Brief Thoughts On Free Will (and no this has nothing to do with Cyber Nations)
Entry posted by Lonely
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I think when considering the existence of free will we need to distinguish between two radically different senses of the word 'cause', with corresponding distinctions between different senses of 'determinism'. The causes of human actions are fundamentally different from the causes of non-human actions. For example, when we assess all the causes of an explosion, it becomes impossible for any power in the universe to prevent that explosion. On the other hand, if you're given sufficient cause to celebrate, that does not necessitate your resulting celebration. It follows from this that every movement of human organisms cannot be attributed to necessitating physical causes.
These two different senses of causation can be distinguished using Hume's terminology of moral and physical causes. If we describe some non-human event, such as an eclipse of the sun, then we employ the word 'cause' in a sense implying both physical necessity and physical impossibility: what happened was physically necessary and anything else was, in the circumstances, physically impossible. But in the other sense of the word 'cause', the sense in which we attribute motives to human actions, this is not the case. Suppose, for example, that I were to deliver some sort of good news to you. If you choose to respond to the news by celebrating, you may quite properly describe my action as the cause of your celebration. But I did not truly cause your celebration, it was not necessary and unavoidable. Perhaps you might have refrained from celebrating, because we were, say, in a library at the time. In other words, my news may have caused you to say “hooray!” but you might have cried “whoopee!” instead. To adapt a famous phrase of the philosopher-mathematician Gottfriend Leibniz, causes of this second, motivating sort “incline but do not necessitate.”
(credit to Antony Flew, whose ideas these are)
Does anyone have a refutation? This appears to me to blow the reductionist arguments out of the water.
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