Kevin's Watch

Let's compare free will to rolling a die, specifically one with 4 sides (for wrong, permitted, obligated, and beyond-the-call-of-duty actions*), so that relative to free will, from any set of 4 given actions that correspond to the options, there is a 25% chance that the person facing the choice will do whichever of them.

Now, most people also seem to accept something like an instinct postulate, namely that people always will end up doing whatever they "most want" to do. But what "wanting" is, as a passive or active state, can vary enough to make this assertion unhelpful, as if it were hardly anything more than to say, "People always do whatever they do," or, then, that all trees are trees, or that A = A, or whatever. However, let us allow the notion as a counterweight to the above paragraph, saying,

• There is, relative to instinct, a 100% chance that someone will do what is most instinctual for them, in any given circumstance.

Since human activity does not resemble this fact alone, however, maybe the thing to do would be to balance the probabilities against each other, namely there is permanent 62.5% chance that someone will do what they "most want" to do, as this is the average of the chance that they will do what they want at all, and any chance they have of doing a specific thing, morally-speaking.

*Of course, different theories/diagrams/w/e for deontic logic/geometry, might posit more or less fundamental categories. The generic pattern is just to set the probability of any category being the one a given action falls within, at 1/x & x = the number of categories.

I think you need to consider that people rarely want one thing. I want a cookie, but I want to keep my weight down, but I want my grandmother who baked them to be pleased, but I want to save room for cake later. No matter how they decide, it is "what they want" -- so that tells you nothing at all.

"Permitted" can be interpreted as wanting to stay within acceptible norms; "obligated" can be interpreted as wanting to fulfill social functions; and "beyond the call of duty" can be interpreted as wanting to stand out, or wanting the good of the many, or wanting someone we love to be safe. Still nothing but want, want, want.

Even when you follow your instincts, you do because you want to. You want to trust them, or you want the result they provide, or you want to be decisive, or you want to be unburdened by contemplation.

Because "want", in the end, is merely a label for a choice you might make. That you chose one is a matter of course. Even when you do something you don't want to do, you want to do it for a different reason.

You can even want to be impulsive, want to be unpredictable, want to be random.

So when "wanting" is ubiquitous, it tells you nothing, and so you need a different language to speak about choice.

Well usually I suppose people would really think more like, if they are extremely hungry, thirsty, aroused, etc. it is likely that they will eat, drink, or be merry, so to say. They wouldn't talk about wants or desires in the abstract, and a word that might be used instead, here, would be "drives," as in a metabolic or a sexual drive. Now, on the other hand, concepts like self-command and asceticism and so on, indicate a faculty of acting contrary to these constellations of drives, and if there is some mathematical-metaphysical relationship between abstract moral vocabularies and the nature of free will, and yet if the determination of action in free will is still subject to the constraints of the physical universe, and if the seeming inference from quantum problems to the possibility of multiple choices in the macroverse is valid, then the thing to do would be to copy the application of the concept of probability to quantum problems, to the application of this concept to free will. I.e. just as bosonic and fermionic classes of fields are differently postulated as reflections of different statistical orders, a "deontic field" is postulated for free will, where its "momentum" is equally nondeterministically divided over the basic possibilities (on the assumption of free will as an isolated determinant of action).

However, since many balk at the idea of such a radically powerful free will, since they justly or not refuse to blame themselves when sometimes they act in the heat of passion (or whatever along such a line), I would not think to blandly claim that the weight of the world is evenly balanced at every juncture in our lives. I might think that (or even hope so!) but not insist on judging people in public by such appearances.

The only value such a proposal has, anyway, though, maybe, is as a way, not to predict behavior necessarily, but to accommodate a range of such predictions, but who knows...

To step aside a minute to make an analogy: a person is bombarded with sensations at all times. But at any given time, one thing has your attention. You have a "filter" that selects. Sometimes more important things rise to the top. Sometimes you consciously choose to ignore one thing and focus on another. It is a unique mechanism that is partially controlled and partially reactive.

Choice is like that. You are bombarded with desires at all times. But at any given time, you choose to pursue one of them. Sometimes the important one. Sometimes it's an instinct. There's a unique mechanism that's partially controlled and partially reactive. But still: a filter.

A desire filter.

So you really can't use a four sided die as a model. It's more like a path with branchings and joinings. A maze. A maze with many ways through, but with traps and monsters and prizes that pull one way or the other.

Agreed.

And why only 1 permutation for "wrong?"

Surely there are as many degrees thereof as there are for "permitted" actions?

--A

Re: permutations of wrong, there is actually a little debate out there, in academia, over the concept of "suberogation." Basically, the asymmetry between the forbidden/prohibited operator in deontic logic, and the possible obligation-and-supererogation (beyond-duty's-call) operator pairs, is at least conceptually or mathematically puzzling, though no analysis yet has come up with an ordinary-life formula for identifying a suberogated action (maybe breaches of etiquette would fall into this?).

Re: the attention-filter idea:

The symmetry is very appealing haha, yet, though it is based on a venerable tradition in the theory of attention (the spotlight model, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/#SpoThe), is, for me then, open to a certain avenue of questioning, which I have pursued, and not that this by itself means that attention is not mirrored between perceptions and desires, as the will---in fact I am sure that free will and the capacity for focus are equivalent, but the construction of this fact is perhaps elliptical, or will sound so.

The first premise is that space and time themselves are symmetrical. That is, they are both three-dimensional, and everything that moves in one, corresponds to a movement in the other (motion being a go-between concept for both of them). Whether other things there might be, on the order of space and time, I don't quite know, of course, though I have special suspicions on this count... This premise is not necessary for the basic form of the argument but is the point of contact with my larger idea of space and time.

The second/real axiom is that the imagination is a 3-dimensional grid that begins in a "vacuum" state until a being with imagination fills it. Since the "vacuum" is isomorphic with empty space, it is possible for a being to imaginatively copy physical representations into the eidolic vacuum, and this explicit copying is what attention is, that is, I focus on X when I (intentionally) copy my representation of X in physical space into the eidolic vacuum.

A consequence of this idea would be, though, that attention is only a spotlight when used as such. Depending on a person's mental training or potential or whatever, it might be possible to copy a huge number of representations at once. Indeed some abilities (like for those who can count a pile of paperclips in a flash) might depend on this?

Agreed my description of "attention" was not complete. Agreed that the analogy between attention and choice only goes so far and not farther.

But, at minimum, I want to convey the notion that choice consists of selecting one desire out of many desires to satisfy. (Although it's more complex than even that - one might make a choice because it satisfies more desires than another; what one may desire is to repress another desire; etc.) It is not a matter (as your die-roll analogy suggests) of choosing a quality or mode of response to one single thing.

We are eternally in conflict with ourselves. Victors continuously emerge, and these are our acts.

There might be action-problems that consisted in choices of responses to already given situations, but it would be just as well that we could also choose which situations to get into; the die, if it were there in some metaphorical sense, could roll for either type of problem. But I suppose the image of dice is unnecessary; the only thing is the idea that

• If free will is the sole determinant of my actions, the probability of my doing a given thing, out of any integrated deontic set (of however many elements = X), is equal to 1/X.

(So the dice-image comes from the idea of equal probability, not the dynamics of rolling a die, which is not what we necessarily do when we choose, after all; neither that nor flip a coin nor spin a wheel or cast sticks to the ground, or whatever...)

(And the general question, then, is just how to apply probability to free will, i.e. do we assume that, at any given time, for all things a [person can do, there is an equal chance that they will do any of them? Or do we suppose that people regularly tend to act on some specific motivational set that can be weighed against the arbitrary/equally-distributed probability of using free will at all? As an explanation for why we do what we actually do, though, I don't know, since a nonzero chance of doing something besides what we did, would mean that it was not "because" something was more probable that it happened; causality and probability do not fit together in that way?)

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:So the dice-image comes from the idea of equal probability

Why would the probabilities be equal? I would think that they would never be very equal. There's a lot of 99% to 1% in my life, I will tell you. Like (a) go to work or (b) stay home and sleep.

So: the device you would need is now a Wheel-of-Fortune, with differently sized wedges, some wide, some narrow.

Then again, I don't believe free will is "random" in any sense. Only apparently random. But I am trying to help you out.

Free will and fate are exactly the same. Its all about perspective.

Choices in life are linear and adamntine. Given the circumstances from one moment to the next you will choose the way you choose without deviation. Once you've chosen the choice becomes an indelible part of history.
Dice are like a clock. A clock is not time it is simply a tool to keep track of time. Dice are not chance nor fate but simply a tool that allows the roller to witness the appearance of random chance.

I appreciate that these dice/spinning/etc. images are not so good. Also I appreciate the 99% to 1% kind of ratio, hence the need to find an input into the "equation" besides just free will by itself.

The overarching concept is the difference between active and passive information. Some information we have encoded into us and we call it to mind actively. Much information is relayed through our senses, however, relative to which we are "passive" in the technical sense (as in passible vs. impassible beings). Accordingly, our physical actions are caused by a peculiar conjunction of our pure active potential on the one hand (free will per se), and our empirical inclinations (desires/wants/drives/instincts/hungers). If free will were the only cause, the probability would be equally divided; but we do not tend to believe in such a division, so the counterweight, to find the most probable action in a given situation, is ((1/X) + Y)/2, when X = the number of abstract choices for free will in general and Y = 100% for our passive causality, so that the action we do is as probable as whatever that "equation" ends up with, like 62.5% in the original example.

Illustrated (sort of):

Let's suppose I have an abstract choice between A, B, C, and D, and that under the circumstances the D is what I most want Now, since we are not solely determined by passive information, it was not actually 100% probable that I would do D However, it was not merely 25% probable, either. Rather it was (100%+25%)/2, or 62.5% probable. (And this would turn out to be somewhat formulaic, as long as the balance was between abstract activity and concrete experience with X held constant; but one might wonder whether, rather, X might vary.)

Now a corollary of all this, I guess, would be that if I did NOT do D but chose, say, the C :O then the probability I would do that is actually (0%+25%)/2, or, that is, there is only ever a 12.5% chance that I would act contrary to my passive feelings.*

(Keep in mind, I'm working with a pretty primitive take on probability; I've no idea how Bayesian ideas or who knows what else, would fit into this, to say nothing of how to bridge quantum statistics with macro-volitional ones...)

*EDIT: Now, one might object, what about cases where my choice is just between different passive feelings? However, again technically, I think this situation cannot arise; there is always the limit case of deciding to shuck feelings as much as possible, eh? This does hint at a variable X, though, I suppose.