Responsibility and Determinism

[Outlandish_Existence]

Hey... I have red hair... no really, I do... No things are random... and yet all things are random... -->happen is because it must<--.

So who's really in control? Not the human... ever... Or does he just think he is... funny concept... this free will... free will to be forced to make decisions because time must go forward... and because we are not solitary entities... are we really in control of us? Or is it the environment around us making us make these decisions... hehe. Life is a duality... don't always focus on one perception or you will find yourself going in circles for a lifetime. When time is stopped and I am placed in complete and utter solitary confinement to nothingness but myself... just MAYBE... just MAYBE... then I'll believe in one's own free will... See, not even red haired people believe they have free will... :P

 

[moving finger]

"common sense" is the only means of analysiing the genuine
*meaning* of a word -- arguing with artificial defintions is pointless.
You might as well say only red-haired people have FW.

What artificial definition are you referring to?

I've noticed that people who are beaten by logic often resort to saying that argument is pointless - it's the only refuge for free will left.

Best Regards

 

[moving finger]

UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE HAD ALREADY MADE HIS MADE UP TO VOTE FOR KERRY.

Not necessarly. Jones may not have “made his mind up” until the very last moment. He may have been undecided up until the moment when he was to put his mark on the ballot paper.

It doesn't matter at what point in time Jones "makes up his mind" - all that matters is that he decides one way or the other - either he decides to vote for Kerry of his own free will, in which case Black does not intervene and Jones is clearly responsible for his act of voting, or he decides to vote for Bush, in which case Black does intervene and Jones is then clearly not responsible for his act of voting. Either way, he votes for Kerry, so the outcome is determined. But in the case where he willingly votes for Kerry he is responsible even though he could not have done otherwise.

He was reponsible for it, and it was *his* choice because it was *his* desire, it was *his* desire, because he could have desired something else.

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. Don't forget, if he decides to vote for Kerry of his own free will then Black does not intervene - therefore Jones's choice is exactly as "free" as if Black were not there.

Frankfurt counterexamples only reinforce the point, which has already been incorporated into the Darwinian theory, that what is important is the "run up" to the decision.

I agree completely, and I agree that the Darwinian model may indeed be a good model of parts of how our brains work. But I don’t agree that the Darwinian model produces anything except for a mixture of determinisdm and indeterminism – it certainly does not produce anything that most libertarians would call free will.

At what point in time ? Could-have-wished otherwise is as important as ever.

The point in time is irrelevant - the only relevant issue is the outcome. Jones can wish or desire or choose whatever he wants - the only important issue as far as responsibility is concerned is his voluntary act. If it appears to Black that the results of Jones' deliberations (wishing, wanting, desiring etc) is going to end up in a vote for Kerry, then Black does nothing and Jones acts voluntarily and is responsible for his act of voting for Kerry. If however it appears to Black that the results of Jones' deliberations (wishing, wanting, desiring etc) is going to end up in a vote for Bush, then Black intervenes and forces him to vote for Kerry, and in that case Jones is not responsible for his act of voting for Kerry.

In the case where Jones chooses to vote for Kerry of his own will then he is responsible for his act, but he could not have done otherwise - no matter what he would have done, he would end up voting for Kerry.

Hence responsibility does not entail alternate possibilities - there is nothing wrong with the logic, Tournesol. I know you don't like it, but if you cannot show any flaw in the logic then all you have left is irrational denial.

If responsibility cannot answer the "Only Some Entities are Credited with Volition", problem without CHDO, CHDO is still necessary.

What needs to be done to answer this is to agree the necessary conditions for responsibility.

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?

I start my argument with a defintion of FW, and my conclusion is compatible with it.

Sorry, which particular argument are you referring to now? (Tournesol, in all honesty I do find it difficult sometimes to understand what you mean in some of your posts, because you make references to things that you obviously understand, but that the rest of us maybe have to guess at)

It is important to distinguish between explanation and explanandum. Libertarian explanations are often supernatural -- we naturalist libertarians are a minority -- and people confusedly think that means the explanandum of FW is supernatural by definition.

I understand, and I agree. I reject the suprenatural explanation of FW simply because it is not an explanation – it’s an avoidance of explanation. The problem with trying to explain free will without resorting to mysticism is that imho it just cannot be done (or at best one ends up with something that is just a mixture of determinism and indeterminism).

At one time, every mental faculty was given a supernatural explanation. As neurology, computer science, etc, have progressed, that is no longer the case.

Agreed. But it does not follow from this that everything with a supernatural explanation will one day also be explained naturalistically.

It is quite odd that so many people in the present day remain insistent that FW is superrnatural or nothing.

Yes, I can see that it seems odd to you. But it seems very straightforward to me, because I believe what we like to call free will is simply a mixture of determinism and indeterminability.

By me, yes. My critics don't seem to have an alternative analysis.

OK, is this the analysis in the following paper?

http://www.geocities.com/peterdjones/det_darwin.html#darwin_vs_buridan

"Arbitrary" is a straw-man. I go to some lengths to explain how they must be combined.

(e.g.: "That does not mean that I think the computer I am using to write this sentence has free will; I see free will as an integral part of human mentality (not as something metahphysically Basic, or Separable), so I would not consider a machine to posess free will unless it could reproduce other aspects of human mentality; and some of the other aspects, such as phenomenal consciousness, pose more of a problem").

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.

Best Regards

 

[moving finger]

A 'decision' is rarely, if ever, a single event. We might start weighing choices and act on one, but that choice (generally) is being constantly evaluated, and as newer information becomes available, that information can be acted upon also.

I agree with all of the above.

Saying we are not in control because of a highly complex, yet random element which is controlled by other decision making elements is rather extreme.

Having thought further about this I agree that the word “control” is probably the wrong word to use here. Control can mean “having the power to direct or determine”, but it can also mean “exercising restraint”. In the sense that the Darwinian model can be configured to provide random outputs within a certain defined range, it could be said to exercise restraint even when it is not deterministic.

My real concern about suggesting the Darwinian model as an accurate model of free will is based on the fact that I see no way to distinguish, in the output of the model, between a free will decision on the one hand, and a decision that is either deterministic, indeterminable, or an indeterminable mixture of the two, on the other hand.

Tournesol is suggesting that true indeterminism is an essential component of the model. But I could build a “model of the model” which operates completely deterministically, using a deterministic RNG in place of the original model's indeterministic RNG, which in principle would behave exactly the same way as the original model – ie its behaviour would be indistinguishable from the original model. In what sense can we say that the original model is acting with free will, but the deterministic "model of the model" is not, if their behaviour is indistinguishable?

I'll try to explain in more detail in my next post

Best Regards

 

[Tournesol]

It doesn't matter at what point in time Jones "makes up his mind" - all that matters is that he decides one way or the other - either he decides to vote for Kerry of his own free will, in which case Black does not intervene and Jones is clearly responsible for his act of voting, or he decides to vote for Bush, in which case Black does intervene and Jones is then clearly not responsible for his act of voting. Either way, he votes for Kerry, so the outcome is determined. But in the case where he willingly votes for Kerry he is responsible even though he could not have done otherwise.

He could have done otherwise up to a point: something
has has to trigger Black's mechanism.

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.

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.

Don't forget, if he decides to vote for Kerry of his own free will then Black does not intervene - therefore Jones's choice is exactly as "free" as if Black were not there.

I agree completely, and I agree that the Darwinian model may indeed be a good model of parts of how our brains work. But I don’t agree that the Darwinian model produces anything except for a mixture of determinisdm and indeterminism – it certainly does not produce anything that most libertarians would call free will.

And as for those idiot metallurgists, thinking steel is a mixtureof iron and carbon...

At what point in time ? Could-have-wished otherwise is as important as ever.

The point in time is irrelevant - the only relevant issue is the outcome.

says who ?

Jones can wish or desire or choose whatever he wants - the only important issue as far as responsibility is concerned is his voluntary act.

Wich is voluntary because he could have *wished* differently, even if he could not
have acted don't the wish.

In the case where Jones chooses to vote for Kerry of his own will then he is responsible for his act, but he could not have done otherwise - no matter what he would have done, he would end up voting for Kerry.

He could have wised otherwise, since somehting has to trigger the mechanism.

In the first version of the story, Black can prevent a choice being carried through, but can't prevent it entirely. Jones has lost the power to "do" in the sense of deciding to vote Bush, and then doing so, but not in the sense of having the first inkling of a decision ot vote Bush. He has not completely lost his CHDO. He still has free will, and still has CHDO.

Maybe Black could perform a more radical operation and remove even the remotest possiblity that Jones would vote for Bush (so there is now no need for a mechanism, and nothing would ever trigger it anyway). But after such surgery, woudl we then say Jones voted freely for Kerry ? Surely the whole point of the surgery is to ensure that he cannot. So, in this case, he has neither free will nor CHDO.

So in neither scenario does Jones have free will without having CHDO.

Hence responsibility does not entail alternate possibilities - there is nothing wrong with the logic, Tournesol. I know you don't like it, but if you cannot show any flaw in the logic then all you have left is irrational denial.

I have shown the flaw. Responsibility lies with freely-chose intentions.

If responsibility cannot answer the "Only Some Entities are Credited with Volition", problem without CHDO, CHDO is still necessary.
What needs to be done to answer this is to agree the necessary conditions for responsibility.

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

It doesn't answer counterexamples about hypnotically-implanted suggestions, compulsions,etc.

http://www.geocities.com/peterdjones/det_darwin.html#compatibilism

I start my argument with a defintion of FW, and my conclusion is compatible with it.
Sorry, which particular argument are you referring to now? (Tournesol, in all honesty I do find it difficult sometimes to understand what you mean in some of your posts, because you make references to things that you obviously understand, but that the rest of us maybe have to guess at)

I am always referring to the "locus claissicus"http://www.geocities.com/peterdjones/det_darwin.html

It is important to distinguish between explanation and explanandum. Libertarian explanations are often supernatural -- we naturalist libertarians are a minority -- and people confusedly think that means the explanandum of FW is supernatural by definition.

I understand, and I agree. I reject the suprenatural explanation of FW simply because it is not an explanation – it’s an avoidance of explanation. The problem with trying to explain free will without resorting to mysticism is that imho it just cannot be done (or at best one ends up with something that is just a mixture of determinism and indeterminism).

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.

At one time, every mental faculty was given a supernatural explanation. As neurology, computer science, etc, have progressed, that is no longer the case.

Agreed. But it does not follow from this that everything with a supernatural explanation will one day also be explained naturalistically.

It doesn't follow from that you have to stick like glue to pre-scientific ideas.

It is quite odd that so many people in the present day remain insistent that FW is superrnatural or nothing.

Yes, I can see that it seems odd to you. But it seems very straightforward to me, because I believe what we like to call free will is simply a mixture of determinism and indeterminability.

So do I!

What *are* you saying ?

Being a mixture of iron and carbon doesn't stop steel being steel!

By me, yes. My critics don't seem to have an alternative analysis.
OK, is this the analysis in the following paper?

http://www.geocities.com/peterdjones...win_vs_buridan

As ever.

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.

AAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!

NO! of course it doesn't! FREE WILL JUST ***IS*** A MIXTURE OF THE TWO!

 

[moving finger]

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.

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.

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.

The point in time is irrelevant - the only relevant issue is the outcome.

says who ?

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).

Jones can wish or desire or choose whatever he wants - the only important issue as far as responsibility is concerned is his voluntary act.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

But it does not follow from this that everything with a supernatural explanation will one day also be explained naturalistically.

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.

So do I!

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.

What *are* you saying ?

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.

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”!

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.

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.

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