Question about Free Will and Predestination
Imagine a light layer of sand covering a vacant parking lot. You walk from one side to the other, pushing a shovel in front, creating a path clear of any sand. You notice that the path has a yellow surface.
In your walk from one side to the other, you freely chose the path, now turning left, now right, now making a loop. The path you uncovered is yellow, so you naturally assume the entire lot is yellow. However, when the sand is blown away, you see only the path you uncovered is yellow; the remainder of the lot is black.
How can that be? You theorize there is something special about the sand and/or shovel such that the surface turns yellow when the shovel uncovers it. But no, you find its normal sand and a normal shovel. You learn that someone somehow knew in advance the path you would take and painted the pathand only the pathyellow; the remainder of the surface was left black. How this person knew the path in advance is left unanswered. Maybe the person could see the future. Maybe God painted the path.
From your point of view, you freely chose the path. You freely turned when you wished, went straight when you wished. From your point of view, you have free will. Yet the path was painted before you uncovered it.
Suppose the experiment is repeated many times. Each time you feel that you freely chose the path. Each time, when the sand is blown away, only the path is yellow; the remainder of the lots surface is black.
Question: in this scenario, do you have free will? Or are you predestined to create the specific path? Or both??
In your walk from one side to the other, you freely chose the path, now turning left, now right, now making a loop. The path you uncovered is yellow, so you naturally assume the entire lot is yellow. However, when the sand is blown away, you see only the path you uncovered is yellow; the remainder of the lot is black.
How can that be? You theorize there is something special about the sand and/or shovel such that the surface turns yellow when the shovel uncovers it. But no, you find its normal sand and a normal shovel. You learn that someone somehow knew in advance the path you would take and painted the pathand only the pathyellow; the remainder of the surface was left black. How this person knew the path in advance is left unanswered. Maybe the person could see the future. Maybe God painted the path.
From your point of view, you freely chose the path. You freely turned when you wished, went straight when you wished. From your point of view, you have free will. Yet the path was painted before you uncovered it.
Suppose the experiment is repeated many times. Each time you feel that you freely chose the path. Each time, when the sand is blown away, only the path is yellow; the remainder of the lots surface is black.
Question: in this scenario, do you have free will? Or are you predestined to create the specific path? Or both??
Comments (44)
The question is part of a more essential question. What is the ultimate or first cause of an effect? Me, or something else?
Is it necessarily the case that one thing causes another, or that a cause and an effect are separate phenomena?
Just because you know what someone will choose doesnt make the choice predetermined.
Would you rather have your eyeballs pulled from their sockets with a rusty knife or a pleasant meal?
Nothing magical about predicting you would choose the pleasant meal. Its not predetermined, its just easy to determine just like it would be for your writing god or future seeing person.
I didnt answer the poll because your OP doesnt actually address free will. Its a free will adjacent question but you're actually just asking about foreknowledge of action, the answer to which depends on what ones views on free will already are.
I mean "know" with absolute certainty.
In your example, you "know" with high probability but not with certainty. The person may have had a stroke and be insane and chose the knife. The person may be suffering from deep depression. The person may think his suffering will somehow pay for his sins and send him to heaven rather than hell. Etc.
The question is: If it is KNOWN WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that you will have bacon and eggs tomorrow for breakfast, then tomorrow are you nonetheless free to choose corn flakes?
Of course, it may be argued it is impossible to know the future with absolute certainty. But that's beside the point as this is a thought experiment and one premise is that is it possible.
Good point, but the certainty still wouldnt make the choice predetermined. The knowledge of what happens does not effect the outcome of what happens. That was my point.
You would be predicting, with certainty, what the person will choose. Its pre-knowledge of what will happen, not knowledge of what is predetermined. The predetermination is still separate from what youre asking here as I described initially.
You are essentially positing that pre-knowledge and predetermination ( in the free will sense) are the same thing, which I dont think they are. You can have pre-knowledge ( in the context of this thought experiment) of something whether its predetermined or not so you arent actually addressing free will here imo.
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In this scenario where you follow a path that is predetermined without being able to see it happens regularly. It is rather interesting to me the way footpaths and trails form, with people walking across hypotenuses or taking other shortcuts etc in well trafficked areas. When snow falls or leaves fall and the paths become obscure people will still follow the paths in the same manner as they were originally beaten when they were being established.
I have a pet peeve about half-assed thought experiments, but this is a pretty good one. Paints an interesting picture. Now the question is if the scenario you describe is a good model of how things actually work. My first thought is that in the real world, the sand never gets blown off the parking lot. We never really have to face convincing evidence that our behavior is strictly constrained. We can only speculate.
Foreknowledge, how does that work? Does it necessarily imply determinism i.e. negate free will? Can I predict what a person x will do in a given situation based on what kind of person x is? Does a person have any say on that score i.e. does x have a choice? Even if x can choose, x's character is knowable to some extent and for that reason x is predictable proportionately.
Yes, the sand never gets blown away. We know what we did but were we free to do something else? I feel I was free, but that's not the same as knowing.
Question is whether "you" will know if others are knowing that you will have bacon and eggs for breakfast. If you are a contrarian then you will have corn flakes, just to be able to say you defeated determined course of the universe. But then you did not, but proved that the people who had purported to have had that knowledge did not actually have that knowledge.
That's all.
One thing you have not considered, and many others also haven't: Freedom is relative term. Both in magnitude and in amount.
And there is another thing people don't consider, or rather, mix up. They mix up what they or humans can possibly know, and what can possibly be known by a know-it-all. To be possibly known does not require a knower, that's a third thing people don't consider.
Go from here.
Just one more thing to consider: nothing is free of anything else, but our knowledge does not encompass all minute details of relationships between all events and all things.
The first part is free will. The second part is destiny. We are all destined to freely choose to follow our predetermined preferences.
That is wrong. If you know, it is predetermined. If it is predetermined, you won't necessarily know.
And people know dick all. That's why future is uncertain. But only for us, because we don't know all the causes and the state of things as they are, therefore our predictions are only guesstimates.
If we knew, we could tell what the future holds, precisely because it's predetermined.
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Free will? you think that your will is something that is the ONLY thing in existence that can defy the cause-effect rule between events that happen to things?
The only argument I ever heard to support free will is the appeal that the Creator God made us this way. This a very strong argument. For the faithful in a God. However, if you don't believe in a God-Creator, then the argument falls down.
This is where my warning of "what is something free of" comes in. You are not free to follow your preferences. It is your preferences that dictate your behaviour. You can't act against your preferences, unless, of course, you have an overriding preference, also your own, that compels you to act against your preference.
You are anthropomorphizing preferences. They are not separate things subjugating my will.
You are mistaken in believing that everything that subjugates your will has to be human-like.
You are also mistaken by thinking that preferences are part of your will.
This of course opens up the can of worms for us, if we must define what will is.
So.. preferences are not separate from what? Your will? You did not say what they are separate from. You need to state that to make sense.
they are separate from what? Each other? or from everything else? You need to say to make sense.
Dictate: Lay down authoritatively. That is something only a being can do. An artificial intelligence can be made to seem to do this.
Quoting god must be atheist
I agree we have to define will, and perhaps preference.
Quoting god must be atheist
Are they separate? Its a big jumbled.
Lets consider the body. It is a single system, and at the same consists of many subsystems, and is itself part of a larger system than itself.
I don't believe any one part of my body "dictates" what another part does. Presumably, my preferences are a subsystem of my over all being. They don't rule me, but are a part of me. Hmm, not sure that is exactly right, but am I making any sort of sense?
Quoting god must be atheist
I am asking if they are separate from each other. I'm wondering if all arguments that X causes Y are essentially post hoc ergo prompter hocs.
Edit: For example, if everything is predetermined, you can't say "You crashed the car because you were drunk", because crashing was already predetermined before I got drunk. Even if there is a "first cause", what this first cause will cause is, according to predeterminsm, predetermined.
Lets take an example of being thrown in prison. Then all the people that work at the prison leave with the keys. There is just me and the prison. Assuming I want leave the prison, and can't, is the prison "subjugating my will"?
Is the number two "dictated" by arithmetic to be 2? Like 1 and 1 are FORCED to be two?
thanks for so thoroughly answering my questions, and explaining your answers. Knowing that some can't be explained in a single paragraph, if they can be explained at all.
I quoted this because I agree with most of your first response, except this quote.
In a way everything being caused and therefore predictable and knowable is indistinguishable from fatalism, that is, knowing ahead of time, without knowing the causational processes that precipitate in an action. Furthermore, it is also true, like you said, that knowing ahead of time may be due to not following the causational links, but, instead, due to some other knowledge. And in essence, if you push it to the limit of Hume's argument, which states that random, from each other independent events can be explained by sheer happenstance as much as they can be explained by rigorous and exacting following the causational route.
This really is undecidable.
What I find impossible, though, is the half-and-half, or both causation and free will occurring concurrently. If a thing is caused, it happens. If it is not caused, then it does not happen. If a desire is causing your will to swing into action, it will. If nothing is enticing your will to perform an action, then it won't.
This is a good scenario, because it taxes the reason.
Is the prison subjugating your will? Not at all.
Are the people who locked you up subjugating your will? Not even they.
Is the freedom that you seek as opposed to being in prison subjugating your will? You bet.
I think it is important to identify what the will wills, before doing anything else. Your will is to be free at that moment that you are alone in the prison. Nobody is subjugating it. Your will is predetermined by the facts that 1. prison is an unpleasant place 2. being locked and no food in the foreseeable future is scary 3. you know that outside the prison you have a better chance at fulfilling your needs.
Being locked up has no impact on your will. You'd always want to be in the open, eat healthily and as much as you want/need, and not be a prisoner in a prison.
It's you who is in the prison, not your will. Your will's function is to motivate you to get out of there.
You've addressed the analogy well, yet not tied it in to the question we were discussing:
Can our wills be dictated/subjugated by external things.
With the prison example, we agree the answer is no.
Are our preferences, maybe rooted biology or whatever else, whatever it is we attribute as the cause of our will.... Can and do such things "dictate" our will?
Are our preferences biological(or metaphysical?) prisons?
Quoting god must be atheist
Interesting. Isn't seeking freedom the same as having the will to freedom? And so, my will would be subjugating itself?
Quoting god must be atheist
This is interesting too, compared to the statement that the will to freedom is the subjugation, and here the will to freedom is a motivation to get free.
On the one hand, if one does not have a will which opposes being in prison, one would not be subjugated.
On the other hand, if one doesn't oppose being in prison, one will not try to leave prison.
Edit: I think I am forced to believe there are two wills.
One is negative desires, proclivities to addictions and such, which may be inherited genetically or else created by unconscious negative reactions to unwanted experiences.
Another will is to be free of unconscious habits.
"Can our wills be subjugated / dictated by external things?"
If and only if this is the question, then my answer is a resounding "no". Our circumstances can put us in a subjugation, but our will can't. If we are in unpleasant circumstances, then our will is not subjugated; it is motivating us to get out of there. We wish to get out of there, our will is to get out of there.
I've heard of instances where people talk of "his / her will is broken". Not from first hand experience, thank god.
Is that possible? To have one's will not function, or make it malfunction, or to make it powerless? I don't think so. But what do I know.
People commit suicide in a number of painful situations -- mental, emotional or physical -- but that is not an indication of a broken will. It is an indication of their utter hopelessness that the situation would ever change.
One thing makes me wonder: people who are certain that they will be executed, go along the plan of the execution. For instance, many dig their own graves knowing that they will be interred there after the execution.
Or they simply line up against a wall to be shot.
There are footages, real footages, of these scenarios from wars: WWII, and in the Middle East. So this is not a fantasy or an imagined scenario of a mental experiment. The work is to be done on real examples.
Are the wills of these moribund people broken?
If and only if we are in a bad, intolerable or undesirable situation, then our will is invariably DETERMINED (i.e. can't act other way than), to get us out of that situation, or to make the situation stop.
This could be a prison situation, or going through a bad divorce, or having prostate / ovarian cancer.
The will is not subjugated; but it is affected by external circumstances. It is behaving in a predictable way, and therefore it follows the rules of determination. It is an effect of a cause, and it causes its own effects.
I don't understand this. It's not the French part I have trouble with. It is the English text that I can't make heads or tails out of.
For instance, I've never encountered an "incredulity fallacy". I am unfamiliar with that concept. Please explain and give a typical, educational example.
How can you commit something from something? You commit things TO, not FROM.
Don't let's? Let's not use unconventional grammar.
This is the point I want to explore. Do the rules of determination subjugate the will. I don't think they do.
I think analogy is the best way to understand these sorts of things is why I brought up prison.
How would you describe, by analogy, how the rules of determination determine what we will?
When you said they "dictate our behavior", it sounds to me like a master and slave relationship. And that, to me, as anthropomorphizing. I'm worried I am not getting my point across.
I am not a slave to the rules of determinism unless, like a prisoner who opposes walls and prison bars of a prison, I oppose the rules of determinism. Amor Fati, the love of one's fate, or the rules of determinism, frees one from "negative will". When a man "knows his limitations" and accepts them, he frees himself from banging his head against the wall of limitation.
On the other hand, a defeatist resignation is as much of a trap as willing what one cannot have.
This is why the stoics say to focus on what you within your control and accept or be indifferent to what is not.
No, but they do affect the will and the will will respond in a predictable way.
Maybe my post was too long for readers. Maybe I should have just said so.
Subjugation is not the ONLY way a causational effect can happen.
Subjugation of the will never happens. But the will is exposed to causes to act on it, and the causes make the will behave in predictable ways.
The will has its own causes to act the way it does, and it has its own effects by its actions.
This is patently false. You can't oppose and succeed in defeating the rules of determinism.
But let's say you can, for argument's sake. Then your conclusion is false: If you oppose the rules of determinism, then you are a slave to (i.e. must always obey) the rules of determinism.
This is not proven, not even intuitive.
Also, unclear what you mean, because the word oppose means any one of these three things: successful resistance, or staging an impedance, or protesting against. Which do you mean?
Quoting Yohan
What's negative will? How does the love of one's fate free someone from this?
Quoting Yohan
This is true. But it does not address the will defeating determinism.
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This post of yours does not explain itself at all, and it states things that are not intuitive, so you NEED to explain them if you want to make others understand what you mean.
Please also iron out the difficulties in composition that I unfortunately had to point out to you.
I meant that if I do not resist the rules of determinism, then I will no longer feel like the rules of determinism are subjugating my will. Not that I can go against the rules, but harmonize with them.
Quoting god must be atheist
Yes, if the rules of determinism go against my will, I will feel like a slave to them. If I am willing to go along with the rules, then it will feel voluntary.
Quoting god must be atheist
I simply mean desiring that something not be so. The three options listed come after the initial desire. I see now that oppose may mean more than desiring that something not be so, so I'll drop that word.
Quoting god must be atheist
I think by negative will I mean the same as what I meant by being opposed. A will that stems from having a negative opinion about something. In this case, having a negative opinion about the inevitable. Loving one's fate doesn't free one from one's fate. It frees one from having a negative opinion about one's fate.
Quoting god must be atheist
I hope I have done so.
Good luck understanding me. I suspect we are not enough on the same page here! We don't have to continue.
Edit: There are different ways to explore the question.
For example, lets say I am on a trajectory based on a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think I am bound to fail at everything in life, and so this belief self sabotages me. I try hard to push away or suppress this belief that I will inevitably fail, but the harder I try and suppress it, the more strong it gets. Finally, I stop resisting and accept that maybe I am fated to fail, and am ok with it. Then, I start to stop self sabotaging myself and as a result start meeting with "success". I have changed what I BELIEVED by fate was. But all along, it was my fate that I would eventually succeed (if I did in fact succeed...and if fate is real).
Okay, but nothing can subjugate the will anyway. So whether you go along or not, your will will not be subjugated. And whether you go along or not, your will will be affected by causes.
Yes, you explained yourself very well. Thank you very much, I appreciate that.
Until causality is proven to be real, I will doubt it is real.
When we watch a movie, nothing we see happen in the movie is caused by what happened just before. The whole movie exists at the same time, but we experience it in a linear sequence.
This may be how time works. All time might exist at once, but we experience it in a linear sequence.
(Edit. A counter argument could be that a movie is created sequentially, and so its still record of a sequential events)
At any rate, I can't see how it can be proven that causality is real. It seems impossible to connect two moments.
This means I don't believe in pre-determination, since pre- signifies that something was determined in the past. Rather, I believe everything is determined NOW. Not that some factor or factors in the past cause or predetermine the future.
Quoting god must be atheist
great
Very interesting.
I think there is no complete free will. Otherwise, you would naturally resort to randomness. Also, if you have an uncertain future goal in mind, what is predetermined IS the pursuit of the goal and avoidance of the path away from the goal. This mentally only has free will in terms of the goal that was set. Because of the uncertain nature of goals, you're back at square one. I suppose if your set a goal to "always be right" it may actually become self-fulfilling if you believe it with certainty in the PRESENTLY unfolding reality.
If the path is always yellow, perhaps you are ironically always choosing unpredictability in the present moment, which I believe is a contradiction.
Argument from incredulity/Divine Fallacy
As for bad grammar, mea culpa. It sounded right to me; perchance it's a dialectical variant of "let's not". I dunno.
I think that in a world where determinism is true, the world's course will be indistinguishable from predestination.
A predestinated world can continue to happen two ways: no causation, in this case it is not determined; and with causative processes, in which case that world's course is determined.
The free will-determinism issue is well beyond my ken. I asked around but to my surprise very few are willing to share their findings on the topic; either that or no one knows what it's all about.
Free will vs. determinism
1. Why isn't there even an attempt to prove free will?
2. Can free will be tested for i.e. is it an empirical claim?
3. Is free will unprovable in principle or is it just a case of INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER?
4. Left to the reader as an exercise.
Consider two EGGS, not balls, that are made of rubber. Or to footballs. (American football ball, not soccer balls.) Humans can't predict their paths if they are bouncing about and colliding with another american football. And they are just slightly different from balls, round balls.
Now imagine two dice. Again, some insist that their rolling is not random, it is predictable, because they are determined. Yet dice games are useful as games of chance, because no human mind can predict the outcome of the roll.
Now take the case of a human. He has a will. What affects the will? Anything that affects his thoughts or his body will affect his will. How can we measure that or how can we even identify the individual causes in the causation process? Humans are much more complex than a dice, and we can't even do this with dice!!!
So this is what stops any attempt of empirically creating a test for free will and/or for determination. We can only theorize that everything happens due to a cause; why would something happen that has no push or cause to happen? But beyond that we are impotent in our thinking to prove causation and prove (or disprove) free will.
Then ask a kin who can, in your clan who's got the ken.
Good point. So determinism & unpredictable and therefore empirical testing is not going to help us settle the matter.
However, the dice & balls scenario is actually predictable if we get our hands on all the relevant info, oui monsieur? That means free will can be experimentally tested for - it should manifest as random chaos or something like that in my humble opinion. Kinda like no hidden variables in QM.