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Other people have answered this well, but I think that the question of determinism vs. indeterminism is essentially the question of an ordered universe vs. a ra
by eseehausen 12y ago
Other people have answered this well, but I think that the question of determinism vs. indeterminism is essentially the question of an ordered universe vs. a random one (or picking a point between those two extremes). If that's the case, then what we are usually talking about when we speak about somebody acting freely or having free will has little to do with that discussion.
To get to your question about what free will would be then: I'm not a huge fan of a pure concept of free will, though we talk about people acting more or less freely often enough that it's worth thinking about. I think then that a useful definition of "free will" might simply be a measure how much somebody's actions are able to be in accord with their desires. How an outside observer would ever gauge that as well as what actions, desires, and the two being in accord would mean are obviously murky philosophical territory, but it's pretty late.
To answer at least one obvious rejoinder, actions and desires can certainly be reduced to particles and the like, but they are phenomena that have qualities we wouldn't ascribe to particles. For instance, it makes little or no sense to say that a particle has a nice smile. In much the same way, we generally mean something different when we say a person wants to do something and a particle wants to do something.
- danbruc 12y agoIs there any good definition of free will at all? Given somebody is in situation X and has options A and B then the choice to do one or the other can either be completely at random or on the other extreme depend completely on the situation X (including the person with the brain and all the memories and the complete environment). Or it may be a mix of both where the situation affects the probability distribution. But none of these scenarios matches what I would call free will, making a choice that is neither random nor a deterministic consequence of the situation, but I can not even think of any mechanism outside of the spectrum from randomness to deterministic consequence.
- eseehausen 12y agoThis issue you're running into is why I think trying to think about free will in that context is a category error. The concept doesn't make sense when it's something that depends on randomness or determinism. Instead, I think it's useful to think about how we use it in actual practice, which is generally something like, "is a person more or less self-directed" where self-directed means that their actions are consistent with their observed character and expressed desires. That's not particularly satisfying if you're raised in a culture that puts a lot of value on free will as a concept, but I think it may be the best we can do.