The effects that follow any cause necessarily depend on the conditions in which the cause occurs. Nobody in Jonestown had poison funneled down their throats. They acted on what they were told, each according to the conditions in their own mind and (largely shared but not identical) environment.
Interesting; I noticed that you’re using words like “responsibility” and “consent” and “choice” a lot. Do you take a non-materialist view of the mind? That is, do you think a mind is something more than the physical systems it’s made of?
It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect. The state of the mind-system must necessarily evolve according to the laws of physics when it is provided a particular input. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing it’s like to be the mind (as it’s commonly understood), or that the mind doesn’t partially operate by generating and comparing counterfactual realities; only that from a global view it’s all physics. I agree that while we’re “being in the world” it’s usually not useful to take that angle on things, but it’s important not to just forget it either.
You’ve appealed to free-will-cluster concepts heavily in your argument, and I’m just trying to get a feel for how you think they’re relevant.
You also say you don’t believe in “magic spells” (where just saying a thing has a predictable effect, if I’m reading you correctly), but you claim to be able to predictably make certain changes by incanting “I do not consent”. That doesn’t feel consistent to me.
It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect
So physics excludes libertarian freewill and compatibilist freewill?
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia).
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that …
Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.
The best argument against a you are nothing more than a clockwork zombie governed by physics set in motion at the beginning of time assertion is that we don’t have a theory of everything
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The effects that follow any cause necessarily depend on the conditions in which the cause occurs. Nobody in Jonestown had poison funneled down their throats. They acted on what they were told, each according to the conditions in their own mind and (largely shared but not identical) environment.
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Interesting; I noticed that you’re using words like “responsibility” and “consent” and “choice” a lot. Do you take a non-materialist view of the mind? That is, do you think a mind is something more than the physical systems it’s made of?
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It’s just that if the mind is limited to the physical systems that compose it, then free-will-cluster concepts (consent, responsibility, &c.) are map-stuff and don’t really signify in a discussion of cause and effect. The state of the mind-system must necessarily evolve according to the laws of physics when it is provided a particular input. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing it’s like to be the mind (as it’s commonly understood), or that the mind doesn’t partially operate by generating and comparing counterfactual realities; only that from a global view it’s all physics. I agree that while we’re “being in the world” it’s usually not useful to take that angle on things, but it’s important not to just forget it either.
You’ve appealed to free-will-cluster concepts heavily in your argument, and I’m just trying to get a feel for how you think they’re relevant.
You also say you don’t believe in “magic spells” (where just saying a thing has a predictable effect, if I’m reading you correctly), but you claim to be able to predictably make certain changes by incanting “I do not consent”. That doesn’t feel consistent to me.
So physics excludes libertarian freewill and compatibilist freewill?
I don’t think it’s always useful to think of free will as a “capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events” (wikipedia). I’m not even sure that definition makes any sense, actually. To me, at least, it doesn’t feel like I make decisions without referring to my memories, which were laid into my mind by my past experiences. It certainly feels like different memories could easily result in my making different decisions in the same situation. And the fact that we can get more skilled at handling certain situations as we get older and experience those situations more times supports that notion.
Rather, I think it’s (at least sometimes) more useful to reframe free will as how it feels to be inside a system that operates at least partially by constructing counterfactual futures and conditioning its outputs on how it provisionally responds to those simulated futures. Start such a system in a specific state, give it a particular input set, and you can expect a specific output; but from within the system it feels like freely making a choice. We can see exactly this happen in patients experiencing Transient Global Amnesia, and with other conditions that prevent the encoding of new memories (though those with permanent conditions do still show some neuroplasticity, and this leads to some changes in the long term).
But I also don’t think I would say that “physics excludes… freewill”. Rather, I would call trying to reconcile free will with cause and effect a category error. Free will is a way to model how a mind can feel like it works from the inside, while causality is a way to model how information propagates through the universe. They’re just not really related, is all.
That’s not the only definition. That’s the definition of libertatian free will.
You are reading ”...has not been determined by past events” as though it means “entirely unconnected to previous events”. It doesn’t mean that.
You start off by saying that this approach is “sometimes” “useful” and then switch to treating it as stone cold fact.
Taking a step back ,
1 we are basically always at map level, because ,even in physics, we have to use simplifications. We can’t model things at the quark level.
2 we can’t regard map level features as false just because they are map level features. So claims like “free will is a map level feature” don’t disprove free will.
3 defining free will as an illusory feeling doesn’t prove or disprove it either, since other people use other definitions.
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There’s also compatibilism.