Out of order because I think we might be better off just re-focusing on this:
I am not asking you to explain it in terms of something else. I am asking you to describe how consciousness chooses which possibility to actualize. It's like asking a physicist to explain how a photon behaves, which they can do to a pretty remarkable degree.
Ah, now this is good stuff getting us back to the questions of causality that should precede free will discussion ->
How does a physicist explain how a photon behaves?
But I think it would be disrespectful to not address the rest of the post so Here. We. Go.->
Why can't uncaused events be a fundamental aspect of the universe?
Because it means something happens for no reason at all - that's as illogical as saying Something can come from Nothing. At least if one accepts the Principle of Sufficient Reason. And if one doesn't then it would be difficult to see why free will is a problem?
The behavior of the things that do have independent existence. And when such behavior does not come into play regarding an event, then that event is random.
Or instead of random - where something happens for no reason - in a Panexperientialist or Animist perspective free will is utilized by the things. Or, if there's a God who determines the final causes of things, agents have this capacity in a limited degree whereas mere things without consciousness have their final causes decided by the Prime Mover.
It's all not clear to me what it means to say the behavior of things have an independent existence. Isn't this saying things in themselves have causal power...wouldn't that make it possible for conscious agents to direct their causal power as they choose?
Please don't give me long homework assignments. Instead, summarize what the writer is saying.
It's not a long paper though? However to quote some relevant portions:
I will focus on recent accounts of laws of Nature and describe how the dominant ones fail without the efforts of God; I shall also outline one alternative that tries to make sense of the order of Nature and the successes of modern science without laws of Nature and without immediate reliance on God.
I endorse this kind of pre-Cartesisn/pre-Humean empiricism and I have spent a lot of effort trying to show that notions like powers and causings are not only compatible with an empiricist view of science but that we cannot make sense of science without them. This is a long story. The one thing I should note here is that in the right circumstances powers can play themselves out in regularities. But when the circumstances are not felicitous what happens may be highly variable.
I mention it because you said free will has to operate by laws, but it's not clear to me why there have to be laws at all....especially if the universe is ultimately random and somehow this pure contingency resolves into regularity.
Additionally it brings us back to the paper
Causality is Not Your Enemy, noted previously, where causes don't necessitate effects and are instead dispositions. As noted there, if effects aren't necessitated then you can have free will.
I'm not really emphasizing that free will is impossible. I'm asking for a description of how it works. Without such a description, I'm no more inclined to believe in it than I am to believe in anything else that someone names but cannot describe.
Well I've been asking for an explanation for how causality works for a few pages now....perhaps you can see why I doubt the claim free will is impossible in all possible worlds?
Your lack of belief was - if I understood your claims correctly - based on the idea that everything is random or determined, but I've yet to see why I should believe that something happens for no reason at all, nor do I see why I should think causes necessitate effects.
I'm happy to read your summary of how a primer mover helps make sense out of indeterministic yet nonrandom causes.
If there is a Prime Mover, it decides the final causes. But It can grant this power in a more limited form to conscious agents.
There are no random causes here, because every thing that happens derives from the Prime Mover.
As noted in Aquinas: A Beginners Guide:
For if God is the first mover underlying all the motion or change that takes place in the world, that would have to include the motion or change that results from our voluntary actions, in which case God must be the ultimate cause of those actions. But in that case, how can they be free actions? Aquinas considers this question himself (QDM 6; cf. ST I.83.1). His answer is that though God does move the will, “since he moves every kind of thing according to the nature of the moveable thing … he also moves the will according to its condition, as indeterminately disposed to many things, not in a necessary way” (QDM 6). That is to say, the nature of the will is to be open to various possible intellectually apprehended ends, while something unfree, like an impersonal physical object or process, is naturally determined to its ends in an unthinking, necessary way.
Feser, Edward; Edward Feser. Aquinas (Kindle Locations 2425-2431). Oneworld Publications (academic). Kindle Edition.
And likewise I've been waiting for even a hint of a description of how an agent makes a free decision.
Well I noted one above and have linked to a few places where there are others that discuss how free will is a fundamental. But let's look deeper into causation below.
So explain it to me. What you've just done is introduced another term, telos, that seems to hold the secret.
This gets us into the necessity of final causes - Why I said that one would have to start with causation. Here, final causation is one of Aristotle's four causes. As listed in Eric Weiss'
Embodiment: An Explanatory Framework for the Exploration of Reincarnation and Personality Survival a description of the four:
Material cause is the basic stuff out of which an entity is created, efficient cause is the effect of the past on the entity in the present, formal cause is the pattern of possibilities out of which an entity forms its character, and final cause is the purpose which motivates the entity into being.10 Scientists, though they focus most of their attention on efficient causes, actually do take into account at least three of Aristotle’s four causes. Scientists speak of material cause (the basic stuff out of which everything is made) in terms such as energy and negative entropy, or fields of probability.
Scientists speak of efficient cause as the effect of the immediate past on the present. Scientists tend to thrust formal cause into the background by imagining that all formal causation is the expression of one, uniform body of “natural law” which is the same for all entities and which can be best expressed in mathematical equations which describe invariant relations among the results of measurements. Scientists, however, positively reject the notion of final cause. They want to imagine that what happens is shaped by material and efficient causes operating in an invariant scheme of natural law, but they are adamant in their rejection of final causes. They want to imagine that nothing comes into being as the expression of purpose. The four causes look quite different when they operate in an ontology of actual occasions.
So why aren't efficient causes enough?
Because they lead to pure contingency:
For Meillassoux, Hume establishes once and for all that neither experience (which only pertains to the past and present, never to the future) nor a priori reasoning (which can only exclude logical contradictions) is able to guarantee the necessity of causal relations. For "there is nothing contradictory in thinking that the same causes could produce different effects tomorrow" (AF 87). If the prospect of arbitrary change is not impossible, Meillassoux argues, then it cannot be excluded from the world as it is. Where Lewis affirms the reality of all possible worlds, Meillassoux argues for "the absolute necessity of contingency," or of sheer ungrounded possibility, in our own world (AF 65).
I think this is simply illogical, that things happen for no reason at all. Though if one does accept this I don't see why free will is a problem since if contingency is the origin of a reality that resolves to predictability that is still a reality of dispositions. If anything is possible in "sheer ungrounded possibility" it would seem free will is possible as well.
But I think a better explanation would be that there is final causation - a teleology to reality (especially if efficient causation needs some kind of final causation). So the aforementioned Prime Mover - who follows from the actual Cosmological Argument - mentioned above determines the ends - the final causes - of all that happens in the non-conscious world but grants this determination of ends (in limited capacity) to free-willed entities in creation.
Or, from another perspective, we can follow Whitehead's ideas in what Weiss called at the end of that last quoted piece "an ontology of actual occasions". This takes us back to the question of what you need for a cause (thrown brick) to produce an effect (broken window).
As Esser notes you need the following for causation. He then notes, from his reading of Rosenberg's A Place for Consciousness in Nature, how this lines up with consciousness:
What types of properties must things possess for there to be causal significance? In a key move, Rosenberg proposes there must be two distinct (though interdependent) types of properties, called effective properties and receptive properties. Effective properties are the sort we usually picture as having the ability to impact other things (and ultimately on us as we investigate the world). It is argued that physics describes these effective properties. But effective properties alone cannot do the full job of real causation. A property of a thing can only be effective if some other thing is receptive to the property’s presence. You can’t have one without the other. And it is this necessary role for receptive properties that other theories have missed.
Physical concepts are circular- they are difference relations which don’t “sit on” anything else. There must be a wider system of properties on which these differences and relations are instantiated. These properties are called carriers. He then argues that phenomenal properties are perfect candidates to be carriers. Phenomenal properties are differentiated yet qualitative and are extrinsic within a system (their nature is not exhausted by the difference relations in the system). So, it is postulated that phenomenal properties are the carriers of the effective properties described by physics.
So what carries receptive properties? An experiential property. Experiencing carries receptivity. Putting it together, a natural individual is one which experiences phenomenal properties. Each event is an individual experience of phenomenal properties. This is a panexperientialist model, where each event in the world is proto-conscious, by virtue of having some sort of experience.
Finally, how do we build up from this to explain human consciousness? Well, each consciousness is a cognitively structured high-level individual with an experiential receptive field.
An Animist, it seems to me, would have a similar ontology but would simply say each event is conscious rather than proto-conscious. I'm not even sure what proto-consciousness is, and this might be a holdover from Rosenberg's - mistaken IMO - commitment to some kind of naturalism that still holds consciousness as fundamental. (He calls it "liberal naturalism", I believe it's akin to Smolin's "Naturalism II" if anyone has seen mention of these elsewhere.)
The above is why consciousness is the carrier of causation rather than bound by causation. Or to get into Whitehead's terminology of Actual Occasions:
-Prehension is receptivity to effective properties of past events (Events are the fundamental in Process Philosophy).
-Actual Occasions are that which have effective and receptive properties. There are the Events in the above quoted portion (
"Each event is an individual experience of phenomenal properties.").
I've given my proof: Random means not determined. It's a true dichotomy. At no point has anyone offered a description of a third way of making decisions that seems to break the dichotomy.
Giving a definition of something isn't really proof that it exists. You've merely said things ultimately happen for no reason at all. Either they happen in a way that breaks with previous patterns ("random") or they happen in a way that is in accordance with previous patterns but without explanation for why something
else doesn't happen ("determinism"). As noted above this is Meillassoux's sheer ungrounded possibility where it would be difficult to explain why free will isn't among the possibilities.
As such it's hardly convincing?
I very much doubt that any of these philosophers are going to answer my question.
They might surprise you. I was once a determinist myself after all...
They have and will propose various sources of free agency, but do not explain how such agents make free decisions in a way that sounds like it does not reduce to deterministic and random methods.
It's amusing that you can predict how they will fail - precognition? :)
But please do quote a paragraph from one or more of them that you think sounds promising.
Well I would like to get back to discussing causation - Maybe we can get back to what it means for one event/process/thing to be the
cause of another and how that relationship between cause and effect work?
Additionally I've mentioned some relevant portions above - but without making this post go over the limit I will add this bit from the neuroscientist-philosopher Raymond Tallis (
From How Can I Possibly Be Free):
That intentionality cannot be understood in terms of the laws of physics may seem a rather startling claim. It will help to explore a very basic example: my perceiving a material object — more specifically, my seeing a material object. If you believe the kind of account that underpins determinism, the light from the object enters my eyes and stirs up neural activity, and this activity is the basis of my seeing the object — and, moreover, my seeing the object is nothing more than this neural activity. But this story is incomplete. For while the passage of light into the brain is an instance of standard physical causation, the gaze that looks out most certainly is not. It is different from a physical causal chain in two respects. First, whereas the directionality of the phenomenon of light passing into the brain is “downstream” from cause to effect (from the object that deflected the light to the neural activity in the brain), the directionality of the gaze is “upstream,” from the effect to its cause (the neural activity to the object of the perception). And second, whereas the “forward arrow” of the causal chain that includes the triggering of neural activity by the light extends without limit forward into the causal nexus, the “reverse arrow” of the gaze is finite: it refers to and so comes to a rest on the object, and does not, for example, refer or look beyond the object to the earlier history of the light.
This “bounce back,” this causal reversal, has crucial consequences.The object that is picked out by the gaze has some notable features, the most important of which is that in human beings and not in any other sort of beings, it explicitly exceeds the experience of it. The perception is not just of the appearance of the object but about the object as something that is more than its present appearances. It is experienced as a source of future possible experiences. These possible experiences have a generic character, quite different from the definite particularity of the items in the material world. Objects of perception open up, and hold open, what we might call a Space of Possibility that exists explicitly for embodied subjects such as you and I.
I think this is a bit conservative, in the sense that I don't think this needs to be restricted to human beings or even biological entities.
Because free will has only two tools: It can decide determinstically (using a flowchart) or it can pick arbitrarily (by flipping a coin).
Well I've yet to think those are the only "tools" or that they even exist. Additionally see below.
A fixed flowchart is not a decision making method?
The actual decisions aren't adequately explained - If you are deliberating something, and spend days trying to make a decision, what explains the decision you ultimately make?
At best you could claim logic is deterministic, but not every decision is resolved by logic - it only pairs down the possibilities. So how is the decision made? To say it's random is to say there is no reason at all. So to the degree its random its not logical at all, and if its deterministic then there's another problem:
Within the context of the rest of the world the decisions are based on the influence of what you called the "system" in previous posts and so aren't logical (in fact logic would have no ground at all:
1. Materialism holds that thinking consists of nothing more than the transition from one material process in the brain to another in accordance with causal laws (whether these transitions are conceived of in terms of the processing of symbols according to the rules of an algorithm à la computationalism, or on some other model).
2. Material processes have their causal efficacy, including their ability to generate other material processes, only by virtue of their physical properties (i.e. those described by physical science), and not by virtue of any meaning or semantic content that might be associated with them. (For example, punching the symbols “1,” “+,” “1,” and “=” into a calculator will generate the further symbol “2” whether or not we associate the standard arithmetical meanings with these symbols or instead assign to them some eccentric meanings, because the electronic properties of the calculator alone are what determine what symbols get displayed. Similarly, neural processes that are in fact associated with the thought that all men are mortal and the thought that Socrates is a man would still generate the neural process that is in fact associated with the thought that Socrates is mortaleven if these neural processes had all been associated with some other meanings instead, because the neurophysiological properties of the processes alone are what determine which further processes get generated.)
3. But one thought can serve as a rational justification of another thought only by virtue of the meaning or semantic content of the thoughts. (For example, it is only because we associate the symbols “1,” “+,” “1,” “=,” and “2” with the standard meanings that “1 + 1 = 2” expresses an arithmetical truth. Similarly, it is only because “All men are mortal,” “Socrates is a man,” and “Socrates is mortal” have the meanings they do that the first two sentences logically entail the third, and only when the neural processes in question are associated with the corresponding thoughts that the first two provide a rational justification for believing the third.)
4. So if materialism is true, then there is nothing about our thought processes that can make one thought a rational justification of another; for their physical and causal relations alone, and not their semantic and logical relations, determine which thought follows which.
5. So if materialism is true, none of our thoughts ever is rationally justified.
6. But this includes the thoughts of materialists themselves.
7. So if materialism is true, then it cannot be rationally justified; the theory undermines itself.
Just substitute any deterministic metaphysics where mental states are based on the surrounding environment where he says "materialism".
The problem is not whether free will is a fundamental aspect of some other fundamental thing. The problem is the description of how a free decision is made.
If randomness can be fundamental, why can't free will be granted the same ontological status? The latter at least gives a reason for something happening by offering Consciousness as fundamental, the former is just a description of causes under-determining the result based on past observation.