Does Evolution Have An Objective?

Compatabilists might argue that choice is really the result of subjective beings presented with imperfect information. Dan Dennet argues this quite well. From wiki:

quote:

---

Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make decisions without duress, as opposed to an impossible and unnecessary freedom from causality itself. To clarify this distinction, he coins the term 'evitability' as the opposite of 'inevitability', defining it as the ability of an agent to anticipate likely consequences and act to avoid undesirable ones.

---

Because you still have the choice, even if the choice you make is predetermined. The thing that is an illusion is the feeling that you could have chosen differently.

Relevance is a contextual issue. It is relevant to me if I choose to murder my partner or choose not to. It is irrelevant to the cosmos, which has no considerations of relevancy.

But if that's all we have, then the word 'choice' is a perfectly valid word to describe it. The only alternative is to abandon the word 'choice' (since nothing has choice) and use a new word 'schmoice', which has all the same colloquial meanings but has some philosophical nuance to it. This seems less ideal than just acknowledging that choice refers to something different than we feel it means.

Look at the complex entanglement you get when you try to enforce incoherent ideas into common language!It's simple. When there are multiple options for an agent, and that agent must decide between them, doing so is called choosing and what they choose is their choice.It doesn't matter that it 'seems to you' to be a non-deterministic process. Because they point to the same thing, so its pointless inventing a new word. There is the objective fact of choice, the thing we point to when we are discussing choice. Then there is 'what it seems to us to be' when we choose. Just because some people have difficulty discriminating between the two doesn't mean we should abandon a perfectly good word.

I'm not suggesting that we are not agents that are free to exert conscious will. I'm just saying that the exertion of free will is as determined as anything else. 'Free' can't mean 'without any constraints, uninfluenced by anything', since that would just be pure randomness which is clearly not how we make decisions which we would colloquially call 'acts of free will'. We are influenced by our memories, personality and so on. Our memories, moral codes, personality and so on all go into determining how we will 'freely choose' something. Is there something that can cause us to make a decision that doesn't go towards 'determining' our decision? That sounds like nonsense to me. Not for the purposes of identifying the thing in question. We can point to thunderstorms even if we don't understand that they are entirely deterministic systems. We can identify that we choose things, and that we are capable of simulating a world to predict the possible consequences of our actions and therefore make those choices with awareness of said consequences. They both point to a real thing, but different people have different conceptions of the explanation behind that real thing, and what that real thing implies etc. Not at all. Compatabilism has a long history, it's just better informed by recent research now.I am not really all that compatablilist. I hold that 'free will' is an incoherent idea, and if it were real it wouldn't be something that is to be desired and wouldn't give us any basis for moral responsibility. If we are asserting that 'free will' exists at all (for example, if we are to take 'free will' as trivially readily apparent) then I agree with the compatabilist's notion. I think calling it 'free will' can be misleading, but sometimes people do insist that disputing that we have 'free will' is the height of ludicrousness, so it can be necessary; their version of free will is at least coherent and evidenced.Dan Dennett likens consciousness to a magic trick. We are amazed when we see a magic trick, the seemingly impossible in front of our eyes. Some people are disappointed to learn that a cool magic act was just a cheap trick of misdirection or the like rather than a real thaumaturgical act. Free will is a bit like that, the thing we all agree we have, we have - but it isn't the magic we initially thought.So sure, sawing a woman in half isn't real magic (thaumaturgy), it's just magic that's actually real (illusion). This can be confusing, but there you go; just because sawing a woman in half is just the illusion of thaumaturgy doesn't mean we should therefore avoid using the word magic to describe it.

I haven't seen anyone denying that there is a difference in conception between an incoherent view of something experienced in nature and a coherent view of something experienced in nature. But if someone has made this argument, it was not me. Indeed, my position is that the common notions about these subjects are filled with 'magic'. Right, but it is not a trick that is magic is it? Nor is it part of a show that is magic. It is the illusion of magic, but is still called 'magic' colloquially and technically (eg., The Magic Circle).The real point is that these illusions are the only magic that is real. REAL Magic is not real! As Lee Siegel wrote

quote:

---

I’m writing a book on magic, I explain, and I’m asked, Real magic? By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. No, I answer: Conjuring tricks, not real magic. Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is
not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

---

As I said: If you want to ask 'do we have free will' and you mean 'do we have some Cartesian actor that is non-deterministic or non-causal' then my answer would be 'no'. If, instead you want to say 'That we have freewill is apparent, I can freely choose to eat this banana or not', then I would concur that that thing exists but that the choices being made are deterministic, which may seem counterintuitive - but so what?Unfortunately, since the concept of free will is generally expressed incoherently it is difficult to know what any given person actually means when it is said. I'm not surprised that people object to it, but then people object to the notion that the apparently conscious design of life is just an illusion of design, so why would I be surprised?Sometimes, science or philosophy forces us to confront the fact that our common intuitive notions are erroneous or entirely backwards. I was looking for a pithy quote about this and came upon this blog entry about shifting folk intuitions about free will - I didn't read it, but a skim looked vaguely interesting and relevant. The quote I was looking for is the source of the name of the blog:

quote:

---

Yes, we have a soul, but it's made up of lots of tiny robots. --
Giulio Giorello {translated}

---

And, switching to the topic of the thread - even Richard Dawkins has caught himself talking about biology and evolution in teleological terms. Perhaps saying something like 'the genes want to replicate'. We just have to learn to live with this tendency of ours, it appears.

Of course. But then, those people are then talking about something for which there is no evidence of its existence, dontcha think?

And we can make choices by these meanings, but whether we have freewill or not depends on what the individual in question means when they say it, which varies from person to person. No - compatabilists are quite clear that their version of freewill is different than the common intuition, but that they are pointing to the same experiences.^* But likewise, science and philosophy can be used to change the common conceptual use. Consider that in colloquial 'I weigh 60kg' - but scientifically I actually weigh 600N and have a mass of 60kg. I've not disputed this. Just that the thing we call freewill, that sense we have of free will, is compatible with determinism. And they can be, but it means rethinking what freewill actually is - rather than what philosophers of old, and maybe our personal intuitions tell us it is. The word 'choice' does not imply non-causality and it would be foolish to insist it does. Freewill is another issue, and compatabilists do specify what it is they mean when they say it is compatible with determinism.

---

^* or I should say that they suggest the solution to the problem of freewill can be resolved with an understanding of freewill that is deterministic while retaining moral responsibility.abe: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a good overview:

quote:

---

If we are to understand compatibilism as a solution to the free will problem, it would be useful to have some sense of the problem itself. Unfortunately, just as there is no single notion of free will that unifies all of the work philosophers have devoted to it, there is no single specification of the free will problem. In fact, it might be more helpful to think in terms of a range of problems. Regardless, any formulation of the problem can be understood as arising from a troubling sort of entanglement of our concepts, an entanglement that seems to lead to contradictions, and thus that cries out for a sort of disentangling. In this regard, the free will problem is a classic philosophical problem; we are, it seems, committed in our thought and talk to a set of concepts which, under scrutiny, appear to comprise a mutually inconsistent set. Formally, to settle the problemto disentangle the setwe must either reject some concepts, or instead, we must demonstrate that the set is indeed consistent despite its appearance to the contrary

---

Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

And the straightforward intuitive notion of motion is that things don't keep going until they are stopped by something, that the earth is flat and the sky is a dome. See cognitivie science, neuroscience etc etc.Can you point to any similar 'soul science'?

Right, that it doesn't seem compatible with determinism, and yet must be deterministic if it is to make coherent sense is the problem of freewill. Something has to give if we're going to solve it, right? What it demonstrates is that people not philosophically or scientifically savvy aren't really sure what they mean when they use those terms and they just 'feel' something and are disappointed that science says they're feelings aren't quite the way things actually are. Well, perhaps you should think of it was better defining something that was previously ill-defined. The non-compatabilists have to give a definition of freewill that results in moral responsibility and I can almost guarantee that their notion of freewill will be at odds with our intuitions about how we make moral choices.That's the problem of freewill: If it is to be solved, something has to give. Becuase the capacity for moral responsibility is called 'freewill' and that's what the word points to. It would be a terrible solution to the problem of free will if it didn't propose to solve the problem of free will, right?

To appeal to Dennett again try this thought-pump.You are playing golf and are putting 18ft. You miss and then make the claim "I could have got that" and I enquire "What do you mean?', you might suggest that if the circumstances were repeated 10 times, you'd make it 9 times out of ten. Of course, the counter argument is that repetition of the exact same circumstances is impossible.We exist in a certain world. But from our limited knowledge perspective there are many possible worlds and we're not sure which one we are in. If we fall down a lift shaft, we still try to avoid dying because we might be in the world where survival is possible.This is where free choice comes in - it is merely an artifact of us being unsure which world we are in. Are we in a world where we choose to take the money in the wallet, or in a world where we hand the wallet in? We don't know until we do one of them, so it seems that it wasn't determined until we 'chose' it.There are therefore 'genuine possible alternatives' from the perspective of the chooser, even if there is only one possible outcome in actuality. There is a disconnect from what it feels like to be a chooser and from what it actually is to make a choice.The genuine possible alternatives are the other 'possible worlds' that you can't be sure in which one you exist.Which is mind-bending, and I can see how some people would be disappointed with it. A bit like people that are annoyed when they learn how a trick was done. Because that's kind of 'the problem of freewill', or at least one understanding of it. Agreed, it should be completely reconsidered. But reconsidering what it means to have moral responsibility doesn't mean throwing away moral responsibility. Trying to do this successfully is the problem of freewill. There is a real alternative. We punish people so as to make sure the payoffs for committing 'moral crimes' are balanced so that the optimal strategy is as close to 'do not commit moral crimes' as possible. This leaves us open to considering non-punitive methods of maximising adherance to the cooperative ideal.The alternative that we are agents that are free of deterministic causes - then we can't blame them for doing something...their actions were just essentially random and the threat of punishment is non-deterministically linked with the choice to commit the crime. I have no idea what this means. Dan Dennett didn't invent compatabilism, but he has popularised it. If our actions are determined by our perceptions of the world we live in, we want the perception to be that commiting a crime will result in punishment so that agents living with such a perception with deterministically not commit moral crimes.

Probabilistically deterministic Yes. I'll run with Stanford's theory-neutral definition: the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the fullest manner necessary for moral responsibilityBut I hold that this is really only a working definition and a final definition would require a lot of philosophical heavy lifting. That hinges on the word 'capacity'. From a subjective point of view eating beef and broccoli was a possible world^*, and there is insufficient information available to the subject to rule it out until a certain point (called a final decision). Further information can be found At this encyclopedia of philosophy entry

---

^* We exist in a certain world where our actions are determined by our history. Subjectively, we do not know which of a set of possible worlds we inhabit. Occasionally we will make a decision that is made in awareness of their consequences. There are possible worlds in which we make alternative decisions. This is a 'free choice' made with 'free will' though it is determined ultimately by the actual world in which we live.

---

A further note, I'm not really a compatabilist, it is just the view being put forward. I personally would prefer to suggest that we have no free will, but that we have moral responsibility - the end result is largely identical to compatabilism however.

Has someone just said 'nuh-uh they are too compatible'? Maybe so, but does that get us to moral responsibility?

I think he also presented an argument that he is referring to free will as the capacity to make decisions, and so did a little more than simply saying 'they are too compatible' If the choices you make are not determined by your will, how can your will be held accountable? Moreover, 'I don't see why not' is equivalent to 'nuh-uh they are too' in quality of argument.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.