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You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.
However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.
I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.
There's nothing to grasp. Materialistic free will, AKA soft determinism, is an extremely convoluted and complex (and ultimately sophistic) web of reasoning created by very intelligent people who found the (obvious) conclusions of hard determinism to be repugnant, and so use their brainpower to maneuver around it as best as they can. They do this mostly by fiddling with definitions until they have bamboozled themselves into believing that they have proved something. Once you have accepted determinism, free will cannot exist, not in the way one usually thinks of it. The only way you can get around the free will problem is to:
Reject determinism - I have never seen anyone do that successfully.
Posit the existence of a soul which is outside the currently understood laws of the universe - and there are too many commonsense objections to this that I cannot resolve.
Soft materialism is in a category of beliefs that I have labelled as 'so absurd only the very clever could convince themselves to believe it'
I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history, but rather refer to much more mundane limitations in the material world on individual human will.
The animal whose desired path is blocked before them has no free will. The animal whose desired path is unblocked has free will. This is an entirely workable and normal conception of what ‘free’ means. Cf “you are free to go”, cf the constitution etc etc.
Can you execute a given desire? If you can, then in that instance you have free will for that task. No complex argument around determinism or the process by which you came to your desire is necessary.
I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.
But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.
Is it, in fact, a redefinition at all? It seems to me that ‘free will’ is really about the output space for whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level. Anti-soft-materialism arguments struggle to explain what ‘classical’ free will that excludes it is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, it is possible to suggest at the (largely semantic, of course) difference between ‘hard determinism’ and the ‘soft materialist’ positions. Consider a criminal enterprise. Someone gets arrested, volunteers everything to the cops, gets released on bail, his co-conspirators say “what the fuck man, you have free will bro, why did you tell them that?”. The point being made isn’t a complex analysis of the internal process in the mind that occurs during reasoning, it’s a straightforward exhortation that this agent was not being externally forced to do something that it did anyway. It’s clear that it refers to a way of discussing the bounds of our behavior in a material reality, not an immaterial spiritual concept, which is why we don’t talk about having “free will” to regrow a leg or jump to the moon.
Defining free will as something that happens at the intersection of deterministic machines with good but imperfect predictive ability, material reality, and the forward passage of time fits with the way the term is generally used.
I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.
I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.
I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:
In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.
FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.
But you're always going to reject the same ones and chose the one you were always going to, based on everything that has come before that decision point. You will always make the same choice given the same set of conditions. There is no such thing as "free will".
You seem to be constraining the definition of free will to something tautological, while trying to prove some meaningful point.
There are different categories/qualities of free will, specific to any given entity and context. Free will of material+spirit sapients in a material+spirit world looks freer to the philosopher than the free will of material sapients in either a purely material or a material+spirit world, since spirit is (presumably) acausal relative to the material. However, a theologian who presumes original sin is a spiritual condition which constrains the will to the selfish choice will think a purely material AGI a freer will than an unrepentant sinner.
Assuming a purely material world, an agent’s ability to carry out a given choice or to even think of that choice as a choice is naturally constrained in many ways, by fatigue and hunger, by senses and by neurology, by lack of abilities or skills, yet that agent is still functionally free to will whatever he can imagine.
I advise you to consider the concept of Turing completeness before calling my paradox more absurd than your tautology.
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