Love, love, love when an article I'm writing challenges me.
I think I've rewritten this last one a few times now - but always for the better. It worries me when writers just look for evidence to serve their initial arguments; when I come across information that challenges a premise, I love nothing more than to sit with it, and see what more cohesive argument I can build that takes it into account as well.
Now to take a quick walk to percolate before final revisions. đź‘Ś đź’«
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Does baseball exist? It’s nowhere to be found in the Standard Model of particle physics. But any definition of “exist” that can’t find room for baseball seems overly narrow to me. It’s true that we could take any particular example of a baseball game and choose to describe it by listing the exact quantum state of each elementary particle contained in the players and the bat and ball and the field etc. But why in the world would anyone think that is a good idea?
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The concept of baseball is emergent rather than fundamental, but it’s no less real for all of that.
Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,”
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I’m not saying anything original — this is a well-known position, probably the majority view among contemporary philosophers. It’s a school of thought called compatibilism:
Oh, I'm very familiar with compatibilism. I don't agree with it (it relies on a divide between external & internal that I consider arbitrary and often deeply removed from systemic formative factors - thus why I talk about external contexts acting upon habituated biochemistry, & draw from Robert Sapolsky's BEHAVE for the evolutionary behaviouralism behind my views), but it's a neat conversation!
Did I miss a preceding post? What brought you to thinking about "free will" today?
Yes the rub of compatibilism, is exactly where is the line drawn. At what exact point does the "emergent" behavior swamp out the "fundamental."
I'm having trouble seeing let alone responding to your toots directly, Matthew, but there's no contradiction in the challenge for me. I've been habituated to react a certain way to dissenting or otherwise complicating data, and to be interested in onboarding it to adjust my overall conclusions. Plenty of people have been habituated to ignore or put aside evidence that doesn't hold with their pre-existing views. No crisis of free will at all; I'm just playing out my programming.
I can see your replies in your profile, but not on my thread. Glitches are fascinating.
Ah, I grok you now! That's a critical question (how we respond to new intel), & relates to one of my deepest concerns about most social media: how it's invited us to see dissent as "attack". Holding ideas in tension is vital for democratic discourse, but "cancel culture" panic and generalized shame at being "wrong" has made it more difficult for folks to respond constructively to dissent.
Ah! Thanks for link. My thread views are doing funny things.
No, I don't believe in free will. I've written on this a few times, and the upcoming novel plays with related concepts as an AI narrates a story about biological beings. For me, our reactions to new stimuli ("choices") are probabilistically shaped by habituated biochemistry.
Dan Dennett was reluctant to give up free will, fearing that we would act badly if we didn't believe we had it. I find that to be a silly fear.