This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
I freely (!) admit that I don’t understand the philosophical concept of libertarian free will, which appears to boil down to a cause that is both uncaused and non-random. It seems to me that whether this uncaused, non-random cause is material or immaterial is, um, immaterial. The same question of free will arises whether it’s the brain or the soul that’s doing the causing. So, can someone explain to me what an uncaused, non-random cause means?
I feel the difficulty preventing complete agreement is going to hinge on what we understand by “observed”.
I’d suggest these facts are not observed facts
Mung,
Simulation, model, forecast. In some domains computers are now better at this than people.
Tu Quoque fallacy it is then!
And they claim we are the ones shifting the burden of proof.
It could be that you have come to think of things in terms of one single meaning of cause, the efficient cause.
The Four Causes
Whilst Aristotle was a remarkable character, judging by what remains of his writings, our collective understanding of how this universe is has evolved since 300BC.
The idea of a regression of causes only makes sense if you think this universe is strictly deterministic. It isn’t.
John,
Yes, and that’s the source of its incoherence. To the extent that the decision making process is deterministic, it isn’t free in the libertarian sense. To the extent that it’s random, it isn’t free either — it’s just random. Combining the two doesn’t help.
Alan,
No, it just means that non-deterministic events feed into the causal chains.
But you can’t determine them!
Mung,
You need to brush up on your fallacies. I’m not saying that phoodoo is wrong because he fails his own test. I’m saying that he’s laughable because he fails his own test.
You, too, by the way. Or do you agree that your immaterialism “doesn’t explain squat”?
speak for yourself 😉
peace
It would be much better if you would just try to answer my question as clearly and completely as you can. Pointing me to a web site that doesn’t in fact answer it (or not that I can tell), is not helpful. Do you want to be helpful?
Alan:
So? They’re still causes, and they still feed into causal chains.
How can we tell your brand of revelation from mental illness?
I’ll admit that there is something odd about declaring myself as having a specialty in ‘philosophy of mind’ when in one sense I don’t think there are any minds. More precisely, I think that there are minds in Ryle’s sense, but not in Descartes’s sense. (I’d happily call myself “a philosopher of body” but there’s no way to say that and not sound creepy.)
To the point, however: I do not think that “reasons, and decisions, and thought and anything else we can conceive of, if all the operations of the human intellect are the product of the interactions of chemicals.”
I say that because I do not think that the subpersonal level of cognitive machinery described by neuroscience is ‘more real’ than the personal level of propositional contents of beliefs and desires, the inferential relations between those contents (both the formal inferences of logic and the much more important material inferences of ordinary language), and their role in prediction and deliberation.
(Dennett, who coins the personal/subpersonal distinction, does at times say that the subpersonal is more real than the personal. I disagree with him about this.)
On my view, our language of reason-giving — “the space of giving and asking for reasons”, as Sellars famously says — is constitutive of how we interact with each other as agents and indeed as persons. It is we persons who attribute, both to ourselves and to others, beliefs and desires that can be evaluated in light of reasons. We can have reasonable beliefs, irrational desires, and of course also rational desires and irrational beliefs. There’s a complex set of considerations for assessing desires in light of one’s ideals and values, assessing one’s personal life-plan in light of what is good for a human being, revising beliefs in light of evidence or refusing to do so, and so on.
It is persons who have beliefs and desires, not brains and not any sub-component of a brain (neuronal assemblies, synaptic pathways, neurotransmitters, or voltage spikes).
(A crude analogy: synaptic pathways no more have beliefs than spark-plugs all by themselves will get you to work. But if you put those spark-plugs in an engine, and the engine in car, and the car on a properly functioning road, then you can get somewhere.)
And that is perfectly compatible with affirming that persons are animals of a specific kind; there’s no transcendence of biology. On the version of naturalism that I am developing, culture, language, society, logic, morality, art, cooking, music, dance, religion, science, and philosophy are the uniquely human modes of being an animal, and not anything that takes us out of the animal world altogether.
I do not think that it makes sense to say that persons are brains or that brains are rational animals. (A brain is a part of an animal; to say that a person is its brain is a conflation of a whole with one of its parts.) But we can conceptualize the subpersonal, functional level as doing something like reasoning, and that is predicting.
On the predictive processing model of neocortical functioning, we can understand the multiple, hierarchically structured feedback loops within and between neural assemblies as causally implementing reasoning-like functions.
Adopting this position means that there is no need for the Cartesian view, with its deeply Augustinian roots, which contends that everything truly human must have a different ontological status than anything “natural”.
Here natural is notoriously difficult to spell out; let it suffice to say that Descartes accepted a modified Epicureanism — briefly, mechanism without atomism — as necessary and sufficient for empirical science. His aim was to curtail modified Epicureanism so that it would not imperil his basically Augustinian view of the soul, which he regarded as both self-evidently true (on the basis of introspection) and necessary for Catholic doctrine.
Neither do I accept Epicureanism itself as getting right the metaphysics of nature in light of 21st-century science, which is why I do not call myself a ‘materialist’.
Yes. So my question would be, what is that third thing, the uncaused, non-random cause?
I would hope we would not get bogged down in a discussion of libertarian free will. It’s completely beside the point. What at issue is whether we can be said to decide anything whatsoever. Decision is impossible given materialism
As a Calvinist I don’t hold to libertarian free will or materialistic determinism. I hold that our will is constrained by our nature. but we still decide.
peace
you know the answer to that one
peace
Agree that a non-deterministic event can impinge on another event. I’m doubtful about chains. There’s enough chaos in this universe to undermine the idea of a regression of causes.
I never presume to speak for anyone else!
Please start giving straight answers. It’s not ‘enigmatic ‘ it’s just shitty.
Here’s Roderick Chisholm, from 1976:
“If we are responsible . . . then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing — or no one — causes us to cause these events to happen.” (as cited in Dennett, second ed. Elbow Room, p. 83).
Chisholm’s version of agent causation is that each of us is an uncaused cause — conceived of as ‘efficient causation’, let us note — when we intentionally act. The will causes actions to happen, but nothing causally affects the will.
The fly in the ointment here is that we take ourselves to be acting for reasons, which means that the will has to be sensitive to reasons but not affected by causes. If the will weren’t affected by reasons, then we wouldn’t be able to justify our actions, explain why we should or shouldn’t be held accountable for them — which is to say that we wouldn’t be agents at all. Hence agent causation requires that we think of ourselves as constrained by reasons but not as constrained by (non-agential) causes.
I freely confess that I don’t understand how that can possibly work, because I think that reasons are causes.
the strait answer is revelation
But you knew that already, like I said
peace
exactly.
And when it comes to materialism there can be no reasons there is only matter in motion.
Well, it seems that scientific enquiry doesn’t supply answers to “why” questions, just as atheism does not supply answers to religious questions.
John,
It doesn’t, and cannot, exist.
The libertarian wants his decisions to emanate from himself, on the one hand, but not to be caused by anything, on the other. Those criteria are impossible to satisfy simultaneously.
To the extent that a decision is shaped by the nature of the decider, it is caused. To the extent that it isn’t, it’s just random, bearing no causal relation to the nature of the decider.
The libertarian simultaneously wants it to be caused and uncaused. It’s incoherent.
What the immaterialists tend not to realize is that this is as much a problem for them as it would be for a libertarian physicalist. Positing the existence of immaterial entities doesn’t evade the dilemma.
That assumes that all necessary paths are possible
I believe the topic is the immaterial decision maker, if there are various ways this immaterial something affects material somethings one or two examples would be helpful.
Alan,
Why? If a non-deterministic event impinges on another event, which impinges on another event, which impinges on another event, you have a chain.
If you’re speaking of chaos in the technical sense, be aware that it is a deterministic phenomenon, and therefore not only perfectly compatible with, but actually dependent on, causal chains.
If you’re speaking of chaos in the colloquial sense, then you need to distinguish between apparent chaos (in which the underlying interactions are lawful, though complicated) and actual random chaos. Both are compatible with causal chains, however — the first for obvious reasons, and the second for the reason you just mentioned: non-deterministic events can impinge on other events.
The chain idea works just fine. (Keep in mind that it’s more of a mesh than a chain, however, because an event can have multiple causes and can in turn impinge on multiple events.)
Free will is the possession of free spirits and I’m not sure that there is anyone on the planet who is a free spirit. But just as we are born totally dependent on adults and gradually mature into adults who are responsible for our own actions, so evolution is a process whereby individuals are on the path to becoming free spirits.
So I would not ask, “how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions?” I would ask, which decisions (by any of us whether materialists, idealists or anything in between) could we say are free? If drug addicts decide to shoplift to make money to feed their habit, then they are not acting in freedom. If someone dives into a lake to save a drowning man, this may or may not be a free decision. It would all depend on their motives. If they are doing it for the glory then I would not call it a free act. If the motive comes wholly from within without any external influence then I would say it is free.
There you go. You say a mesh is a sort of a chain. I’m skeptical. 🙂
To be clear, if you leave out mention of a chain, I agree. I like the concept of a mesh of events. A chain implies direction.
But not reversible (as evolutionary processes are irreversible).
Rather than get bogged down, I will just ask you what is it about non-materialism that makes decision possible.
How? Does something cause us to decide the way we do, is it random, or is there a third thing? And if there’s a third thing, how could it possibly work?
Alan,
The mesh is just as directional as the chain. The causality runs one way.
In fact, the mesh can be recast as a chain if you take the states of the universe as the links of the chain. The current state of the universe, along with any non-deterministic events happening inside it, causes the next state via the laws of physics.
keiths:
Alan:
Causal chains don’t depend on reversibility.
1) the creation of the universe
2) the incarnation
3) regeneration
peace
Two high energy particles arrive from different directions of the universe, collide, disintegrate and new particles with new energies emerge from the collision. Which particle was the cause?
A decision is a non-material thing. As is a reason
peace
And you’ve told me “revelation” is just like when I communicate with my wife. Except its nothing of the sort.
Our nature along with our environment cause us to decide the way we do. We do ultimately for the most part what we want to do.
peace
Sure it is.
How do you know that your wife loves you?
She reveals it to you
How do you know you are not imagining that she loves you?
She reveals to you that she loves you.
That is exactly how it works with God
peace
She is real. I can talk to her, see her actions, iteratively interact with her in ways a third party can verify. Next.
Alan,
Your question is confused. A particle is not an event.
The same goes with God.
keiths,
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-is-cause-part-2-crossing-desert.html
RB’s synopsis of Putnam is good, as is the analysis of INUS:
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-is-cause-part-2-crossing-desert.html
Examples please. Real world examples.
Something like this “I asked God XXXX and Gold told me YYYY which was later verified by ZZZZZ”
What is a decision?
What a bore you are, fifth.
Constantly yammering about revelation, but unable to explain how you can determine whether a revelation is real or imagined.
Without an answer, your presuppositionalism never gets off the ground.
keiths,
“You know the answer, Keiths”
LOL. With no way to terminate the regress.