Q&A: Two Questions About Free Will
Two Questions About Free Will
Question
A. In the debate with Aviv, you said that determinism cannot be refuted in practice. But I thought of a scientific experiment that, in my opinion, could refute it:
There is a British man named Clive Wearing who, because of an illness, remembers nothing and also cannot form any new memories at all. That is, he can remember the last 30 seconds and no event that ever happened to him beyond that (which is why every few seconds he is sure he has just woken up from a 30-year coma). His Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing
You could place him many times in exactly the same external conditions, have him make a “choice,” and see whether he always chooses exactly the same thing.
B. Regarding intuition for moral judgment—in the debate you agreed that it developed evolutionarily, but you still said that it represents something real in reality, that there really is justification for moral judgment, and from that it follows that there is free choice. Why say that? That intuition would certainly also have developed in a world without free will and without justification for moral judgment. So how can you infer free will from its existence?
Answer
The two situations are never completely identical, and neither is his brain structure, even if he has no conscious memories.
I do not infer this from its existence, but from the feeling that accompanies its existence. Just as I cannot infer from sensory appearances that there really is a world outside, and yet that is what I think. There is no way to answer skeptical doubts, and therefore there is no point in engaging with them. Either you are a skeptic or you aren’t.
Discussion on Answer
You are conflating thinking and deliberation with a value-based decision.
As for your actual claim, I didn’t understand what use it is. Indeed, there is nothing new there. So don’t be sorry—you didn’t do anything. 🙂
“You are conflating thinking and deliberation with a value-based decision.” Fine. But why does that matter? I was talking about the possibility of describing all creative human thought by means of a deterministic process. So are you claiming that in the ideas of the relativity of time or the uncertainty principle there is nothing essentially new? I can make do with this screenshot in the video “The Bluff of Determinism in Two Minutes” that I’m making. But I would have preferred a more serious and less deterministic response.
I noticed that in all debates of the free will versus determinism type, the discussion always revolves around whether choice is possible, and it seems to remain undecidable. I suggest trying the opposite direction. Is deterministic thought even possible? Suppose every decision a person makes is derived from various past data points (genetic, cultural, experiential, etc.), which by means of some algorithm are translated into a decision accompanied by the illusory feeling (a “cover version”) that this decision was made not because of those data points but for the sake of something else.
What can we say about such a model? Suppose that is the situation. If so, then all of a person’s decisions are always a reaction to some interpretation of past data. If so, then in no human decision can there be anything essentially new. Which is not supported by simple observation of reality. Sorry that I so easily presented you with such fertile ground.