Is there a philosophy of libertarian free will that doesn’t just devolve into randomness?

Question

Note that by randomness, I don’t mean a particular kind of random process (such as a uniformly random distribution), but rather something occurring without a deeper reason.

In libertarian free will, actions are chosen without determinism, or atleast not complete determinism. Determinism may be involved in limiting the number of options an agent chooses, but the final decision amongst those options is essentially “free”.

So if an agent commonly believed to have libertarian freedom, such as God, chooses between X, Y, or Z, and He chooses X, why is He choosing X instead of Y or Z?

If He is free, then clearly nothing else internal to God is determining His choice of X. But if He is free, does this not imply that nothing is then determining His choice? And if nothing is determining His choice, how is this not random? More importantly, if randomness is what is ultimately at play here, in what sense is God the controller of this specific action anyways? How can He choose His own (seemingly random) choice?

Answer 1

Free will is actually the very opposite of randomness. Both free will and randomness are excluded from determinism and both produce unpredictable results. But there is a very significant difference: Random outcomes occur for no reason, deliberate choices are always made for multiple reasons.

So, the answer is yes. Free will just cannot "devolve" into randomness. Any philosophy suggesting that would be totally useless.

"Random choice" is an oxymoron and so is also "determined choice". Reasons are not causes. Reasons are just relevant knowledge that helps to make better choices. Reasons don't determine anything.

A choice is a deliberate selection of a course of action out of multiple alternatives. A choice is not a physical event and therefore it cannot be determined.

Answer 2

Only physicalist monist causality is limited to the dichotomy between deterministic causality and random causality.

In the non-physical realm, nobody knows how causality works, so any philosopher and theologicians can assume anything without falsifiability.

And what goes for gods in theology also works for the human mind in many forms of dualism. That means instead of modeling a mind as a machine performing some kind of computation, the mind has no detailed model but is treated as a black box about which only inputs and outputs are known. Neither libertarians nor theologicians have any working model of what goes on in their concept of human or divine mind, only they feel mighty sure it cannot be bound to a causality that has the deterministic+random dichotomy.

So "free" here is only a negative definition of what limitations do not apply, it is not a positive definition of what is possible or how.

Even without that dichotomy, if introducing things like quantum indeterminacy, there is still no model of how that would be of any use for a positive definition of libertarian free will.

Other concepts to circumvent the problem are pseudo-philosophic words like strong emergence and top-down-causation, which have zero proven examples or even attempts at justification, nor do they help much with free will.

Answer 3

Mind your own position and perspective in this thought experiment.

Like where are you in relation to that god? Are you an external observer who treats their actions as a black box being only aware of the inputs and outputs or are you within the god box, having complete awareness of their ideas and thought processes?

Because you seem to start from an outsiders perspective and try to justify an insiders perspective that doesn't necessarily follows from that.

The thing is, it's quite possible, maybe even necessary that from an outsiders perspective the actions of the god seem random. Like there's a good chance that this "randomness" is the origin story of the concept of a will in the first place.

So for example picture an inanimate object that is just described by the external forces pushing and pulling upon it and now compare it to idk an animal, which might act the same way under different circumstances or different under the same circumstances. So in other words it's not just the circumstances that motivate it's actions, but there's something inside it which follows it's own plan. There seems to be a will, that is independent or only loosely dependent on the particular situation.

So idk picture yourself looking at a 3-D model of the world where you've frozen time so that you can move around and observe things. Now, in that scenario, picture a compressed spring. It looks like an inanimate object, lacks most of the hydraulic parts common in life or whatnot. Still if you press "play" on your simulation and let time run again, it will decompress and return to it's "normal" shape.

So despite giving the initial appearance of randomness, it's nonetheless deterministic and the assumption of a will is more or less the result of different time scales and misunderstandings of cause and effect.

Now free will implies that your subject isn't just a system of compressed springs that react to inputs in a delayed, but nonetheless deterministic, way. But that it's actions are chosen by itself and are NOT causally determined by external conditions.

So regardless of whether the actions of the subject are predictable or random (to you!) they follow it's own motivation (thus not actually random to the agent), rather than whatever deterministic reason you model them with.

In other words they might as well be determined by initial states of the subject, but those initial states are NOT causally determined by the external state. So the agent acts because it WANTS to act like that.

While in a libertarian free will the agent is also free to want what they want. Again whether that looks to an observer to be random or orderly (both are aesthetic choices that someone could want...), the important part is that it's determined by the agent itself, instead of the agent being just a more complex inanimate object that who's state is the result of external forces.

The problem is that this creates this mind-body-problem, where "the mind", "the you", "the conscious self" or however you want to call it, is both intimately tied to the body with whom it interacts with the entire rest of the world both in terms of perception and action, so much so that it apparently can't exist without it. But with which it is at the same time it is not synonymous and from which it is actually causally independent.

So idk picture something like the system "excavator + operator". Where the excavator is the body and the operator is the mind. The operator in a sound proof cabin can only interact with the world via the excavator, but what they do is not determined by what the excavator experiences but what the operator wants.

Or picture an avatar in a computer game, where the person on screen is the body but the mind is actually outside of the "physical reality" that the avatar is in.

Now the nature of the universe (simulation) can force the avatar on a set deterministic path, but that doesn't actually control how the player feels about that and what they want or instruct their avatar to do.

So for example you could play a racing game, but instead of running around in circles you can crash the cars or run off cliffs and test the physics of the game. To an outside observer it may appear random, but with regards to your own motivation it makes perfect sense and might aim to be deterministic, meaning you actually react to inputs in a way that you think fits.

Though trying to fit expected outputs, is different than having your outputs be involuntarily defined by the inputs itself.

So no the inner workings of your god don't have to be random to produce results that are seemingly random. And they don't even have to seem random at all to begin with. They just need to be the result of the wants of the god and not determined by the inputs to it.

How that is supposed to know? No idea and the deeper we look into the human body the more and more options for a hiding place of the mind become obsolete. Though if it's like the avatar and the player we'd also never be able to find the player within the source code of our character either. And the very quest to find it there seems futile because there would be a necessary transition to a non-deterministic realm somewhere where our deterministic methods would struggle to find results. Or you know our models could be true and this free will simply doesn't exist and it's just an emergent phenomena of complex systems that is ultimately an illusion that we make up to make sense of the things that we don't understand, because we haven't found a deterministic cause and effect relation for them (yet).

Answer 4

I’m questioning the basic premise of your question. Which proponent of free will aims to explain free will by randomness, i.e. by the operation of a mental random generator?

Instead proponents of free will emphasize that persons act due to internal reasons, represented by their conscious and unconscious mental processes. The origin and the strenght of these internal reasons may depend on the individual biography.

Answer 5

The mechanics of libertarian free will is unspecified.

It's not deterministic, it's not random. But people don't say what it is (or where it is, or how it interacts with the physical world).

Which raises the question of whether it's even a coherent concept, never mind how can we know it exists.

It seems to be rather strongly tied to the idea of a "soul", a non-physical consciousness (although there may be people who accept the existence of libertarian free will but not of a soul). If you already accept that there's some vague non-physical consciousness (due to e.g. religious beliefs), it's not much of an extension to say that consciousness also has some vague non-physical concept of free will.

Both a soul and free will entail some poorly defined and dubious connection to the physical world and to causality:

• It's hard to deny that brain injury and brain disease and various substances people take (e.g. medication and recreational drugs) very directly influences how we think and which decisions we make.

• We can see a two-way link (via brain scans) between brain activity in certain parts of the brain and various types of conscious thought.

• We see strongly correlations between people having experienced certain external factors (e.g. growing up under certain circumstances) to them thinking a certain way and making certain decisions.

• In the scope of life on Earth more broadly, we can see what appears to be consciousness forming naturally and incrementally across time via evolution, with e.g. brain size linked to capacity for complex thought.

• The growing brain within a single organism (and them being exposed to various stimuli) also corresponds to an increase in capacity for complex thought (a human adult can think more complex thoughts than an infant).

• Further still, and perhaps the most problematic of all, is just the basic premise. If I go to an ice cream shop, and I really want chocolate ice cream more than anything else - where does free will come in? I can't seem to choose to not want chocolate ice cream. Can I choose marzipan or whatever, even though I really dislike that? I'd say no - the fact that I don't want that prevents me from choosing that, and I didn't choose to not want that (although if you offer me a million bucks to do so, I'd probably want the money more than I dislike marzipan, which is still consistent with my point). But even granting that I can choose that, it doesn't seem like a useful freedom to be able to get something I don't want.

  Maybe you'd say I can choose between equal preferences, but if they're equal preferences, then I'm indifferent to which one I pick. Maybe I can weigh up different factors, but I didn't choose any of those factors, and I don't choose how important any of them are to me. Whether any given factor pops into my head at that moment is not in my immediate control.

There is this strong two-way link between the physical world and consciousness. Our personality is a causal determiner of which choices we make, and our personality is determined by our physiology, our natural tendencies, our memories, etc. (i.e. things we didn't choose, or things we chose, which are in turn determined by things we didn't choose).

Libertarian free will doesn't necessarily deny any of this, as much as it tries to insert some non-specific thing into some non-specific place in the middle, without actually trying to explain where or how it fits in.

If you're looking for something scientific, testable, empirical, demonstrable, something we can investigate, something specific, something we can explain in detail, something that tries to account for and make sense of the evidence... libertarian free will has none of that.

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If we're talking about some non-physical conscious entity like God, we're essentially already granting much of the premise.

Answer 6

Yes, there is a philosophy of Libertarian Free Will that does not devolve into randomness.

There is a conceptual block you are suffering from, and it is a false dichotomy belief that only determinism and randomness are possible causal mechanisms. What we have discovered about logic is that there are infinite logics: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/abs/guide-to-logical-pluralism-for-nonlogicians/EDFDFA1C9EB65DB71848DABD6B12D877 while some logics have only two causal mechanisms, others have more.

The specific causal mechanism needed is Agent Causation. 3

The best definition I have found is that free will is the operation of agent causality, as detailed in this blog post from the Information Philosopher Bob Doyle: https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html

The key point is that agents do not act due to event causation, or randomness, but instead thru a different type of causal process. Free will is the term for the process of agent causation.

The development of a coherent idea of agent causation is a currently active project in philosophy. One such thinker is Helen Stewart, whose Metaphysics of Freedom is reviewed here: https://philosophynow.org/issues/105/A_Metaphysics_For_Freedom_by_Helen_Steward

Tying your question about free will to a conceptual God is not going to bring out the best set of answers here. There is a lot of reflexive anti-theism on this board. Free will and religious questions are most usefully decoupled.

Answer 7

I think you would have to not be human for this to not happen. It is in our DNA to seek patterns, that's why some people cannot comprehend the universe probably had no beginning, its has just always been.

There's too many distractions (forms of pattern) in the world for the majority of people to have the time to contemplate these complex ideas. To me you have either got to be really smart from birth or, like me, be of slightly above intelligence hindered by upbringing but now I am on a military pension I have all the time in world now to sit down with low stimulation and contemplate these dilemmas.

We are not who we think we are, we aren't special at all, We really are just plain old animals doing things automatically but for some reason we developed an Ego that made us think otherwise.

The sad hardest fact to come to terms with is that we actually do need to be controlled otherwise we wouldn't be where we are today as we would devolved into randomness..either aliens came down and gave us a guideline or there is some type of God, my thoughts are aliens are the gods, or another way to think of it is that the actual universe is our God. It gave us the original frame reference of time being the day night cycle, I'm talking in the very early years of human evolution, maybe that habe us the foundation of beginning and end.