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Interesting subject.
I’ve heard Dennett speak about this and I’m still not sure I fully understand his position, but isn’t it just a version of the classical materialist ‘agency’-centered definition of free will?
Free will represents the material, social or other bounds of behavior that inhibit the execution of the brain’s probabilistic output. If I generate an LLM output and then reply ‘sorry, that’s not what I want, you need to give me another answer’, this is the digital equivalent of trying to exercise my free will to break into the White House and being stopped by the police. This isn’t a new conception of what freedom means, it’s the classical conception of liberty. The more ‘liberal’ (ie ‘free’) we are, the fewer restrictions we impose on biologically willed behavior. Sometimes these are political/social, sometimes these are raw material realities, like someone in a wheelchair being unable to exercise their desire to stand up and walk. Free will is the ability to execute the output of our language model in the material world. The initial output itself (desire) is unaffected. (This is obvious when we bring up, say, why we don’t have the ‘free will’ to fly like a bird; we are bounded by material reality; free will is execution, not thought.)
There are a huge number of mysteries still in the universe, including forces and existences likely beyond our comprehension. But I am confident they all exist within some kind of material reality, even if it is one we don’t (and possibly can’t) understand. The materialist conception doesn’t even necessarily prohibit some kind of spiritual existence, a soul of some form, a God, an all-loving, all-knowing being beyond and above us (the simulation hypothesis, which would allow for such a God, can be framed in materialist terms). It doesn’t prohibit heaven or reincarnation (all possible with sufficiently advanced technology/magic). It just says that if they’re real they’re going to be systems, they’re going to function in a predictable way, they’re going to be based on laws of the universe whether we understand them yet or not. It is unclear to me why even some form of Mahayana Buddhism, for example, would be incompatible with classical materialism in this context.
I guess it really depends on your definition of ‘material’, because the standard conceptions of these things (like the conception of God’s omnipotence and omniscience) are very much contrary to the idea of material existence in terms of things like, ‘these are actual objects composed of materially smaller parts put together in some larger material space’. If you conceptualize materialism as just, ‘this is a paradigm that says that things will function in a way predictably subject to the axioms of existence at large’ then that’s not really something rejected by even staunch anti-materialist theists, as they see the entirety of the universe (including the things in the universe that aren’t ‘physical’) as predictably and ultimately subordinate to God’s will, and if you have knowledge of God’s will through viewing God’s essence (in terms of the Beatific vision) then you also have total knowledge about the past and future as far as a human could possibly know. In fact, the idea in Catholicism that perfect knowledge of God, who is the embodiment of all possible laws of being as God is Being, in fact makes you God (as that communicates to you the divine essence).
And obviously the classical theistic idea of ‘God’ is also much different from the post-humans attempting to capture us in ancestor simulations. They’re still, to our knowledge, ‘finite’ in terms of causality, space, time, extension, dimension, etc. If not, then they wouldn’t need to ‘simulate’ us to begin with, as there would be no distinction between their knowledge in simulating us or not simulating us, or distinctions in their indexical knowledge from ‘t1 where 1 is the second before the simulation occurs’ and ‘t2 where 2 is the second when the simulation starts’. A truly all-knowing and all-powerful deity wouldn’t be limited by computation (or hypercomputation) and would be more analogous to like, a metaphysical singularity rather than anything else. This is also quite similar to the Buddhist idea of non-duality which is pretty antithetical to materialism, to the point where basic classical laws of logic like the law of excluded middle seem to break down once you try to predicate the non-existence of the ‘self’. If I am mischaracterizing your conceptualization of materialism then I’m sorry, because I’m taking this from a very rudimentary idea of materialism as effectively conceiving reality as just being totally concrete sums of things out together in causally connected ‘space’. The traditional Aristotelian ideas of angels as being just forms beyond space and time and God as being pure actuality, as well as the Dharmic ideals of the ultimate non-existence of selfhood and the univocality of nirvana and samsara. The investments of these religious ideals are much bigger than anything extensions of materialism can supply, even the ‘out-there’ materialism of transhumanists where you can just recreate everyone who ever lived in an ancestor simulation and call that ‘heaven’, even as someone like Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t consider that as the same thing as transcending material reality, causality, and spatiality at all in union with the ultimate metaphysical principle at all.
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You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.
However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.
I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.
There's nothing to grasp. Materialistic free will, AKA soft determinism, is an extremely convoluted and complex (and ultimately sophistic) web of reasoning created by very intelligent people who found the (obvious) conclusions of hard determinism to be repugnant, and so use their brainpower to maneuver around it as best as they can. They do this mostly by fiddling with definitions until they have bamboozled themselves into believing that they have proved something. Once you have accepted determinism, free will cannot exist, not in the way one usually thinks of it. The only way you can get around the free will problem is to:
Reject determinism - I have never seen anyone do that successfully.
Posit the existence of a soul which is outside the currently understood laws of the universe - and there are too many commonsense objections to this that I cannot resolve.
Soft materialism is in a category of beliefs that I have labelled as 'so absurd only the very clever could convince themselves to believe it'
I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history, but rather refer to much more mundane limitations in the material world on individual human will.
The animal whose desired path is blocked before them has no free will. The animal whose desired path is unblocked has free will. This is an entirely workable and normal conception of what ‘free’ means. Cf “you are free to go”, cf the constitution etc etc.
Can you execute a given desire? If you can, then in that instance you have free will for that task. No complex argument around determinism or the process by which you came to your desire is necessary.
What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?
It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.
And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.
This is a really interesting question. Is determinism falsifiable? that kind of feels like asking if trigonometry is falsifiable. Determinism is more theorem than theory, an exercise in hard logic rather than empirical data gathering. I think almost everyone would agree that the universe moves according to causality; that A leads to B leads to C, in a reliable, repeatable, (one might say deterministic) way. Determinism is merely the philosophy that you can extend that thinking from 'every part of the universe excepting the human brain' to 'every part of the universe'. In a dead universe, we would all be determinists.
I mean, what does the null hypothesis for determinism even look like? That causality is not true? That today we might mix 8 grams of oxygen and 1 gram of hydrogen and receive 9 grams of water, but tomorrow we might receive 15 grams? or that yesterday's water might spontaneously dissociate back into hydrogen and oxygen? Or perhaps into neon and feathers? Empiricism, the entire scientific method, is based on the truth of causality. If causality is false we have to throw pretty much everything out and just accept that we're all living in Plato's cave.
Or perhaps the null hypothesis is that causality is true everywhere... except the human brain. Not much of a null hypothesis, is it? Really feels like, if that's your theory, then determinism ought to be your null hypothesis.
Materialists generally claim that their viewpoint is simply the default, that there's zero evidence for anything non-Materialistic, and so they simply follow where the evidence leads.
Determinism is adopted because non-deterministic free will would pretty clearly break Materialism.
The problem is that there is precisely zero actual evidence for determinism itself, and there is an absolutely staggering amount of evidence for non-deterministic free will.
Every human has an entire lifetime's experience of making choices freely. No one has ever demonstrated actual deterministic control over the human will, in any way, to any degree, ever, despite repeated claims that such control was trivial and extremely-well-resourced and -motivated efforts to implement or demonstrate such control.
Despite this, Materialists routinely reject all evidence of free will on the basis of a determinism-of-the-gaps, having retreated from "we can directly, repeatably and arbitrarily engineer human will to our preferences" to "whatever you do was what you were always going to do, even if we can't predict it or control it or test this claim in any way". Determinism has been tested, and has failed all tests. After decades of steady retreat, the current version makes no testable predictions at all, but is precisely a statement of blind faith.
Observable free will is significant evidence that Materialism is wrong. But no human belief arises deterministically, and every human belief is chosen through an act of the will. Materialists choose to adopt Materialism as an axiom; evidence of free will conflicts with that axiom, and so it is discarded, not because it is disproven, but because weighting and filtering evidence is the purpose of axioms. Materialists know that free will can't exist, because if it existed it would disprove Materialism, and their adherence to Materialism is pre-evidential.
...And all the above is not an error to be corrected on the part of the Materialists, but rather a demonstration of how human reason actually operates. All beliefs are chosen. No one has ever or will ever be "forced" to adopt a belief, by evidence or by coercion or by any other mechanism. Some beliefs require more maintenance and effort than others, and some beliefs pay off more than others, but it all comes down to choice.
That we do not have access to a complete understanding of reality, and that the unknown unknowns are significant and must be accounted for.
Empiricism and the entire scientific method are not universal solvents. They have limits, and those limits should be understood and respected, not papered over, ignored or lied about. The later solutions have caused great harm and misery, and that harm and misery has never been adequately answered for.
Why? Within its limits, science and causality work quite well. Engineering is delightful. But my appreciation of air conditioning and microcircuitry and repeating firearms does not obligate me to ignore significant evidence that free will exists. I am comfortable saying that inert matter seems to run on strict causality, while the human mind does not appear to do so. This costs me nothing, requires me to paper over nothing, offered significant predictive value back when Determinism was still making falsifiable predictions, and seems to me to offer decent predictive value on the currently-untestable predictions that Determinism still allows itself.
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I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.
But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.
Is it, in fact, a redefinition at all? It seems to me that ‘free will’ is really about the output space for whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level. Anti-soft-materialism arguments struggle to explain what ‘classical’ free will that excludes it is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, it is possible to suggest at the (largely semantic, of course) difference between ‘hard determinism’ and the ‘soft materialist’ positions. Consider a criminal enterprise. Someone gets arrested, volunteers everything to the cops, gets released on bail, his co-conspirators say “what the fuck man, you have free will bro, why did you tell them that?”. The point being made isn’t a complex analysis of the internal process in the mind that occurs during reasoning, it’s a straightforward exhortation that this agent was not being externally forced to do something that it did anyway. It’s clear that it refers to a way of discussing the bounds of our behavior in a material reality, not an immaterial spiritual concept, which is why we don’t talk about having “free will” to regrow a leg or jump to the moon.
Defining free will as something that happens at the intersection of deterministic machines with good but imperfect predictive ability, material reality, and the forward passage of time fits with the way the term is generally used.
I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.
I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.
I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:
In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.
FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.
But you're always going to reject the same ones and chose the one you were always going to, based on everything that has come before that decision point. You will always make the same choice given the same set of conditions. There is no such thing as "free will".
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What would qualify as success?
Any logically coherent non-determinist explanation that meshes with our understanding of the universe, or even with not-yet understood parts of the universe.
I think you could do this with appeal to divinity, as per point 2 - 'god made us and wanted us to have free will so therefore we have free will' is logically difficult to refute - but as I said I think this runs into common sense objections, e.g. if we have souls then how can it be that brain damage can change our personality? Plus, most people I have had this debate with are atheists and so not able to lean on that.
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Although the UFO community has always been strongly associated with woo, there's nothing in principle that says that aliens have to have a supernatural component. Modulo concerns about FTL travel, there's nothing that says there can't exist a naturally occurring biological species on another planet that develops means of space travel, because we already have an example that proves that that sort of thing can happen, namely us. So I always found it strange and unfair that aliens are automatically put in the same category as ghosts and God (and I felt this way long before I became obsessed with this topic last summer).
The kicker isn’t that they exist, which (I think) is rather socially acceptable. It’s that they are responsible for specific phenomena outside our current understanding. Oh, and those phenomena don’t appear more often as technology improves. Put like that, the woo category starts to look more appropriate.
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From my point of view, with the evidence we have on hand, the likelihood of God’s existence far surpasses that of aliens. But the UFO thing is a great example of mainstream culture reasoning based more on emotions and consensus than actual logic or reasoning.
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I agree that this is frustrating. But the 'core' of this position, which I think is much more common and often very deliberately confused for the bailey you cite, is that we probably shouldn't act as if big foot, ghosts and aliens definitely exist just because they might, theoretically, exist.
Yeah this debate tends to get messy. I threw Bigfoot in there for variety, I’m not a cryptozoologist by any stretch of the imagination.
What I’m trying to get across is that while most default modern thinkers believe they have achieved a hyper rationalist, extremely logical and bulletproof worldview based on rigorous scientific inquiry, they in fact have not. And don’t even question the core assumptions of their worldview, just dismiss challenges a priori.
To your credit it sounds like you allow a much larger amount of leeway for possibility than most. I’d be curious if you’ve tried prayer or any other personal or ‘experiential’ practice aimed at seeking direct contact with the divine or spiritual world?
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