Can a materialist conception of the mind really preserve free will?

[Peter_Plato]

Your question presupposes the omnipresence of matter! Are our beliefs, values, choices and conclusions **always **caused by physical events?

Being a manifestation of God’s actualizing of potential does not make it the only possibility, nor identical to his power, nor even makes it necessarily a limitation on how God acts in the physical world.

 

[tonyrey]

*Your question presupposes the omnipresence of matter! Are our beliefs, values, choices and conclusions **always ***

I agree but we have to share His power even to a very limited extent if we are genuinely responsible for at least a fraction of our mental activity - and there seems no reason to believe physical energy is the sole form of power where God is concerned.

 

[SentinelofTruth]

polytropos:

Form unifies a thing and accounts for the way it behaves. So whatever goes on in a human - even by efficient causation - is subsumed by the form, which is actualizing the substance. The soul determines how the substance acts, but it is not a separate “thing” acting efficiently on the body.

If it determines the actions of the body, it must be separate, unless the body itself has free will (proven to be impossible by your OP), since free will is the only way a substance can determine it’s own actions.

polytropos:

The idea that the soul has properties “traceable” to those of the body seems to imply that they are two separate substances which happen to coincide.

No, exactly the opposite was intended. Traceable was meant in the causal sense.

You have answered your own question!

You forgot to say how.

 

[tonyrey]

]
Even a single cell does not function with mathematical precision. Its plasticity distinguishes it from inorganic structures.

You draw too deep a line between organic and inorganic. What really is the difference?
And yes, a cell does function with mathematical precision. Unless it’s one of the cells that directly interacts with the soul, it’s deterministic. You have answered your own question,
.

You forgot to say how.
"Unless it’s one of the cells that directly interacts with the soul, it’s deterministic."

 

[SentinelofTruth]

“Unless it’s one of the cells that directly interacts with the soul, it’s deterministic.”

This only emcompasses cells that directly interact with the soul. That is not all cells. Besides, God could have given us computer chip brains, and then the same statement would apply to inorganic matter.

 

[tonyrey]

This only encompasses cells that directly interact with the soul. That is not all cells. Besides, God could have given us computer chip brains, and then the same statement would apply to inorganic matter.

I’m not sure the idea of cells interacting with the soul is intelligible. What does seem certain is that personal activity cannot be explained entirely in terms of brain functions, i.e. physical energy. In order to be responsible the buck must stop with us. In other words we must be “prime movers” who initiate events. If we can trace **all **our choices and decisions back to physical causes we are merely cogs in a machine. As Kant observed, “ought” implies “can”. And “can” implies an element of novelty, creativity and spontaneity which doesn’t exist in scientific processes.

Materialism is incompatible with self-control because if everything is derived from atomic particles the “self” is a fantasy. It is often argued that qualities such as wetness are evidence that emergent evolution is not only possible but probable. The fatal flaw in this argument is that material qualities are quite different from immaterial entities. How could Hume’s “bundle of perceptions” or a neuroscientist’s set of neural impulses be unified and transformed into a person?

A far more cogent explanation is that perceptions imply the existence of perceivers. We don’t regard ourselves and others as products but agents. The colossal amount of **unnecessary **suffering caused by the human race is overwhelming evidence of the harsh reality of evil. There has been interference with biological development to an unprecedented extent which doesn’t fit into the scientific scheme of things. Accidents and disasters have always been a feature of life on earth but not in such a consistent and systematic pattern until the advent of modern technology - which reveals the power of independent thought and creativity, i.e. free will…

 

[SentinelofTruth]

tonyrey:

I’m not sure the idea of cells interacting with the soul is intelligible.

Why not? As you point out below in your post, our free will determines the actions of our bodies. Therefore, soul and body interact.

 

[Bahman]

Not in the same sense. It is not rational or responsible.

Have you ever experience being an insect, bird,… life is continuous.

 

[tonyrey]

Have you ever experience being an insect, bird,… life is continuous.

The continuity of life does not imply that all organisms are identical.

 

[Bahman]

The continuity of life does not imply that all organisms are identical.

I didn’t say so, I meant complexity like life is continuous.

 

[Just_Lurking]

You draw too deep a line between organic and inorganic. What really is the difference?

For me, the important distinction isn’t organic vs. inorganic. The distinction that I am really interested in is alive vs. dead. What truly is the difference between a live cell and a dead cell? Is it possible to take a dead cell, move a few atoms around, and reanimate the cell to life?

 

[SentinelofTruth]

Just Lurking:

For me, the important distinction isn’t organic vs. inorganic. The distinction that I am really interested in is alive vs. dead.

See? Lurking has it right.
Just Lurking:

Is it possible to take a dead cell, move a few atoms around, and reanimate the cell to life?

ITT it is not because moving a few atoms around wouldn’t put connect a dead cell to a soul, which is what makes something alive.

 

[tonyrey]

I’m not sure the idea of cells interacting with the soul is intelligible.

Aristotle compared the self to the captain of a ship who oversees operations rather than gives separate commands to each sailor. The conductor of an orchestra also directs the musicians to play in such a way that they achieve the desired effect. Free will is the power to transcend natural functions and introduce a rational purpose to brain activity which would otherwise be instinctive, impulsive and sometimes even incoherent. Plato’s image of the charioteer and his horses illustrates it beautifully.

 

[SentinelofTruth]

tonyrey:

Aristotle compared the self to the captain of a ship who oversees operations rather than gives separate commands to each sailor. The conductor of an orchestra also directs the musicians to play in such a way that they achieve the desired effect. Free will is the power to transcend natural functions and introduce a rational purpose to brain activity which would otherwise be instinctive, impulsive and sometimes even incoherent. Plato’s image of the charioteer and his horses illustrates it beautifully.

Yes, exactly. The captain of a ship is not the form of his ship. He is not in any way metaphysically dependent on the ship. He is completely separate from it. Same with the conductor. He controls the orchestra. The only way it affects him is by the way he perceives it.

 

[polytropos]

By the same principle that the water’s wetness arises, even though the constituent parts are not ‘wet”. By the same principle that the qualitative changes can result in quantitative changes.

But this does not imply that the explanation is not reductive. As Peter Plato has noted, wetness is a human sensation. Water feels wet to us. And this is explicable by other properties of water: what we call wetness feels the way it does because of the specific heat of water, its cohesion, and its liquidity, which all can be explained in terms of the molecular structure of water (which in turn can be explained by the electronegativities of oxygen and hydrogen, etc.).

I did not argue that the computer “thinks”, or it has “free will”. This discussion was not about that, even though you never defined what “thinking” is or what “free will” is.

I provided what I thought would be a necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) criterion for a substantive definition of free will. I have also been arguing using your definition of free will since you provided it.

As far as thinking goes, I am bringing it up because it is commonly held that minds think and computers don’t. Thus there is a further disanalogy with computers. You may not have been trying to say that a computer behaves like a brain per se, but it is the thinking which will threaten the sufficiency of any such analogy. Even if you could show that computers are an example where alternate laws “emerge” in a virtual world (or whatever), that would be insufficient to show that the entirely different set of phenomena - free will, consciousness, etc. - of the mind are no longer problematic.

The point was that the laws of physics are inapplicable in the virtual reality of a computer generated “world”, and they are not applicable in our mind. Therefore none of them can be reduced to the dancing of the electrons.

But the problem with your argument is that the computer generated “world” does not exist - it does not even exist as our mind is held to exist. The computer generated world is, at best, a series of images that do not have determinate, mind-independent meaning; there are no new laws to speak of, since the processes to produce the images/calculations/whatever are fully physical.

It gets even worse when we get to the mind. The meaning of the computer’s virtual world is parasitic upon our minds - without our minds, they produce a series of images and electrical impulses that don’t mean a thing and don’t embody any set of laws. But then what are our minds parasitic upon? There’s nothing left.

My argument is very simple. You stated that at least one higher level of existence (thinking and decision making) is reducible to the lower level of physical interaction of atoms. I pointed out that this reductionism is incorrect. There is nothing else to talk about.

I am willing to hear about your non-reductionist materialism. The problem is that you haven’t shown that it’s consistent. Your examples are still reductively explained. The properties of water do owe to the properties of individual water molecules, which do owe to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. They do “emerge,” but not in a way that precludes reductionism.

You brought up the critical mass of uranium - ostensibly - as an example of a property that is explained non-reductively. But when the question was posed, If the structure of a uranium atom is not what explains why a sufficiently large mass of uranium behaves in a certain way, what does?, the answer was deferred to “physicists.” So you were using uranium as an example, although you did not know why, or if, the explanation was actually non-reductive.

The example of the computer relies on the computer actually generating a virtual world with alternate laws. But the images or electrical signals being construed as another set of laws is parasitic upon a human mind to interpret them that way - so here, not only is it dubious that you avoid reductionism, but its doubtful whether the “virtual world” genuinely emerges at all.

There are, of course, naturalists who hold an emergent theory of mind - Thomas Nagel, for instance. But at least in the case of Nagel, they take the problem of mind to be perhaps indicative of a problem with materialism as an enterprise. And certainly it seems so from your posts. You have held that two identical brain states can lead to the different thoughts - in which case, there would seem not to be a material explanation for mind, since mind cannot be qualitatively differentiated on the basis of matter.

Being an essentialist, I am even sympathetic to the resistance to reductionism, but I don’t see how it is consistent with materialism.

 

[Portofino]

This post is directed at varieties of materialist philosophy of mind which hold that all mental activity in some way “supervenes” upon neural activity. What I am essentially arguing is that there is a lite interaction problem for materialists, the resolution of which necessitates the denial of free will.

I’m puzzled because, given my knowledge of the history of philosophy, most materialists *do *deny that freedom of the will is a meaningful concept. They do not deny, of course, that we experience something that we call “free will” (though a heroin addict or someone struggling with inner demons might experience something quite different).

Spinoza, who was a theist and a materialist at once, denied the existence of free will. So did Voltaire, to my knowledge (“we can do as we will, but not will as we will”).

To me, free will is as logically inconceivable to me as, in an opposite sense, the absence of experiencing it would be inconceivable. The existence of free will is a paradox insofar as causality exists. If my will is the cause of my behavior, then something must, in turn, be the cause of my will. My will is the link in a chain that both extends backwards and forwards, as it were; no less than I “cause” some phenomena, so too am I the “effect” of other phenomena.

If free will existed, it would indeed be something divine, a gift of the gods or of God – and as easily as I could adduce evidence for it, empirically, it would be difficult for me to argue that freedom of the will is not an absurd notion, unless I am willing to let go of my concept of causality. For, with free will, I would be positing “I” as the “uncaused cause” of my actions, positing that the “I” that determines is not itself, in turn, determined. My ego (my conscious volition) would have the God-like quality of having the buck stop with it, as if it were the uncaused cause, the first mover, of my behavior.

But I certainly agree that indeterminism – an acknowledgement of randomness and chance, or unpredictability – is not the same as freedom. “Freedom” is a mysterious, mystical quality, and would seem to subvert causality itself.

 

[polytropos]

I’m puzzled because, given my knowledge of the history of philosophy, most materialists *do *deny that freedom of the will is a meaningful concept. They do not deny, of course, that we experience something that we call “free will” (though a heroin addict or someone struggling with inner demons might experience something quite different).

I’m not quite sure what the numbers are, but yes, I think many materialists regard free will as impossible; eliminativists certainly do. But the idea that it could somehow “emerge” out of the complexity of the brain or from quantum mechanics is still common.

 

[tonyrey]

To me, free will is as logically inconceivable to me as, in an opposite sense, the absence of experiencing it would be inconceivable. The existence of free will is a paradox insofar as causality exists. If my will is the cause of my behavior, then something must, in turn, be the cause of my will. My will is the link in a chain that both extends backwards and forwards, as it were; no less than I “cause” some phenomena, so too am I the “effect” of other phenomena.

You are implying that reality is composed solely of physical objects and physical causes. There is very good reason to believe persons are just as real as - and more powerful than - particles. We have direct experience of our power to make decisions and influence events whereas we only infer the existence of physical energy and causality.

All our knowledge begins at home.

 

[tonyrey]

Yes, exactly. The captain of a ship is not the form of his ship. He is not in any way metaphysically dependent on the ship. He is completely separate from it. Same with the conductor. He controls the orchestra. The only way it affects him is by the way he perceives it.

We agree on basics!

 

[Bahman]

To me, free will is as logically inconceivable to me as, in an opposite sense, the absence of experiencing it would be inconceivable.

It is logically impossible to experience free will since the possibility of experiencing it produce the knowledge of our own actions hence it leads to causality. Free will is a persistent anomaly inside our minds.

The existence of free will is a paradox insofar as causality exists. If my will is the cause of my behavior, then something must, in turn, be the cause of my will. My will is the link in a chain that both extends backwards and forwards, as it were; no less than I “cause” some phenomena, so too am I the “effect” of other phenomena.

Free will which is an anomalous quality is the only entity that can break the chain of casualty. Without that the sense of “I” was an illusion.

If free will existed, it would indeed be something divine, a gift of the gods or of God

The main question is how an anomalous entity could be given or created. This is more puzzling since creating an entity which God has no knowledge on it is behaviour seems logically impossible.