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How can any action a agent makes be meaningful without causal links to the outside? One of the responses that has been raised to that issue goes like this: At
by Qz 16y ago
How can any action a agent makes be meaningful without causal links to the outside?
One of the responses that has been raised to that issue goes like this: At any point we have a number of meaningful choices from which to choose. For example, if someone calls you up and asks you to go out to dinner with them, it would be meaningful to say, "sure that's great!" or "no thanks maybe later". In any situation like that, we are 'free' to choose from a set of meaningful choices. Each is meaningful in that it is related to the past, but regardless of eventually choosing one choice, we could have chosen another of those choices, and still had it be meaningful.
I don't particularly buy that argument, as the idea of 'could have chosen something else' is just a further escaping of the question of free will. But it is a way of looking at it that seems to avoid the randomness/lack of meaningfulness associated with the idea of free will.
- ugh 16y agoI’m also not sure how that solves the problem. It could be that in any such situation our brain runs a little algorithm that takes into account past experiences (there is your causal link to the outside) or our brain maybe decides at random. Most probably it does a little of both. One is deterministic, the other is random, no free will (as defined before) there. Do proponents of free will (as defined before) claim that there is some entity somewhere, decoupled from the rest of the brain, that makes those decisions? That’s maybe unlikely but, yeah, it is possible. It’s just that I think that such a entity would have to blind to the outside world. If it would base its decisions on information about the outside world it would be just as deterministic as the little algorithm the brain could also run to make decisions. It would essentially be the same and no free will (as defined before). I also don’t see how such a blind entity could make meaningful decisions if there is no information there to base those decisions on. It could easily make random decisions but that's also no free will. (Thinking through the consequences of such a blind entity leads to some quite absurd results: You couldn’t give this entity the names of the alternatives since that would create a causal link to the outside world. I’m not even sure whether you could tell it the number of possible alternatives without creating a causal link to outside world.) (Oh, and if you are wondering why I’m writing ‘as defined before’ whenever I write free will: I do think free will is a useful concept. It’s just that you need determinism for it to work.)