…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
I think Mung’s comment was perfectly relevant and informative. If Darwinian evolution is true, free will is an illusion. Sal HAS to do what he does, he has no choice.
Yes, quite so. Not sure what leads Sal to think “genetic deterioration” plays some grander role.
phoodoo,
Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe he has no choice due to indoctrination rather than genes. Don’t really care. I enjoy debate.
It’s a thought mine. Like a quote mine, but not verbatim.
Take bits and pieces of concepts and jigger them together to build something that supports forgone conclusions.
“Thought-mine” – I like that! Gonna have to steal it!
But there is no maybe, if Darwinian evolution is true right? No free will.
phoodoo,
I don’t know that ‘true free will’ is any more available to embodied spirits than it is to evolved entities. It’s a tedious and ultimately fruitless question really, as the illusion of the exercise of choice would be indistinguishable from the exercise of choice, introspectively.
What I suspect you are hinting at is some kind of deep genetic determinism, which is not a necessary entailment of evolution. The sort of caricature you seem to carry involves people having genes for taking position X, and someone else having a gene for taking position Y. I’d hope no-one would think that a reasonable view, but I become less surprised by ‘the opposition’ the more I encounter them.
They managed to figure out that fifth is a bot and that Salvador was programmed, but the gene for self-examination is missing.
Thus he wrote, obliviously.
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller,
The philosophical questions here would be (1) does the best explication of the concept of free will strictly imply libertarian freedom? (2) does the best explication of the concept of libertarian freedom strictly imply a rejection of physicalism? (3) does our best understanding of evolutionary theory strictly imply physicalism?
Evolutionary theory and free will are incompatible only if the answer to all three questions is “yes”.
Since no one has shown that that’s the case, no one is rationally entitled to assert that evolutionary theory and free will are not compatible — or that they are. The work simply hasn’t been done.
I will point out that Jerry Coyne is a strict determinist.
I think the issue is rather silly. Perhaps good for recreational musing, but hardly anything to get worked up over.
Jerry Coyne uses determinism as an argument against the death penalty.
I’m opposed to the death penalty, but can’t see determinism as relevant.
I agree with those views; there are good reasons for being opposed to the death penalty, but that’s got nothing to do with “determinism”.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t know what you mean by Libertarian freedom, or why that phrase is even necessary-but you have no justification for saying that free will can exist inside a series of chemical positions. Where does it come from?
Without such an explanation you are just burying your head in the sand. Simply putting numbers in front of ideas and then listing them, does not make ideas correct.
Free will can not be a chemical position. If free will could be a chemical position, then what would be the chemical position which changes it to another position? Darwinian evolution implies nothing other than these positions.
I suspect David Bentley Hart would have a field day with such an absurd use of philosophy.
Allan Miller,
Allan, its far more essential, then just pondering what our genes can and can’t do. What it ultimately has to come down to is, are we the result of what we are made of, in combination with the environment we are in. That’s it. There are no more options than this, in a materialist worldview (the problem of course being that most materialist don’t even know what their worldview means).
If all we are is what our bodies are made of, then what is left to decide about that body, that is not itself that body? As soon as a decision to do anything is made, then the thing that made that decision, is no longer that thing, it becomes a different thing. Then that different thing makes another decision, and in turn becomes something else. Likewise, as soon as you experience anything, you see an image, you are no longer the thing you were before you saw that image. Something has been changed within that organism. So who had the free will, the thing before it saw the image or the thing after it saw the image? Both organisms have the same free will?
Can I decide to be the thing that I was two minutes earlier?
Firstly, there’s nothing in any version of Darwinian evolutionary theory — nothing in Darwin’s original version, in neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, or the Extended Synthesis — nothing in any of those theories which presupposes or entails Epicureanism materialism, reductionism, physicalism, etc. That’s just not the case.
And this is for a very simple reason: the ontological commitments of a theory consist only of the entities that must exist in order for the claims of the theory to be true. Hence the ontological commitments of these theories involve genes, organisms, and environments. The metaphysical materialism with which Monod and Dawkins associate with evolutionary theory is simply not itself an assumption or implication of the theory. They are simply wrong, period.
Secondly, in order to deny that free will is compatible with any version of naturalism, one would need to do at least one of the following: (1) show that there can’t be emergent properties; (2) show that naturalism cannot allow for emergent properties; (3) show that free will cannot be an emergent property. Despite what some might wish to believe, the metaphysics of emergence remains a hotly contested issue.
Kantian Naturalist,
You don’t even have an explanation for what an emergent property is, so this is not a hurdle one needs to overcome.
Where did KN say that? It wasn’t in what I read.
In point of fact, I don’t think there are emergent properties. But it’s not easy to see why.
Let’s start with a definition: a property P of a system S is said to be emergent just in case
(1) there are explanations of S that contain terms referring to P;
(2) there are no explanations of any sub-system of S that contain terms referring to P;
(3) none of the terms referring to any property of a sub-system of S are coextensive or synonymous with any terms referring to P.
That tells us what emergent properties would be, if there were any. But are there any? Let us assemble the following considerations.
First, notice that explanations of empirical phenomena must always be relative to some spatio-temporal interval (if they weren’t, they couldn’t be empirical). That is, there’s always some temporal and spatial persistence to the phenomena being explained.
Second, notice that we are interested in explaining phenomena at many different spatio-temporal resolutions. If we want to understand what caused the French Revolution, quantum mechanics or geology can’t help us!
Third, since there are many different interesting phenomena at different spatio-temporal resolutions that interest us, there are going to be many different patterns of explanation: historical explanations, economic explanations, political explanations, ecological explanations, evolutionary explanations, thermodynamic explanations, and quantum mechanical explanations.
Each of these styles of explanation has a characteristic way of picking out some spatio-temporal phenomena for explanation.
All this seems like something that the advocate of emergent properties is also expected to say. But I do not think there are emergent properties. Why not?
It is because the advocate of emergent properties is doing a certain kind of metaphysics that I find useless. The advocate of emergent properties invokes emergent properties in order to provide a “meta-explanation” of how, for example, a historical explanation coheres with an evolutionary explanation, or how an evolutionary explanation coheres with a quantum mechanical explanation. And she is interested in “meta-explanations” because she is interested in a single unifying viewpoint from which everything can be seen as hanging together in a single comprehensive system.
However, I think that (1) we have no a priori reason to think that reality can be understood in terms of a single, comprehensive system; (2) we have pretty good reasons for thinking that the human mind is composed of distinct modules, each of which is good at representing some feature of reality, but (3) we have no “meta-module” and no way of representing the representations contained in each distinct module, which means that (4) even if there were a single comprehensive system of reality, it would be epistemically inaccessible to human beings.
But since the only motivation to invoke “emergent properties” is to carry out a philosophical project that doesn’t advance the development of first-order explanations of empirical phenomena and that is probably not epistemically feasible for finite human inquirers, I find it best to drop all talk of emergent properties entirely. The concept is perfectly coherent — see my explication above — but it is useless.
A really interesting explanation KN. I’m curious then, how do you understand the properties/characteristics that arise from mixing NA and CL (or an O and two Hs) together that are not remotely similar to the properties/characteristics of the two separate components?
I am not so sure that those count as emergent properties.
The interesting properties of H2O can be explained in terms of what happens when an oxygen atom is bonded to two hydrogen atoms. If I recall my college chemistry, the single electrons of the two hydrogen atoms are partially “sucked into” the much larger electron cloud that surrounds the oxygen’s atomic nucleus. (I’m not clear on why this happens — something to do with the stability of the orbitals?). This gives the oxygen atom a weak negative charge and the two hydrogen atoms a weak positive charge. Weak electrical attractions and repulsions do the rest. That’s why water can absorb so much heat before undergoing a phase shift, why many molecules are dissoluble in water, and so on.
A similar story could be given for NaCl, and why NaCl dissolves in H2O.
My point is, these are cases where we can explain the properties of the system in terms of the properties of the sub-systems, so they wouldn’t count as emergent — at least not in an interesting sense.
I would see KN’s argument as a map/territory problem.
There are things in science based not on theory, but on observation.
Thermodynamics is on of those things. There is no theoretical underpinning for the Second Law. It’s a formalized observation.
As is emergence. There is no theoretical framework requiring emergence. It is just observed.
Water is a good example of emergence. Your understanding is wrong.
Or I am wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.
So that’s what happens with a single water molecule? Or do you perhaps need several before many of water’s recognized properties start to kick in?
That’s the point about emergence. An atom of iron isn’t a “metal” in the sense that metals are understood, one needs several iron atoms connected by metal bonds before you have “a metal.” There isn’t even any sense about asking about the electrical conductivity of a copper atom, electrical conductivity arises in connected copper atoms. Steel emerges as tough and strong as a bulk material, not as single atoms of iron.
Glen Davidson
Gallienesque. Tardvergence.
People who believe there is such a thing as free will come in two basic flavors–(i) those who believe that free actions are compatible with determinism (compatibalists); and (ii) those who believe that there are actions that sentient beings may take that are not determined by prior existing conditions and physical laws (incompatibalists/libertarians).
The compatibalist position may just sound self-contradictory, but the idea is that they think free acts are those where the actor does what he/she wants to do. That is, it’s not that there’s no determination, its that the determination is (or is largely) a matter of the motives, desires, etc. of the the actor. So, they’d say your action is free if it’s not coerced by other people or other things (someone pulling you with a rope or a hurricane pushing you into a tree). It’s What The Cause Is, not Whether The Cause Exists that matters for them.
Libertarians respond that if the motives and desires of Smith is determined, then even if Smith is doing what s/he wants, s/he is not free. And if determinism is true (as the compatibalist believes), those motives/desires/etc. ARE completely determined. So libertarians hold that if there’s determinism, there can be no free will, that the two are incompatible.
Anyhow, that’s why KN put in “libertarian” there.
I can’t believe Neil Rickert, Petrushka and Flint are this staggeringly stupid about what quote mining is. Jesus. “You can’t quote someone who disagrees with you or you are quote-mining!”
ROFLMAOABC
I can easily believe William J. Murray and Mung are defending the dishonest practice of quote-mining. Creationists have no morals or scruples.
Pretty remarkable. Would look nice preserved in amber.
Seriously, petrushka, you need to really think about the nonsense you’re saying here. It’s really bad. I can understand adapa and flint – they’re basically morons. You and Neil though – you’re smarter than this.
Just think about the implications if quoting people you disagree with to make a point they would disagree with was “quote-mining”. Think about it.
I mean, Jeez.
What would we do without out shining moral beacons like WJM here to tell us dishonest and despicable quote mining is really A-OK?
I think without William we would have no shortage of quote mine defenders. We had a pile of Meyer defenders, and he fabricated a quote from two different parts of a paper, without documenting it.
GlenDavidson,
I think you have a big problem if you start wanting to say “free will” is a mixture of this chemical and that chemical, mixed with this atom at this temperature, and voila. The list of issues with such a thought is too long to put here, but suffice to say, without a physical entity we can point to (like steel for instance) , it becomes a bit preposterous to equate the mixing of something like a recipe, which gives us a new thing, to creating intangible concepts like thoughts and decision making.
After all, we can take different things and make a magnet, but we haven’t actually created magnetism as an emergent thing. The magnetism already existed. But if we suggest we could take a bunch of proteins and put them into a certain soup, and then call this soup “a batch of free will”, that’s when the crazy talk of emergence comes in.
We can take two things and put them together and make something else. Saying we can take two things and put them together and make a concept…sorry. That’s not science or philosophy.
What a bunch of tripe utterly unresponsive to my actual point, which had nothing to do with free will, and was meant to imply utterly nothing about it as well.
But I guess you have to show that you’re wholly incompetent even to read anything properly, no matter that everyone should know that already.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
So your point WASN’T
??
Well, why didn’t you say so!
Said the guy who thinks aliens visit his family on a regular basis, that is when they can find a timeslot free of ghosts…
Yes, because it makes far more sense that god sacrificed himself to save us from the things it knew we were going to do because it created us knowing everything we’d do in advance.
Mung,
Hmmmm.
I think I’ll exercise my coffee-making gene. I have no choice.
phoodoo,
Oh, I love being told what my worldview means, by people who appear to struggle even to correctly conceptualise that worldview.
There’s an interesting meta-issue to decision-making: we can hardly avoid making a decision. Even if our decision is to make no decision (I can hear mockery clearing its throat at this juncture: don’t take that too seriously!).
We are (and I doubt we are alone in the animal kingdom) decision-making entities, and it pretty clearly goes along with the possession of a nervous system (although animals lacking such can make ‘decisions’ of a sort). If those decisions were constrained solely by genetic programming, they would be worthless, because decisions need to be responsive to the environment – even ones based largely on instinct. ‘Always turn left’ is not a useful program instruction, as the Circling Frogs of Aldebaran found to their cost.
What appears to happen in the brain (I forget the detail, and can’t be bothered searching for it!) is that an organism presented with a choice will vacillate about the alternatives for a while (measured in milliseconds). It may make a conscious decision after evaluating the inputs, which include its own learned experience. But after a while, if no conscious decision is forthcoming, a decision is made anyway. Organisms cannot afford to sit there endlessly vacillating. But the idea that the biological ‘I’ does not have a choice is poppycock – it’s there partly to make choices. That choice is always constrained, however. You don’t decide to kill yourself with the same ease with which you decide to have a sandwich, and you don’t do the latter with the same freedom hungry or satiated.
Less practical notions – ‘you were always going to make that decision’ – are unprovable irrelevancies. If Sal was ‘always going to’ argue X, then I was ‘always going to’ counter with Y. Or not. I don’t see my position on free will affecting any decision I make (or think I make).
All philosophers arguing on Free Will eventually leave the table and return to their daily lives.
Allan Miller,
Yes, I know you have an issue with people explaining what a philosophical position naturally entails. Its as if someone has a belief that the world is a flat square, and then if they are asked, “So you believe it is not globe shaped, and that it is not a sphere that’s circles around the sun, being held by the sun’s gravity?” the person responds, “Well, sure I do, don’t tell me what I believe.”
The person either made up what being flat means, or else they don’t understand the details of that belief. You can choose which applies to you. But the person who explains what that worldview means is not the one who is wrong.
A misrepresentation, how surprising.
Certainly you can quote people who disagree with you. What you can NOT do (and be honest) is quote them in such a way as to make it appear that they DO agree with you, when you know perfectly well they do not. Or when they are making an argument completely different from the argument you are misrepresenting them as supporting.
The honest use of their quotes would be in presenting their actual position and actual argument, as they intended it. THEN you can dispute their position all you want. Making their position LOOK LIKE your position is dishonest.
I think there is a lot of determinism in the physical universe, but there are some degrees of real freedom and creativity.
I would not have come to that conclusion if I had not seen hints of it in mathematics (related to Godel’s incompleteness) and some physicists have seized upon this feature of math (since they presume the physical universe is mathematical in structure) as a possible source of free will.
When we CHOOSE to look at some mathematical structures, our choice determines what that structure is because there is no deterministic answer.
For finite collections of objects, there are deterministic answers, independent of our choice:
1+1 =2
in standard real number arithmetic.
But for infinite collections of objects, absolute determinism starts to melt away:
There is the Grandi infinite series.
? = 1 + (-1) + 1 + (-1) + ……
you can, by re arranging terms make the sum of the numbers any integer you want! Example
1 = 1 + [ (-1) + 1 + (-1) + ……]
it’s a little more complicated, but you can get the series to be 2 or any other number you want.
Similarly the Riemann series,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem
You can make the sum of the numbers to be whatever number you choose.
Going beyond that there is Gödel’s theorem, and you have even more freedom to choose and create realities.
stcordova,
Absolute determinism for what the numbers equal to? What in the world does this have to do with an individuals ability to chose from?
Any time Sal starts into any discussion about thought and reason, his words just seem to magically divorce themselves from any kind of meaning or conclusion. This time, its something about the fact that we can imagine infinite series of things, therefore the world is not deterministic.
Why the heck this is so, is part of the mystery of Sal.
More precisely: by people who appear incapable of understanding that worldview.
Then again, most of what I see at TSZ consists of people who are incapable of understanding any worldview that they don’t endorse.
I’m not sure the person capable of understanding world-views they do not endorse exists!
Such people are called “philosophers”. Whether they exist is an open question.
🙂
From the public school homework of one of the 8-year olds I’m teaching creation to that her parents encouraged me to help her with.
This is not what I teach, but what the public school teaches, and I agreed with the public schools.
and
Good lesson. No need to define adaptation in terms of being created by Darwinian selection. Selection may operate on a trait and demonstrate how well the trait is adapted to an environment, selection may tune the trait a little, but there is no evidence Darwinian selection created the adaptation.
It’s rather easy to point out, if an adaptation was life critical for an environment, one could ask “could the creature adapt to that environment by Darwinian selection since it would already be dead without that life critical adaptation in the first place?”
I didn’t point that out to the kid, but well, maybe next time. Bwahaha!
God, Murray is a stupid lying shit. I wrote this, including “They admit that not all of their quotes are verified–yeah, so why not?.” A-hole Murray ignores that and mentions the disclaimer to which I had referred, with an idiotic “Good grief, Glen. The disclaimer at the very top of the page:”
Really, shithead, how important that you draw attention to what I had already mentioned.
Of course he moves on with his usual dishonest tripe, oh, it’s just a resource, and it asks for corrections, blah blah. Bullshit, the disclaimer won’t be read by many, and even fewer will care, while they merrily misuse the same old shit that creationists have misused for decades. No no, they aren’t quotemines–horseshit, they are clearly bereft of context, and sometimes referenced very poorly–notably the top one.
It’s like saying, “well I heard that Murray fucks chimps, but you know, it’s unverified.” So what’s the problem? I made a disclaimer. Well if it’s unverified and reasonably important you shut up about it until you can verify. Not that William does, repeatedly lying via ignorance, stupidity, and lack of regard for the truth, but that’s clearly why he promotes endless tripe and isn’t the least bit bothered by unverified and clearly non-contextual nonsense trumpeted by ID Creationists.
Had to leave that thread and move to Noyau because Murray is the issue, endlessly dishonest in support of whatever idiocy he’s fallen for at a given time.
Glen Davidson
A more simple way to phrase it for an 8-year old.
Nice exercise in critical thinking.