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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn't contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus's alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
But it doesn't matter. My whole point was that you wouldn't have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I'll believe.
Or instantaneous transportation over perhaps large distances.
Fair enough. Let me take a stab at it, then.
Free will.
We know that matter is deterministic; electrons, protons, neutrons all follow pretty well-understood laws. We know that the human body is made of electrons, protons and neutrons; perfectly normal matter. Therefore, human behaviour should also follow from those same laws; it's merely a massive amount of work to follow the reactions of such a vast amount of electrons, protons and neutrons, which is why no-one has done the calculation yet. This implies that human behaviour should be deterministic.
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. That they have choices. That they can choose to get up in the morning, or to sleep late.
Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
It seems to me like souls that somehow affect the brain would completely suffice. Why do you think an all-powerful and all-knowing god is needed?
...you raise an excellent point. Free will can be adequately explained by the existence of the soul; some form of stuff, of whatever nature, that is not deterministic and can somehow make decisions, and which is a part of every human being.
But then, what is the soul? If it is physical - some arrangement of quarks or something - then can it really be entirely limited to humanity? What of the chimpanzee? On the flip side, is that the missing piece preventing the creation of artificial intelligence?
If is is not physical, then what sort of stuff is it? Where does it come from, where does it go (or does it dissipate and evaporate on death)? If it dissipates, then what are the products of that dissipation, do they hang around, undetected but building up somehow, or are they somehow recycled into new people? Is there a limit to the amount of soulstuff that exists on the Earth, and does that create a hard limit on the possible population of said Earth? What happens if Earth's population exceeds that limit? And if such soulstuff does exist, then is that reason to update in favour of the possibility of existence of some much larger intelligence?
Why exactly?
Because if there was a giant brain of physical matter hovering around Earth, we'd see it. If there was a giant brain of some undetectable non-matter stuff hovering around, then the fact that we can't see it doesn't mean a thing, one way or another.
It's still significantly less likely to be there than not, but rather more likely than if intelligence needs a brain-like matter substrate to work on.
No, we don't.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/Determinism.pdf
Some people think so:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Huh. Interesting.
So, even in general relativity, there's some circumstances in which the same initial conditions can lead to differing future states?
Okay, I've only skimmed this site, but I find myself agreeing with a lot of the points he makes. This is dangerous, because I haven't seen him prove any of those points, merely argue convincingly for them, and that implies that I'm likely to miss subtle flaws in said arguments (if such flaws exist) because his conclusions seem to mostly confirm my thoughts on the matter.
Then you have a prima-facie convincing case of a naturalistic FW. The point is that the idea that FW requires the existence of a deity has no traction amongst professional philosophers, theologians, etc, and is more of an internet meme.
...you certainly make a convincing case. But I do not intend to argue that free will requires a deity, merely that free will is more likely given a deity than not given a deity.
Not convinced. In particular, a genuinely omnipotent deity is arguably incompatible with free will for any other agent; perhaps a merely omniscient deity is. The arguments here are about as convincing as the arguments for incompatibility between a deterministic universe and free will.
Much less impressive sorts of deity -- e.g., those of the ancient Greek or Roman pantheon -- pose much less threat to free will, but it's also hard to see how they do anything to make it more likely.
It seems to me that it takes quite a "fine-tuned" notion of deity to make free will more likely. Perhaps you need what many theologians profess to believe in -- a god who in some sense could be omnipotent but has somehow chosen not to exercise that power in all its fulness. It's not clear to me that this idea is even internally consistent; in any case, it's certainly not something that inevitably follows from the idea of a deity.
Yes, I think so, too. Especially in the case where an omnipotent omniscient deity is the creator of everything.
You are mistaken: we can write a story, we can know everything that happens in the story, and we are omnipotent in the story: whatever we write, happens in the story. But that doesn't prevent us from writing "Peter had free will and freely chose to go left instead of right."
In fact, someone who is omnipotent can produce free will precisely because they are omnipotent, just as in the example where the reason why you can "produce" a character with free will is because you are omnipotent relative to that character.
Let's switch tenses.
"Peter has free will and will freely choose to go left instead of right". Does Peter actually have free will?
This gets us into the standard "can God create a stone so heavy He Himself cannot lift it" paradox territory.
Specifically, creation of true free will requires sacrificing omniscience.
A genuinely omnipotent deity can remove your free will at any point, and can override your free will at any point; thus, if you have free will in a universe including a truly omnipotent deity, then you have that free will at the sufferance of said deity. I don't think that this means you can't have free will.
...I'm currently debating this point with lisper in a separate thread.
Agreed. I wouldn't count those as deities - they're closer, in my mind, to sufficiently advanced aliens (with surprisingly human psychologies).
...point taken. My thought process is that a deity would have some probability of deliberately wanting to create a universe that includes free will, and that probability will be higher than the probability of free will developing in a completely random universe (because free will is such a complicated thing that the odds of it turning up by chance are extremely small). I am assuming that if a sufficiently powerful deity wants to create free will, and is willing to go to the effort to do so, then there will be free will.
I think it's at least debatable. I am inclined toward compatibilism myself, in this as with determinism, but I think that in both cases it requires a rather "weak" notion of free will.
Is free will complicated? It looks to me as if intelligent life is complicated, but given intelligent life free will is one of (1) impossible, (2) inevitable, (3) neither of those but doesn't involve extra complication as such. I'm not sure which, not least because I think it depends on how you define free will and I'm not even sure there is an altogether satisfactory definition, never mind what the best definition is if so.
I certainly agree that it's debatable, and that there are some very strong arguments for the side I'm arguing against.
I think so. Life is at the very least a necessary precondition (I think), but I need to ignore that particular complexity lest I fall victim to the anthropic principle. Taking intelligent life as a precondition may be inadvisable, as I suspect that free will may be a necessary precondition for intelligence - which would mean that intelligent life always has free will, by definition of intelligence.
But the main reason why I think that free will must be a fairly complicated thing is because it runs completely contrary to the idea that particle physics is perfectly predictable, if we could but solve the necessary calculations. Life is compatible with the idea that the behaviour of the individual electrons, protons, neutrons is predictable, and that therefore a closed set of such particles is predictable, and that therefore the system as a whole is predictable. Free will requires a closed set of particles that are able to do different things in the same situation. I have no idea what the physics of free will looks like at a particle level, but I don't see how it can possibly be anything simple.
Any deity? Is there a logical connection between the idea of a deity in general, and FW.... or are you running off the shear familiarity of the Judeo-Christian god concept,
I was thinking Judeo-Christian, but my line of argument could be rephrased as a universe planned out in advance would be more likely to have free will than a completely random universe.
Why?
Because free will seems to be an extremely fragile thing. Perfectly predictable physics precludes most notions of free will, and perfectly random physics precludes most notions of predictability; there's a very delicate balance involved in having a world predictable enough that free will matters (because you can make decisions with strong certainty as to the consequences thereof) yet unpredictable enough to permit free will at all.
At the same time, it seems to me a thing that would be desirable to include in a planned-out universe.
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man's first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God's orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve's rebellion can look back with our 20/20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there's this big booming voice on her left saying, "Don't eat this fruit" and a snake on her right saying, "Don't listen to that clown, he's lying to you. Go ahead and eat it." How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don't see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don't see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven't heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don't have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it's a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I'm a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I'm "really" a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn't have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can't escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it's not.
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam's situation at the time is analogous to Eve's - he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don't have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won't be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
I have never read Dennet's book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my "red" quale or my "green" quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of "qualia" which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet's mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn't make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion - hmmm. I don't really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It's possible that Eve "took" the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve's tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let's look at the situation from Eve's point of view: she's just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they're naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn't actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it's strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it's bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God's order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn't correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was "evil" seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don't yet know how. But even if we knew how it's far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
This is an oversimplification of Dennet's position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it's weird. You need to read Dennett's book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It's actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it's because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn't.
Of course you do. So do I. It's a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short - perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one's interesting for the footnotes
The tree apparently granted "knowledge of good and evil". So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him - yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy - again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it's a thin thread.
Interestingly, it implies that it's not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
Because we don't know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it's almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can't correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I'm not surprised.
...huh. Fascinating. You're right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don't exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by "quale" differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be "quale".
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a 'you' to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word "Then". That word ("az") does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here's an interesting bit o' trivia: the original of "a tree to be desired to make one wise" is "w'nech'mäd häëtz l'has'Kiyl" which literally means, "and the tree was cute for wisdom." (Actually, it's not quite "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that. A better translation would be something like "smartness" or "brainpower".)
Sure, but 1) I don't grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn't know it was evil except in retrospect.
That's the Ethan Couch defense, and it's not entirely indefensible. We don't generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
You are mistaken.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it's actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn't make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it's useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it's much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It's kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don't you go read the book before we go further.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it's a vector space.
Huh. Maybe I've been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with "smartness" being more related to academics and book-learning and "wisdom" more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
I'll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others - Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished - just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing - so education is still important to reduce sin).
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we're considering computable in practice, then there's the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that's more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you're coming from - you're saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I'm not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn't mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Okay, I've had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy - that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It's also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I'm not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I'm saying I don't follow the reasoning that leads to it.
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can't exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
This is a contradiction. If you don't have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I'm not saying that the certainty can't improve the illusion. I'll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and - somehow - use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I'm rather left wondering how, but I'll trust that it's possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I'd have to find a copy first.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that's how I think of it), but as a vector space?
Well, they are. Maybe "mental faculties" would be a better translation. But it's neither here nor there.
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
Indeed. But God didn't provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
Huh? I don't understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity "cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate". I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can't.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can't do; that's kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can't do.
Actually, that's not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that's a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you've travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you're predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That's what it means to be reliably predictable.
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I'll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I'll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
Sorry, that didn't parse. What is "that"?
Well, yeah, at root I'm not doing it deliberately. What I'm doing (when I do it -- I don't always, it's hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I'm doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I'm not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I'm slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
Yes. Did you read "31 flavors of ontology"?
The word "could" is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of "could" (and of its associated notions like "possible" and "inevitably").
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can't calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable... predestined.
I still don't understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don't understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
I'll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I'll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist - even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
The idea that "You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will".
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don't see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
There is no phenomenon of free will. There's no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will. What there is, is the phenomenon of people believing they have free will. And that has various explanations.
However, it's no different from other popular beliefs with no empiric evidence. People naturally ("by default") believe in souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye, and a hundred other things for which the existence of belief isn't strong evidence. Since free will, like souls, is pretty much by definition empirically unobservable, people's belief in it (that doesn't come with a concrete argument) in it isn't evidence for it, since the belief couldn't have been caused by observation.
That statement seems (currently) true enough; presumably if we could execute a free will test, someone would have done it by now and there would be no need for these debates.
You compare free will with "souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye...". It seems to me that the notion of free will is actually more similar to the notion of consciousness than it is to those things that you list. Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can't really empirically test for consciousness. Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can't empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
Do you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon? If so, then what empiric test or observable property would you use to determine whether something (e.g. an artificially intelligent computing system) is conscious?
If contentiousness doesn't exist how can we empirically test for anything? Empiricism is based on using past observations to predict future observations, it becomes meaningless if there's nothing there to do the observing.
They are useful concepts exactly and only because they are such strong and common intuitions people have, so we have to use these concepts to model other people's beliefs and behavior. In the same way that an atheist needs to understand religion.
Different people use very different, often contradictory definitions of 'consciousness'. Some are obviously true (for humans): for example "a system that models itself as part of the world and understands that its outputs determine the behavior of that part". Some are by definition empirically untestable: "conscious entities experience events but do not affect them, and some things (people) have such conscious entities attached, while others (simple animals) don't", a la p-zombies, or for example "I know I have qualia but I can't know if others do", similar to solipsism.
In general, I think there is no "study of consciousness" (as there would be of a phenomenon); there is, however, a lot of study of the way people use the word "consciousness", which involves psychology, sociology/culture, linguistics, neurology, and so forth. And the same is true for "free will".
There is a study of consciousness, or at least aspects of consciousness, as anyone can discover via google, and it is not just a study of the way people use the word.
A study of "consciousness" under which definition?
Anaesthesiologists study consciousness, meaning awareness of the environment and ability to form memories, as something that can be switched on and off. Cognitive psychologists study access consciousness, the ability to make verbal reports about some of what is going on in your head. Perceptual psychologists study phenomenal consciousness, blind spots, blind sight, synaesthesia, and so on.
Now, maybe you could answer my questions: why didn't you know the above, why didn't say you research it, and why you think it is a good idea to make armchair pronouncements abut what science can do?
These are all good and useful fields of study, but crucially, they're using the word "consciousness" to mean something different from what was under discussion here, which I did my best to point out.
This subthread started with the g_pepper saying:
Clearly, whatever is being talked about here doesn't belong to one of the fields of study you mentioned. In none of those fields does the statement that "we can't [ever] empirically test for consciousness" make sense - obviously we can test if a person (or other system) is forming memories, is able to make verbal reports, has blind spots, etc. We don't need to rely on people's own impressions of being conscious, either.
This is "consciousness" in the vernacular (and philosophical) sense, closely related to sentience: the possession of a subjective experience. It's a confused concept, which doesn't admit empirical study, just like souls or dualist free will don't. But people's belief in, and beliefs about, the concept can be studied.
I never said science can't do something.
The tone of your reply seems aggressive. What did I say that you found offensive?
And yet I know that I possess a subjective experience, and I suspect that you do to. Just because something does not currently lend itself to quantitative scientific study does not mean that it is not real.
ETA:
Note that much of the discussion of free will in this comments section has had nothing to do with souls or dualist free will; e.g. compatibilism has nothing to do with souls or dualism.
In general there is a study of consciousness, but there is not a study of some specific aspects, theories and definitions.
Subjective experience can be studied up to a point, eg synaesthesia. The studies tend to assume that subjects have experiences an are report them accurately....n other words, the assume the non zombie hood of the subjects. Zombiehood isn't testable, but is a specific theory of consciousness, not "consciousness".
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;'t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can't generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of "X". Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn't trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which - implicitly but clearly - talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.