Re: Making your mind up

On 29/04/2024 18:53, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:12:08 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net>:
 

On 4/28/24 10:32 AM, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:50:12 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net>:
>

On 4/26/24 4:27 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:32:27 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net>:
[...]

>
I get the feeling that predetermination means, to you, that if I am
predetermined to choose to buy this house (say), then no matter what I
think, or even if I don't think at all, I will end up deciding to buy
that house. I could move to Tibet, scramble my brain with acid, and
spend all my conscious time playing Candy Crush, and still, in a day or
two, the though will come to me, "I need to buy that house."
>
That's not how predeterminism works. In a predetermined world, I find
myself in need or want of a house, contact a realtor who shows me
available listings; I visit those houses which are in good price range
and neighborhoods; probably I am influenced by external factors such as
the amount of traffic I had to fight through to get there or how hungry
I am at the time. The good and bad points of the different houses being
fed into my mind, I eliminate some obvious non-candidates, and let my
gut guide me to the best of the remaining.
>
That is predetermination at work.  Note that it appears, to all
observers, exactly the same as non-predetermination. That's why the Free
Will issue has never been resolved.
>

So, if I'm understanding that correctly, there is no
difference between determinism and non-determinism (or if
you prefer, determination and non-determination), and
therefore "free will" is a bugaboo which is not accepted
although its implications are?

>
No detectable difference between the two. And I should have added "free
will" is also wrapped up in religious, personal angst, and equivocation
issues, which also contribute to making it a bugaboo.
>

OK. I'd point out that the fact that the concept of free
will is "wrapped up in religious, personal angst, and
equivocation issues" doesn't make it false.

>
My position is not that it is false, but that it is effectively meaningless.
>

And that one
possible reason why there's no detectable difference is that
we have no way to detect the operation of free will in
itself.

>
I have given some thought to how, even in theory and with advanced
technology, one might detect free will, and I have come up empty. Some
Star-Trek-like parallel universe thought experiments could conceivably
determine whether the universe was deterministic or not, but even if
not, that only rules out determinism, not the lack of free will.
>

Yep. I've done the same, although not in any great depth,
and come to the same conclusion; the closest I've come is
something like, "Well, the probabilistic nature of base
reality *seems* to leave room for something resembling
choice, but as for testing it...". It's sometimes amusing to
discuss such things as determinism vs. free will, or the
number of angels which can occupy a pin point, but it
becomes boring fairly quickly due to the lack of any way,
even conceptually, to determine the answer. Which, as I
noted below, brings it down to a matter of belief in the
validity of personal experience.

I think Anil Seth's view of free will in "Being You" is the most cogent I've seen yet. Basically his proposal is that our sentiment of "free will" is a cognitive mechanism that evaluates past decisions in order to make better ones in the future. In this view the whole paradoxes of "could I have chosen differently in the past" induces with determinism OR randomness is based on the fact we're really asking "could I have chosen differently in those conditions" but the conditions are arbitrarily precise meaning it's hard for the answer to be either "yes" and seem free, or "no" and seem willful.
But if "free will" isn't so much about "could I have chosen differently in the past" but "*should* I choose differently *in the future*" that changes the equation immediately because implicitly it *can't* be about arbitrarily identical conditions anymore. The exact conditions of the past will never obtain again, but we will encounter new situations in the future *that are close enough* for the lessons of the past to be useful. If so "free will" would really be about our freedom to make choices within those wider equivalence classes of situations. And the ability to project ourselves as making any of the possible choices so we can think them through.

>

Testimony, of course, is irrelevant, since it may
itself be deterministic. I do see the problem, which comes
down to whether to accept of the validity of personal
experience. I happen to choose (there's that word again...)
to do so.