tl;dr: An Article on Volition

[Basics]

This was written by a friend of mine, and it's probably one of the most concise, well-written and comprehensive philosophical treatises I've ever read. Copied without permission, original can be found here:
http://www.xanga.com/derickhalley/544561938/tour-de-force-in-defense-of-volitionfree-will.html

Tour De Force In Defense Of Volition/Free Will

Free will exists. This, the faculty of volition, is part of human consciousness, is real, possesses a specific nature, and is consistent with the law of identity.

This piece is being written so that all those concerned have the rational case for volition consistently presented to them, as opposed to the prevalence of concrete-bound argumentation. It is to cover loose ends and to stand at the center of my continued defense of the existence of volition, and I am prepared to continue to defend it against those who have read this.

I hardly need to mention my intellectual debt to Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff; consider this as including one huge citation to all of their work, with the footnote “As interpreted and applied by myself.” Hardly any of what I’m writing is strictly new ideologically, and I act as an unofficial scholar of Objectivism, although some of these integrations are mine and I officially represent only myself, who happens to be indebted to their work.

Throughout this piece, the following definitions are being used as to clarify the precise meaning of my words.
Free Will/Volition: “The faculty possessed by human consciousness allowing the possessor the possibility of more than one specific course of action.”
Determinism: “The belief that all entities, including humans, necessarily take once specific course of action, its identity allowing no alternative, i.e. that man is determined. Belief in the non-existence of free will.”
Causality/Law of Causality: “The metaphysical law, a corollary of the law of identity, which states that everything acts with and based on its identity. The fact that actions are caused.”
Mechanical Causality: “The instance of the law of causality in which every specific action taken by the objects involved necessarily took place on account of a linear causal sequence.”

Whether or not one agrees with my developed definitions is in most ways superfluous. This is what I mean, and if the definitions given distance one from the argument altogether, then we are speaking of a different subject anyway.

The following facts are to be taken for granted in this treatise: the validity of sense perception, the potential competence of human cognition, the law of identity, the validity of reason, the validity of logic, and the objective significance of the meaning of words as referents to reality. Anyone who contradicts these is contradicting himself in a very blatant way, and I am not currently taking it upon myself to validate these for those who wish to deny them. “Volition is the thing.”

This work is split into the following sections:

1. Intro (this,)
2. The Nature of Free Will and Why One Believes In It
3. Volition as Axiomatic
4. Discounting Arguments against Free Will
To Be Added Later: Conclusion and Consequences of the Issue

The Nature of Free Will and Why One Believes In It

Before arguments against free will can be sufficiently discounted, it must be stated why one is to believe in it in the first place. It is necessary to establish the syllogism or observation that one is defending.

Free will is self-evident to each of us the moment one begins to think. It can be observed directly, via introspection, or implicitly by the act of thought. When one makes decisions, one observes that more than a single method of cognitive (and therefore existential) action is possible. Decision-making and conceptual cognition itself rests on this premise. A thinking human is consistently aware of separate conclusions and actions, which, by his nature, he could draw, but with reason (or a lack of it) do not; note that on the cognitive level, thought is action.

Lacking free will would leave us bound to the perceptual, animal level of consciousness: infallible and limited. We would lack true thought, and our perception would lack the possibility of actual conclusions, which, by their nature, are conditional. As one proceeds to the conceptual level, one simultaneously observes the existence of volition.

One can then proceed to establish that this observation is consistent with our knowledge of other human, conceptual-level minds. While animals (not always successfully,) consistently act towards self-preservation in their own limited, mechanical way, humans have the potential to choose to think or not to think, to focus or to evade, to pursue life or to pursue a form of self-destruction. This can be seen in the existence of irrationality, of suicide, of drug abuse, as well as in the ability of the mind to focus, to discover electricity, to invent the combustion engine, or to write Atlas Shrugged. And, most of all, this is displayed in a specific mind’s potential to pursue either direction. All of this supplements one’s own introspective observation of free will.

When looked at honestly and objectively and not from the position of Ivory Tower daydreamers, free will is neither a mystic fantasy nor a matter of random chance. We each both perceive and accept it implicitly as a very real faculty of our cognition.

While most of our thoughts and actions operate within mechanical causality, the basic decision on the nature of our mental motive power, i.e. “to focus or not to focus,” does not; multiple alternatives are open. And this is what makes it ‘free will,’ i.e. causes our specific actions not to be necessitated by our past nature.

This, we observe in our decision-making and accept implicitly, is the nature of volition. And to deny it, is to indulge in a contradiction.

Volition as Axiomatic

Humans, the only possessors of conceptual cognition on Earth, do not merely perceive individual objects. While we do posses this automatic, perceptual level of consciousness, we can build from it unto a higher level, which is dependant on it. This, the conceptual level, is not automatic. Think about your sight and you will realize you need to initiate no action in order for it to work. Think about your sight, and realize that thought requires conditional, self-initiated action. The volitional is the conceptual. The concepts we form, which allow us to categorize concretes and act on long-range essentials, depend on choice.

Concrete perception (or lower) cannot be wrong. Whatever senses a consciousness possesses, be they eyes, or color-blind eyes (such as mine,) or the pure pre-perceptual sensations of certain sea creatures, there is no basis on which to consider them invalid. Some means of perception, such as my own, might but be slightly (or others much) less efficient in some way and thus less profitable for life than they would be if they were not deficient, but the knowledge gained by these means is not “invalid” in the sense of not corresponding with existence, in the way that someone’s conclusion might not. All pre-conceptual cognitive tools mechanically respond to the specific identity of external reality, in a form necessitate by their nature, and are used by the possessor to consider whatever part of external existence it experiences by whatever means it happens to have. This level of perception is not, and can never be, “right or wrong,” but “its own specific means,” and cannot be properly doubted; it had to be that way, so there is no basis for criticism.

The fallibility and greater complexity of the conceptual level of knowledge is the essence of the role of volition. Were our consciousness non-volitional, it would also be infallible. The law of identity would necessitate all of our thoughts. But it can be observed that conceptual knowledge, by its nature, is not automatic. This is what makes it fallible. Your eyes cannot be wrong. Your conclusions can be. All conceptual knowledge (and therefore all words) takes for granted the conditional nature of this process, and therefore implicitly accepts volition.

To say, “I am a determinist,” is to say “I believe it is wrong to believe in free will,” is to say, “I believe it is wrong to believe that human knowledge can be evaluated.” This is a contradiction, as that itself is an evaluation.

It is impossible to logically and consistently believe in the non-existence of free will. To make any statement is to imply that it is true and therefore wrong to disagree with it, and the whole conception of “right and wrong” depends on volition. The statement “free will doesn’t exist” could only be true in a universe without conceptual beings, i.e. without words, i.e. where the statements itself could not exist.

Not that we know that it is illogical not to believe in free will, it can be demonstrated that it is certainly not illogical to believe in it.

Discounting Arguments Against Volition

Free will does not contradict identity, does not contradict causality, science cannot discount it, and is ‘complete’ in every meaningful sense.

It is asserted that free will is the belief of mystics, that it is non-objective and anti-causal. This is itself an irrational implementation of the mind-body dichotomy, which is false. Like those who assert that matter and consciousness cannot both exist, and that belief in the existence of non-material consciousness brings one outside the realm of logic, those who assert that free will contradicts the law of identity or causality need to be answered with a single word, which they cannot account for: “Why?” (Perhaps it is relevant that this happens to be the question that the determinist theory cannot accept as relevant, as the term is inapplicable to those who believe that all of our conclusions are necessary.)

The fact is that matter and consciousness both exist and integrate with the other, that free will and the law of causality are real, and that we know this because we observe it, because it is self-evident. Those who assert that consciousness or free will contradict material existence are playing what I call “Kant’s Big Lie,” which Ayn Rand mentions (without my label) in Ayn Rand Answers. They are adapting his method of asserting what reality should be, and expecting listeners to value their demands over factual observation. It is necessary that one withdraw the benefit of the doubt to those who expect the basic nature of the universe to conform to their arbitrary demands.

Those who claim that “all is matter” or that “all is spirit” are both making the same mistake, taking different sides of the same epistemological coin (Rand’s term,) trying to escape that which unites the two: the mind; that is, reason. The same goes for those who defend causality by denying free will or defend free will by denying causality.

The belief that free will contradicts identity usually (when it is merely an error by its better advocates) stems from their impression that, since man’s particular actions are not specifically necessitated by his nature, this would mean that his actions contradict his identity, and that a volitional consciousness is erratic and irrational. But this is not the case, and the subjectivist view of free will is equally (if not more) invalid as the concrete-bound, materialist view that the volitional is the subjective and therefore false (volition is not false, although the subjective is.) The determinists have no reason to associate the anti-causal advocates of free will with free will per se.

Actually, the faculty of free will is part of man’s specific identity. And, all actions possible to man, including those that are chosen, exist as part of a finite (yet incalculable) number of potential actions, which are all necessitated qua potential action by man’s identity, although not all of them actually take place. This is the only way that free will could exist.

This leads us to the issue of causality. Man’s actions are, although free, still caused, because it is man’s specific identity that allows (i.e. causes) all of his specific possibilities to exist. And from his choice of the basic motive “to think or not to think” onwards, all of man’s decisions act on mechanical causality; the choice to focus, or to evade, or to de-focus, the fundamental choice, is the mind’s non-mechanical selection of which cause should motivate one’s actions. Volitional beings still act within their nature. The law of causality still always applies.

An individual has the ability to only select a specific type of action in one’s life, accepting one’s existence qua rational being as the cause of all of one’s actions, even though one did not have to do so, so that he is simultaneously free, rational, and orderly. And those who do choose to be irrational will face specific, hazardous results because of this, despite their wish for the course of their life to be illogical; instead, their life will lead to the logical result of their irrationality: destruction.

The free is not the erratic. In fact, it is only the existence of free will that makes the concept “rationality” meaningful, as non-volitional cognition is neither rational nor irrational but merely there.

The claim has been made that the definition of “mechanical causality” that I present is the proper definition of the law of causality per se, and that volition contradicts it (which it does.) I will account for this, not by debating the proper definition, but merely by temporarily accepting that of my opponents. By that definition, the law of causality is neither axiomatic nor absolute. There is no reason to believe that all causality must be linear, that all actions must be directly necessitated by the possessor.

It is only by the type of definition that I have provided (which Leonard Peikoff uses in OPAR) that the law of causality is irrefutable. One cannot deny it without accepting that one’s denial itself is acting within its nature. But there is no basis on which to assert that all entities must act with mechanical causality. Why can they not, as we have observed humans do, select from multiple possible course of action caused by their nature? The only definition of “law of causality” that can be held as axiomatic and absolute does not contradict free will; one that does contradict free will is not axiomatic and absolute. This presents to us to a defense of the Objectivist definition: the best meaning for a fundamental metaphysical law is the one that is fundamental and absolute, not one that acts as a mere label for a certain instance of a metaphysical law. Causality merely means that the actions of existents are caused by their nature, not that they are necessitated; to be caused is not to be necessitated, but to be made possible by the identity of the object involved.

It has been claimed that science has led to evidence that free will does not exist. First of all, as I am a follower of contemporary physics, let me state that there is no consensus on this and that it is not accepted in the field to believe that volition has been disproved. “The status of free will and its role within fundamental physical law remain unsolved.” (1) Further more, because (unknown to most scientists, and it will eventually kill the industry if unchanged) the scientific method and the validity of the physical sciences exist within a (proper) philosophical context, such as the validity of logic and sense perception, the conclusions of physics are necessarily preceded by the conclusions of rational philosophy. One would likely say that this amounts to “philosophy comes first,” which is in a sense true but is also misleading. Reason comes first. A philosophy developed with reason is a pre-requisite of the scientific method, and scientific conclusions which contradict rational philosophy are outside the realm of science in the actual, justified sense. Rational scientific induction and rational philosophy do not contradict. To establish with science that free will does not exist is no more possible than to establish with science that you the observer, or science itself, does not exist; it is a contradiction.

The scientific method is the product of man’s conceptual faculty, and takes for granted the fallible nature of human cognition. It also accepts, above all, the validity of direct perception. All of these facts demonstrate that science rests on the existence of free will.

I theorize that scientists who claim to have disproved free will are doing so as the result of a mistake in the intellectual realm, which they have not approached scientifically. For example, they may show that the neurons in our brain act in a certain way, which they can prove, but as a philosophical issue, have taken this fact as indicating that free will does not exist, even though it does not indicate this. By accepting a mistaken philosophical syllogism, they can make assertions about philosophy that are allegedly backed by science but are not. If one asserts “I think that if 2+2=4, then free will is imaginary, and I can prove mathematically that 2+2=4, so free will doesn’t exist,” one has not “mathematically proven that free will is impossible;” one is merely taking a mathematical truth as means of establishing a separate conclusion in the field of philosophy, that is not the necessary result of one’s valid conclusions in one’s specialized field (such as physics neurology or math.)

Remaining are allegations about the possibility of “partial free will.” This can mean one of two things. A, that the entire universe is not the result of choice. B, that our free decisions are weighted by demons inside of us. The first is obviously true, and an objective reality is a prerequisite to consciousness, not to speak of volitional consciousness. The fact of volition, for example, needs to be necessarily true before volition can exist. No one denies that certain facts are independent of human choice, except those with a fundamentally irrational view of the universe.

The second interpretation is certainly false. “A free will saddled with tendency is like a game with loaded dice.” (2) Remembering the fallibility of knowledge issue, in order for conclusions to be qualified as valid or invalid (which all statements assume,) our volition must be pure and actual. “Tendency” as part of free will is an incorrect rationalization that falsifies the issue entirely. Once tendency is introduced at all, there is no where to draw the line, and one is no longer responsible for one’s assertions. For something to actually be the product of one’s choice, it must be purely the product of one’s choice. That is, one must have complete power over whether or not to accept any idea, despite the fact that all of our cognitive processes must be consistent with the nature of our mind. And these truths are not mutually exclusive.

Free will does not contradict the law of identity or the law of causality, has not (and cannot) be disproved by the scientific method, and exists pure where it does exist, although not all of existence is the result of it.

Citations

(1) Brian Greene, “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” Vintage Books, Copyright 2004.
(2) Ayn Rand, “For The New Intellectual,” pg.137 (Galt’s Speech from Atlas Shrugged) Copyright 1957, 1961.

 

[obi]

I will be responding to this when I get home tomorrow, it's too late for me to write anything, but don't think you aren't getting a response if no one says anything for a day. =) Maybe I'll make 24 more posts before it so I can pretend like 2000 is a significant number. =)

 

[Basics]

I'd be glad to hear anything you say. I'm more than happy to adress the more Basic (LOL) questions, but if it's something I don't understand I may have to relay it to the original author. I'm sure he'll have absolutely no problem responding though, he lives to spread the word of Objectivism.

 

[teekay]

He should try to develop a written voice that doesn't sound like my math textbook.

Anyway, I'm always glad when people are into philosophy, but I honestly think this is a pretty unsubstantiated argument for the most part, and anyway I'm always put off by authors who are so utterly convinced of their rightness.

An example of something I think is rather shortsighted:

Why can they not, as we have observed humans do, select from multiple possible course of action caused by their nature?

Frankly, I don't think he really made a substantial argument that humans do in the first place, but this is a pretty simple answer from my point of view and it also applies to his supposedly unanswerable "why" question from earlier:

In a scenario in which there are multiple possibilities (a scenario I'm perfectly willing to grant exists), there must be some criteria on which the outcome is based. I'll allow for now that those criteria do not necessarily mean there will only be one outcome. But it should be self-evident that if there aren't some criteria, the "choice" is random.

So let's say that there are criteria on which the decision is based, and they allow for X number of options out of the original number of possibilities. Now all we have done is restated the problem in smaller terms. Either an outcome is selected randomly, or there is some new set of criteria. We may continue to narrow the options in this manner until there are only two left, and the outcome is always the same: ultimately, there is only one thing which, given a set of criteria, will be chosen, because that is the only option other than randomness.

In other words, declaring that causality allows for multiple different options based on the nature of the thing is dismissing the opponent's argument by restating it. Many determinists, including myself, will not disagree that there are multiple possible outcomes based on the thing's nature. It does not change the question to lower the number of options from countless to countable.

I should probably amend this by saying that I consider myself a determinist and I also believe in free will. I believe that the clash between them is only an illusion based on a misunderstanding of the way outcomes are determined. But hey, that's just me.

EDIT: Oh, and go update that girl thread. It is much more interesting than this one.

 

[Vyacheslav]

I've always been convinced that free will doesn't exist, and we are only convinced it does because we are more like characters in a book.

Think of us more like acting 'in character'. We can reconcile everything in our heads as free will because it all happens 'in character' for us, so free will exists somewhat but in a charad-like way.

 

[Brain]

For the tl;dr guys you can just read the first two paragraphs.

There exists an innate understanding of what free will is, but an incapacity of evaluating, formally, what it represents. Well, let me say it in plain words: free will is the capacity of an entity to perform actions which human beings can relate to in a way which is unforeseeable by a normal human. That's it. I know it is somewhat embarrassing, but when a normal human speaks about free will, that is what they mean, nothing more, nothing less. Free will is an informal and inherently anthropomorphical concept which does not (and never did) withstand rational inquiry. We don't want free will to be random because it's arbitrary; we don't want free will to be determined because that seems contrary to what we feel it means. Don't get me wrong, there are very clever ways to reconcile free will with determinism, but when they are not vague to the point of uselessness, they grant free will to entities we would never normally consider as free-willed (when one has to argue that a computer's ability to get a list of the programs it is running is a manifestation of self-consciousness, you have to agree that's quite a bullet to bite). Well, seeing all this confusion, all the countless discussions about free will that go absolutely nowhere, the only rational conclusion I can arrive at is that free will simply isn't a real subject of philosophical inquiry. In everyday life, it's nothing more than a gut feeling we have about entities we can relate to, considering options we deem relevant. Philosophically, it's a vacuum.

I would say that the whole debate about free will isn't really about the concept of free will. It's about the concept of self. If we were aware of what we are, there would be no debate. Unfortunately, we are not. Not really. Human beings have a gut feeling about themselves, about how they are special. We are illusioned about our thought process and I'm not talking about an illusion of control but about an illusion of unintelligibility and privacy. We have the innate impression that our identity is a sort of black box that cannot be opened or analyzed and about which we can only talk using made up high level concepts such as free will. It is disturbingly insidious: many people argue against free will saying that natural law determines our actions, not us, without ever pausing to consider whether it'd make sense to conflate the two, at least in part (hint: it makes tremendous sense). As such, it is the validity of the perception we have of ourselves (our illusive but gratifying "self") that is truly under attack. Debates about volition are a clash between a gratifying mind state we'd like to keep and the cruel thought that it is unintelligible by the standards of rationality we set for ourselves.

=======================
Now for a couple more things. Feel free to relay them to your friend.

Free will is self-evident to each of us the moment one begins to think.

"Self-evident" things can turn out to be dishearteningly meaningless when you analyze them. They are much more psychological than they are rational. Although a lot of self-evident things are truly useful tools, a lot of them exist because they help people bond, motivate them to do useful things, etc. If a common belief in X is advantageous, it will eventually become "self-evident" even though it's complete bullshit.

Lacking free will would leave us bound to the perceptual, animal level of consciousness: infallible and limited. We would lack true thought, and our perception would lack the possibility of actual conclusions, which, by their nature, are conditional. As one proceeds to the conceptual level, one simultaneously observes the existence of volition.

I don't get it. What's conditional to what? Perceptions are conditional to what reality is, rational thought operates on those perceptions and conclusions are thus conditional on perceptions. Perceptions are simple, rational thought is complex, but there's a whole spectrum between the two. Perception is straightforward; object extraction is more complex and more prone to mistakes; then you have tracking; shape recognition; shape categorization; each a tiny bit more complex and more "fallible". The animal level is hardly infallible, there's a whole spectrum of task complexity and I'd like to know where you draw the line.

While animals (not always successfully,) consistently act towards self-preservation in their own limited, mechanical way, humans have the potential to choose to think or not to think, to focus or to evade, to pursue life or to pursue a form of self-destruction.
...
Humans, the only possessors of conceptual cognition on Earth, do not merely perceive individual objects.

You glorify humans too much. Animals certainly have concepts, though they might not be elaborated enough for you to consider them.

While we do posses this automatic, perceptual level of consciousness, we can build from it unto a higher level, which is dependant on it. This, the conceptual level, is not automatic. Think about your sight and you will realize you need to initiate no action in order for it to work. Think about your sight, and realize that thought requires conditional, self-initiated action. The volitional is the conceptual. The concepts we form, which allow us to categorize concretes and act on long-range essentials, depend on choice.

What? There isn't a low level and a high level, there are thousands of levels. Animals can build a "higher level", or they wouldn't be able to interact with objects. Ditto for computers. The "conceptual level" is nothing more than a compressed version of the perceptual level - for example, you see an image of a dog and you say "dog" - here, the concept of "dog" (three letters) is representative of an image. Similarly, logic summarizes an infinity of true statements in a couple axioms. And so on. We're good at this, better than everything else we know, but that's no reason to think it is special. And then you parachute volition out of nowhere. What does choice have to do with this?

The fallibility and greater complexity of the conceptual level of knowledge is the essence of the role of volition. Were our consciousness non-volitional, it would also be infallible. The law of identity would necessitate all of our thoughts. But it can be observed that conceptual knowledge, by its nature, is not automatic. This is what makes it fallible. Your eyes cannot be wrong. Your conclusions can be. All conceptual knowledge (and therefore all words) takes for granted the conditional nature of this process, and therefore implicitly accepts volition.

I don't get it. First, fallibility can occur without volition. If I write a program to calculate square roots but it calculates squares instead, it will fail to do what was intended. Where's the "volition" in that? You're conflating concepts that need not be. Second, there is no reason conclusions have to be "fallible".

Those who claim that “all is matter” or that “all is spirit” are both making the same mistake, taking different sides of the same epistemological coin (Rand’s term,) trying to escape that which unites the two: the mind; that is, reason. The same goes for those who defend causality by denying free will or defend free will by denying causality.

"spirit" is a broken concept, for if it was found, it would become material.

The free is not the erratic. In fact, it is only the existence of free will that makes the concept “rationality” meaningful, as non-volitional cognition is neither rational nor irrational but merely there.

How would you know if that's the case or not? Say you have a volitional world and a non-volitional world. Could they look identical? If they were identical, how could you tell in which one you are? Seemingly, both worlds would have to follow your argument and conclude that volition exists, yet the conclusion would be wrong in the non-volitional world. What's up with that?

For example, they may show that the neurons in our brain act in a certain way, which they can prove, but as a philosophical issue, have taken this fact as indicating that free will does not exist, even though it does not indicate this.

The fact nobody can agree on a proper definition of free will should tell you how broken the concept is in the first place. From what I can see, your definition is rather vague and it is based on dichotomies that are in fact smooth functions with no apparent threshold. For example, to define free will according to a schism between the perceptual and the conceptual levels is grossly oversimplistic. There's a whole gradient in-between and I don't see where you're going to draw the line, so free will is either gradated or it is arbitrary. And that's a stretch - the "gradation" is as qualitative as it is quantitative. Furthermore, the "conceptual level" we have access to, as cool as it is, might be extremely poor in comparison with the best there could be - we wouldn't want our future AI to do the same argument you just did, except replacing "animals" with "humans", right?

 

[DM]

Ian your posts aren't just disappearing I'm deleting them because they add nothing to the thread so stop reposting it kthxbye

 

[obi]

Sorry this took so long

"Free will doesn’t exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can’t trace them back. If you’ve got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, that domino fell because it wanted to." - Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

Free will is self-evident to each of us the moment one begins to think. It can be observed directly, via introspection, or implicitly by the act of thought. When one makes decisions, one observes that more than a single method of cognitive (and therefore existential) action is possible.

This is just as much a reasonable premise as saying that all things revolve around the Earth. We cannot feel the motion of the Earth, so it just makes sense that it isn't moving. We can see things move in the sky, so it makes sense that they move. That we are capable of introspection and that we have free will are two completely different thoughts; the one does not imply the other.

Decision-making and conceptual cognition itself rests on this premise. A thinking human is consistently aware of separate conclusions and actions, which, by his nature, he could draw, but with reason (or a lack of it) do not; note that on the cognitive level, thought is action.

This reminds me of the old joke about Ford cars: You can have any color you want, as long as it's black. It's possible that we only have the illusion of free will, because not only is there often only one real choice, the existence of other potential choices is irrelevant, because our desires themselves are already determined. If you are born with a desire to do one thing over all others, even at the cost of life itself, did you ever have a choice? No conscious thought can override this, because you don't want to override it.

Lacking free will would leave us bound to the perceptual, animal level of consciousness: infallible and limited. We would lack true thought, and our perception would lack the possibility of actual conclusions, which, by their nature, are conditional. As one proceeds to the conceptual level, one simultaneously observes the existence of volition.

First off, I'd like to second Brain's criticism of animal's thoughts being infallible.

However, there is another error here, one that strikes to the heart of this part of the argument. Free will and cognition are not necessarily linked, which I will go into later.

One can then proceed to establish that this observation is consistent with our knowledge of other human, conceptual-level minds. While animals (not always successfully,) consistently act towards self-preservation in their own limited, mechanical way, humans have the potential to choose to think or not to think, to focus or to evade, to pursue life or to pursue a form of self-destruction.

This can be seen in the existence of irrationality, of suicide, of drug abuse, as well as in the ability of the mind to focus, to discover electricity, to invent the combustion engine, or to write Atlas Shrugged. And, most of all, this is displayed in a specific mind’s potential to pursue either direction. All of this supplements one’s own introspective observation of free will.

There's more to animal behavior than simple self-preservation. The most prevalent example is when an animal will sacrifice itself to save its children. That is not self-preservation, but rather, gene-preservation. If that seems too semantic for you, then perhaps a few examples of psychological experiments will be enough.

A rat is put in a cage, and every hour, two buttons light up (I don't remember the exact set-up, but it was something like this). One button is preset to stimulate the pleasure center of the rat's brain (via an electrode wired to the brain), the other dispenses food. At the start, the rat would just be attracted by the light and hit them at random. However, after a short amount of time, the rat learned what these buttons did, and as soon as it did, it hit the button for the pleasure every single time. This is virtually identical to human drug addicts behavior, except it even removes the physical addiction, meaning purely psychological addictions can drive behavior.

Martin Seligman did a famous experiment with dogs in which he put them in a cage, and then shocked them with a high voltage. The dogs tried to escape, but there was a barrier preventing them from leaving the area in which the shock was delivered. After a bit of conditioning with this, the barrier was removed. Dogs who were put into this new cage and shocked predictably tried to escape, eventually finding where there was no shock being delivered. The dogs that were in the cage when there was a barrier, however, had already learned that the shock is inescapable, and thus did not try to get out of it. They had, essentially, given up hope.

Some primates use sticks to get ants out of their hill for some food. They use rocks to smash open fruit (or, in some cases, another monkey's head). That these are crude uses of tools implies not that they don't think, but rather, that they aren't as good at it as humans.

If the fact that human's abilities are varied is a proof of free will, then surely computers have free will as well. They can do math faster than people, they can warm my house, make my coffee, spell check this message, propel a car, attack my base in Red Alert, read aloud, transcribe, guide nuclear warheads, and organize peace rallies. Surely, then, computers, too, are volitional beings.

When looked at honestly and objectively and not from the position of Ivory Tower daydreamers, free will is neither a mystic fantasy nor a matter of random chance. We each both perceive and accept it implicitly as a very real faculty of our cognition.

While most of our thoughts and actions operate within mechanical causality, the basic decision on the nature of our mental motive power, i.e. “to focus or not to focus,” does not; multiple alternatives are open. And this is what makes it ‘free will,’ i.e. causes our specific actions not to be necessitated by our past nature.

This, we observe in our decision-making and accept implicitly, is the nature of volition. And to deny it, is to indulge in a contradiction.

I am still yet to see the link between cognition and free will. If it is "I think, therefore I choose, because I can think of choosing something else", that is no proof at all.

Do not think about pink elephants. Upon reading that, you immediately thought about pink elephants. Perhaps you conjured up an image of one in your mind, perhaps it reminded you of your favorite character from The Simpsons getting drunk. Whatever it is, try and erase that image from your mind right now. Do not waste time relaxing and such, stop thinking about pink elephants right now. Can you choose to do so? This problem is particularly vexing to people who suffer from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Despite all desires to the contrary, they cannot stop thinking about their obsessions (usually related to filth, either physical germs, dirt, and the like, or extremely scrupulous moral standards. Another common obsession is an overriding desire for balance of some sort, for instance, if a sufferer scuffs the left shoe, they would need to scuff the right shoe), and therefore perform their compulsions to ease the anxiety. They realize that their thoughts are irrational, and would like nothing more than to just stop worrying about it, yet no matter how much they concentrate on not thinking their thoughts or performing their rituals, they eventually become overwhelmed with anxiety until they break down and just do it. Is the obsessive-compulsive, therefore, incapable of free will, if they cannot even control their cognitions?

Volition as Axiomatic

Humans, the only possessors of conceptual cognition on Earth, do not merely perceive individual objects. While we do posses this automatic, perceptual level of consciousness, we can build from it unto a higher level, which is dependant on it. This, the conceptual level, is not automatic. Think about your sight and you will realize you need to initiate no action in order for it to work. Think about your sight, and realize that thought requires conditional, self-initiated action. The volitional is the conceptual. The concepts we form, which allow us to categorize concretes and act on long-range essentials, depend on choice.

Stub your toe, and realize that you immediately realize how painful it is. This is a thought, but it did not require any self-initiated action. Have you ever felt a strong emotion, but not known why? Most people are, at some point in their life, sad, angry, bored, reflective, or any one of a myriad emotions without knowing why. There is more to thinking than "conscious vs. unconscious". I am always aware of feeling in my feet, but as soon as I began writing this, my awareness was heightened. If I were to stop writing and think more, I would be even more aware of feeling from those extremities.

Concrete perception (or lower) cannot be wrong. Whatever senses a consciousness possesses, be they eyes, or color-blind eyes (such as mine,) or the pure pre-perceptual sensations of certain sea creatures, there is no basis on which to consider them invalid. Some means of perception, such as my own, might but be slightly (or others much) less efficient in some way and thus less profitable for life than they would be if they were not deficient, but the knowledge gained by these means is not “invalid” in the sense of not corresponding with existence, in the way that someone’s conclusion might not.

What the eye sees, the mind believes. Just because a belief is justified does not make it true. For instance, a loud sound can cover a small sound both before and after the loud sound is heard. If you hear a loud sound and conclude that is the only sound, you could be wrong, it could be the case that other sounds were masked.

If you really believe everything your senses tell you is true, then I'd like to meet you and show you a few "magic" tricks, possibly with some money involved.

If someone with bad eyesight misreads a word because of their vision, and they say that the word is X when it is, in fact, Y, their senses have failed them, and they are wrong. Ironically enough, I was just checking my spelling of "amygdala", because it's not in Word's dictionary, but I typoed it as "amydala". The result came back talking about "Princess Amydala" but I still read that as "Princess Amygdala", and thought it was a good pun. It took me quite a few seconds before I realized just what I had done. And yes, I am aware that the proper spelling is "Amidala".

All pre-conceptual cognitive tools mechanically respond to the specific identity of external reality, in a form necessitate by their nature, and are used by the possessor to consider whatever part of external existence it experiences by whatever means it happens to have. This level of perception is not, and can never be, “right or wrong,” but “its own specific means,” and cannot be properly doubted; it had to be that way, so there is no basis for criticism.

Much of the fear response comes from an evolutionarily older portion of the brain, the amygdala. In yet another famous psychological experiment, John Watson conditioned a young boy by the name of Albert to fear a stuffed animal (a white rat, to be specific) by pairing its appearance with a loud noise. This fear response is not a conscious decision (imagine if it were; a tiger comes up and starts mauling you, but you pause, and think "Hmm, I believe I should flee," before you actually do), but the reasons for fearing it are still wrong. There is no threat from stuffed white rats (Albert eventually generalized his fear to all things white and fluffy), so I don't see how you could support the precarious claim that unconscious = infallible.

In fact, the reverse is true. When you do a task often enough, you can do it without thinking about it. This is commonly referred to as "automatic processing". When you think about doing it, that is "controlled processing". Automatic processing is much faster than controlled processing, as most people would expect, but it is also more error prone, or, in other words, more fallible.

To say, “I am a determinist,” is to say “I believe it is wrong to believe in free will,” is to say, “I believe it is wrong to believe that human knowledge can be evaluated.” This is a contradiction, as that itself is an evaluation.

I agree with the first premise, that to be a determinist is to reject free will, but I disagree that the rejection of free will entails that knowledge is unevaluatable. I fail to see how that follows.

It is impossible to logically and consistently believe in the non-existence of free will. To make any statement is to imply that it is true and therefore wrong to disagree with it, and the whole conception of “right and wrong” depends on volition. The statement “free will doesn’t exist” could only be true in a universe without conceptual beings, i.e. without words, i.e. where the statements itself could not exist.

I really need to know from where this idea arose.

Those who claim that “all is matter” or that “all is spirit” are both making the same mistake, taking different sides of the same epistemological coin (Rand’s term,) trying to escape that which unites the two: the mind; that is, reason. The same goes for those who defend causality by denying free will or defend free will by denying causality.

I have yet to see any persuasive arguments as to why "All is matter" (the materialist view) is incorrect, and, aside from followers of Christian Science, I have yet to see any arguments claiming "all is spirit".

If one asserts “I think that if 2+2=4, then free will is imaginary, and I can prove mathematically that 2+2=4, so free will doesn’t exist,” one has not “mathematically proven that free will is impossible;” one is merely taking a mathematical truth as means of establishing a separate conclusion in the field of philosophy, that is not the necessary result of one’s valid conclusions in one’s specialized field (such as physics neurology or math.)

If one asserts "I think that if cognition has some basis, and I want to believe in free will, then free will exists, and cognition does have some basis, so free will does exist", one has not "proven that free will exists" either. Until the reasoning behind this link is explained better, there can be no more debate.


I'm going to close with some questions on just what freedom is.

Imagine that you walk into Safeway (or another such grocery store) with the intent to buy some Minute Maid Orange Soda. However, the store you walk into is owned by a certifiably crazy person, and the only thing this store stocks is Minute Maid Orange Soda. You think, "Wow, this is odd," buy some soda, and leave, content.

Did you actually have a choice in the buying of this soda? Your only option of things to buy was that one product. Would you have had a choice if the psychotic store owner had put a gun to your head and demanded you buy some soda? Your options there are soda or death.

If God himself were to come down from Heaven and command you to buy the soda, under threat of eternal damnation and reward of everlasting salvation, would you then have a choice in the buying of the soda? Would there be a difference in the amount of choice you have in any of these scenarios?

If you answered that yes, there is, in fact, free will in each of these scenarios, then is there ever any situation in which there is no choice at all? Is a situation in which you choose between death / eternal damnation and anything else a choice?

 

[ls]

Please do not quote Orson Scott Card unless it is to mock him. Ditto Ayn Rand.

Anyway, I do not want to begin with a long diatribe on free will, but I will say that I'm not very fond of Brain's definition. Actions can be foreseeable by other humans and still be intuitively "free". Economics for example is the science of predicting the behavior of freely acting rational (or semirational) individuals given scarcity. I prefer the counterfactual definition of free well: free will means that for every action x, there is a possible world with ~x.

 

[Brain]

Please do not quote Orson Scott Card unless it is to mock him. Ditto Ayn Rand.

Anyway, I do not want to begin with a long diatribe on free will, but I will say that I'm not very fond of Brain's definition. Actions can be foreseeable by other humans and still be intuitively "free". Economics for example is the science of predicting the behavior of freely acting rational (or semirational) individuals given scarcity. I prefer the counterfactual definition of free well: free will means that for every action x, there is a possible world with ~x.

Intuitively, to be able to predict one's actions perfectly contradicts the idea of free will. I didn't mean predict with tools, though. It's really all about human intuition. I guess I could say that free will is the capacity that entities have to behave in a way we can relate to and leave it at that. Also, note that what I'm doing here is that I'm giving you a definition that corresponds to what normal (dumb) people expect to find in the concept of free will (and are failing to).

As for your definition, the problem is that it's as vague as vague can be. If a photon hits a surface and has 50/50 odds of rebounding or passing through, that would give it free will. I mean, you can stick with it if you want (it's not like I care what free will really is), but in addition to the fact that's not what people have in mind when they talk about free will, I don't see any worth to it.

 

[Glen]

i am going to be atrociously blunt and say that even acting freely isnt all that free. every action you take is merely reactionary. you can say 'oh i hate the system i am going to fight against it' or what have you, but youre just counteridentifying. thats not real free choice.

the only way you can really be free, in my eyes, is to somehow seperate yourself from the world around you. but even thats gonna be problematic as youre still enslaved by memories and thought. thought and analysis in general is looking backwards. you can never assess the present, you can only assess the past. therefore every opinion you have on everything is based on thought and analysis of what that thing WAS. how can you have a real relationship with anyone? your opinion of them is based entirely upon who they were in the past. theyre different people than they were when they last gave you a flower, or when they last punched you in the face. this is slightly off topic though.

but back to my initial point, 'free will' isnt free at all. everything is a reaction; either you identify or you counteridentify, and i dont see how thats free at all. the trick is to somehow remove yourself entirely from this reactionary, past-obsessed bullshit, but im only 18 and havent really figured out how to do that yet 8 )

 

[teekay]

Intuitively, to be able to predict one's actions perfectly contradicts the idea of free will.

I don't think it does. Maybe what some people think free will has to be, but they're wrong. It's a mixup between "can" and "will." Even if I can perfectly predict what someone will do (which I could given a complete knowledge of every single factor involved in their decision), it doesn't mean they had to do it, just that they are going to.

 

[Brain]

I don't think it does. Maybe what some people think free will has to be, but they're wrong. It's a mixup between "can" and "will." Even if I can perfectly predict what someone will do (which I could given a complete knowledge of every single factor involved in their decision), it doesn't mean they had to do it, just that they are going to.

If I have perfect knowledge of a person's brain and could thus infer with certainty that the person will do action X, then there is no path that he could possibly follow to perform action Y. Therefore, he can't do Y. He can only do X. He could have done Y if his brain was configured differently, but it isn't and he would arguably be a different person if it was. Even if there was a part of randomness to our actions, there is no logical law that prevents us from peeking at randomness before it's drawn and thus still predict outcomes with 100% certainty. Obviously, if perfect knowledge of all factors is allowed, there is never any more than one possible outcome.

A sensible way to define free will would be to relax those unreasonable assumptions and say that an entity has free will in proportion to how uncertain we are about its actions provided we have zero knowledge about the entity (in other words, the more influence an entity has on its environment, the greater that quantity is). Now that's reasonable. The problem, of course, is that all computer programs, regardless of how dumbly they behave, fit the bill. And also that it's very easy to mechanically inflate that uncertainty. Furthermore, any lower bound on the complexity of an entity ought to be arbitrary and difficult to calculate.


I also want to add this: in a way, you can define a person by the choices he or she will make throughout his or her life. The way you react to a situation depends on your nature, who you are - if everybody reacted the same way, it means they have something in common in their nature. But furthermore, if everybody could have reaction X then they still have something in common: we can describe their behavior indifferently. My point is that if free will existed, paradoxically, what would differenciate people is precisely what they don't have free will about. In a world of "perfect" free will, everybody would be identical. Free will is a terrible concept. It's nothing but deceit.

 

[obi]

If you know with 100% certainty what someone will do, then that means there is a 0% chance that they will do something else. If there is no possible world in which you will do something, then can you really say they "can" do it? I would define saying someone can do X is equivalent to saying there is some chance they will do X. If they have multiple options of things to do (with a non-zero probability assigned to at least two of these options), then there is no longer 100% certainty of what they will do.