by MeisterKleister » Tue Jun 13, 2017 6:57 pm
Daniel Maidment wrote:Dennet also bothered me in this, I've read some of his books to figure out just how exactly he manages to reconcile hard determinism and free will, and he doesn't end up managing. Only skirts around the definitions, which I think can be summarised succinctly as this:
Game Theory -->
1 player in the system --> simple system
2 players in the system --> attempt to out compete the other --> guess the others intent --> recursive guessing --> complexity --> effective free will because system is too complex
Reality -->
many players --> system is stupidly complex --> predicting outcomes is absurd --> might as well call it free will.
So yeah, Dennet's approach comes down to condescendingly saying that even if reality is perfectly causal, which would imply determinism, it doesn't matter because it's so complicated anyway. Which is a bit of a cop out. Don't get me wrong, I love Dennet and his work, and to a large degree I agree with him.
Chess sub-program A almost always beats chess sub-program B. When trying to explain this fact, you'd want to avoid saying: "Because A is determined to win." It's true in a sense, but completely uninformative.
A far more interesting explanation would be on the level of computer science or chess strategy, not physics.
Even if you replace the (determined) pseudo-random number generator in any or both machines with a genuine quantum-RNG, this wouldn't really change the regularity with which A almost always beats B. If you yourself were to play against a good chess AI, it would make no practical difference if it had a genuine RNG or just a good pseudo-RNG.
Determinism is not the enemy of the interesting sort of free will and indeterminism doesn't grant you any practical extra freedom or powers either. The universe could be deterministic on even days and indeterministic on uneven days and no one would ever know.
Dennett is a soft determinist (i.e. compatibilist) and argues that we have
a variety of free will that is worth wanting: the power to be active agents that respond to our environment with rational, desirable courses of action, capable of appreciating and considering reasons for doing so.
Again, I think Reddit put it better than I could:
What's the best argument for free will you've ever heard?
Think about how the concept is employed in our everyday life. I am writing this of my own free-will. What is the purpose of saying that? Well, no one made me write this out, and I'm intentionally writing this out. The first mistake is to think the question 'what makes an act free' is a causal question, because it leads back to the Empiricist picture of 'the will', whereby 'acts of will' are posited as the causes of human action, these 'acts of will' are mental causes we bring about, which bring about acts which are free because their cause is free, however as Ryle noted, this leads to an infinite regress, since we must then explain whether that 'act of will' was itself free, and either its cause was free or not, if it was free, then we can again ask whether that cause was free, and so on.
The problem of 'free-will' is always couched in conversations about causality, but that, as far as I can tell, is very very far from its conception and use. If you go into the court system, you'll realize it's used there, extensively, to assign blame or to exculpate individuals for certain acts, or failures to act, because they were either coerced (someone put a gun to their family and told them they had to do such and such or their family would be killed or some such) or they were ignorant of some fact they couldn't reasonably be expected to conceive of (someone puts a bug in your salad and you ate the bug, but you were ignorant of doing so, you didn't freely eat that bug, and cannot be held responsible, instead, whoever put it their will be).
So to my eyes, free-will is an ethical concept, not a metaphysical concept about causality and agents who cause their behaviour. It's one of many concepts we use to characterize human life, others are psychological (where the concepts of aim, desire, intention all play a role), another is agency generally (where we have agents and patients, and we need to decide what the difference is between, say, you picking up your coffee cup and the beating of your heart), and then the concepts of reason (such as knowledge, ignorance, belief). All of these play a role in accounting for human life, but each is distinct. If free will is anything, it is a capacity to both act and undergo things free from ignorance and coercion. We say that someone was kissed, and that they accepted the kiss freely, so note that free-will is not used simply for actions done by agents, but also for actions received by patients, something passive can be received freely, as when someone offers to give me a back massage, and I freely accept it.
Lastly I will note that the majority of current professional philosophers (59.1%) are compatibilists of one sort or another.
[quote="Daniel Maidment"]Dennet also bothered me in this, I've read some of his books to figure out just how exactly he manages to reconcile hard determinism and free will, and he doesn't end up managing. Only skirts around the definitions, which I think can be summarised succinctly as this:
Game Theory -->
1 player in the system --> simple system
2 players in the system --> attempt to out compete the other --> guess the others intent --> recursive guessing --> complexity --> effective free will because system is too complex
Reality -->
many players --> system is stupidly complex --> predicting outcomes is absurd --> might as well call it free will.
So yeah, Dennet's approach comes down to condescendingly saying that even if reality is perfectly causal, which would imply determinism, it doesn't matter because it's so complicated anyway. Which is a bit of a cop out. Don't get me wrong, I love Dennet and his work, and to a large degree I agree with him.[/quote]
Chess sub-program A almost always beats chess sub-program B. When trying to explain this fact, you'd want to avoid saying: "Because A is determined to win." It's true in a sense, but completely uninformative.
A far more interesting explanation would be on the level of computer science or chess strategy, not physics.
Even if you replace the (determined) pseudo-random number generator in any or both machines with a genuine quantum-RNG, this wouldn't really change the regularity with which A almost always beats B. If you yourself were to play against a good chess AI, it would make no practical difference if it had a genuine RNG or just a good pseudo-RNG.
Determinism is not the enemy of the interesting sort of free will and indeterminism doesn't grant you any practical extra freedom or powers either. The universe could be deterministic on even days and indeterministic on uneven days and no one would ever know.
Dennett is a soft determinist (i.e. compatibilist) and argues that we have [url=http://dannyreviews.com/h/Elbow_Room.html]a variety of free will that is worth wanting[/url]: the power to be active agents that respond to our environment with rational, desirable courses of action, capable of appreciating and considering reasons for doing so.
Again, I think Reddit put it better than I could:
[quote][url=https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3ibg1p/whats_the_best_argument_for_free_will_youve_ever/]What's the best argument for free will you've ever heard?[/url]
Think about how the concept is employed in our everyday life. I am writing this of my own free-will. What is the purpose of saying that? Well, no one made me write this out, and I'm intentionally writing this out. The first mistake is to think the question 'what makes an act free' is a causal question, because it leads back to the Empiricist picture of 'the will', whereby 'acts of will' are posited as the causes of human action, these 'acts of will' are mental causes we bring about, which bring about acts which are free because their cause is free, however as Ryle noted, this leads to an infinite regress, since we must then explain whether that 'act of will' was itself free, and either its cause was free or not, if it was free, then we can again ask whether that cause was free, and so on.
The problem of 'free-will' is always couched in conversations about causality, but that, as far as I can tell, is very very far from its conception and use. If you go into the court system, you'll realize it's used there, extensively, to assign blame or to exculpate individuals for certain acts, or failures to act, because they were either coerced (someone put a gun to their family and told them they had to do such and such or their family would be killed or some such) or they were ignorant of some fact they couldn't reasonably be expected to conceive of (someone puts a bug in your salad and you ate the bug, but you were ignorant of doing so, you didn't freely eat that bug, and cannot be held responsible, instead, whoever put it their will be).
So to my eyes, free-will is an ethical concept, not a metaphysical concept about causality and agents who cause their behaviour. It's one of many concepts we use to characterize human life, others are psychological (where the concepts of aim, desire, intention all play a role), another is agency generally (where we have agents and patients, and we need to decide what the difference is between, say, you picking up your coffee cup and the beating of your heart), and then the concepts of reason (such as knowledge, ignorance, belief). All of these play a role in accounting for human life, but each is distinct. If free will is anything, it is a capacity to both act and undergo things free from ignorance and coercion. We say that someone was kissed, and that they accepted the kiss freely, so note that free-will is not used simply for actions done by agents, but also for actions received by patients, something passive can be received freely, as when someone offers to give me a back massage, and I freely accept it.[/quote]
[url=https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/57q3pc/do_modern_philosophers_believe_in_free_will/d8u2cud/]Lastly I will note that the majority of current professional philosophers (59.1%) are compatibilists of one sort or another[/url].