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From: GKMARH@IRISHMVS.BITNET (steven horst 219-289-9067)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Free Will (long)
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Date: 27 Jul 88 03:04:00 GMT
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Date: Mon, 25 Jul 88 14:22 EDT
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From: steven horst 219-289-9067 <GKMARH%IRISHMVS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Free Will (long)

A few quibbles about some characterizations of free will and
related problems:
(1) D.V.Swinney (dsinney@galaxy.afit.af.mil) writes:
> The "free-will" theorists hold that are (sic) choices are only
> partially deterministic and partially random.
>
> The "no-free-will" theorists hold that are (sic) choices are
> completely deterministic with no random component.

I'm not really sure whether Swinney means to equate free will with
randomness, but if he does he is surely mistaken.  On the one hand,
there are some kinds of randomness that are of no use to the free
will theorist: the kind of randomness suggested by quantum physics,
for example, does not give the free will theorist what he wants.
One can believe in quantum indeterminism without believing in
free will.  On the other hand, the term "choice" is ambiguous between
(a) the ACT OF CHOOSING and (b) THAT WHICH IS CHOSEN (in this case,
let's say the behavior that results from the choosing).  It's not
clear which of these Swinney means.  I think that what the free will
theorist (at least some free will theorists, at any rate) would say
is that the CHOOSING is not determined (in the sense of being the
inevitible result of a previous state of affairs governed by a
universal law), but the resulting behavior IS, in a sense, determined:
it is determined by the act of choosing and the states of the
organism and its environment that allow what is chosen to be carried
out.  (There is a fairly large philosophical corpus on the subject
of "agent causation".)
    What the advocate of free will (we'll exclude compatibilists for
the moment) must not say is that choices freely made can receive
an adequate explanation in terms of natural laws and states of
affairs prior to the free act.  So Swinney is right that
(non-compatibilist) free will theorists are not determinists.  But
randomness just doesn't capture what the free will theorist is after.
And I think the reason is something like this: human actions can be
looked at from an "external" perspective, just like any other events
in the world.  As such, they either fall under laws covering causal
regularities or they do not, and so from this perspective they are
either determined or random.  But unlike other events in nature,
the actions (and mental states) of thinking beings can also be
understood from an "internal" or "first-person" perspective.  It is
only by understanding this perspective that the notion of FREEDOM
becomes intelligible.  Moreover, it is not clear that the two
perspectives are commensurable - so it isn't really clear that one
one can even ask coherent questions about freedom and determinism.
At any rate, the notions of "freedom" and "bondage" of the will
are not reducible to indeterminism and determinism.

(2) John Logan (logajan@ns.uucp) writes that
> Unproveable theories aren't very useful.
   and that
> Unproveable theories are rather special in that they usually only
> occur to philosophers.

     If we were talking about logic or mathematics, Logan's assertions
might be correct, though even there some of the most interesting
"theories" are not known to be proveable.  But in the sciences, NO
interesting theories are proveable, as Karl Popper argued so
persuasively (and frequently and loudly) for many years.  The nature
of the warrant for scientific theories is a complicated thing.
(For those interested, I would recommend Newton-Smith's book on
the subject, which as I recall is entitled "Rationality in Science".)
Perhaps Logan did not mean to conjure visions of the logical
positivists when he used the word "proveable", in which case I
apologize for conjuring Popper in return.  But the word "proof"
really does bring to mind a false, if popular, picture of the nature
of scientific research.

Steven Horst
   BITNET.......gkmarh@irishmvs
   SURFACE......Department of Philosophy
                Notre Dame, IN  46556