It seems like you mostly refute common arguments for why free will doesnt exist, as opposed to providing compelling arguments for why it does exist.

I personally think that possessing the ability to do otherwise doesn't imply free will exists, but that there is an inherent randomness to determinism. I see determinism as defining the likelihood of certain decisions being made, not necessarily what choice WILL be made. It defines the thought processes that lead to certain things being chosen over others.

I think that, free will exists according to your parameters, sure. But I don't really agree with your parameters. But this then just comes down to, what does free will even mean? Its a semantic debate, and I remain completely convinced its entirely a semantic debate based on that article.

Good read though.

I'm starting to feel that these discussions are meaningless, due to the nature of such words meaning different things to different people. You can only really prove free will or determinism is correct according to what you define them as. Such terms are so hard to pin down..

I also appreciate that this is written in a way so that it can be understood by those who aren't academic vermin. Nice to read a philosophy post without the pretentious wank.

My thoughts. You are restricting Laplace's Demon without justification. You called the demon "the ultimate predictor." A reasonable interpretation of that would be that if something is necessarily true from known information, then the demon will know it. I think this would have been the correct understanding of the demon for the situation. Instead, you have gone with the interpretation that if something is algorithmically provable from known information, then the demon will know it. A given program will halt or it will not. One of those is necessarily true. It is not algorithmically provable. That doesn't, in any reasonable sense of the word mean the program is free.

Second I think you fail to show an infinite computational medium. Perhaps a person with an infinite lifespan in an infinite universe would have an infinite computational medium. And so a question like "will he ever take x action" might be undecidable. However, If you restrict the scope to a given timeframe. "will he kiss that girl he likes today", you are restricting your focus to a finite period of time, and a finite space (i.e. a sphere of space 1 light-day in radius). You lose your infinite computational medium, and suddenly you have a decidable problem.

In situations of weak selection (survival and reproductive chance are not at stake), normal humans can generate any nonsense sequence of behavior at will, I can shout "cat", "-957", pause for 3 minutes and 49 seconds, "0.03", "I don't want a watermelon", "ξ"...so on. Such nonsense is arguably non-decodable. In other words, we have the "ability" of free will, but most people don't necessarily use it due to societal and environmental constraints. Unconscious behaviors or decisions that are made fast without thinking are very much predictable I agree.

>So what’s wrong with this line of thinking which is so drawn to molecules and such? Consider the following question as an analogy: Are apples red? Suppose we all agree that apples have color.

And so on. Uh... rigid designators. Taxonomy. Humans are lazy. Oh my god. Bertrand Russel would take you to school on this example like a boss, perhaps like so: 'Of course we mean to speak within a certain generally-accepted range of experiences - possibly limited to only humans, and even then, not definitive, for what of the colorblind? We refer to a sense impression. The simple phrase "it is red" is the peak of a pyramid of unstated assumptions, agreements, and limitations!'

Honestly. Go ahead and try changing a bunch of those molecules and see what happens to "red" back up at the top of that pyramid. Change the molecules in the human eye. Change the molecules in the human brain. So many ways to disrupt the vaunted "red" that are not on the scale of "red," and you want to use it as an analogy for why focusing on the wrong scale is an error, with an eye towards suggesting that various scales possess magical independence from each other.

Yikes, dude. I sincerely hope you do not cavalierly engage in "independent scale" surgery on yourself with confidence that your various "rednesses" will not be affected. That would be a very bad idea. Don't do it. Some "rednesses" are not as lazy and tolerant as others. "Alive" seems like a pretty broad one at the outset, but you might want to do some research on how many "independent and irrelevant scale" changes can disrupt it quite definitively.

>It is caused by many small parts, but only when taken together all at once. And that’s the same thing as the whole person. So my thoughts and actions are deterministically caused by me. The molecules of which my brain is made are deeply irrelevant to this fact.

So it's caused by many small parts all at once, but the molecules aren't even some of those small parts? They're irrelevant small parts? Even though we can measure changes in them as apparent partial causes of actions and partial consequences of other actions?

You're asserting a mind/body divide here baldly. Where's your argument? Where's your evidence?

>If a molecule were the relevant cause of my action, this would not be true in the same way.

You literally just posited that many small parts can all work in tandem, even though you rejected the possibility that molecules are the relevant small parts. This line, therefore, is something akin to a straw man. That accusation can only be perversely rebutted by the fact that we know molecules are not indivisible, and not always stable. Some molecules can "self reflect" (read: not really, because everything is connected, and subject to physical laws) and become not the molecule they originally were.

Re: undecideability

Instead of nitpicking - because it's exhausting, and I could do it all day - let me try to ask you a broader question:

If you do something that surprises Laplace's demon, how on Earth does it not also surprise you? If it surprises you, then doesn't it seem a little odd to call it "free?" It seems much more like we're just almost-infinitely-dumber demons who possess no real awareness of our own goings-on - only comforting illusions, which is a peculiar booby prize of ignorance. Doesn't the definition of undecideability you quoted make the very question you're trying to answer unanswerable? You retreat to what cannot be known to try to convince us that you know how something works.

Predicting yourself isn't relevant to free will because being free means that you aren't controlled (or perfectly predicted) by anything else. You are you. So if you predict you, that's fine. You control you. And you can also be free without actually making any prediction of what you'll do.

So violations of your own expectation of yourself don't say much about free will one way or the other. But violations of Laplace's demon's expectations say a lot.

It’s all pachinko

The first time I tried tickling myself, I expected to experience the urge to laugh. Not experiencing that urge violated my own expectations. However, I would not say that I freely chose to not experience the urge to laugh.

I wrote the last sentence with an expectation of what my behaviors and their experienced outcomes would be. My prediction was as reliable as one might expect, yet I feel like my choice free, or at least more free than the earlier not-experiencing of the urge to laugh.

Since I can observe myself, but resolutions of expectated observations seem orthogonal to my sense of freedom, I doubt violations of expectation say much about free will one way or the other.

No, it's in the "Autumn 2022" issue of the journal, but that issue wasn't released until yesterday.

[deleted]

Glad I could clear things up :) Brandom's someone I've spent a lot of time reading and talking with others about in my studies, so I'm always happy to talk about him more.

wow, you actually read it? I commend you.

I'd just ask OP for a summary of his main points. lol

It was published in the same journal twice? Exactly a year apart?

I do not think free will and predictability are contradictory. Free will posts that we can make choices and that they are not just pre-determined. Those choices are going to be strongly influenced by our experiences and preferences, but they are still our choices.

Free will allows to make choices even if the majority of them will be predictable.

I think free will simply has to exist because decision making happens in a complex system, brains, which runs on electficity and is affected by quantum states and mechanics. I believe this mechanical fact is what separates us from a purely mechanical system. Even on a very simple level, I believe that quantum mechanics are how we get true randomness into the universe, and even if we spend our wholo lives making the most predictable choices, we made them out of free will because the particle proterties involved in reality and our brains can not physically have been pre-determined.

Yesterday

If we are "just" organic cells, then who's being misled by the realistic illusion? Can a cell experience an illusion? A cell can't experience anything at all. Only a non-reduced, complete functional pattern of billions of cells can experience something. So that complete pattern has very different properties and capacities than do "just cells."

That complete functional pattern of cells, when taken as a whole is called a person. So a person is not "just" cells. If we want to know whether a person has free will, it's a mistake to change the question to whether or not "just cells" have free will.

Ok, deydrate but...you kinda missed the point. Not trying to be your adversary here. Trying to help you learn how to think.

Let's look at it a different way.

The conversation started as one about 'objective truth'. That's a fairly high standard of truth and very little can be proven under it. You are thinking of truth in a different way, for lack of a better description let's call it 'practical truth'. In this we will essentially accept the world around us exists, and the data we receive from our perceptions in generally real (excepting things like hallucinations, mind playing tricks, etc.). So, with this frame of reference, you can start to look at things and say stuff like this table is X inches high, this table is made of cherry wood. But you can't say things like this table is brown because color is much like hot and cold. Color is subject to the lighting conditions. You may think, wait a minute "I can see that the table is brown." And that is a true observation, but not a true statement of the table itself. If the table is in a room, you can simply turn off the light and the table is no longer brown. Your brain thinks, "wait a minute, if I shine a light on it, I can see it is brown again." But in order to achieve that color you have to shine the light. And if you shine a light of a different color, the table changes color. You may want to say, "no that is the color of the light making it seem as if the table is different color." Nope, you only think the table is brown because of the color temperature of light you normally shine on it. If you lived on planet with a red sun, everything would look different and that would be the 'natural' color of the table instead, and if you shined a 2700K white light on it, that would be the same to them as you shining a red light on the 'brown' table. The point being, all color is subjective to the lighting conditions available. So while you may want to say something as simple as an orange is orange, that's not accurate. It is called an orange and that would be a practical truth, but to say an orange is orange is all dependent upon the lighting. So, the truth you are looking for doesn't exist. You can bring things down to another level and take things like lighting out of the equation and maybe get to something you might want to call 'everyday truth' but that's a simplification of a grand number of events and conditions happening all around you at all times. To sum it up, using the idea of 'objective truth': If a man is standing in the middle of a road, you must ask what evidence is there that he is a man? What evidence is there that he exists? How can you show he or the road even exist? Using the idea of 'practical truth': What road is he standing on? Is he on Earth? Then calculations come into play regarding how fast the Earth is moving as well as the galaxy. Technically, even the universe but that's a bit harder number to calculate so it can be ignored. But the conclusion is that a man standing on a object without moving is in fact moving. And then using the idea of 'everyday truth' yes, you can have what you are starting to think of as truth, the man is standing in the road because you can see him standing in the road. But this is a philosophy subreddit, and concepts of physics and existentialism are part of much of the conversation. Yeah it's a headache, but that's philosophy.

When was this published?

Two interesting concerns. I think I have answers for them.

AI can get pretty accurate, but never completely accurate in its predictions of what you'll do. And many of your actions that are amenable to prediction by AI are also somewhat predictable by other humans. Like I can predict pretty well that you'll have something for dinner this evening. I might be 99% percent sure of it. But I can't really know that you won't skip dinner. You could. So you have the ability to 'do otherwise' even in the case that you do end up eating dinner like I predict. I think the predictions made by AI will be like this.

Some group actions are more predictable than individual actions. But you are not a group. So your free will isn't diminished by this. Also, a group can be made unpredictable by individual action.

You could easily see that if you just google “all roads lead to Rome” and then you google “circulatory system of a rat”.

Regarding the first one: it took millennia to build, the efforts of perhaps millions of people, with different ideas, objectives, needs, in different times and for different reasons (commerce, love, power, money, craziness, etc).

Also, you could draw a similar map for pretty much every major city in the whole world, it just depends on which road you select and why. You could say that it’s the product of the free will of millions, so it should be unpredictable.

The second one (the rat) we think is just the product of biology, chemistry and physics. No free will at all, in fact it is predictable (it’s the same in every mammal, in every leaf, in every hydrographic system, etc).

So…millions of “free people” were able to recreate a pattern that does not require free will, and they did it without even knowing it, across millennia.

My point being: our brain runs a sophisticated software that gives us a very bright and realistic illusion. We are just organic cells with shoes.

That all sounds great to me. And I think

>responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).

is obviously much better than "tapping into something". I do not have the best words. And admittedly I'm not well read on Blackburn OR Brandom, but I cannot help myself maundering. Thank you for humoring me!

edit- I have no clue where I got Brandom, it's very possible I was reading SEP and listening to the video at the same time, apologies.

I'm not sure if this really stays within the same philosophy. But I have 2 concerning thoughts about this. I tend to agree with the statements suggesting we have free will. However, many of the modern AI systems seem to keep improving at predicting our preferences and behavior the more data they collect, contradicting the statement of our unpredictability.

Also, the more we look at humans in larger groups rather than at each human individually, the more it becomes possible to predict the overall actions of a group. Which also contradicts said unpredictability and possibly suggests that it's controlled by a complex ecosystem of humanity and its environment as a whole. Rendering free will to be an illusion.

Breaking hard determinism unpredictable chaos

I’m not proposing an idealist theory of Truth. Your case of the red ball has an important nuance. It is not about the present indeterminacy of the red ball being there or not. This is something that CAN be checked, it is a falsifiable theory. If you were to add as a premise that the box is indestructible and that it is impossible to verify whether there is a red ball or not, then we have an issue where we have to banish the possibility of objective Truth.

There might in fact be an objective Truth, the ball is there or it isn’t, but what good is it to us if its impossible to have the truth one way or another? If I correctly guess that the red ball is in there (assuming the objective Truth is the red ball is there), I will never be able to benefit from the objectivity of this truth, because for me it will always be doubtful, so it is inevitably reduced to the level of belief. So what good does it do me what the objective truth is? Even if I am holding the truth in my hand, I don’t benefit from it.

This indestructible box example is a better metaphor for your question of the consciousness of another being (AI, or even another human), because as far as an outsider is concerned, we can only make educated guesses based on intuition about the existence of a consciousness in another mind. Strictly speaking, you have never directly seen concrete evidence of another person’s mind, and so based on a theory of 100% certainty, you might as well be solipsistic. But we operate without having to know absolute truth. I operate on the basis of a very strong intuition that other minds are conscious, without a certainty about it. I have banished the need to know the objective truth here and allowed myself to be satisfied with an uncertain, but accessible and functional, subjective truth.

Salt doesn’t melt a snail. No.

This just seems like semantics. I’m not following you. Sorry.