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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Choose your own review/for hard determinists

    • You do not believe in free will, given the nature of objective reality

      • You observe that minds are embodied and subject to the constraints and fates of physical objects. Rocks, machines, organisms, brains, and mind, all operate on strict causal laws in which whatever happens at time t was determined by the state of the world at time t-1. In a certain sense there are no real agents, no unmoved movers. All is a seamless web of cause and effect.
      • You are a hard-nosed realist, you feel in fact that you see the truth and have a responsibility to convey that truth to your fellow primates. You did not choose to feel this way, any more than you made any other choices.
      • The dangers of this view is a total and corrosive nihilism. Nothing really matters, there are no choices to be made, and whether you work for the betterment of mankind or kill yourself makes little difference and is preordained anyway. People as agents don't exist, and all talk of values, morality, and choice is just a persistent illusion (possibly a necessary illusion, but you don't let that stop you).
      • Hypocrisy
        • And since you are a human being with all the responsibilities it entails, you act like you have choices. It would be rude, a failing, not to. It wouldn't be your fault, exactly, but other people would certainly think less of you, and that would feel unpleasant.
      • Determinism would seem to explode almost any notion of morality. It literally gives everybody a universal excuse for any kind of bad behavior -- they can't help it, nobody can help anything.
      • I suppose there is something liberating in this view of life. It forgives all, it achieves what religion is supposed to achieve, salvation. Even at the cost of our identity aa real agents. The very notion of sin and guilt turn out to be nonsensical. We can un-eat the fatal apple that Eve took from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and go back to something else, or forward to a world beyond freedom and dignity, in Skinner's terms.
from The Soul of the Marionette
  • book by John Gray, subtitled "A short inquiry into human freedom". I read this while trying to rescue myself from the tedious free will debate (see Choose your own review ) – this one was about 1000x more sophisticated.
from Choose your own review/for strong free willists

    • You are a believer in free will, based on the fundamental experience of being.

      • Congratulations on sticking up for yourself, or your Self, your freedom and your subjectivity, in a world in which all those seem to be largely illusory. You are a true existential hero. The science nerds might sneer at you, but you are probably a better person than they are. You certainly have a strong sense of morality, a stubborn refusal to disbelieve in the reality of right and wrong. If science and reason say that you don't exist, that your experience of freedom is unreal, well, fuck science and reason.
      • And putting aside whatever attachment you have to your Self, it seems like hard determinism has some deep deep problems and embracing it would be a big mistake, no matter how much it might seem to be true. It is entirely corrosive to all traditional notions of mind and morality, as well as freedom and subjective expereince. It seems to be on a deep level anti-value, anti-purpose, and anti-meaning. And that means it is fundamentally anti-life, a toxic idea, something we literally can't live with, no matter how true it is.
      • It not only subverts morality, but thinking itself, which is necessarily based on a kind of freedom. A coerced thought is not really a thought.
      • Thus you are a romantic out of necessity; your passionate belief in yourself, your feelings, and that of others outweighs the science. You are, in fact, battling the forces of nihilisma and materialism and will continue to do so until your last breath.
from Performance All the Way Down
  • I picked up this book in the midst of my little obsession with free will Choose your own review. Surely whatever the merits of this book it is at least offers a fresh take.
from Choose your own review/my actual position
    • In case this all seems like an elaborate effort to avoid taking a position, here are some things I think are true:
      • Computation and cybernetics have solved like 85% of the mind-body problem. But we can't adjust to it, our concepts are too rooted in thousands of years of mind-body dualism.
      • Hard determinism is a disembodied theory of reality. It makes perfect sense if you are God, who can view all of reality from outside. God is outside of time and so all moments are equally real, and every choice has already happened.
        • But we aren't God, and we can't think like God. We are temporal, our thinking is also temporal. Trying to think like God is a source of massive confusion.
        • eliminativism (saying that freedom, mind, selves etc do not exist) is an error, and fundamentally obnoxious and anti-human. Sometimes its useful for shock value, but the better Way to think About them is that they are real as anything else, but their nature is not quite what we thought they were. Hey
      • All of us, whatever our metaphysical states, are obligated to act under conditions of extreme uncertainty. We have to make choices, whether or not we are free in some metaphysical sense. We have to think of ourselves as agents, it's a cognitive-moral requirement. We are responsible for ourselves; a large part of social cognition is devoted to making this be true. The selves that we construct are based on a sense of responsibility, fictive though it may be.
      • We can't nope out of this process (possible exception for actual psychopaths). This I think is the basic teaching of existentialism; we can't avoid acting, whether or not we have political or metaphysical freedom. We are obliged to create ourselves and take responsibility for ourselves, and we should thus learn to get better at it.
from Choose your own review/compatibilists

    • Compatabilists believe that some notion of freee will and determinism can coexist

      • You are very sensible, a compromiser. You are a naturalist and do not believe in spooks, so your theory of mind is thoroughly materialist, but you do not accept that that makes everything mental somehow unreal or nonexistent. Goals, ideas, desires, imaginings, are all perfectly real, they just are implemented in the form of physical machinery.
      • Your personal experience is real enough (it seems stupid to deny the most real thing there can be) but it is also a kind of theatrical illusion. Your mind is creating a show for itself, serving as playwright, director, cast, and audience all at once. If you meditate you can catch yourself doing it.
from Choose your own review/for illusionists

    • We have no free will, but we aren't allowed to know it.

      • You are an "illusionist". I find this a fascinating attitude, and have been drawn to it myself because of its paradoxical qualities. But if an illusion is truly necessary, then it can't really be called an illusion any more. Those who claim to be able to somehow step outside the illusion and see it for what it is -- taking the red pill and escaping the matrix, in effect -- are deluding themselves, and are in no better shape than the poor deluded fools in the base level.
      • I've seen such arguments made for religion, that it is beneficial or even necessary for human flourishing, and that supercedes any trutfhulness or lack thereof. But it makes more sense for free will. If you don't at some level believe you have it, then you can't operate at all.
      • There's No Such Thing as Free Will - The Atlantic
        • Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will. Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.
        • Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend.
        • Borges
          • I believe that free will is a necessary illusion. Right now, I feel free. But if you were to assure me now that the moment I said “right now, I feel free” I could not have said otherwise, I would accept that there is no such thing as free will. But we need that belief, perhaps false, in order to write. That is, we need to believe that we make free choices. That is, we may well be pieces on a board, but we must think of ourselves as the players moving those pieces. And it’s funny that you should ask me about it, since only yesterday I was writing a foreword for William James's The Will to Believe, which deals with this question of free will. And I also remembered Jonathan Edwards who wrote a defense of predestination a century and a half before. I think that if someone were to tell us now that from the moment we were born up until this very moment we have been mere puppets, we have been forced to do what we did, not by the will of some god but, you know, as a result of an infinite number of past events, we would accept it. But if anyone were to tell us right now that we are helpless, we would reject the idea. Perhaps the mere illusion of free will is enough for us.

      • If you are some kind of Everett-interpretation multiverse weenie

        • Hm, this is anti-free-choice and also a kind of illusionism. Every time there is a choice between A and B, you take both but generate differeent versions of yourself, each of which thinks they have made a particular choice, and each correct in their separate spheres.

      • Why is it so hard to have a coherent theory of agency?

        • [not sure this section belongs here or anywhere]
        • Agency seems like something we should all understand, since we all embody it, by definition. We are built up and trained for it. Our education and culture is supposed to make us not just into agents, but good agents. Competent adults who seem to know what they are doing. Who know how to act for their own benefit and the benefit of those around them.
from Choose your own review/the question is stupid
    • Stupid and/or boring

    • Smart people know better than to waste time on unsolvable and unproductive questions like free will.

      • Philosophers have been pondering this question for thousands of years and not made any progress. That would suggest that the question is ill-posed, a product of some fundamental problem with our thinking. We seem to be faced with two absolutely incompatible alternative visions of reality, neither of which actually works (in that, neither can make sense of the real world ) yet both seem undeniable true in some sense. What if neither position is really true, and the apparent need to choose between them an illusion?
      • In this case, the ultimate culprit is probably something like mind-body dualism. Minds are agents that do things, bodies are made of physical matter subject to physical causality, and never the twain shall meet -- in our lame and broken ontology. This metaphysical split does indeed seem to be baked into our thinking, but that doesn't make it true or necessary. Realizing that it is fake is quite liberating. It also solves the free will problem, which is a consequence of stipulating these two interpenetrating but radically different worlds, one operating according to material law, the other according to the laws of thought.
      • Cybernetics and AI and science in general were supposed to have gotten rid of this particular error. Thanks to these adv ances, we don't have to be mystified by the relationship between mind and matter, we know how they are related, or at least, have models for how they could be related. We might not know all the details of how the mind performs its function, but we can at least imagine what such knowledge might be like.

      • If you think the question is stupid for Marxist or Buddhist reasons

        • Your theory of agency is way more sophisticated than the implicit individualism of free will. Marxists sniff at bourgeoise individualism; Buddhists are skeptical of the reality and centrality of the ego.
        • And both have solutions to fretting about whether you have free will. Marxists advocate political praxis, in which your unimportant individual self becomes part of the force of real social agency. There is something quasi-religious about this communion. Alas I am not of the faith.
        • Buddhists take almost the opposite approach, of disengagement, observation, and deconstruction of the self
          as always when I talk about Buddhism, I feel like I am oversimplifying, and certainly Buddhism doesn't always imply political disengagement
          . Buddhism also offers The Middle Way to break out of dead dichotomies, and the free will question is obviously one of those. Determinism is a kind of nihilism in regards to the self, whereas naive free will is an eternalism.

Choose your own review

08 Feb 2024 - 20 May 2024
Open in Logseq
    • I was amused by the fact that two books on free will, with opposing views, by similarly-qualified authors came out at about the same time last year. Captivated in fact. I'm not even sure why, the topic is not one I would normally take an interest in; it seems like one of those things clueless people worry about. Yet I felt compelled to take advantage of this situation, and here I am, writing about it against my better judgement.
      I'm not just trying to be clever here, I'm absolutely serious, and in fact that is one of the things that gives me some hope for this little project. In part it is an exercise in allowing myself to be compelled.
    • The two books in question are Determined by Robert Sapolsky, a behavioral ecologist and Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist. Despite both having professional commitments to nature and naturalism, Sapolsky denies any notion of free will, while Mitchell is emphatically for it. That is interesting!
    • My position on this issue is, let's say, evasive or trying to be meta (as I think the form of this text indicates). The naive question (is free will real or not) is not that interesting, but the efforts of individuals to try to construct versions of themselves that conform to these conflicting ideas, well, that is interesting to me. But if you must Choose your own review/my actual position
    • Who has choices need not choose We must, who have none We can love but what we lose— What is gone is gone.
      • – Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn