Probability is the oil of rationalisation.
You'll find it here. And there is this:
The closest thing you can have to free will is for your actions to be
determined purely by the state of your brain. Free will is determinism.
Very good sentences
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Free will is part of an account; like intention, and a thousand other mental events.
It does not happen in the present, but only in a retrospective grammar.
It’s not that it fails to happen, but that the term itself has no interest or use in the present.
There’s an infinite hierarchy between determinism and randomness. Just look at repeated diagonalization of the space of deterministic machines. Thus there is a mathematics for free will that satisfies the property that it is neither deterministic, nor random. That doesn’t mean we actually have it, though I think Penrose tried to prove that we did. But to simply say that random, deterministic, or a mix (which really means random) is the whole space of possibility is simply incorrect.
Probability is the oil of rational choice!
Chaos is deterministic.
Sure, free will is determinism. Freedom is recognized necessity, war is peace, ignorance is strength.
Uncertainty is the mother of ambiguity and the grandmother of wishful thinking.
Every organized mass murder in the 20C (120-160 million dead) was perpetrated by, and occurred among, people known for their deterministic world-view. If you’ll remember Milgram’s long ago experiment on authority, one of the very few people to refuse to torture other innocent human beings specifically invoked his “free will” to end his participation in the torture.
The next time an arm-chair philosopher derides free will to you in favor of determinism, simply hand him a copy of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’, or Marx’s ‘Das Capital’, or Khomeini’s ‘Hukumat-i Islam-i’, or Luther’s letter to Erasmus, or Ibn Wahhab’s ‘Kitab at-Tawhid’, or Sayyid Qutb’s (Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher) ‘Milestones’, or Lenin’s command to slaughter all of Georgia.
What about the probability that something will change making long-run calculations irrelevant?
Perhaps we have some evolutionary holdovers that cause us to emphasize short-term, but we do pretty well.
a Duoist: Three big exceptions from the top of my head:
- the Armenian genocide, which was a way for Turks to remove politically unreliable population during war with Russia. Hard to find any philosophical determinism there, just typical wartime brutality,
- the Rwandan genocide, based on visceral ethnic hatred,
- the mass murder of Hindus and Muslims at the time of partition of India, which was basically work of street-level mobs, not known for particular interest in determinism vs. free will.
The actions of a schizophrenic are determined by the state of her brain.
She takes a long time off between posts. And you thought her post was interesting because?
Determinism is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to perpetrate mass murder. It is doubtful that science will be able to answer the question of free will anytime soon — we can’t even predict known deterministic systems like the weather or the movement of tectonic plates outside a narrow time window. Whether brains are deterministic or not, we can still express moral intuitions and express our preferences for certain outcomes above others and for the moral and legal rules that might best lead to those outcomes.
@ chris:
It’s true that you can’t tell the difference between a free-willed brain and a deterministic brain, in the same way that you can’t tell the difference between a universe that’s 15 billion years old an one that was created 3 seconds ago in it’s current state. But the explanation is needlessly complex – instead of having a brain built purely from the laws of physics, you now have a brain built from the laws of physics AND this mysterious, invisible free-will stuff that interacts with the laws of physics in a mysterious, invisible manner. Free will fails on parsimony.
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