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“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me bonker

“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me bonkers. Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever? The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all abstractions do).

naasking 6y ago
So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will. So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car? If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will". Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.
- adjkant 6y ago
  The way you are using the object and the name can also apply to humans within a deterministic world though along with the parent argument. When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world. The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.
  - naasking 6y ago
    > what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will. So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".
    - adjkant 6y ago
      > When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree. However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications. You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.
      - naasking 6y ago
        Most philosophers are actually Compatibilists [1], along similiar lines to what I've been writing. I have no issue with determinism as it's compatible with free will in my view. [1] Around 60% Compatibilist, https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
        6y ago
- ravenide 6y ago
  > Free will is just as real as cars. This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief. Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph. Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble. Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.
  - naasking 6y ago
    > Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm. When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will. Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.
    - ravenide 6y ago
      > The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me! As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement. I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true. I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.
- nicky0 6y ago
  There is no underlying concept of "free will" just as there is no underlying concept of "a car". They are just names we give to things that appear to be. Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ajuc 6y ago
  That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc. If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.
  - naasking 6y ago
    > That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc. I disagree: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compatibilist_Intuitions_are_not_Mistaken_A_Reply_to_Feltz_and_Millan https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
    - vidarh 6y ago
      People may have compatibilist intuitions, but start digging into what they they think past their initial intuitions and you tend to get completely different responses. Most people never think about what free will implies, and so their intuitions are fairly uncorrelated with what they'll insist on if you start questioning them about details in my experience.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      Ask them if their roomba has free will.
      - naasking 6y ago
        Their roomba doesn't have thoughts, beliefs, intentions or the ability to learn in any meaningful way. Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
        ajuc 6y ago
        What's a thought and why should it matter for free will? What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do? When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it? In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans. We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition. > Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury. I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all. Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.
taneq 6y ago
Totally agree that "you" is an emergent phenomenon rather than some atomic entity. Is this where we start debating the meaning of 'free will'? Because most discussions usually miss that step, rendering the rest of the conversation kinda pointless.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
Yeah that argument, that chaos = free will is usually made by people, who never studied any philosophy or read much about determinism (which one exactly?). I read that aaall the time and it's also annoying to me.
- CuriouslyC 6y ago
  chaos = free will is a bit of a strawman. Physics being non-deterministic does open the door to the universe exerting "will" though, and choice is just as good an explanation for the variance as randomness.
CuriouslyC 6y ago
Note here that you're using the word random, when in science the phenomena are unpredictable. "You" as a stable, persistent entity does not exist, but you as a momentary observer, with the ability to exert will to guide the evolution of the universe sure seems to. Which hypothesis fits Occam's Razor better: that the same pattern of observation and response occurs at all scales in the universe, with the only variable being the complexity, or that there are two different processes, one of which takes over only at one very specific scale? If we don't have free will, if we're just dumb machines, why would we even be conscious in the first place? IMO it's far too big a thing to just be a random side effect.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  What do you mean it's 'too big of a thing' to be explicable within the framework of the physical universe? That does not sound like a sensible intuition to fix on. For most of history life was thought of as too big of a thing to be explicable in terms of the physical universe, and philosophers appealed to the divine and extra-physical vitalism, but we now know that life really is susceptible to physical explanation. As for your question as to why humans or other sentient beings would be conscious if they belonged to the physical universe, the answer is obvious: for the same reason that we and other animals possess all other attributes, because of its functional value in enhancing our survival fitness as a species. Perhaps high level information-processing requires consciousness, or consciousness is a byproduct of some or all high level information-processing with organic matter. I should say I'm agnostic about consciousness because I think we know next to nothing about it.
smcphile 6y ago
> “Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ... I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken. > The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either. I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery. I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness". I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example. So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  I am very suspicious of the ordinary formulation of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? Usually when people distinguish the two in order to suggest that the first is 'easy' and the second 'hard', they beg the question and build their conclusion into their premise. If you assume from the beginning that the first is subject to the normal canons of empirical investigation as to how the physical world operates, and the second isn't, then of course they will appear as 'easy' and 'hard'. But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world. Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I agree that the qualifier of hard and easy is arbitrary, but think there are at least as much premises build into qualifiers like free or will for that matter. If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer. > But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed. But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion? > subjective experience Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.

naasking 6y ago

So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will. So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car? If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will". Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.

adjkant 6y ago
The way you are using the object and the name can also apply to humans within a deterministic world though along with the parent argument. When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world. The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.
- naasking 6y ago
  > what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will. So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".
  - adjkant 6y ago
    > When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree. However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications. You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.
    - naasking 6y ago
      Most philosophers are actually Compatibilists [1], along similiar lines to what I've been writing. I have no issue with determinism as it's compatible with free will in my view. [1] Around 60% Compatibilist, https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
      - 6y ago
ravenide 6y ago
> Free will is just as real as cars. This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief. Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph. Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble. Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.
- naasking 6y ago
  > Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm. When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will. Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.
  - ravenide 6y ago
    > The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me! As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement. I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true. I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.
nicky0 6y ago
There is no underlying concept of "free will" just as there is no underlying concept of "a car". They are just names we give to things that appear to be. Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ajuc 6y ago
That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc. If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.
- naasking 6y ago
  > That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc. I disagree: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compatibilist_Intuitions_are_not_Mistaken_A_Reply_to_Feltz_and_Millan https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
  - vidarh 6y ago
    People may have compatibilist intuitions, but start digging into what they they think past their initial intuitions and you tend to get completely different responses. Most people never think about what free will implies, and so their intuitions are fairly uncorrelated with what they'll insist on if you start questioning them about details in my experience.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    Ask them if their roomba has free will.
    - naasking 6y ago
      Their roomba doesn't have thoughts, beliefs, intentions or the ability to learn in any meaningful way. Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.
      - ajuc 6y ago
        What's a thought and why should it matter for free will? What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do? When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it? In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans. We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition. > Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury. I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all. Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.

taneq 6y ago

Totally agree that "you" is an emergent phenomenon rather than some atomic entity. Is this where we start debating the meaning of 'free will'? Because most discussions usually miss that step, rendering the rest of the conversation kinda pointless.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

Yeah that argument, that chaos = free will is usually made by people, who never studied any philosophy or read much about determinism (which one exactly?). I read that aaall the time and it's also annoying to me.

CuriouslyC 6y ago
chaos = free will is a bit of a strawman. Physics being non-deterministic does open the door to the universe exerting "will" though, and choice is just as good an explanation for the variance as randomness.

CuriouslyC 6y ago

Note here that you're using the word random, when in science the phenomena are unpredictable. "You" as a stable, persistent entity does not exist, but you as a momentary observer, with the ability to exert will to guide the evolution of the universe sure seems to. Which hypothesis fits Occam's Razor better: that the same pattern of observation and response occurs at all scales in the universe, with the only variable being the complexity, or that there are two different processes, one of which takes over only at one very specific scale? If we don't have free will, if we're just dumb machines, why would we even be conscious in the first place? IMO it's far too big a thing to just be a random side effect.

Emma_Goldman 6y ago
What do you mean it's 'too big of a thing' to be explicable within the framework of the physical universe? That does not sound like a sensible intuition to fix on. For most of history life was thought of as too big of a thing to be explicable in terms of the physical universe, and philosophers appealed to the divine and extra-physical vitalism, but we now know that life really is susceptible to physical explanation. As for your question as to why humans or other sentient beings would be conscious if they belonged to the physical universe, the answer is obvious: for the same reason that we and other animals possess all other attributes, because of its functional value in enhancing our survival fitness as a species. Perhaps high level information-processing requires consciousness, or consciousness is a byproduct of some or all high level information-processing with organic matter. I should say I'm agnostic about consciousness because I think we know next to nothing about it.

smcphile 6y ago

> “Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ... I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken. > The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either. I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery. I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness". I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example. So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.

Emma_Goldman 6y ago
I am very suspicious of the ordinary formulation of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? Usually when people distinguish the two in order to suggest that the first is 'easy' and the second 'hard', they beg the question and build their conclusion into their premise. If you assume from the beginning that the first is subject to the normal canons of empirical investigation as to how the physical world operates, and the second isn't, then of course they will appear as 'easy' and 'hard'. But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world. Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I agree that the qualifier of hard and easy is arbitrary, but think there are at least as much premises build into qualifiers like free or will for that matter. If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer. > But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed. But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion? > subjective experience Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.