It’s bad enough everyone is using this “New Atheists” label: various critics keep inventing new ones. Some letter writer to the Independent has decided to call us “Naive Atheists” because we are unaware of the implications of atheism.
However, let’s forget about the unfortunate history of atheism for a moment and concentrate instead on its philosophical implications.
Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.
What a silly, silly man. If anyone is naive here, it’s someone who thinks atheists must all be amoral robots, and that unpleasant consequences mean you should reject the truth value of a claim. But now he’s going to tell us he’s got evidence for his argument, straight from the mouth of an atheist.
But don’t take my word for it, take the word of some of the most distinguished atheists of the last hundred years.
Take Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix. In one of his last books, ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’, he flatly denied the existence of free will with these words: “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you — your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.
Have you got that now? What Crick is saying is that nothing you do is freely chosen.
Your ‘decision’ to read this column is the result of chemical reactions in your brain.
Your love for your spouse is only a chemical reaction.
Your love for your children is only a chemical reaction.
Your beliefs, whether you are an atheist or a religious believer for example, are the result of a chemical reaction. None of these things are freely chosen.
When you ditch belief in God you are left with the idea that matter and energy are all that exist. Everything you do is the result of your genes reacting with the environment.
First of all, Crick is not quite saying what he thinks he’s saying. That our minds are the product of electrochemical activity in our brain in our brain is not the same thing as saying there is no free will. What it says is that this magnificent product of evolutionary refinement residing in our cranium is a biological machine of immense sophistication capable of making complex choices and generating complex responses. The brain, in other words, is a choice-making machine. It is also not deterministic. It takes in a multitude of inputs, including lots of noise, filters them on the basis of deep personal history, and generates interesting internal states and elaborate responses. There’s no “only” about it.
My love for my spouse is the outcome of long association. I got to respect her in third grade as the smart kid in class, and as she got older, she was the va-va-va-voom girl in high school (yes, there was all kinds of interesting internal chemistry going on), and when we started dating, I enjoyed her personality and her outlook — my rational brain, my emotional responses, and my hormones were all engaged. At every step of the way, I can say that only natural processes were involved, and that’s just beautiful to me. No ghosts required, no extraterrestrial magic, no cherubs armed with enchanted arrows, just two smart animals nuzzling each other in those intensely human ways.
When some shallow git on the internet claims that is “only a chemical reaction,” I have to say that he seems to be deeply ignorant about how powerful chemistry and biology can be … and that he seems to be overlooking the fact that if we’re right, “only” chemistry produced Shakespeare, Bach, and Baryshnikov. Does it diminish Mozart that he was made of meat, that he used a chamberpot and got sick and fueled himself with food and drink?
Secondly, if we materialists are right (and of course, I think we are), then it doesn’t matter if the writer believes he’s an ephemeral puppet whose strings are being tugged by invisible vapor — he’s made of meat, too, and all of his most cherished feelings are the result of tuggings by a chemistry he chooses to ignore. Similarly, if he were right (and no, he isn’t!) and I had some magical non-corporeal spirit diddling my synapses, my disbelief wouldn’t change that fact, either.
Remember when you were five years old, and your best friend was hysterically concerned for you because you didn’t believe in Santa Claus? “You won’t get any presents,” he cried, “and Christmas won’t happen!” But of course Christmas did happen, and you got presents, and that you had replaced an imaginary obese elf with real, live, physical parents who loved you was an improvement on the damned stupid fairy tale.
That’s what runs through my mind on traces of ions guided by miniscule pipes of lipid, triggering slight sprays of neurotransmitters in orderly patterns, when some theistic lightweight protests that I won’t feel love if I believe in the beauty and elegance of chemistry. I love my chemistry.
Beatifully said!
People who believe that you need religion in order to have a morality scare me. Apparently the only thing that is holding them back from committing all sorts of crimes is their belief that a diety will notice it and punish them.
Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.
John Calvin would disagree with this guy about free will in Christianity.
Why do you think the brain is not deterministic?
The temperature argument against Penrose’s quantum microtubles works for every other biochemical process – unless it can be shown to be sufficiently well insulated. Since there’s no evidence that any structure in the brain has the insulation necessary to preserve quantum entanglement, there’s no known source of non-determinism. It’s true that unsolved problems like protein folding, the bewildering complexity of the brain’s internal structure, and the sheer number neurons (presently …) prevent mere humans from modeling the brain deterministically, but that is due to limitations in understanding and processing power, not due to any known source of non-determinism in the brain.
If one’s actions are guided by fear of punishment in an unseeable afterlife, that is not morality it is fear.
If one chooses to do or not do certain things because one seeks great rewards in an eternal life, that is not morality it is greed.
If the reasons for ones actions are the potential harm or good that those actions will bring to other people, THAT is morality.
What Crick is saying is that nothing you do is freely chosen.
You don’t need to be an atheist to get that. Look at Calvin and Predestination. God determines your life’s outcome before you’re born. You don’t have free will, it’s all decided by God – you don’t even have a say in whether you end up in hell or not.
For crying out loud, neurontransmitters are just ways neurons use to communicate – they’re not information-processing devices.
Emotions aren’t ‘chemical reactions’. They’re not chemicals. They’re the end result of certain kinds of information processing.
This twit fails to grasp atheism, neurochemistry, AND information processing.
Whenever I read something like that, I always wonder what these people think our oversized brains are for. If some disembodied soul or other mindstuff is doing the work, making uncaused choices and so on, why do we waste so much energy supporting and protecting the organ in our heads?
PZ, whenever I encounter this sort of argument, I just point out that the person making the argument is confusing ‘mores’ with ‘morality.’ Science in general (and evolution in particular) does confound traditional beliefs, as I’m sure you’d be the first to affirm; it doesn’t confound the capacity for developing ethical systems of conduct, with or without God. In fact, as with the other mental faculties, ethical systems seem to be a product of evolution.
Besides, an atheist could in principle could be aware of, and agree with the ‘neutered morality’ take if it suits him or her’s personal lifestyle—so there’s no justification for describing their atheism as ‘naive’, either.
Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality. One has to acquire (read: be infected with) belief in god first. That should be telling everyone something. To listen to this is to believe unsupported the hypothesis that the members of the National Academy of Sciences are all master criminals. Or maybe pirates. Arrrrr!
I’d rather be the product of billions of years of evolution and 10^40 chemical reactions (made that fig. up) than be created in a day 6000 years ago.
Of course, the main reason for choosing atheism is because it’s true. Whether it makes you feel any better about the universe is a little beside the point.
Hooray for the Cognitive Revolution! To paraphrase a certain quote, now we atheists can be intellectually fulfilled non-determinists!
…sort of.
John Lynch would skewer me on the spot, but I still think we’re basically automatons when it comes down to it. Unless you want to get all quantum, but even then, whence free will? Call it random will if you’d like, but I’ll take Dennett’s stance: the illusion of free will is the interesting part. Causality can go take a hike.
At the same level of sophistication, an omniscient god already knows what you will do or choose. There’s no free will there, only a series of continuous surprises as you learn of your own actions in real time.
As for the morality issue, it seems fascinating to me that so many civilizations sprang up outside the influence of the Abrahamic god that are no less moral than our own. The golden rule and the basics of the cherished 10C existed in other civilizations prior to their incorporation in Jewish literature. Considering how atheistic Europe is at this point, it’s a wonder our SuperChristians in the US aren’t protesting European led war in Iraq. After all, those atheists can’t resist immoral acts right?
BTW, free will is one of the few things which I think it’s OK to believe in without any evidence whatsoever (except subjective perception).
Yes it’s probably an illusion- but it’s a pretty good one and it helps not to be too fatalistic about life.
Of course, it’s a little paradoxical- if you don’t have free will, then you don’t have any choice in the matter of whether to believe in it or not.
I disagree with the aesthetic premise.
Personally I think “The New Atheists” sounds cool, and kind of gives the image that we want, that the “New” part is that people are fed up with keeping quiet about it, or allowing the religious to dominate discussion etc. It doesn’t sound like we’ve found new ‘reasons’ to be atheists, just that there’s something new about our approach.
And there is.
So, I wouldn’t dispute “The New Atheists” as a nickname (even if it does sound like a college town band).
I personally do not believe in free will, in the sense that you can take some action that is not completely dependent on the history of the universe up to the point of action. But I also believe that a world without free will is indistinguishable from a world with free will—the factors that influence any given action are so numerous, interdependent, and complex that we will perceive them to be the product of free will. So whether we believe free will exists or not, it shouldn’t have any influence on the way we interact with people and live our lives.
Daniel Dennett wrote a remarkable book about free will:
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the question of free will.
If morality is as objective and absolute as the god-botherers would like to believe, then why has it changed so much over the course of human history? Slavery and the treatment of women are two clear examples of this.
I like the reference to “objective morality.” Apparently the Christian version of morality is “objective” while the atheist version is not. So if you deconvert from Christianity to lack of belief then you are abandoning the “objective” version of morality.
Can someone explain this?
So how do you feel about Cornell biologist Provine?
http://eeb.bio.utk.edu/darwin/Archives/1998ProvineAbstract.htm
He argues:
BobL and RM
By the way if you think Calvin (or Calvinism) denies the free will, then you don’t know jack about Calvin (or Calvinism). Arguing on the basis of simpleminded caricatures, the way most commenters on Pharyngula argue, is no way to go through life. There is a great deal of literature about free will in light of predestination. I’d suggest reading Jonathan Edwards on the subject.
That was fucking great. I’m still rolling. “Diddling my synapses”…priceless.
And what’s this “unfortunate history of atheism” nonsense? The only thing unfortunate about the history of atheism is that god belief, along with its stone-age mentality, has held on this long.
There’s a sense in which you can’t have objective morality without God. Having God doesn’t help. In that strong sense, there just is not objective morality.
There’a a sense in which you can’t have free will without God, and the same story applies.
Moral platonism and libertarian free will are just so unlikely, in any event … and belief in God doesn’t help. Still, this shows up what we’re up against: the believers will tend support a package of ideas that includes all these ideas, plus others such as metaphysical dualism. It seems to have some psychological attraction for many people, but there’s no reason to believe any of it.
What Crick is saying is that nothing you do is freely chosen.
Religion can’t work (or rather, it becomes very uninteresting!) without a notion of “free will.” Never mind that free will remains as elusive as the diety, they have to believe in it, otherwise all the sin and redemption and whatnot goes overboard and we’re just meat robots getting jerked around by the Divine Plan(tm).
I’ve found that it’s amazingly fun to engage the faithful on this topic because they think it’s going to be easy and don’t take the usual fall-back woo touchy-feely position until you start chewing them up. They almost invariably fall back on quantum intdeterminacy, which is a great big ole trap since you can corner them into the position that the hand of god (THOG) is hidden in quantum indeterminacy – which lets you slam their fingers in the door of divine 50/50 randomness.
Aaaah… I was at a wedding this weekend and got to have the free will debate with a californian new ager. What fun!
I hate that silly ‘everything is just chemicals’ stuff. Sure, it’s technically true in a way, but then, New York is ‘just’ a collection of buildings, doesn’t really do the subject justice.
Russel Blackford writes:
There’a a sense in which you can’t have free will without God, and the same story applies.
How can you have free will with god? If god “gives” you free will, then the chain of causality begins with god – an entity outside of you, and after that physical determinism and quantum randomness take over. Unfortunately, if the universe is deterministic there’s no room for free will. And if quantum randomess is what you anchor free will on, I find it hard to see how a photon going one direction or another 50% of the time gives you the ability to break out of a deterministic universe. After all, the photon isn’t you and if it’s tossing dice for you, you’re not really participating in a ‘decision’ are you?
Here’s a fun trap: show me you have free will.
Peter writes:
I hate that silly ‘everything is just chemicals’ stuff.
Yeah. It’s all atoms, even the chemicals. Saying “everything is just chemicals” isn’t simplified far enough. :)
Someone else pointed out a good analogy: imagine two children offering to help a playmate. One did it on his own, the other did it because his mom told him to. Which has the more honorable sense of right and wrong?
If it were to be accepted that free will does not exist, then what happens to personal responsibility, law etc.? This would be a shattering worldview with what consequences?
Well, no. But I can see how he made that mistake: because once you get into the habit of questioning everything, you start asking “what is this free will stuff anyway?” and “hey, all I’ve ever seen is various people’s subjective moralities with flimsy veneers of objectivity pasted over them; why should I believe there’s a Real Objective Morality somewhere? And if there is one, how would I find it and how would I recognize it if I had found it?” and not taking any answers that aren’t supported by something solid.
Those aren’t philosophical implications of atheism, though. They’re unsolved philosophical problems that have been around for thousands of years; some atheists just reject some of the standard theological attempts to sweep them under a God-shaped rug. (Others don’t, because atheism has no scripture and isn’t monolithic.)
Perhaps a better way of putting it is: a more rigorous approach to philosophy leads to questioning free will and objective morality *and* also leads to atheism. But it isn’t the only form of atheism.
Larry:
Christian morality is founded on the Ten Commandments. They were inscribed on stone tablets – objects. Therefor, Christian morality is objective.
By contrast, atheist morality is discussed on the internet – a hotbed of porn, materialism, and immorality. Therefor, atheist morality is pornographic.
“Objective morality?” Oh please, has this poor man ever read his bible objectively? The god of the bible is anything BUT moral, let alone objective! This Christian follows a god who is a serial murderer, an instigator of gang rape, one who lies and promotes deception to accomlish his purposes. The list of immoral acts goes on ad infinitum and finally ends with eternal damnation and the lake of fire for those who not in agreement….Hitler was more just.
By the way if you think Calvin (or Calvinism) denies the free will,
Hedde,
Oh sure I’ve read that. I understand were it is coming from; you just can’t let the “sinners” get off with a “I’m just the way God made me” argument. That would deny the Chosen Elect™ their fun when they were tormenting the sinners.
Hitler was more just.
Brilliant!! And you’re right. Simple argument: Hitler’s actions were limited to the here and now. “God”‘s cruelty and immorality is alleged to be eternal. Hitler may have killed innocent children but “God” sends some of them to eternal torment because of the “sins” of their parents. What a dick.
Is he though? We know for a fact that he’s wrong all over the place – eg even just about what Francis Crick meant! However, is that wrongness definitively because he’s stupid (and ignorant), or could there be a contributory component of dishonesty to his claims?
Well, he’s right on one matter. There is no such thing as objective morality. Morality is social construct, and as such is entirely subjective in nature. It only appears objective to some because so many of us share a common subjective morality. Of course, I don’t understand why he says that like it’s a bad thing. As far as I’m concerned, the “objective” morality as described in the Bible isn’t all that “moral” in many cases.
Those people who say they’re not made of meat?
They’re Made of Meat.
Let’s try that tag again, shall we?
They’re Made of Meat
Yes, we all know “objective morality” is shorthand for “what I claim to be the only moral position is, objectively, the only moral position”. As for “free will”, that means whatever the hell it’s claimed to mean by whoever is making the argument. Saying “atheism” implies a lack of free will is an argument I’ve seen in the past year, but “free will” is only a property that exists in a vacuum of incomplete understanding.
The Calvinist argument (sorry Hedde, I’m getting this from http://www.fathnet.org.uk) is that, because of the sovereignty of God’s will, there is nothing existence that happens other than from God willing it to happen. Now I know a lot of theologists have made a lot of hay by conjuring up a lot of jibba jabba to obscure this logical relationship, but it seems at least as consistent as any other theological argument (and more so than most). Everything this critic blames on “chemistry” has, in the past, been blamed on “God’s will”.
Neither argument is terribly interesting to me, but it should be noticed that claiming “free will” is a property unique to, and somehow characteristic of, theistic thinking is a ludicrous position to have, when literally centuries of theists cannot resolve for their own selves exactly what “free will” is supposed to be.
If you take “free will” to be an emotional state, then it’s absolutely true that it depends in no way on any theistic claim. In which case the entire argument seems a bit silly.
PZ, may I pay you the compliment of calling you Dawkinsesque in your ability to convey the passion, wonder and beauty that an understanding of science adds to a human life.
Do people who believe in free-will believe it to be a uniquely Homosapien thing, or do they think animals have it too?
Those animals with monogamous pair bonding with their mate and offspring is strictly chemical, but our human bonding is special.
Special indeed! It’s called “special pleading”.
Completely off-topic, but I’m loving your use of Comic Sans to denote inane drivel.
Sorry, this all strikes me as funny this morning. I’d just finished writing (and blogging about) an article in last month’s Natural History Magazine about altruism among amoebas. Seems to me that a lot of those “moral” values Christians love to accuse atheists of lacking are not only independent of the existence or belief in a god, but are relatively simplistic and exist in organisms that they would never “lower themselves” to comparison to.
Altruistic amoebas don’t die for the reproductive success of their local groups or ‘families’ because some long ago amoeba died on a stalk after asking them to follow Him. Rather altruistic behavior is a feature of fitness
What is it about the religious that makes them want to think they have something special or different that makes them superior in some ways to other animals?
Arguing about the moral and free will consequences of atheism is a logical fallacy end-to-end. It is simply irrelevant. It does not affect the truth or falsity of atheism whether it makes people run up their credit cards and kill cute bunnies or fund charitable foundations and feed the homeless. It is like arguing that gravity is false because it would mean people die when they fall off cliffs. And this affects the truth of gravity how?
It is no coincidence that for many years the best online list of logical fallacies was found on various atheism connected web sites. For some reason, theists consistently engage in logical fallacy. ;)
Poor heddle.
Wrong! Old Testament or Jewish morality is based on the Ten Commandments. Christian morality should according to Jesus be based on the saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (King James Bible Matt. 22:39) a precept that would appear to give a good basis for morality without having to bring any sort of god into the equation.
In one of his last books, ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’, he flatly denied the existence of free will with these words: “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you — your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.
The author only seems to have bothered to read the introduction to Crick’s book and not the complete work. Had he at least browsed to the post script, he would have noticed a more complete and detailed explanation of Crick’s view on Free Will. One that is vastly superior to the Christian version where an omniscient deity already knows what the future holds and those deluded in believing in this deity can’t honestly say that they believe in “Free Will” -not when his son is due back any day now.
Ultimately, Crick writes in “The Astonishing Hypothesis” that Free Will is the culmination of both conscious plans and unconscious processes and computations and what causes us to act on a given plan over another is subject to common limitations -but the conditions that cause a given decision may not always be clear. The outcome, he says, is “the appearance of Free Will.”
I have to agree with some of the other commenters — what free will? It’s all really deterministic unless you believe there’s some magical ghost in the machine. Of course, whether we have free will or not, it sure feels like it.
I would even go so far as to argue that without a belief in free will, we should be even more compassionate toward and understanding of our fellow men. After all, they are a product of their genes, their experiences, and their circumstances, just like you.
This is typical of apologist tripe. No one and I mean no one posts more addle minded stuff than heddle and yet he insults what I see as the most consistently intelligent commentary of any blog I visit.
As mentioned above freewill essentially has to be some form of illusion simply due to the fact we are the sum of parts guided by forces we don’t control. This was a great post PZ.
On a similar note, I’d love to see some kind tally of Fundamentalist preachers to determine in what proportion they actually quote the sayings of Jesus (or, at least, those attributed to him) compared to Leviticus and similar.
I’d be willing to bet that Jesus would barely get a look in ;)
Coming soon from the same author:
“Francis Crick Converted On His Deathbed, Too”
To my mind it degrades Mozart and Beethoven and any person really to imply that any “thing” had a hand in helping them create their masterworks. They are just smart animals… and in some cases spectacularly smart and talented.
And as others pointed up, it denigrates all people to think that the only thing that keeps us moral is fear of retribution from an angry “god”.
Besides which, those ten commandments aren’t all that creative, frankly. Seeing as how most of them are just a guide for how to live in a society and a society increases my fitness… wonder where all those morals came from.
YAY for morals.
“Does it diminish Mozart that he was made of meat…”
Your whole family is made out of meat!
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000484.html
“As mentioned above freewill essentially has to be some form of illusion simply due to the fact we are the sum of parts guided by forces we don’t control.”
But how does this impact personal responsibility and decisions in law? I’m curious about the end result.
I will exercise my free will in awaiting an observable definition of “free will”.
I will exercise my free will in awaiting an observable definition of “free will”.
PZ said: “What a silly, silly man. If anyone is naive here, it’s someone who thinks atheists must all be amoral robots, and that unpleasant consequences mean you should reject the truth value of a claim.”
He is a silly man, for all the reasons PZ and the comments have stated, but the above is also a tad silly. The letter-writer is correct that atheists can’t have an “objective morality”, but he never claims that this would necessarily make humans amoral, as PZ retorts with his “amoral robots” quip.
The battle to refute the drivel spouted by the godly shouldn’t be undermined by us resorting to Straw Man argumentation, for what should be obvious reasons, in that the atheist position is founded in reason, not rhetoric.
Who are all you bastards claiming to feel like you free will? If I had free will, I wouldn’t have eaten that Ben and Jerry’s last night. If I had free will, I would be jogging right now. If I had free will, my hair wouldn’t be thinning, and I wouldn’t need glasses. I have no more control over my brain, and the thoughts it produces, than I do over my hair.
The fun thing about thoughts, though, is that I can always make more of them, and I can identify with some and not others. So it’s a hall of mirrors, and I can pick which reflections of nothing I like best.
Nobody’s picked up Shelley’s question — what about personal responsibility? — so I’ll briefly address it here, and put the fears of anarchy and gang rape to rest. WIthout free will, society still has an interest in enforcing order, and that means punishing inappropriate behavior. You don’t have free will and you couldn’t stop yourself from robbing that store? Too bad; society needs to make robbing stores less appealing, so off to jail you go.
Secondly, enlightened socieities do look at environmental causes of things like crime (poverty, lack of education, culture, etc.) and attempt to address them. Free will freaks, like Christians, simply blame the individual and do fuck-all to prevent the problem except to make the victims/perpetrators feel like total shit. Witness the high rates of teen pregnancy in bible-belt states compared to lower rates in amoral atheists states.
“Free-will,” or the pereception of how people make choices, is really the nub of two hugely divergent world views.
Also, I know what PZ’s talking about.
Just enjoy the ride folks. It will all be over soon.
I like this game! Can I play?
“If you ditch belief in the Muses you must also, logically, ditch belief in the value of art.”
Yipiiiee!
And on the morality question: if founding your actions on fear of a punishment or hope of a reward is morality, then trained dogs are moral beings.
I like this game! Can I play?
“If you ditch belief in the Muses you must also, logically, ditch belief in the value of art.”
Yipiiiee!
And on the morality question: if founding your actions on fear of a punishment or hope of a reward is morality, then trained dogs are moral beings.
Hi,
Just to say, I’m an Irish Atheist, and I’ve written a number of letters on the subject to the Irish Independent – I do find it very tiresome to keep up with all the rebuttal that I should do (the letter PZ refers to draws on a letter I wrote, published Sept. 3 – see http://sjbrophy.blogspot.com), but rest assured, there are plenty of Atheists, humanists and freethinkers in Ireland (www.humanism.ie)
I’m sjbrophy, and my email address is that @gmail if anyone wants to discuss Irish atheism or similar – I can’t promise that I’ll keep up to date with this thread…
Inkadu,
From a practical point of view, society locking people up for disapproved behaviors works, but logically, it lacks.
But you are absolutely correct about fundamentalists reducing all choices to “free will” and neglecting to address causes that lead to these poor choices.
What is really missing from the atheist’s arsenal is the ability to blame their actions/situation on someone or something else. We can’t say the devil tempted me or god is testing me. Nope, we’re responsible for our actions and situations.
Free will be damned, I want an excuse!
Nuggets from the “most consistently intelligent commentary of any blog:”
1) Free will is an illusion
2) OK, but how does that impact personal responsibility and law? (fair question.)
3) You don’t have free will and you couldn’t stop yourself from robbing that store? Too bad; society needs to make robbing stores less appealing, so off to jail you go.
But, but, but, isn’t making it less appealing based on the notion that people will then be less likely to *gasp* choose?… Oh never mind. Let’s stick with Cognitive Dissonance for $2000, Alex.
So can someone please send this guy a copy of Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. Seems to me that would bring down his strawman quite quickly.
I think those are personality integration issues, not theological issues. ;-)
If we allow ourselves to cast aside any and all sophisticated philosophical, theological, and biochemical arguments for a moment, I think we’ll see one simple fact emerge: A hell of a lot of people can’t bear to face (let alone embrace) a reality that doesn’t include some sort of magical sky parent who guides, protects, and lays down the rules.
The existence of the sky parent relieves us of all manner of responsibilities and cares. It’s very seductive, but so is heroin.
Religion is like our parents’ basement. Many choose to live their entire lives there. Others prefer to grow up, move out, and make their own way. Someday I’ll have children of my own, and what I’ll want most of all is for them to grow up happy, healthy and independent – more to the point, non-dependent on their parents. I ask you: What parents with their salt would want anything less?
All the philosophical acrobatics required to integrate Free Will and Predestination is little more than the intellectual pursuit of dung. It’s rationalization of an arbitrarily conceived theology based on other arbitrarily conceived theologies. It’s a smoke and mirrors trick performed to justify the notion that we’re all free to choose whether or not to believe in a sky daddy who will cast us away and condemn us to suffer eternal agonies if we do not. And if I slip a silver dollar and a slice of goat liver under the bed each night, the bogeyman beneath will not eat me in my sleep.
Why do you think the brain is not deterministic?
The brain itself can’t be deterministic because it is not a closed system.
Even the universe itself, which is arguably deterministic and which our brains are a part of, is only deterministic on a crude and gross scale, comparitively speaking.
Nonsense! The electrochemical activities in your brain clearly made you say that!
Santa Claus brings me freewill every year at Christmas.
But, but, but, isn’t making it less appealing based on the notion that people will then be less likely to *gasp* choose?
No, it’s based on appealing to their natures, which in this case would constitute the sum of their experiences, environment, and genetics. A person’s nature is changeable, but that doesn’t really matter. If you know from past experience that a) breaking social rules leads to going to jail, and b) going to jail is unpleasant, and c) you don’t like unpleasant experiences, chances are, you’ll behave in an avoidant manner. This is standard, Skinneresque operant conditioning stuff.
I don’t really believe in free will, because of the following thought experiment: If you somehow created a hundred copies of me frozen and dropped them in a hundred copies of exactly the same situation, would I behave in the same way every time? Yes. I’m a product of my experiences, environment, and biochemistry, which means that stimuli go in and responses come out. However, what gives the appearance of free will is that there are always more variables in any situation than human beings can (presently) account for, so it looks like we’re “choosing” rather than just “responding.”
I really fail to see why free will is a big deal anyway. Here’s a question: Why do you care so much about whether you’re actually choosing, or whether you just seem to be? What difference does it make, since obviously one or other or both of us can’t tell the illusion from the reality anyhow?
Your whole family is made out of meat!
I’m not! I’m made of Soylent Green!
{whisper from offstage>}
Really? Oh, sorry. Carry on
Provine is my personal god. I have a shrine dedicated to him. Excuse while I go light a fresh stick of incense.
For a great book on free will, and the total incoherence of it in all of its forms, check out “The Problem of the Soul” by Owen Flanagan.
No. “Less appealing” is just a shorthand way of saying “If the potential harmful consequences of this action are increased, fewer people will perform it.” No free will is required. Clearly the actions of humans (and other species) are influenced by their environmental conditions: change the conditions and you change the behavior. It’s no more mysterious than the fact that a dog will drink more water in a hot climate than in a cool one.
Nobody doubts that human beings have intentions and goals; the only question is whether those intentions and goals are products of some mystical “free will”, or whether they’re a more complex version of the behaviors common to related species. Do chimps have free will? Do they *choose* to strip the bark off twigs and insert them into termite mounds in order to pull out the termites and eat them? Does a dog choose to bark when strangers enter its territory? Does a tree choose to grow towards light?
Heddle —
Heh heh.
This is fun.
It all depends on how you look at it. If you don’t believe in free will, then punishment is just another environmental factor determining the probability of an outcome.
In a world where people acknowledge there is no free will, there is still plenty of justification for continuing to do things pretty much the same way we’ve been doing them. Some things would change, but it seems that a lot of people have these ideas of complete and total anarchy that just don’t hold water. It’s pretty much the same nightmare scenario, in fact, they believe will come about if people stop believing in God.
Shelley — I’m not sure what your point is. Seems to me if society wants to prevent stolen cars, locking up people who steal cars is perfectly logical. If you have a point to make, make it.
Although the original article began with name-calling, “naïve atheists”, I find it unproductive to reciprocate – no matter how warranted it may seem. In my opinion, referring to the original author as “silly” or a “shallow git”, takes away from the discussion.
With that said, I found the arguments in this article to be unconvincing. One premise of the article is that the brain takes in input and returns an output (choice) that is not deterministic. How was this idea supported?
Two examples are discussed, falling in love and producing art. Although I agree that both of these processes are complex and that given the input, I would not be able to determine whether the author would have been in love or how Bach would write his next symphony, neither support the claim that our complex brains make “choices”. These anecdotes, while pleasing to read in a blog, simply reaffirmed that the brain is complex. Does the complexity automatically imply the capability of choice? And how do we know that “no ghosts” were required for the above processes?
In short, the article seems to draw conclusions based on aesthetic preferences with little evidence.
If the author were raised by abusive, unloving parents who never provided, would he prefer the idea of spiritual beings who may exact retribution in the afterlife?
Free will is just a weird concept. That it has been bestowed on us is just silly.
That version of free will is bizarre and requires religion.
The reality that most of us have morals and laws we follow and choose whether we follow them is obvious. The notion that it would go away, if religion did, is assinine.
I Blame Clinton for everything.
Kseniya —
Oh, but it is all about free will. I like to think of people in environmental context, and I sometimes flatter myself with my ballsy atheist skeptic ways, but I probably don’t have any more choice in the matter than my sister, who is an evangelical baby-machine. For whatever reason, I value different things, and that has driven my behaviors and decisions from a very young age. Maybe she felt more the presence of God during her church services, where I was just bored and restless. This led her to embrace religion, and led me to begin questioning it. My father is a skeptic Catholic hater, and I identified with him. My mother is religious, and my sister identified more with her. It’s hard to say that any of us “choose” anything in a significant way, since the ground on which we are doing the choosing is so rigged one way or the other.
Does this mean, for instance, there’s no point in arguing with people about religion? Maybe whatever cognitive-cultural tides that allowed me to be an atheist will eventually sweep them up as well. Maybe there’ll be an undertow that drags everyone back into religiosity. Who knows. It’s still fun to argue, though.
Chris — Thanks for explaining my “appealing,” word choice. I knew it would get me into trouble, but couldn’t think of anything conversational enough to get across the behaviorist element. Ah! Maybe “aversive.”
When you ditch belief in God you are left with the idea that matter and energy are all that exist. Everything you do is the result of your genes reacting with the environment.
And?
It’s over for me. I gave my free will to Goodwill one year at Christmas when I was a girl, so that some poor child somewhere could decide what not to have for dinner. I guess that explains why, as a kid, I loved that movie The Predestined Emancipation of Willy.
Although Danny’s comment is long and reviews the blog post in some detail, I found it failed to in any way to support the fundamental thesis that the brain is complex, and in fact, makes an argument for the brain as being merely a machine that produces grammatic verbiage.
“Does it diminish Mozart that he was made of meat, that he used a chamberpot and got sick and fueled himself with food and drink?”
Hear, hear. Not only does it not diminish Mozart — I think it makes him, and all of us, more spectacular. To me, the idea that, out of atoms and molecules, we can somehow generate consciousness and meaning, love and joy… how fucking awesome is that?
And don’t forget that free will is thrown out the door if god decides everything that happens to you.
“Although the original article began with name-calling, “naïve atheists”, I find it unproductive to reciprocate – no matter how warranted it may seem.”
As Crow would say: Oh bite me, it’s fun.
I haven’t thought free will was a coherent concept since freshman year at college.
Supposing free will does not exist, how is this an argument against atheism? Of course free will doesn’t exist. So what?
I’ve found that people who think free will exists usually either haven’t thought about it hard enough, or have in mind a definition of free will that is pretty different than the average person’s idea about what those two words mean.
trained dogs are moral beings.
I have 2 dogs and they obviously have a notion of “fair.” I’ve experimented with this – by showing one preferential treatment over the other (and vice versa) – they react about the same way that human kids do (only less loudly). A sense of “fair”is one of the roots of any moral system. If you can add empathy (I haven’t seen a lot of empathy out of dogs…) then you’ve got everything you need.
Free will consists in precisely the freedom to reject or accept any morality.
Very few of our acts are rationally argued, so most of us do not experience any use of free will. In fact the most mature and together of any of us might make two entirely free decisions in a lifetime. Not because we are determined, but rather because we do not fully engage our reason with every single moral decision we make.
Morality exists because we have free will, not because there is or is not a deity. Our experience with decisions are handed down, ideals of behaviour are contemplated and codified and handed down. Morality also exists because we transmit information and experience over time.
Theists may claim a little external help, but it can only be _a little_, because the very notion of free will means we can get it right on our own. Of course the right of getting it right is part of the conflict within morality itself. Morality is often as evasive as beauty and the source of as much conflict.
The highly nuanced moral system of the Buddha is not theistic. The theistically inspired violent crusades are not moral.
Being human is being in paradox. We just have to get used to it.
Believing in god does not make one a human being. It is a blatant attempt to make oneself extra-human.
Heaven, eternal life… give me a break.
“There’s no “only” about it.”
Precisely. That free will happens to be an electrochemical product of our brains in no way cancels, subverts, scandalizes or otherwise diminishes it.
One would think people like that letter-writer would recognise how extraordinarily impious and sacrilegious it is to keep dissing material reality…which is, after all, the handiwork of their deity. What hubris to keep second-guessing their creator so.
What can they possibly be thinking? Oops, that’s right…there isn’t much thinking involved when all of their thinking is already being served to them, neatly packaged and complete and hermetically sealed and tied with pretty bowed ribbons, on a silver platter.
Those people who say they’re not made of meat?
They’re Made of Meat.
Aren’t they making vegan people out of tofu and texturized soybeans and sawdust nowadays? I’ve met a few woo-heads from California who couldn’t possibly be made of good old meat. There’s gotta be tofu in there, someplace, for them to be so dopey.
I’ll give it a shot. It doesn’t at all. Although once better understood on a molecular level you could imagine treatments that would prevent such occurences. Just because a person may be driven by their biology doesn’t mean society doesn’t also have a right to restrict those that are driven in impermissable ways from the whole.
The effect is exactly the same. The individual is removed from society until his behaviour reflects change.
You seem to be wanting to argue that consequences you don’t like make a claim false. It simply doesn’t follow. If and it appears to be correct that free will is simply an illusion it’s up to us to understand this and wor within the framework rather than just pretending as many prefer.
1) I’ve never understood this argument from theists, it makes no sense logically from their perspective. Assume they believe their world view is right in the face of any evidence which I think is a fair assumption, which means in their minds god imposed morality that they would not have with out him, and that we are just deluded idiots. According to their world view then shouldn’t we still benefit from that morality? By their views no matter how ignorant and willful we are we can’t escape the fact we have this god given morality. So where does this idea that atheists are immoral come from? Apparently we have power to make god do things, that or god is just a prick who takes away morality from those who don’t believe (and if you assume the theists believe only one religious world view is true then most of the major religions are out numbered heavily by unbelieving immoral robots) which begs the question why all these amoral types haven’t destroyed the world in their selfishness. And you just know most theists would kill themselves before admitting that either god doesn’t exist or he doesn’t really mind atheists. But either way their argument that atheists are immoral doesn’t make sense if they believe what they claim to believe.
2) So since we have forced god to act and take away our morality, how do they account for the fact atheists make up a much smaller percentage of US prison populations than the percentage atheists make up of the national population, and Christians have the same values for both? The evidence suggests that by and large atheists are more law abiding and moral as individuals.
3) Christians and the bible aren’t really that interested in morality anyway, they are often more interested in piety, and seem to think that pious equals moral, which is not the case. Pious behavior frequently puts faith in god above compassion or morality. Piety is therefore often immoral.
4) Free will is an interesting argument from a theist, because it rarely takes much effort to find the compartmentalizations they function under. Largely because few theists ever take their ideas to the logical extremes assuming they ever really think about them at all. They just use what they need and flip flop as needed between clearly contradictory positions as suits them. Consider, without free will we can’t choose to be good or evil or believe in god, so we must have free will or much of theist thinking falls apart. But whenever something tragic happens they start whining about god’s plan, that person must have died for a reason, for god’s plan. These are mutually exclusive arguments. If you die by god’s plan, you must have arrived at that event by god’s plan, which means you lived by god’s plan, which means you were born by god’s plan, which means your parents met and had you because of god’s plan…which means there can’t be free will. So to have free will god can’t have a plan, the universe has to function randomly so now we have a god who isn’t omnipotent and omniscient. But wait god has to be omnipotent (except for those pesky iron chariots) and omniscient, which means he knows in advance what you will do all the days of your life, and those days only exist because he wills it. So again we have no free will, or god can’t be god. I suppose the cop out at this point is god is so omnipotent he can grant free will, which means humans can surprise him but then he can’t be omniscient which causes a problem. The concept of an all powerful, all knowing god must deny free will, which denies the basic tenants of theist thinking. Free will denies the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient god which also knocks the foundations out from under theist belief. The two are mutually exclusive. If you have one you can’t have the other.
Talk about your circular arguments.
Theists should stay the hell away from the idea of free will, it invariably says more about the contradictory nature of their beliefs than helps them. I suspect that most theists would chose the existence of god over free will so I’m not sure why they bother with the idea in the first place. I think they just embrace it because it helps reinforce their belief that they are somehow special and not just another bunch of monkeys. Sorry to point this out, but we are all just a bunch of monkeys.
Aren’t they making vegan people out of tofu and texturized soybeans and sawdust nowadays? I’ve met a few woo-heads from California who couldn’t possibly be made of good old meat. There’s gotta be tofu in there, someplace, for them to be so dopey.
Someone needs to apply meat tenderizer to you, Marcus.
“But how does this impact personal responsibility and decisions in law? I’m curious about the end result.”
Not at all, at least for everyday rather than philosophical purposes. There is still a self to which one can attach moral responsibility for actions. It’s just not a self that sits outside the cause-effect chain, nor is the possessor of the self conscious of all the inputs and processes involved in deciding to perform a moral act. The latter point is surely evident even for theists, and raises just the same questions about morality and law that determinism does. As for decisions in law, I’m struggling to see what the problem is. The whole reason we have laws in the first place is to maintain order in society and (these days) to protect rights. What changes about that in a non-free-will-in-the-old-sense world?
“But, but, but, isn’t making it less appealing based on the notion that people will then be less likely to *gasp* choose?… Oh never mind. Let’s stick with Cognitive Dissonance for $2000, Alex.”
Denying free will in the traditional sense does not mean denying that humans make choices, some “rational” and some not. You’d know this if you’d read any of the literature on the subject. See Dennett’s books or more recently Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop for some examples. It just means that those choices are not uncaused but result from the past experiences of the person, current circumstances, the nature of the stimulus and the wiring/neurochemistry of their brain.
“So since we have forced god to act and take away our morality, how do they account for the fact atheists make up a much smaller percentage of US prison populations than the percentage atheists make up of the national population, and Christians have the same values for both? The evidence suggests that by and large atheists are more law abiding and moral as individuals. ”
This doesn’t follow logically – other factors could explain it. For instance, assume for the sake of argument that black people are more religious than the general population (I believe this is true, but I don’t have the figures to hand). We know that black people are disproportionately represented in prison populations, from institutional racism, laws that disproportionately imprison black people (eg the crack/cocaine distinction) and for sociological reasons. That could in principle account for the disparity.
Re: free will. Suppose humans were mere Turing machines.
Now, because of the halting problem, there logically can
exist no algorithm (on Turing machines) that tells what
any Turing machine will do, given any input.
Does this imply there is “free will” even given complete
determinism? If free will does not equal the non-existence
of a such universal prediction device, how is it to be defined
then?
Already quick googling suggests that this has been discussed
quite a lot, and maybe there’s a standard riposte. But I’d
guess F.C. didn’t really think about looking for it yet.
If the letter writer doubts that decisions ultimately arise from mere brain chemistry he should try making some potentially life-altering decisions while his chemistry is being influenced by crystal meth. Or find some pillar of the evangelical movement and ask HIM if such agents affect the thought process when contemplating, how should we say, risky behavior?
I’ve been saying that for years (except that I usually use “mere” instead of “only”).
Daniel Dennett addresses this in “Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” (already recommended above). The problem arises when you try to understand a big complex system, so you come up with a small, simple analogy to help wrap your mind around it. Then someone points out a problem caused by the smallness or simplicity of the model, and thinks that the big complex system must have the same problem.
The classic example is the mind:
– There is nothing magical about the mind: it’s just the operation of the brain, in which molecules simply follow the laws of physics, much as the interlocking parts in a wind-up robot.
– Ah, but wind-up toy robot is utterly predictable! It will keep walking in a straight line until its spring runs down or until it hits a wall. I don’t want to be that predictable; therefore, I don’t want my mind to be just a bunch of chemicals.
This could be parodied as follows:
– I think I know how Wal-Mart’s warehouses are organized: imagine a row of breadboxes…
– Ah, but Wal-Mart sells bicycles, and a bicycle can’t fit in a breadbox, so you’re obviously wrong.
I can write a computer program to simulate tossing dice such that the results are unpredictable, uniformly distributed, don’t cycle during any time period over which you would be willing to check, and are different each time the program is run. If a computer can do that, why not a brain?
(See also Graculus @ #66)
I agree with your second point, and with all the others who have pointed out that “free will” is not a well-defined concept. However, my trial of your thought experiment did not replicate your results.
Now, because of the halting problem, there logically can
exist no algorithm (on Turing machines) that tells what
any Turing machine will do, given any input.
The halting problem says that there is no algorithm in finite time that can tell you whether a program will run indefinitely. But what does that have to do with free will? A turing machine is 100% deterministic. You can’t tell whether the program will eventually halt or not, but that doesn’t give the program “free will” does it? It’s still just a big tape running through a machine.
Seems I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t concerned about religious implications, but legal implications. Some defendants have argued, successfully or not, that because of abuse, deprivation, etc. that they either should not be held responsible at all or receive reduced sentences.
I.E. if there is no free will and we are driven to do based on the sum of our experiences, it might imply that these defendants were correct in their arguments.
But, I accept the argument that society can dictate undesirable behavior and deal with it appropriately.
Religious people seem to insist that “free will” means “contains a ghost.” When they complain of the notion of a world consisting only of “matter and energy” they are really arguing for a world consisting only of matter, energy and ghosts.
In the absence of a clear definition of “ghost” supplied by a believer, let us posit the following characteristics, which are intended to be both conservative and charitable, and are quite open to correction:
1. A ghost is capable of influencing the material universe. A ghost with freedom of choice but no power to act would not be free at all.
2. A ghost is causally affected by the material universe. A ghost unaware of the context within which it acts would be indistinguishable from a non-deterministic natural system. Therefore the photon striking the retina exciting the neuron prompting the branching activation must continue on across some material/immaterial interface to have some causal influence upon the ghost.
3. The ghost, while influenced by material causes, is not bound by them. A ghost bound by material causality would be indistinguishable from a deterministic natural system.
4. Nor can the ghost be bound by immaterial causes if it is to be said to have free will. If an immaterial source of information, say, influence by spiritual beings, is used as a criterion for a putatively free choice, then the problems that plague free will in a materialistic universe have merely been expanded into an hypothetical other plane of existence.
Posit a “conscience” that comes from “God” and a “temptation” that comes from “Satan” and you have merely suggested an alternate source of causality. Whichever “choice” the ghost makes, the question remains whether it could have made a different choice given the exact same circumstances and influences. We wish to say that the choice, if it merits the term at all, must be in some way independent of causal and contextual inputs, but this is once again indistinguishable from randomness. To the extent that a choice is informed, it is caused. To the extent that a choice is uninformed, it is random.
However, that which is random is no more “free” than that which is strictly deterministic. Randomness is not choice; it is merely unpredictability. It is unclear what it could possibly mean to propose an entity that makes nonrandom decisions that are not informed and shaped by the context within which those decisions are made.
This edge cuts both ways. On one hand, ghosts do not resolve the question; they merely posit an additional level of complication to the universe, like a philosophical junk drawer into which we stuff questions when we don’t know what else to do with them. Once something is in the “immaterial” drawer, we declare it dealt with. It really isn’t, but we don’t have to look at it. On the other hand, material indeterminacy does not promise or explain free will, and I cringe a little when materialists invoke quantum effects in these discussions.
When it comes to questions of free will, a hand-waving response of “ghosts” is no more satisfying than a hand-waving response of “brains.” The difference is that the people who say “brains” are trying to eliminate the hand-waving and at least maximally reduce the mystery. Their hypotheses may not seem intuitively satisfying, but at the core they are no more problematic than the ghost hypothesis. It’s just that the people who say “ghosts” have supposed that the interesting parts of free choice happen in a realm unavailable for human examination and thus aren’t asking any further questions.
In conclusion, the only real issue here is that what we would intuitively like to think of as “free will” is an internally inconsistent concept. We want free choice to be simultaneously context-aware and context-independent. Whether it’s brains or ghosts, one simply cannot make sense of this combination.
How do Calvinists train their dogs?
-The puppy keeps stealing my shoes, I think we should make it less appealing to him by not chasing him when he does it.
–But, but, but, isn’t making it less appealing based on the notion that he will then be less likely to *gasp* choose to take your shoes?…
-Oh right, silly me, behaving like the dog has free will! I’m such a heretic sometimes!
What’s wrong with not believing in “free will” or “objective morality?” I don’t even see how you could make a rational argument for either, they’re both ridiculously silly ideas. Though at least with “free will” you can argue that the approximation that we have is complex enough to make the difference practically irrelevant. But that doesn’t make it any more true.
The original article and resulting comments are compelling proof that science and religion are opposite sides of the same imagined coin.
beautiful. amazing. you’re the best writer ever. thank you for being rational.
” It is also not deterministic. It takes in a multitude of inputs, including lots of noise, filters them on the basis of deep personal history, and generates interesting internal states and elaborate responses. ”
And continues to evaluate and reevaluate them through succeeding moments.
Even if a given thought or decision or impulse *were* a purely deterministic result of a chemical reaction, that thought/decision/impulse is subject to veto or adjustment by later thoughts before it is carried out or elaborated.
Basically, the question of the mind and free will depends on the scale at which it is considered. At the scale of a single neuron or a single chemical reaction, no we don’t have free will – we cannot directly influence things at that scale, and things at that scale don’t directly influence us. But at human timescales and physical scales, we do have free will, because at that scope feedback loops and reconsideration come into play.
“Do people who believe in free-will believe it to be a uniquely Homosapien thing, or do they think animals have it too?”
I figure it depends on the animal’s capacity for reevaluating prior thoughts and decisions without further stimuli from outside. This would exclude cases where, say, a monkey reaches for a berry but then stops because it recognized the berry is actually a toxic tree frog.
If a monkey thinks “I’m going to groom that cute female” but then with no new input, and based only on past experience, decides “aw hell no I’m not, she doesn’t like me and the big male is probably going to beat my ass if I do” then I figure that monkey has free will at least to that degree.
The thing is, it’s a lot easier to observe what animals *do* than to observe what they decide *not* to do.
I think thonyC is being a little selective in his quotation.
Mathew 22:37
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
thonyC (or any one else for that matter) could argue that the second of the laws is all you need as the basis for a working morality and I would agree with the claim, but that isn’t what Christ is reported as saying.
“Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.”
This statement suggests that God’s command is what determines something as moral or immoral, rather than God commanding something because it is already inherently moral. (It also suggests his ignorance surpasses his so-called logic). If this were the case, then how could you justify God’s authority? How can you call God good, or moral, if its His own arbitrary designation?
This ridiculous argument has been negated by simple logic since the time of Plato, and was cast aside by Catholicism over a thousand years ago. It’s called the naive Divine Command Theory. Search for it on Google sometime.
In one sense he is right. “Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.”
There is no free will (although I certainly act as if there is) and morality is subjective and relative. But so what? that has nothing to do with whether we are good or bad. These facts are true for Christians as well as atheists.
Not on ordinary hardware, you can’t. At best your results will be “unpredictable” in the naive sense: that is, they can’t be predicted without complete information about the conditions under which your program runs. *With* such information your results will be totally predictable – by a duplicate computer running a duplicate program under carefully duplicated conditions, or a sufficiently powerful simulation thereof.
I think that, in fact, that kind of “predictable in principle, but not in practice” complexity *is* what brains are doing, hence the thought experiment upthread. (Impossible to carry out practically because you need *exact* copies of the person and situation, which are unobtainable in practice.)
Note: there are at least two different Chrises on this thread. #112 is mine, #111 isn’t.
To the original poster, well said! It gets tiring to see these theists constantly attack straw men about atheists and materialist/humanist philosophy.
If you actually had “free will,” what could you do differently?
“I’m not sure what your point is. Seems to me if society wants to prevent stolen cars, locking up people who steal cars is perfectly logical. If you have a point to make, make it.”
though punishing people for “wrong doing” does not seem to work all that well. while imprisoned they seldom steal as many cars they seem to revert to “life of crime” once released
nor does it seem to work that well for the gods and churches either. still a lot of sinning going on
“free will and moral choice” can they be traced back to “the meat”? are they related to other animals behavior?
the more you look the less distinct is the difference between animal intelligence and human intelligence.
are moral choices about the survival of the individual and the group? all operating in the environment of nature, personal history, personal need, desire, group need, probability and “chaos”
Most religious do not want to have to make so many decisions.
religious thinking tries to make the mystery and complexity of life simple. they have used metaphors and poetic images to make it understandable but over time people forget that they are symbols and think they are facts. just do what it says in “the book” even when “the book” is so contradictory as to be impossible to understand. it is fear that drives them to try to silence all other ideas they really do not want to think they want a soft easy way to live (which is impossible).
they do not want to think about the fact that death is coming to each alone in their own skin. they want to remain asleep in their dream and will make all kinds of frantic fantastic incomprehensible arguments and do almost anything so as to protect their dream
so why do we so easily fall for the bait and try to argue on their terms about their terms. why do we let the religious frame the argument? it is just a boring negative exercise in which we can not hope to convince nor even pin down the argument.
Marcus, where did I say that we can have free will with God? If you mean libertarian free will, rather than compatibilist free will, then the idea is incoherent. If something I said implied otherwise, I didn’t make my point well. I do think that theism gives some people psychological motivation (for complicated reasons) for wanting to believe in libertarian free will, but I don’t think it makes libertarian free will a coherent concept.
Damn, thats well put. I was thinking of writing something like that myself, about how we are but chemistry but that itself is something amazing, and if we can stop trying to deceive ourselves we can truly appreciate how special we really are.
Also, I’ll add that I initially thought that having a purely chemical brain meant we had no free will because everything can be decided by classical physics. But then I discovered quantum ideas and realised that was bollocks too.
Morality is objective. It is a wee bit more than just our personal feelings and opinions, being a product of the complex system known as “human society”, and something agreed upon between humans. Like language, which is not subjective, either. Not that aspects of morality and language can’t be subjective (not to be confused with “malleable”), but the “thing as a whole” isn’t.
For practical purposes we have “free will”, as we can never have enough information about the system to predict the outcome. That also means that we can predict that certain gross influences can negate any strict “free will” (hence insanity pleas).
Which of the above claims are you saying I can’t do, and how much are you willing to bet me? (I’ve done it on an Apple //e.)
(Note: CPU clock cycles are tied to the local AC power source, which varies on the MHz scale; and as chaos theory tells us, small disturbances can give rise to large changes in sensitive processes.)
Whether that’s free will or just something that is indistinguishable from it by experiment, I’ll leave to the philosophers.
From my experience with computer games, I’ve come to realize that most good games that attempt to simulate reality in some way need random elements. Accordingly, I find it hard to believe that this universe doesn’t have just a pinch of random seasoning in its recipe.
Possible experiment: place an ant (or a series of ant clones) in the bottom of a small sand pit with four food sources at equidistant, symmetric distances away from the pit on an otherwise featureless and level sand pile. I predict there will some randomness to the ant’s choice of path in repeated trials.
Whether you agree of not, thanks for the reply anyway.
Larry Moran: Same old bad moral philosophy, I should think. Funny how many moral philosophers would disagree, even conservative theists like Plato …
Incidentally, one of the standard authors these days to read on “compatibilism” wrt free will is a Jesuit …
Of course, these folks probably dislike the Catholics almost as much as us unbelievers.
True, but a Von Neumann architecture (what I meant by “ordinary hardware”, basically) isn’t that kind of sensitive process. It’s specifically designed to work according to its design logic and ignore those minute fluctuations. That’s what makes it a *digital* computer.
Of course you can make it much harder to predict the output if you’re using some chaotic analog process for input. (Then you’d have to be able to simulate that process in sufficiently precise detail, which might require observational detail forbidden by the Uncertainty Principle and other implementation difficulties.) But ordinary computers can’t do that, because they’re specifically designed to kill the chaotic noise and produce results that precisely follow the digital logic designed into them. If analog noise did flip some bits in a digital computer it could quite easily crash the program.
P.S. to #123: The rest of the specifications you can meet quite easily, and under the ordinary meaning of the word your program’s output could well be “unpredictable”. I didn’t intend to impugn your programming ability – it’s just that *true* unpredictability falls outside the class of operations that something equivalent to a Turing machine is capable of.
But I think in the context of a discussion of free will it’s important to distinguish between “unpredictable” and “very difficult to predict, but if you had the right conditions, theoretically you could predict it”. I can’t imagine anyone arguing that a system described by the latter phrase has free will – which makes it very important whether *brains* are only “almost unpredictable” or not.
I just don’t see how having my self consist of a vaguely-defined soul attached to (but separate from) an unimaginably complex body automatically makes my free will any more or less real or illusory than having my self consist of the unimaginably complex processes of the same body.
After all, the soul too must be “just” something or other, unless it’s nothing at all. If the free will of the hardcore materialist can be an illusion, so can the free will of the Cartesian.
Chris @ #123 & 124:
I probably haven’t given enough hints to explain what I mean, which is this. A computer, and a brain, can get stimuli from the outside world, which in turn can be used to “seed” and modify results of semi-random algorithms. In the case of computers, they can count clock cycles between mouse clicks or keyboard taps. Due to variations in the AC power grid, even if a robot arm is used to tap the keyboard at precise intervals, the number of clock cycles counted can not be predicted or replicated exactly. In the case of a brain (which is capable of sensing a single photon impinging on a retina) there are also fine stimuli which could be used as part of a random decision-making algorithm (to be used for trial-and-error when all else fails).
In this way, a very small random element which is inherent in the universe’s workings could trickle up into the decision processes of computers and brains. As I have said before, since in the long run a random search algorithm works just as well as anything else, if there were no random element in biological processes, evolution would have had to invent one.
Whether results which cannot be predicted by any experiment available to humans are truly random or only naively random I will again leave to philosophers to argue.
Apologies if this point has already been raised, but I have only had time to glance over the hundreds of comments before mine. The argument of incredulity regarding “only a chemical reaction” is designed to invoke the same old god of the gaps, and the mind is just the latest plinth upon which the well travelled goalposts have been erected. Every time new advances are made in the understanding of our own bodies, the mysteries that remain are clung to as evidence that we are indeed made in His image, in a very real metaphorical sense.
That means Heisenberg is back.
That means Heisenberg is back.
Chris wrote:
But I think in the context of a discussion of free will it’s important to distinguish between “unpredictable” and “very difficult to predict, but if you had the right conditions, theoretically you could predict it”. I can’t imagine anyone arguing that a system described by the latter phrase has free will – which makes it very important whether *brains* are only “almost unpredictable” or not.
Actually, I came across a guy arguing exactly that on Usenet: a perfectly deterministic system can have free will. His definition of “free will” – credited to Dennett, fairly or not I do not know – was somthing on the lines of ability to react to stimuli based on internal goals.
Just a heads up – the writer isn’t a letter writer he’s a regular contributing columnist called David Quinn (the piece ended up in letters section on the web version by accident). He’s an ultra conservative roman catholic who also writes regularly for the Irish Catholic and is the director of the Iona Institute (www.ionainstitute.ie/index.html) which describes itself on its website as follows “The Iona Institute is a non-governmental organisation dedicated to the strengthening of civil society through making the case for marriage and religious practice”. This should put his waffling into its proper context….
David Marjanović: Not necessarily, as Pat Churchland/Rick Grush and Vic Stenger have pointed out. (Besides, I think that figure is something of an exaggeration anyway.) Yes, perhaps one molecule of rodopsin (?) can change confirmation, but …
Nescio: There are a lot of “compatibilist” positions these days. It isn’t so surprising. Whether they are correct, who knows? (I don’t find Fischer and Ravizza’s very convincing, but that’s the only one I have studied in any depth.)
(I call you a “Red-A atheist.” Sometimes, “evangelical atheist.”)
Different people come to different conclusions from subjectively evaluating the same data – from different perspectives and in different conditions and sequence. But we can find a pattern – and we will.
Whether it’s a genetic result of evolution or the way we are designed by a Creator, even very young children seem to have a sense of awe and a preference for what we later call “Beauty.” They understand that there are consequences to infringing rights of other people before they can express the idea, “That’s not fair!”
I wish that more believers understood that our concept of “the image of God” applies to non-believers as well. And that more of us acted as though it is true, rather than trying to talk or force it into being true.
Then we could spend more time talking about What or what happened/existed before the Big Bang.