There is in fact no physics which could possibly cause me to believe I had “free will” in the sense of somehow determining my actions outside of physics, because any method for determining my actions is a physical process.
I don’t think this is a valid argument without the premise that if my will is a physical cause, it must itself be subject to physical causality. In other words, why couldn’t my will be a ‘one-way’ physical cause, able to cause things in the physical world, but unable to be affected by the physical world? Are you certain that every possible physics excludes this kind of one-way causation? Because while the idea strikes me as wildly implausible, it doesn’t seem to be contradictory or anything.
I haven’t seen an argument anywhere in the sequences (or elsewhere) defending this premise. This has always bothered me, so I’d appreciate it if you could supply the argument or point me to wherever I may have missed it.
In other words, why couldn’t my will be a ‘one-way’ physical cause, able to cause things in the physical world, but unable to be affected by the physical world?
The simplest examples of one-way causes may be the laws of physics. They cause the physical universe to have its properties but the universe does not cause them to exist or affect their nature. Theoretically there could be other “laws of wills” governing our behavior in a similar way but I would hesitate calling them actual (or especially individual) wills because of their effective non-agency. Agents’ behavior is caused by interaction with the physical universe, whereas the nature of laws is apparently not caused by interaction with the physical universe. A one-way will would be completely sensory-deprived and thus lack effective agency.
I think this is a very interesting thought, one famously articulated by Kant: the CI is essentially a law in the style of natural law, only pertaining to the will. He agrees with you that the law can’t be identified with each individual will (for one thing, some of us are bad or irrational). This avoids the ‘sensory deprivation’ problem, but keeps the idea that insofar as we’re governed by the law of the will, we’re free. The result is that we’re free only to the extent that we’re good.
Actually, that premise isn’t needed. No matter what the causes are, or even if I am an ontologically basic mental entity, it still remains true that I did not cause myself. I may not have been caused by anything else, but I certainly didn’t determine which algorithm is making my decisions. Not to mention that the rest of the world has to affect my will somehow, or I couldn’t actually perceive it or act on it intentionally (it’s a simple inversion of the argument against epiphenominalism). One-way causation is easily possible; I could write a computer program that worked like that. But the very act of writing the computer program violates the “free will” in the strict knee jerk reaction sense of “determining my own actions”. Determining your own actions requires cyclic causality, and even then I would struggle to accept that I really was determining my actions, rather than just saying that they happened basically by chance (I cannot recall where, but I recently saw something by EY about circular causality and time-turners in Conway’s Game of Life in which he said that the only way to calculate it with a Turing machine is to iterate over all possible universes and rule out the ones where it doesn’t happen by chance).
I don’t think this is a valid argument without the premise that if my will is a physical cause, it must itself be subject to physical causality. In other words, why couldn’t my will be a ‘one-way’ physical cause, able to cause things in the physical world, but unable to be affected by the physical world? Are you certain that every possible physics excludes this kind of one-way causation? Because while the idea strikes me as wildly implausible, it doesn’t seem to be contradictory or anything.
I haven’t seen an argument anywhere in the sequences (or elsewhere) defending this premise. This has always bothered me, so I’d appreciate it if you could supply the argument or point me to wherever I may have missed it.
The simplest examples of one-way causes may be the laws of physics. They cause the physical universe to have its properties but the universe does not cause them to exist or affect their nature. Theoretically there could be other “laws of wills” governing our behavior in a similar way but I would hesitate calling them actual (or especially individual) wills because of their effective non-agency. Agents’ behavior is caused by interaction with the physical universe, whereas the nature of laws is apparently not caused by interaction with the physical universe. A one-way will would be completely sensory-deprived and thus lack effective agency.
I think this is a very interesting thought, one famously articulated by Kant: the CI is essentially a law in the style of natural law, only pertaining to the will. He agrees with you that the law can’t be identified with each individual will (for one thing, some of us are bad or irrational). This avoids the ‘sensory deprivation’ problem, but keeps the idea that insofar as we’re governed by the law of the will, we’re free. The result is that we’re free only to the extent that we’re good.
Actually, that premise isn’t needed. No matter what the causes are, or even if I am an ontologically basic mental entity, it still remains true that I did not cause myself. I may not have been caused by anything else, but I certainly didn’t determine which algorithm is making my decisions. Not to mention that the rest of the world has to affect my will somehow, or I couldn’t actually perceive it or act on it intentionally (it’s a simple inversion of the argument against epiphenominalism). One-way causation is easily possible; I could write a computer program that worked like that. But the very act of writing the computer program violates the “free will” in the strict knee jerk reaction sense of “determining my own actions”. Determining your own actions requires cyclic causality, and even then I would struggle to accept that I really was determining my actions, rather than just saying that they happened basically by chance (I cannot recall where, but I recently saw something by EY about circular causality and time-turners in Conway’s Game of Life in which he said that the only way to calculate it with a Turing machine is to iterate over all possible universes and rule out the ones where it doesn’t happen by chance).
It sounds like the premise is not just needed, but quite complicated!