Men largely don't do the donkey work, so they're largely unaware of the massive effort and unending, back breaking hard work it entails. Nor do they bear the economic cost, there is no "daddy track" that stalls their careers and lowers their salaries.

I'd swap places with "complying with society's rules.." on your list. That's the path of least resistance, while raising children requires enormous effort and self sacrifice, mostly on the part of women.

... yes I may be grouped in with the class of Homo Sapiens that possess an incomplete (i.e. "Y&quot chromosome, otherwise known as (cough) male, and thus I did create the draft version of my chart from that point of view.

However, it seems to me that your suggestion revolves around a question of the level of Effort and not Effect involved with my O3/X2 example.

If so, would it be better to move "Raise a Child to Adulthood" to the O4/X2 position and discard the current O4/X2 example?

and, for most of the world, doesn't involve a conscious choice to do so.

I also think "complying with society's rules..." belongs on a far lower effort scale since it really is the path of least resistance. Again, most people comply without thinking about it, those rules have been a part of them since early childhood. Not complying with these rules takes considerably more conscious choice and effort as those of us who went through the 60s well know.

..."Raise a Child" goes to O4/X2
However, I would suggest that "complying with society's rules" (or not) takes more than minimal effort (in many {most?} cases) and more to the point, the effect (benefit or detriment) to the individual is greater than the effort.

Obviously a lot. I read Free Will, and thought I understood it, but recall no emphasis on Effort vs. Effect. While he concedes, near the end of the book, that we can, and do, effect change, he pretty much chalks that up to a confluence of accidents, too. Is that what you mean by "effects." I just don't follow. It's a very pessimistic work really. I came away pretty convinced that Sam doesn't acknowledge free will.

... there really is no discussion of Effort/Effect, this is entirely a construct of my own in my attempt to provide a framework (and a means of mental exercise) for thinking about the concept of Free Will before I went back and re-read the book.

Whether this construct has any value is a question yet to be answered.

However, I did pull the book off the shelf last night and jumped to the conclusions, and am now wondering if he didn't just punt the ball with:

"The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion"

Or just about anything from the "new atheists," most of my beliefs are entirely my own.

I don't believe in free will. As far as I am concerned we are nothing more than the product of our environment filtered through the screen of our genetic make up. If I try to act out against this and prove free will, I am still reacting to an environmental stimulus based upon my own genetic predispositions. I don't see why some people react so badly to this conclusion, it is what makes us who and what we are.

To me, "free will" is begging the question. What exactly is our will "free" of? God? Fate? Fate is as imaginary as god and free will. Fate implies a design or designer. It implies that everything has been meticulously set up to go according to some plan or tapestry. But, as far as we here in the AA group are concerned, there is no design or designer. What is, is. What was, was. What will be, will be.

But even if we assume there is a creator, free will is a poorly defined concept. Somehow this creator knows how everything that has been or will be in the universe, knows the consequence of every inclination he supposedly made us with, and yet we can in someway affect our destiny? It is as self contradictory as the idea of an omnipotent god. If fate exists, then free will can not exist. If fate does not exist, then there is nothing for us to be free from.

Simply put, there can be no "free will" because our will has nothing to be free of in the first place.

... the perception that I do make choices. A or B or C ad infinitum (almost).

And that these "choices" require (presumably) some level of effort, to which I was attempting to construct a scale. And, that these choices, once enacted, cause some level (again, scale-able) of effect.

That is where I was starting, before I really jumped into the question of whether we have free will (or not).

What is the nature of these apparent "choices".

Glad the whale got away in the end. Oh... wait?

never mind.

... but I did read the book...

...or did I?

Last edited Thu Apr 17, 2014, 07:20 PM - Edit history (1)

I should read the whole thread before cracking a duplicate joke.

... you have penguins.

They cover for me.

..... we would have no choice in discussing free will. All our arguments and conclusions we came up with would be pre-determined.

...or....

We might have no choice but to discuss Free Will.



Ahhhhhh.....I've fallen into a conundrum and can't reason my way out......

...To further my investigation and my understanding of Free Will, I updated my chart of Level of Effort and Level of Effect:



Also, I found an interesting discussion/perspective/definition for Free Will as related by Daniel Dennett.

In a nutshell:
[q]Free Will exists, for humans, and quantum physic determinism does not matter. You can have something with Free Will, made from things that do not have Free Will. The whole issue between determinism and in-determinism in physics is a red-herring as far as Free Will is concerned. The science that you need to understand, to understand Free Will, is not physics, it is biology.”[/q]

I created a transcript of Dennett’s explanation of his definition of Free Will.

Point of Inquiry (POI) podcast: 2011-12-12
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/daniel_dennett_the_scientific_study_of_religion/
Starting at the ~27:00 minute mark.

John Shook:
“…What is Daniel Dennett’s Quick, Scientifically Approvable, 100% Naturalistic, Yet Friendly to Agency, Definitions of ‘Free Will’?”

Daniel Dennett:
“It’s going to take more than 30-seconds…it is not 25-words or less…let me sort of back up a little bit and then build to it.”

“When life started on this planet there was no Free Will. Bacteria have negligible options and negligible capacity to act on those options and basically they are very myopic for if something isn’t touching them their only sensory (input?)…takes contact. They don’t have any distal: they don’t have any vision, they don’t have any hearing. Distal perception like hearing and vision is really important because for the first time when you get that, you can begin to think ahead. You can duck that incoming brick, you can go catch that fleeing dinner, or run away from that galloping predator who is coming toward you. That set off an arms race. Now that gets us to quite an interesting variety of Agency, it’s just not really Free Agency, but still impressive. Where there are options, there are good reasons, to go one way or another and to a remarkable extent organisms are capable of, in effect, tracking those reasons and tend to do the right thing at the right time because if they didn’t they would be supper.”

Shook:
“Is it the stage which it becomes appropriate to have teleonomic (sp?) or teleological descriptions of what a mere mechanistic…”

Dennett:
“Yes, but that goes back to the bacteria. This is part of my current campaign is to push harder and harder on the line I have been developing over the years for what I call Free Floating Rationales, but what I want to say is that nature is a-flood with reasons. There are reasons for so many things. In the bacterial world, there are reasons why the motor proteins are where they are, there are reasons why there is a membrane. There are reasons all over the place, right down to the macromolecules. But those are just not represented anywhere. They are not anybody’s reasons they are just not the reasons of any Mind. They’re just the reasons that nature honors in evolving these things. The first time these reasons are represented are when clever people, scientists, come along and reverse engineer these things and then they see why the parts are the way they are and it is just breathtaking. You find this tremendous ingenuity in Nature and (take a deep breath and agree, I am urging) in the same way we can reverse engineer a radio or an automobile engine or a computer, and figure out the reasons why the parts are the way they are, we can do the same thing with any living thing and they are reasons in the same sense. It is true, of course, that engineers and architects and scientists and other inventors have thought through the reasons to some degree in the artifact, but that doesn’t matter. They are reasons just the same.

So, first line: There are reasons everywhere; it is just that only a very limited percentage of the living things recognize reasons, represent reasons, are moved by reasons, do things for reasons. There is a reason why trees spread their limbs, but the tree doesn’t have the reason, the tree doesn’t think the reason. Nothing thinks the reason. There is a reason why bacteria have membranes but the bacteria don’t have a reason for having membranes. In fact, dogs don’t have reasons for what they do, porpoises don’t have reasons for what they do, even chimpanzees… there is a reason why chimpanzees do what they do, but they don’t have those reasons in the same way we do.

Shook:
“So, it’s one thing to have goals, aims, purposes, to achieve these things, and it is quite another to deliberately know that you are going about doing them and why.”

Dennett:
“To know the reasons and to be able to be moved by reasons. This is a very familiar theme in moral philosophy, you go back to Kant (to be moved by reasons) or more recently by Wilford Sellers, talking about the space of reasons, how so much of what we do is built on the sort of interactive game of asking for reasons being able to give reasons, being able to trade reasons, and compare and evaluate reasons. Being able to say “well that is not a very good reason”, that, we are the only species on the planet that does that and Free Will, of the kind that is really worth knowing, depends on that. That is why small children and brutes, animals that don’t have language, that is why they don’t have Free Will in the morally important sense. That is why if a bear kills a man, it is not homicide.

Shook:
“So, by making sure that the social space of reasons can be understood you build a bridge and then by understanding how we develop talking about giving and sharing reasons and holding each other responsible for our conduct then that provides the bridge between the naturally cultural sphere and then our self-conception of ourselves.”

Dennett:
“So now what we do is work backwards, we say ’Alright, imagine we have morality, we want to have the idea of responsibility, and holding people responsible both for the good things they do (the good deeds they are the authors of) and also for the evil they do (the crimes they commit if you will) if you start there you say ‘Now, what has to be the case to justifiably, to reasonably, to with good grounding, to hold people responsible for those deeds?’ You work back to that and that is what Free Will is and it is, as it were by definition, important because it’s the necessary condition for the world of Taking Life Seriously and Holding People Responsible.

Shook:
“That would nicely explain why freedom comes in degrees because we’re are talking about the development of human capacities in the social realm as John Dewey once famously quipped “No one ever marched in protest over lack of metaphysical free will”. What people really want is social freedom and more of it, frequently.

Dennett:
“Yes, I think that is true, metaphysical free will is being somehow insulated from causality, is the more you think about it just a preposterous idea, but it is deeply rooted in everyday thinking and the fact that for so many people that is by definition is what is meant by Free Will, that we get so much thoughtless, or imperfectly thought out work by neuroscientists who see the folk-link between determinism and lack of freedom, and just take it on its face and don’t ever stop to look at it, and of course there are those who think ‘well at least we don’t have to worry about this’ because quantum physics is in-deterministic and they sort of use quantum mechanics as their trap door to get out. Let’s grant that, at least according to current wisdom, in-determinism, indeterminacy, reigns thanks to quantum physics. My point is that it does not matter, the whole issue between determinism and in-determinism in physics is a red-herring as far as Free Will is concerned. The science that you need to understand, to understand Free Will, is not physics, it is biology.”

Shook:
“So, perhaps the neuroscientists and the other folks are being too reductionistic trying to look for freedom in the relationships among atoms or sub-atomic particles when where they should have been looking where it was all along is in the relationships between human beings.”

Dennett:
“And, think about it maybe this way, you raise the term reductionism, which usually I object to because it means so many different things to so many different people. I think most people now, are quite happy with the idea that things can be colored even though their finest parts are not colored. Atoms are not colored, but things are really red, blue and green. They can really be red, blue and green and it is not just an illusion that they are red, blue and green even though the atoms, that they are made of, are not any color at all. Things can be alive, like a cell, even though they are made up parts that aren’t alive. In fact, if it doesn’t work out that way we are in deep trouble. So you can make something living out of parts that are not living. You can make something colored out of parts that are not colored. You can make something conscious out of parts that are not conscious. Neurons are not conscious. Some people, to my amazement, say ‘even individual neurons must be conscious’. I think, ‘ok, if neurons are conscious then so is athletes foot’, they are both eukaryotic cells, not much difference between them. Do we really want to say that yeast is conscious?”

Shook:
“Probably not, probably not, we touched earlier on morality; and let me make a bit of a swerve…”

Dennett:
“Let me just finish, I have one more case: you can make something free out of parts that are not free.”

Shook:
“Please, go ahead.”

Dennett:
“Free in the important sense, in the same way that being alive, being conscious and being red, these are macroscopic properties that are not shared by their microscopic parts. Same thing is true of freedom in that it doesn’t mean that when you put enough neurons together in this way, you have something which violates the laws of physics. No, it is just as determined by the laws of physics, if they are deterministic, it does not escape that, it is just that it has this property, at a higher level, which is the one that matters to us. And, it isn’t illusory any more than being red is illusory or being alive is illusory.”

Shook:
“And indeed, it is quite manipulate-able, anyone who has raised children knows that agency, responsibility and morality are right there in front of your eyes and they can be easily controlled to some degree and indeed we do want to control.”