Taking the fight to the real issue

Post Reply New Topic

What seems to be most neglected in discussions of free will is its utility. Why would anybody commit to a decision without close attention to the implications of that decision based on past experience? A decision is only useful out of past experience which means it must be determined by that experience and the evaluative capabilities of the decider, both of which are fixed.

I think you both are essentially stating that if time’s arrow can flow backward then causality does not exist. However your position is predicated on the assumption that time's arrow is not objective. The problem with this is that there is a good deal of scientific evidence to suppose that time's arrow is objective. The first proof of this is the most commonly cited; the Arrow of Time being discernibly objective from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The fact that ice cubes melt in hot coffee rather than assembling themselves out of the coffee, that a block sliding on a rough surface slows down rather than speeding up, and that we can remember the past rather than the future. My personal favorite proof comes from the article ‘Black Hole Evaporation Entails an Objective Passage of Time’ by Avshalom C. Elitzur and Shahar Dolev.



I see this as a sort of metaphysical fatalism. When one talks about theology and free will; one supposes already that God has a full account of the universe. This is especially the case when one considers things like Molinism or Calvinism. When one then postulates that this is incompatible with free will; as many have over the centuries this is termed theological fatalism. It’s very interesting how the closely fully deterministic views mirror those of the theological fatalist. There is a really good article by Bill Likin called ‘Free Will and the Burden of Proof’, one of the methodological points in relation to determinism and free will and he argues that ‘the default position between any two things ought to be that they are compatible with one another’. If one claims that they are impossible then it would have to be contended that free will could not exist in any possible world. When one argues compatiblism, then it only has to be true in at least one world. Looking at this, you can see who is actually making the bigger claim.

I also do not put much stock in Hawkings argument, however his argument is about as close to a scientific (as in non-philosophical) as one can get that Human free will is deterministic. I see no reason to see these things as the same thing. I would contend from a theological and philosophical position that the Theist has a much better chance of reconciling free will and determinism than any secular Compatibilist. This is due to the fact that one can contend that free will, like the Theistic view of morality simply exists necessarily in much the same way as the laws of mathematics do. From the Theists view, free will is a property of God’s nature. It is people like Dennett who twist themselves into knots trying to reconcile things like free will with determinism with little chance of reaching the almost intuitive position of people that the scientific method works and that they can have free will also.

Whatever the theological delusions of free will there seems here a total blindness to the understanding that decisions made through free will, that is without reference to the understanding of consequences that do not take into account either the experience and understanding of the decision maker or the preconditions that produce the consequences is merely pure insanity and of no use whatsoever in solving a problem. Free will is a useless procedure.

I am not. I'm simply skeptical to the use of time in a naive manner.

The issue is whether the "arrow of time" through the Second Law is sufficient for an ontology of time. After all, the second law's claim, if you look at it, ends up being statistical. It is *possible* that order grow in a system, it just isn't likely that it ever does because of the number of molecules needed to work in a relatively uniform manner.


I actually consider God's whole account to undermine freedom. I think I already posted an article by Dean Zimmerman on an argument against Molinism, wherein the problem is that God's knowledge necessarily leads to God's full control over the situation.

As it stands, I haven't put forward an argument against compatibilism, I was fully expecting you to have a libertarian view of free will. Most religious people do. Not only that, but Catholicism tends towards this position. From my understanding, compatibilism is really most connected to religious positions like Calvinism.



Umm..... problem: Free will is in many ways an empirical issue. One cannot make it an axiom or any other similar thing without the possibility of anything having axiomatic free will. As such, I think Dennett's knot-tying makes sense. I think it is necessary regardless of one's theological position, as Dennett is wrangling with the facts of human psychology. The big issue is that there have to be psychological facts, other than a "feeling I have free will" that ultimately go forward to show that there is unity and command for persons over themselves. I'd say a major problem is that it is unclear whether we can pull a "self" out of the mind, and whether we can show that this "self" has any degree of control.

Has anyone noticed? There is no way of empirically testing the hypothesis of free will. That is because we cannot rewind reality and play it again.

ruveyn

perspective is important.

unless, i guess, you don't believe in relativity...

consider the light from a star not too far away. ten lightyears or so. it takes ten years for that light to go from it's source to your face and yet, from the perspective of the light, no time has elapsed.

time is not objective. if it were, we wouldn't have to math so hard to keep keep our gps satellites working.

perspective. yummy.

Well, actually, there are certain ways of doing so that have some validity. Usually they rely on showing that decision making is a result of unconscious impulses. The Libet experiment is often cited in these discussions. Quantum consciousness is also cited, but many consider it empirically invalidated.

Define what is 'will' first.

Excuse me, I will respond to these two posts together:


I am actually a Molinist. As to Dean Zimmerman, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong. It is also worth indicating that Zimmerman is a Theist. It is also worth mentioning that the debate between open theism and Molinism is still continuing and is unlikely to be resolved soon, with both sides give the other the credit of being functioning ‘mere Christians’ (as C.S. Lewis would term it). It is perfectly reasonable to assume that either side could lose this theological debate. My personal belief that Molinism is based on the book of Acts in which God asserts his divine foreknowledge;

'This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men' (Acts 2.23)

'For truly in this city there were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever thy hand and thy plan had predestined to take place' (Acts 4.27-28)

This mostly has to do with the assertion that God possesses what is termed ‘middle knowledge’. To the open Theist God is seen akin to the master chess player, always knowing what his next best move would be but not knowing the outcomes of someone else’s free will. However a Molinist sees no issue with God having full control but people still having free will. It is argued by Molinists that God has the full control over those who sin but this does not impinge on their capacity to choose. For instance take this argument by Dr. William Lane Craig:

If we take the biblical word "foreknowledge" to encompass middle knowledge, then we can make perfect sense of God's providential control over a world of free agents. For via His middle knowledge, God knew exactly which persons, if members of the Sanhedrin, would freely vote for Jesus' condemnation; which persons, if in Jerusalem, would freely demand Christ's death, favoring the release of Barabbas; what Herod, if King, would freely do in reaction to Jesus and to Pilate's plea to judge him; and what Pilate himself, if holding the prefecture of Palestine in A.D. 30, would freely do under the pressure of the Jewish leaders and the crowd. Knowing all the possible circumstances, persons, and permutations of these, God decreed to create just those circumstances and just those people who would freely do what God willed to happen. Thus, the whole scenario, as Luke insists, unfolded according to God's plan. This is truly mind-boggling. When one reflects that the existence of the various circumstances and persons involved was itself the result of myriads of prior free choices on the part of these and other agents, and these in turn of yet other prior contingencies, and so on, then we see that only an omniscient mind could providentially direct a world of free creatures toward His sovereignly established ends.

As to compatiblism; I personally have nothing against it. My personal view is that compatibilism works in conjunction with my own view of free will up until it starts infringing on moral responsibility. One of the reasons I am sympathetic to Dennett in this regard is that he clearly does not want free will to impinge responsibility. If someone wants to convince me that this view is incompatible with my view of free will then let them; I would like to learn.
I also think your fight about dealing with the fundamental distinction between the objective nature of our brain and the subjective nature of our mind. They may be the same thing, that has yet to be totally proven and there are many serious thinkers who are still dualists (those who hold that they are not the same thing). I personally tend towards dualism in the face of the science on philosophical grounds. I think you are right about making the distinction between the self and the mind though in the sense that it is difficult to prove one way or the other.



I don’t think response you have made; fits what I actually stated. I held that time was objective in the sense that it objectively works only in one direction. The point you have made relates to relativity; and I agree that this is provably true. I do not hold that this point you have put forward disproves what I have stated; that the science behind Black Hold evaporation shows that time only flows in one direction; though it is true that it can flow at different speeds and in strange ways (as AG has pointed out).

Last edited by 91 on 17 Nov 2010, 3:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, ok, but the issue is that Dennett's view of free will is not highly compatible with standard molinism, which still ends up being libertarian.

I am not sure if it is that worth noting about Zimmerman. His paper argues for a push towards open theism. The problem with open theism is that it has problems with the philosophy of time given Einstein.


I know. I have an open theist friend. He used to be really into the issue. I also will on occasion read Greg Boyd's blog.


It seems to me that this is no different than the Calvinist's claim on the same issue, but the issue is that if God plans everything, then his control is such that the beings lack autonomous ability to make their own decisions, but rather the decisions made have God as the ultimate cause.


I am not sure that "providential direction" really is the best word for outright control. Nor do I think that if God has this kind of power, that we can still rebut very much to the problems of free will for the evils of the world.


Well, the issue, as I understand it, is just that Molinism is a variety of libertarian free will based theology. I suppose there is no law saying that the two must be together, but.... I've never heard of a compatibilist molinist. I am not even sure that middle knowledge has the same function if compatibilism is true that is argued for under standard knowledge.


Well.... no, I wasn't getting into dualism. I think dualism is pretty close to dead in terms of providing good explanation for reality. The idea has always been ad hoc to some extent, and at this point it is starting to look outright ridiculous. Rather, the point I am getting at is that our knowledge and fundamental basis of notions of free will is experiential. The problem is that if our experiences are found to be based upon entirely unconscious mechanisms of choice, it becomes unclear to me that we have free will. We no longer have a conscious decider that we can say "knew all of the facts", but rather we'd have shown that the mind is effectually a mechanism.

-----------
All that being said, let's shift back away from apologetics for God, since I think those have floundered a bit, and into counter-apologetics.

In this world there are extremes of horrible things. People tortured. People who commit suicide. People going through the most outrageous things a person may imagine. Heck, on most accounts of theism, there is hell. Is it justifiable to think that a God of love would be responsible for all of these things existin? I would say no:
1) The two propositions are strongly at variance at each other at a simple glance. After all, most people DON'T have those they love suffer so terribly, and in general act to their utmost to prevent most of these occurrences.
2) The burden of proof for something so extreme is rather high, and most counter-points don't seem to meet this.

For this reason, I'd say that there is a real problem arguing God's existence. This ties back into our discussion of Molinism somewhat, as it all goes back to whether God is justified and responsible for the evils of the world. He created everything knowing what would happen, so he is certainly responsible for the existence of these evils, just as if I push a domino knowing the entire effect, I am responsible for what that does. And.... well... there seems to be little justification for this extreme degree of horror. After all, if we had a politician or any other figure with this much responsibility, we'd outright reject their lovingness or goodness rather quickly. If I were asked if this were the kind of world the most loving being would create, I would say no. I can conceive of better worlds.


Even further, science is pushing back the boundaries. A lot of notions of God seem to really be a "God of the gaps" there to explain where nothing else is currently successful. The issue is that science is always pushing outward, and removing the unknown. Given this history of success against a history of failure for supernatural claims, it seems reasonable to reject those supernatural claims as a matter of induction. How convoluted and ad hoc does an idea have to be before it is discarded? How flawed must a paradigm be in order for it to be replaced by another one? I'd hold that theism is past the point of practical usefulness.

time is a vector.
Its quantity is relative; its direction is not (see the second law of thermodynamics).

QUOTE:
If we take the biblical word "foreknowledge" to encompass middle knowledge, then we can make perfect sense of God's providential control over a world of free agents. For via His middle knowledge, God knew exactly which persons, if members of the Sanhedrin, would freely vote for Jesus' condemnation; which persons, if in Jerusalem, would freely demand Christ's death, favoring the release of Barabbas; what Herod, if King, would freely do in reaction to Jesus and to Pilate's plea to judge him; and what Pilate himself, if holding the prefecture of Palestine in A.D. 30, would freely do under the pressure of the Jewish leaders and the crowd. Knowing all the possible circumstances, persons, and permutations of these, God decreed to create just those circumstances and just those people who would freely do what God willed to happen. Thus, the whole scenario, as Luke insists, unfolded according to God's plan. This is truly mind-boggling. When one reflects that the existence of the various circumstances and persons involved was itself the result of myriads of prior free choices on the part of these and other agents, and these in turn of yet other prior contingencies, and so on, then we see that only an omniscient mind could providentially direct a world of free creatures toward His sovereignly established ends.


This is one of the most hilarious examples of open self deception I have ever encountered. To posit that a super-being permits total freedom and then describe how this freedom can be totally frustrated by a deceptive arrangement of circumstance and manipulation of individuals concerned without having a sense of how self contradictory his proposal is can only indicate a mind driven to total befuddlement by a silly agenda.

Time is a scalar. Roughly speak a time interval between two events is the number of cycles of a harmonic oscillator that occurs between the first event and the second event.

ruveyn

Mmmm I'm fairly sure it's a vector:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
quote:
Einstein showed that if time and space is measured using electromagnetic phenomena (like light bouncing between mirrors) then due to the constancy of the speed of light, time and space become mathematically entangled together in a certain way (called Minkowski space) which in turn results in Lorentz transformation and in entanglement of all other important derivative physical quantities (like energy, momentum, mass, force, etc.) in a certain 4-vectorial way (see special relativity for more details).
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 921AA7LroT
quote:
- In non-relativistic physics, time is a scalar quantity, because there is no indefiniteness about it, and it is the same for everyone.

- But in relativistic physics, time is NOT a scalar. It is, in fact, the 4th component of a 4-vector: (t, x, y, z). That is why time and space coordinates get mixed together by the Lorentz transformation.

Time can be described or specified with a single number. That makes it a scalar.

ruveyn

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpS5KRLGSmg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]