And does anybody wonder why I cannot will myself to bear to read JP's comments?

Watched a bit of Kane. Some dubious things in there.

He give an eaxmple of a business woman on her way to an important meeting when she sees somone in trouble in an alley. She is torn between wanting to help and wanting to serve her career goals by attending the meeting. Kane tries to argue that this is to competing neural networks each suppressing the other with random noise and that the one that wins out and triggers action is her willed effort.

But no doubt whichever choice is made would be counted her free will choice and we really can't credit noise either way. It's supposed to be a Burridan's ass scenario but that can only be assumed. The two options aren't comparable in many ways and we can just as well say that the neural networks just take some time to compute a good enough solution that outranks the other and would have done so repeatedly given the precise circumstances and states at the time. It really demonstrates nothing at all about whether people have free will or not.

Another thing he says is that he believes people are responsible for their own character and that previous 'free choices' must account for someone's character at any later choice. Aside from the absurd impracticality of this, it's completely untestable, how do you freely choose to construct your own character? It is surely a process that begins long before you have any conception of your own character or what you might want it to become in future years. A Baby doesn't choose to stop sucking it's thumb because it wants to grow up to be an adult that is not the sort that sucked their thumb as a baby (whatever that would be). It seems to be taking the myth of the self made man to absurd extremes.

Anyway, it's a different perspective.

Freedom to think

GrahamH wrote:Watched a bit of Kane. Somedubious things in there.

Read Kane's Free Will a couple of times a few years ago ... it's a collection of essays from various authors.

The thing that struck me was how tortured the arguments were even those that were against free will.
None really dealt with can we be independent of cause and the consequences thereof.

I have read somewhere Kane's position is actually compatibilism dressed up as libertarianism.
But what the hell.

romansh wrote:

John Platko wrote:
Libertarian Free will means that determinism is false. And you have free will, i.e. you can actually choose to do otherwise.

This might help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determini ... eeWill.svg

The hard incompatibilist will have a hard time understanding that cosmic dice shakers shaping my will is somehow free. Unpredictable yes, and perhaps by some lights, doing otherwise. But end of the day it was the cosmic dice shaker that was shaping my will. The dice rolled and there appeared my will.

Is this an eye test? Where are the hard incompatibilist in that picture?

scott1328 wrote:And does anybody wonder why I cannot will myself to bear to read JP's comments?

Nope. If I found myself asking questions like:

sigh

If the notion of libertarian free will is totally discarded, what is actually lost?

I couldn't bear to read JP's comments on why libertarian free will is the best concept we have to explain the choices we make either.

GrahamH wrote:Watched a bit of Kane. Somedubious things in there.

He give an eaxmpleofabusiness woman on her way to an important meeting when she see somone in trouble in an alley. She is torn between wanting to help and wanting to server her career goals by attending the meeting. Kane tries to argue that this is to ompeting neural networks each suppressing the other with random noise and that the one that wins out and triggers action is her willed effort.

Does he give any reasons why he believe the networks are shooting noise at each other? (On second thought, are you sure he said that?)

But no doubt whichever choice is made would be counted her freewill choice and we really can't credit noise either way. It's supposed to be a Burridan's ass scenario but that can only be assumed.

Did he actually say that? I'm going to have to watch the video.

edit: Holy crap! I watched the video and he did actually say that. WOW! He can't possibly know that noise is the cause for such choices. And the situation he set up is hardly an obvious Burridan's situation - as he pointed out at about 103:00

The two options aren't comparable in many ways and we can just as well say that the neural networks just take some time to compute a good enough solution that outranks the other and would have done so repeatedly given the precise circumstances and states at the time. It really demonstrates nothing at all about whether people have free will or not.

Anther thing he says is that he believes people are responsible for their own character and that previous 'free choices' must account for someone's character at any later choice.

Makes sense to me.

Aside from the absurd impracticality of this,

What do you find impractical about that?

it's completely untestable, how do you freely choose to construct your own character?

People do it all the time - you got to get out more - maybe hang with more variety of characters choosing their character.

It is surely a process that begins long before you have any conception of your own character or what you might want it to become in future years.

Sure, that makes sense.

A Baby doesn't choose to stop sucking it's thumb because it wants to grow up to be an adult that is not the sort that sucked their thumb as a baby (whatever that would be). It seems to be taking the myth of the self made man to absurd extremes.

Anyway, it's a different perspective.

It's the same perspective I have. Other than the bit about noise, which I can overlook as just a bit of speculation, I rather like his presentation and overall analysis of free will. It's well thought out. Anybody know if he's a Catholic?

romansh wrote:
The thing that struck me was how tortured the arguments were even those that were against free will.
None really dealt with can we be independent of cause and the consequences thereof.

You're making exactly the same sort of argument against free will that John Platko is making in favor of it. Even regardless of whether your argument is accepted, that should tell you something. Even if you understand what that's telling you, I'm not betting you'll use it to improve your 'argument'.

Let me reformulate my critique, then:

Whatever you were caused to do is what you did. You just write the converse of that so it looks like a conclusion from reasoning to deterministic causation. You didn't identify any causes of what you did, and if you go ahead and accept that challenge, the only justification for your 'argument' is that the Big Bang happened something like 13.8 billion years ago, or you'll pick some proximal rationalization for what you did do, after the fact. Of course it looks to you as if it was 'caused'. It happened, ergo it must have been caused, because there is no free will, only deterministic random dicey influences.

Isn't it wonderful to have a totalizing rationalization for everything you did, do, will do? You did what you did, so yeah, it seems like it was inevitable in retrospect. The lack of evidence for your dicey causal chain is mounting, romansh, so get busy filling in the blanks.

Cito di Pense wrote:

romansh wrote:
The thing that struck me was how tortured the arguments were even those that were against free will.
None really dealt with can we be independent of cause and the consequences thereof.

You're making exactly the same sort of argument against free will that John Platko is making in favor of it.

True, but to be fair to both of us there really is no other sort of argument to be made.

Even regardless of whether your argument is accepted, that should tell you something. Even if you understand what that's telling you, I'm not betting you'll use it to improve your 'argument'.

Let me reformulate my critique, then:

Whatever you were caused to do is what you did. You just write the converse of that so it looks like a conclusion from reasoning to deterministic causation. You didn't identify any causes of what you did, and if you go ahead and accept that challenge, the only justification for your 'argument' is that the Big Bang happened something like 13.8 billion years ago, or you'll pick some proximal rationalization for what you did do, after the fact. Of course it looks to you as if it was 'caused'.

Isn't it wonderful to have a totalizing rationalization for everything you did, do, will do? You did what you did, so yeah, it seems like it was inevitable in retrospect. The lack of evidence for your causal chain is mounting, romansh, so get busy filling in the blanks.

John Platko wrote:True, but to be fair to both of us there really is no other sort of argument to be made.

Well, even if you understand what that's telling you, I'm not betting you will take the hint and desist from your 'argument'.

Maybe you should try a different tack, perhaps argument by contradiction. This has a side benefit, since you start out making an argument that something you think is true is false, with the aim of finding that you contradict yourself when you develop the argument fully. In an arena like this, negating something you think is true carries some emotional cost.

By way of example, if I really thought romansh was trying to argue for free will via proof-by-contradiction, I'd applaud.

John Platko wrote:Libertarian Free will means that determinism is false. And you have free will, i.e. you can actually choose to do otherwise.

Hm. I suspect not.

If Libertarianism is merely that, then that's a very, very low bar indeed.

Libertarianism, by that definition, is just another type of pseudo free will, and you can have it and I won't ask to borrow it from you. Good luck to you and all who sail that pseudo Free Will toy ship.

Also, it's not the sort of free will humans have traditionally and still mostly do think they have. That sort involves a little hommunculus or an equivalent function exercising its ultimate, actual free will. I suspect that's what many if not most Libertarians implicitly mean anyway.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:Libertarian Free will means that determinism is false. And you have free will, i.e. you can actually choose to do otherwise.

Hm. I suspect not.

If Libertarianism is merely that, then that's a very, very low bar indeed.

Well, some have difficulty crawling under that bar because they errantly think the world is deterministic.

Libertaranism, by that definition, is just another type of pseudo free will, and you can have it and I won't ask to borrow it from you. Good luck to you and all who sail that pseudo Free Will toy ship.

You're in the same ship - illusions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Also, it's not the sort of free will humans have traditionally and still mostly do think they have. That sort involves a little hommunculus or an equivalent function exercising its ultimate, actual free will. I suspect that's what most if not many Libertarians mean anyway.

Conway and Kane support the same sort of free will. It's rather obvious why a no free willer would not like a free will definition that we obviously have. In any case, no true scotsman arguments are lame.

Cito di Pense wrote:
By way of example, if I really thought romansh was trying to argue for free will via proof-by-contradiction, I'd applaud.

If this is what you mean Cito ... if we had free will we would be able to choose our wants?

Well clearly we can wish that we had stronger wants to loose weight or learn another language. Is this what you mean? So is this what free will would look like? Well perhaps. But where does our wish come from? And if we could identify this, we can play the recursive game until we end up in some unidentified cause, be it deterministic or indeterministic.

This is the basis of Galen Strawson's argument against free will.

Now while I might be able give my causes beyond some anecdotal confabulation, there are studies of the more easily observable proximate causes of our behaviours ... even as individuals we may not be aware. These are summarized in the popular science literature ... Mlodinow's Subliminal is an example. So there seems to be evidence against our anecdotal free choice ... in fact all to often we confabulate our free choices.

If we go to the underlying causes whether they be determinate or indeterminate ... I don't care, other than a confabulated academic interest, do you?

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:Libertarian Free will means that determinism is false. And you have free will, i.e. you can actually choose to do otherwise.

Hm. I suspect not.

If Libertarianism is merely that, then that's a very, very low bar indeed.

Libertarianism, by that definition, is just another type of pseudo free will, and you can have it and I won't ask to borrow it from you. Good luck to you and all who sail that pseudo Free Will toy ship.

Also, it's not the sort of free will humans have traditionally and still mostly do think they have. That sort involves a little hommunculus or an equivalent function exercising its ultimate, actual free will. I suspect that's what many if not most Libertarians implicitly mean anyway.

That' my understanding of the term and what Romansh's chart shows. Determinism is false, so your choices are not determined by the past and you have free will. You are the "uncaused cause".

GrahamH wrote:Determinism is false, so your choices are not determined by the past and you have free will. You are the "uncaused cause".

Yes, it's an AND thing. A sort of a two-stage affair. With the nub of the problem shunted into stage 2, where randomness is counterproductive, because in stage 2 you want to be able to determine stuff, you just want to determine it freely.

Personally, that's where I think the little hommunculus comes in.

John Platko wrote:

Also, it's not the sort of free will humans have traditionally and still mostly do think they have. That sort involves a little hommunculus or an equivalent function exercising its ultimate, actual free will. I suspect that's what most if not many Libertarians mean anyway.

Conway and Kane support the same sort of free will. It's rather obvious why a no free willer would not like a free will definition that we obviously have. In any case, no true scotsman arguments are lame.

Sorry, I'm not following your point there.

To clarify my point, what I find interesting, arguably most interesting of all, is that for most people (it seems) the sort of free will they believe in (often in a rather intuitive, contradictory and confused way because they haven't given it a lot of thought) is an illusion.

This, in a way, is separate to discussions among intelligent young philosopher such as ourselves, where we might have more informed and sophisticated understandings.

I'm only half joking. When Jerry Coyne stood in front of that audience and told them they didn't have free will, I reckon the sort of free will he said they didn't have was mostly (assuming they weren't all philosophy enthusiasts) the sort they intuitively thought they had. The Ultimate sort. Or something akin to it. I'm basically talking about Folk Psychology.

What I am saying is not entirely dissimilar to saying that most 'ordinary' religious people who have not thought deeply about their religion, may have an idea of god that is......dodgy. Unlike your good self, of course.

romansh wrote:If this is what you mean Cito ...

Do you think that causality is a human construct or a feature of the universe? Whichever it is, why do you think so? If you think it's a feature of the universe, do you think it's a feature of quantum electrodynamics, or do you think it, er, emerges, you know, the way consciousnessness does?

What I mean is that your dull-witted reliance on reducto ad absurdum is as tedious and boring as John Platko's is.

Well clearly we can wish...

And what of it?

where does our wish come from?

Did you really want to reify wishing, or is this just your habit of whipping out a buzz-phrase from folk psychology when you think you need something that looks like an example?

And this 'comes from' business? Did you mean 'originate'? Yes, you probably need to post-date your 'wish' from the Big Bang, or before. After all, it's a thing, just like an electron is. Are you really equipped to join this conversation, or are you just hoping nobody will notice the stuff you're not specifying properly?

So you say: Let's not get all academical about it. This is just an informal philosophy bull session.

we can play the recursive game until we end up in some unidentified cause

Is an unidentified cause sort of like an unconscious thought? What's an unidentified cause, romansh? Is that what happens when you pull your thumb out of your ass, forget where you just stuck it, and then can't figure out why it smells the way it does? What caused your thumb to stink like that? Was it the act of sticking your thumb in your ass, or was it something you ate? Or some ecology of flora in your gut?

You know the drill: Something must have caused it, because your model is causality. You assume it and then you prove it. Well done, you.

Are you starting to see what's so fucking stupid about causality outside a mechanistic model of some physical process, which omits looking for ultimate cause, sort of like the way archibald wants to leave out ultimate free will?

there are studies of the more easily observable proximate causes of our behaviours

Causes, romansh? These are not from some fucking mechanistic model. These are the folktales of psychobabble. Causality should be made of stronger stuff, lest it be mistaken for ultimate causality, or better fucking yet, unidentified causality.

John Platko wrote:
People do it all the time - you got to get out more - maybe hang with more variety of characters choosing their character.

Do you have any personal anecdotes of doing that? How about some blogs or similarly rigorous evidence?
Even if you think you are doing that, thinking that the choice you make today will create in your character trait X in the future, you couldn't actually tell that it worked. Confirmation bias would have you in a bind there.

Let's say your teenage diary recounts a choice you made about a lost wallet you found. Suppose you were then of dishonest character and wanted to pocket the money and toss the wallet. Do we credit that you decided against your character at the time to return the wallet in the hope that in the future you would develop an honest character?
Do we suspect that you were more honest then than you gave yourself credit for?
Maybe your priest had told you to think WWJD the Sunday before and you had it mind that you should try to be a better person. Than that's the reason for choice rather than a free choice of your own, for no other reason than you want to crate a different character.

That makes no sense. Maybe you can spin a better tale.

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote:Determinism is false, so your choices are not determined by the past and you have free will. You are the "uncaused cause".

Yes, it's an AND thing. A sort of a two-stage affair. With the nub of the problem shunted into stage 2, where randomness is counterproductive, because in stage 2 you want to be able to determine stuff, you just want to determine it freely.

Personally, that's where I think the little hommunculus comes in.

Ignore randomness. That's just a gimmick to counter hard determinism.
Think of libertarian free will as a spontaneous creation of your own mind, a bit of magic. A sort of inspired second guessing of your own wants and desires such that the choice does not follow from existing wants and desires but is what you want and desire when the choice is made.

This is, of course, just a fantasy explanation of a nonsense concept.

Cito di Pense wrote:What's an unidentified cause, romansh?

Oh oh I've got one, I think (waves hand in air above head and hopes teacher will notice him).