Free Will (from Mary)

CSGnet Archive CSG1997
1

[from Mary Powers 970127]

Rupert Young (970123)

Pardon me if I misread you, but I think you are confusing two
concepts: freedom and free will. A more able person, as you
suggest, has more possibilities in life, which you are not alone
in defining as freedom. But having a sense of one's own free
will doesn't depend on this kind of freedom: it exists in people
whose environmental, physiological, etc. constraints are severe.
(This is part of the hassle about assisted suicide - a person who
chooses to die but needs help doing it has free will but lacks
the freedom).

There are all kinds of arguments against free will, but what,
really, do causality and determinism have to do with a state of
mind? If you believe you have free will, you have it. If you
have some belief system (scientific, religious, whatever) that
convinces you that you don't, you don't. Or at least you think
you don't.

I think that the greatest obstacle to free will is internal
conflict. If you want something and want its opposite as much,
you're stuck. You may shove one side of the conflict aside, and
be unaware of it, but it affects what you are trying to do.
"Trying" being the operative word. Life is a struggle, and
choices are forced. (If you haven't reaad about conflict in BCP
or on the net, this won't make much sense). You can't have free
will if you are unaware of what a lot of the things you want are.

Having free will, then, is being in a (relatively) conflict-free
state. Such a person may choose, or will, to accept the
constraints on his life, or choose to fight them, but whatever
the choice, as an organization of control systems, he is
functioning well, without a lot of reference signals he knows
nothing about pulling him in opposite directions.

To put it in rather trendy terms: the mind is an emergent
phenomenon of the brain, and free will is an emergent phenomenon
of the well-functioning human mind.

Mary P.

2

[from Rupert Young (970129.1100 UT)]

Mary Powers 970127

Pardon me if I misread you, but I think you are confusing two
concepts: freedom and free will.

Yes, I agree there are two different concepts. Perhaps, I didn't express
myself adequately, but what I meant was that freedom is the only one that it
is really practical to discuss and free will doesn't really have any meaning.

If you believe you have free will, you have it. If you
have some belief system (scientific, religious, whatever) that
convinces you that you don't, you don't. Or at least you think
you don't.

This is a nice perspective but wasn't what I took as what is commonly meant by
free will. Daniel Dennett wrote a nice book about free will (or was it
Hofstatdter) called "Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" in
which he discusses different types of free will.

Having free will, then, is being in a (relatively) conflict-free
state. Such a person may choose, or will, to accept the
constraints on his life, or choose to fight them, but whatever
the choice, as an organization of control systems, he is
functioning well, without a lot of reference signals he knows
nothing about pulling him in opposite directions.

But aren't those conflicts and reference signals a result of previous
experiences?

My own personal feeling is that people/society want to believe in something
called free will so that those in control (govt/religions/authorities) can let
themselves off the hook and take the moral high ground when it comes to
deciding what should happen to the "less able" people. Free will allows the
concept of personal responsibility, so the authorities can say that criminals
"chose" to be bad and that is all there is to it, without really considering
the persons background, or what brought them to such a state. The result is
that only the symptoms of the criminal society are addressed without looking
at the underlying causes (with only lip service to rehabilitation).

I feel it is more positive to forget about free will and personal
responsibilty and consider that the the behaviour of many people is shaped by
their experiences in a negative way. Once we do this we can actually work on
the real "causes" and stop the cycle of criminality and abuse by teaching
children
to think for themselves and not blindly accept the opinions or behaviour of
their peers/parents.

···

--
Regards,
Rupert

3

I think that it would be best to teach people about control
theory at a very early age and make it an integral part of education.
Part of what they would learn is that the world is fundamentally
indeterminate, and that behaviors are related to internal goals which may
be inculcated subtly, surreptitiously, and pre-linguistically in many
cases into young brains that are eagerly seeking successful behavior
patterns. If people knew everywhere that behavior is inextricably tied
to internal goals which are, in hierarchical PCT, often morphable, then
they would have secured a valuable perception, freeing them from
destructive behavior loops. Talk about positive social change is utterly
vapid without an epistemology that incorporates individual freedom as a
fundamental principle of higher cognitive existence.

        Sorry this post is more rhetorical than dialectical, but dialectic
hasn't gotten very far here without begging the question, as Bill Powers
pointed out.

Scott

···

On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Rupert J Young wrote:

[from Rupert Young (970129.1100 UT)]

My own personal feeling is that people/society want to believe in something
called free will so that those in control (govt/religions/authorities) can let
themselves off the hook and take the moral high ground when it comes to
deciding what should happen to the "less able" people. Free will allows the
concept of personal responsibility, so the authorities can say that criminals
"chose" to be bad and that is all there is to it, without really considering
the persons background, or what brought them to such a state. The result is
that only the symptoms of the criminal society are addressed without looking
at the underlying causes (with only lip service to rehabilitation).

I feel it is more positive to forget about free will and personal
responsibilty and consider that the the behaviour of many people is shaped by
their experiences in a negative way. Once we do this we can actually work on
the real "causes" and stop the cycle of criminality and abuse by teaching
children
to think for themselves and not blindly accept the opinions or behaviour of
their peers/parents.
--
Regards,
Rupert

______________________________________________________________________________
Scott M. Stirling Email: scstirli@anselm.edu
Saint Anselm College Phone: (603) 668-1101 school
Box 2111 (603) 225-3799 home
100 Saint Anselm Dr.
Manchester, NH 03102-1310

http://www.anselm.edu/student/scstirli/welcome.html

4

[from Rupert Young (970129.1100 UT)]

My own personal feeling is that people/society want to believe in something
called free will so that those in control (govt/religions/authorities) can let
themselves off the hook and take the moral high ground when it comes to
deciding what should happen to the "less able" people. Free will allows the
concept of personal responsibility, so the authorities can say that criminals
"chose" to be bad and that is all there is to it, without really considering

        This is exactly the kind of meaningless talk that pervades
Wright's book, _The Moral Animal_. Using words and phrases like "want to
believe," "authorities can," and other sloppy language which assumes,
logically, that the agents being referred to are fundamentally free, is
totally inappropriate for determinist discourse. Those words are
meaningless in the determinist's conceptual framework.

I feel it is more positive to forget about free will and personal
responsibilty and consider that the the behaviour of many people is shaped by
their experiences in a negative way. Once we do this we can actually work on
the real "causes" and stop the cycle of criminality and abuse by teaching
children
to think for themselves and not blindly accept the opinions or behaviour of
their peers/parents.

        Again, "we can," "think for themselves" are vapid statements in
the determinist view. If, Rupert, you are going to argue for anything
from determinism, please be consistent in your logic and language.
Without logical consistency, deterministic discourse becomes babble. But
the determinist cannot be blamed for that, though, because either his
genes or the environment (a false dichotomy if there ever was one) made
him do it (whoever "him" is--perhaps "it" would be a better term in the
determinist paradigm).

Scott

···

On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Rupert J Young wrote:

______________________________________________________________________________
Scott M. Stirling Email: scstirli@anselm.edu
Saint Anselm College Phone: (603) 668-1101 school
Box 2111 (603) 225-3799 home
100 Saint Anselm Dr.
Manchester, NH 03102-1310

http://www.anselm.edu/student/scstirli/welcome.html

5

[From Bruce Gregory (970130.1400 EST)]

Scott Sterling (970130.1250)

Those words are
meaningless in the determinist's conceptual framework.

As far as a determinist is concerned, aren't all words
meaningless?

Bruce Gregory

6

[From Bruce Gregory (970130.1400 EST)]

Scott Sterling (970130.1250)

Those words are
meaningless in the determinist's conceptual framework.

As far as a determinist is concerned, aren't all words
meaningless?

No, meaninglessness is not implied by determinism. Anyway, Scott's use in
this instance was flawed; what he is pointing to is not meaninglessness,
but rather something more like contradiction. This phrasing error is
trivial given that it occurrs in the midst of Scott's very impressive
replies to determistic assertions.

Tracy Bruce Harms
Lake County, California

···

*From: Tracy Harms (1997;01,30.12:00 PST)

7

[Martin Taylor 970130 15:30]

Tracy Harms (1997;01,30.12:00 PST)

>[From Bruce Gregory (970130.1400 EST)]
>
>Scott Sterling (970130.1250)
>As far as a determinist is concerned, aren't all words
>meaningless?

No, meaninglessness is not implied by determinism.

As I understand it, determinism means something like what Laplace said--that
if he knew the position and momentum of every particle in the Universe, he
would be able to predict the entire future evolution of the Universe
(nowadays we would have to know a bit more than that, but the principle
holds). A determinist can believe in that, without believing that s/he
_does_ at this moment know the position and momentum of every particle
in the Universe. From the point of view of any one person's current
perception of the world, what will happen next is quite indeterminate,
whether or not that person is a determinist.

So, even a determinist can be told facts that were previously unsuspected,
and can wonder what will happen next. As a perceptual control system, the
determinist still has to look at the world to see where it's got to.

I'm not at all clear what determinism has to do with free will, though.
What more can we do than perceive that we do or don't have free will?
We may or may not have it, whatever the definition of it might be, but
we'd never "know" (i.e. have a surely veridical perception of) it. And
if we have faith in determinism, but cannot take advantage of it because
we don't know the entire present wave function of the Universe, would we
not expect to perceive ourselves to have free will?

Martin