He says, completely undermining his own point. As does every single person who opines that he/she hasn’t free will.
Determinism is an obvious crock of shit, and it makes me wish I could work my way down the line of its proponents with a heated poker, because one and all, would say first,
“Don’t burn me”
then,
“why did you burn me?”.
If any one of you believed it for a second, you wouldn’t waste time typing out anything, would you?. Nothing but your own wishes and will, made you log on here today.
So your violent refutation of free will would involve reliably inducing predictable responses through application of an external stimulus; in a procedure that could hardly be designed to look more like a demonstration of cause-and-effect?
I think you may have mistake me for someone who disbelieves in ‘wills’ rather than in their freedom. I don’t disbelieve in agents willing things; I just suspect that agents will what they do, rather than something else or nothing at all; because of inputs(whether ultimately deterministic or at some level fundamentally stochastic I leave to the physicists); and are no more free than anything else in a causal chain.
I’m doubtless even further out of my depth than you, but I don’t see how motivation (a total lack of it, an overabundance, or anything in between) indicates a freedom of the will, anymore than a ball being stationary or moving indicates its freedom from physics. It’s quite true that believing in freedom can have utility, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually out there.
I also don’t know what to make of akrasia in this context. Is it meant to bear on freedom somehow? We’re free because we sometimes make poor choices? I don’t follow.
As stated, it’s missing a bit - Stoicism does address emotions. As I understand it, the key point is to live and enjoy the ones that are rational, accept when some are irrational, and know the difference so that you’re not being controlled by irrational emotions. (‘Rational’ and ‘irrational’ in this case being in terms of the Stoic ideas.) So if you’re driving and someone just ahead of you is swerving wildly, it’s rational to feel fear of a potential wreck; you can be cautious, and pull back or away from them. But if you’re a passenger jammed in a plane, it’s not really rational to fear that the plane will suddenly fall out of the sky and wreck; there’s nothing you could do about it anyway except have an anxiety attack.
Sorry, I wasn’t terribly clear on the train of thought there: it isn’t directly connected; but one of the fairly immediate follow-up questions for free will tends to be “So, if we have free will, why is it that we sometimes make lousy decisions even when we know they are lousy?”
Making lousy decisions by mistake; or choosing something that others judge as lousy but you don’t(immediate gratification vs. a greater deferred reward, say) isn’t terribly mysterious for a free will that has imperfect information and various appetites; but the “I knew I was making a mistake even as I did it.” genre is trickier. Some in Team Econ like to ‘solve’ this by the mechanism of ‘revealed preference’; where you simply treat the decision implied by the subject’s action to be authoritative in the case of any conflict with their alleged motivation. Cognitive behavioral therapists seem to be fond of a slightly more introspective flavor of this; where turn around all “Doc, I’m doing $SELF_DEFEATING_THING despite knowing that it’s a terrible plan.” complaints with a “So, what purpose are you satisfying by choosing $SELF_DEFEATING_THING?” question. Plato’s out was that the will is of finite strength(no word on what weakens or strengthens it; and how to assess it except by observing failures) and while the subject always wills the good sometimes they do not act according to their will.
Self-defeating/stupid choices aren’t a non-issue for people who reject free will, it is still a question why unfree agents do questionably sensible things; but they don’t have the same weight. That case mostly just boils down to “Why is there a bug in the system?” or “Did a corner case trip up some heuristic?” which are the sorts of problems that keep an entire industry of programmers employed; but don’t really keep you up at night.
@Brainspore:“don’t be a dick” is vernacular for the golden rule. An ancient rabbi, Hillel, replied to someone asking him to teach him the Torah in brief: “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary, go study.”
The brains of preschoolers was the subject of a short piece of This American Life I heard just minutes ago. A 4 year old who had been told the story of Jesus and his message was home from preschool for MLK day. She asked her dad about him, and was told he was a preacher who taught that all people should be treated the same. She asked “Did they kill him too?”
My favorite serenity prayer: “Lord, help me be the person my dog thinks I am.”
It’s a bit surprising just how tone-deaf this post is with respect to the usual crowd (or at least the commenting crowd) at boingboing. I knew as I was reading it that the comments would be interesting, and you all did not disappoint. Although when it comes to philosopical discourse, this is more my speed: http://existentialcomics.com/
As for the book, I love that it says “Copyrighted Material” right there on the cover. Twice!
Also, I might need to find the time to read some Wodehouse.
I remain puzzled. Maybe I misread you initially? Do you think wills are free in some sense? I don’t. I’m unsure, obviously, but I don’t see any reason to suspect that they’re free.
In my experience, that follow-up generally arises from the implications of determinism, e.g.: if we’re clockwork, whence all the egregious malfunctions? Freedom’s usually the explanation for disjunction in intent & action, not a question arising therefrom, no?
What does (or would) freedom add to an otherwise systematic modeling effort such as you described? Is the notion of freedom doing work for your behavioral therapist, or helping Plato resolve a conundrum? There’s no there there, so to speak (not that I can glean).
At the bottom of all this, the fact that subjective experience often contradicts or complicates empirical explanations doesn’t mean subjects are free from anything. It certainly means we’re ignorant of how subjects work. They may well be free in whatever sense, but that’s not obvious.
I would question that re the “king of Rome” thing: I would imagine a good number of five-year-olds are familiar with the word “emperor” because (a) fairy tales and (b) Star Wars. If you get one who isn’t, it can be dealt with in five seconds – “What’s an emperor?” “Bit like a king” – and you’ve increased their vocabulary to boot.
That’s sometimes called the Platinum Rule. The inverted formulation (which is found in more than a few religious philosophies) helps avoid the big problem of the Golden Rule in Christianity; namely, fanatics who can honestly say “Of course I’d want others to torture me until I accepted Christ and Yahweh! It’d save my immortal soul, I’d be grateful in the end!” and invoke Do unto others as you would have them do unto you to justify atrocities. The Platinum Rule is harder to pervert because of the explicit instruction to refrain from active interference with others.
I’ve never thought of Plato as an exponent of “spoon theory” before this moment.
Raising children gives interesting insight into free will issues, it seems to me; humans appear to have more control over our minds and our behavior both before and after the teenage years. It’s hard to top an angsty adolescent for inexplicably self-defeating behavior.
If you want to demonstrate will, burn yourself with the poker just to prove you can will yourself to do it. Pointing out that other people are automatons that react predictably to stimulus hardly makes your case.
No, of course it wouldn’t prove anything to a determinist, obviously. a) they are demonstrably simple minded, vis, they read something half convincing about determinism and were convinced even though their own experience screamed at them that the theory was false, b) a really determined determinist with a strong will would just make robot noises, wouldn’t he, determined to be proved right.
However, yes, I did jump to a conclusion specifically in regards to what you were saying, misunderstood you quite clearly, and that was wrong and careless of me. Sorry. Especially given that now you make your point clear to me, I agree with part of it, and don’t see a way to disprove the part I ( obviously, instinctively ) disagree with.
No, the burning thing was more because I really hate stupidity, and am by nature, environment, and free will, a bit brutish in my impulses. I see determinism as an obvious elaborate lie a bunch of trolls indulge themselves in, and it would be my first impulse to cruelly harm them, one and all. I would restrain myself from doing it, as long since and of my own, carefully thought out, free will, I determined to be law-abiding, but that wouldn’t change the fact that I would WISH to do it.
Every time I do any unpleasant task, ( and yesterday I wiped my fathers senile, incontinent arse thrice, each time to his raving abuse ) I prove exactly the same thing.
In fact, of the group of determinists I tortured, I would expect only some to say Don’t burn me. Some would rage and threaten, others reason and explain, one or two strong willed would grit their teeth and die silent. Because there are not that many actual automatons that react predictably to stimulus in the human race.
I don’t particularly care about whether people think there is free will or not. I assume the dichotomy is just a misunderstanding of the actual possibilities. I do think that, as originally stated, your torture-fantasy-avec-argument that there is free will read a lot more like an argument that there wasn’t.
You might be right too. That is the problem we begin with, though, when we debate an obviously false theoretic premise, none of us can possibly be making sense. The very fact we posit and advance arguments is rather blatant proof we both have free will, unless one of us crosses their eyes and just determines not to see it.
Though I think torture-fantasy is a trifle harsh, I wouldn’t be enjoying my self too outrageously, just between ourselves I would have to force myself to do it, pour encourager les autres.
