This sensation of freedom occurs when I believe that I can carry out, without interference, each of multiple actions, such that I do not yet know which of them I will take, but I am in the process of judging their consequences according to my emotions and morals.
This is a very good definition of free will, and it is way more sensible than claiming to be the “only and ultimate source” of one’s own actions, but there is a notion in the Greek and Judaic traditions of being able to rise above one’s fate that isn’t quite captured by it.
To put this kind of ‘transcendence’ into your terminology, we might know all of the macro-level influences on a person—parents, friends, media, genes, nutrition, etc. -- and still be surprised at what sort of person they turn out to be. Sometimes people appear to rise above (or sink below, or just act in strange ways that seem unrelated to) their circumstances.
If you (a) buy reductionism, and (b) have a complete model of the local universe with subatomic resolution, then we shouldn’t be surprised to observe anything about human behavior, because the model would fully predict and account for the behavior.
Likewise, one might just think that, in practice, we never do know all of the influences on a person and then assemble them according to anything like a scientific model of the human personality, so that while we often think we are in a position to make a confident prediction about what person X will do next, we are simply mis-calibrated and overconfident.
I think it is an interesting hypothesis, though, to propose that even if we did have all of the macroscopic information about a human personality and a good set of psychological rules for assembling that data into coherent predictions, we would still be surprised sometimes by the behaviors we actually observed.
This hypothesis is interesting if and only if we can get such a dataset and such an algorithm well before we are capable of getting a complete model of the local universe with subatomic resolution. I think we probably can.
This is a very good definition of free will, and it is way more sensible than claiming to be the “only and ultimate source” of one’s own actions, but there is a notion in the Greek and Judaic traditions of being able to rise above one’s fate that isn’t quite captured by it.
To put this kind of ‘transcendence’ into your terminology, we might know all of the macro-level influences on a person—parents, friends, media, genes, nutrition, etc. -- and still be surprised at what sort of person they turn out to be. Sometimes people appear to rise above (or sink below, or just act in strange ways that seem unrelated to) their circumstances.
If you (a) buy reductionism, and (b) have a complete model of the local universe with subatomic resolution, then we shouldn’t be surprised to observe anything about human behavior, because the model would fully predict and account for the behavior.
Likewise, one might just think that, in practice, we never do know all of the influences on a person and then assemble them according to anything like a scientific model of the human personality, so that while we often think we are in a position to make a confident prediction about what person X will do next, we are simply mis-calibrated and overconfident.
I think it is an interesting hypothesis, though, to propose that even if we did have all of the macroscopic information about a human personality and a good set of psychological rules for assembling that data into coherent predictions, we would still be surprised sometimes by the behaviors we actually observed.
This hypothesis is interesting if and only if we can get such a dataset and such an algorithm well before we are capable of getting a complete model of the local universe with subatomic resolution. I think we probably can.