The Fat Man Retaliates

There’s a variation to the Trolley problem thought experiment in which, rather than throwing a switch to divert a runaway train from a track on which five people would be killed onto one where only one person will be killed, there is a lever which you can use to open a trap door to drop a fat man onto the tracks and thus avert a greater disaster.

Now, the lever and trap door arrangement is there to avoid you having to physically throw or push the fat man onto the tracks – so there is no visceral reaction to getting your hands metaphorically dirty with killing him, you pretty much have the same separation as you had with the switch and are again sacrificing one life for five.

A no-nonsense utilitarian response to the idea of opening the trap door and putting the fat man in front of the train should be that it is equivalent to switching tracks to kill the one person instead of the five that would otherwise die.  There is however a meaningful difference between the two scenarios – in the standard scenario (switching of the tracks) the single person dies as a consequence while in the fat man variation, the single person dies as a means – in other words the killing of the fat man is instrumental.

The general consensus is that it is wrong to kill a person instrumentally even if, by doing so, you can prevent the death of more people.  A related scenario is that in which a healthy person is sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and the doctor realises that she is the perfect donor for five other patients all of whom will soon die without donated organs.  It’s horrific to think that a healthy person might be harvested for organs, even if a large number of people might thus be saved (which is an expression of our intuitive take on the morality of the suggestion).

Then there is the notion of justified self-defence.  The general consensus here is that a person is justified in acting, even violently or lethally, in order to defend themselves, so long as their action is proportionate.  It should be noted that this is about defending oneself, not necessarily about saving oneself.  If you are set on killing me, and I can’t realistically disable you or run away, then I am justified in killing you.  On the other hand, if some natural disaster is imminent, and I could survive only if you died, then I am probably not justified killing you – at least not instrumentally.  I could be justified in doing something that only consequentially leads to your death but was necessary to save my life or many lives (like dumping CO₂ that may well asphyxiate you but is intended to put out a devastating oil rig fire).

It gets a bit vague about how justified one is to act violently or lethally to prevent harm.  The legal system varies somewhat on how the victim of long term domestic abuse is treated when they crack and kill their abuser.  Sometimes there’s some leniency, sometimes there’s simply a formal continuation of the abuse.  Sometimes there’s a sentence of probation (ie a non-custodial sentence), sometimes it’s jail until you die (or effectively so).

Let’s just consider the right to defend your life.

Consider the fat man, who is on the trap door but who, for some reason, cannot move.  You are near the lever and the runaway train is heading for five people who, if you do not act, will die.  You’ve recently been listening to a podcast that was extremely positive about utilitarianism and you are therefore primed to do whatever you can to minimise suffering.  You are not without feeling however, and you tell the fat man that what you are going to do is for the greater good before you start moving towards the lever.

The fat man, while unable to move, is not entirely helpless though because he has a large shotgun.  To defend himself, he can’t risk merely wounding you because you could still operate the lever, he has to kill you to assure his survival.

Is the fat man justified in killing you?  Alternatively, if you were the fat man, would you be justified in killing me given that I am intending to open the trap door and drop you on the tracks in front of the train?

Note that if the fat man kills our hero, there will not only be that direct casualty but also the casualties due to the runaway train that will not be stopped and will instead kill the five people on the tracks.  So is it okay to kill six people to save your own life, if at least five of those deaths are only consequential?

My initial intuition is that it is justified for the fat man to shoot the person who is going to activate the lever.  The fat man is not responsible for the runaway train or the five people on the tracks and it is not justified to kill him instrumentally to save the five people.  The five who die only die consequentially and there is no other way to save the one life (that of the fat man) other than killing the wannabe lever operator.

Nevertheless, it seems odd to say that it’s okay to let six die to save one.  In an analogous situation, if a car with sabotaged brakes was careening towards a deep canyon and the driver could only save herself by sideswiping a car which was being driven parallel to the canyon, and which would fall into that canyon thus killing the six occupants, then it’s difficult to think that this defensive course of action would be justified – even if the saboteur was known to be in the second car.  We’d possibly further expect the driver of the sabotaged car to avoid unintentionally sideswiping the second car, even if that would (unintentionally) save her life.

Then there is another possible scenario, this time not related to the fat man but rather to the single innocent person on the section of track that the train could be switched to in order to save the five.  Let’s say that, for whatever reason, this person cannot simply avoid the train.  If you switch the tracks, he’s going to die.  Fortunately for him, he has a sniper rifle and the skills to use it.  He sees the runaway train and knows that the average person will decide to switch tracks to save the five.  He raises the rifle, puts his eye to the scope and sees you in his crosshairs, ready to change the direction of the runaway train.

Is he justified in shooting you?  Would you be justified in shooting someone else, if it were you on the tracks and they were about to consequentially kill you, even if you knew that by your actions six people would die?

---

There is a reason that the fat man is a fat man.  He’s not just fat, he’s a lot fatter than you are – no matter how fat you happen to be.  You can’t simply jump onto the tracks yourself and stop the runaway train.  This caveat is in place to prevent you from taking that option because too many people would choose to sacrifice themselves before sacrificing another person – perhaps because dying as a hero is more attractive than living as someone who killed a guy by pushing him off a bridge into the path of a train.

Ignoring the fact that the potential victims in the scenarios above have guns (or accepting that, despite them having guns handy, they are average decent people), it seems to me that the only difference between allowing someone else to create a situation in which I die and creating that situation myself is the question of agency.  I don’t have a choice if someone else does something to me and I am unlikely to like that, even if I would have chosen freely to put myself in precisely the same situation that I end up in due to another’s actions.

Put that aside for a moment.  Consider instead the moral judgment we would make on the person who, to save five, throws themselves in front of a runaway train.  Or the moral judgment of someone who is able to divert the train onto the track that they themselves are on, and thereby save five lives at the cost of their own.  This is equivalent to the brave soldier who throws himself onto a grenade and saves his comrades.  Or the mother who dies saving her children, or perhaps even the children of another.  Such people are heroes, which implies that they did the right thing.

But if this is so, then why is it not necessarily the right thing for the fat man, or the man on the track to abstain from defending themselves?  They have agency.  They can, if they so choose, prevent what is going to happen to them.  Choosing not to prevent their deaths, when such prevention is an option, is equivalent to choosing to sacrifice themselves actively – which is apparently the right thing to do.  How could they be thus be justified in doing the thing that is not right, which is by definition the wrong thing?

---

Going a bit further, it would seem that if you are at the lever, or the switch, and your potential instrumental, or consequential, victim has the ability to prevent you from acting, then you should act to save the five, and two variants become morally equivalent.  If you are not shot in the process, it is only because your victim chose their fate or maybe they missed when they tried to shoot you – but either way, they saved the five, not you.

Thoughts?

Ethical Structures, Non-Identity and the Repugnant Conclusion

Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion results from a consideration of welfare and population.  In essence, the conclusion is that a world in which a very large number of people have lives that are barely worth living is preferable to a world in which a much smaller number of people have significantly better lives.

My attention was brought to this ethical conundrum by Sam Harris and William MacAskill in one of Harris' podcasts - Being Good and Doing Good.

The Repugnant Conclusion is reached in a step wise fashion with certain assumptions, primarily the idea that we should maximise "quality of life" (with a further assumption that we can quantise "quality of life" or at least think about units of "quality of life", which are even further assumed to be positive).  Also tied into this is the idea of future persons, who don't currently exist (hence their non-identity, which leads to other considerations which I'll get to shortly).

Imagine one person, A, existing with a total of 100 units of "quality of life" (let us call these UQL) and say that 100 units of UQL is pretty damn good.  If we are maximising UQL, then it follows that 101 people existing with 1 UQL each is better than this one person existing with 100 UQL, where having 1 UQL is equivalent to having a life that is barely worth living.  With the leap to the conclusion, this seems bizarre - many people living what is only slightly better than a life that is not worth living doesn't intuitively feel better than A living the bliss of a 100 UQL "pretty damn good" life.

(Note that our intuitions associated with this are likely to be faulty.  As I write, the 2016 Paralympics have opened and the whole and healthy among us would probably find it difficult to think that someone who is eligible to enter these Games would not want to swap their stumps for real legs, or to be able to see, or to not be confined to a wheelchair.  However, these people would not see themselves as a life that is barely worth living - and this applies to more the mundanely handicapped, not just Paralympians.  Some even claim that they would turn down the hypothetical option to turn back the clock and not be handicapped.  This notion has important links to the "non-identity problem".)

The Repugnant Conclusion, however, is not reached by a leap, it is reached step-wise.  Consider, rather than 101 people living a 1 UQL life, two people living lives that are only slightly worse off than A's life, even 99 and 99 UQL.  This is clearly better than just one person living a life with a total of 100 UQL, it's very close to double the total UQL.  Keep doing this over and over again and you eventually reach the conclusion that a very large number of people living lives that are barely worth living can be better than any significantly smaller number of people with significantly better lives.

Converting this into a real world situation, this would mean that it would be better to keep producing more and more humans until all of us are living lives that are barely worth living, but we'd do it one baby at a time where each new baby would not significantly degrade the average UQL and would slightly raise the total UQL.  There are few among us who do not realise that if we were all to continue to produce large numbers of children, as we did in the past, then the future will look bleak indeed, but few of us choose not to produce any children at all in order to not contribute to great suffering on the part of our potential descendants - noting that our population increase shows little sign of slowing down (at least globally) and may in fact increase if we are so foolish as to eradicate malaria, cure cancer, prevent heart disease, stroke and diabetes and provide universal first world medical care and clean water to the third world without modifying their family structures - so even if we restrict ourselves to one child, we may still thus produce descendants who will be born in to a world with a vastly increased population.

Now we turn to the "non-identity problem".  This problem revolves around hypothetical people, who might exist (or not exist) based on decisions we make.  In essence, the question is whether it is better for a person to exist than not exist, given that their existence might not be perfect.  Such moral dilemmas are faced (or ignored) by people who are aware of the risk of defects in their unborn child and choose to get a check.  Say an unborn child is found to have Down Syndrome and the parents decide to abort the pregnancy.  In this situation (at least in a sense), an existent person stops existing and a life that was probably worth living is not lived.  (There's a complex calculus that could conceivably be conducted to determine what the overall UQL would be with the introduction of this Down Syndrome child and it is arguable that the total UQL would go down, but this would possibly be the case anyway with the decision to go with an abortion since such a decision is rarely an easy one.  Other arguments could be made that humanity is held back by its weakest links, but such arguments would veer close to eugenics and are probably repugnant in themselves.)

We could step back a little and think not of an abortion, but of a decision to not conceive.  We make these decisions all the time and have few qualms about them, because they involve acts of omission rather than commission - the omission of an emission in the case of the withdrawal method, and the occlusion of an emission in the case of condoms and similar devices, such that both methods result in sperm and ovum not meeting.  However, in each decision to avoid conception, we are effectively denying the existence of a person who could have existed and who could have lived a life worth living.  If we have the potential to bring into being a person who could live a life worth living, how do we justify not doing so (assuming that any reduction in our quality of life is marginal and we can continue to live a life worth living)?

If we cannot justify choosing to not bring into being a child with UQL of greater than 1, then the conclusion is that we should just keep producing children to the greatest extent possible, until we would otherwise start producing children with an UQL of less than or equal to zero.  And this does not seem right.

So how could we justify to not create such a child?

Selfishness seems a common (albeit post hoc) justification.  I like my life as it is, I don't want to compromise it by introducing children into it.  However, this is making the assumption that my marginal quality of life (the slight difference between the quality of life that I have as a single, unencumbered person and the quality of life I would have as parent) is more important than the hypothetical quality of life of this potential child (which would not exist in the world if the child did not exist).

Another justification is that any child is a link towards a future descendant living in a bleak, overpopulated world.   But this argument only works if you have decided to never reproduce.  It disappears as soon as you produce your first child and then you seem committed to produce as many children as you can, paradoxically rushing towards a situation in which your descendants are consigned to living in a world which is barely worth living in (and who may in turn have descendants living in a world that is not worth living in).

These linked problems, the Repugnant Conclusion and the Non-Identity Problem, have not been conclusively solved by ethicists.  Attempts to avoid the conclusions tend to result in other paradoxical outcomes, or other ethical problems (for example, if we think about UQL in terms of an average rather than a sum, we can arrive at a conclusion that it is better to eradicate those with low UQL and keep doing so until there is one single blissfully happy person with very high UQL - presuming that this person doesn't mind the genocide going on around her).

What does the Ethical Structure approach lead us to think about these problems?

Careful readers will probably have picked up on stilted wording above.  It's not easy (for me) to breeze past a statement that "X is better than Y" without commenting on the fact that the term "better" isn't securely grounded.  What exactly is a "better life"?  In what way is 100 UQL vested in one person "better" than 101 UQL spread across 101 people?  What does it mean to say it is "better" (or even simply "good") to keep producing children?

A "better" life is merely a life that is more good, but good for what?  And having quality of life is again ungrounded.  Does this mean happier, more productive, containing more puppies, what?  Even if we allow that quality of life need not be defined precisely, we are left with a begged question as to whether a life with high quality is a good thing.  Good for what?  The unabated production of children is good for what?

The answer, if the logic behind the Ethical Structure idea is correct, is survival - but survival on a few levels.

Firstly, to survive we each need to have lives that are worth living, in order to prevent ourselves from self-terminating (or at least so that we put serious effort into not dying).  We need to have both lives that are worth living and the expectation that our children's lives will be worth living in order to survive through them (so legacy survival as opposed to physical survival).  We do not, however, necessarily need to have a quality of life that is very high - merely sufficiently high.  Similarly, we don't need to expect more than that our children should have a sufficiently high quality of life - where "sufficiently high" is a value judgement that will vary from person to person.

Secondly, there is the need to continually signal to other members of our communities that we are obeying the rules and not threatening the welfare of others.  In this context, the unabated production of children is not good because flooding of the population with my children (my legacy) is potentially deleterious to your legacy and even to you personally, if my children were to displace you.  The rules, in the form of social norms, tell us how many children are appropriate and any significant divergence from this number (positive or negative) is generally frowned upon, which is to say you could thus be a suspicious character as a rule-breaker who had too many children.

These are, however, practical considerations and they don't address the more abstract notion that we should want to increase the total quality of life in the world (at least among humans) nor do they explain that we are appalled by the idea of large numbers of people that have lives that are barely worth living.  These, I suggest, derive from our consideration of the people that we want to be or, more accurately, the people that we want other people to think that we are, the nature of which follows from an internalisation of the ethical structure.

The second tier of the structure is the injunction against harm.  This is generally applied to existent people (most importantly ourselves), but in order to be consistent and to convey our reliability to fellow community members in quite a cost-effective way we may also apply it to potential or hypothetical people.

Consider person A, the one with 100 UQL.  We compared this with 101 people with 1 UQL each.  Note that the injunction is against doing harm, rather than being a commandment to do good (since we can more reasonably demand that people not harm us as opposed to demanding that others do good for us).  With the 101 people with 1 UQL each, we either have one person who has been harmed by losing 99 UQL - or who has been eliminated entirely (thus losing 100 UQL and her existence!)  This is a level of harm that we cannot countenance, especially if A is supposed to represent "me".  (This is a difficult conclusion to avoid, since if there were one single person in the universe, hogging all the UQL, then that person would obviously "me" from their own perspective and there would be no other perspective.)

We can accept an incremental decrease in our quality of life, especially if it is hypothetical, because by doing so we are affirming to ourselves and advertising to others that we hold the survival (and thus existence) of other people to be of more importance than maintaining a high quality of life for ourselves.  Remember though that when it gets down to brass tacks, the purpose of my ethical structure is to aid my survival, not yours, and that means I have a point at which I will abandon the "charade" of morality in order survive (as do you).  This means that while I might accept a gradual decline in my quality of life, there is still a point at which I will no longer accept it - not that I necessarily know precisely where that point lies, but it how it is set will probably be related to how I view my legacy in relation to my physical survival, I am likely to call a stop to the diminishment of my quality of life when it threatens my legacy.

When thinking about population increase, this manifests as a hypothetical willingness to sacrifice a little quality of life in order to allow another person to come into existence.  As we don't want people to suffer (or rather we don't want anyone to think that we would not care about people suffering), our preference is that hypothetical and newly existent people should a similar level of quality of life to ours (or slightly better, or slightly worse, it doesn't really matter particularly since it's hypothetical).  But we are not willing (even hypothetically) to significantly decrease our quality of life, nor to posit into existence people with a quality of life that is substantially below ours.  This might in part be because we don't really deal in absolutes, we deal in comparison, so a single "positive" UQL would be counted as negative when compared to our notional 100 UQL.

An example which came up frequently in the Harris-MacAskill discussion was Singer's drowning child in a lake.  In this thought experiment, you are walking past a shallow lake, one that you can safely enter to extract a child that is drowning.  However, you're wearing a nice set of clothes and the lake, while safe, is dirty or muddy, so while saving the child, you would be ruining your outfit.  Do you risk the expense of getting a replacement outfit and save the child?

The argument goes that you would be a moral monster if you were to fail to save the child simply because you wanted to save your clothes.  Taking your clothes off and rescuing the child naked is apparently not an option, nor is laundering them afterwards, although interestingly enough, it seems a common that people do want to save the child, but they also consider how they might prevent damaging their clothes in the process.  We could instead imagine a hypothetical imperative to drive off the road, thus destroying your car, in order to not kill a small child that had strayed onto the road - a dispassionate choice to prioritise your car over the child would make you a moral monster.  This scenario makes killing the child somewhat more active, rather than passively letting it drown.  In a sense, the drowning child dilemma is more like a variation of the trolley problem, in which you can choose to inconvenience yourself slightly in order to redirect the trolley onto a track that will destroy some of your stuff and thus save the life of a child.

Reframing the dilemma slightly, we could say that by not saving the life of a child on the grounds of a relatively small cost and minor inconvenience we become moral monsters.

Therefore, using Singer's extrapolation, we become moral monsters when we fail to send money to sub-Saharan Africa to help buy mosquito nets, at least those of us who have discretionary funds that we waste on such things as iPhones, summer holidays or food that we don't need (given that if we are overweight it's almost certainly because we eat more than we need).  Harris and MacAskill used the phrase "we're back standing by the lake" or the like to suggest that by failing to help distant people, or by reaching a conclusion that is repugnant, we would be doing the equivalent of letting the child drown (while noting that salience, or immediacy, is absent by virtue of the distance involved).

I agree that if we let the child drown while we stand passively at the lake's edge or as we walk away, we could be considered to be moral monsters.  I'd find it difficult to forgive myself if I failed to act in such a scenario, because I would not be the person I would want to be, and I'd be deeply suspicious of anyone else that I knew to be willing to let the child drown.  However, I don't agree that we run the same risk of being considered moral monsters due to any responsibility to save distant people.  I do, on the other hand, agree that we have precisely the same responsibility to save distant people as we have to save the child - but by that I mean that we have no responsibility to save any of them, none at all.  Yes, I meant to write that. 

As an ordinary person walking past the lake, we have no inherent obligation to save the drowning child.

Before I get accused of being a moral monster, let me try to explain the thinking behind this.  If I don't care what sort of person I am, and I don't care what you might think of me or do to me if I were to fail to react the way you think I should, then I would have no motivation or obligation to save the child (for the sake of saving the child) even if I could do so at no cost or inconvenience to myself.  However, none of us, perhaps not even psychopaths, live in that sort of world.  We live in the sort of world in which a real, if not inherent, obligation emerges when there is a pressing, obvious and reasonable demand for our assistance - because we do care about what sorts of people we are and we do care about what others think of us and what they might do to us.  So take on board an expectation that we should attempt to save a child drowning in a lake if we can do so safely

What is not expected is that we should go out of our way to address a vaguely defined need for assistance that is largely invisible.  This is partly why the crystallisation of that need, via advertising or someone knocking on your door, tends to work.  A level of expectation is only established once we are aware of the need and, to be really effective, there should be some threat of shaming involved, meaning that someone else must know that I am aware of the need.  If I can avoid donating time or money without feeling bad about myself or being shamed for my selfishness, why shouldn't I?

(As an aside, the donation of time and money is more obvious in the US than it tends to be in other countries - acts of charity are certainly more ostentatious.  Charity is simply not expected to the same extent in most other countries, and people will rarely ask as to whether you volunteer time and/or money to any worthy causes.  Spending quality time in your garden may well be more highly regarded than being a "busybody" or "do-gooder".)

So, getting back to Harris and MacAskill's discussion of Singer's drowning child argument, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that the reluctance to donate to worthy-but-distant causes is related to a lack of immediacy or salience.  But I disagree that this is a truly moral issue, since we have no more objective obligation to save the child drowning in the lake than we have to save the child being bitten by mosquitoes in Africa, any obligation we do have is subjective and dependent only on how much we care about our place in the world.

As a society, we might choose to build into our ethical ruleset the notion that ostentatiously donating to worthy causes irrespective of distance is a requirement - and there may well be survival and quality of life benefits in doing so - but until then, our reluctance to donate time and effort to distant causes is no more than a psychological issue that charities need to deal with.

God As Utility Monster

In Theological Zombies, I suggested that in order to maximise the number of people who freely choose to know and love it, a god needs only to create a world for each individual that is specially tailored such that the conditions necessary for that individual to freely choose to know and love god are satisfied.  Assuming anything other than an evil god, it is reasonable to conclude that the god would not create an individual that it knows would never choose to know and love it - because this is knowingly creating something that would suffer for eternity (the bunny problem).  So all individuals created, if the circumstances were right, could freely choose to know and love the creator god.  Being unlimited in power, time and materials, the god would therefore not put individuals into universes in which the conditions are not conducive to salvation.  This implies that anyone in our universe who is not going to be saved can't be real and must therefore be a theological zombie.  (I took a lot longer to get to the point in the linked article.)

At the end I listed some possible routes for a theist or apologist to take with respect to the argument, one of which was to reject the notion of maximal excellence (or maximal greatness, as it is sometimes termed).  Another option, that I didn't list was along the lines of Kevin Scharp's divine psychology objection.  The theist could state with some confidence that we have no idea as to what a god might want and what a god might choose to do when given the option to save one individual at the expense of another.

This is true enough.  However, once this floodgate is opened, the theist has lost the right to claim anything about what god thinks, or wants, or will do.  The power of many "logical" arguments for the existence of god are founded on assumptions regarding what god might do, might have done and how it might have preferred to do it.

Another problem is linked to the utility monster idea.  This is originally an objection to utilitarian ethics, the squishy idea of maximising happiness or well-being.  At an extreme, if Trevor got 100 units of pleasure from killing Maude, at the expense of 50 units of pleasure lost from Maude and her family, then Maude should let Trevor kill her and thus maximise happiness.  It doesn't have to be that extreme though.  If we both like chocolate, but I like chocolate twice as much as you, then I should get more of it than you, at least until your unhappiness outweighs my extra happiness (or I have eaten all the chocolate).

In a sense, the god of the bible could be thought of as the ultimate utility monster.  If that god wants anything, to even the slightest extent, then by its nature, that want becomes a command.  If something would be even in the slightest bit pleasing to that god, that something would be mandatory.

Consider, a being like this cannot forget and is eternal.  So anything that is even vaguely pleasurable will, in the mind of that being, exist positively, forever.  For us, however, anything that is even ecstatically pleasurable that we might experience will fade in our memories and eventually die with us.

In effect, that would make us ethical slaves to merest wishes of such a god.

At least it would if we were utilitarians.

And if the god in question existed.

An Atheist Onslaught on Free Will?

In Random Will, I presented a mechanism by which some form of free will might be possible.

In that article I wrote:

If the universe is entirely deterministic, there is no free will because our actions are merely the consequence of our interactions with our environment.  Presented again with precisely the same environment, our brains would go through exactly the same processes and we would make the same decisions, take the same actions and think the same thoughts.

If the universe is entirely random (and therefore entirely indeterminate), then there is no free will either.  There would be little, if any, causal relationship between action and reaction in a random universe.  Presented again with precisely the same environment, our brains would likely react in a vastly different way.  However, integral to the concept of free will is the idea that there is some degree of constancy in our thoughts and behaviour.

Since then, I’ve been involved in a ranging discussion on an “atheist onslaught against the common concept of free will”.  This discussion has involved many participants, both theist and atheist as well as what appears to be the occasional quantum mystic.  Not all have been as grumpy as myself.

I’ve collected some of my contributions to the discussion below, with some minor editing, as a form of intellectual recycling.

----------------

The initiator of the discussion used the definition from a creation science web-site (creationwiki), claiming it to be the "common definition":

Free will, is the capability of agents to make one of alternative futures the present. The logic of free will has two main parts, a categorical distinction is made between all "what chooses", and all "what is chosen", referred to as the spiritual domain and the material domain respectively. This understanding in terms of two categories is named dualism.

Together with these two domains come two ways of reaching a conclusion, subjectivity and objectivity. You have to choose to identify what is in the spiritual domain, resulting in opinions (subjectivity). You have to measure to find out what is in the material domain, resulting in facts (objectivity).

This definition seems to have some major issues. First and foremost, a computer has the capability which is described as "free will" in this strange definition. A simple example being the one that controls the traffic lights at an intersection. Say the lights are flashing amber and there are two alternative futures for one set of lights, they can be red, or they can be green. The computer can make a particular future become the present (assuming the passage of time) by making the light green. The thing that falls into the category of "what chooses" is the computer and "what is chosen" is the future state of the set of lights (which can be objectively measured, either by checking that a light in a particular position is lit, or by checking the nature of the lens over the light that is lit).

I think we can safely abandon this definition, can't we?

There seems to have been an effort to define "spirit" and "freedom of opinion" but not "free will". It's bizarre that long discussions about free will (such as the one in question) are about something that is effectively undefined, either because no-one makes the effort to produce a definition, or because the operating definition is as weak as this one.

I asked that the main protagonists make clear what they mean by free will. As a start, by trying to answer the following:

By "free will", do you mean that decisions can be made without taking any cognisance of prior states? Do you mean that a person who is brought up on the wrong side of town and is taught to be a criminal makes a free decision every day to continue on with criminal behaviour? Or are you saying that free will somehow allows us to make decisions totally divorced from our experience and that it is only some weakness on the part of criminals that makes them freely choose to do what other people in their social group (i.e. other criminals) do and it would be easy for them to bring their free will to bear and choose to stop being a criminal at any time?

Or, by "free will" are we saying that in the traffic light example, we are more like the computer, making choices between more complex alternatives, rather than deciding which lights should be on at certain times? In which case, our decisions are totally determined (or pretty much determined) by antecedent causes, and our "free will" is just the ability to affect other things that are not able to interact in the same way with antecedent causes?

Sadly no-one really put forward a usable definition.

Never mind, I presented one for consideration.

--------------------

To my mind there is "strong" free will and "weak" free will.

If you have "strong" free will, then you are not influenced by what came before, and you have some sort of immutable element that can make decisions unconstrained by current circumstances (i.e. an immortal soul). This presumes some sort of absolute morality, since the "right" thing to do won't be situational.

If you have "weak" free will, you can mould your decisions, you can change your mind and you don't have to follow a set rule book - but you are going to be heavily influenced by who you have become and what is going on at the time and your options will be limited by a number of factors (including what you know and what you can imagine). This presumes a more fuzzy logic approach to decision making, with multiple overlays that contribute to a sort of grid from which options can be selected. It's "sort-of-free will".

This latter form of free will is what the materialists tend to be happy with (including me). The former is the domain of magical thinkers including theists.

--------------------------

Later on, I returned to the idea of what free will is not:

I prefer to use a definition based on Laplace's demon. Laplace's demon knows everything there is know - all the characteristics of the most fundamental particles (or waves or probability functions or whatever is most fundamental to the universe). If the demon can tell what is going to happen in the future based on that knowledge, then there is no free will. If there is something else, something fundamentally unknowable, then that makes it impossible for the demon to predict the future and free will is a possibility.

(Note that I am assuming here that probabilistic phenomena are based on laws and forces that we humans might not be able to know about and that it is this lack of access that makes it impossible for us to identify the antecedent cause that results in the radioactive decay of particles at some precise instant and not before or later.  However, the reliability of probabilistic predictions of such decay does indicate that some regular mechanism may be at play "behind the curtain" as it were. If so, Laplace's demon would be able to see behind that curtain so long as what goes on there is natural, rather than supernatural.)

This conception makes free will something magical, rather than emergent from physical phenomena and therefore it's the sort of free will that theists tend to believe in. I refer to this form of free will as "strong free will" and I think it's what Belinda calls "ontic free will". (I suspect though that "ontic" just means it's real, sort of like when the Greek Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus where creating humans and all the other creatures respectively, they are described as slotting in abilities to their creations - they'd have had a free will module on the shelf and Prometheus would have inserted that into his human. Alternatively free will might have been in a vat, with Prometheus decanting a large portion and putting it in to the human, and Epimetheus taking smaller portions for all the other creatures.)

With the notion "strong" free will comes the notion "weak" free will. For me, weak free will is a consequence of the imperfection of biological machines. We are sort of programmed, by our genetics, our upbringing and other experiences and by our culture (and also our language of course). This programming sits inside our wetware processor and reacts to stimuli - but our sensors are not perfect, nor is our brain. The huge complexity of what is going on when we respond to our environment makes how we act appear like it's driven (at times) by strong free will, but it's not - we're just reacting according to programming that we ourselves did not choose, using a processor that we did not choose on the basis of input that we did not choose via sensors that we did not choose.

To a certain extent it is true that we cannot help ourselves, but only to an extent. For example, we could choose what factors play a greater role in each decision (although that choice itself is limited), we can eat Italian if annoying our friends who don’t like Italian is the most important factor, or Greek if gastronomic pleasure on our part is primary (and we are big fans of Greek food). But not only that, we can mould our wetware processors, and our programming, by changing our behaviour to improve our outcomes in the future. We're not always successful at this (because we don't always know what we will want in the future), but it does allow for a very strong feeling that we are, at least in part, self-created beings exercising free will.

---------------------------

What I have noticed, both in this debate and more generally, is that the whole discussion regarding free will tends to miss a key element - what is the actual mechanism for free will? At least theists have their "souls" to point at, although they can't prove the existence of a soul (the closest they have got is via that extremely dodgy 21g experiment and surely no-one takes that seriously). So I ask, if a free will defender is not positing a soul, but is positing free will, what is their proposed mechanism?

Note that pointing to quantum uncertainty isn't going to help because fundamentally not being able to know what is going to happen in the future isn't any more helpful with respect to free will than knowing the future perfectly. Unless of course the free will defender posits a mechanism that somehow bends quantum uncertainty to their will, in which case they head into quantum mysticism and, again, they would have to explain how this mechanism works.

Note also that I am not saying that if a mechanism isn't immediately available, that the idea has to be shelved forever.  I'm just saying that if you don't have a mechanism by which free will would be possible (and you have no other evidence that free will actually exists), then you're not in much of a position to champion the existence of free will.

-------------------

Unfortunately, no-one was able to present a mechanism by which free will would work – not even “weak” free will, let alone “strong” free will.

-------------------

Later, I got a little hot under the collar:

Can we agree that if the universe is strongly, and ontologically, deterministic, then there is no free will - irrespective of whether the universe is epistemologically predictable?

I think we can, so I'll press on.

I struggle to see how people justify making the leap from the notion that the universe is *not* strongly (and ontologically) deterministic, that this leads inexorably to free will. As Belinda indicated, we can't truly perceive causal connections. We can only intuit them, or deduce them, or backwards engineer them - and when we do so we can only do so incompletely.

At certain levels (i.e. macroscopic levels) and within certain timeframes (i.e. shorter timeframes), we seem to be able to predict the future based on our understandings of causal connections, but only to a certain extent. If we want to be totally accurate, we can't. If we want to predict well into the future, we can't. And if we want to make discrete predictions at the subatomic level, we can't (we can only make probabilistic predictions).

Any will we might have, therefore, is somewhat frail - we can't really will a thing to happen with total certainty and what we can will to happen is predicated on pre-existing circumstances and a host of physical "laws" over which we have no influence whatsoever. Thus we cannot will ourselves to fly by flapping our arms, but we can will ourselves to drink a cup of coffee, so long as a cup of coffee can be procured.

How could such a will be justifiably described as "free" when it's so very much constrained?

But even going this far is making an unwarranted assertion. I suspect that when a free will defender implies that if the future is (ontologically) "open", then free will follows. The problem here is that the inscrutability of the future doesn't necessarily give us (humans, or any other living creature) an ability to shape it. There's no reason to think that we have any more influence over an indeterminate (and thus unpredictable) future than we have over a strongly deterministic future. From what I can tell, in a practical sense, the claims about free will centre on an ability to influence the future - not just about whether the future is fixed or not.

I suggest that the best position is to be sceptical about the existence of "strong" (or "ontic") free will until such time as evidence for its existence appears (or a mechanism by which free will would work).

--------------------

It was about this time that the initiator of the discussion revealed himself to be crazier than had previously been apparent – singing the praises of the Tea Party, claiming that people who deny his definition free will were spiralling into depravity, accusing me of a being a filthy cursed liar (when I’m so obviously clean) and using a website like www.scienceoflife.nl as a reference.

Syamsu had been claiming that a Professor Walter Schempp had used a freedom based theory to produce the functional MRI and I responded that there was no indication that Schempp had any involvement in the development of the fMRI.  It was at this time he called me a filthy cursed liar and provided the following link and quote as counterevidence:

http://www.scienceoflife.nl/html/walter_schempp.html

"You have studied and come to understand the complement of this concept. You created mathematical models which are used for constructing functional MRI devices, by which now even separate nerve strands can now be made visible in the body, thanks to your work."

I put a bit of effort into my response (tinged with an element of anti-quantum mystic grumpiness) so I’ll share it with you:

-------------------

Syamsu,

Where to start?

Ok, firstly this is a useless reference because it does not support your claim, i.e. that Schempp developed the fMRI (expressed when you asked in a previous post "How can anybody accept the machine Schempp produced, but reject the basic theory Schempp used to produce the machine, as pseudoscience?") The quote only claims that Schempp has created mathematical models that "are used for constructing functional MRI devices". At best he may have contributed to the improvement of fMRIs.

Secondly, the nature of the quote makes it useless. It's taken from an open letter to Professor Schempp, inviting him to contribute to a book "Science of Life". There is no indication that Schempp has responded.

The only person from the list of people Otto von Oddball has invited to contribute whose name I recognise is Matti Pikanen and that's only because I've had a similar discussion to this about his TGD theory. It's interesting to note the comment on the page that lists Matti's work: "These materials are made available online because TGD publications are not yet accepted in so-called ‘respected’ physics journals." 

A search of Matti's eye-strainingwebsite indicated that he is actually linked to Science of Life.  For example Matti makes reference to a document on Crop Circles ... yes, that's right, he's talking about crop circles being "messages providing biological information (including genetic codes) about some unknown life forms". As a keen watcher of the television show QI, I've seen some of the guys who have created a number of these crop circles as a bit of a lark, including one with a QI logo.

No wonder, if Walter Schempp is a half-way reputable scientist, that he wants nothing to do with Science of Life.

Finally, as I've already presaged, the website from which you've taken a quote that doesn't support your claim (and would be useless even if it seemed to do so) is hardly reputable. It's a treasure trove of dead ends, there's no indication that "Science of Life" is linked to any reputable academic body, he talks about a Science of Life Symposium in 2011 that never happened and when you look at Otto von Oddball's writings, one quickly sees that there's something seriously wrong. For example, look at this article on something close to your heart "Freedom of Choice" - I'll post a bit here so people can see without having to soil themselves by visiting the site:

Otto von Oddball wrote:

Freedom of choice is a change in dimensional organisation.

This can be represented by Dimensional Operators.

The Vortex is a well known Dimensional Operator.

A vortex unifies Point, Line, Plane and Volume.

Although we can define this, we cannot describe this.

The reason is that Dimensional Operations involve involvement.

In changing our involvement, we also change the Dimensions.

This requires a notation addressing multiple logic.

Presently, scientific notation offers this option.

Classical, Relativistic, Probabilistic and Unified theories complement each other.

Each pertains to a different mode, degree, in participation in creation.

The shift from one theory to another is executed by a scientist, using choice.

In changing our involvement, we change our participation in creation.

At the same time, we change our realisation in/of/for creation.

But we also create a realisation of change.

We need to realise that WE create that change.

The realisation of creation of change is known as awareness.

The realisation of change of creation is known as consciousness.

The realisation of consciousness of change in creation is called life.

The realisation of awareness of change in creation is response-ability.

The rant just keeps going. Pretty much the whole thing (and the text on other pages) is written in four line blank verse.

In sooth I do know why it makes me sad, Syamsu, but a quote from this website unwisely ripped does not me a liar make. (Thanks and apologies to Shakespeare.)

Your challenge now, Mr Syamsu, is to produce authoritative evidence that Schempp supports a theory that even remotely supports your creationwiki definition of free will and that he applied that theory in the development of the fMRI.

Please note that I am not ridiculing Professor Schempp, I'm ridiculing your misuse of Professor Schempp's work (and the misuse by other mystics). Unless of course, Professor Schempp is a willing participant in this nonsense, in which case I'll ridicule him too, but so far there's no real evidence that he is, other than his name appearing at the quantrek.com site (a site dedicated to what appears to be quantum nonsense).

-----------------------

My expectations with regard to a response were not high and Syamsu managed to live down to them.

----------------------

I just realised that I left out one of my longer attempts to get a cogent response from Syamsu (slightly edited):

Ok, if the only definition of free will you will accept is that which is closely linked to a peculiar fantasy regarding the origins of the universe, then of course you're going to find that atheists don't think much of "free will". I don't think that atheists are attacking the "common concept of free will", nor do I think that your definition is anywhere close to the common conception of "free will" (except in the sense that it is "base" or "simple", as in "simple-minded"). I think you'll find that most atheists will just ignore it, because it's silly. I will do you the honour, however, of trying to take you seriously.

You seem to think that atheists, and others who disagree with your "common concept of free will" are ignorant of or don't understand how choosing works. This is a curious claim.

Let me try to give a real example of what goes on inside the mind of real live atheist.

Earlier today I was playing a computer game, Need for Speed. One could say that I chose to play it. I certainly did choose to purchase the game, from a range of many other options (so I made "neopolitan owns a copy of Need for Speed" the present, in accordance with your creationist definition of free will).

However, I'm a bit of an achievement junkie, so I have become conditioned to play this game (and games like it) for the thrill I get from, for example, learning how a particular car handles and using it to beat one of the harder races. A win, particularly if it required some effort, releases a rush of endorphins and it is often the case that I "choose" to immediately start a new race after a sweet victory. But do I really choose?

Sometimes it doesn't feel like it.  Sometimes I know that I should be doing something else, and I might have previously thought "This has to be the last race, then I really must go and see what else Syamsu has written", but I nevertheless find myself clicking on the right combination of buttons to start a new race anyway.

Even within the race scenario, my "choices" are not entirely my own. While there's some fiddling going on with the computer program with regards to the steering (I suspect that the game cheats and makes me drive into walls at the most inconvenient times... until it takes pity on me after a few soul destroying failed attempts), but there is also some autonomous control on my part.

For example, taking a hint from something that the cricketer Don Bradman used to say, I adopted the principle of not looking at cars and structures that I needed to drive past but rather I looked at the gaps that I needed to drive through.  As a consequence I found that I crashed into such obstructions far less frequently. I didn't previously "choose" to crash into civilian traffic, or into annoyingly placed buildings, but the simple act of not focussing on them seemed to result in me hitting them less often.

With regard to that element of my experience, I didn't feel like I had much free will at all - I was responding at an unconscious level and when I tried to exert a free will of a kind by controlling my driving in order to avoid obstructions, it actually brought about what I didn't want (ie crashing into those obstructions at high speed).

Anyway, I eventually did stop playing the game to take my dogs for a walk.

Now, was that my choice? Was it a free choice? It certainly felt like it, more so than my compulsion to keep playing, but really, I was just responding to a more subtle mix of stimuli and motivations.

One section of my brain wanted more endorphins in the quick rush from winning a race, while another wanted the slower release of endorphins and health benefit of a walk, plus there was an avoidance of the guilt that would have ensued if I had failed to walk my poor dogs. But walking the dogs is something that has been foisted on me by my earlier self (the one who bought the dogs in the first place), and really I only get a little window of choice in respect to exactly when I walk. I further get a bit of a choice as to where I walk, limited by the distance we walk and the weather, and where we walked the day before, and so on. In reality, I just follow a pattern, if I remember to do so.

Now, Syamsu thinks that I don't know about making choices, but with regard to the walk, I made a whole host of choices ... when to walk, where to walk, what to wear when I walked, what music to listen to while I walked, who to stop and talk to while out walking, who to ignore and hurry past, when to stop to let traffic past, when to walk across the road, when to check my phone for messages, when to scratch my nose and so on. I managed to do all of this, despite being an atheist (or more specifically a non-theist)!

Each one of these choices (choosings?) presented me with alternative options, and I acted to make one of those options become the present (they became "the present" at the time, sadly they are now all in the past, except for my ongoing health resulting from the walk and the relative happiness of my dogs). So, in in the Syamsu world, was I exercising "free will" as he defines it, or was I somehow getting it wrong? If so, could Syamsu explain how I was getting it wrong.

Please note that it is possible to scientifically explain all of my behaviour as described above (even my suicidal crashes during the game), none of it is particularly mystical. I'm not seeking therapy with respect to it, I just want Syamsu to explain how this "choosing" thing is differently to the choosing that I've been doing pretty much every day of my life.

Syamsu's response?  Well, he only responded to the first paragraph, with this:

That's great but taking the common concept seriously means to disregard all other concepts. Go ahead, apply the common concept.