Isn’t pantheism the same thing as atheism?

[The Grand Nudger]

Precisely so, you segregate the offender if you understand that they’re a danger so long as those circumstances are in play, so long as recidivism is entirely likely. You can withhold the personal judgement and it’s profligate consequences, however, which is often shown to help prevent recidivism….and especially in the case of crimes of addiction- recovery.

It holds even in a more extreme example. Understanding an enemy combatant. That they fight, why they fight, what compels them. Perhaps that the two of you would be fast and best friends in any other scenario, with a vast well of common interests and predispositions to draw on judging by your shared profession.

As far as all of the metaethical theories compatible with determinism, at some point, it’s just a case of whether you think moral propositions -mean- anything…,or if we’re mouthing empty phrases.

[HappySkeptic]

The emergent position (as contrasted with reductionism) is that there exists both bottom-up and top-down causation.  Brains create their own information which is often as causal as any more direct physical cause of behaviors.  This means that potential causes are sometimes selected and not merely added together as in a mathematical equation.

For the brain, it needs to work in a certain way, it needs to be logically and this means having rules, having circuits, which means it is deterministic.

Free will decisions are virtual, yet still causal.  They are in addition to what is merely determined on a less complex level.  That is what makes them emergent.

I am saying all this to contrast the perspectives of emergent materialism with reductionistic (deterministic) materialism.  Science has not decided which is correct yet.  Scientists and philosophers are still arguing over the issues, and many have strong opinions one way or the other.  I have read books expressing both perspectives.

For more of an overview, see for instance Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy.

How would determinism prevent emergent properties from existing, or the brain from making decisions?  Emergent properties are still based on a physical framework.

Yes, at a level of complexity, it is best to discuss causes in terms of high level abstractions, and not chemistry.  In an information processing system, information is a cause, and in a re-entrant system, abstractions build to become their own causes of future choices.

This would all still happen, whether or not determinism is true.  As it happens, it is likely that determinism is not true, because there is quantum randomness, but how does randomness improve the ability of a system to process information (actually it might - stochastic averaging may be part of the operation)?

I'm with you - emergence is a fascinating field, and because of chaos, it becomes impossible (even in principle) to trace choices in a brain back to reducible causes.  It would be impossible to "debug" it back to primary causes -- the causes exist in the form of beliefs and preferences, on top of beliefs and preferences.  I read that emergent states can always be modeled by a strange attractor in a chaotic system.  The attractor becomes effectively a new cause.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that’s where I fork off. Quantum randomness, sure…but not for things at our scale, or the scale of the human brain. The interrelationships between particles and structures of known composition appear to limit the possibilities of anything so constructed. That might be an explanation of how or why order, or a more definite order, emerges at our scale of interaction. Not just with brains, but in general. Our order is the remainder of a constrained set of outcomes.

A negative image, of sorts.

[Ferrocyanide]

Lack of free will strongly suggests we shouldn't hold moral agents (including the pantheistic "god") accountable for their actions. But there is still room for the determinist/incompatablist to judge actions morally good or bad. The determinist/incompatabalist thinks we ought not hold people morally responsible for their choices because their choices are merely nature unfolding according to its laws. 

The correct thing to do is see to the causes of immoral behavior and fix those. Otherwise, you're just getting mad at the water for fizzing after an alka-seltzer tablet has been dropped in. Don't get mad at the water for fizzing. Stop the alka-seltzer tablet from being dropped in if the fizzing bothers you so much.

But there's nothing stopping the determinist from judging fizzy water as better/worse than non-fizzy water. Of course, some hard determinists are also moral nihilists. That makes sense too. Both metaethical theories are compatible with determinism as I see it.

I’m getting the impression that people think that there are 3 systems:
1. deterministic
2. non-deterministic (random)
3. Free will

But I haven’t seen anyone give a logical explanation as to what “Free will” is suppose to be.

This is a matter of logic.
1. Either you know the system entirely and you can predict the outcome: deterministic.
2. Either you don’t know some of the system, but the system might still be totally deterministic.
3. Either the system is a mix of deterministic and random, so it makes the output of the system hard to predict to a certain level of precision, at a certain scale.
4. Either the system is totally random, and such a machine will not work properly.

I think our reality rides on #3.
Yes, we have figured out that matter behaves as a wave, and so, this makes predicting their position, their speed to a certain precision impossible.
Even radioactivity gives us a clue that matter behaves randomly, so we get the equation : N= N_start * e(-t/z)

So, I’m still not sure what you guys think free will is.

Just became a software (brain) is a set of algorithms, doesn’t mean that software is not responsible for the decisions it makes.

I don’t judge fizzy water, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes because consider them mindless (brainless) entities. They don’t have decision making circuits.

[HappySkeptic]

I’m getting the impression that people think that there are 3 systems:
1. deterministic
2. non-deterministic (random)
3. Free will

But I haven’t seen anyone give a logical explanation as to what “Free will” is suppose to be.

This is a matter of logic.
1. Either you know the system entirely and you can predict the outcome: deterministic.
2. Either you don’t know some of the system, but the system might still be totally deterministic.
3. Either the system is a mix of deterministic and random, so it makes the output of the system hard to predict to a certain level of precision, at a certain scale.
4. Either the system is totally random, and such a machine will not work properly.

I think our reality rides on #3.
Yes, we have figured out that matter behaves as a wave, and so, this makes predicting their position, their speed to a certain precision impossible.
Even radioactivity gives us a clue that matter behaves randomly, so we get the equation : N= N_start * e(-t/z)

So, I’m still not sure what you guys think free will is.

Just became a software (brain) is a set of algorithms, doesn’t mean that software is not responsible for the decisions it makes.

I don’t judge fizzy water, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes because consider them mindless (brainless) entities. They don’t have decision making circuits.

Great post.  I think the mystics believe that free will means agency, and that agent (the soul) is outside of the material world and therefore not bound by it. 

In this scenario, the agency of the soul is either

A) not caused by anything else - it is a first order cause in and of itself, owing to its divine nature.
B) The agency is caused by some sort of "non-material" framework, and subject to the same 4 possibilities you mention above.  In other words, declaring the soul's agency to be non-material gains you nothing.

The problem with A) is that there is plenty of evidence that choices ARE correlated with the material nature of the brain.

[Ferrocyanide]

Great post.  I think the mystics believe that free will means agency, and that agent (the soul) is outside of the material world and therefore not bound by it. 

In this scenario, the agency of the soul is either

A) not caused by anything else - it is a first order cause in and of itself, owing to its divine nature.
B) The agency is caused by some sort of "non-material" framework, and subject to the same 4 possibilities you mention above.  In other words, declaring the soul's agency to be non-material gains you nothing.

The problem with A) is that there is plenty of evidence that choices ARE correlated with the material nature of the brain.

If they want to believe that the soul is outside of this universe, we can explore that possibility.
1. Since the brain is the organ that controls the rest of the organs, this means that the soul has to interact with the brain.
2. The way to interact with atoms is to give some energy to them. So, energy is being transfer from the soul to the brain, from Universe A to Universe B. This is something that should be measurable.
3. The soul has to read the data inputs. It needs to read the visual input, the sound input, touch input, heat sensor, cold sensor and more.
I think this also means energy is being transfer from the soul to the brain.
4. We would have to believe that for some reason, a soul is being plugged into the brain somehow.
Whenever a fetus is being developed in Universe B, a soul needs to be develop in Universe A. At the right moment, a contact is made.
5. Are there other souls? A soul for the hand, a soul for the eyeball?
6. How does a human soul find the human fetus? What if it accidentally plugs into a cat fetus?
7. If there is a soul, it reduces the processing burden from the brain. Perhaps most of the brain is useless. Perhaps all brain functions can be transferred to the soul.
What’s the point of having the brain being connected to the spinal cord and having nerves? The soul should be able to connect directly to the entire body.

[The Grand Nudger]

You were asking before what free will is (or is supposed to be) - and now we're wondering about souls - but souls aren't necessary to free will and compatibilists don't assert (or need to assert) a soul.

You also offered the notion that free will was the outcome or effect of programming (in the brain). Well - that's not free will - or at least not the free will that people once wished to assert (and some still do). Free will is the programmer, not the programming. The idea that our decisions are meaningfully unalike the outcome of a set process. A bootstrap paradox.

[Ferrocyanide]

HappySkeptic mentioned “soul” in his previous post, so I responded.

Some people seem to think that the “free will” is something that comes from the soul or is some kind of a “special sauce” of the soul. I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood them.
Do some of them believe that we don’t have a soul and we have free will?

You also offered the notion that free will was the outcome or effect of programming (in the brain). Well - that's not free will - or at least not the free will that people once wished to assert (and some still do). Free will is the programmer, not the programming. The idea that our decisions are meaningfully unalike the outcome of a set process. A bootstrap paradox.

Like you said, perhaps they think that the output of a program has no meaning and that if we are a set of algorithms, then our thoughts have no meaning.
One person told me that free will means our ability to make a decision.

My response to that is, with an EXAMPLE:
A light bulb connected to a battery + breaker is a circuit that makes a decision.
When you set the state of the breaker to ON, the light bulb turns ON.
So, it looks like a system that makes a decision.

The algorithm is
if(breaker==ON)
   Lightbulb=ON;
else
   Lightbulb=OFF;

EXAMPLE:
We can also change the breaker. Let’s put a photoconductor in its place.

if(photoconductor detects light)
   Lightbulb=OFF;
else
   Lightbulb=ON;

EXAMPLE:
A human can walk around a maze and make decisions to not run into the walls. He can walk around and make a map in his memory and try to figure out how to get out.

We can make a robot that does the same thing.


------------------------
Like you said, maybe some of these guys (theists and atheists and the other flavors) mean something else when they say free will. It’s the special sauce that they want to believe that they have and they want to think that they are different than a calculator. Some of them want to think of themselves as some sort of supreme ultra being that is a few degrees shorter than the big giant brain (the god).

There is also the question of the other apes. Do they have free will or are they just robots?
What about cows and pigs?
What about emotions? Do they have emotions?