Friday, March 18, 2011

Placeholder Post: "Free Will" is undefined

Hello all -- haven't been here for a dog's age, for a number of reasons. But my semi-regular mid-morning splurge of reading a backlog of news, blogs, emails, etc. brought me to some folks cynical on the future of human survival and one dude cynical on conservation or sustainability, period (conservation being the propping up of things found unfit to survive, seeming to be his point). For one thing, it occurred to me that both of these dudes (one immensely annoying, one that I simply disagree with--and who is one of the few folks linking to this blog) seem rather certain of their conclusions. They both, to be sure, use critical thinking processes and scientific evidence to reach their conclusions. But they seem to evince a certainty in things I neither a) share, b) find productive, or c) find utility-maximizing. That is to say, if we know anything from patterns from history (which both thinkers rely on extensively, with good reason), we know that certainty that you have reasoned correctly has very little, if any, correlation with the odds that you have reasoned correctly. Many people who are certain are wrong, and many who are tentative have been proven right. So their certainty in their pronouncements I find annoying (says the guy with enough certainty to declare things on blogs).

But this spiraled into a series of other thoughts in the shower (few enough of which had to do with the papers that I need to grade, others I need write, or the breakfast I need to eat, sigh), and led me back to an idea I had the other day:

Free Will is undefinable.

I've had this thought before (though I'm not going to be arsed with finding a link for yeh), but my thought before was more that you could not put into precise words what you mean by free will. This is true for a certain number of people, but Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) among others have simply summed it up as this: the ability to make choices that don't originate purely from material causes (i.e. it can't be traced through physical causes and changes in the brain and environment, i.e. it has a supra-natural--supernatural, if you will--origination). In other words, if there is no soul or manifest self beyond biology, there cannot be free will, because biology, like everything else, is subject to deterministic laws. (For our purposes here, I define even chaotic results are deterministic, in that their outcomes are still determined by physical laws, there is just room for multiple outcomes under the determined constraints. Philosophy Bro briefly broaches some of this under indeterminism.) But it occurred to me a bit ago: a soul is undefined.

Ok, so this is turning into a post, not a placeholder. But: the soul. Let's stick with Christian conceits--if Hell were unending torment, or Heaven unending pleasure, what would that mean? It occurred to me--the human brain is configured in such a way that it would eventually just stop registering pain if it went on forever; you'd become inured to it. If you didn't, or if it kept escalating, you'd go some form of crazy--you would no longer be yourself. And once you've lost your mind, can you keep losing it, some more? Same with unending heavenly bliss--novelty is important to human satisfaction. If you just get the same pleasure again and again, you again become inured to it (see: hard drugs) and need "higher highs". And again, if they keep going higher ad infinitum, well, we're back to insanity in the membranity.

But it's all heavenly and shit, right? It defies the laws of physical reality. Ok -- so -- imagine you, but it's a you with no maximum capacity for pleasure or pain. You can keep getting "higher" or "lower" forever. And ever. Like, not years, decades. Centuries. Millennia. Eons. Umm... no. "You" would no longer be "you", at least, not in any way you recognize--are you the same person you were as a newborn? No? Well imagine that level of change... times infinity. But, if it's your soul, it's something that's *more* you than *you*, right? It's your *essence*. Well, if our essence is something so essential that it's the same from when we're a newborn (imagine here, for example, newborn Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Stalin, Gandhi, Mandela, and MLK--and imagine that at birth, somehow, their essences are as different or distinct from each other as they were at any other point in their life), then our essence is something that is essentially unknowable, un-understandable to us, ourselves.

Ok -- all of this is to say that all that we know of ourselves is grounded in material reality. If free will is defined as the ability to make decisions outside of physical causes, well--imagine what that means. What does it mean to make a choice unconstrained by anything? If we had a "soul" unconstrained by our biology, how would our choices differ? "Well," one could say, "They would be rational." Ok--rational according to what metric or goal? That is to say, would they be rational at maximizing our own "well-being", at maximizing the world's, at pure logic, at what? And what reason would "they", this soul, have to maximize any of those things if it wasn't constrained by biology and physics et al.? Without human subjectivity, as I've been telling my students, there is no reason to prefer existence to non-existence, good to bad, life to death, justice to injustice, fairness to unfairness.

This all changes, of course, if one presumes the universe is set up in some way to achieve some transcendental good of which we are only dimly aware (or any other transcendental goal, I guess). I would argue that "good" is undefinable outside of our experience, but it cannot be proven that there is not some ultimate "good" or "bad" we're stretching to in the very fabric of being (in the same way that it cannot be proven that my carpet is not made of infinitely many ingeniously disguised Timorese Leprachauns).

7 comments:

Daktari said...

I'm weirded out by the idea that you think there is a soul.

Second, I think free will is simply improperly defined here. Free will is the ability to act like douche or not. You can do the hedonistic route or you can do what's "right". Right, of course, being determined by the Puritans.

Honestly, I don't think free will is nearly as weighty as the emphasis you are placing on it here. Free will are the singular, everyday decisions we make that change the course of our lives. We are a product of the many, seemingly unrelated decisions we made freely throughout our lives.

And given the state of my existence at the moment, there is some serious karma kicking my arse.

Glad to see you back J or Q or whoever the hell you are now.

Daktari said...

Oh, and you need to fix the link to my blog on your sidebar. It's http:/daktarii.blogspot.com. And I've been just as derelict as you in posting anything meaty in the past year. Ugh.

Finishing this damn degree may kill me.

Q said...

Hmmm and ummm...

I emphatically don't think there is a soul. Don't know what else to say about that, and not sure how to fix that it came across that I did...

As far as Free Will being weighty or not, I'm actually again not sure what to say. I know you don't go in much for philosophy, but it has certainly been considered a meaty topic classically is all I can say. And your definition of free will sort of sidesteps the whole classic debate--possibly intentionally. The argument is whether or not we can be said to even have made choices, given that everything has to proceed from physical causes. That is, are we just incredibly complex programs being read out in interaction with everything else? If so, we can hardly be said to have made choices.

I'd be interested to see you engage with the classic free will debate/arguments, which is what this post is a tag-along to. Philosophy Bro has a decent overview of this at the link I put up.

Sorry to hear the recent news from your way about the job and all. But I'm quite sure you're gonna finish this sumbitch. And you've got just as much excuse, or more, much more, than me for not posting as much meaty stuff. And you've still been posting plenty of other things, and dieting and exercising and cooking and generally kicking ass, so I'm actually a little chagrined!!

Unfortunately, I think this re-sighting of J/Q/whoever the hell is gonna end up being a fluke.

Anonymous said...

NP: Undefinable, or implausible (by the uniformitarian point you make)?
Also: you lost me at soul.

MJC: Undefinable, NP. The argument of many is that Free Will should be defined as the ability to make decisions apart from material causes--in other words, a soul. I don't believe one exists--don't why that it comes across that I do--but the only coherent viewpoint I can see from which to define Free Will would be a soul, the intrusion of a decision-making source independent of material causes.

NP: But isn't that a definition?

MJC: The philosophical point to me is this: Free Will is undefinable and untestable without the supposition of a soul, and it is actually beyond undefinable--meaningless--*with* the supposition of a supra-material soul.
If one defines Free Will without a supernatural force, then many have argued that there is no possible source from which a non-deterministic decision-making system can arrive: the mind is made of material, and therefore all choices must proceed from material causes that are deterministic and therefore preclude free choice. (Determinism in the sense I mean it includes Philosophy Bro's indeterminism--that is, even if you argue something is open to chance or probabilistic, being purely probabilistic is distinct from free choice.) So, Free Will becomes undefinable (or rather, undefined, in recognition of your question re: a definition; my argument is more properly that all definitions of Free Will are inherently contradictory such that the question cannot be meaningfully asked or answered, all appearances to the contrary) in this context, because it posits: a) Free Will means making choices independent of material, deterministic/probabilistic causes, and b) no such supernatural independence exists.

MJC: It is untestable, at least as far as I can see, because I thought of the question: how would decisions made by a "Free Will" being in a material universe be different than those confined by material causes? That is, given this thought experiment, how would the two differ in observable ways:
1) There is no immaterial soul, but beings are able to freely make decisions based on bounded rationality, limited information, and a mix of self-regarding, altruistic, and reciprocal motivations.
2) There is no immaterial soul, and beings make decisions based on bounded rationality, etc. etc. that are strictly deterministic consequences of material causes.
How would we differentiate the two? What differences can be presumed or hypothesized between the two? That is to say -- how would an individual with Free Will, imperfect knowledge, and interactions with an environment it does not completely control differ in its decisions from an individual without said Will, the same circumstances, and strict deterministic decision-making?

Anonymous said...

Okay, now what if we assume a supra-natural decision-making force? Then, how would decisions be different? If we presume (and it seems those who believe in a soul do) that whatever this entity is, it is still influenced by material phenomena, how would its decisions differ discernibly from beings without a soul (but the same faculties as humans)? In order to know this, one must know the motivations of this "soul", but where would such motivations come from? Without materially-derived influences, there is no basis for which a "soul" to be motivated. Good, evil, moral, immoral, selfish, altruistic--these can all only be defined within the context of a material world, not in the abstract. Or, at least, those who believe in God(s) of course believe the opposite, that Good et al. is and can only be defined as the supernatural whims of this invisible friend; these whims are simultaneously discernible via select contacts with humans on Earth and impossibly mysterious due to their origin from an ultimately Unknowable Entity in that we cannot conceptualize the whole of Its motivations or nature. So in the special case of "God(s) Exist", we have the idea that our decisions are or should be influenced by an imperfect understanding of an impossible-to-understand plan, and thus the whole Proposition is untestable, because the differences between a world where there is a plan we can't understand and a world wit no ultimate plan are completely undefinable. Again, this is like the infinite and cleverly disguised East Timorese Leprachauns that *may* be making up my throw rug--I am under no obligation to believe in all the possible but unfalsifiable hypotheses in the world. But this is a really a time- and sanity-saving rubric; there is no reason or obligation from a materialist viewpoint to entertain such notions, and there are infinitely many of them, but any unknown number of them *may* be true. We don't entertain them because to proceed with any rational action we *must* assume that we are not simply the dream of a sleeping giant, or that all of our present awarenesses aren't simply an elaborate retrospectively justifying delusion; that is to say, we must assume our evaluation of material causes and seeming consistencies in the world are indeed material consistencies, otherwise there would be no point to proceeding with studying anything. This does not mean ignoring these fanciful "possibilities" is objectively correct, just that there is no rational and internally consistent alternative.

Anonymous said...

So anyway, the same is true regarding a Soul not fit within any given theistic cosmology, with the additional fact that if we do not assume a supernatural teleology, it becomes impossible to define choice. What does choice mean when choice is unconstrained by any material considerations? If there is no Ultimate Supernatural Teleology, but there *is* a Soul that gives Free Will, upon what basis would it Freely Make its choices? I cannot think of any possible basis for choice but the material world or supernatural cosmology; this is what I mean by undefined (or undefinable), not implausible. Or I suppose, it is undefinable without assuming a Cosmology/Teleology. But we have no basis for proving or disproving such a supernatural Cosmology, we just have no rational basis to believe in them--knowing that a lack of rational basis is not the same as disproof. It is a self-regarding or sanity-keeping assumption, that rationality is possible and consistent, ultimately unprovable in the same way Cosmology is. The crucial difference, in my view, is that materialism (proceeding only from an understanding of observable or deducible-from-observation causes) can yield fruitful understanding of our world and has shown its usefulness through science and its success. Simultaneously, defining Free Will is undefinable from within such an understanding, because the differences between a being with Free Will and without cannot be intelligibly formulated from within such an understanding. That is, I can imagine the possibility of a being freely making choices based on bounded rationality, limited knowledge and recollection, etc.--making the choices it thinks is best for itself, in a non-deterministic manner, but how would such a being be different from one in the same circumstances without Free Will?

I suppose you could argue that this means that the only meaningful definition of free will are the cosmological possibilities I laid out, which are likewise dismissable under a materialist frame. Hence your point: implausible, not undefinable. The irony of course is that our theory as to whether or not free will exists is completely immaterial--the irony which shooting-the-shit conversations like this always come back to. I don't have the ability to convince you or myself or anyone else of any proposition out of will; I'm not "choosing" to write these words, you're not choosing to evaluate them and formulate rebuttals or expansions, I'm not choosing to maintain my position or modify it. Yet our own limited abilities at understanding make it appear that all of these things are occurring. So, from an internally material frame, am I obligated to believe my own subjective experience of my own Will from my repeated perceptions ("empirical observations") of it, or am I obligated to believe the logic derived from a series of other beliefs and propositions based on my repeated perceptions ("empirical observations") of the way the material world appears to work under a certain interpretive frame? (And one which, if history is any guide, will be ridiculed as quaint, limited, and based on seemingly obvious falsities and self-deception in 1000, 2000 years? In a way, empiricism would lead us to believe that most/much of what we are deriving from science will be viewed as important, but ultimately quaint and based on some correct and some incorrect premises. Very few ideas survive the test of time, which is what makes them so fascinating. Most of the innovations and expansions of a given idea will be a blind alley or misapprehension. So empirically, we can assume with a high degree of confidence that a large portion of our most strenuously empirically derived information is incorrect in important ways.)

Anonymous said...

NP: $freewill = NaN

MJC: Hah! Why couldn't I just have said that?
I like that, though -- Free Will is *exactly* like i: incredibly useful, vital in carrying out certain operations, but not physically definable or tangibly real (and indeed, imaginary). Yet imaginary in such a way that it seems to naturally result from materially meaningful operations.
Free Will, the √-1 of human existence.

NP: Now that's a great definition!
I agree with you, btw. Or, rather, the world agrees with itself.