Adina Roskies - Free Will and Decision Making

Adena if I want to understand Consciousness I have to deal with free will decisions intentions so I'm trying to get a handle on these different concepts so let's deal with decisionmaking and Free Will how do the two relate to each other well I think decision- making is something that you can have first of all without Consciousness right you can have a purely non-m minded algorithmic machine that makes decisions um but I think that what we think of when we think of making free decisions is there some aspect of Consciousness involved in those but uh it's really not clear what aspect of Consciousness is important for a decision to be free or what other things are important for a decision to be free because some people think that decisions have to be uh indeterministic or self-authored in a way that you couldn't possibly have been caused by anything else or other things that are very hard to understand in order for them to be free um but I think that the common sense notion of Free Will has something at least to do with Consciousness um and responsibility now it's possible that you could even be free make free decisions unconsciously and a lot of social psychology seems to suggest that we freely make decisions that we're not necessarily conscious of as we're making them um but responsibility it seems is really linked much more closely to Consciousness it's hard to imagine holding somebody responsible for something that they didn't know that they were doing or weren't conscious of so so now we're adding another complexity which is the uh the morality the legal side so you have really a a a contiguous series of Concepts that are somehow linked but not entirely yeah yeah I think we're still struggling with how all of these somewhat related Concepts uh hold together um which ones are more closely related to other ones um so so let's start with let's let's take Free Will as the core okay so if we settled on Free Will what can we say about decisions you've said that decisions could be made without free will because in one sense every computer is making decisions you can have different algorithms in computers and they do things you put in possibilities and decisions come out that are pre prefixed by algorithms but those are not free as we would as we would calculate you could even put in random numbers but then that is uh to make decisions but then that is sort of a a determined in in a in a random way I mean yeah so I mean that that I think is what indeterminism is it's some element of Randomness that uh will push your decision one way or another and people who are Libertarians about Free Will who think that in order for us to be free we have to be undetermined um essentially have to make peace with the the notion that there's some random element that you as the agent have no control over uh that is making it the case that you decide to do a rather than b but why would then Randomness be any more making a free decision than determinism that is an excellent question which uh I don't see an answer to um but the people who are Libertarians about free will just accept that it is well but there's a different concept the concept of openness openness is not the same thing as Randomness that's true except it's if your question is are you going to be are you in a deterministic universe right or not right that's that's question one right that's question one if you say no then the universe is indeterministic and uh you might need that for openness but the openness comes at the price of indeterminism I don't see any right but but can you have an openness that is not generated by a Randomness I don't believe you can okay so that's a that's an important kind of critical question because if you cannot if you cannot have openness without Randomness right without chance call it luck whatever you want right then I'm not sure I see a difference between a deterministic an indeterministic universe as opposed relative to making free will choices I completely agree with you so uh what you do gain is you get the the robust possibility of things having could have been different could have been different right things could have been otherwise and you can say that without any complexity um whereas if you believe in determinism you have to give some kind of philosophical account of what that means you have a unique position with doctorates in both uh neuroscience and in philosophy so you're on both sides of this war yeah I guess I am you have relatives on both sides of this uh this war except I wouldn't characterize the war as a war between the philosophers and the neuroscientists oh I like War I like that I I think that we shouldn't be too friendly there there no I think that's not it at all I actually think that uh there are pretty strong contingence of compatibilists in both the philosophical camp and the neuroscientific camp and cabalists are people who think that you can be free or have free will or have free action uh in a deterministic universe yeah what they're doing is they're degrading the uh the notion of Free Will that's very contentious right I think it is the notion of Free Will and everything else is bloated yes exactly okay so that's fair so so you're but there's a price to pay no matter which so you're you're a compatibilist I'm a compatibilist right so you're you live in a determinist of of libertarian intuition but no I'm a comp and and so you live in a deterministic universe where every thing that happen had a cause and you can trace all the causes back and ultimate intelligence could figure it all out probabilistically however it works I have to stop you because I I don't live in that Universe either I'm completely agnostic I think it is possible that the universe is in deterministic it's possible that it's indeterministic but whatever count of free will I can give or anyone can give it should be compatible with both of those possibilities okay but your free will would be different in different kinds of your two different Universe you're saying well however it works however the universe works I'm Free Will is my is my core value and I'm going to keep it if it has to be a little bit bloated or a little bit shrunken I don't really care you're not saying that I'm not saying that you're saying uh the the difference is um what I what I think is that the account of Free Will cannot hinge on the question of determinism or indeterminism oh that's a very significant whichever way it goes the account should stand up and uh so I'm not saying that the Universe has to be deterministic I'm not saying it has to be indeterministic um what I'm saying is that whatever explanation I'm going to give you for why I choose freely why I'm responsible for my decisions Etc it's not going to make reference to the fact that the Big Bang caused me to do something something and it's not going to make reference to any indeterministic blip in my brain yes but wouldn't the fact that you're defining free will in a way so that it wouldn't matter which way by its very nature making you defining Free Will at a lower common denominator than someone else you you have to do that uh I don't think so I think Free Will is a macroscopic uh kind of phenomenon that you don't need to make reference to those microphysical details in order to give an account of and if you're going down that far I think You' you've got the wrong account so you looking at a higher macroscopic level a more of a brain level uh and so H how how is your brain structure mind uh uh compatible with this kind of free will do you need anything going on in the brain that's indeterministic you don't or you're saying you don't you don't know you don't care it might be indeterministic it might not and that question isn't going to be relevant to my story for why we're free and that's not a common approach I don't think it is okay and and how do you defend that you defend that by creating your free will on such a macroscopic level that everything else washes out um no you got to Def my it's not my free will it's my account of Free Will that's fine and um I'm not uh I'm just saying that when I give an account of why my choices are free or responsible I don't need to make reference to that ultimately low level of of event I'm going to make reference to things like reasons uh desires preferences other kinds of mental States I'm going to make reference to um maybe some mechanisms of decision making that we find out from neuroscience uh but those don't take sides on the question of determinism or indeterminism either and I would say most compatibilists actually don't require that determinism be true they just what the position says is that determinism is compatible with freedom but it doesn't say and it has to be determinism there are people who have said that you have to that in an indeterministic world you couldn't be free that that freedom requires determinism but most compatible lists are open about that so I don't think I'm that far off but but I think uh at least my work has has sort of jumped off from the point that um you don't need you don't need to make uh you don't need to answer the question of determinism or indeterminism if what you're interested in is Free Will I think that answer especially if you're a neuroscientist or interested in Neuroscience I think that answer is not coming from Neuroscience uh so if you want to give a brain-based account of free will you can skip that question and start thinking about the things that we actually have access to like representations and reasons and desires motivation things like that

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 8,831

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Adina Roskies, Free Will, philosophy, consciousness, morality

Id: h6vQATNzXdY

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024