Posted by alexandra_k on December 7, 2004, at 20:04:21
In reply to Re: Free will conundrum explored, posted by Mark H. on December 7, 2004, at 14:09:40
ok. If having free will requires that we COULD HAVE DONE otherwise, then it turns out that we have no free will. Science has simply shown that to be empirically false. e.g.,
The notion here is that your conscious experience of free choice is causally irrelevant to producing the behaviour you emmit. Science has shown it to be so. (I should perhaps say that some have attempted to critique this interpretation of Libet's experimental results, but I buy it.)
So IF having free will means that one could have done otherwise THEN it follows that we have no free will. Skinner was right :-(
There is no progress to be made on the problem on this analysis of the concept of free will, because it turns out that freedom is an illusion and we do not have it.
BUT - Surely we have free will! If we want to retain that then...
free will cannot mean that we could have done otherwise. Sure we have a phenomenological experience of making a free choice, but science has shown us that that experience occurs AFTER we have already started to move in the way that we eventually consciously experience as having 'decided' to do. The conscious experience of making a decision is causally irrelevant as the 'decision' has already been made.
So now we need to look at what we should mean by free will. Now you might want to say that nobody forced that guy to kill all those people. Nobody was holding a gun to his head. We usually say that people are not free if they are prevented from acting on their beliefs and desires because of environmental restrictions. So here being free is relative - if you can act on your beliefs and desires without others preventing you or making you do something then you are free in a sense. e.g. the person in jail is not 'free', whereas we are.
Then there is the case where (according to Hume anyway) kleptomaniacs are not free because they are in the grips of a compulsion. Here the idea seems to be that they have a first order desire to steal, but they also have a strong second order desire - they wish like anything that they did not have that first order desire to steal. Here they are a slave to their first order desires and so (according to Hume) they are not free. But then if someone had the first order desire to steal and their second order desire was that that first order desire was fine - well then they are acting freely.
This is a little odd, because here we are saying that the person is free when their first and second order desires are in synch - but in the 'could have done otherwise' sense of free will, we never freely chose those beliefs and desires (neither the lower or higher order ones).
But then that is irrelevant to this conception of free will
Don't get me wrong, many problems remain. I just considered it to be progress because we need to decide what we mean by freedom, and well, if we want to be free then we need to define it in such a way so that we can have it!
Now that was a confusing ramble.
I am sure I used to be more lucid...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:424323
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041202/msgs/425891.html