Posted by Ouros  4/12/2018 3:14 am | #1 |
I have been thinking lately about this subject.
The rollback objection is this:
Let's imagine Luke, in the morning, deciding what he will drink: coffee or tea.
Now, when he will have choose, God will reset the world just before Luke's choice. He do that again and again, until we get probabilities of what Luke will do: let's say something like 40% of time he take tea, and 60% coffee.
So, given that, two questions:
- How do we make sense of those probabilities? They can't be something external to Luke, or it would mean that he is not free. But if they are internals, how can we explain their precise values?
- How can we know them? If we want a science of human behavior, it seems we need to know thoses probabilities, so we can predict human behavior. (Given that we can predict what our neighbort would do in some situation, I would say that we can.)
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Posted by seigneur 4/12/2018 4:04 am | #2 |
A bunch of questions:
- What is the rollback objection objecting to? To (libertarian) free will?
- When God resets the world, does Luke get reset also?
- A predictive science of human behavior would obviously reduce free will to a mockery, so why should the science of human behavior (strictly) predict human behavior, instead of accounting for free will?
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Posted by Ouros 4/12/2018 4:12 am | #3 |
- Yes, it's an objection to libertarian free will. Basically, the intuition is that even indeterminism is a threat to libertarian free will. If we say that the probabilities are the cause for Luke's choice, then it seems that he isn't free anymore.
- After God's action, the situation is exactly as it was juste before the choice. So Luke doesn't know that he got reseted.
- Well, I think that free will doesn't mean unpredactibility. If that was the case, human wouldn't choose freely very often.
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Posted by seigneur 4/12/2018 7:42 am | #4 |
Ouros wrote:
If we say that the probabilities are the cause for Luke's choice, then it seems that he isn't free anymore.
Probabilities are the cause of choices? How does this work?
In my universe, people choose, and the distribution of choices equals probability distribution, i.e. the causality is the other way round.
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Posted by Miguel 4/12/2018 12:09 pm | #5 |
The probabilities don't cause the action, it's just the distribution of choices. The rollback objection is pretty weak I think, it's like just imagining different possible worlds in which the person chose differently. Yes, and? The person was still free to choose whatever she wanted, and it may be possible that she would've acted differently in one of the rollbacks, that's just what a choice is: it's motivated by a reason but ultimately caused by the agent who could've chosen differently.
In this sense, free will does give us some unpredictability. You can never really be sure what someone will do. But that doesn't mean we can't have a science of human behavior (or something close to that), because free actions are motivated, they are explicable by motivations and purposes (which are not entailing, however) and by knowing someone's personality we can reasonably predict how they act (or at least how they won't act) in a number of a situations. And knowing that most people are balanced and typically share some basic similar values, we can also extend that more generally. I know a friend of mine won't murder me if I jokingly insult him, even though in principle he could do that, as he's free.
Just goes on to show how mechanicism leads to false problems. Because of the mechanistic obsession of science in the natural world, we sometimes find it difficult to understand causal acts which are neither determined nor random/probabilistic, but that's precisely what free actions are: caused by the agent and explained by different motivations, but neither deterministic nor random. It's you.
Last edited by Miguel (4/12/2018 12:13 pm)
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Posted by Ouros 4/12/2018 12:53 pm | #6 |
Well, I agree with what both of you said.
But then we get back to my original question: how can we explain the precise values the probabilities have? It seems that there is a gap here: we get something arbitrary and quantitative, from something rationnal and qualitative.
Another thing that I think strange with this suggestion, it is that it seems to imply that basic particles are also free. Or, would you say that free will require consciousness, or something like that? If that's the case, reflexes and other unconsciouss actions wouldn't be free?
Last edited by Ouros (4/12/2018 12:55 pm)
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Posted by Greg 4/12/2018 1:55 pm | #7 |
The rollback objection is this:
Let's imagine Luke, in the morning, deciding what he will drink: coffee or tea.
Now, when he will have choose, God will reset the world just before Luke's choice. He do that again and again, until we get probabilities of what Luke will do: let's say something like 40% of time he take tea, and 60% coffee.
There need be no such probabilities. It may be that the proportion of coffee selections does not converge upon any number, as the number of resets goes to infinity. It could even be that Luke chooses coffee every time, and yet was not determined to. (There's often a supposition that there is some clear way of translating between possibilities and probabilities, as though the probability of A is going to be analyzed as the proportion of possible worlds in which A. But that is of course not the case. If you have a probabilistic model in which the only two options are A and B, and you stipulate that the probability of A is 60%, then you still only have two possible worlds, in one of which A.)
The libertarian will say that, when Luke chooses coffee, his choice explains that he has the coffee. If that is admitted, at least for the sake of argument, then we don't obviously need anything further than Luke's choices to explain the pattern of Luke's coffee selection in the resets.
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Posted by Miguel 4/12/2018 4:01 pm | #8 |
Well, I agree with what both of you said.
But then we get back to my original question: how can we explain the precise values the probabilities have? It seems that there is a gap here: we get something arbitrary and quantitative, from something rationnal and qualitative.
Another thing that I think strange with this suggestion, it is that it seems to imply that basic particles are also free. Or, would you say that free will require consciousness, or something like that? If that's the case, reflexes and other unconsciouss actions wouldn't be free?
I'll just add thst of course basic particles are not free. I explicitly and specifically said that free will is neither deterministic nor random or probabilistic. It is the mechanistic way of looking at thigs that cannot conceive of something whose actions are not reducible to either deterministic or probabilistic mechanistic events. The free action is motivated and explicable by purposes, but these purposes do not determine the action, even though it attracts the will. But ultimately the action can only be carried out if the rational will consents and initiates the action. Thus we may say it is improbable my friend will murder me because I have a good idea of his thoughts and motivations, even though these motivations do not force the action. It is not merely a probabilistic chance process either, because while the purposes motivate the will (and some motivate it more than others -- you may feel a stronger urge to eat chocolate than to fast) they do not determine it one way or another as it needs the agent initiative which, though responding to the inclinations of his will, is not determined by them, and doesn't pick any sides based on a coin toss. Just pay attention to your own action.
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Posted by FrenchySkepticalCatholic 4/13/2018 1:42 pm | #9 |
The rollback objection is this:
Let's imagine Luke, in the morning, deciding what he will drink: coffee or tea.
Now, when he will have choose, God will reset the world just before Luke's choice. He do that again and again, until we get probabilities of what Luke will do: let's say something like 40% of time he take tea, and 60% coffee.
Why do you assume that the probabilities are not 100%/0%? I'm confused.
If a choice is always the same because the agent is willingly and freely choosing the choice, how is this possible?
Are you assuming that a choice must be free if it's different in another possible world?
The fact that the other world is possible doesn't mean it actually exists in another reality, even if God resets the world. For "I could have choosen otherwise" is not equal to "if you rewind the world enough times, I will have choosen otherwise".
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Posted by Ouros 4/22/2018 8:02 am | #10 |
Then, two questions from what you've all said:
1) Can we really say that an agent is free when he do an action necessarily, even purposely, by an infinite good, say? ( I don't see in what other case an agent would "freely" AND necessarily do something.)
I would say that it's because X is an agent that in a case of an infinite good, he will necessarily choose the infinite good. But the fact that X is an agent isn't determinate by the agent himself, obviously. That would be meaningless.
2) Would you say that it's the motivation that fix the possible probabilities? If that's the case, then it seems that the agent isn't free, because they are external to him and fix what he could do.
If not, then how can we know what an agent would do, even without certainty? There would be nothing to observe, to measure.
