Q&A: Free Will
Free Will
Question
I listened to your series about free will (about twenty hours in total). Impressive. But here’s the thing: right at the outset you accepted a foolish assumption of the determinists, namely that given a hypothetical situation in which the system can be recreated, a being with free will is capable of choosing differently.
But look: a person who changes his mode of behavior in similar situations is perceived as unstable, as someone who is “not settled within himself,” and is ridiculed at best, and under certain conditions is even suspected of being slippery and opportunistic. Why? A person with choice—that is, someone acting rationally, not whimsically or randomly or under compulsion—is expected to behave in the same ways in similar situations, all the more so, and all the more all the more so, in a completely identical situation. Ah! Does that sound like compelled behavior? Good for whoever thinks so, but a decent, healthy, rational person is supposed to act identically in an identical situation in the absence of new data.
So by what would you test the freedom of choice? That is a different question, programmatic in essence.
Answer
I saw that, yes.
You have two mistakes: 1. I am not dealing with a person’s stability and the question whether it is proper to change positions, but with the question whether it is possible. 2. In value questions, as opposed to factual ones, the data do not determine the decision. Values determine it, and values can be changed. A person repents, goes secular, converts to Christianity, becomes right-wing, left-wing, etc.
Discussion on Answer
Of course human beings change their minds, become religious / go secular. Among rational creatures this happens given at least one new piece of data, at the very least some additional time for deliberation. The thought experiment that the determinists forced on the libertarians, and they fell into the trap, speaks about “recreating a system,” meaning all the data are identical. There is no reason for a rational creature to change his mind, unless in your view free will has an element of randomness.
Another falsehood that the determinists “sold” and the libertarians “bought” is the claim that both views can describe a person’s outward behavior with equal success. False. Deterministic thinking is reactive by definition. Reactive thinking cannot create anything genuinely new. Hence: 1. Either human beings have never created anything genuinely new. 2. Or what is genuinely new that human beings have created is creation ex nihilo. Determinism was created to escape the ex nihilo of free will and fell into the ex nihilo of creativity.
To uphold what was said: “The success of a bluff lies not in its sophistication but in its brazenness.”
You are ignoring both what I write and are also raising absurd and self-contradictory arguments. It’s time to part ways. I’m done.
And if you’re asking how this could be tested empirically, of course it can’t. And that too has nothing whatsoever to do with stability.