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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
As the author of a story, I have the power to write in the preface, before the story is written at all, "Peter has free will and in chapter 4, he will freely choose to go left."
It would be ridiculous to say that Peter isn't free, and that I am wrong about my story. He is free in the story, just as he has certain other characteristics in the story. Of course, he is not free in real life, but that is just because he does not exist in real life, but only in the story, where he is also free.
The same thing would apply to a situation where you are created free by an omnipotent being. In that being's world, you do not have free will, but that is just because you do not exist at all in that being's world. In your own world, you both exist and have free will. This is what was meant by the traditional theology that maintained that God is not one being among other beings, but a being above all beings. The creator and the created things exist in very different realms of existence, like an author and the story world created by the author.
Since I have no problems being ridiculous, I will say that Peter does not have free will even if you claim so in your story.
Take at a puppeteer with his marionettes on a stage: when he says "Do not look at me, look at the puppets, they are free to do whatever they want!" are you going to believe him?
Being a bit more explicit, the problem, as TheOtherDave noted, is inconsistency. Saying "Peter will freely choose to go left" is self-contradictory.
And the issue with separating things into "worlds" -- e.g. the world of the Creator and the world of the created -- is that it's not useful or illuminating. I can do the same thing, too -- I can make an abacus and use it to calculate. Can I declare that my abacus has "free will" on its own, lower, plane of existence?
So, just to clarify my understanding of your claim here... if I write in my story "Peter goes left and simultaneously stands still," is it similarly ridiculous to say that I'm wrong about my story? Are we therefore similarly committed to the idea that I have created a (fictional) being who both moves and stands still?
If I write in my story "Peter correctly adds 2 and 2 to get 5", does the same kind of reasoning apply?
Are these things all, on your view, similarly analogous to the relationship of God to beings in the real world?
Discussing the possibility of putting something incoherent into a story is not a clarification but a sidetrack, unless you have some evidence that free will is incoherent.
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.
But that idea is false.
While there are perhaps circumstances where physical theories fail to predict the future accurately (someone earlier in this thread posted a paper to that effect - was that you?), in general, the failure requires very specific circumstances which do not apply to human decision-making.
For example, Newtonian physics was described as having a failure condition that, at any point, a particle could enter the area under consideration from pretty much infinitely far away, moving at several billion times the speed of light. This requires that the area under contemplation be an open system ; that it, it permits the entry of distant particles. Yet, enclose a human inside a forcefield, prevent any such distant-particle interactions, and Newtonian physics does become predictable; and, at the same time, the human does not lose his free will.
Newtonian physics is not a good model of particle physics. The best model is quantum mechanics which is not usually regarded as determistic.
True enough, the applicability of quantum indeterminism to neurons is a difficult and unclear subject .... but you didn't say brains are deterministic, you said particles were.
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.
More fragile than intelligence, etc?
You seem to be assuming that free will is inherited, as it were, form the fundamental laws of physics, so that if they don't have the exact balance required themselves, free will is impossible. It seems to me that the law of physica allow individual systems to display a wide range of behaviour, from extreme chaos to exteme determinsim, (and therefore embracing the Goldilocks zone) and that it is the systems themselves that are responsible for the fine-tuning.
ETA Free will is not the only thing that requires fine balance. Intelligence itself does...a balance between creativity and rule-following, between over and under detection of patterns,
Why?
Probably not more fragile than intelligence. I'd put it at a good deal less fragile, in fact. But reasoning based on the presence of intelligence in the universe risks falling into the anthropic trap...
Yes, in the sense that all behaviours of complex systems that consist entirely of atoms must be consistent with the laws governing the behaviour of atoms.
I do not claim that free will is, or even must be, an inevitable result of the fundamental laws of physics. I merely claim that, for free will to exist, the fundamental laws of physics must allow it, in the same way as the fundamental laws of physics allow intelligence.
Because I can think of few other reasons to create a universe. Anything made of matter - a creator capable of creating a universe can certainly create any amount of matter. Energy? Similarly.
But a free-willed creature is of a whole nother order. We build structures of logic; we dream, we imagine, we create entire worlds in our heads and then we share them with each other... I may be suffering from a pro-human bias here, but (a) I think that's really special, and (b) I'm having trouble coming up with a way to get that without a universe to keep the people in.
I suppose our universe could be intended as some sort of work of art, like a sort of four-dimensional sculpture, designed to appeal to aesthetic senses so much more all-encompassing than our own limited viewpoints...
Which trap? Of thinking that something is likely just because we are in a place where it has occurred ?
Which? What occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics, but that is weaker claim than saying the laws of physics must be specifically fine tuned for it.
But the alternative does not give you such a strong argument that FW is unlikely.
Meaning other reasons wouldn't motivate you if you you were God, or wouldn't motuvate a God like you, an anthropomorphic God ... but a deity only reduces the unlikelihood of FW if it us likely, and likely to create FW. But the cultural famiarity of anthropomorphic deities is not objective probability.