Scientific Justification for Free Will?

[Divine Insight]

Is there any scientific justification for the notion of Free Will?

Question #1. If you believe their is, can you please state your scientific evidence for the existence of Free Will.

Question #2. If you believe there is no scientific justification for the notion of Free Will, then please explain how we can have any scientific justification for holding anyone responsible for their actions. In fact, wouldn't the very notion of personal responsibility be scientifically unsupportable?

[Goat]

If there is "Free Will", then there would need to be a "Free Agent" involved that could not merely be the secular combination of secular properties of a logical material universe.

Why? Can you clarify this???

I thought it was pretty straight forward.

What could serve as a "Free Agent" to make a "Free Will Choice" if all that exist is material that necessarily must follow the laws of physics?

And secular properties of any secular combination of material that is merely following preset laws of cause and effect and logic could not become a "Free Agent" that is independent of it's underlying secular material construction.

Really?? How do you know??? Can you show me a way to test for the truth of this statement, or is that one of these, 'unsupported claim' thingies.

What do you mean about testing for the truth of this statement? This is a tautology.

If you premise (or assume) that there is nothing more to this machine (i.e. a biological brain) than the material it is made of that is necessarily following the preset laws physics and of cause and effect and logic, then how could this machine do anything other than follow those laws and forces?

By the very assumption that nothing else is going on you have no choice but to conclude that whatever this brain does it must necessarily be a result of the material it is made of and the preset laws of physics that govern how that material behaves.

This very tautological situation is an example of no free will. Given this situation you really have no choice but to conclude that in this situation there can be no free will.

The only way you could bestow free will upon this situation is to remove the limitation of this machine being solely the result of the material it is made of and the laws of physics that govern that material.

But that would require the assumption or premise that some other "Free Will Agent" is acting on it to make it do something OTHER than what the material and laws of physics would cause it to do.

Thus, it's not even a question of whether or not science can answer the question, but rather that in order for the answer to be "Yes we have free will" would require that a "Free Agent" is involved that is not dependent upon a purely secular material physics.

I don't think you have supported the concept of 'Free Agent' well enough to make this conclusion... or even defined 'free agent' well enough. It seem hokey to me.

A "Free Agent" would be anything that could intervene to change the behavior that would otherwise occur if the only thing in play was the material the brain is made of along with the preset laws of physics that govern how the material must behave.

Even the introduction of pure randomness would not constitute a "Free Agent" that could be said to have "Free Will Choice". Because although randomness might be able to have an affect on precisely how the laws of physics unfold, it could hardly be called a "Free Will Choice". The randomness itself would be completely random by definition of what is being proposed.

So even adding in an element of randomness would not suffice to constitute an actual "Free Will Choice" being made.

What is it that would be making this Free Will choice? That's the question.

If you believe in Free Will, ironically you really have no choice but to also believe in a mysterious "Free Agent" that must be totally independent of material, laws of physics, and randomness. It must exist "outside" or "beyond" any of those mandatory influences.

So whether we actually have Free Will or not, is really not even the question.

The question is that in a purely secular universe there could not be any Free Will under any circumstances. Everything would necessarily need to be nothing more than a result of the pure secular laws of the physical world.

Well, some atheist scientists would agree with that, other would disagree. It all depends on just how much determinism is in the world.. and I don't see any way of testing that with our current technology. You see, there is some in-determination going on in the quantum level in some interpretations of QM. There is SOME (not much) indication that MIGHT have an effect on the neurological level.

But even in-determinism alone would not constitute Free Will.

Suppose there does exist quantum randomness and this randomness can allow a brain to be random and make random choices.

I've thought about this quite deeply. This may actually be a mechanism that is necessarily to allow a "Free Agent" to actually execute a purposeful Free Will in a physical brain. But the introduction of randomness alone would not constitute "Free Will". On the contrary all it would amount to would be random indeterminate choices. You could hardly call that "Free Will".

It might be "Freed" from the otherwise mandatory laws of physics. But it wouldn't be "Free" from total randomness. Therefore it would meaningless to consider it to have been a "Meaningful Choice".

So the question of whether science can answer the question is basically moot.

What makes it more moot is that philosophy can't answer the question either. That sort of makes the entire concept moot. I see the concept of "FREE WILL" as something that religion trots out to try to unsuccessfully answer the 'problem of evil'.

Philosophy can answer the question of Free Will by simply proposing the idea of a spiritual or mystical soul that goes beyond the material world.

In fact, this is the idea behind the Eastern Mystical philosophies.

I do however agree with you that the concept of "Free Will" is totally unsuccessful at answering any problem of "evil".

That's ridiculous.

In fact, the problem of "evil" is far better answered if we assume there is no such thing as Free Will and brains just do whatever they do as a result of the pure physical laws as proposed by secularism.

So the fact that humans seem to do "evil" things is actually a reason to presume that they most likely don't have any Free Will at all.

Seems to be totally unsupported to me. You are putting too much WOO into the world, without support.

The problem of evil is only a problem when discussing a deity that you assume is benevolent.

[Divine Insight]

The problem of evil is only a problem when discussing a deity that you assume is benevolent.

I agree. In a purely secular world there is no such thing as a "problem of evil".

In fact, in a purely secular world the problem is almost turned directly on its head.

In a purely secular world that is the result of nothing but unconscious random laws of physics I would suggest that we actually have a "Problem of Benevolence".

In other words, in a totally random accidental world why are things as good as they actually are?

Look at the crime rates for example. They are actually extremely low by comparison with the overall population. Less than about 1% of people commit violent crimes. Less than 10% commit even petty crimes.

This leaves 90% of the world's population being far more benevolent than evil.

How do we explain this in terms of a purely secular world?

So secularists have a "Problem of Benevolence".

It's only religious people who have a "Problem of Evil" because if there exists a God then any evil at all (even in small amounts) is a problem.

Ironically though the religious people have been convinced by their religions that the vast majority of people are evil and only few our benevolent. That actually doesn't match up with the real world. If anything, we need to explain why the vast majority of people are benevolent.

[olavisjo]

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Seems to be totally unsupported to me. You are putting too much WOO into the world, without support.

The problem of evil is only a problem when discussing a deity that you assume is benevolent.

Congratulations Divine Insight you have thoroughly thrashed Goat, this is about as close to victory as you will get in a debate, when all he can say to refute your argument is that you have too much unsupported WOO. He even lacks the ability to frame his objection to your argument in any coherent fashion.

So, I will help him out a little.

It is possible that the choices we seem to make are the results of quantum indeterminacy, where our brain cells will fire and begin random thoughts and these thoughts travel through the brain and they get filtered by some sort of natural selection that weeds out "bad" ideas and keeps the "good". At the end, the idea that survives becomes our "free will" choice.

[Divine Insight]

So, I will help him out a little.

It is possible that the choices we seem to make are the results of quantum indeterminacy, where our brain cells will fire and begin random thoughts and these thoughts travel through the brain and they get filtered by some sort of natural selection that weeds out "bad" ideas and keeps the "good". At the end, the idea that survives becomes our "free will" choice.

That's an interesting proposal olavisjo. That very well may be the truth of what is actually going on in a secular world. I can't deny that this could be the reality of our existence. This would also explain why most people are benevolent and only few are "bad". The filtering process you speak of would clearly not be 100% efficient.

However, even if this is the process that occurs in a secular reality, I would still argue that this process does not constitute "Free Will". Instead it just constitutes an algorithm that plays out as programmed by evolution. The times where it fails to produce "good" choices does not actually represent a Free Will choice by an actual Free Agent, but rather it simply represents a failing of this algorithm to be 100% efficient.

There would still be no "Free Agent" to blame.

All that could be 'blamed' would be the failure of this generalized algorithmic process.

It seems to me that we can't bring a sense of personalized "blame" into the picture until we can justify a personalized "Free Agent".

I would argue that your proposal of a generalized algorithm does not provide a personalized "Free Agent" that can be held responsible or blamed for the failings of this generalized algorithm.

Would you agree?

[otseng]

It is?? Define 'Free Will ' in a manner that is consistent..that everyone will agree on. Make sure you reconciliate incompatibism and compatiblism. Once you do that, I will acknowledge you ahve a point. Until you can, then I don't see how you can support that claim.

Until that can be done, I don't see how the concept of 'Free Will' has meaning.

"Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

"'Free Will' is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

"voluntary choice or decision"
"freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free%20will

Do you accept these definitions?

No, I don't. Because, it doesn't address the issues of compatibilism verses incompatiablism, or the dozen or so different concept of determination.

Those definitions ignore a lot of the variations, many of which are mutually exclusive.

These are standard, secular definitions of free will. I see no compelling reason why you should reject them. If you do not accept these, then what definitions do you propose?

[otseng]

And I agree with your point.

There is no scientific evidence for the existence of free will. Yet, free will is foundational to ethics and morality.

What this shows is the limits of science. The only thing that secularists can do is to ignore and dismiss the issue.

This is indeed how I feel.

I personally believe that life is mystical, or spiritual, and therefore I have reasons for believing in free will. However, my personally beliefs are irrelevant. This also does not send me running to worship Zeus, or Jesus, or any specific religious dogma.

Yes, I also believe that the existence of the free will is evidence of the supernatural/spiritual. I also agree that free will by itself would not necessarily lead to any specific god or religion.

I think that a pure secular society could create a culture based upon "subjective ethics". In other words, they could make laws and enforce those laws using majority rule as the basis for their subjective ethics.

However, they would have absolutely no justification in holding anyone personally responsible for breaking these rules. In other words, when they arrest and convict "criminals" (i.e. people who break the law) they would have no right in viewing those people from the perspective that they had a choice.

I also agree.

If they incarcerate a criminal the idea would not be to punish the criminal, but rather to protect the rest of society from this criminal. It would be ludicrous to "punish" a person who can't even be said to have "Free Will". We'd have to view all criminals as nothing other than defective biological computers.

And the same would go for praising any "good" acts. If it's automatic (or random), the concept of good (and bad) acts would be meaningless.

On the other hand, if we're going to assume Free Will Choice, then we must also give up secularism and concede a mystical magical "soul". Because there can be no secular justification for Free Will Choice.

Agreed.

[Peter]

Is there any scientific justification for the notion of Free Will?

Question #1. If you believe their is, can you please state your scientific evidence for the existence of Free Will.

Question #2. If you believe there is no scientific justification for the notion of Free Will, then please explain how we can have any scientific justification for holding anyone responsible for their actions. In fact, wouldn't the very notion of personal responsibility be scientifically unsupportable?

The type of free will that would support the notion of personal responsibility is completely unsupported by science.

If my brain was organized like a serial killers I would be a serial killer. There is no "soul" floating around choosing what we choose.

We make choices based on our brains programming and some brains consistently make the wrong choices. Like a misbehaving computer these brains can be reprogrammed. Do we attribute personal responsibility to a misbehaving computer?

Sam says it better than I can. Check this out.

So then you agree than in a totally secular society we can't really speak about "blaming" anyone for anything. We can hold their body responsible for being a 'defective computer' but that's all we can do.

We can't say that a serial killer is an intentionally "bad person". They are simply a malfunctioning computer.

Right?

That's my conclusion. I also see nothing wrong with this. I'm just saying that in a purely secular would that's the conclusion that we'd necessarily need to make. Blaming anyone for anything like as if they chose to do a bad thing intentionally like as if they had a Free Will choice would simply be an unsupportable position.

Like you say, it would be like blaming your computer for malfunctioning.

That's correct, if we can't fix a malfunctioning computer we dispose of it but we don't personally blame it for malfunctioning as if it had the "free will" to do otherwise. We're basically very complex biological computers. Some can be repaired and some cannot.

[Peter]

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Sam says it better than I can. Check this out.

Sam constantly invokes the very thing he is denying.

I don’t believe I’m the first person to observe that certain truths are best left unspoken, especially in the presence of young children. And I would no more think of telling my daughter at this age that free will is an illusion than I would teach her to drive a car or load a pistol.

Sam has chosen to leave the issue of free will unspoken as far as his daughter is concerned.

You keep confusing the ability to make a choice with "free will". We make choices all the time but "free will" implies that we can somehow choose what we choose. Sometimes I describe it as the ability to make a choice that we didn't make. It seems to me that "free will" would require a separate "soul or free agent" to somehow watch over choices and countermand the bad ones. It's no wonder that theists insist they have free will.

[Peter]

Look at the crime rates for example. They are actually extremely low by comparison with the overall population. Less than about 1% of people commit violent crimes. Less than 10% commit even petty crimes.

This leaves 90% of the world's population being far more benevolent than evil.

How do we explain this in terms of a purely secular world?

It's called empathy. Most humans are programmed for it because overall it results in better species survival. A shorter answer would be Evolution.

[Divine Insight]

And the same would go for praising any "good" acts. If it's automatic (or random), the concept of good (and bad) acts would be meaningless.

I agree with this as well.

And I thank you for understanding the topic. I'm not saying there is no free will. I'm just saying that in a secular world the concept makes no sense.

I actually agree with Goat when he says that our intuitive feeling that we have free will is extremely strong. I believe we do have free will, and therefore there is reason to believe in a concept of personal responsibility.

All I'm saying is that if we truly want to believe in this concept it basically requires that we also believe in some sort of extra-secular "soul".

Exactly what religion or spiritual philosophy we might choose to associate with this "soul" is up for grabs. But it seems to me that something would be needed beyond secularism if we want to believe that we have Free Will.

Or, if we prefer secularism, then we need to forfeit our ideas of free will, and personal responsibility, or even personal praise as you point out.

What is it that we would be praising or blaming?