Proposed: We should believe in free will and act accordingly, no matter what the truth of that matter is.
Posted May 11, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC
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By way of support, I link to this earlier post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gue/comments/h28ll/proposed_the_world_behaves_deterministically_but/
However, I think there is the potential for different direction in your proposition that might produce different arguments!
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Thinking and acting as if you possess a free will is indistinguishable from actually possessing a free will.
tl;dr compatibilism.
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If stimulus X results in outcome Y (e.g. torture -> anxiety), regardless of one's views on free-will, then it would be impossible for your actions (in a deterministic universe) to be functionally indistinguishable from the actions of someone with free-will.
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Is that so?
How would you distinguish between Universe A in which people believe they have free will and are physically determined, and Universe B in which people believe they have free will and they are not physically determined?
Your torture example seems to demand some explaining if there is a distinction to be teased out there.
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Is that so?
Yes.
How would you distinguish between Universe A in which people believe they have free will and are physically determined, and Universe B in which people believe they have free will and they are not physically determined?
In universe A, Stimulus X would result in outcome Y when controlling for all variables other than "free will" (it would have to in order for this to be a deterministic universe). In universe B, stimulus X would not necessarily result in outcome Y when controlling for those same variables.
Your torture example seems to demand some explaining if there is a distinction to be teased out there.
No it doesn't. I put it in as a simplified example of a causal relationship which could hypothetically override free-will in a deterministic universe. If, outside the confines of our hypothetical discussion, torture does not necessarily lead to anxiety, it wouldn't disprove my point.
EDIT: and "anxiety" would be an example of something one with free-will would eliminate by means of said free-will.
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A few observations. First, you have changed my definition of Universe A in your reply. In my formulation, everything, including the will, is physically determined. In your Universe A, everything except the will is physically determined, which is not in line with my example.
But allowing that perhaps this was a semantic misstep, second, I don't believe that an example involving triggering a certain emotion based on a physical stimuli is necessarily the most profitable example to debate over. Free will doesn't strictly mean the freedom from stimuli, or the freedom to will anything at anytime. I believe, rather, it means that more generally, you are capable of being the author of your own thoughts. An example in which others imposing their will upon you does not seem to be mutually exclusive to being the occasional author of your own thoughts, or to conclusively shift the debate one way or another.
Returning to my point—I believe that in your example, and any others I have ever encountered, it would be very difficult for you to prove that the personal agent experiences life in any way different if there is or is not free will. To this end, merely believing that you have free will (even if that thought itself was physically determined from the beginning of time) is just as good as actually having it, because you could never know the difference anyway.
Turning back to your example—in neither universe, A nor B, would the tortured agent be capable of knowing if his anxiety is physically determined and also the result of his own free will, or physically determined and without a free will.
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If free will can't hold its own as a concept or a phenomenon, i.e. if it's non-definable, illogical, or not descriptive of anything in the actual world, then we should drop the concept. I don't think this in itself would lead to the problems that people often worry about, because I don't think the commonly presented choice (either we "believe" in free will or there's no such thing as moral responsibility) is valid.
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How do you get moral responsibility without free will?
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The nature of our decisionmaking process, and the consciousness which it derives from, is something that science (nor philosophy or religion) will ever fully explain. If the universe is truly deterministic, then it's determined from more variables and moving parts than we could ever hope to count, let alone analyze and project. So, we should still act according to the "free will" principle, because it's something we can relate to, and we can apply consequences to action- however imperfectly so- better than without the idea of free will.
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Perhaps a mere technicality, but is not demanding that everyone believe in the concept of free will an infringement of free will itself?
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No, just good arguing. Persuading someone to change their mind on something appears to more a proof that people have the ability to change their mind than it is a proof that the state of molecules in their brain determines all of their actions.
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(For the sake of argument) I don't believe in free will, and therefore "should" statements are meaningless to me. I do whatever it is that I was predestined to do.
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Out of curiosity, when you have a difficult decision to make, how does your internal process go?
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Even when not trying to defend a CON position, I'm not sure how to answer this. The only answer I can come up with is that I "think" about the issue.
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Because we don't have free will, we do not have the ability to choose whether or not to believe in free will, rendering this whole debate meaningless. BTW- I did not choose to craft this response, but due to lack of free will, I believe that I did, but I didn't choose this belief and yet I believe that I chose it, unwillingly.
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If you believe that everyone chooses what they do out of free will, then it is easy to classify any observed negative behavior by someone as "evil" and that someone then becomes an "evil" person.
However, if we treat people as having little to no free will, we are motivated to delve deeper into the physical causes of this negative behavior and maybe find solutions in the form of therapy, drugs, environmental changes, and some day even gene therapy.
Believing in free will doesn't mean we don't examine the things that can strongly influence a choice, like therapy, drugs, and environmental changes.
Free will doesn't mean all options appear equal, but it does mean we are, ultimately, responsible for the choices we made within a field of influences. We should still consider all these influences and the role they play, but we should not exude the individual's role as being deterministic.