I was unable to add this to your Free will and determinism page. I suspect a total-page-length issue.
Although I like your arguments, and I agree with your conclusion, I submit a couple of observations.
- Observation 1
- If the universe follows the laws of determinism, it may well be determined that I believe the universe follows the laws of free will.
- Observation 2
- If the universe follows the laws of free will, it is allowed for me to believe the universe follows the laws of determinism.
Regardless of whether free-will or determinism is the way the universe works, it is clear that society does hold me accountable for my actions; does dish out praise and blame; does decide whether I am sufficiently sane to be held accountable. Even self-proclaimed determinists will hold me accountable for my decisions and my actions.
It therefore behooves us to behave as if we have free-will, and expect to be held accountable for our decisions and actions. This leads one to socially approved decision making and therefore socially approved behavior regardless of one's free-will choice to believe in determinism. ;-)
Jesse Chisholm
- behooves us to behave as if we have free-will
- In a world in which you do not have free will, nothing behooves you because you have no choice about how to behave! There is little in moral guidelines to be drawn from the free will debate. If there is no free will, then all moral suggestions are irrelevant. So people's behavior in the determined world cannot be affected by this way, and your argument fails logically.
- Thankfully, reality also demonstrates that your conclusion does not take place (there are so many people not following socially-approved behavior). It was funny though ;-). Generally, i have never understood the desire to deny the experience of choice. --JohnAbbe
I thought that the original page by Larry set out the various viewpoints very succinctly and clearly, but his conclusion that free will must exist was driven apparently by his pre-conceived notion of the need in our society for personal accountability, for the sake of justice. I hasten to agree that individuals need to be judged in that way, in order for our society to function properly. Whether or not free will exists, the criminal must be punished and held accountable for his actions. We must punish criminals fully, even in the knowledge that their ignorance led to the crime. If we cannot educate before the crime, we must punish afterwards. We must waste resources on ambulances to carry away victims, until we can learn how to teach people not to commit crimes. We must do it for the good of humanity.
I'm a determinist, and I think in this way: the amount of free will that we believe we have is in direct proportion to the amount of ignorance we have of all attendant circumstances and causes. Jesse's comments touched on that point. I agree with him that it behooves us to believe that we have free-will. It is our ignorance that behooves us, not our knowledge.
If a person, about to commit a crime for which he would ultimately be apprehended, was somehow made magically aware of the future, he would not commit the crime. He would be insane to do so. It is his ignorance that gives him the illusion of freedom. If it is a crime that you, or I, would not commit, it is only because our circumstances are different, and those circumstances include the information that our brains have received from our individual experiences that bias us not to commit the crime. It might be fear of apprehension, or conscience, or personal richness, or laziness, or lack of opportunity to commit that crime. Whatever it is, it limits us, and that is restriction, not freedom. Instead of asking ourselves how much freedom we have, we should turn the question around and ask ourselves how much limitation we have on the infinity of apparent possibilities awaiting us.
Larry mentioned science's claim about the uncertainties in nature at the sub-atomic level, as an argument against the determinists' claim to causative links everywhere. Yes, most physicists make that claim, but I was interested to read Prof. Stephen Hawking's comment about that, in his book "A Brief History of Time". I won't quote it verbatim, but his point was that one may well imagine some being that is outside the physical constraints of the universe, with the ability to examine all of the causal connections without affecting any of them by doing so, but such notions can only ever be speculation by us humans, and are not worth pursuing. He appears to make allowance for the possibility that, at a level unreachable by us humble humans, universal causative links might exist.
JWJM
Just great; another butchery of physics we can blame physics textbooks and popularizers for!
Actually, the situation is completely reversed. You need an infinite being in order to even talk about Indeterminism. (The case against indeterminism is even stronger than that: it's impossible for finite beings to even talk about unpredictability.) So indeterminism is:
- almost universally rejected by theoretical fundamental physicists and cosmologists (the only physicists who matter on this issue) except for Hawking
- not true
- anti-scientific
To be technical about it, finite beings can't decide whether it's true or not, they have to assume it. But since it's incompatible with science we should assume it's false, and that determinism is true.
Further, Larry's formulation of determinism is screwed up.
Besides, indeterminism is incompatible with volition, so it can't rescue "free" will.