I understand what you mean. It might simply be a preference of Phys. for some reason, but that’s not for me to elaborate upon anymore as he brought it up.
I see what you’re saying. By adding ‘libertarian’ it plausibly construes a personal value onto what could simply be called ‘free-will’ in legal doctrine.
just as determinism allows for the possibility of a gazelle to run away from a lion, so does it allow for the possibility of you knowing some truth that is there for you to know it.
you cannot claim to have a coherent self that makes decisions, if the these decisions come willy-nill with no cause, i.e. if you or anything about you does not in anyway cause these decisions.
The freedom worth wanting is the freedom to make decisions, which is the freedom we have. its really an ‘ability’ to make decisions.
FYI those of you lurking or contributing that may be scratching your heads about LFW, “Libertarian” in the field of metaphysics has a distinct meaning from “Libertarian” in the field of political philosophy ( even though there are historical reasons for the sharing of the name it is a danger to equivocate (not saying anyone is!))
Which is why I said previously that reason harmonizes with will-power. Will of reason is determinate. Will of will-power is determinate. There is no choice, this is what a human does. The harmonizing comes into play when will (cause) is meeting with the rest of the world (effect). How an individual harmonizes, ie. brings into agreement, their individual will with the rest of world involves a singular/individual act of choice. Yes the choice, as I said, is determined as the individual has no choice to make the choice because humans make choices whether they feel like it or not. What I contend is that some are too involved with determinism to take note of the content of choices that a person is determined to make. Maybe the determinist see too much use of the term free-will and believe that the free-will speaker isn’t recognizing the determinate aspects. Thus why I said ‘harmonize’. For I don’t see how either free-will nor determinism are null or void.
edit: And by ‘harmonize’ I argue that categorically means ‘reality’. because the two are playing out in the field of reality so I see them harmonized. Both are real and neither is better than the other and neither is false.
Perhaps I’ve been thinking of a strawman when thinking of “determinism” as some kind of absolute view where all actions, all choices, are already pre-determined somehow by the causes that lead to them. Certainly, we are all constrained by the nature of reality, but within those contraints, there are still a variety of ways of satisfying reality and continuing our actions and existence. It is there, within those natural constraints, that we are capable of using free will and choosing among the courses of action that are available to us.
As an example, humans need food to survive. However, there are a wide variety of foods that we can choose to eat, and a variety of ways of acquiring those foods.
Your choices are determined both by your desires and available information. This is what it means for an individual to be a utility maximizing agent. The ‘strawman’ you oppose is actually correct. The concept of choice that is not determined by a selection mechanism and driven by fundamentally irrational desires is logically invalid. Compatiblism and other ‘soft’ determinist views are not really any less deterministic. The determinism of Dennett and Hofstadter is still absolute. They simply use language that is more palatable to most people. They say ‘there is freedom of choice’, but they are using ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ in very different ways than you are. There is no homunculus, no Cartesian Theater in libertarian determinism.
is this an established or a novel term vis metaphysics?
I’m sorry for any confusion, I was referring to compatibilist interpretations of determinism such as Dennett and Hofstadter.
The thread is off the chain with activity among a lot of veteran Mises posters. For the casual observer the first question that comes to mind is what is the energy driving the thread about this topic?
Anyway there are a lot of big terms and concepts being thrown around the thread by very smart people. Can someone suggest an article or write a post that dumbs down the discussion a tad so a casual observer can understand the point of the discussion?
the energy: personally it was fun.
what was being said: I think that’s what everybody was trying to find out that was involved in the discussion.
that particular post of Nir’s: lol, yes he let his intellect run free on that one. that was a good time-out, let’s breath post.[:P]
how to know these concepts: Some time ago, I had to look them up in the dictionary, and search on the Mises cite for some reoccurring categories and concepts. If there’s anything in particular that you may want to know about, pm me and I may be able to help you out or point you in a direction to somebody that seems more keen in a certain area than I.
Just trying to find out if a common definition of free will is in contention… control of actions, decisions, or choices.
the part about is free will free… well that is semantics and useless outside of an academic context conversing with joe blow on the street.
the part about determinism just seemed to be a discussion about logically refuting it.
I want to point out that free will wouldn’t be true if ther was no basis for it even if determinism wasn’t true. What makes free will true or valid is the fact that the human animal is an animal of knowledge more than he is an animal of raw biological imperative. What I mean by an animal of knowledge is the fact that a human being is born without the contents of his mind, he is truly empty, but with an active capacity to be less empty as he learns of the world and himself.
It is this knowledge that fills his mind that defines him, determines his actions, and for which he is privy to change. To say he can change his actions is as absurd as saying you can unbreak an egg you just dropped; time works one way, it’s not symmetrical, and so does action. A man can choose to think otherwise and un/learn. That is his degree of freedom, that is his free will as it were. It may not be free of circumstance, but it is free to allow the man to change in character and knowledge. No other creature on Earth (other than Man) seems to show this quality. If this isn’t free enough for the determinist, then frankly said determinist can screw the pooch for all I care.
the determinist in this thread really haven’t explained themselves very well in my opinion. But then again Dennet may do a better job and that’s all good. I really don’t know what unique thing the determinist were trying to point out. I mean reality constrains human action, I mean even that is an axiom and therefore is unavoidable, so I don’t know what all the hub-bub is about. I was trying to probe and figure it out myself during the discussion.
My contention, but this might only be considered a set back by the determinist, is the seeming avoidance on their part of the term ‘free-will’ and then to replace it with ‘determinism’. Yet from what I’ve gathered they haven’t rid the reality of ‘free-will’ but only have clothed it in the name ‘determinism’. I don’t know maybe it is a short-cut. Instead of saying free will and determinism and explaining the natures of both those phenomenons it seems that ‘determinism’ is an effort to combine those two realities into one term and they arbitrarily choose ‘determinism’, I don’t know, maybe because most of the world is ‘determined’ so by default quantity gets the upper hand.
Then again some are saying the ‘determinism’ term they are using isn’t the same as the common vernacular use of the term. I mean I don’t have a problem with that either. But I don’t see what any of this changes as I’ve pointed out. There is a real thing called free-will and a real thing called determinism. Why it needs to be restated in a different way? I have no idea. But I haven’t read Dennet and find my interests at the moment to be elsewhere as knowing Dennet doesn’t seem worthwhile.
I guess that’s what I got out of it. As I pointed out a couple times: cause mediated by free-will into some kind of effect - this happens and harmonize is the goal of any truth minded person, as knowledge is fallible, still doesn’t deter such a person from desiring to avoid errors.
P.S. I noticed some links, at least on the first page of this thread that Conza gave and Nir too, and Lilburne wrote down some Mises quotes, so that might be a good place to start for anybody that may want to delve into this more. I haven’t read all those links and I went in accord with my current knowledge during the discussion.
Also, I forgot to note there is a difference between epistemological and metaphysical determinism. In this case, I hinted at it when talking about there being a world where there is no free will but no determinism. It’s equally true that the universe on the whole can have no deterministic pattern to it and the human mind could operate by some rules leading to predictible behavior. But any case, I see no argument for traditional free will nor for metaphysical or ‘natural’ determinism.
What’s that being used interchangeably throughout the discussion? If so, then that’s one mark in the confusion category.
What would that be?
Rules of the human mind only? Imposition as opposed to reflectional notions on what reality is as conveyed by a human?
Meaning there are no good arguments for either of these? What’s traditional free-will, meaning, is there a modern version or unique version?
Traditional free will is simply the freedom to do otherwise in the same situation. For example, you’re at a lunch buffet and deciding between two deserts: icecream of your favorite flavor, and a baked pie or cake that’s also your favorite. In Libertarian (metaphysical) free will you could’ve chosen either so long as the alternative exists. Alternatives in this case isn’t merely a set of choices, but a definitively claim that you can will otherwise. Some have taken this to literally mean you can even alter reality at some fundamental level (I think George Berkeley thought so…I can’t be sure…). Others have taken that in all possible worlds you can choose at random and it would still be your choice.
The problem with the latter (I don’t think the former is worth discussing here) is that if choice is random in all possible worlds then how can one claim it’s your will? It’s just assigning a dice roll to the selection process. A determinist can take this argument to its end, showing the absurdity of Libertarian free will, but the same case can be applied to compatibilism too, meaning neither Libertarian nor Compatibilist arguments for free will make sense.
But determinism makes equally no sense as it assumes not only a forward cause/effect chaining, but as implication a backwards chaining of effect/cause (where only a set of effects can ever be made by a set of causes). Nature doesn’t exclude any other possible combination of cause/effect chains nor does it exclude the probability of causeless effects (like in quantum mechanics, brownian motion, and etc). This means determinism at a metaphysical level can’t be argued even if an epistemological basis can be (this form of determinism can be called predictive determinism).
What this all simply means is that free will as defined makes no sense and using determinism (which has no basis in scientific fact for the whole of Nature) to argue against it is equally ridiculous. The best answer is that either free will exists on some phenomena or basis in Man or does not. It shouldn’t include anything regarding that which is not Man (such as Nature or physics).
I’m sorry, but quantum indeterminacy exists in the map, not the territory. Quantum indeterminacy is not equivalent to causeless, the very fact that we can model quantum behavior (albeit probabilistically) should make this very clear.
Quantum Mechanics and Godel’s Incompleteness are the two most misunderstood and abused concepts in science. Whenever someone references either in discussions that lie outside of mathematics or physics, a little red flag should pop up.
Free will is simply a confusion that stems from ones intuition (see Hofstadter or Metzinger for an explanation of why this intuition is so strong, while incorrect) combined with folk psychology and dualism, none of which are tenable positions.
Brownian motion (named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown) is the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called a particle theory.
emphasis mine.
Exactly, and chaos theory has been very successful in elucidating the underlying causes of such dynamic systems. It is entirely non-mysterious.
Exactly, and chaos theory has been very successful in elucidating the underlying causes of such dynamic systems. It is entirely non-mysterious.