Comprehensive Summary

Introduction

What does determinism claim?

Determinism claim that given the knowledge of any time point, the future is destined to be of a particular way. There was only one history, and because of that, there will be only one future. The belief of free choice or free will is an illusion, no matter how plausible/compelling it seems.

What is Laplace's demon? What did Laplace claim that the demon could do?

Laplace's demon is an entity with unlimited computational power in an idea experiment of Laplace. We human being and our computers are limited by the current state of development of technologies, namely computational power and observational power, and because of that we can't prove or disprove the claim of determinism.

However, Laplace's demon doesn't face this kind of problem. He has all the knowledge of current state including the velocity of every atom in the world. And by that knowledge he can compute at each timeframe all the outcome in the future. By knowing the present he precisely predicts the future.

Three conditions (we proposed) that must be met for a person to have free will?

1. Having different options.
2. Having control on which option to choose.
3. Being responsible for the free choice of action.

Hard Determinism

Hard determinists argue that if determinism is true, then we do not have free will because none of the three conditions for having free will are met. What is their argument that each of these conditions is unmet in a deterministic universe?

In a deterministic universe:

1. Having different options: not true. We only have one possible outcomes of future (as Laplace's demon computes).
2. Having control on which option to choose: not true. The course of development of things, the scenarios (under which we have illusion of making free choice) we meet or are about to meet, and the choice we make or are about to make, are all determined by things far before we are born. What we do is follow a pre-determined routine to be born, to live, to act, and to dead, without any moment where we can make independent choices on our own.
3. Being responsible for the free choice of action: not true. We are programmed to act good deeds or bad deeds. In this case no credit should be given to a good person and no punishment should be posed to a wrongdoers.

Soft Determinism

What is soft determinism?

Soft determinism believes that we can still have free will even if determinism is true. The free will, in this case, is not necessarily absolutely "free" or "independent of all external influences". No matter whether hard determinism is the truth of universe, we can still be 100% sure that we do have desire and we do feel them.

To David Hume, that is enough for free will. Whether hard determinism is true or false doesn't matter, since the proof or disproof of it is, of course, beyond the capacity of human reasoning. It's like that we are by definition, bound to be ignorant of whether we are brains in a vat. And for that reason, we should not even care to solve it. We should only look at the picture of time/space that our sensation offer, and engage in our life by ruminating on solvable problems.

According to Hume, what two conditions must be met for an action to count as free? Use examples to illustrate these two conditions.

• Acting in pursuit for desire, and responsible for the deed.
• No obstacles against the pursuit for desire.

Most philosophers reject Hume's account of free will. Sketch an imaginary case in which a person meets Hume's conditions but does not seem to have free will.

The core of rejection lies in: we can have false, or very "dependent" desires. An "altruistic drug dealer", or someone who deliberately makes you having a particular desire by chemical, can implant desire in your brain and make you a slave of it. In these cases we can't say one have free will.

The reason behind: merely pursuing desire is still too weak a condition of free will, leaving spaces for psycho-control and hence logical flaw. We need a stronger condition for soft determinism.

Use examples to illustrate Frankfurt's idea that a person is free only if she acts on desires that she wants to have.

Frankfurt made improvements on Hume's argument. He claims that one should have a second-order ability to reflect on what he desire, and hence a second-order wish to having / not having the desire that one desire.

For example, suppose a person influenced by friends (or that psycho-controlling pill) and gets to smoke. Every moment he has a desire of lighting a cigarette, however, he feel guilty and he wish he would rather not to have the desire of smoking. Under Hume's conditions of freedom this man is free: he is pursuing his desire. Every time he wants to smoke, he smokes. Frankfurt's improved test of freedom can align with our intuition and reject his freedom. He's having a desire that in his second-order reflection he would rather wish not to have. He is a man not free.

However, the problem that soft determinism encounters doesn't stop here. What if the chemicalist freak implant in your brain a desire of "having desire to commit crimes" that affects directly the second-order reflection? It seems that we have to beg for a third-order capability of reflection to arrive the intuitive conclusion that the man is not free. And this chain of thoughts just extend to infinity.

Libertarianism and Free Will

Why did William James find determinism disturbing?

Determinism is disturbing because of it eliminates possibility of existance of normative judgements, that is, the question of "what we ought to do" or "what we should have done instead". If everything is eventually determined and we are puppets of the physical rules of the universe, it no longer makes sense to argue on what is morally right, or what is worth pursuing.

This is actually a direct outcome of losing free will.

Scientific Liberatarianism

What do scientific libertarians claim? Why do scientific libertarians think that we are free?

Recent advancement in physics put on evidences to undermine determinism: We found that the laws of physics in microcosm can only determine the possibility of a list (or a spectrum) of outcomes, instead predicting precisely the actual result.

This is a very exciting discovery: we can still acknowledge the possibilities of the past, the present and the future. We proved that we still live in a world where things can go otherwise. In other words, there are still some kind of randomness in our neural process and given the knowledge of the past we cannot predict the future, especially future human behaviors. We can beat Laplace's demon in rock-paper-scissors because there's something random that he ultimately cannot precisely calculate. In this sense scientific libertarians claim that we are free.

Can scientific libertarianism accommodate the three features we proposed? Consider each of them and explain why scientific libertarianism can (or can't) accommodate that feature.

It's convenient to revise the three features of human decision-making that are required for free will.

1. Having different options.
2. Having control on which option to choose.
3. Being responsible for the free choice of action.

And hard determinism reject all three of them:

1. Our universe only have one line of evolving.
2. We are determined by things before we're born, and we actually have no control on which option to choose, although we usually feel an illusion of freedom.
3. Hence we can not be held responsible for our choice.

With the evidence from physics we can now refute the statement (1). We do have different options and different choices. However scientific libetarianism still cannot refute the statement (2). Can we be considered free if our brains are still controlled, or partly controlled, by some probabilistic laws of physics? Seems not. It's like that instead of following the arrow of time which takes us to a series of pre-determined events, we are now, at each moment, thown randomly into one of the possibilities of the next moment over which we still have no control and hence no freedom of choice. And because of that, scientific libertarianism fails to refute statement (3).

Radical Libertarianism

What does radical libertarianism claim about human decisionmaking?

If follows naturally that in order to be free, it's got to be that our decision-making processes aren't governed by any causal laws at all. Immanuel Kant put forward a rather radical statement: yes, we do lack free will if our thoughts are in the end, governed by deterministic laws. And he responded: we all have a non-physical, "transcendental" self, out of time and space, ungoverned by the laws of physics.

Discussion Questions

Many people find the idea that the universe may be deterministic to be disquieting or spooky. Do you? How do you think it would

affect your life if you became convinced that determinism is true and that everything you did throughout your life, down to the smallest detail, was determined, and could have been predicted, long before

you were born?

Some philosophers have argued that if determinism is true, then it makes no sense to punish criminals for their crimes, since their behavior was determined by the state of the universe long before they were born. Do you agree that punishing criminals makes no sense in a deterministic universe? If not, why not? If you do agree, how do you think the laws should be revised if the universe is deterministic?

At the end of section 3, we proposed a revision to Hume's version of soft determinism, developing an idea from Harry Frankfurt. We finished the section by suggesting that even this new version of soft determinism is problematic. Can you suggest some further improvement to our soft-determinist theory to deal with these problems?

Radical libertarians think that in order to have the sort of free will that is required for morality, it must be the case that human decision-making is not governed by the laws of physics. Do you think they are right? Do you think it makes sense to claim that human decisions are not governed by the laws of physics? Do you think it is true that human decision-making is not governed by the laws of physics? If human decisions are brain processes that are governed by the laws of physics, what implications does this have for morality?

Theists in the Abrahamic tradition believe that God is omniscient; he knows everything. If that's right, then God knows everything we are going to do, and he has known it since ... well, forever. Yet most theists in the Abrahamic tradition also believe that God gave humans free will, and it appears that these two beliefs are incompatible. Do you think it is possible to have tree will it God is omniscient? If so, how is it possible? If you think God's omniscience is incompatible with human free will, then which belief should a theist give up? If you find yourself intrigued by this problem, check out the last item in the What to Look at Next section.