Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Angrboda]

I reduce the constraints on human behavior down to two strategies.
1. Antagonizing behaviors that agonize discomfort and anxiety (reduce behaviors which increase pain or displeasure; e.g. distracting yourself from worrying about that promotion)
2. Agonizing behaviors that antagonize discomfort or anxiety (increase behaviors that reduce [subjective] discomfort; e.g. eating when we feel hungry)

I hope you won't mind if I comment that this seems vastly oversimplistic, and while you're entitled to your view, asking me to buy it without any scientific basis is a bridge too far.

I don't mind, particularly, but you've introduced an explanation of human behavior which is equally simple and expect us to accept it on the basis of a philosophical argument. However, when I introduce an alternative explanation of human behavior, you require scientific rigor. Requiring a lesser standard for your own explanation than you do for mine is a form of special pleading, and makes your argument fallacious. If you're not willing to consider my explanation on the same terms as your own, then I am fully justified in dismissing your argument on that basis.

I would argue that the human organism always seeks what it considers to be the ideal compromise amongst all factors. If this is true, then its choices aren't free, as it will always choose what it thinks is best, and what it thinks is best wasn't itself chosen the moment before, but rather determined by its past history.

You appear to be saying that a will isn't free unless it is able to make decisions without developing the best compromise amongst all factors. I don't agree, since the freedom is embedded in the decision of what factors to include and how to weigh them. If you want an example of decisions made without weighing of factors you could just use a random number generator. Does a random number generator have free will? My view is that consciousness is required for will.

No, that's not what I'm saying. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was introducing a model of decision making which in my opinion is sufficiently powerful and capable to explain human behavior at this level, a model which doesn't require free will to produce the same results (the choices and decisions). This model combines the two strategies with this criterion to yield a deterministic algorithm which I believe well captures how humans work. (The one notion I excluded which is common is the notion that we seek pleasure. That may or may not be a valid objection. See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis.)

You say above that "...it ( a human organism) will always choose what it thinks is best...". Based on that rule, you should be able to devise a practical test, demonstration or scenario where I or someone else are unable to do anything other than what I/he/she think(s) is best. Can you come up with one? If there isn't one, does your view of will have any practical use or meaning?

Well, the difficulty is in detecting what that is inside a working brain. However there's a more fundamental problem here. You've repeatedly asked for an example of what a world where we don't have free will looks like. Yet I've just introduced two examples, the robot drivers, and my algorithm for human choice. You dismissed one with a wave of the hand and special pleading, and you don't even respond to the other (it's like there's an 18 minute gap of silence in your reply). We know what a world with determinism in it looks like. We have plenty of scientific evidence of determinism. The very science of psychology depends on human mental behaviors being robustly predictable. (Can you imagine a world where scientists study human behavior when doing so has no predictive value?) We don't have any scientific evidence of any processes which are free in the sense that you seem to think free will is. And while we still need to connect the dots and demonstrate that all human behaviors can be explained deterministically, the possibility that they can is much more probable than that an unknown entity named free will which nobody has ever seen or described does.

Note critically at this juncture the common alternatives that crop up in free will arguments. The assertion that people believe in free will, therefore it must be based on something. This is a mix of argumentum ad populum and argument from tradition, and both make it fallacious. And the claim that determinists can't show how fully determined mechanisms explain human behavior, therefore, "free will." (It's arguable that you've just done this in your reply to me.) This is an argument from ignorance, and is again fallacious. And I see you've raised another, referring to our need to hold people morally accountable for their actions. (May have been pocaracas.) This is essentially an argument from consequences, that the results of our not having or coming to believe we don't have free will would be so undesirable that they simply could not be tolerated. This again is a flawed argument. Even if scientists discovered that there was no free will, and people immediately began raping, killing, and eating babies, this would not prove the scientist was wrong. Your task is to demonstrate free will. Demonstrating the undesirability of a lack of free will gets you nothing. (And I do have provisional answers to the consequences argument, but I'm not going to go into them.)

In one of your replies, you assert that human choice is free because we are able to choose what values and weights and criteria we place upon our choice. (Sorry if it's a bad paraphrase.) Are these factors freely chosen? If not, then the choice itself is not free. I'll accept that these factors are freely chosen. By freely chosen, of course, I mean the values and criterion for choosing the values and criterion were themselves freely chosen, and the choice of those was determined by choosing the values and criterion for that — if any free choice requires a choice of values and weights, that values and weights choice also requires a choice, and you end up with a vicious regress. Generally speaking, philosophers consider a vicious infinite regress to be very bad news. You could argue that it's turtles all the way down, and preserve your argument, or accept the inevitable, that this chain of choices must bottom out with a choice that is not free, thereby robbing the entire chain of decisions of their freedom.

I just got up, so I'm not fully coherent. I missed a point or two. I've got book clubs to read for, so I likely will not return to this discussion for a while (or perhaps at all). Consider my arguments for what it's worth.