism answers a lot of your questions. Ever since reading it, I have felt annoyed hearing the opinions of both free will advocates *and* determinism advocates -- at least, those whose views are less sophisticated than Dennett's.
I don't think he really addresses these points at all. Dennett starts from the assumption that if non-introspective data can be accommodated for, then this shows that we should endorse conclusions compatible with a severely diminished value placed on introspective data. His entire philosophy presupposes that introspection has very limited evidential value. This assumption is largely unjustified in his work. It's also false. Without it, though, basically every argument he gives is essentially worthless. He's very good at seeing the implications of his views in metaphysics and epistemology. Those views, though, are incorrect and unjustified. This makes all of his arguments unjustified as well.
I encourage you to read the book to find out. His arguments have a cumulative effect that short summaries cannot do justice. One thing the Grok summary in particular leaves out is Dennett's extended case for why libertarian free will itself is just not a kind of free will worth having. His case for determinism-compatible free will is strongly bolstered by the realization that it's a *better* form of free will, one that's more consistent with what we want out of it.
We've also observed the unbroken link between cause and effect repeatedly too, which contradicts free will. So can you really point to repeat observation of your free will when we also repeatedly observe the laws of physics that contradict it? And besides, how reliable is repeat observation? Humans observed the sun and stars revolved around the Earth repeatedly for thousands of years, and incorrectly concluded we were in the centre of the universe.
You say that you observed yourself making choices. That just means you experienced the sensation of having made a choice. The choice and the feeling of having made a choice can both easily be the result of deterministic processes.
Also, many people (eg Sam Harris) do seem to suggest that they actually don't experience free will, but that one needs to pay attention to notice that. For instance, noticing that choices emerge out of nowhere much like any thought. In that sense experiencing a choice is similar to experiencing a sound: it's something caused by other factors that eventually appears in consciousness.
"You say that you observed yourself making choices. That just means you experienced the sensation of having made a choice. The choice and the feeling of having made a choice can both easily be the result of deterministic processes"
Sure. Just like the sensation of typing on your keyboard could have been the result of an evil demon deceiving you.
Computers create (in principle) predictable, deterministic outputs, given initial conditions. Human brains are just digital computers- there's nothing special about them. You consciously experience "making a decision", and this isn't an illusion- you are making a decision; in the same way that ChatGPT decides how to respond to you. It's just that the decision you make is a consequence of the state of the neurons in your brain.
It's unlikely even to be quantum, in any relevant sense. Neurons are small, but they're not quantum-small.
I'm disappointed by this article. Bryan is usually a clearer thinker.
He's not really arguing against determinism. He's arguing for "free will" and just assuming that the two are incompatible. I don't like the definition of free will that "I could have chosen differently", I prefer something like "I can choose for my own reasons", and there's nothing problematic about determinism being involved in that. In fact, it's much better for free will that my choices are determined by the state of my mind than that they aren't.
Even if there is a metaphysical difference between determinism and contingency, this is not accessible through experience.
Therefore: This has no impact on the lived reality of being a mind.
Once a choice has been made, it is singular and unrepeatable. It is impossible to create exactly the same world at two different points in time, so it is not possible to experiment with this.
> I have a lifetime of repeated, careful observation of my own mind
You haven't been observing your brain's physical state, which is what determinists claim is the important thing. Your observations thus don't do anything to argue against them (a group that includes me).
I know I have free will. Maybe no one else has free will, but I do.
Sometimes I sit in my comfy chair and think about past events. Maybe someone tried to make a joke about me but it was a poor joke. I was simply quiet in response. In my comfy chair I'll replay the event and decide on a better response next time. For example, the next time it happens, I'll give the person a kind and humorous reply even if the joke was weak or biting.
I also think about future events. "I should set up a meeting with Rob." "I should ask Lorraine about her father." "I should tell Michael about that book I just read."
I think about things and that changes my future behavior. I know I have free will.
When you say there are several things you "could" do, are you simply saying there's a random probability over them, or is it something distinct? If the latter (as free will tends to imply), could you clarify what the claim actually is? To me, it seems like the actual statement here can't really be defined
Your definition of free will apparently refers to your subjective sense of being unrestricted when you choose among options. Like all normal human beings, I share this same subjective sense of choice. However, I know that many of our perceptions do not reflect reality. For example, we have the subjective sense that our eyes are showing us the way the world is. For example, the grass outside my window looks green, so my subjective sense is that the greenness is really in the grass. However, my knowledge of the way nervous systems work informs me that this perception of the grass itself really being green is an illusion, an artifact of the way my eyes and visual cortex interpret the wavelengths of light reflecting from the grass. Animals with different nervous systems will perceive the same grass differently, and none of these perceptions reflect reality concerning color.
The same is true for the subjective sense of free will. It feels like, at any moment, I could have made a different choice, but the principle of scientific determinism says otherwise. At each particular point in time, there could have been no other choice than the one I made. My assumption of determinism and lack of free will is not unsettling, because, subjectively I feel free. Just like, subjectively, I see greenness in the grass.
As for solipsism, I find the argument for it based on thoughts not being publicly observable silly. There is a good reason to assume that others are having experiences very similar to ours, namely, that our brains are similarly constructed. There are some philosophical arguments worth having, and some, not. Free will is worth discussing; solipsism is not.
Solipsism is only worth not discussing because it's true. That said what's equally true is it's number one critique of its irrelevance. True or not changes nothing, it's unknowable so we have to live in a framework where other people do exist because subjectively they do even if objectively it's unknowable hence Solipsism itself is irrelevant.
Determinism TBH has the same problem in its irrelevant. Whether we have free will or just the perception of is irrelevant, for people that care about such questions they have to pretend whichever answer suits them is subjectivity true regardless of it being objectively so.
Both philosophies are uninteresting outside dullard thought experiments during a pipedream, like pondering if God exists or his motives. All are objectively unknowable hence the best solution is just acceptance (or resignation) that the questions themselves are superfluous.
I agree with your assessments of solipsism and free will as philosophies. I am less interested in free will less as a philosophical issue than a psychological one (I am a psychologist). I want to know what people mean by free will and how their thoughts and feelings about their conception of free will make a difference (or not) in terms of how they live their lives.
Consider an electron. What we can say about it is exhausted by what physics says about it--its charge, mass, spin, momentum etc.
Consider lightening--we can say plenty more. How it looks, how it feels. The lightening exists beyond the discourse of physics in a way electron does not. Electron is an item in physical theories. It has no existence beyond it. Lightening exists pre-physics.
You seem to be saying that knowledge by acquaintance (the subjective experience of lightning--how it looks, how it feels) does not require knowledge by description (theoretical knowledge of electrons). These are indeed two kinds of knowledge. A physical explanation of lightning is not equivalent to the experience of lightning. However, this does not mean that lightning has somehow transcended the laws of physics as currently understood.
The case for free will is very simple: The statement "I have no free will" is a self contradiction because, if true, the statement is merely cosmic noise predetermined by the big bang.
Our current understanding of physics does not explain the "mechanism" of free will any more than it explains the origin of life. Yet both life and free will exist. The latter is an emergent property of the former.
It is a shame that students at all levels rarely ever encounter a course in basic LOGIC except perhaps in some esoteric branches of philosophy.
The most common logical fallacies involve making an argument which also refutes (either directly or by implication) one of the concepts upon which it is based.
This is most obvious is the "paradox" of the man who claims "Everything I say is a lie!"
Other cases are more deeply buried.
Let's rephrase "I have no free will!" to reflect what the speaker intends to communicate in a way that will convince the listener:
"I have thoroughly considered all the options and DECIDED of my own free will that it is TRUE that I have no free will." In other words, concepts like "decide" and "truth" are meaningless is there is no free will.
Indeed all THOUGHT presupposes free will. Everything else is cosmic noise.
When I prompt ChatGPT, I observe the text it outputs. But I don't observe the process that generated that text. For all I know, the process is deterministic, even if *I* can't see why it couldn't have generated some other text.
When I think to myself "Should I cook or order in?" I'm aware of the choice I end up making (I'll cook, let's say) but similarly, I don't observe the underlying neural process that generated that choice. So even if, for all I can tell, in that exact moment I could've made a different choice, that's no more evidence that my brain processes are genuinely indeterministic than it is with ChatGPT.
And the same thing can be said about the "prompt" of asking myself what to have for dinner. I'm not aware of any deterministic processes that caused that to be the question that popped into my head when it did. But it's a total non sequitur to conclude that, therefore, none exist.
Basically, I don't see why you think the evidence of introspection bears one way or the other on the question about the nature of the underlying processes that ultimately determine (or merely influence!) what makes it into consciousness.
Yes. There seems to be a confusion between “I can’t determine (lack of info about myself)” vs “it cannot be determined.” It seems obvious that lacking information on a system makes it look like it has free will.
This is what introspection does to our own sense of choices since our unconscious doesn’t communicate the full thought-process to us.
The default observation is therefore not that we scientifically observe Free Will in ourselves but that we cannot predict our thoughts. This is actually a necessary property of complex systems with predictive power and is totally compatible with a deterministic worldview.
All complex predictive systems are unable to fully predict their inner workings. It’s an adapted corollary of Gödel’s theorem.
The process we “observe” is also our deliberation between what choices we will make. We don’t just observe us making one decision. We also have an experience of deciding whether to cook or order in.
We’re also not denying that there are underlying neurological factors that influence our decisions. We just deny that there’s sufficient reason to think that these are deterministic, so it’s ad hoc to assume it is when we have introspective evidence otherwise. Also, as Caplan has noted, biological and environmental effects are together insufficient to explain human decision making, which is surprising given determinism. https://www.betonit.ai/p/free_will_and_bhtml
"The process we “observe” is also our deliberation between what choices we will make. We don’t just observe us making one decision. We also have an experience of deciding whether to cook or order in."
Yes, but it remains completely unclear how this experience would contradict determinism. No one has worked out in detail the implications of determinsism for subjective experience. So, how do you even know that there is a contradiction?
"We just deny that there’s sufficient reason to think that these are deterministic, so it’s ad hoc to assume it is when we have introspective evidence otherwise."
There is a big difference between "there is insufficient reason for X" and "X is much crazier than Solipsism". Also, determinism is not ad hoc. It was not invented as an argument against free will. But given that all fundamental physical laws seem to be deterministic (I'm including Quantum Theory here, because "quantum randomness" seems to be beside the point anyway) one is somewhat justified in adopting it as a default hypothesis. It could even help clarify some other aspects of subjective experience, e.g. Grey Walter's "precognitive carousel". (If it is real.) I don't dismiss introspection or subjective experience as evidence. But I think these kinds of experiments can show that one has to be careful about generalising from everyday experience.
Do the laws of physics explain subjective experience, as the qualia felt by humans, and also animals (it is quite likely that animals have qualia)?
This is, of course, the hard problem of consciousness and as long as this remains the hard problem, it can not be maintained that physics is all-explaining,
I'm not sure I believe in the Hard Problem of consciousness. But I didn't claim that physics is all-explaining. I just think that physics (and science in general) makes determinism a reasonable default hypothesis, and even in light of my subjective experience it seems far from crazy.
The point is we don't have introspective evidence one way or the other. If the underlying process were deterministic, how would things feel any different at the level of consciousness?
Maybe the idea is that we'd be more predictable if the underlying processes were deterministic, but in that case, i strongly disagree. Sufficient complexity is enough to get you unpredictability without indeterminism. Nobody thinks the weather has free will, but it's de facto unpredictable once you're on a long enough time horizon.
I wouldn’t expect to feel like I have the ability to deliberate between more than one option. It’d feel like I was sleepwalking awake, like someone was controlling my actions. A league of evil scientists trying to trick me into believing that I’m not a brain in a vat might predict similar experiences to what I’m having right now, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the more plausible perspective!
The behavioral genetics evidence works regardless of complexity. The studies measure the effects of genes and the environment even if we don’t know all the specific genes or environmental factors. That’s the point of them: learning why we make certain decisions using e.g. twins who have 100% of the same genes, even though we don’t know what every gene does.
It seems like you're conceptualizing determinism as a force acting against your conscious choices, so you want to do something, but laws of physics stop you from doing that and force you to do something else. I can see why you'd think that would feel like someone else controlling your actions.
But that's not the deterministic picture at all. Rather, it's that you have no conscious access to the level of description at which your choices are deterministic. It's not like I can tell what microphysical state my brain is in. So I deny that it seems introspectively that my brain could've been in exactly the same microphysical state and yet I made a different choice; introspection just doesn't tell me anything about microphysical states of my brain.
I'm not sure what point you're making about behavioral genetics. Is the idea that if determinism were true, behavioral genetics would have more predictive power than it does? In that case, I disagree; there's tons of info about the environments people face that we don't have, and can't quantify, and can't use as a basis for prediction. Think about all the different life experiences identical twins have. There would still be plenty of de facto residual unpredictability if determinism were true.
I like the reference to Godelian theory implying agents cannot predict themselves. Similarly, a model in which I "will" my actions into existence begs the question of whether my "willing" itself constitutes an action that I would need to further "will" in an indefinite regress.
My introspection suggests that my actions and inner dialogue come from nowhere accessible to my mind. I didn't "ask" for any particular thoughts to appear. They just appeared. I can characterize my personality and thought patterns, but I didn't really ask for those traits either, and they are not that predictive of any individual thoughts or actions. The fact that my thoughts are experienced as intricately tied to my person is immaterial; I didn't ask for that experience of locus of control either.
No, your mistaken. I’m not necessarily conceptualizing determinism in this way. Of course, under determinism, I could feel like that. But that’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that I wouldn’t feel like I was deliberating between different decisions. Or, I’d feel like I did during the times of my life where I had the least control of my actions (say, under medical drugs). Not like I felt trapped, but I wouldn’t even know how to deliberate between different courses of action, kind of like a bug wouldn’t know how to drive. I would just go about my life only making one decision without thinking about making another because I wouldn’t have a conception of that.
As far as your microphysical brain state argument, I will just return to the brain in a vat case. “I don’t have access to the vat or the scientists, so they must be explaining all of my visual experiences.” I just don’t find that compelling. I’m still able to deliberate between different decisions, so that’s super surprising given determinism.
As far as your comments on behavioral genetics, what you’re saying is simply implausible given what we know about the research in my view. If what you’re saying were the case, then parents would have a much higher influence on people’s outcomes than what the data shows as they are perhaps by far the biggest environmental influence on people’s lives, yet they are only 0-10% of people’s life outcomes. People’s environmental experiences simply don’t have much effect on their life outcomes (parents, peers, schools, etc.). All of the biggest influences!
I still don’t see why determinism should change how deliberation feels, given that the mechanisms behind it—whether deterministic or not—aren’t accessible to introspection. Maybe the question to ask is: what does it feel like to be in control of your actions, and would that feeling be surprising (or misleading) if determinism were true?
Here’s a how I’d describe the difference between impaired and normal deliberation. Under drugs or confusion, I might do things without understanding why, and without recalling deciding to do them. In contrast, under normal conditions, I’m not surprised by what I’m doing: I maintain a coherent narrative of where I am, what I'm doing, and what I'm thinking about, and my judgments about what I should do tend to guide my actions and attention. That’s what deliberative control feels like.
I don’t see why determinism would make my whole life feel like the drugged case. Maybe you're assuming that determinism implies epiphenomenalism—where conscious thought doesn’t affect behavior? If so, I agree that would be troubling. But determinism doesn’t require that. If you're a phyiscalist, you'll probably think conscious deliberation is causally efficacious. It matters whether your deliberative capacities are intact or compromised. So yes, you have control—but that doesn’t require indeterminism.
In fact, your contrast—between conscious control and “autopilot”—makes perfect sense within a deterministic framework. I think the situation is like Wittgenstein’s (apocryphal?) quip about the Earth’s rotation, in response to somebody who said it looked like the earth was stationary and the sun was rotating around it: what would it have looked like if it had instead looked like the Earth was rotating? Similarly: what would deliberation feel like if it was the product of deterministic processes? I think it's a lot harder than it at first seems to explain why it would feel any different than it does.
I'm still not following you on behavioral genetics. What do you think the field would look like if determinism were true?
What you seem to be presupposing: that you have simply observed that you have done one thing when you could have done another, with all conditions being exactly the same. I.e., that you have simply observed a modal fact, in the way that one might observe a desk or a drop of rain. I would dispute that you have observed any such thing.
I do agree that you have observed yourself making genuine choices. But to assume that this is evidence for libertarianism is just to assume that compatibilism is wrong. That’s the subject of much debate, with most philosophers thinking that assumption is false, and almost no philosopher thinking it is something that one can just assume without detailed argument.
Doesn't PvI sort of argue like this? I mean, contra Caplan in this post, he spends a ton of time arguing that compatibilism is wrong, and then, when it comes to the case for free will, he's just "well, I'm more confident that I am morally responsible for at least a few things [his so-called "state occasions"] than I am confident that determinism is true"?
That seems fair. PvI, as I recall, does more or less assume that we have free will. That may be unfair to the free will skeptics in the world, especially those that argue for their skepticism by arguing against compatibilism and then arguing that determinism, or something close enough, is what we get from physics. But I mostly bristle at Bryan simply ASSUMING that compatibilism is false, especially since that's my position!
To argue against free will is self-contradictory. There are no arguments in a world that lacks free will.
I'd say that Caplan just isn't in the weeds enough to lose at least some of his incompatibilistic confidence, but then I think of Mike Huemer, who knows the literature well, and I think he's just as confident that compatibilism is obviously false. FWIW, I'm an incompatibilist, but I'm not that confident about it.
Well, if you are still an incompatibilist, then you obviously have not read my 2016 book! (To be clear, that is a joke, in the sense that I know that no single work of philosophy actually lays the issue of free will to rest for all rational people who have read it. But I am also shamelessly plugging a real book: “Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account.”)
Well, I'm partial to Balaguer's view, but I'm also open to whatever completely insane metaphysics is necessary for Kant's incompatibilist compatibilism to work.
Wouldn't linguists be better experts rather than philosophers to ajudicate whether compatibilism is true? And why do you need a book in the first place to decide a semantic question, don't we all understand English here?
Determinism doesn't predict or claim that your mental experiences would be any different than under libertarian free will.
In other words, you experience yourself as making choices among different alternatives. Determinism also predicts that you would have that experience.
Couldn't one make the same argument for solipsism?
I beg you to read Dennett's *Freedom Evolves*. His compatibilist position on free will and determinism answers a lot of your questions. Ever since reading it, I have felt annoyed hearing the opinions of both free will advocates *and* determinism advocates -- at least, those whose views are less sophisticated than Dennett's.
I don't think he really addresses these points at all. Dennett starts from the assumption that if non-introspective data can be accommodated for, then this shows that we should endorse conclusions compatible with a severely diminished value placed on introspective data. His entire philosophy presupposes that introspection has very limited evidential value. This assumption is largely unjustified in his work. It's also false. Without it, though, basically every argument he gives is essentially worthless. He's very good at seeing the implications of his views in metaphysics and epistemology. Those views, though, are incorrect and unjustified. This makes all of his arguments unjustified as well.
From summaries of the book, I can't tell how his claims are different from determinism.
I encourage you to read the book to find out. His arguments have a cumulative effect that short summaries cannot do justice. One thing the Grok summary in particular leaves out is Dennett's extended case for why libertarian free will itself is just not a kind of free will worth having. His case for determinism-compatible free will is strongly bolstered by the realization that it's a *better* form of free will, one that's more consistent with what we want out of it.
Thanks for that reference.
Here's Grok's synopsis of that book => https://x.com/i/grok/share/jkRA5kbCkea1lplPqguAod6QJ
We've also observed the unbroken link between cause and effect repeatedly too, which contradicts free will. So can you really point to repeat observation of your free will when we also repeatedly observe the laws of physics that contradict it? And besides, how reliable is repeat observation? Humans observed the sun and stars revolved around the Earth repeatedly for thousands of years, and incorrectly concluded we were in the centre of the universe.
"So can you really point to repeat observation of your free will when we also repeatedly observe the laws of physics that contradict it?"
How do they contradict it, as opposed to just not mentioning free will?
You say that you observed yourself making choices. That just means you experienced the sensation of having made a choice. The choice and the feeling of having made a choice can both easily be the result of deterministic processes.
Also, many people (eg Sam Harris) do seem to suggest that they actually don't experience free will, but that one needs to pay attention to notice that. For instance, noticing that choices emerge out of nowhere much like any thought. In that sense experiencing a choice is similar to experiencing a sound: it's something caused by other factors that eventually appears in consciousness.
"You say that you observed yourself making choices. That just means you experienced the sensation of having made a choice. The choice and the feeling of having made a choice can both easily be the result of deterministic processes"
Sure. Just like the sensation of typing on your keyboard could have been the result of an evil demon deceiving you.
Computers create (in principle) predictable, deterministic outputs, given initial conditions. Human brains are just digital computers- there's nothing special about them. You consciously experience "making a decision", and this isn't an illusion- you are making a decision; in the same way that ChatGPT decides how to respond to you. It's just that the decision you make is a consequence of the state of the neurons in your brain.
It's unlikely even to be quantum, in any relevant sense. Neurons are small, but they're not quantum-small.
There is a missing premise in your argument: that the mind is the brain. What reason is there to think that?
I'm disappointed by this article. Bryan is usually a clearer thinker.
He's not really arguing against determinism. He's arguing for "free will" and just assuming that the two are incompatible. I don't like the definition of free will that "I could have chosen differently", I prefer something like "I can choose for my own reasons", and there's nothing problematic about determinism being involved in that. In fact, it's much better for free will that my choices are determined by the state of my mind than that they aren't.
Even if there is a metaphysical difference between determinism and contingency, this is not accessible through experience.
Therefore: This has no impact on the lived reality of being a mind.
Once a choice has been made, it is singular and unrepeatable. It is impossible to create exactly the same world at two different points in time, so it is not possible to experiment with this.
My book is about precisely this point, and what it means for stuff like the future of AI. Check it out if interested: https://amzn.to/4aMQJD1.
> I have a lifetime of repeated, careful observation of my own mind
You haven't been observing your brain's physical state, which is what determinists claim is the important thing. Your observations thus don't do anything to argue against them (a group that includes me).
I'm glad you wrote this.
I know I have free will. Maybe no one else has free will, but I do.
Sometimes I sit in my comfy chair and think about past events. Maybe someone tried to make a joke about me but it was a poor joke. I was simply quiet in response. In my comfy chair I'll replay the event and decide on a better response next time. For example, the next time it happens, I'll give the person a kind and humorous reply even if the joke was weak or biting.
I also think about future events. "I should set up a meeting with Rob." "I should ask Lorraine about her father." "I should tell Michael about that book I just read."
I think about things and that changes my future behavior. I know I have free will.
Determinism and free will are not in conflict. A simple 3 minute explanation why: https://youtu.be/_fUVQ5PaCNs
When you say there are several things you "could" do, are you simply saying there's a random probability over them, or is it something distinct? If the latter (as free will tends to imply), could you clarify what the claim actually is? To me, it seems like the actual statement here can't really be defined
My own view is that people who disagree about libertarian free will often hold tacit, different definitions of free will, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202404/robert-sapolsky-and-kevin-mitchell-on-free-will , and consequently speak past one another, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202405/when-disagreements-are-caused-by-talking-past-each-other
Your definition of free will apparently refers to your subjective sense of being unrestricted when you choose among options. Like all normal human beings, I share this same subjective sense of choice. However, I know that many of our perceptions do not reflect reality. For example, we have the subjective sense that our eyes are showing us the way the world is. For example, the grass outside my window looks green, so my subjective sense is that the greenness is really in the grass. However, my knowledge of the way nervous systems work informs me that this perception of the grass itself really being green is an illusion, an artifact of the way my eyes and visual cortex interpret the wavelengths of light reflecting from the grass. Animals with different nervous systems will perceive the same grass differently, and none of these perceptions reflect reality concerning color.
The same is true for the subjective sense of free will. It feels like, at any moment, I could have made a different choice, but the principle of scientific determinism says otherwise. At each particular point in time, there could have been no other choice than the one I made. My assumption of determinism and lack of free will is not unsettling, because, subjectively I feel free. Just like, subjectively, I see greenness in the grass.
As for solipsism, I find the argument for it based on thoughts not being publicly observable silly. There is a good reason to assume that others are having experiences very similar to ours, namely, that our brains are similarly constructed. There are some philosophical arguments worth having, and some, not. Free will is worth discussing; solipsism is not.
Solipsism is only worth not discussing because it's true. That said what's equally true is it's number one critique of its irrelevance. True or not changes nothing, it's unknowable so we have to live in a framework where other people do exist because subjectively they do even if objectively it's unknowable hence Solipsism itself is irrelevant.
Determinism TBH has the same problem in its irrelevant. Whether we have free will or just the perception of is irrelevant, for people that care about such questions they have to pretend whichever answer suits them is subjectivity true regardless of it being objectively so.
Both philosophies are uninteresting outside dullard thought experiments during a pipedream, like pondering if God exists or his motives. All are objectively unknowable hence the best solution is just acceptance (or resignation) that the questions themselves are superfluous.
I agree with your assessments of solipsism and free will as philosophies. I am less interested in free will less as a philosophical issue than a psychological one (I am a psychologist). I want to know what people mean by free will and how their thoughts and feelings about their conception of free will make a difference (or not) in terms of how they live their lives.
"the principle of scientific determinism says otherwise."
What is this principle? Does science tackle conscious humans in the first place?
All the science ie physics is built up by studies on inanimate bodies. They don't do physics experiments on living things qua living things.
My body consists entirely of chemical elements. The fact that they combine into organic molecules does not make them exempt from the laws of physics.
But do the laws of physics exhaust the total properties and reality of chemical elements and substances?
Don't the laws of physics abstract from the total reality?
For example, do the laws exhaust the totality of a lightening strike?
I do not understand what you mean by "exhaust the total properties and reality of" and "exhaust the totality of."
Consider an electron. What we can say about it is exhausted by what physics says about it--its charge, mass, spin, momentum etc.
Consider lightening--we can say plenty more. How it looks, how it feels. The lightening exists beyond the discourse of physics in a way electron does not. Electron is an item in physical theories. It has no existence beyond it. Lightening exists pre-physics.
You seem to be saying that knowledge by acquaintance (the subjective experience of lightning--how it looks, how it feels) does not require knowledge by description (theoretical knowledge of electrons). These are indeed two kinds of knowledge. A physical explanation of lightning is not equivalent to the experience of lightning. However, this does not mean that lightning has somehow transcended the laws of physics as currently understood.
The case for free will is very simple: The statement "I have no free will" is a self contradiction because, if true, the statement is merely cosmic noise predetermined by the big bang.
Our current understanding of physics does not explain the "mechanism" of free will any more than it explains the origin of life. Yet both life and free will exist. The latter is an emergent property of the former.
Couldn't the statement "I have no free will" be true and cosmic noise predetermined by the big bang?
I mean I wouldn't describe the comment "comic noise predetermined by the big bang", I just don't see how that is a refutation.
It is a shame that students at all levels rarely ever encounter a course in basic LOGIC except perhaps in some esoteric branches of philosophy.
The most common logical fallacies involve making an argument which also refutes (either directly or by implication) one of the concepts upon which it is based.
This is most obvious is the "paradox" of the man who claims "Everything I say is a lie!"
Other cases are more deeply buried.
Let's rephrase "I have no free will!" to reflect what the speaker intends to communicate in a way that will convince the listener:
"I have thoroughly considered all the options and DECIDED of my own free will that it is TRUE that I have no free will." In other words, concepts like "decide" and "truth" are meaningless is there is no free will.
Indeed all THOUGHT presupposes free will. Everything else is cosmic noise.
But I don't think it is a decision as to whether free will is true, so I don't think it is self refuting to say there is no free will.
Like imagine I said "I have decided it is true that I am tall". Being tall is not something I decide.