It’s easy enough to avoid the phrase “free will” , but avoiding the concept is harder to avoid, not least because it’s actually several concepts.
Compatibilist free will is the lowest bar to clear. Almost any mechanism of choice would amount to CFW. So it’s not controversial apart from whether it’s what we centrally mean by free will.
Libertarian free will involves an addional ingredient , leeway or the ability to have done The ability to have done otherwise.doesn’t seem possible in a physically determined universe , leading to the worry that free will is a supernaturalistic process where an immaterial soul overrides the physical causality in the brain. Supernatural libertarian free will is easily refuted by naturalism.
That leaves naturalistic libertarian free will as the controversial case. Naturalistic free will is a somewhat overlooked option. Science minded types are inclined to class FW as a “religious concept” , but it isn’t because it isn’t a single concept. Naturalistic and supernatural concepts come under the label “free will” and a naturalistic concept could coincide with what is intended to be merely an account of the mechanism of choice ,
Philosophers don’t have much to say about the nature of the capacity to choose, but then it’s not what’s controversial. What’s controversial is the ability to have done otherwise—which is itself controversially linked to moral responsibility.
The ability to have done otherwise is easily possible in a undetermined universe , but these models have a series of worries about control and purposiveness.
Self modification doesn’t give you any CHDO at all—it’s quite compatible with determinism.
In a deterministic universe, the progress of a self modifying mechanism is as determined as anything else.
But the mechanism could have an indeterministic element, in which case it coincides with libertarian free will. The right sort of mechanism could even resolve the worries about control and purpose.
ETA:
I didn’t want to include this in the main post, because I wanted to keep it concise and on-topic, but I don’t think determinism is relevant. If you were given the options of receiving a million dollars or of receiving death, you would try damn well to make your choice as deterministic as possible.
That’s one kind of case—where you are making a decision for personal benefit, and it’s very clear which way to go. There are also torn decisions , where you have desired in both directions, or your desired conflict with external morality, etc.
However, I think this is the wrong model to have for the possibility of choosing otherwise. Instead, you should imagine that a different choice function in your place might choose a different action:
But do you know that? Surely establishing how the capacity for choice actually works requires empirical investigation.
This solves the problem of capacity to choose otherwise without requiring stochasticity. That a choice is made is just a way of pointing out there is some choice function, a chooser, and that there exists a different chooser that would result in a different action
But that’s only a logical CHDO. Under the circumstances, an agent can only make one choice, under your model. The agent has no power to choose the world they are in. What is the point of scuba CHDO? The point of compatibilist CHDO is the agent is not compelled; the point of libertarian CHDO is that the agent can steer towards a future of their choosing.
That doesn’t stop it from being a choice you make
It could stop it from having certain characteristics beyond being a choice.
Undetermined choices are more momentous , because an open, non-inevitable future depends on them.
Determinism allows you to cause the future in a limited sense. Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn’t allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past—it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation). It allows, in a purely theoretical sense “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A” … but without the ability to have actually chosen b.
Under determinism, you are a link in a deterministic chain that leads to a future state, so without you, the state will not happen … not that you have any choose use in the matter. You can’t stop or change the future because you can’t fail to make your choices, or make them differently. You can’t anything of your own, since everything about you and your choices was determined by at the time of the Big Bang. Under determinism , you are nothing special...only the BB is special.
(This is still true under many worlds. even though MWI implies that there is not a single inevitable future, it doesn’t allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under MW determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were—before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born. You can’t choosee between them, even in the sense of adjusting the probabilities).
By contrast, Libertarian free will does allow the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A”. And you actually could have made choice a or choice b....these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones. That in turn means that the future is not inevitable, and can be shaped, but merely caused...a free agent can create or steer towards a variety of futures. For a free agent, doom does not have to be inevitable.
It’s like the difference between a car and a train. The train goes somewhere but it can’t jump off the tracks
In fact, determinists don’t even need the conditionals. Under determinism, you can think of sets of pre-existing agents, which make different decisions, or adopt different strategies determinstically, and you can make claims about what results they get, without any of them deciding anything or doing anything differently. That additional, non-redundant, sense of control is what would have been required to answer the concern that libertarians actually have about what determinism robs them of.
The situation is rather analogous to simulationism: a simulated universe might seem just like a real universe...but it isnt real. And a deterministic universe might seem to contain decisions and actions...but they are not decisions and actions in the fullest senses of the terms, because they don’t make a difference. So there is precedent for saying that two things can be different without being visibly different.
Almost everyone, including rationalists, implicitly believe they have the ability to control the future,to steer to better futures. In the case of rationalists, that is the motivation for AI safety and effective altruism.
Before I begin my response, I would like to point out that I really don’t appreciate your commenting style. I spent a while working on my post, and you didn’t even bother to engage with my first paragraph, where I say that capacity to choose otherwise is asking the wrong question. If you think it is the right question to be talking about, you should argue for that, not just assume it is something we can agree on.
When I talk about choosing, I am talking about modelling the world, not some magical and mysterious capacity that non-choosers lack. A chooser is defined simply to be an entity that takes in information and outputs actions. Choosers are a useful abstraction because such things exist: Many entities perform more optimal actions by using information they possess. But there is no need to hypothesize an elan volonté for how this all works.
Now, to talk a bit more about the content of your comment...
But do you know that? Surely establishing how the capacity for choice actually works requires empirical investigation.
You claim that there is some “capacity to choose”, but whence comes this idea of a capacity to choose? I fear that you just have an intuition that “you make your own choices”, and then you take this intuition too far, saying that no choice can be “real” if it has a causal or physical link to the rest of reality.
I say that choice-making is the process of converting information into actions. You are the one who says it requires some special capacity to choose. You are the one who claims there is anything to talk about there, at all.
Undetermined choices are more momentous… it is nothing special… you are nothing special… only the BB [Big Bang] is special...
Libertarian free will… [not] merely caused… doom [not] inevitable… [sense of control] determinism robs them of.
It doesn’t matter if an undetermined choice is more “momentous”; that doesn’t make it more true. I don’t even grant that undetermined choices are more momentous than determined choices. Our future depends on our choices, whether they are deterministic or not.
I do grant, though, that it would be more important to study choice-making if choice-making was more momentous.
It’s like the difference between a car and a train. The train goes somewhere but it can’t jump off the tracks
And both are controlled by people.
I agree that there are varying levels of ownership we can assign to entities that make choices. The self-tuned PID controller has more ownership over its choices than the human-tuned PID controller, but less than a human has over his/her own choices. The error you are making is in only accepting two extremes: (1) Choices are completely deterministic, owned completely by the universe as a whole, and (2) choices follow from “free will”, owned completely by the agent with free will.
Also, I think it is important to distinguish modelling the world from social responsibility. Whether someone is to be held responsible for their choices is a social problem, not a fact of the universe. We can model a computer as making choices withoutholding it responsible, and instead holding its programmer responsible.
a simulated universe might seem just like a real universe...but it isnt real.
When you run a computer program, is it less “real” if it is written in an interpreted language than if it is written in a compiled language? (An interpreted language works by simulating a virtual computer which executes higher level instructions using the base computer, while a compiled language directly outputs instructions to be used on the base machine. This is, of course, a great simplification of how interpreters work.) Does “real” to you just mean that you have reached the limit of your understanding? I wonder what you think a physicist would say if you asked him whether an electron is “real”. He, after all, understands that an electron is a theoretical model, not a hard fact of existence.
Instead of seeking to apply labels like “real” or “unreal”, I think you would be better served by looking at what is actually happening.
It’s easy enough to avoid the phrase “free will” , but avoiding the concept is harder to avoid, not least because it’s actually several concepts.
Compatibilist free will is the lowest bar to clear. Almost any mechanism of choice would amount to CFW. So it’s not controversial apart from whether it’s what we centrally mean by free will.
Libertarian free will involves an addional ingredient , leeway or the ability to have done The ability to have done otherwise.doesn’t seem possible in a physically determined universe , leading to the worry that free will is a supernaturalistic process where an immaterial soul overrides the physical causality in the brain. Supernatural libertarian free will is easily refuted by naturalism.
That leaves naturalistic libertarian free will as the controversial case. Naturalistic free will is a somewhat overlooked option. Science minded types are inclined to class FW as a “religious concept” , but it isn’t because it isn’t a single concept. Naturalistic and supernatural concepts come under the label “free will” and a naturalistic concept could coincide with what is intended to be merely an account of the mechanism of choice ,
Philosophers don’t have much to say about the nature of the capacity to choose, but then it’s not what’s controversial. What’s controversial is the ability to have done otherwise—which is itself controversially linked to moral responsibility.
The ability to have done otherwise is easily possible in a undetermined universe , but these models have a series of worries about control and purposiveness.
Self modification doesn’t give you any CHDO at all—it’s quite compatible with determinism. In a deterministic universe, the progress of a self modifying mechanism is as determined as anything else.
But the mechanism could have an indeterministic element, in which case it coincides with libertarian free will. The right sort of mechanism could even resolve the worries about control and purpose.
ETA:
That’s one kind of case—where you are making a decision for personal benefit, and it’s very clear which way to go. There are also torn decisions , where you have desired in both directions, or your desired conflict with external morality, etc.
But do you know that? Surely establishing how the capacity for choice actually works requires empirical investigation.
But that’s only a logical CHDO. Under the circumstances, an agent can only make one choice, under your model. The agent has no power to choose the world they are in. What is the point of scuba CHDO? The point of compatibilist CHDO is the agent is not compelled; the point of libertarian CHDO is that the agent can steer towards a future of their choosing.
It could stop it from having certain characteristics beyond being a choice.
Undetermined choices are more momentous , because an open, non-inevitable future depends on them.
Determinism allows you to cause the future in a limited sense. Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn’t allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on causes in he past—it is nothing special and nothing different from physical causation). It allows, in a purely theoretical sense “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A” … but without the ability to have actually chosen b.
Under determinism, you are a link in a deterministic chain that leads to a future state, so without you, the state will not happen … not that you have any choose use in the matter. You can’t stop or change the future because you can’t fail to make your choices, or make them differently. You can’t anything of your own, since everything about you and your choices was determined by at the time of the Big Bang. Under determinism , you are nothing special...only the BB is special.
(This is still true under many worlds. even though MWI implies that there is not a single inevitable future, it doesn’t allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under MW determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are, and always were—before you make a decision, after you make a decision , and before you were born. You can’t choosee between them, even in the sense of adjusting the probabilities).
By contrast, Libertarian free will does allow the future to depend on decisions which are not themselves determined. That means there are valid statements of the form “if I had made choice b instead of choice a, then future B would have happened instead of future A”. And you actually could have made choice a or choice b....these are real possibilities, not merely conceptual or logical ones. That in turn means that the future is not inevitable, and can be shaped, but merely caused...a free agent can create or steer towards a variety of futures. For a free agent, doom does not have to be inevitable.
It’s like the difference between a car and a train. The train goes somewhere but it can’t jump off the tracks
In fact, determinists don’t even need the conditionals. Under determinism, you can think of sets of pre-existing agents, which make different decisions, or adopt different strategies determinstically, and you can make claims about what results they get, without any of them deciding anything or doing anything differently. That additional, non-redundant, sense of control is what would have been required to answer the concern that libertarians actually have about what determinism robs them of.
The situation is rather analogous to simulationism: a simulated universe might seem just like a real universe...but it isnt real. And a deterministic universe might seem to contain decisions and actions...but they are not decisions and actions in the fullest senses of the terms, because they don’t make a difference. So there is precedent for saying that two things can be different without being visibly different.
Almost everyone, including rationalists, implicitly believe they have the ability to control the future,to steer to better futures. In the case of rationalists, that is the motivation for AI safety and effective altruism.
Before I begin my response, I would like to point out that I really don’t appreciate your commenting style. I spent a while working on my post, and you didn’t even bother to engage with my first paragraph, where I say that capacity to choose otherwise is asking the wrong question. If you think it is the right question to be talking about, you should argue for that, not just assume it is something we can agree on.
When I talk about choosing, I am talking about modelling the world, not some magical and mysterious capacity that non-choosers lack. A chooser is defined simply to be an entity that takes in information and outputs actions. Choosers are a useful abstraction because such things exist: Many entities perform more optimal actions by using information they possess. But there is no need to hypothesize an elan volonté for how this all works.
Now, to talk a bit more about the content of your comment...
You claim that there is some “capacity to choose”, but whence comes this idea of a capacity to choose? I fear that you just have an intuition that “you make your own choices”, and then you take this intuition too far, saying that no choice can be “real” if it has a causal or physical link to the rest of reality.
I say that choice-making is the process of converting information into actions. You are the one who says it requires some special capacity to choose. You are the one who claims there is anything to talk about there, at all.
It doesn’t matter if an undetermined choice is more “momentous”; that doesn’t make it more true. I don’t even grant that undetermined choices are more momentous than determined choices. Our future depends on our choices, whether they are deterministic or not.
I do grant, though, that it would be more important to study choice-making if choice-making was more momentous.
And both are controlled by people.
I agree that there are varying levels of ownership we can assign to entities that make choices. The self-tuned PID controller has more ownership over its choices than the human-tuned PID controller, but less than a human has over his/her own choices. The error you are making is in only accepting two extremes: (1) Choices are completely deterministic, owned completely by the universe as a whole, and (2) choices follow from “free will”, owned completely by the agent with free will.
Also, I think it is important to distinguish modelling the world from social responsibility. Whether someone is to be held responsible for their choices is a social problem, not a fact of the universe. We can model a computer as making choices without holding it responsible, and instead holding its programmer responsible.
When you run a computer program, is it less “real” if it is written in an interpreted language than if it is written in a compiled language? (An interpreted language works by simulating a virtual computer which executes higher level instructions using the base computer, while a compiled language directly outputs instructions to be used on the base machine. This is, of course, a great simplification of how interpreters work.) Does “real” to you just mean that you have reached the limit of your understanding? I wonder what you think a physicist would say if you asked him whether an electron is “real”. He, after all, understands that an electron is a theoretical model, not a hard fact of existence.
Instead of seeking to apply labels like “real” or “unreal”, I think you would be better served by looking at what is actually happening.
How would you respond to my reply to Dagon?