Michael,Great points.
Let’s though reference human behavior that requires an active use of creative activity, not a simple goal of muscle movement.
If I am writing a paper about Sartre’s concept of freedom, I will fail to say anything comprehensible unless I first study Sartre’s concept. After reading what Sartre wrote about his concept of freedom I might be confused by what seems to be innumerable contradictions. So I may turn to reading an interpretation of Sartre’s concept. That may lead to finding more contradictions and to increasing my level of confusion. So I might seek further sources of interpretations. That might also result in no success in comprehending Sartre’s concept of Freedom. So I might read Sartre again, and reread a primary interpretation. And do those activities over and over again for a month. And continuously think about it all in then shower, and while riding my bicycle, and when annoying my friends by constantly discussing my inability to understand his concept or to accept interpretations that do not seem to properly explain it.
And then while driving home from the grocery store I might have an epiphany and it all becomes clear. I then go home and reread Sartre and discover that my new interpretation is entirely consistent with everything he says about his concept of freedom.
I do not argue that free will means we are without influences. We exist in networks of influences and we are able to choose many of our influences and actively and joyously do so without knowing or wanting to know in advance how we might be influenced. We load ourselves with information that we can use for creative efforts. And I claim autonomy in my epiphanies. They are mine. I am the author.
Though BF Skinner claimed we have no free will he also said that our environment makes us who we are, but we can change our environment which can result in changing who we are. So, he contradicted himself and defends the argument for free will. By reading more and more about Sartre’s concept was me changing my environment and I was consciously doing it too change who I was. Following that I had an epiphany that did not come directly from conscious thoughts but from who I had made myself into being. It was not an accident but a directed achievement, yet even if I failed it was still directed autonomous behavior.
So, despite many claims to the contrary, we can self-cause, we can change our environment, we can choose how to change ourselves, we can manipulate our influences, we can claim who we become then express an act of free will that does not even come from immediate conscious awareness. Too much emphasis is put on a requirement of active conscious awareness being necessary for an act to be claimed to be purposeful autonomous and free. My purposeful writing life could not exist if it required constant reflective awareness.
The above also contains my refusal of the could-you-have-done-otherwise argument. No choice exists in a single moment but is a culmination of many choices throughout time, and at the moment of any choice the one chosen is the choice, end of story. It’s nonsense to try to reverse-engineer a choice from it’s moment.
I am hopeful that you will comment on this.
Thank you for your previous note.
Peter
Peter Lloyd Jones
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Hi All:
Goodness. Such certainty! Perhaps a bit more humility is needed here.
In this video, Hossifelder is correct, I think, when she says that there is no
free will. The idea — the theory — that “we” are “autonomous agents” that can choose to do “what we please” is, I agree, nonsensical. Here is but one of many simple reasons why: I have the
goal to lift my arm. That goal “comes to me” – “I” didn’t choose it. (What do we mean by “I” anyway?). If that is so, then “I” can’t be said to have “free will” because what I am calling my
will isn’t free. So the theory of free will makes no sense.
But this does not mean that the following is true:
These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what
happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the
whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out. These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because
you are made of particles, and what happens with you is a consequence of what happens with those particles.
That is a bold assertion that cannot be found in the “scientific evidence”. It is an extraction from what we know about simple mechanistic systems. But it is not a truism that can be stated with the certainty with which Hossifelder states
it. .
Unpredictable behavior exists – for example, the weather. Why is the weather unpredictable not because we don’t have the tools to analyze it, but because it is a complex dynamic system. The behavior of a complex system
self-organizes as an emergent product of the
relations among its elements within the context in which it operates. There is nothing that is not “deterministic” about this. However, I suggest that at higher levels of complexity, there are
emergent deterministic processes – processes that are so complex that emergent and novel – yet still determined – action is possible.
In my view, the problem of the determinism-free will dichotomy is that determinism is being juxtaposed to free will – a nonsensical concept. We simply don’t have good ways of talking about the processes that we point to when people
say that they have free will. We need to reformulate the determinism-free will debate. How is a system simultaneously deterministic yet capable of novel and emergent action?
People experience themselves as having the capacity to exert control over their actions. The theory of free will does a very
poor job of explaining this. Nonetheless, this experience – and many like it – are things to be explained – and not merely
explained away. We need new ways of doing so that don’t get us into the linguistic traps of yore.
My Best,
Mike
Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
Academic Director, Compass Program
Professor, Department of Psychology
Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845
978.837.3503 (office)
978.979.8745 (cell)