Eise

Then what do you think that the answer on 'Why' is? Do you have some religious ideas about it?

In the first place, I did not answer with 'just because'. Of course you may ask why things are as they are. One way to this, when we are talking hard sciences, is to try to find the reasons, and the result will be that we find that there is some law of nature. If we can predict some phenomenon, based on initial conditions and some laws of nature, then we know the reason why the phenomenon occurs. Now you ask for the reason why there are reasons: you ask why there are laws of nature. How would you expect somebody could answer this? By referring to another law of nature? That would not work, because you would use exactly the kind of answer your are questioning. But you use the word justification. And then your example about black people is a moral situation. So do you ask why it is morally justified that there are laws of nature? That would be a huge category error. Nature is as it is. There are no moral reasons behind it, no justifications. There are just regularities, that we can discover and describe. But people act because of reasons, and they are able to justify their actions with reasons. And your example belongs in this domain.

Yes, QM is not fully deterministic. But it is you who saw room for free will in that. In previous posts I have argued that indeterminism (of any kind) is in contradiction with free will. If you do not agree then please react on these arguments. I don't want to rehash all these arguments again.

In the context of free will it is important: you cannot decide e.g. that you measure polarisation vertically and that it will be down. Yes, but that is an open door. We know that determinism is not true for Q-processes. But that is simply not enough for free will. You still have the burden to show how this indeterminism could support free will. I assume we agree that in QM chance distributions are determined, right? But then where, when or what event takes place, is not further influenced at all. We know that if we do enough measurements we will get the determined chance distribution, but there is no known process that determines the single event in this chance distribution. And it is my understanding that with the EPR like experiments it is proven that there are no such (local) processes at all. Now, how do you want to build free will on that, on pure probability?

Sorry but that does not work. In QM you cannot affect the outcome according to your will. You can decide what you measure, but you have no influence on what the exact outcome will be. So then explain why the addition of probabilities makes for responsibility. How can you guarantee that some action of you was not just a probabilistic twitch of one of your neurons?

I gave already a two formulations of the same idea: Now you tell me how randomness is necessary for free will?

The question if we have free will is not a scientific question, Migl. It depends on what you think is the correct definition of free will, and that is simply not a scientific question. What is a scientific question is if all single events are completely determined by previous conditions. And then it is obvious that they are not: in QM chance distributions are determined, but not single events. So yes, reality is not fully determined. But QM offers us, in the limits of its chance distributions, only randomness. Now you must explain how randomness can contribute to your free will and responsibility. Does unpredictability make for responsibility? Is your decision based on the throwing of a die more responsible then your decision based you your wishes and believes? And the link that is still missing, is that QM events influence your behaviour. Estimates of physicists, based on the number of particles involved in neural processes, temperature, the 'wet environment', etc, suggest that we can approach neural process in a classical, i.e. determined way. Quantum randomness just cancels out. And then, the brain is a 'massiv parallel processing system', which is also massively redundant. So one neuron, which reacts a few times differently than it would normally do, goes under in the normal firing neighbour neurons. So at most, when QM effects sporadically would make it to visual behaviour, it can explain some funny twitch of you, but not a well deliberated decision. So rejoy! We are determined, and therefore our choices, our free will, matter.

O, sorry, forgot: there is a huge category of philosophers that use this concept of free will. Namely, those incompatiblist determinists who say we have no free will. This is the concept of free will that they deny, and for them it is the only meaning that makes sense (because most people believe this is free will). For the compatibilist, this is a stupid procedure: first to define free will in such an absurd way, and then deny that it exists. Only some neuroscientists are even more stupid: they say that we have discovered that we have no free will. How, for God's sake can you discover that we are determined, when determinism is the necessary presumption of the possibility of the natural sciences überhaupt? So there are many philosophers who believe this is the correct definition of free will. But, and there you are right, there are only a few that really believe that it exists.

No: for a falling stone the concepts voluntary - involuntary simply do not apply. A stone cannot say if it wants to fall, or that it was forced to do so. And we, as third party observers have no reason to think it was forced or that it falls because it wants to: simply because a stone doesn't have wishes and believes, so the question if it falls according these is meaningless. Compare what Schopenhauer says about Spinoza: The compatibilist concept of free will is not messy at all. Determinism is the reality of existence (for all practical purposes), and without determinism we could not have free will. Yep. But there are still a few, e.g. Robert Kane. Just to repeat myself: I think that all compatibilists defend that determinism is a necessary condition for free will to exist. Without determinism, free will would be impossible. Hmm, somehow you are mixing free will and consciousness now. The relation is the other way round: consciousness is a necessary condition for free will. It is difficult to see how one can talk about wishes and believes without consciousness. Then I can comfort you: no, determinism does not make choice meaningless. You confuse determinism with fatalism. Fatalism would mean something like: everything is determined, so it does not matter what you do. But that is a wrong argument. Of course it does matter what you do! Say, a comet is on a collision course with the earth. Now you can be a fatalist: whatever you do, it will collide with the earth. But does it make sense to say the course of the comet does not matter, in the end it is determined to fall on the earth? Of course not, that does not make any sense. And now compare you, knowing the comet will fall on the earth anyway, whatever you do. Why is that? Well, of course because it is far beyond your power. So you decide to go to your favourite restaurant for the last time. You get the menu card, look through it, and the waitress comes and asks "What is your choice?". Do you say: "Sorry I am a fatalist determininist, whatever I choose, you will bring the menu that is already determined." You see, that that does not make sense? Your choice plays a causal role in what will happen, and therefore, even in a determined world, choices matter. They are caused by previous conditions, of course, but you choose, and what happens depends on your choice. I don't know what free will can be more than that: that what happens depends on your choice,

'Brilliant book'? Ward has a very particular view on some of these philosophers. Kant himself: From Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason', one of Kant's main works. Kant, a compabilist? And about Spinoza: But alas, that does not go for us normal mortals, while: So I have a strong impression Ward does not know what he is writing.

Yeah, that's funny, isn't it? So maybe we should accept that a free action, i.e. an action that arises from my own will, and therefore is my free will, and therefore the action can also be called voluntary. A free action is just a synonym for a voluntary action. No, that is misuse of the concept of the concept of 'forced'. My history made me what I am, but that is not 'forced'. That is an anthropomorphism. Can you tell me if a stone falling to the ground does so while it is 'forced' by gravity, or because it 'wants' to go to a centre of gravity? Facts is that we notice the regularity that a stone always falls when we drop it in a gravitational field. I came into existence not because I was forced, but because nature just has such regularities that given the beginning condition this happened. 'Forced' is only correctly used in the context of free will as 'doing the will of somebody else'. Fully agree, with this one addition: free will will never be programmed. It will arise automatically when the 'general expertise system' is capable of reflecting its reasons, and can act autonomous. I think that accountability, responsibility and morality only make sense when we also have a concept of free will. What is non-accountability other then not having done an action out of free will?

No, QM at most limits free will. QM knows of real, irreducible random events. If you think that for free will we need randomness, then let me know, and how you build a concept of responsibility on random events. Without determinism, free will is impossible. Yes, I noted that. Now it would be interesting to know what you think of the standpoint of others here, why your idea of determinism and your idea that QM 'makes the notion of free will possible' would be better than other ideas mentioned above.

Are they? Number 1 is correct, 2 is obviously wrong. For a compatibilist, the opposite of 1 is when you are forced to do something, i.e. you act against what you normally would do, and act according the will of somebody else. I think I am not deep enough in AI to answer this. But my gut feeling is that pattern recognition simply is not enough. Say I recognise my girl friend. So some visual subsystem in my brain sends signals all around my brain 'Jane detected'. And then? How would follow an action from that? If I am freshly in love with her, I walk up to her and embrace her. If I see her in a bar sitting there with my one-night stand, I dive under the table so she won't see me. Now you can call these reactions also the result of pattern recognition (I know that diving under a table helps in not being seen), but I think that all these endless pattern recognitions lead to something new, that a pattern recognition on its own cannot do. One could say that all these myriads pattern recognition modules are the atoms of our 'possible-action-dependent-on-anticipated-futures machine'. One cannot explain the life of a plant by looking at its atoms alone: one must see how these are organised. One could say that everything that is organised in the way that a plant is, is a living organism, even if the building blocks were not atoms. So I think that only a very specific organisation of pattern recognising modules gives rise to consciousness and with that the possibility of free will. Maybe it helps (I am aware I'm just throwing in a few new concepts, but maybe it helps to see where I stand) to say that conscious animals are universal future anticipating entities. Yep. Very true. But such is life. Therefore it is sometimes so difficult for a judge to decide if a defendant is responsible for his action. Did he really act from his own free will? Is he a well functioning 'possible-action-dependent-on-anticipated-futures machine', or does he lack some of the conditions for it (Down syndrome? Psychologically impaired?)? Yes, more or less. 'Free will' is a social construct. It needs some physical basis (as described above and in my other postings here). But one should not make the error to say that social constructs do not exist: taxes, marriage, institutions, law etc are all social constructs. So to ask for the extra (meta)physical explanation apart from the afore mentioned physical (biological...) basis and its social functioning in our society, is a category error. So free will exists, as a social construct, and can only exist in physical entities with a certain specified complex structure.

A determinist can believe in free will. I do, and I am a determinist (for all practical purposes). No, but the common definition is wrong. I state that with everyone we would analyse the experience of free will, so to speak as a socratic dialogue, we would discover that being uncaused is not an element of free will, or at least, that we don't know if this is an element of free will. I never mentioned pattern recognition. It may be part of it. But I would also add conceptualisation to it. No, when we evaluate our choices before the fact. Possibly. In the end, we are organisms whose capabilities grew out of previous existing ones. But being 'innate programming of biological competitiveness' does not exclude that it is more than that. Always be aware when you place 'just' before such propositions. Nearly always people leave out the essential point. (People are just like stones: when they fall they do according the same Newtonian laws. A steam train is just iron, cokes and water.). I would suggest, talk with him. Or more scientifically, do a Turing test with him.

No. free actions are a subset of all determined processes. It is the subset in which causal explanations based on wishes and believes are valid. E.g: a stone does not fall to the earth because it wants to: a stone has no wishes or believes. However, when a human chooses to do something, based on his wishes and believes, and acts according to them, then it is valid to say that his wishes and believes caused his action. We cannot be fully responsible who we are. Who we are is determined by my biological inheritance and my personal biography. Only as soon as I can get control of my life, I become responsible: not especially for what I am, but for what I do.

First of all, 'determinist' and 'compatibilist' is not an opposition. A compatibilist is a determinist, per definition. What you probably mean is what usually is called a 'hard determinist'; but I find this also a wrong term. The determinism of a compatibilist and a determinist is just as hard. Compatibilism is not determinism mixed with just a 'little free will'. So the best term is 'incompatibilist determinist'. The compatibilist claims that, how hard the determinism might be, that there is a meaningful concept of free will that covers all necessary concepts that presuppose free will, such as blaming, praising, responsibility, punishment, etc, except a few wrong ideas that people have about free will. The basic idea is that all is needed is that people can act according their own wishes and believes, i.e. that their own wishes and believes are part of the causal fabric of the universe. That also means that the concept of free will that the compatibilist has, needs determinism. Without determinism, free will would be impossible, what people do would be random. It is difficult to see how random actions can be a basis for responsibility. The biological basis of free will is the capability of animals to anticipate the future. Depending on what they expect, they act. They need to be able to see how their own future actions influence the future. Simple example: my cat says 'mow' when he is hungry, knowing that I will notice him and fill his top. But the biological basis on its own is not enough: we need insight in our reasons for actions. Having such insights might evolutionary have arisen by the capability to have a 'folk psychology': to assign reasons to other animals. The next step is to assign reasons to yourself, and being able to evaluate them. At this moment 'free will is born'. I think that the clearest sign in other species is behaviour that only can be reasonably be explained by animals that try to manipulate on the basis of what they think that other individuals think. So if we recognise compassion with other animals that are in pain, trying to hide food when nobody looks, cheating and mobbing, then these might be indications that we are justified to assign free will to them. So that would mean: certain crows, apes, whales and dolphins, and elephants can be assigned free will. One important aspect of having free will is the capability to limit the free will of other individuals: one can coerce other individuals by creating a situation in which he does something that he normally would never do; or let him believe something to be true, which in fact is not true. Then this individual does not follow its own wishes or believes, but of somebody else. Seeing this should clarify the whole free will discussion: the opposite of free will is coercion; the opposite of determinism is randomness. There is no opposition between free will and determinism.

Genecks, I think you do not understand Popper. A theory is not scientific because it is falsified or so. A theory is scientific if it does definite predictions, that can be tested. Being able to test the predictions means that the theory can be falsified in principle. But if the tests are done, and the predictions turned out to be correct, then the theory has survived falsification, and we can take it to be true for the moment. The theory might still be falsified by other tests on other predictions. If a theory stands many and many tests, if even working technology is based on it, you can safely assume it is true, at least in the domain where it is applied. The special theory of relativity is such a theory, and until now the same seems to hold for general relativity. A scientific theory that is falsified has turned out to be a wrong scientific theory, but it could be called scientific, because it did definite predictions. I think what Popper did was just a kind of clarification what actually happened in science already for hundreds of years. But Popper's ideas gave also a a demarcation criterion between science and pseudo-science. Except clarification, Popper's idea of falsification did not contribute much to scientific development. It only made it more understandable. But it was a clear weapon against pseudo-science.

Well, Awe, there are many possible reactions to your ideas: - if everything is determined, so are our reactions to blame somebody for his actions - in line with the quote of Hakwking: our intentions and believes are part of the causal chain that leads to our actions, so what we intent or believe does matter - if you think we cannot blame somebody because his actions are determined, then you are doing a moral claim. And the moral claim does matter: the outcome of our considerations make a difference. But assuming we have this capability, we might expect the same capability of the person we consider to blame for his action. And therefore we can blame him for his action. Not doing this is a performative self-contradiction (Karl-Otto Apel).

See how difficult it can be to find the reguarities and the mathematical formulations to describe them? sorry hoola, that is all too speculative for me.

No, reality is not mathematics. Mathematics is describing physical reality. But only that counts as (physical) reality, if there really is an object that is described. And a lot of mathematics does not describe anything in physical reality. From the repeatability and the reguarity of events in reality it follows that reality can be described by mathematics. If you can give me examples of regularities that cannot be described by a mathematical rule, then tell me.

The OP asked why there are laws of nature. The fact that from the constancy of the laws of nature one can derive the law of conservation of energy is one of the deepest scientific truths that I know. But it does not answer the question why there are laws of nature. It 'only' shows a deep connection between concepts that on first view are not related. Now of course I did not answer the 'why question' either. But I tried to show that there is even no reason to regret that there are laws of nature, as the OP seems to do. So lamenting about the question why there are laws of nature does not make much sense: you would not like to live in a world where there were none. Or worse (?): you would not even be there to ask yourself the question (a rather global application of the anthropic principle). But that has not much to do with physics. That is really more philosophy. But not every mathematical truth correspondents to some law of nature. And the 'exposition' is not very clear: otherwise laws of physics could be easily found. History learns that it is not that easy at all. Or did you mean something else?

Hi Marshalscienceguy, First of all previous posters are right in saying that your questions are not scientific: they are philosophical. So the only thing you can do is to try to clarify the question. Then you should ask yourself how our lives would look like when there were no laws of nature. It would mean that your capability to act for purposes would become impossible. If there were no laws of nature you would not know what the result of your action would be. One day it is this, another day it is something completely different. So the laws of nature are a prequisite of being able to act rationally. It is the regularity of the consequences of your action that enable you to act. So their existence is a pre-condition for the possibility of free will. You should also realise that laws of nature do not dictate how nature behaves: they are descriptions of how nature behaves. Laws of nature are not causes of how things happen: they describe how causality works, but cause nothing themselves. As they are descriptions, they also do not force anything. Your behaviour is also just described by the laws of nature, not forced. Maybe you also see now why magic would not be any solution. Magic exists just in another universe (in your phantasy) where there are different laws of nature. If there were no laws of nature in a 'magical world' you also could not get experience which magic works, and which does not. The better one knows the laws of nature, the more power you can have over your world. So if you want to be powerful, get to know yourself, the people around you, and the world (in that order). The better you understand them, the freeer you get. Eise