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Let me see if I am following this thread properly...
Is predictability really devastating to free will?
If I may clarify, I did not mean to imply that predictability devastates free will. I do not believe that free will is negated by being predictable in an everyday sense. I actually meant that predictability may be devastating to the idea of freedom. By which I mean that the idea of freedom carries certain promises, if you know what I mean? Like "if only I were free, I would be a happy person." Or "if only I were free, I would be a good person." But really, freedom confers neither happiness nor goodness automatically. I might realize right now that I am free and have been free this whole time, and I am neither happy nor good. Or consider, "if only I were free, I would be free." I swear to God this isn't sophistry! You see, that second "free" doesn't mean what free really means. Let's say that it means, "I would do everything differently" or "I would do everything not predictably." What I'm saying is, the devastating thing is that if I were free, I would be just as predictable as I am now. I would be just the same as I am now, because I am free now.
In other words, predictability in this sense doesn't prove that free will doesn't exist. It just shows that freedom isn't all that. (The paradox is, if you realize that... then it is all that. But that's sort of another story.)
But we were talking about free will. Back on track.
Moore's maxim is that an action can be said to be a free action if it agrees with the statement I could have done otherwise.
That works pretty well for me. And now *strangled noise* I have to talk about 24... the way I see it, Kiefer Sutherland *could* have done any of those other things (golfing, having a nervous breakdown, going by the book); it's just that he *would* not, and we know that he wouldn't (given who he was and what the course of his life had made of him thus far.) And Dennis Hopper can be reasonably expected to know that, apparently. No, no... that's being unfair, I think it's reasonable that Dennis Hopper could know that. But speaking of Dennis Hopper, there's a character with an entirely different range of could and would. Again in an everyday sense, I think that most of those circumstances that you mention don't circumscribe the younger Sutherland's *ability* to choose (could) but rather his *will* to choose (would); and that doesn't make them less mitigating to me, by the way. In fact I felt insulted at how he persistently insisted that he had no choice, although I suppose that could be a realistic depiction of a person in that situation.
But on a deeper theoretical level, I would be happy to muck about in the area where would dissolves into could. Where there's virtually no difference between the restriction of will and the restriction of ability. And the more I think about it, the more I remember instances in 24 that seem to intentionally illustrate tension between predictability and free will, and without precogs... but goddamnit, I *am* going to get to these pool balls too!
I would be interested to know if anyone thinks that the balls in a game of pool are free. If not, in what ways the actions of people different from the actions of pool balls.
No, I do not think that pool balls are free. Can we just assume that pool balls are not free? There is probably an argument that pool balls are as free as people; but I think what we're trying to argue is that people are as not-free as pool balls, or that people are entirely different from pool balls and that is to say free?
In an everyday sense, pool balls cannot be said to have a will of their own. In this sense, I can understand that the predictability of pool balls is based on --or perhaps I should say governed by-- rules of physics. Now, people. More complex than pool balls. But supposing that there is a being that is more complex than people to the degree that people are more complex than pool balls... perhaps to this being, it is indeed apparent that people are governed by rules more complex than those that govern pool balls --but that are *rules* nevertheless. Not probabilities. Perhaps they are only "probabilities" to us, because they involve things unknown to us. But if these things were known, by us...
And so that is where we are now, right? We are the most complex beings that we know. We can perceive that we have "a freedom of the first sort," as Smoothly says. But we can imagine that our will "always does have a gun to its head." And that's not just imaginary... there's a good deal of public policy that's based on this idea, for one thing. So not only are there philosophical and moral distinctions of free will, but also legal. And I think that a legal definition isn't going to consider the perspective of a being that sees people as pool balls.
Just to touch base for a sec, though: Who here believes that they have free will of a kind, and what kind? And are you aware of your perception of your own free will (or lack thereof) as affecting the way your life tends to turn out? |
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