Re: Making your mind up

LDagget <j.nobel.daggett@gmail.com> 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.
 

I thought Arkalen was saying something I was trying to get at in my own
reply to Bob but Arkalen did it 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.
 

I think contingency itself important from what I recall of Gould. And
randomness is a thing, but it does crap all as a starting point for free
will. May as well be rolling dice when deciding to commit murder or not.

>
The free will question is, what influence is there that is not material?
>

If one is a dualist or libertarian. They have no monopoly on free will.
Compatibilism exists. Dennett made a career out of it.

>
How does that non-material influence act upon the material brain, by what
force or mechanism? What is the evidence?
 

Doesn’t matter if one can make deterministic arguments for free will. I’m
agnostic somewhat.