[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
That no one thinks of a bird's defiance of gravity (a biological pattern trumping an inorganic pattern) as an example of free will is exactly my point. It is the analogy I am drawing to call into question why we would think of a social pattern trumping a biological pattern (say, resisting the urge to urinate in public) as an exercise of free will.

dmb says:
That's exactly what I don't get about the analogy. It doesn't make sense to talk about the will until we get to social level morality. That's when the expression of preferences begins to meet with resistance, particularly the biological impulses and instincts. As far as I know, animals cannot defy their own urges and instincts. I don't even think it would be fair to say that house-broken dogs have any free will. We train them to poop outside by using their own instincts against them. We can get them to prefer the yard by making in-door pooping very unpleasant for them. 
Steve said:
[the question of free will has to be framed around an "independent" agent]  ... Because independence is another name for freedom. If the so-called agent is dependent or causally related to other things, then it is not a free agent.

dmb says:
Well, there you have reasserted the will as a separate metaphysical entity and opposed it to determinism, which follows from causal relations. As my dictionary puts it, determinism is "the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will." 
But to say the agent is "dependent" doesn't necessarily mean he is subject to causal relations, that she must act according to the laws of causality. It just means the agent is not isolated from or separate from all other things. I mean, to say we exist in relation to everything else is not the same thing as saying everything causes us to will or act or choose or whatever.

Steve said:
...The idea of freedom that Pirsig talked about (DQ) is a resolution of the dilemma that is in no way an affirmation of either horn of the free will versus fatalism Platypus. It is a denial of both by denying the underlying assumptions of the question. He says not merely that free will is bunk but that the self that is supposed to be the locus of this "free will" is a fiction. Lila doesn't have values. Values have Lila.

dmb says:
Okay, now we're talking about the same thing.
But I don't think free will is bunk so much as the metaphysical entity behind it. Same with the notion that reality itself is a series of causes and effects. That's very metaphysical too.  These are the two basic metaphysical substances in subject-object metaphysics, of course. But, as you almost point out, the MOQ does not dispute the idea that freedom and constraint are real. The MOQ says DQ is the quality of freedom and sq is the quality of order. Without DQ nothing could grow or change and without sq nothing can last. Without static quality, DQ degenerates into chaos. With DQ, static quality would fossilize or die of old age. And it takes a living being to negotiate that balance. In that sense, freedom takes a lot of discipline. Static patterns don't determine what we will do but they limit what we can do. 

Steve said:
[Einstein believing in Spinoza's God]   ...doesn't have anything to do with his argument about free will, either.

dmb says:
It shows that he subscribed to a metaphysics of substance. This is what led him to say "God does not play dice". In the MOQ, there is no God and he does nothing but play dice. ;-)

Steve said:
Einstein is noting that the feeling of willing a given action is something that everyone experiences, but in what sense does it mean anything to say this willing is free? ...Is claiming to have free will saying that our acts are frequently accompanied by the feeling of having willed the act? If so, no one should disagree, but what more could someone possibly mean is unclear to Einstein who was quoting Schopenhauer (who had the same difficulties with the notion as Harris and I) since we don't have the feeling of willing our will.


dmb says:
The feeling of willing our will? I just can't make any sense of that notion. Why does this second will keep popping up? I don't understand why anyone would look for some other will in addition to or behind the will as it's experienced by ordinary people every day. If we make choices all the time, on what basis do we say that free will is bunk? In what sense is that experience not real? Like I said, this is an empirical question with an empirical answer.
And it's not just a feeling of freedom that we experience. It's also a practical matter, where we live with the consequences of those choices, have feelings of regret or satisfaction as they play out.