I'm almost finished with the essay about theories of freewill, and arguing for a supercompatibilist position.
Everyone has an opinion on the question of freewill, whether they like it or not (ba-doom-tish, stay around for a drink, I'm here all week).
So what's yours?
A) Hard determinist "All your actions are determined in Minkowski space-time"
B) Soft determinist (aka compatibilist) "But Minkowski space-time and determinism is necessary for free will"
C) Libertarian "It's a chancy world and so we have freewill (somehow)"
D) Hard indeterminist (aka supercompatibilist) "It's an indeterministic world but we're totally controlled by it"
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4 comments:
Hmm, I've never thought about the issue in profound terms before. I've always followed the point of view that free-will is contingent on the organism's capacity for differed neurological responses to given stimuli.
That is, a tree has a physiological response to a stimuli such as sunlight: it faces its leaves towards it. There isn't much room for free-will. The more complex the neuro-system of a given organism, the wider the range of possible reponses.
Our 'free-will' is merely the illusion we place on the fact that we have exponentially many choices in our range of possible responses. But there's a wall, beyond which we can't choose, through free-will, to go.
That said, I'm not sure that it's necessarily incompatible with any of these interpretations. Perhaps they're independent.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah it makes total sense.
Illusory freewill is at quite consistent with all of the 'main' interpretations except for a libertarian view. So it depends whether you're an indeterminist or a determinist from there on.
There is possibly another view, 'soft libertarian', which may account more for your view. Whereby there IS choice, but it is limited in the same way that a computer program has a limited set of instructions.
Defining freewill also varies, from 'If I had done something different, would there be a different result' to 'could I have done something different'. I tend towards the latter defintion.
Theres a paper by Australian neuroscientist John Eccles that sort of says that too, but then goes on to argue for a libertarian view, whereby the decision maker seems to be some 'ghost' outside physics.
I find that interpretation hard to swallow myself.
The two definitions you posit there are interesting. Is either all that meaningful? I mean, neither can ever be possibly answered for any such choice, right?
That's the ultimate epistemic cruelty of the philosophy of free-will, how would you ever know? It could be complete determinism, and we are simply passive observers in a pre-told reality, merely acting under the illusion that we are choosing to do what we do. Our only evidence, observation of reality, is entirely consistent with both this, and the converse extreme indeterminist view.
Damn, I dig philosophy sometimes.
Yep, there is an epistemic limitation, so we will probably never know the ontological truth of the matter. But I think the more accurate behavioral science comes, the more chance of it swinging the way of determined behavior (regardless of the determinacy or indeterminacy of the physical world).
John Earman summed it up nicely:
"It seems then that the attempt to locate human agents in nature either fails in a manner that reflects a limitation on what science can tell us about ourselves, or else it succeeds at the expense of undermining our cherished notion that we are free and autonomous agents."
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