Free Will and Determinism II PDF

Free Will and Determinism II PHI101 Introduction to Philosophy Dr. Simon Langford  Outline Introduction Libertarianism Quantum Physics  Introduction Recap The problem of free will: A scientific view of the world: Every event has a cause. Current eve...

Free Will and Determinism II PHI101 Introduction to Philosophy Dr. Simon Langford  Outline Introduction Libertarianism Quantum Physics  Introduction Recap The problem of free will: A scientific view of the world: Every event has a cause. Current events are determined by events in the distant past. How, then, can we have free will if everything we do is bound to happen?  Introduction Incompatibilism: free will and determinism cannot both be true. Hard determinism: determinism is true and there is no free will. Libertarians: we have free will and determinism is false. Compatibilism: free will and determinism can both be true--our actions can be determined AND free. Libertarianism Libertarians are incompatibilists; they accept free will and reject determinism. Libertarians may accept that determinism applies to most things in the world. E.g., planets, trees and oceans etc. may obey deterministic laws. But people are different—they’re not governed by deterministic laws. What makes people special?  Libertarianism Libertarians offer different answers. E.g., people have souls which are non-physical, conscious entities not governed by physical laws. E.g., people are entirely physical but are not subject to the same laws as non-conscious things. Either way, people’s decisions are not wholly determined by earlier physical events. Challenge: libertarians need to give a positive account of free actions—to explain what free actions are.  Libertarianism Libertarians don’t want to say that free actions are entirely uncaused. Think what that would be like. Imagine a soldier finds a grenade in a market full of people. He picks it up to dispose of it safely, but all of a sudden an uncaused event happens! He pulls out the pin and tosses the grenade at a group of people, killing them all. We are supposing that this is uncaused.  Libertarianism So, it’s not caused by some dark desire in the soldier’s psyche. Not caused by a nervous tic that produces involuntary gestures. Not caused by some other external event. That doesn’t sound like a free action that the soldier is morally responsible for—it sounds totally random! So, free actions require causation after all—they are actions which are caused but not determined( had to happen/ forced ).  Libertarianism Some libertarians say there is a special kind of causation—agent causation. Agent causation is not like ordinary mechanistic causation. You can’t predict it on the basis of previous events and the laws of nature—it doesn’t run like  Libertarianism With agent causation, if you repeated exactly the same situation many times, agent causation would produce different outcomes based on the agent’s free will. In contrast, mechanistic causation would produce the same outcome every time. ( determensed view says if like we do a scenario of me ordering coffee I will always choose black coffee ( mechanistic  Libertarianism Does this really solve the problem of randomness? Imagine trying to decide who to vote for—you have some reasons to favour party A and some reasons to favour party B. You weigh up the pros and cons and eventually decide in favour of party A. If your decision is not random, it should result from your rational deliberation. But in that case, if you went through the same deliberations again, they should bring you to the same decision.  Libertarianism If you made a different choice instead, that would seem like a random decision unconnected with the rational thought that went before it. Instead of emerging from your careful thought processes, it would seem to come out of nowhere!  Libertarianism Clash with science Libertarians will have to say that physics cannot describe all physical events in terms of physical laws. Imagine that your free decision to move your hand causes certain neurons to fire in your brain. These firings cannot be explained by physics in terms of deterministic laws—they were caused but not determined. So, the laws of physics break down when it comes to what goes on in the human brain.  Libertarianism So far, it looks like we have two unattractive options: Deny human freedom and with it all moral responsibility (hard determinism) OR Declare that science is limited and will never fully explain human actions (libertarianism). What are the other options?  Quantum Physics We have been talking as though science described the world deterministically. That is a simplification. Quantum physics is the science of tiny particles, and standard interpretations of it are radically indeterministic.  Quantum Physics Quantum physics makes probabilistic predictions. A quantum event, e, could have a number of possible outcomes each with a specific probability. o1 30% e o2 40% o3 30%  Quantum Physics This isn’t simply because we don’t know all the relevant factors. It’s not like rolling a die. When we roll a die, there are six possible outcomes. Each outcome seems equally probable. But, if we knew enough detail about the toss, we could predict with certainty how it would land.  Quantum Physics With quantum physics, even if we knew everything about the conditions leading up to the quantum event, that still wouldn’t determine one outcome with certainty. Some philosophers think that the indeterminacy involved in quantum mechanics opens the door for human freedom. It allows human actions to escape determinacy without being wholly uncaused.  Summary Libertarianism They are incompatibilists—they deny determinism. They may accept determinism for trees and planets. Humans are different though. Libertarians owe a positive account of free actions. Free actions shouldn’t be uncaused. Our choices flow from our deliberation. Doesn’t the deliberation determine the choice? If not, the choice will seem random again.  Summary Quantum Physics At the quantum level, the world is indeterministic. The outcomes of an event are probabilistic not certain. Will this make room for human freedom?  Questions What do libertarians think about deterministic science? Why can’t libertarians say that human decisions are just uncaused? What is agent causation? What problems does it face? Explain the idea that events are indeterministic at the quantum level. How is it different from rolling a die?