Free Will: Randomness

[packbat]

[Poll #1058418]

(No, "something"-made-it-happen ain't an option. I already said that no thing made it happen.)

Edit: Note that the scenario described involves causal indeterminism, not predictive indeterminism.

I raise this hypothetical for a simple reason: one of my fellows in my PHIL282 class just told me that he believes it would not be random. And that, for me, finally makes free-will libertarianism make sense.

See, in class, we've basically just started talking about the second half of what these individuals must prove. For the record, people holding this position state two major claims: that determinism, were it true, would imply that no free will exists; and that indeterminism, which is true, allows free will to exist.

In fact, the naive example of the libertarian position (which does not make it false, only naive) is simply that free will looks like the hypothetical in the poll.

Many people, of course, balk at this - in fact, there's a name for the noises they make when they do: the Luck or Arbitrariness Objection. This counterargument, in fact, is barely more than pointing at the scenario and saying, "that's not what a free choice looks like". Further, a lot of philosophers - e.g. Daniel Dennett (whose stance I prefer), Robert Kane (whose textbook is assigned for this class), the professor - are inclined to accept the force of this objection. Some of them - Kane - choose to argue around it. But until I talked to this guy from my class, I had no gut knowledge that a person could simply reject it.

"Yeah, that is what free will looks like," these people say. "If it were caused by anything - if anything made it so the other one didn't happen - it wouldn't be free," these people say. And however you cut it, that's it - there's nothing left to say.

Comments

[packbat.livejournal.com]

...I think I almost see what you mean. In your example, despite determinism, there are multiple futures in the free will entailing sense, and this is because no being can work out with true certainty what happens before it happens. Am I close?

In the poll hypothetical, though, there distinction is irrelevant, since the event was causally undetermined.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

In your example, despite determinism, there are multiple futures in the free will entailing sense, and this is because no being can work out with true certainty what happens before it happens. Am I close?

Yes, that's what's going on in my example. I was also trying to say some other things with it, but they're tangential.

In the poll hypothetical, though, the distinction is irrelevant, since the event was causally undetermined.

I'm now realizing I misunderstood the example all along. If I had understood it properly, I would still be saying it's a false dichotomy, but for rather different reasons. I see three possibilities, none of which excludes any of the others, and any of which is sufficient to explain the phenomena.

First, we could have true chance: the laws of the universe include an element that is purely probabilistic. For instance, the only difference between future A and future B might be that in A, one atom of carbon 14 decayed at some time T, and in B, it didn't.

Second, we could have an entity in the universe whose behavior is undetermined by universal law but not random. This encompasses your someone did it; perhaps animal (including human) behavior can be demonstrated to depend on homununculus particles, which are indivisible, present in all brains and interacting electrically with neurons, and there is no way of predicting their behavior with certainty but it is clearly not random. (The His Dark Materials setting seems to work like this.) It doesn't have to be about life, though; suppose that cosmic rays turned out to be caused by spontaneous particle creation, and that the distribution of inbound rays was nonrandom, but we were completely unable to discover a cause for it.

Finally, some component of the universe could be experiencing a force whose origin is external to the universe. A miracle, if you like. I suppose the cosmic ray example could just as easily be about that case.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Excluding the outside-influences example (I neglected to specify that the universe was closed to outside causes), I'm not sure I understand how your proposed "homunuculus particles" could be both unpredictable re. the laws of the universe and nonrandom.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Random is a particular sort of nondeterminism; it's actually rather predictable. You can write down the probability distribution function and controlling parameters for the radioactive decay of carbon 14, and you can't say exactly which atoms in a lump of the stuff will have decayed in 5730 years, but you know that half of it will be gone, sure enough to set your calendar by. Same goes for any quantum process; you don't know which way the wave function will collapse, but you can write down all the possible outcomes and say exactly how likely each of them is.

The homununculus particles, though; the hypothetical there is that they can somehow be detected in the brain, and if you set up a controlled experiment where people have to make nearly the same decision over and over, they are observed to move at key points in the ERP decision-making sequence, and the motion is correlated with the actual decision made. (ERP = Evoked Response Potential = EEG studies of brain waves in response to stimuli.) So that it seems like the component of human behavior that is not explained by bog standard stimulus-response can be explained by the response of these particles to the stimuli. There's no well-defined probability density function for what they do, so they aren't random, but it's also clear that they don't always do the same thing in response to the same micro-environment. (Maybe someone's managed to pull one out of a rat brain and put it in a quantum trap and poke at it with photons and electric fields.)

Basically I'm trying to take your "someone did it" and put it on a more concrete footing.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

All right. I don't buy it - it seems a bit like an appeal to mystery - but I know a number of people hold theories like that of will.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is the way the real world works either, but we're so far into hypothetical land already, all that matters is that it's a logical possibility.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Also, if we had observations like that in the real world, I guarantee you people would be trying like mad to come up with a theory of the particles' behavior that made them fit into either the "deterministic" or "random (quantum sense)" boxes.