Re: Making your mind up

On 03/05/2024 20:43, LDagget wrote:

Arkalen wrote:
 [ chomp chomp chomp ]
 

I feel you're maybe seeing the philosophical objection to free will based on determinism but you're missing a parallel one involved in random choice. Basically many people feel that a choice being random isn't "free will" anymore than it being predetermined is. That "free will" still requires decisions to be under our control somehow, which randomness negates. Like "free will" involves "free" and "will" and determinism gets in the way of the "free" part but randomness gets in the way of the "will" part.

 

Put another way, if we translate it into the legal domain (the area where notions of "free will" have actual practical relevance), someone with a mental disorder that leads them to predictably and unavoidably do

 

a bad thing would be considered legally incompetent - but someone with a

 

mental disorder that lead them to behave randomly would be considered just as incompetent. Either way the issue is not having control over one's actions.

  Please reread that. It's frustratingly pointless for being a combination
of meta arguments and ridiculously literal parsing. I know you can do
better.
 Few adherents of a dualism that includes some metaphysical realization of
"free will" go so far as to deny that "choices" can be influenced by environmental factors. That some subset of those factors that coincide
with
the timing of making a choice are "random" is pretty much a given. To
what extent you are influenced by a blue car versus a white car driving
past you influences a choice you are about to make may be small or large,
but the color is essentially random with respect to the elements of most
of the sort of choices you might be challenged to make, for example what
to order off of a lunch menu. And if you have some objection to thinking
that some car of a different color can influence such a choice, use your
imagination to find something else that could be an influence and fill in
the obvious blanks on a backwards causation chain as per below.
The back chain of dependencies that lead to what car passes you when has
a fading sense of determinism, by which I mean that far enough back, some
critical factor, perhaps weather, was essentially random but was
consequential
in determining some future event that had influence upon a choice you
are faced with.
This should be a recognized given in all discussions of free will. Nothing
 in this is controversial, new, or surprising. No discussion of determinism
can honestly deny that in our universe, randomness creeps in. It's a
given.
And so discussions that deny it are grossly tedious. Randomness in
causation
is a given. Choices have myriad influences of varying scale.
The free will question is, what influence is there that is not material?
How does that non-material influence act upon the material brain, by what
force or mechanism? What is the evidence?
 

I absolutely disagree that this is what the free will question is. If the free will question is "what influences are there that aren't material" that makes "free will" as inherently immaterial and not a question that has any relevance in a materialist universe (because in a materialist universe that question has a simple and obvious answer: "none"), but I don't think that's the case. Or at least everybody doesn't agree that it's the case. Even under materialism questions related to free will like those of legal responsibility exist. Materialists like Anil Seth have discussed free will as something that exists. The questions might be different (like "what is this thing we think of as 'free will'" more than "does free will exist") but they're there.
I would also argue that even in a non-materialist universe this wouldn't be the actual "free will question". The non-materialist "free will question" to me is "does free will mean decisions are uncaused". The determinism/randomness issue exists whether influences are material or immaterial because those are completely orthogonal categories.