Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

This I think is a fundamental error. Neither determinists nor free will theorists are proposing that determinism is in error. Both accept determinism fully. Where free will comes in is assuming that decisions and choices are determined by a law or laws that are not in the currently accepted set of natural laws. A free will is every bit a part of determinism, it's just that these specific choices are determined by something whose behavior and laws, for lack of a better term, are "free" — meaning certain departures from the other natural laws, whose behaviors seem not to possess this trait. The problem for the free will theorist is not to refute determinism — determinism is necessary for both — the problem is to demonstrate the existence of these heretofore unknown laws, and the entities which are ruled by them. (Pineal gland?)

The bolded part does seem to be the most commonly accepted meaning of free-will, even though there is nothing in its actual definition to suggest that. That is the misconception I'm trying to correct.

Yours is the misconception. The concept of free will has contained that as a part of itself for most of its history, usually with reference to duallistic notions, but not always; see below.

For Aristotle, a break in the causal chain allowed us to feel our actions "depend on us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). He knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future.

This is the view of some Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma has been determined by our past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.

One generation after Aristotle, Epicurus argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused. For Epicurus, the occasional interventions of arbitrary gods would be preferable to strict determinism.

Epicurus did not say the swerve was directly involved in decisions. His critics, ancient and modern, have claimed mistakenly that Epicurus did assume "one swerve - one decision." Following Aristotle, Epicurus thought human agents have the ability to transcend necessity and chance.

" ...some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. ...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach."

—

If something is not determined, either by current natural laws, or whatever additions are required to understand our will as free, then its behavior is essentially random, as nothing, free or not, determines its course. And this, as noted, is not free will. (As Rhythm hinted and I agree, compatibilism, the notion that determinism as defined by current natural laws does not preclude free will, usually by changing the definition of free will, is attempting to solve the problem by defining away the hard bits. But the hard bits are the part we find interesting. If a used car salesman offered you a tired old but truly free will, or a shiny new compatibilist free will, most of us would opt for real free will.)

If the current understanding of free-will (as being free from natural law), is based on a misconception (that the agent can exist independently of the natural law), then, in light of modern knowledge, it bears correction. Correcting one's understanding of what something means is not redefinition.

You're not "correcting" anything, you're taking a concept we know to be flawed and replacing it with a new concept, presumably in the hopes that the new concept will furnish all the things the old concept did, only without all its problems. What about free will is worth preserving, and is that or those things actually preserved by your new concept. If moral culpability is the only thing you're trying to save, you haven't saved it. If the feeling of freedom is what you're trying to save, I suggest we don't need that "feeling" for anything useful. If your fear is that without the belief that we have free will people will stop caring and stop living (like those people on the planet in the movie Serenity), I think a) you need to demonstrate this would actually happen, b) that this would be a bad thing even if true. I forget who said it, maybe William James, but it has been said that the truth is never a mistake; and I haven't seen anything to contradict that. If there is some other something that you think is "rescued" by your redefinition then name it. I personally don't think you can, which makes redefining free will along compatibilist lines a lot of work for absolutely no result.

A stickier question, at least for the compatibilist, is what is meant by "I". It's a shortcut to say that whatever is in the brain is the I, because it's not — there are many things in the brain that are not the I, and some, Buddhists, contend there isn't even an I. Equating the brain with the I is largely handwaving, albeit handwaving which many materialists have fought hard to sell.

That question, in my opinion, is the crucial point which must be settles before the discussion of free-will even begins. But this is not a question that can be resolved by looking at things reductionally, but holistically.

Drawing an analogy - what is a computer? Is it the CPU? The RAM? The motherboard? The keyboard? Mouse? Monitor? The hard-disk? Or is it the operating system?

None of these things can be singly pointed out to represent a "computer". Even if they are simply put together - in a bag - they still wouldn't be a computer. We need to put these component entities in a specific arrangement, make them capable of performing specific functions. Only then the emergent entity called "computer" can come into existence.

Similarly, we cannot keep pointing to parts of oneself and keep asking "Is that me?", when what "you" are, is the sum of it all, in a particular arrangement. So, no, you are not your brain. Atleast, you are not just your brain.

I just want to note for your benefit that I am intentionally skipping this point. Partly because I'm not up to it at the moment, and partly because the question of what an emergent property is, what their ontological status is and whether there can be anything attributed to them independent of non-emergent properties is such a large topic that I'm not sure it isn't simply a distraction.

A quick example. Let's suppose we simulate a hurricane on a computer by programming in all the relevant conditions, humidity, pressure, temperature and gravity, and all the relevant rules of physics. Suppose it's six days before landfall of Katrina, and we want to try to predict what areas are going to be hardest hit. We run our simulation and six days later, Katrina comes ashore exactly where our model predicted. Now, the course of the hurricane in our simulation is an emergent property: we did not program in which direction Katrina was going to go, that emerged as a result of the totality of all lower level properties. However, calling the hurricane's course emergent doesn't in and of itself get you anything, as emergent properties are every bit as deterministically caused as lower level causes, they are just a higher level characterization of the same phenomenon.



(Anyway, my browser crashed so I've lost my place, and to be honest, I'm kinda burned out from all of Rhythm's abuse, so I'm gonna step back for an indefinite period of time. [and no, Rhythm, I'm not blaming you, I'm just reporting my emotional state to explain why I'm stepping aside for an unknown length of time, and to an unknown extent.].)