moving finger said:
If he desires to vote for Kerry, why is it suddenly *not* his desire if Black is waiting in the background to force him to vote for Kerry if he would decide not to vote for Kerry.
Tournesol said:
It *is* his desire to vote for Kerry. And he *can* do otherwise -- or at least, wish otherwise. Becasue something has has to trigger Black's mechanism.
You have put your finger right on the button. We are now moving from the original libertarian premise of “could have
done otherwise” to a new premise of “could have
wished otherwise”. You obviously concede from this move that it might be the case that Black could ensure that Jones could NOT do otherwise (“do” in the sense of “act”), and now you wish to push the point of interest back before the moment of action, to the moment of wishing. But Black can move his neural intervention back too, so that he detects the neural precursors (the antecedent mental states) to the “wish”, and by doing so he can ensure that Jones either “wishes” to vote for Kerry of his own accord (of his own free will) or (if Black detects neural activity which suggests Jones may instead wish to vote for Bush) then Black intervenes and forces a “wish” to vote for Kerry. In this case, not only could Jones not have “done” otherwise, he also could not have “wished” otherwise.
I don’t need to explain that this procedure can be placed as far back in the “decision process” as we like. The argument you are using here is basically the “flicker of freedom” argument, which ends up pushing the flicker back so far down the causal chain that it eventually extinguishes itself in randomness. For a more detailed examination, see Diana Hsieh, in Defending Alternate Possibilities, here :
http://www.dianahsieh.com/docs/dap.pdf
If we apply Black’s device to your Darwinian model, and push it as far back as we can, then Black eventually ends up monitoring the output of the RIG – and then sending countermanding instructions to the SIS if he decides to intervene. In your model, it is the RIG, and not the SIS, which is effectively “making the decisions” for Jones – and these RIG decisions are of course completely arbitrary (they have to be, to fulfill the arbitrary libertarian requirement of alternate possibilities)….. that’s ultimately where your so-called “flicker of freedom” comes from.
Tournesol said:
And as for those idiot metallurgists, thinking steel is a mixtureof iron and carbon...
Any metallurgist who does think that steel is “simply” a mixture of iron and carbon is indeed an idiot – steel is a very particular kind of mixture, put together in a particular way – “any old mixture” of iron and carbon will not necessarily give you steel. And “any old mixture” of determinism and indeterminism will not necessarily give you ultimate responsibility and free will. The point is that you cannot explain just why one particular mixture should give ultimate responsibility and another one not.
moving finger said:
The point in time is irrelevant - the only relevant issue is the outcome.
Tournesol said:
says “could have
done otherwise”. There is no temporal constraint in the phrase.
Of course if you now wish to change that requirement to “could have wished otherwise” or “could have willed otherwise” or “could have thought otherwise” then that’s fine – but shifting the goalposts doesn’t change the basic argument (as shown above).
moving finger said:
Jones can wish or desire or choose whatever he wants - the only important issue as far as responsibility is concerned is his voluntary act.
Tournesol said:
Wich is voluntary because he could have *wished* differently, even if he could not have acted don't the wish.
Then why do the libertarians insist that free will entails “could have
done otherwise”? If only the wish, and not the act, is important, it follows that what he could have “done” is irrelevant to whether he has free will or not.
Tournesol said:
I have shown the flaw. Responsibility lies with freely-chose intentions.
And I have shown the flaw in your “flicker of freedom” argument. Black’s intervention can be moved back to the neural states antecedent to the moment of Jones forming his conscious choice, so that Jones’ conscious choice is always to vote for Kerry (he cannot choose otherwise), but in one case Black does not intervene (Jones chooses freely) and in the other (when he sees that Jones neural states indicate that he will form a choice to vote for Bush) he does intervene (Jones does not choose freely). See Diana Hsieh for more detail on the argument against the “flicker of freedom” answer to Frankfurt cases.
moving finger said:
What is wrong or missing, do you think, from the following suggested necessary conditions :
1) I did X
2) I wanted to do X
3) I understand the consequences of doing X and of not doing X, and I understand right and wrong.
If an entity meets all 3 of the above conditions, why would we say that entity is not responsible for the act of doing X
Tournesol said:
It doesn't answer counterexamples about hypnotically-implanted suggestions, compulsions,etc.
This is why my original (2) was :
2a) I would have done X, even if I could have done otherwise
Which would answer the hypnosis and compulsion (and Frankfurt) cases. Perhaps you prefer condition 2a to condition 2?
Does a person under hypnosis “want” to do X? How could we tell?
In what sense is a person with a compulsion not responsible for what he does, as long as he does it willingly (ie he wants to do it) and he understands the consequences of what he does?
what additional necessary conditions for responsibility would you add, or what would you change, to answer the counterexamples you have suggested? (understanding that we cannot add “free will” or “ultimate responsibility” as conditions, because this simply results in a tautology, and we cannot add “could have xxxxx otherwise”, where xxxxx stands for done/wished/willed/chosen etc because the Frankfurt cases show that this is not a necessary condition for responsibility)
Tournesol said:
You have never given a reason -- except the supertnaturalsim that you don't acctually believe in -- for thinking FW could not possibly be a mixture. So it is in fact your objection which is incoherent.
The main reason is because nobody, including yourself, has come up with a plausible and coherent mechanism which shows how free will works. The best anyone can do is a form of hand-waving with a conclusion “well it looks like it could make reasonable and unpredictable decisions, so I guess it has free will”.
Free will (of the libertarian kind) entails ultimate responsibility (UR). To have Free Will, an agent must be ultimately responsible for its actions. The problem we face is in defining exactly, in a coherent and rational fashion, just what is meant by UR. Most libertarian accounts of Free Will gloss over the interpretation of UR and do not enter into detailed examination of the coherency of the concept. A typical example :
“Freedom is not mere caprice, nor does it lie in being the puppet of circumstances, it is self-determination, a gradual evolution of selfhood”
This kind of freedom definitely sounds like something we would all like to have. But is it a coherent notion, or is it just a warm and fuzzy feeling? If incoherent, then the notion is simply an idle fantasy. Self-determination is another libertarian way of saying that to be free we must be ultimately responsible for what we do. The tricky thing with UR is that to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you must also be ultimately responsible for the way you are (because the way you are, in absence of mere caprice, determines what you do). But to be ultimately responsible for the way you are, you would have to have intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are. Intentionality is a fundamental aspect of UR (if what we do is not what we intend to do, how can we be held ultimately responsible for what we do?). But to intentionally bring about a certain state N, you must have had a prior state N-1 which led to the intentional development of your state N (if N is an arbitrary state in the sense that you had no state prior to N which intentionally brought about state N, then you can hardly be responsible for state N, can you?). But this also means that state N-1 must have been brought about intentionally in a similar fashion, which means there must have been some prior intentional state N-2…… and so on ad infinitum. UR thus entails an infinite regress of intentional states. The only escape from such regress is to postulate either some arbitrary intentional starting state, or that the self is somehow magically and mystically able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, the original causa sui (cause of itself). Your Darwinian model vacillates between the two.
As Nietzsche observed in 1886 (in Beyond Good and Evil) :
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness……
I feel that Nietzsche is too generous to causa sui in claiming that it must pull itself up by its hair. If the causa sui had any hair then it is just conceivable that it could accomplish such a feat. But its worse than that, because UR entails that there is no hair to start with – there is absolutely no intentional antecedent state which this causa sui can grasp a hold of in order to pull itself into existence. If the self is to be truly UR, it must literally create itself from nothingness. It cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps, because by definition it has no bootstraps before it pulls itself up.
Most libertarians avoid the problem of explaining how UR can be coherent by avoiding a detailed definition of UR altogether. UR is usually simply stated as an intuitively self-evident concept which needs no further explanation or rationalisation.
moving finger said:
But it does not follow from this that everything with a supernatural explanation will one day also be explained naturalistically.
Tournesol said:
It doesn't follow from that you have to stick like glue to pre-scientific ideas.
I would say the notion that free will actually exists (as opposed to being an illusion) is a pre-scientific idea.
Tournesol said:
No you don’t. You think free will
actually exists, and is a
particular (not just any old) mixture of indeterminism (not indeterminability) and determinism. But you cannot show how this belief works in practice.
Tournesol said:
I am saying that what we “like” to call free will is not free will in the libertarian sense, it is simply a mixture of determinism and indeterminability. We have the illusion that we act freely simply because we do not have access to the detailed reasons underlying our decisions and actions, and this illusion is what we call “free will”. But some of us (libertarians) believe that the illusion is not an illusion, that we are indeed ultimately responsible for our actions.
Tournesol said:
Being a mixture of iron and carbon doesn't stop steel being steel!
Simply “being a mixture of iron and carbon” is not
sufficient for “being steel”!
Tournesol said:
My critics don't seem to have an alternative analysis.
The “alternative analysis” is the free will skeptic or the compatibilist analysis – both camps deny the coherency of libertarian free will. To these camps, free will and ultimate responsibility of the libertarian kind are simply the product of illusions and wishful thinking in the minds of libertarians. The free will skeptic or the compatibilist analysis is the only analysis which is complete, coherent and rational.
moving finger said:
But this does not tell us HOW you would distinguish, in the output from your Darwinian model, between genuine free will on the one hand, and a simple indeterminable mixture of determinism and indeterminability on the other.
Tournesol said:
NO! of course it doesn't! FREE WILL JUST ***IS*** A MIXTURE OF THE TWO!
Like steel
just ***IS*** a mixture of iron and carbon? I don’t think so! There is a difference between steel and any old mixture of iron and carbon – but you seem to be saying that just
any mixture of determinism and indeterminism will result in free will?
I can define the necessary and sufficient conditions for “steel”, and I can apply those conditions to objectively distinguish between a sample of steel and a simple mixture of carbon and iron. If you want anyone to take your claims about the Darwinian model seriously, you need to do the same for ultimate responsibility. Don’t just claim your model possesses ultimate responsibility, give us some rational reasons for believing that it does.
Again, you do not tell us how you would distinguish between genuine free will on the one hand, and a simple indeterminable mixture of determinism and indeterminability on the other. Saying that it “behaves indeterminably” or that it “behaves rationally” is not enough – because (a) a simple machine can behave both indeterminably and rationally, but it does not necessarily possesses free will, and (b) UR is a necessary condition of free will – how would you go about showing that your model possesses UR?
Best Regards
