On May 29 2014 07:09 2Pacalypse- wrote: A good video on free will by Sam Harris that made it painfully obvious (to me) that free will is an illusion:
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
On May 29 2014 06:36 L3gendary wrote: Even though I don't believe in free will this isn't a very good argument. Basically you said that A and B=NOT A need to be both possible for free will to exist. And then (with some added unnecessary operations) concluded that it's impossible because A and NOT A can't simultaneously be true (something can't be both true and false).
So this is just the old argument that any proposition (even those about the future) must be either true or false right now. In other words you've concluded that free will doesn't exist by assuming that logical determinism is true.
Not quite...
First it's important to note that I'm not saying that free will doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that the classical free will thesis is incoherent. It's still perfectly possible that free will could exist (like the source view or something), but the classical free will thesis is logically incoherent.
The ability to do otherwise, or the retrospective possibility of having done something else is what I'm arguing against. All of my arguments come merely as a consequence of the classical definition of free will. Does that make sense?
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Started watching the video. So far it seems like a kind of "Free Will for Dummies" thing. He's just kind of going over the most well known arguments against free will. It also seems like he's relying pretty heavily relying on the classical definition of free will. There are other ways of defining free will besides "the ability to do otherwise."
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on? Is that why science doesn't make any progress?
The best method that we have to find out truth about the world, an objective truth, is scientific method. Rational thought and deductive reasoning go out the window once we're confronted with something that doesn't seem rational, eg. quantum mechanics.
On May 29 2014 05:21 MichaelDonovan wrote: ... Note that B is defined as an action contrary to A.
So by definition of B, we get the bi-conditional:
(1) B* <-> ~A*
...
I'm confused here. How can you make the statement that B is defined as contrary to A?
That's just what we defined B to be in the original proposition. B is some action contrary to A.
The way you are doing it, you are already negating free will in the premise itself. I think you are mixing up the meaning of contrary.
The original proposition is A* -> B*. And B is contrary to A. That means, you can say B* IS NOT A*. But you cannot say, IF B* THEN NOT A*.
The original proposition is:
If an agent did some action A, then it was possible for him to have done some contrary action B.
So there it is. B is an action contrary to A. That's just what it's defined as.
Who has come up with this definition of free will? Is this how logic defines free will?
It says that A* -> B* and A* -> ~B*. This is in itself already a contradiction. There is no need to further proof or disprove it. The proposition itself returns already a false statement!
Classical free will is the old definition of free will that philosophers had been using for a very long time. It just defines free will as the ability to do otherwise. Meaning, if you did something, then looking back you could have chosen to do something else. Basically meaning that you aren't pidgeon holed into one choice by fatalism.
There are no a few other definitions of free will that compete with the classical version. I'm just tackling the logical inconsistency of the classical view here. I'm not showing that free will doesn't exist. I'm just showing that the classical free will thesis is incoherent.
Also, I think you might be misunderstanding the logic a bit.
What we have is the biconditional: B* -> ~A* and ~A* -> B*.
This is just from that definition of contrary action which says that you can't do both of them. Like you can't both slap your girlfriend on the ass and also not slap her on the ass. You either slap her on the ass, or you do something else.
I see, I'm not too familiar with logic, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
Can't you express the contrary action in a simpler way? Instead of writing it like this: B* -> ~A* and ~A* -> B* You can just write B* -> ~A and A* -> ~B*. Is this correct?
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on? Is that why science doesn't make any progress?
The best method that we have to find out truth about the world, an objective truth, is scientific method. Rational thought and deductive reasoning go out the window once we're confronted with something that doesn't seem rational, eg. quantum mechanics.
Well the problem is that empirical evidence isn't foolproof. We can only gather evidence from what we can sense. How do we know we're not in the matrix world, for example? We don't really know that do we? No amount of empirical evidence can prove that we aren't dreaming or that we aren't just brains in vats being stimulated with the illusion of experience. This is because any empirical evidence we gather is contingent upon our trust for our ability to sense it.
Quantum mechanics is not irrational necessarily. It just defies some our previous assumptions about the world. It renders many statements false that were once though to be true. That doesn't mean it's logically incoherent. It just means we don't understand it based on our current assumptions.
Why not just say ~A instead of B, which makes clear immediately your line of thinking, and refocuses us on the real issue, which is what is the meaning exactly of saying "it was possible to do otherwise"?
On May 29 2014 05:21 MichaelDonovan wrote: ... Note that B is defined as an action contrary to A.
So by definition of B, we get the bi-conditional:
(1) B* <-> ~A*
...
I'm confused here. How can you make the statement that B is defined as contrary to A?
That's just what we defined B to be in the original proposition. B is some action contrary to A.
The way you are doing it, you are already negating free will in the premise itself. I think you are mixing up the meaning of contrary.
The original proposition is A* -> B*. And B is contrary to A. That means, you can say B* IS NOT A*. But you cannot say, IF B* THEN NOT A*.
The original proposition is:
If an agent did some action A, then it was possible for him to have done some contrary action B.
So there it is. B is an action contrary to A. That's just what it's defined as.
Who has come up with this definition of free will? Is this how logic defines free will?
It says that A* -> B* and A* -> ~B*. This is in itself already a contradiction. There is no need to further proof or disprove it. The proposition itself returns already a false statement!
Classical free will is the old definition of free will that philosophers had been using for a very long time. It just defines free will as the ability to do otherwise. Meaning, if you did something, then looking back you could have chosen to do something else. Basically meaning that you aren't pidgeon holed into one choice by fatalism.
There are no a few other definitions of free will that compete with the classical version. I'm just tackling the logical inconsistency of the classical view here. I'm not showing that free will doesn't exist. I'm just showing that the classical free will thesis is incoherent.
Also, I think you might be misunderstanding the logic a bit.
What we have is the biconditional: B* -> ~A* and ~A* -> B*.
This is just from that definition of contrary action which says that you can't do both of them. Like you can't both slap your girlfriend on the ass and also not slap her on the ass. You either slap her on the ass, or you do something else.
I see, I'm not too familiar with logic, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
Can't you express the contrary action in a simpler way? Instead of writing it like this: B* -> ~A* and ~A* -> B* You can just write B* -> ~A and A* -> ~B*. Is this correct?
It's correct, but there are intermediate steps to getting there.
You start with the biconditional: B <-> ~A
It goes both ways so you can break it up into two separate statements: B -> ~A (B implies not A) ~A -> B (not A implies B)
And then if you take the contrapostive of B -> ~A which is: ~~A -> ~B (not not A implies not B)
Then the two negatives cancel and you get ~B -> A (not B implies A)
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on? Is that why science doesn't make any progress?
The best method that we have to find out truth about the world, an objective truth, is scientific method. Rational thought and deductive reasoning go out the window once we're confronted with something that doesn't seem rational, eg. quantum mechanics.
Well the problem is that empirical evidence isn't foolproof. We can only gather evidence from what we can sense. How do we know we're not in the matrix world, for example? We don't really know that do we? No amount of empirical evidence can prove that we aren't dreaming or that we aren't just brains in vats being stimulated with the illusion of experience. This is because any empirical evidence we gather is contingent upon our trust for our ability to sense it.
Quantum mechanics is not irrational necessarily. It just defies some our previous assumptions about the world. It renders many statements false that were once though to be true. That doesn't mean it's logically incoherent. It just means we don't understand it based on our current assumptions.
Were you arguing in a thread once with frogrubdown about the idea of the demon that tricks you into thinking your rational deduction is true when it really isn't? In other words, you are still relying on sense perception of a sort when you "know" that your rational thought process has delivered a truth. So you can't do better than "fuck it let's science", or so it is suggested. (And of course I'm saying science with some facetious looseness.)
Or maybe that wasn't you, but have you run into this demon idea before?
On May 29 2014 07:57 EatThePath wrote: Why not just say ~A instead of B, which makes clear immediately your line of thinking, and refocuses us on the real issue, which is what is the meaning exactly of saying "it was possible to do otherwise"?
But nevertheless it was a good exercise. ^^
I say B instead of ~A because saying ~A can cause people to misunderstand it to mean only one action (the action of not doing A).
If I say B is any action contrary to A, then it's clear that B contains many possibilities.
First a formal thing to point out: your quantifiers are mixed up at the start: you say that - not (it was possible for the agent to have done some contrary action B) is - it was not possible for the agent to have done B.
But the correct negation would be - it was not possible to do any action contrary to A. You are pulling a specific B out of nowhere; there might be a whole load of actions contrary to A
There is another problem (which is maybe bigger): you state that if A and B are contrary then not doing A implies doing B. This doesn't follow from your definition of contrary, you would need to change your definition of contrary to - A and B are contrary if one cannot do both and must do one of the two. Now I think all you are saying is that one must do one of A or not A.
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on? Is that why science doesn't make any progress?
The best method that we have to find out truth about the world, an objective truth, is scientific method. Rational thought and deductive reasoning go out the window once we're confronted with something that doesn't seem rational, eg. quantum mechanics.
Well the problem is that empirical evidence isn't foolproof. We can only gather evidence from what we can sense. How do we know we're not in the matrix world, for example? We don't really know that do we? No amount of empirical evidence can prove that we aren't dreaming or that we aren't just brains in vats being stimulated with the illusion of experience. This is because any empirical evidence we gather is contingent upon our trust for our ability to sense it.
Quantum mechanics is not irrational necessarily. It just defies some our previous assumptions about the world. It renders many statements false that were once though to be true. That doesn't mean it's logically incoherent. It just means we don't understand it based on our current assumptions.
Were you arguing in a thread once with frogrubdown about the idea of the demon that tricks you into thinking your rational deduction is true when it really isn't? In other words, you are still relying on sense perception of a sort when you "know" that your rational thought process has delivered a truth. So you can't do better than "fuck it let's science", or so it is suggested. (And of course I'm saying science with some facetious looseness.)
Or maybe that wasn't you, but have you run into this demon idea before?
That was not me arguing. But I am familiar with this example as any philosopher should be. It is an old example from Descartes. It's a pretty strong skeptical example and it's not really clear how to get around it. There's no real way for me to know with certainty that I'm not being manipulated by an evil being in this way.
At this point, my answer for skepticism in general is that you can't really get around it. There will always be some kind of skeptical thesis that refutes your belief. So what we have to do in order to move on from this is just acknowledge that all of our conclusions are contingent on there not being a demon manipulating me. That is, anything I conclude with logic must be believed true only under the assumption that logic is a reliable method of deriving truth.
On May 29 2014 08:07 sOda~ wrote: First a formal thing to point out: your quantifiers are mixed up at the start: you say that - not (it was possible for the agent to have done some contrary action B) is - it was not possible for the agent to have done B.
But the correct negation would be - it was not possible to do any action contrary to A. You are pulling a specific B out of nowhere; there might be a whole load of actions contrary to A
There is another problem (which is maybe bigger): you state that if A and B are contrary then not doing A implies doing B. This doesn't follow from your definition of contrary, you would need to change your definition of contrary to - A and B are contrary if one cannot do both and must do one of the two. Now I think all you are saying is that one must do one of A or not A.
he already stated that B isnt a single action but everything not A
On May 29 2014 05:21 MichaelDonovan wrote: Proof: The classical free will thesis is false.
If the classical free will thesis is correct, that is, if we have classical free will, then the following proposition is true:
Proposition (The classical definition of free will):If an agent did some action A, then it was possible for the agent to have done some contrary action B.
Definition: Two actions are contrary actions if an agent cannot perform both of them.
Contrapositive of the proposition: If it was not possible for the agent to have done B, then the agent did not do A.
My issue is with the red above.
I don't think the statement actually says what you intend for it to say. Let me try rewording it:
Proposition: If an agent did some action (A), then there exists at least one contrary action that the agent could have done instead. Contrapositive: If no contrary action to action (A) exists, then an agent could not have taken action (A).
This of course assumes that every action has an alternative, which may or may not be too strong of a definition for free will. Even if this assumption is disproved, you haven't really accomplished much since free will, in general, can still exist. Regardless, I find the way I phrased the proposition less confusing and error-prone. Frankly, I'm not sure if I can follow your analysis beyond there without reading up on philosophical logic, but usually in these types of situations the phrasing of the initial statements is the most important part of avoiding weird or invalid conclusions.... or confusion from your readers.
On May 29 2014 08:07 sOda~ wrote: First a formal thing to point out: your quantifiers are mixed up at the start: you say that - not (it was possible for the agent to have done some contrary action B) is - it was not possible for the agent to have done B.
But the correct negation would be - it was not possible to do any action contrary to A. You are pulling a specific B out of nowhere; there might be a whole load of actions contrary to A
There is another problem (which is maybe bigger): you state that if A and B are contrary then not doing A implies doing B. This doesn't follow from your definition of contrary, you would need to change your definition of contrary to - A and B are contrary if one cannot do both and must do one of the two. Now I think all you are saying is that one must do one of A or not A.
My response to your first objection is that B is defined as some action contrary to A. When I say this, I am not saying that B is a particular action. I really mean the same thing as B is defined as any action contrary to A. So "some action" and "any action" are the same thing here. Doing B amounts to doing otherwise, basically. Does that make sense?
And to your second objection what I would say is that not doing A is an action in itself, and it is an action clearly contrary to A. So it is contained in B. If you don't do A, then that's a contrary choice to A. And yes, it is the case that you must either do A or not A. That's just a consequence of not being able to do both. They are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
On May 29 2014 07:57 EatThePath wrote: Why not just say ~A instead of B, which makes clear immediately your line of thinking, and refocuses us on the real issue, which is what is the meaning exactly of saying "it was possible to do otherwise"?
But nevertheless it was a good exercise. ^^
I say B instead of ~A because saying ~A can cause people to misunderstand it to mean only one action (the action of not doing A).
If I say B is any action contrary to A, then it's clear that B contains many possibilities.
It's just for clarity's sake.
Yeah, but from the other perspective it just makes it seem like you are smuggling a problem into a non-issue (or at least a trivial one) by obfuscating the situation with an extra layer of description. I am sorry to sound belittling I don't mean it that way. Let me try and be constructive:
If you say "If you did A, then it was possible to do ~A [anything other than A]" and take the contrapositive "If ~A was precluded, then you did not do A", the only takeaway is that nothing is possible -- a silly state of affairs -- which I think is what that earlier poster was getting at.
I would be wary of believing anything that seems to be "painfully obvious." If something like this were painfully obvious, we wouldn't be arguing about it for hundreds of years.
That's because philosophers love to argue. Until the real scientist comes along and puts the matter to rest with empiric evidence instead of pure thought .
Facetiousness aside, you should really watch the video. Sam makes a compelling argument on why the very concept of free will doesn't really make sense.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on when our sense perception is so limited
There are really two versions of the world: The world as we perceive it to be and the world as it actually is outside of our experience of it. Truth can be found in the world as it actually is. What we perceive is only contingent on the accuracy and completeness of our sense perception. The only way to get at the way the world actually is, it would seem, through rational thought and deductive reasoning. A fairly lofty task though, to be sure.
Empirical evidence is hard to rely on? Is that why science doesn't make any progress?
The best method that we have to find out truth about the world, an objective truth, is scientific method. Rational thought and deductive reasoning go out the window once we're confronted with something that doesn't seem rational, eg. quantum mechanics.
Well the problem is that empirical evidence isn't foolproof. We can only gather evidence from what we can sense. How do we know we're not in the matrix world, for example? We don't really know that do we? No amount of empirical evidence can prove that we aren't dreaming or that we aren't just brains in vats being stimulated with the illusion of experience. This is because any empirical evidence we gather is contingent upon our trust for our ability to sense it.
Quantum mechanics is not irrational necessarily. It just defies some our previous assumptions about the world. It renders many statements false that were once though to be true. That doesn't mean it's logically incoherent. It just means we don't understand it based on our current assumptions.
Were you arguing in a thread once with frogrubdown about the idea of the demon that tricks you into thinking your rational deduction is true when it really isn't? In other words, you are still relying on sense perception of a sort when you "know" that your rational thought process has delivered a truth. So you can't do better than "fuck it let's science", or so it is suggested. (And of course I'm saying science with some facetious looseness.)
Or maybe that wasn't you, but have you run into this demon idea before?
That was not me arguing. But I am familiar with this example as any philosopher should be. It is an old example from Descartes. It's a pretty strong skeptical example and it's not really clear how to get around it. There's no real way for me to know with certainty that I'm not being manipulated by an evil being in this way.
At this point, my answer for skepticism in general is that you can't really get around it. There will always be some kind of skeptical thesis that refutes your belief. So what we have to do in order to move on from this is just acknowledge that all of our conclusions are contingent on there not being a demon manipulating me. That is, anything I conclude with logic must be believed true only under the assumption that logic is a reliable method of deriving truth.
Ah okay. I wish I remembered these things instead of just referring to them vaguely, so thanks for understanding. /armchair philosophy
On May 29 2014 05:21 MichaelDonovan wrote: Proof: The classical free will thesis is false.
If the classical free will thesis is correct, that is, if we have classical free will, then the following proposition is true:
Proposition (The classical definition of free will):If an agent did some action A, then it was possible for the agent to have done some contrary action B.
Definition: Two actions are contrary actions if an agent cannot perform both of them.
Contrapositive of the proposition: If it was not possible for the agent to have done B, then the agent did not do A.
My issue is with the red above.
I don't think the statement actually says what you intend for it to say. Let me try rewording it:
Proposition: If an agent did some action (A), then there exists at least one contrary action that the agent could have done instead. Contrapositive: If no contrary action to action (A) exists, then an agent could not have taken action A.
This of course assumes that every action has an alternative, which may or may not be too strong of a definition for free will. Even if this assumption is disproved, you haven't really accomplished much since free will, in general, can still exist. Regardless, I find the way I phrased the proposition less confusing and error-prone. Frankly, I'm not sure if I can follow your analysis beyond there without reading up on philosophical logic, but usually in these types of situations the phrasing of the initial statements is the most important part of avoiding weird or invalid conclusions.
I think I like your phrasing of the proposition more than mine as well, thank you. But the argument following from it remains the same. Be sure to understand that I am not attempting to disprove free will in general. I'm just trying to show that the classical definition of free will (the ability to do otherwise) is incoherent. There are definitions of free will (like the source definition of free will) which are unaffected by my argument.
EPT
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