RoR: Forum

Dr. Machan,

In our day the only well known naturalist thinker who defended free will was Ayn Rand ...

But there's one less well-known, naturalist champion of free will in our day: Mortimer Adler.

There is one major argument against determinism that�s very tough to overcome, especially by scientists. This is that unless human beings are free to do independent thinking, including scientific research, the results of inquiry are always infected with bias, prejudice, and other causes they cannot resist.

What a wonderful point!

Similarly, most of us take it the jurors can be objective, if they work at it.

Same as above.

But if free will is a myth, no such objectivity is possible, including about the issue of free will versus determinism. And that is a very difficult idea to reject because even to reject it, one would need to be able to be objective and, thus, to have free will.

Axiomatic!

Ed

Post 1

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 8:42am

Hi Dr Machan, I am a long time admirer of yours.

I wonder if there is a reason that you do not mention Nathaniel Branden as an advocate of free will?

I am sure you are aware that Nathaniel Branden wrote several articles on the subject in The Objectivist Newsletter including one entitled the Contradictions of Determinism.

Brand Blanshard, the professor of philosophy at Yale who wrote Reason and Analysis also advocated free will.

galt gulch

(Edited by galt gulch
on 4/25, 6:24pm)

(Edited by galt gulch
on 4/25, 6:27pm)

Post 2

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 5:01pm

I should have mentioned Nathan but thought that mentioning Rand would suffice in a column, given that she is more widely known. Indeed, my book, The Libertarian Alternative (1973) reprints one of his best pieces on this topic, from the UCLA Law Review.
(Edited by Machan on 4/25, 5:02pm)

Post 3

Thursday, April 26, 2007 - 1:29am

Brand Blanshard, the professor of philosophy at Yale who wrote Reason and Analysis also advocated free will.

Not true. Brand Blanshard was a determinist, who held that all events, including human actions, are causally necessitated. The following is from his book, Reason and Analysis:

It would be absurd to raise the vast problem of moral freedom for casual settlement in a paragraph, but if a writer holds to a universe of necessity, readers have a right to know whether he finds room for morality in such a world. I shall confine myself to two remarks.

First, that necessity in the form at least of causality does govern human action is essential, I suggest, if we are to make sense of moral judgments. If an act B was not caused by A the agent, then it is meaningless to say that A did the act, and it is unreasonable to hold him responsible in the sense that one may justly punish him in the interest of reform or deterrence, for such punishment assumes that very determination of future acts which it is questioning about present ones. It may be replied that though the choice to do action B rather than C was caused by A in the sense that it issued necessarily out of his nature, his nature at the moment of choice was itself undetermined. That such a view would be disastrous to one's own brand of psychology is not perhaps important, since psychology has so many brands; but such a view would make any scientific psychology impossible. If the selves out of which actions emerge are not causally conditioned, if states of the self may suddenly appear which are connected by no laws at all with the past interests or habits, the character or education, of the agent, then human behavior becomes not only inexplicable in principle, but, so far, impossible to influence by discipline or instruction. This may indeed be the case, but it seems to me increasingly improbable as our knowledge of human nature grows.

Secondly, the objection commonly felt to including human nature itself within the domain of necessity is largely based on a misunderstanding. It is assumed that causality is all of one type and that this type is the sort exemplified in the pulling about of puppets in a Punch-and-Judy show. Any self-respecting person would be humiliated at the discovery that his conclusions and moral choices were the product of nothing but mechanical clockwork. But there are levels of causality; and there is no reason whatever to suppose that conclusions and moral choices are mechanically determined. (pp. 492, 493)

Blanshard is evidently referring to the Aristotelian distinction between "efficient" and "final" causation. He is saying that to ascribe necessity to one's conclusions and moral choices is not to imply that the necessity is mechanical in nature and that it has nothing to do with one's understanding or value judgments. One's understanding and value judgments can themselves necessitate one's conclusions and moral choices without implying that one is simply a puppet who lacks self-determination.

As regards Branden's article "The Contradiction of Determinism," please see my refutation of it entitled "The Contradiction of 'The Contradiction of Determinism'" in the Winter 1972 issue of The Personalist, as well as the follow-up discussion in the Summer 1973 issue. The Personalist is an international review of philosophy that was published quarterly by the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. At the time, John Hospers was the editor.

- Bill

P.S. Mr. Gulch, you wouldn't, by any chance, be Nathaniel Branden, would you? ;-)

(Edited by William Dwyer
on 4/26, 1:38am)

Post 4

Thursday, April 26, 2007 - 3:41am

Blanshard's statement that "there are levels of causality; and there is no reason whatever to suppose that conclusions and moral choices are mechanically determined" is at odds with the claim that he is the sort of determinist with whom Objectivists would find themselves disagreeing. Rather he appears to identify a type of determinism--self-determinism--that embraces free will. But this free will is not of the "libertarian" variety--only mildly related to political libertarianism--whereby something random or irrational happens in reality that's construed to be "free," that is, free or independent of the laws of nature. Instead, free will in this version of the position is the causal capacity of a certain kind of entity, with certain faculties that render it capable of self-governance, to give direction to its actions. Because of its faculty of volitional/conceptual consciousness, which is made possible because of the highly complex cerebral cortex, this kind of entity is self-determined rather than mechanically moved by impersonal forces. (The details of this sort of account are laid out in the various more or less technical works of Roger W. Sperry [of which the most accessible is Science and Moral Priority, 1983], who was invoked by N. Branden in his own defense of free will. BTW, Dwyer's so called refutation of Branden is far from successful; one can check wether he has refuted the Objectivist account and defense of free will from reading his input here, on RoR, as well as his review of my own book, Initiative--Human Agency and Society (2000) in JARS and the follow-up exchange between him and me. There are additional valuable discussions of the Objectivist theory of free will in the now discontinued journal Objectivity, available at www.objectivity-archive.com.)
(Edited by Machan on 4/26, 3:44am)

Post 5

Thursday, April 26, 2007 - 10:28pm

Bill, thanks for posting that quote of Blanshard. I rarely come across his works. Can either you or Tibor recommend his most stimulating or useful work?

I have to agree with Tibor that Blanshards' affirmation of causality existing in different types is coherent with my own thought and my understanding of Rand. The problem I have is with his overuse here of the term necessity, which has a moral connotation to me, and which he seems to be using in too strong a force or too uncommon a sense. Perhaps I have simply not read enough to understand. But to necessitate seems to be a term suited to midlevel means-ends relationships, more than to causes. If one wants to cook a souffl� it necessitates obtaining eggs, having an oven set at the right temperature, and necessitates using ceramic cookwear rather than cast iron. But having eggs, a casserole, and an oven preheated at 325 degrees necessitates nothing. Necessity is final causation within the context of a goal. It seems weird to say that gravity necessitates falling, or to use necessity in any natural context.

Am I misunderstanding his usage?

Ted Keer

Post 6

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 12:57pm

Blanshard's statement that "there are levels of causality; and there is no reason whatever to suppose that conclusions and moral choices are mechanically determined" is at odds with the claim that he is the sort of determinist with whom Objectivists would find themselves disagreeing. Rather he appears to identify a type of determinism--self-determinism--that embraces free will.

I don't think so, unless you want to say that Blanshard is what today we would call a "compatibilist," which I think he is, but that does not make him a proponent of "free will" in the classical or Objectivist sense of that term. Free will, as Objectivists understand it, is at the very least the view that one could have done otherwise -- that one's choices weren't necessary -- that they didn't have to occur. For confirmation of this, one need look no further than Nathaniel Branden's essay, "The Contradiction of Determinism," in which he states:

"That which a man does, declare the advocates of determinism, he had to do -- that which he believes, he had to believe." (The Psychology of Self-Esteem, p. 51, hc.)

Recall Blanshard's answer to a possible objection against his argument for determinism: "It may be replied that though the choice to do action B rather than C was caused by A in the sense that it issued necessarily out of his nature, his nature at the moment of choice was itself undetermined. That such a view would be disastrous to one's own brand of psychology is not perhaps important, since psychology has so many brands; but such a view would make any scientific psychology impossible. If the selves out of which actions emerge are not causally conditioned, if states of the self may suddenly appear which are connected by no laws at all with the past interests or habits, the character or education, of the agent, then human behavior becomes not only inexplicable in principle, but, so far, impossible to influence by discipline or instruction."

Blanshard is saying here that the choice to do action B rather than C was caused by A in the sense that it issued necessarily out of his nature and that his nature was itself determined by his past interests, habits, character and education. I don't see how he could have been any more explicit. This is clearly not the Objectivist view of free will. It is true that Objectivists believe that one's actions are "self-determined," but they do not believe, as Blanshard does, that those actions were necessitated by antecedent causes. What is also worth noting is Blanshard's argument that if the self is not determined by past interests, habits, character or education, then human behavior becomes not only inexplicable in principle, but impossible to influence by discipline or instruction.

But this free will is not of the "libertarian" variety--only mildly related to political libertarianism--whereby something random or irrational happens in reality that's construed to be "free," that is, free or independent of the laws of nature.

My understanding of "libertarian free will" is that it refers simply to incompatibilist free will, not that it is equivalent to indeterminism, which is the view that it is just a sheer, causeless accident which of two actions a person performs.

Instead, free will in this version of the position is the causal capacity of a certain kind of entity, with certain faculties that render it capable of self-governance, to give direction to its actions. Because of its faculty of volitional/conceptual consciousness, which is made possible because of the highly complex cerebral cortex, this kind of entity is self-determined rather than mechanically moved by impersonal forces.

The issue, for free will versus determinism is not whether a person's choices are self-determined or mechanically determined, but whether or not he could have chosen otherwise under the circumstances, ie., whether or not his choices were necessary. Although compatibilists reject the idea that a person's choices are mechanically determined, they do not endorse the Objectivist view of free will.

BTW, Dwyer's so called refutation of Branden is far from successful; one can check wether he has refuted the Objectivist account and defense of free will from reading his input here, on RoR, as well as his review of my own book, Initiative--Human Agency and Society (2000) in JARS and the follow-up exchange between him and me. There are additional valuable discussions of the Objectivist theory of free will in the now discontinued journal Objectivity, available at www.objectivity-archive.com.)

By all means, read these discussions and exchanges; I think you'll find them enlightening. That one's conclusions are determined by one's knowledge and value judgments does not imply that those conclusions are biased or arrived at non-objectively. If one values the truth -- if one values objective reasoning and thinking -- then the fact that one's conclusions are determined by one's knowledge and value-judgments necessitates that they will be arrived at objectively. If one does not value the truth, but believes instead that wishing will make it so, then one's thinking will be biased and non-objective, even if one possesses free will. In fact, if one is free to disregard the truth -- free to indulge one's biases and prejudices -- then how can one claim one's conclusions as the product of unbiased thinking? Those conclusions could just as well have been based on prejudice as on an objective evaluation. The argument from bias is a two-edged sword, which can just as well be used to invalidate free will as it can to invalidate determinism.

- Bill

Post 7

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 2:16pm

Ted wrote,

Bill, thanks for posting that quote of Blanshard. I rarely come across his works. Can either you or Tibor recommend his most stimulating or useful work?

I don't know. I suppose it depends on what your interests are. Reason and Analysis is a good critique of the analytic movement in philosophy. See in this connection, Nathaniel Branden's review in the February 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter. Blanshard's two-volume work, The Nature of Thought will give you an insight into his rationalist epistemology, of which Vol. 1 is useful as critique of pragmatist epistemology. And his book Reason and Goodness does, of course, present his ethical views. Blanshard is certainly not an Objectivist, but he does present some good criticisms of contemporary philosophy. He appears to subscribe to H.W.B. Joseph's theory of causality, in which Joseph effectively answers Hume by grounding causal necessity in the law of identity.

I have to agree with Tibor that Blanshards' affirmation of causality existing in different types is coherent with my own thought and my understanding of Rand.

Well, yes, but as I indicated in a previous post, this does not mean that Blanshard agrees with Objectivism's view of free will.

The problem I have is with his overuse here of the term necessity, which has a moral connotation to me, and which he seems to be using in too strong a force or too uncommon a sense. Perhaps I have simply not read enough to understand. But to necessitate seems to be a term suited to midlevel means-ends relationships, more than to causes. If one wants to cook a souffl� it necessitates obtaining eggs, having an oven set at the right temperature, and necessitates using ceramic cookwear rather than cast iron. But having eggs, a casserole, and an oven preheated at 325 degrees necessitates nothing. Necessity is final causation within the context of a goal. It seems weird to say that gravity necessitates falling, or to use necessity in any natural context.

Am I misunderstanding his usage?

Yes. Necessity in causation arises as an issue in Hume, who denied that given the cause, the effect had to occur. As a radical empiricist, he argued that we don't see any necessity in causation -- any "making" of the effect from the cause. All we see are spacial contiguity and temporal continuity. The effect happens to follow the cause and is juxtaposed to it, but we don't see that it must occur as a result of the cause. According to Hume, we don't perceive any necessity in nature; all we perceive are brute facts. Joseph, in his book An Introduction to Logic, provides the definitive answer to Hume. Blanshard quotes Joseph as follows:

If two plants, whose nature is really the same, can determine the growth of totally different seeds, how can we call either the seed of that plant at all? Grant that a seed may sometimes be produced by a plant of its own kind, and sometimes by a plant of another kind, without any difference of circumstances, and merely because causes do not act uniformly, and you have really granted that anything may produce anything; flint and steel may produce seed instead of a spark, and oil raise the waves or quench a conflagration. But to say that anything may produce anything is to empty the word "produce" of all of its meaning. For the causal relation is a necessary relation, such that if you have one thing you must have another. To add that it does not matter what that other is, destroys the force of the must. (p. 407)

Blanshard comments:

The point here is a simple one. To say that A produces B in virtue of its special character is to assert necessity. If it is in virtue of a certain character in A and not of something else that B comes into being, then if B was not there, A was not there, and could not have been there.... Joseph goes so far as to hold that to deny necessity in causation is to deny the law of identity itself. 'To assert a causal connection between a and x implies that a acts as it does because it is what it is; because, in fact, it is a. So long therefore as it is a, it must act thus; and to assert that it may act otherwise on a subsequent occasion is to assert that what is a is something else than the a which it is declared to be.' (p. 408)

- Bill

(Edited by William Dwyer
on 4/27, 2:20pm)

Post 8

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 2:16pm

Here is the rub: "If one values the truth -- if one values objective reasoning and thinking -- then the fact that one's conclusions are determined by one's knowledge and value-judgments necessitates that they will be arrived at objectively. If one does not value the truth, but believes instead that wishing will make it so, then one's thinking will be biased and non-objective, even if one possesses free will. In fact, if one is free to disregard the truth -- free to indulge one's biases and prejudices -- then how can one claim one's conclusions as the product of unbiased thinking? Those conclusions could just as well have been based on prejudice as on an objective evaluation. The argument from bias is a two-edged sword, which can just as well be used to invalidate free will as it can to invalidate determinism." But whether one values the truth is, by the determinist's and compatibilist's account, entirely out of one's hand--one will either to this or not, as a matter of impersonal forces that act on one's mind. Now the problem is that if this is the way the mind works, there is no independent way for it to monitor its own operations and adjust it, willfully, to a course that assures one of unprejudiced thinking. One will just think the way one must and that is true about what one thinks about one's own thinking. There is no way to escape--so no one is in the position to take an independent stance to ascertain whether one--or anuyone for that matter--is prejudiced or not. It is like a computer, which has no way to tell whether what it contains is true or false since it is entirely subject to the "garbage in, garbage out" rule without any way to clear out the garbage which, of course, internally the computer has no way of knowing is or is not garbage. The epistemological obstacles to determinism are, I am convinced, insurmountable. The one philosopher who did a creditable job of trying to overcome it, Adolph Gruenbaum, didn't succeed, as far as I could ascertain. And this is what common sense suggests, too. After all, if I am located in space/time at T1 and several options are available to me to locate myself at space/time T2, why should it not be possible for me to be to locate myself then at A, B, C, or X? Why must it be the case that I can only end up in one of these? My imagination, my speculation, my conceptual reflection is in my power to activate and whether I activate these is up to me, not to impersonal forces--that's the very meaning of volition, including of having the capacity to direct oneself toward the future without prejudice, without some loaded dice. If one denies this, then of course one's denial, too, has to have come about because of impersonal forces (and these include the so called values or convictions one, by the determinist's and compatibilist's account, inescapably had to have had). So what is one to make of a thought that came about not from one's freely activated personal initiative but by the ineluctable daisy-chain of everlasting causes? How could such a thought be ascertained to accord with reality, i.e., be true, if one had to have had it just as a parrot has to utter the sentences it was trained to utter? It can only be true accidentally and certainly it cannot be known to be true since such "knowledge," by this account, is fully conditioned and not independently arrived at.

Post 9

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 2:22pm

Bill, what if I say that you were determined to say that (that you couldn't have chosen otherwise)? That it had to be -- and not only that, but that it had to be in the very words and word-order that you had used in your post. That it couldn't have been any different than it was.

And keep in mind that, if you do agree, that I can always "say" that you "had" to agree.

;-)

Ed
[pretty determined]

Post 10

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 2:33pm

Arriving at an understanding of human volition (or the lack thereof). The short version ...

Determinist:
Believes humans don't have free will -- because of accidental, impersonal forces which had been acting upon him, up until that point of his belief declaration

Volitionist:
Understands what it's like to be a being who can choose to focus or unfocus his mind at any given time. Understands this fundamental choice and how it ties in to things like personal change and morality.

Ed

Post 11

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 4:26pm

Ed: Ed Pols' book, Acts of our Being (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1982) does a wonderful job of exploring the issue in exactly the terms you suggest here.

Post 12

Friday, April 27, 2007 - 11:40pm

But whether one values the truth is, by the determinist's and compatibilist's account, entirely out of one's hand--one will either [do] this or not, as a matter of impersonal forces that act on one's mind.

But you don't choose to value the truth in the sense of valuing objectivity any more than you choose to believe in determinism or free will. You either recognize its value or you don't, depending on the extent of your knowledge and awareness. To be sure, you can raise your level of awareness, but the choice to do so is itself determined by your valuation of that process, a valuation which is not, contrary to Machan, an "impersonal force acting on one's mind," but a personal value motivating your choices and decisions.

Now the problem is that if this is the way the mind works, there is no independent way for it to monitor its own operations and adjust it, willfully, to a course that assures one of unprejudiced thinking.

If a person isn't aware that valuing the truth is of paramount importance, then he won't value it enough to monitor his own operations in order to assure unprejudiced thinking. Often, of course, a person isn't even aware that his thinking is prejudiced. I doubt that people self-reflectively acknowledge their own prejudices and continue to hold them. More than likely, once they recognize them as prejudices, they give them up. In any case, if, through his study of Objectivism (say), a person becomes aware of the importance of logical, unprejudiced thinking, then he can and will monitor his thinking to reflect that value. The fact that he is determined to do so by his understanding of its importance does not invalidate his objectivity. How does he know he's being objective? How does anyone know that he or she is being objective? By self-reflective introspection. It is certainly possible for a person with free will to arrive at biased conclusions. How does he know they're not? He can know it in the same way, by self-reflection.

One will just think the way one must and that is true about what one thinks about one's own thinking. There is no way to escape--so no one is in the position to take an independent stance to ascertain whether one--or anuyone for that matter--is prejudiced or not.

You cannot escape from your own thinking or awareness, or gain intellectual independence from it, if that is what you are demanding as a precondition of knowledge. Any control you have over your thought processes must itself be based ultimately on those processes. Does that mean that your thinking is inherently biased? No, because the issue of objectivity or bias is an issue of the method by which one thinks, and that method can be learned and appreciated, just as the rules of logical thinking can. The fact that the process of learning it is itself determined by one's knowledge and understanding does not make it any less legitimate or any less valid.

It is like a computer, which has no way to tell whether what it contains is true or false since it is entirely subject to the "garbage in, garbage out" rule without any way to clear out the garbage which, of course, internally the computer has no way of knowing is or is not garbage.

The reason that a computer doesn't know whether the information it contains is true or false is not because the computer isn't free; it's because the computer isn't rational.

The epistemological obstacles to determinism are, I am convinced, insurmountable. The one philosopher who did a creditable job of trying to overcome it, Adolph Gruenbaum, didn't succeed, as far as I could ascertain. And this is what common sense suggests, too. After all, if I am located in space/time at T1 and several options are available to me to locate myself at space/time T2, why should it not be possible for me to be to locate myself then at A, B, C, or X? Why must it be the case that I can only end up in one of these? My imagination, my speculation, my conceptual reflection is in my power to activate and whether I activate these is up to me, not to impersonal forces . . .

Whether or not you end up at one of these locations depends on your motivation, and motivation is not an "impersonal force." It is intimately personal, but it governs what you do. Yes, my imagination, speculation or conceptual reflection is in my power to activate, but that power is conditional. It depends on whether or not I have a sufficient reason to activate it. Even though I can imagine choosing alternative courses of action, if I am not sufficiently motivated to choose one of them, then I won't choose it.

--that's the very meaning of volition, including of having the capacity to direct oneself toward the future without prejudice, without some loaded dice.

One can have the capacity to direct oneself toward the future without prejudice, provided that one understands the importance of doing so and truly values it over the alternative. If one does, then one will necessarily think and act in an unbiased manner. If one does not understand or appreciate its importance, then the possession of free will won't matter.

And if one denies this, then of course one's denial, too, has to have come about because of impersonal forces (and these include the so called values or convictions one, by the determinist's and compatibilist's account, inescapably had to have had). So what is one to make of a thought that came about not from one's freely activated personal initiative but by the ineluctable daisy-chain of everlasting causes? How could such a thought be ascertained to accord with reality, i.e., be true, if one had to have had it just as a parrot has to utter the sentences it was trained to utter? It can only be true accidentally and certainly it cannot be known to be true since such "knowledge," by this account, is fully conditioned and not independently arrived at.

Again, the difference between a parrot's utterances and a person's conclusions is not that the parrot's utterances are determined whereas the person's conclusions are free; the difference is that the parrot is not a conceptual being. The parrot doesn't understand what it's saying. Human beings do, and their understanding has nothing whatever to do with whether they are determined or free. These analogies between parrots and computers are plausible only because neither the parrot nor computer has a rational mind, which is the real reason each of them lacks knowledge.

The idea that knowledge has to be arrived at independently of antecedent causes makes no sense. Obviously, one has to initiate a process of thought -- one has to start the process of thinking -- but one does so only because one considers it a better choice than the alternative. It is one's valuation of the process of thinking that determines one's choice to initiate it. One makes the choice for the sake of an end or goal -- e.g., to understand something -- which motivates the choice. One doesn't choose to initiate a process of thought for no reason; one does so in order to gain a value, the value being greater knowledge or understanding. But if one values such knowledge or understanding over its absence, then one could not just as well refuse to acquire it by refusing to initiate a process of thought. If one values A over non-A, it makes no sense to say that one could just as well choose non-A over A.

- Bill

Post 13

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 12:16am

Bill, what if I say that you were determined to say that (that you couldn't have chosen otherwise)? That it had to be -- and not only that, but that it had to be in the very words and word-order that you had used in your post. That it couldn't have been any different than it was.

I'd say you're correct. So?

And keep in mind that, if you do agree, that I can always "say" that you "had" to agree.

Yes, you can, and you'd be correct. So? Like Tibor, you seem to think that this is self-refuting. I've got news for you: it's not. ;-)

Arriving at an understanding of human volition (or the lack thereof). The short version ...
Determinist:
Believes humans don't have free will -- because of accidental, impersonal forces which had been acting upon him, up until that point of his belief declaration

Volitionist:
Understands what it's like to be a being who can choose to focus or unfocus his mind at any given time. Understands this fundamental choice and how it ties in to things like personal change and morality.

Why do you say "accidental, impersonal" forces have been acting on him? If there is anything a determinist does not believe, it is that things behave "accidentally." On the contrary, he would say that they act strictly according to their natures. And why do the forces have to be impersonal, when according to compatibilism, one's choices are a function of one's (personal) value judgments?

You also say that, according to the volitionist, a person "can choose to focus or unfocus his mind at any given time." Do you really believe that that's possible? -- that a person can choose to focus or unfocus his mind for no reason whatsoever? And if he requires a reason -- some purpose -- for choosing to focus in preference to not focusing, then how is it that, in the face of such a reason, he can just as well choose not to focus? In choosing not to focus under these circumstances, wouldn't he be acting contrary to his value preference?

- Bill

Post 14

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 1:57am

In post #12 Bill writes:

> One doesn't choose to initiate a process of thought for no reason; one does so in order to
> gain a value, the value being greater knowledge or understanding.

Bill:

How can one choose to initiate a process of thought? The act of choosing is already an initiated thought itself. One can focus on one particular train of thought as opposed to another, and maybe this is what you mean, but one cannot jumpstart (i.e., initiate) their thought process from a non-thinking state.

>If one values A over non-A, it makes no sense to say that one could just as well choose non-A over A.

In the other thread on this subject, we have already covered this territory and I was surprised that you didn't respond to my summary Post #148 there. As I have already explained, I am not arguing that choices are unmotivated. We agree on this. Where we disagree regarding volition is that you posit that at a given point in time, a man's motivating factors (i.e. values), are predetermined by his past circumstances and related thinking, and therefore, he is necessitated to make a certain choice (let's say choose A because he values A) over non-A. But what you have not answered is what I have proposed; that free will does not consist of choosing non-A over A, but choosing between various courses of action (i.e., goals), say A, B, C and so on. But in choosing B or C, the subsequent action may very possibly yield a non-A result. So from the introspective inside view, we can discover that the true nature of the choice remains ultimately motivated by a goal based upon one or more values, while from the outside, it appears for all intents and purposes that the individual was able to decide between A and non-A and choose to act for non-A in contradiction to a well founded value that they possessed.

The reason that a person can make a choice of this type is because they possess: 1) a conceptual faculty that allows them to construct mental models of the world, 2) self-awareness which allows them to model their own behavior, and 3) imagination which allows various scenarios to be run within these mental models so that possible results can be projected and analyzed. This process is known as thinking. Let's use Bill's example of the dieter to explore this further.

A guy on a diet has a candy bar on the table in front of them. Should he eat it and get the enjoyment or refrain from eating it and benefit from the further healthy weight loss. But this dieter is also going to soon run in a marathon and the candy bar would give him additional energy to help in the race. But if he runs the race and doesn't eat the candy bar he will lose even more weight. But if he doesn't eat it, it's possible he might then also lose the race due to fatigue. Maybe he should just chuck the race, eat the candy bar, have a beer and watch the ball game on TV. Oh my, so many possibilities - so many choices. The race starts in five minutes. The fact that this fellow is considering all of these things is that he is not really clear about what he ultimately wants. The candy bar sounds tasty; doing well in the race would be nice; it would be fun to watch the ball game; and losing weight is certainly a priority. He has five minutes to sit and reflect on all of these courses of actions and make a decision, otherwise, when the race starts some of the decisions will be made for him. After four minutes he finally comes to a decision.

What is going on during those four minutes? Bill, do you think that the choice made at the end of the four minutes was determined and necessitated at the start of the period of reflection by this person's historical circumstances and prior thinking or do you believe that the outcome was indeterminate at the point when the four-minute clock started ticking? I'm guessing that you will say that the entire chain of thought during that four minutes was predetermined by preceding factors and that there was only one possible outcome - but I hope I'm guessing wrong. If there was still some flexibility in the outcome at the start, what about at the three minute point? I'll grant you that at the moment the decision was made and some specific action was taken, there was a motivating factor for that particular action, but I contend that there was no necessitated outcome until the choice was made.

Furthermore, I contend that the entire four-minute thinking process was entirely volitional because it occurred in the space of our consciousness which is free from external influences. We can run these mental scenarios any way we like, focusing on them as much or as little as we care to, ultimately weighing each possibility by a variety of factors while arriving at a conclusion. And if you argue that that process is driven and determined by the values we already hold, then I further suggest that during the four minute deliberation, it is quite possible that some of that time was given over to serious introspection concerning a meta-evaluation of how conscientious this fellow has been in setting priorities for himself and, as a result, he did a little reprogramming of his value hierarchy in parallel with the other thinking he was doing which ultimately affected his choice. And if you say he was casually necessitated to do that reprogramming because of his prior values, then I give up! :-)

In case you are interested, this guy ate the candy bar, ran the race and came in third.

Regards,
--
Jeff

Post 15

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 6:31am

On what we may call first or initial choices--those that happen, supposedly, at a very early stage of one's life when one hasn't yet acquired any convictions about values, goals or anything else (in as much as human beings lack instincts other than, perhaps, the minimal suckling which becomes extinct at a very early age)--how could they be motivated by values? Unless someone forms ideas, with a previously activated faculty of conceptual consciousness, such ideas do not yet reside in or constitute the content of one's mind. (Ideas, in any case, are means of conceptual consciousness, not stuff.) And values are certain type of ideas or convictions about what is worth pursuing. So to claim that one's initial choices, the ones that lead one to think, are already motivated or driven or determined by one's values is highly dubious since they presuppose something that hasn't yet occurred, namely, thought which is required to form ideas (of values). (Not that the idea of initiating thought, the first bits of it, is so simple to conceptualize but without it, one would have to buy into the notion that thinking, a la Descartes, is innate, which is very doubtful.)
(Edited by Machan on 4/28, 9:14am)

Post 16

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 1:06pm

Machan: good point on the suckling reflex. Reflexes have no values attached, like the reflex to cough, swallow, dodge on-coming objects, and so on. Each reflex is simply a motor function response to stimulus, but it does not suggest a value in them. Now, coordinating reflexes to do something, a goal orientated response, is value driven, because it requires the means to observe differences in the perceptual 'field', have the knowledge to recognize what the differences mean, and how to compensate for any set of differences [or to utilize them] to achieve said goal(s).

In essence, it's a separation of conceptual, perceptual, and non-perceptual/reflexive from each other. I've considered this to be a big problem in AI, because if all actions are determined by values, then how in the hell did they form in the first place? What was the proto-value as it were that set the chain reaction of the other values, and their permutations? Logically, this doesn't follow in neurology or any part of biology as currently taught and reported. No one, to my knowledge, has shown such proto-values existing in any animal known, especially humans.

Ultimately, free will, at least to me, is defined as the ability to alternate thought processes that result in the formation of concepts congruent to reality or their anti-concept inverses [to think otherwise, modal logic and etc], such that it allows for new knowledge to form for the ability of the agent [to survive or not, or whatever] to utilize. In short, you have free will because you need to learn to survive, and you can't do it without it. It's our hat trick as a species, we better get use to it and enjoy it for better or worse.

-- Brede

Post 17

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 3:47pm

On what we may call first or initial choices--those that happen, supposedly, at a very early stage of one's life when one hasn't yet acquired any convictions about values, goals or anything else (in as much as human beings lack instincts other than, perhaps, the minimal suckling which becomes extinct at a very early age)--how could they be motivated by values? Unless someone forms ideas, with a previously activated faculty of conceptual consciousness, such ideas do not yet reside in or constitute the content of one's mind. (Ideas, in any case, are means of conceptual consciousness, not stuff.) And values are certain type of ideas or convictions about what is worth pursuing. So to claim that one's initial choices, the ones that lead on to think, are already motivated or driven or determined by one's values is highly dubious since they presuppose something that hasn't yet occurred, namely, thought which is required to form ideas (of values).

The choice to think or to focus, in the Objectivist lexicon, is not the choice to move from a complete absence of thought to the presence of thought, which would clearly be impossible. Any choice presupposes that one is, at the very least, aware of the alternatives. The choice to focus, in Objectivism, is the choice to raise one's consciousness from a lower level to a higher level. In order to make that choice, however, one must do so for the sake of a value, even if the value is only an interest in becoming more aware of one's context.

Rand addresses the issue of how a child learns to focus his mind by comparing the process to the child's learning to focus visually. She asks, "Why does he learn to focus [his eyes]? Because he's trying to see -- to perceive. Similarly, an infant or young child learns to focus his mind in the form of wanting to know something -- to understand clearly." (Ayn Rand Answers, p. 154) The desire to know something -- to understand clearly -- is the value motivating the child's choice.

- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 4/28, 3:53pm)

Post 18

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 9:04pm

I wasn't doing Randian exegesis. So what Rand said may be suggestive to me but is by no means the last word on this topic. Moreover, the inference adduced from what she does say, namely, that the child has values, is not at all evident. It is implicit in the choice that what is being aimed for is knowledge but prior to knowledge, there cannot be any values in a child's mind. There is, indeed, tabula rasa (something Rand also affirms, BTW).

Post 19

Saturday, April 28, 2007 - 10:09pm