WHAT is free will?

It was a response to JLNobody on the bottom of the last page. I have a habit of becoming busy and coming back to threads later to comment on things long past. Sorry.

Sorry, Jim, I must have missed your post last time. With the forks, any direction you go is a fork, whether it's on the road or not. Every possible direction. So really, there is no "offroad" option, just an infinite number of forks - because the theory doesn't limit the number of choices one can have. In reality, we are limited, though, but that doesn't change the difference between a random choice, a determined choice, and a willed choice.

The more willed you are, the less free you are, and vice versa. If you stand at the junction and think about your choice and all the choices on for a bit, than that is a powerful excersize of free will - but you will be determined in your path for quite a while. It is willed and not determined because you determined it yourself.

rufio,

You are right; any seemingly "new" option of "off roading" is not an option to avoid the "fork in the road" metaphor but merely adds another road to choose from. At any given period in time, design space dictates all possible choices available to the deciding agent. Contrarily, as desirable as it might have been in the 18th century, the English Lord of the Admiralty was unable to choose to send Fax messages to his Men-O-War providing them much needed intelligence as to information about the French Fleet.

What determines the existence of "Free Will"(FW) is not the number of options but the fact that all options are available simultaneously to the deciding agent. Many have endeavored to invoke randomness or quantum effects to brace or prop up some sort of indeterminism so as to demonstrate the existence of "Free Will". As a believer that humans possess FW, I do not feel a need for such crutches. Indeed, FW arguments that descend from such indeterministic roots have large logical gaps.

As to your statement:


Intuitively, I would disagree. From my point of view that allows for a type of FW worth wanting and having, the more an agent strives or endeavors towards a specific outcome the more likely he is to "discover" all possible options available in design space and therefore reach his goal.

However, from the point of view of those who would disavow FW, this statement seems in line with the psychologist's definition of "Frustration". Given a deterministic universe, an agent having will or in pursuit of a specific goal kept from that goal by deterministic forces finds himself in the unenviable position of infinitely striving towards an unattainable goal.

Such is life, but, maybe not. Don't we all see, on a fairly regular basis, happy people that have successfully reached numerous self imposed goals? Was this all pre-determined for them at the moment of the Big Bang? Can we summarily dismiss all their planning and endeavors? Or was there, at some critical point, a choice made, among many available, by the individual that can be attributed only to his "self"? If we allow one choice, can we make said individual responsible for maybe one more?

Taking the contrary of the quoted statement we find that:

The less willed you are the freer you are.

But I sense a problem. If we extrapolate this statement outwards far enough we find that for maximum freedom we possess absolutely no will. This seems the realm of inanimate objects. So it is at this point that I would invite you (time allowing) to expound on the last paragraph in which the above quote appears as the first sentence.

JM

This A2K thing sure takes you on a journey.
At the start I was so sure that I knew this one,but the more I read rufio's posts the more I like what you'r saying.
I have now firmly come down on the fence between what I said at the start,about beeing able to calculate everything for ever,and what rufio is saying

[/QUOTE]With the forks, any direction you go is a fork, whether it's on the road or not. Every possible direction. So really, there is no "offroad" option, just an infinite number of forks - because the theory doesn't limit the number of choices one can have. In reality, we are limited, though, but that doesn't change the difference between a random choice, a determined choice, and a willed choice.

The more willed you are, the less free you are, and vice versa. If you stand at the junction and think about your choice and all the choices on for a bit, than that is a powerful excersize of free will - but you will be determined in your path for quite a while. It is willed and not determined because you determined it yourself.

I don't think that being willed neccessarily corresponds to being frustrated - usually, there is more than one way of acheiving any given goal, at least in part, and anyone can discover those other ways and utilize them. The problem becomes when your means become your ends. For instance, your English Lord of the Admiralty might not have fax, but if he devises another means of communication, not having fax doesn't bother him. But put some coporate bigwig back in time with no fax, and we might call him frustrated.

To elaborate on freedom and will being opposed - I do think that ultimate freedom is more or less inactive, or indecisive. When this man comes to the fork in the road, and stops and thinks about where he should go next, he is, at that moment, free, and becomes bound to a direction as soon as he starts moving again. If one were to falsly equate absolute freedom with free will, than one would never move for fear of losing freedom, and effectively remain bound in place (ironic, huh?). But free will isn't a state, it's an ability, or an action that can be used - and while in use, one's state is eternally fluctuating between free and willed.

rufio, But what you are suggesting is that the individual becomes frustrated from not having something that is not available to be utilized. I think that is very unrealistic - IMHO.

I don't mean that the corporate bigwig becomes frustrated because he doesn't have a fax machine, I mean that he becomes frustrated because he is unable to fax, rather than because he is unable to convey information. A better example might be if all the company fax machines broke down and he was forced to resort to snail mail. In terms of fax machines, this might be a little unrealistic, but in terms of acheiving things like "happiness" and coming into the psychological aspect, someone might very well be frustrated not because they can't acheive happiness, but because they can't acheive it in exactly they way they want to. That's what I mean by making the means into the ends.

Now, let me get my bit in here.

If everything was pre-programmed, would we have self awareness. Look at the tool you are using this moment. It utilizes programs. Are those programs self-aware? Can they ever be?

If the answer to both those questions is no, then free-will must exist, due the fact of our self-awarness. However, if self-awarness can be programmed into an equation, then it is possible that everything is pre-defined, and some all powerful nerd is messing with all of us .

I prefer to believe in free will, that way life isn't pointless.

After you take one of the forks in the road you still have at ANY point in time, the option to make yet another choice.

So, you are always at "a" fork in the road no matter where you are.

This whole business of determinism is just depressing. I can't go for that.



Addendum: I just read a passage on Zeno and the famous paradox of the arrow and couldn't help but notice how much my comment sounded like it.

montypython43 : I just saw your post and it leads to a good point:

If we define free will as a potential to choose, we have two things : a choice and an agent making it. Then the act of the free will is agent interacting with 'the world' to make a choice, and 'the world' presenting a choice and making the selection possible.

Now the question of free will is seen in a new light : it seems that the agent's internal functioning is the mechanism that influences the outcome. The question here appears not to be whether we have an internal capacity to make decisions, but is the world really presenting any choices?

In other words, is it possible to predict outcome of every agent's decision without knowing it's exact internal state? Looks like this one is simple. Just make a computer and present it with a decision problem (for example, have a look at recent Spirit robotic rover on Mars and it's driving capabilities).
I claim that within this context and definition of free will, such a machine is manifesting free will! Even without random factors affecting such an agent internally, such program can be sufficiently complex, and it's internal state sufficiently unknown, as to allow for uncertainty in predicting it's actions.


Therefore I must say I am not satisfied with the above definition of free will. The internal state of the actor must not be excluded from the 'factors of the world' and the outcome of a decision must clearly be made dependent on the state of the outside world, as well as internal state of the actor.

Clearly our computer program case fails in this respect; as soon as we know the program and it's internal state (which we can in principle), we can predict the outcome of its every decision!
Is such a function totally deterministic? Does the path to be taken depend solely on the state of the world, and the actor's internal state? Or is there another factor involved, the factor of free will?
I believe that this seems a bit off; because if we assume such a divine factor, we are cutting our way of thinking and our scientific method with the same swing.

Where is a possibility of free will then? Maybe the answer is that the universe does not run on classical equations; it is not a linear process of action-reaction, cause-effect, state in the next frame calculated from the state in the previous frame.

The world might be much different. Cause and effect might not be so clearly separated, and temporally sequenced; maybe 'now' is not an exact moment. Maybe there is no separation between the actor and the world - maybe there are no solutions to the equation of choice.

I believe classical physics and classical way of thinking about causality, free will and consciousness is lacking the power to explain and make sense of all bits. They don't fit.

I am going to keep this alive as long as I have the free will to do so.

James Morrison:


!!!

I think this is an excellent thought.

We don't have "free will," because our culture teache us guilt.

truth
I am (relatively) free to speak my mind. So I have political freedom--relatlively speaking.
I feel (relatlively) free to express my feelings. So I have psychological freedom--relatively speaking.
But I do not know if I have "free will." That is an unresolvable absolutist metaphysical problem.

How many different forms of freedom/free will can one have in addition to political and psychological?

truth
Well, to start with there is physical freedom (I'm not paralyzed), there's economic freedom (I have no debt, and own all the property I need), there's artistic freedom (the government is not checking out my canvases), and who knows?

Free will is a name given to the variety of choices we will make

and i say we WILL make for a reaons
not that cheesy idea of a fate and destiny

but the fact that each choice we made is based around involuntary variables

we did not choose to be born, we did not choose our environment or any of our surroundings, and so each variable behind each "choice" we make from birth till death is based around involuntary things, and so we are entirely unwilling to do each of the things we do.

Are we talking about freedom from determinism or freedom from other people, JL? They are completely different things - if we are free from determinism to any extent, than we all are, but you can't say the same for freedom from other people.

BuddahSlap,

Regardless of the choices you feel you're "forced into", "YOU" still make the final decision.

a free will is what you get if you've got a probate attorney in the family

truth
I agree, Rufio, there is a great difference between freedom from the coercive efforts of other people and freedom from determinism. It seems to me that what we really want in our lives is the former. Only philosophical "free-willers" want freedom from determinism. Schopenhauer once said "We can do as we will [a vote for free will, suppose], but we cannot will as we will [a vote for determinism]." I probably don't understand him here. But he certainly sounds like a philosopher here. I, as a layman, never worry about metaphysical freedom, and I don't think any of us really do. Funny thing about Existentialists (and I guess this is a response to MontyPython's statement about his "preference" for free will) is that they think that we DO NOT HAVE THE FREEDOM to be free; we are FORCED TO BE FREE, to make choices every second of our lives. We do not HAVE freedom; we ARE freedom. It is our very nature to create "essence", to define our selves and to "invent" values, literally out of nothing. Sartre insist, I memory serves me, that we are not free to give up our freedom. We are forced by the nature of our existence to choose, an expression of freedom. But this thread would suggest that at least we can choose to deny our freedom as a metaphysical reality. I think all of it is delusional, because I do not see a self who is making choices; I only see choices being made. Freedom is like a wind unblown by anyone.

True, mostly. But I think the Existentialists and Schopenhauer were saying totally different things there - "we cannot will as we will" I take to mean that we are born into an environment that causes us to will in a certain way (i.e. to want to choose a certain set of things) and that we can't change where we're born so we can't change what we want, though we can make choices based on what we want. Even if we aren't influenced as we grow up, we are continually influenced by experiences and memories, and everything we do has a basis in some event that we had no control over. But if you want to look at it that way, than only random decisions are free choices, and it wouldn't be freedom if we were restricted to the random - and if we define "random" is it really random anymore...?.... and so on, ad infinitum. I say, in order for there to be free will, there must be a unique human mind to will it, and what makes us unique but our memories and experiences?

On being "forced to be free" I think I will accept that bit of determinism, since being "forced to be free" is being forced to be human, and as I said above, without humanity, there is no free will anyway. And in a technical sense, I can always choose not to choose - I can always kill myself right now and never have to choose anything again.

Wind does not blow itself, and freedom does not will itself, in order for freedom to exist, there must neccessarily be human minds and human experiences. And like many things, it is an empty abstraction without humanity.