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casebash comments on Philosophical schools are approaches not positions - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've been thinking I need to find a better example, but I don't have one now. I'll have some more examples of use in future posts, right now I'm just trying to produce a coherent description of the core meta-philosophical concepts that I'll need.
I've edited my post to clarify that part of it - it only becomes linguistic after a certain point:
"We begin by using philosophy to establish the facts. In some cases, only one description may match the situation, but in other cases, it may be ambiguous. If this occurs, we could allow a debate to occur over which is the better description..." I've added this text in italics.
My point is simply that no more precise statement that captures the full-breadth can be made. We can linguistically analyse "free will" to explain what the most common interpretations of the term are, but we'll always miss something. This vaguely reminds me of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we can have a definition that captures the full-breath (but tells us almost nothing specific), or we can have something super-formally specified that completely fails at breadth.
There are two completely different problems we can try to solve.
The first problem is, "what do people mean by the words 'free will', and what do they believe about the concept they reference, and why do they use these words or concepts to begin with"? This is a problem for linguists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, neurologists, maybe even evolutionary biologists. And it's a completely empirical one, even if hard to solve.
Crucially, it doesn't seem to be a problem in need of philosophy, unless philosophers are somehow selected or self-selected so that their own self-reports are more valuable than those of other people, while still being representative of people in general. (Nobody really wants to know the answer to "'what do philosophers use the words 'free will' to mean, which is completely unrelated to what everyone else uses those words to mean?")
I hope everyone would agree that whatever people mean by words, and believe about their referent, doesn't necessarily prove any objective truths about the referent.
The second problem we can try to solve is whether there actually is free will and how it should be best described. Of course, if different people mean different things by "free will", then this is a set of different and unrelated problems. Since we're presumably motivated by actual problem(s) and not by the mere occurrence of these words - even if the problems are driven by intuition and not by empirical evidence - we should be able to taboo the words "free will" and state the problems directly. Solving the second kind of problem should not require first solving the first one.
Have philosophers done this? Did they turn out to be working on the same questions? Do they have any good arguments for any of their positions beyond intuitions (which should be used to solve the first kind of question, not the second one)?
ETA: for example, a dualist might say: "spirits can affect matter, creating material effects that don't have detectable material causes. This action is called the free will of the spirit, particularly a human spirit." This might be a strawman which no-one actually believes, but it would be a concrete statement about free will, trying to solve the second kind of problem.
Of course, everything I've said here about free will is applicable to any philosophical debate where not everyone agrees about the meaning of the words being debated.
In your first case, you gave a classic example of experimental philosophy. I completely disagree with your characterization of the subject as non-philosophical . Proto-philosophical , I'd suggest. Concept mapping is an excellent starting point for recommendations on how to improve our understanding of problems that involve substantial conceptual confusion.
Google x-phi (yes it has a nickname ) and you'll see plenty of work on free will, as well as plenty of metaphilosophical debate on its usefulness.
Up voted - great comment regardless of the above disagreement.
Yes, naturalistic Libertarians have put forward empirically testable theories of free will, in which the term "free will "is tabooable.
I agree with the SEP when it says that:
If the non-deterministic behavior is entirely random (i.e. unpredictable), it clearly doesn't describe our free will. But if it obeys various rules, then how is it different from ordinary dualism, with these rules describing a non-material domain with 'uncaused causes'?
This approach seems so much based on trying to prove intuitions about free will that it persists long after any unbiased person would say, fine, we proposed an empiric theory and it was empirically proven false, case closed, there is no free will.
That is exactly what naturalistic libertarians dispute. Here "clearly" means not "can be seen to be true at a glance", but "seems true when not thought about too much". The argument is on a par with "saying that of course things can travel faster than light, I don't see what is stopping them"? The SEP quote does not preclude non-obvious claims.
Wrong way round. Naturalistic libertarians are proposing empirically testable claims, the opponents who seek to reject their claims using the One-Line Argument are the ones using intuition. (Of course,naturalistic libertarians also have opponents who can make a detailed and informed critique).
When I say that:
Here is what I mean.
Our free will is clearly partially predictable. We are somewhat rational and highly consistent actors, not random noise generators. I can predict what I'll do in various situations, and even what other people will do, much better than by chance.
Now of course you might say the predictable part comes from ordinary physics, and the unpredictable element is free will. But if free will is equated to pure random noise, I really don't think it's doing any useful work anymore except for saying "the universe isn't deterministic". It doesn't match the intuition we started out trying to explain.
What do nat-libs claim? Do they think free will is 'entirely random' or 'entirely unpredictable' (which may be slightly different), and what do they use those words to mean, exactly?
If free will means the ability to do things that aren't entirely determined by previous and external circumstances, then partial randomness explain free will. If free will means having an inner homuncular self that is the ultimate source of deciion making, then it doesn't. Note the difference between the two definitions..one describes a kind of outcome or manifestation of free will, the other defines a possible underlying mechanism for it..in fact, a supernaturalistic mechanism. Natualistic liberatarians aren't beholden to defend a non-naturalistic theory of free will, so they are not obliged to defend the second definition of free will, only the first.
No, they think it is partly random. See http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/two-stage_models.html
All two-stage models seem to have this in common: first there is a random, nondeterministic, unpredictable, or 'free' stage, which generates possibilities. Then there is a rational, at least partially predictable 'will' stage which chooses an action from the possibilities presented.
This might well be a good neurological or psychological model of decision making. (Although I'd expect the actual implementation to have multiple sources of suggestions, and multiple modules and layers of filtering and choosing.) I just don't see what it has to do with "free will".
All discussion of "free will" starts with the fact that we feel like we are freely choosing from possible alternatives. It doesn't matter here how the alternatives were generated: when presented with a multiple choice test, where the alternatives are fixed, we still we're exercising free will in answering it. Why does it help to specify that the generation of possibilities is random?
(Some of) the philosophers quoted in your link say the benefit is being able to choose otherwise in exactly identical repeating circumstances (e.g. simulation reruns) because the generation of alternatives is not deterministic. I don't see why that would be a good thing: it just means that some of the time you won't generate an alternative that you would have chosen in those runs where you did generate - in other words, you lose out because you don't or can't generate all the alternatives all the time.
If the generation process is thought to be completely random, and the selection process completely deterministic, I don't see how this matches an intuition of "free will". (Granted, arguing about intuitions is usually silly in the first place and assumes too much about the typical mind.)
So what are the empirical claims these models make? At least, that we should find in the brain a separation between random generation of ideas (e.g. amplification of chance or chaotic events) and rational selection of outcomes. That would be a great day for the neuro sciences. I just don't think it would convince anyone about anything regarding "free will" or the lack thereof. (After all, philosophers kept believing in free will even when physicists were quite sure the universe was deterministic...)
it might be the case that the issue "starts with" the feeling of being able to make choices, but it starts in the sense that what the debate is about is the most direct interpretation of this feeling that we actually can make free choices. The debate is about what causes, or underlies, or best explains the feeling. For centuries there has been a debate about the conflict between free will and determinism (or, earlier, between free will and divine omniscience or foreordination). That hasn't been centuries of people stupidly failing to notice that the feeling of freedom is trivially compatible with any amount of determinism so long as the feeling is taken to be an illusion.
How do you know? For what value of "free will"? It is now acknowledged that there are different concepts of free will. The compatibilist concept is about being able to make choices without external duress, so by that definition your answers are freely chosen so long as no one is pointing a gun at your head, or anything like that. But is is obvious that most people are free most of the time under that definition, so the historical debate cannot have been about that concept.
The incompatibilist concept of free will contains further conditions, in particular the condition that when we make a free choice we could have done otherwise. That is a straight contradicition to strict determinism, because under determinism, there is no way things could have been otherwise.
Because random possibilities are free from determination by past events, thus allowing that affairs in fact could be otherwise, that multiple real possibilities are actually available.
The point is to give an explanation of what the feeling of free choice seems, directly, to be, not to give an account of why it is valuable or optimal.
The generation process cant be completely random, the range of ideas you can generate has to be constrained by your past history and experience...a caveman can't come up with relativity.
A lot of philosophers kept believing in compatibilist free will, which is..well..compatible with determinsim. Very few kept believing in incompatibilist free will. In fact, the revival of incompatibilist libertarianism has come partly from physics, since the "news" that the universe isn't necessarily deterministic has filtered through very slowly to philosophy...Tony Dore, the Information Philosopher actually has a physics background.
Suppose we're in one of two possible worlds, and we don't know which. One is deterministic (or its random components are irrelevant to human choice) and has an illusion of free will. The other has 'real' free will, whether in a two-stage model or otherwise. The humans in both worlds have the same experiences and intuitions about free will.
How can we tell in which world we are? It would help if the fact of having this intuition was relevant evidence; after all, it's the only reason we're even investigating the subject. Is it evidence? And which way does it point? That's what I'd like to see addressed. Is there a specific argument that having this intuition is evidence that it is true?
This is just like the objection to p-zombies: they imply that the fact of consciousness isn't the cause of experiencing and talking about consciousness. Similarly, imagine p-fwills that behave the same as us and report the experience of free will, but they don't really have free will, they're just deterministic machines.
Two-stage models are supposed to make empirical predictions, so unlike p-zombies, we should be able to detect such creatures and differentiate them from us. One way to do this would be to prove that they are deterministic whereas we are not. But p-fwills have the same intuition as us about free will, so having free will isn't a cause of the intuition.
The question of whether having free will would be a cause of such an intuition is the one that should be settled proof.
Who cares whether we could have done otherwise? In real life we never actually experience the exact same circumstances twice, so why would whether or not we could do otherwise be causally related with us having the free will intuition, which is what we're trying to explain?