I agree whole heartedly. I think it is a kind of word magic that after words have been used to identify an aspect of our experience we can feel driven to pin point more and more about it. We lose track that it is an aspect of something subtle about our experience. There is no perspective from which we can examen ‘it’ in the focal point of attention.
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I wrote my first response without finishing my read of your post. This part makes me think of mysticism which I understand as an openness to experience ungoverned by our rational minds - not uninformed by what we know rationally but at least undirected by rational considerations. I believe our individual consciousness is never untethered from God. If we really have free will why would me preemptively shut out whatever might be given us to know from the mind of God? This is one arena where many choose the certainty of settled doctrine over the immediacy of what may be there. So even those who choose less freedom do so freely.
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Hey, Mark, I was looking forward to a quiet afternoon with a cup of tea and a chance to look over the theological books I bought at the thrift store this morning, and now you’ve opened up a giant can of mystical worms!
I agree. God never abandons us because we’re all God’s children. Having said that, there’s a heck of a lot we humans can do to mess up the “state” of our tethering to God. This is where the free will question gets very, very messy.
Twenty-five years of daily practice as a cataphatic mystic has led me closer and closer to the suspicion that free will – what it is and what it looks like in many different human circumstances – lies at the heart of our frustrations with God (not to mention frustrations with ourselves and each other). We keep looking for unified theories and predictable algorithms and paths to spiritual perfection (because surely God intends human life to be simple!), but we keep falling into free will sand traps that take us ridiculously far from the hole-in-one goals we’re so often taught to expect.
To use myself as an example, I long ago learned (with constant guidance from God) how to harness my free will so it wouldn’t get in the way of my life as a practising mystic. I can hear what God and my guardian angel are saying to me as clearly as if I were talking to them on a smartphone, but nothing in my life has been predictable. You’d think that if you could get mystical help with many different kinds of human problems that your life would get easier and easier, simpler and simpler, more and more “successful.” My life is definitely better than it was (really, there are no words to express my gratitude to God), but my life isn’t easier, simpler, or more successful. It’s more complex than ever because I don’t try to shut out what God is saying to me. I work my butt off to show as much respect, trust, gratitude, humbleness, and courage as possible to God – not because I have to but because I choose to.
This doesn’t mean I’m perfect or have all the answers. It just means I’m very aware of all my limitations as a human being who’s using my free will to ask God for guidance on how to live a human life that doesn’t make me want to cringe with total misery at the end of each day. Partial misery seems to me like a huge improvement!
You’ve mentioned the concept of freedom: people using their free will to choose less freedom to know the mind – and, I would add, the heart – of God. This is absolutely true. There’s tremendous freedom in being open to God’s infinite love, but you have to give up some human traits that may seem desirable from a traditional human perspective (e.g. high status, political power without compassion, massive wealth without empathy, worldwide fame without service). Status addiction in particular puts heavy strain on the “tether” that connects us to God and allows us to be guided by God’s wisdom and love. The more your brain is physiologically addicted to status points, the harder it is for your brain to process intuitive messages from God.
Okay, now it’s time for my tea.
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That’s a fair question. On a libertarian account of free will, the choice in the ice cream parlour wouldn’t occur for no reason, nor in defiance of one’s character, history, desires, or present circumstances. All of those would still matter. I might be drawn to chocolate by habit, to pistachio by curiosity, to vanilla by a prior resolution to choose more moderately, or to strawberry by a desire to accommodate someone else’s suggestion. These antecedents would genuinely shape the field of deliberation. But on the libertarian view, they would not determine the outcome exhaustively.
What makes the choice free, on that account, is that the agent is not merely the passive site at which competing motives battle until the strongest one wins. Rather, the agent is the one who, in deliberating, can genuinely settle which of those motives or reasons will be made decisive in action. In other words, my desires and reasons don’t simply produce the choice in me as causes produce an effect; they present themselves to me as considerations, and I, AS AGENT, determine which of them I will endorse and act upon.
So if I choose chocolate, the libertarian doesn’t say that this means chocolate was always going to win by necessity: he says that I had real reasons pulling in different directions, and that I myself made chocolate the outcome by endorsing that reason or desire rather than another. Likewise, if I choose something else, that choice is not explained merely by whichever motive happened to be strongest at the subpersonal level, but by the fact that I, THE AGENT, made that consideration action-guiding.
In that sense, libertarian freedom doesn’t require freedom from reasons; it requires freedom in relation to reasons. The free agent is not detached from his motives, but neither is he reducible to them. He is not a blank void choosing arbitrarily, nor a mechanism merely registering the victory of antecedent causes. He is the irreducible source of the act in the sense that, among genuinely available alternatives, he can determine which one becomes actual.
And this, I think, is also where the real metaphysical issue enters. For if the human person were wholly material, then the act of will would fall under one of two descriptions: either it’s sufficiently determined by prior physical causes, or it includes some element of indeterminacy. But if it’s determined, then it’s not really free; and if it’s indeterminate, that doesn’t by itself make it free, since randomness is not agency. Real freedom requires more than the absence of determinism: it requires a real subject who can originate the act.
That’s why the classical tradition brings in the soul here, not as a merely cartoonish “ghostly” add-on, but as the metaphysical principle that makes this sort of agency intelligible.
And one of the many reasons (alongside the experiences of billions of people who, if they were all deceived by their own brain, would call into question and cast enormous doubts over every single spiritual and supernatural phenomena ever registered in history, resurrection of Jesus included, for the brain in that case would be proven to be so incredibly deceptive that even the line between reality and dream/allucination would shrink enormously) for thinking that such a principle exists is that the human mind doesn’t operate merely at the level of particular material states.
A material organ, precisely as material, is always tied to the particular: this image, this impulse, this neural configuration, this concrete sensory state. But the intellect can grasp universals: not just this triangle, but triangularity; not just this human being, but humanity; not just this just act, but justice. It can also reflect upon its own acts of knowing and willing and that matters because it shows that the human subject isn’t exhausted by particular material processes.
If the mind can know what is universal, and can take its own acts as objects of reflection, then there is at least a serious metaphysical case for saying that in man there is a principle of thought not reducible to matter alone. And if that is so, then the idea that the agent can be more than the passive endpoint of antecedent physical causes becomes far more intelligible.
So, back to your question: what would strong free will look like in the parlour? It would look like an ordinary act of deliberation in which multiple reasons and desires are present, but in which the final choice is not already fixed by them before the agent chooses. The antecedents condition the act, but they don’t close it. The agent closes it. That, in its simplest form, is what libertarian free will means.
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Oh and I forgot one point…
Free will is not absolute or universal. It is quite variable and fragile. It is limited by all kinds of conditions including chemical and medical. Free will is typically exercised in the creation of habits – self programming, and those habits will limit free will afterwards.
Oh and awareness is another huge factor. You can hardly be free to make choices when you are not even aware of them.
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So I wonder, taking a step back, do bacteria have free will? What about oaks? Starfish? Dogs? Or our closest biological relatives, the chimps? Can one define ‘free will’ in a reasonable way that excludes non-human organisms? What is necessary to ‘display free will’ and can one find which parts or operations are necessary?
Can they be genuinely “evil” or “good”? Do you think they are moral agents?
I’m talking about free will. Not morality.
But they are inextricably linked. There can be no morality without free will. You could decide to sanction some acts and reward some other acts, but the subject wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful sense without free will. Which is also why we don’t think that male dogs who rape female dogs (it happens literally all the time) are “evil”: because they are not moral agents and cannot choose otherwise. They could be conditioned not to do a certain act but they could never grasp the reasons why.
And while i think that there will be animals in the world to come I certainly don’t think that any animal can be lost forever, because they are innocent and incapable of sin.
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Linked but not the same. Moral considerations can be one dimension of how actions might have impact. Choosing chocolate vs. vanilla ice cream is not always a moral decision. The lead article in this thread started with how the brain formulates and registers ‘decisions’.
If we assume animals are not moral agents, that doesn’t mean they can’t have free will.
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Yes, some choices carry no moral weight, but the ability to be a moral agent is also the ability that allows you to really “choose” something in the first place.
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Other intelligent animals exercise a will and choose to harm or help in some situations. (We’ve all heard stories about dogs, dolphins, various primates, and other animals responding to distress in empathetic or helpful ways that seem to go beyond merely instinctual responses or trained behaviors.) I don’t know that it makes them moral agents though. Being a moral agent isn’t about the capacity to decide between a good action and a bad action. It’s about being held accountable to a communal standard of right and wrong.
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But do you think that their choices are free and not totally conditioned?
By you can be held accountable even by your own consciousness, as a human you don’t always need a communal standard, the natural law is written in our consciousness.
Sure, if one assumes that only ‘REAL, SIGNIFICANT CHOICES’ are moral in nature… On the other hand, if one is interested in free will and the mechanisms underlying choice, then one might not limit inquiry to humans that have the facilities to be moral agents.
Actually, that is precisely what I was asking.
I mean, I don’t think that literally every choice carries a moral weight. Deciding to eat a pistachio instead of a donuts is just that: a choice.
I linked the two (the ability to be a moral agent and the ability to choose) because the ability to make even “insignificant” (but really free) choices is also what makes you capable of being a moral agent.
Every living thing interacts with its environment and is possessed of a sensory array and some cognitive means to make sense of what is perceived. Their response is free within what is in their capacity. I imagine decisions are far more straightforward for them than they are for us but I would not characterize them as machines or automatons.
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Well, I don’t think that an animal can be free in the human sense of the word.
I think an animal can have real feelings, it’s not a machine or anything like that, but true agency is another thing.
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We don’t know what the ‘human sense’ of the word means. I don’t expect other organisms to have perfectly human-like behavior but is that a qualitative or quantitative difference? If we say that humans have free will, and make choices, I don’t see how we can demonstrate that all other species lack that basic capability. The shared biology and many shared behavioral traits are significant, particularly among the great apes.
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Definitely qualitative: when I was two years old my IQ was lower than that of ad adult monkey and yet I could already ask myself questions that an adult monkey never asks.
It’s also the first memory I have, I was two years old and I just discovered death and I recognized it as an abomination, even if I really couldn’t really “understand it” properly with my own brain. It was an existential anguish that no animal can experience.
And it’s also literally the first memory I have and the only memory I retain from my early childhood. I don’t remember anything else, before my 7/8 years.