Hmm, looks like you guys *do* believe that free will is only free if it allows you to do things regardless of your desires and motivations. I would call this random behavior, not free choice. When *I* make a choice, you can tell it’s mine because it accords with my goals as best as my knowledge can make it. Economics is the study of making my choices serve my goals more perfectly.

Praxeology holds that everything humans do is a human action; I say that when we wilfully choose to choose a new goal, this also is human action. Therefore every goal we choose to have is determined by goals we had before. This leaves only goals we do not choose to have; but these are not under our control and not part of our freedom.

I concede that I can choose a means that I dislike, but I cannot ever choose an end that I dislike.

Thus, for my morning pleasure drink, I pick something I enjoy drinking for its own sake. I hate coffee, so I wouldn’t touch it for its own sake. However, on an all-nighter, I will willingly start with coffee.

Whether I drink the coffee is indeed up to me. But who am I? I’m not a collection of random “choices”; I’m more than that. My identity is consistent because it’s based on my values (goals) as well as on my mind and other capabilities. I am me BECAUSE I do things in order to get what I desire, not because I do things in order to get what I do not care about.

Lucretius — be careful before you decide to study the mind scientifically. Note that in particular if you don’t believe that intelligent design is scientific you’re proclaiming that science can never understand the human mind, which uses nothing but intelligent design. Read the beginning of Mises’ “Ultimate Foundation” first, to see how our modern view of science won’t help with examining the mind.

-Billy

Billy–well, intelligent design is not a valid explanation for evolution. But is the human mind itself nothing but intelligent design? Clearly not. And Mises didn’t think so either. As much as I admire the great man, I do think he placed too much emphasis on deliberate, intentional actions. The main importance of Hayek is to correct this bias, though he went a bit too far.

I think some at this blog are not sufficiently acquainted with the theory of natural selection Mayr is a trustworthy writer on this subject–e.g. What is evolution. On the subject of ID, I’d also recommend Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit.

I should state that the above may not depend on a “spiritual” view of human beings. Many people have held that a human being has no soul that survives the death of the body, but have still held that human beings exists – i.e. that we are not just robots who happen to look as if we were human beings, but that we actually are human beings.

Of course the very use of the word “we” implies that I think that some other human shaped things are actually people (i.e. that they are reasoning minds – agents, examples of free will), just as my use of the word “I” implies that I believe myself to be a being (a reasoning mind, an agent, an example of free will).

Indeed the very fact that I am thinking at all (that the “I” exists)proves that I am an agent – an example of free will.

Of course none of the above will convince people who hold to such positions as “a thought does not prove the existance of a thinker” (the supposed refutation of Descartes), or who reject the subject/object distiction.

Someone may hold that the we are subjects (of course if we are not subjects the “we” is meaningless), but that our agency ends with death (fair enough).

But to hold that agency (“free will” – the ability to make some real choices) does not exist at all, is (as stated above) to negate humanity.

I continue to suspect that a lot of the difficulty in this whole area comes from the great walls that are built (by specialists) between such words as “mind”, “reason”, “will”, and “idenity”.

For all the differences there may be between these words, they are dealing with the same basic thing.

The “common man” understands this, and so have some philosophers. But some other philosophers (perhaps because they wish to impress by rejecting the views of ordinary people, or perhaps because their own complexities mislead them) seem to miss the wood for the trees.

Sorry I took so long to reply.

Paul, to say that human choices are determined by the human’s desires and reason doesn’t contradict choice and agency; it affirms it in the only understandable way. You claim that there’s a third way besides the determinism of desire and the chaos of randomness; but claiming something doesn’t make it so. You have to at least mention what that third way IS. And keep in mind that you also have to explain how this fits with the axiom of Human Action: all human action is the result of a human weighing his desires and choosing an available means to fulfill the strongest one. I claim that this axiom also holds with respect to desires: whenever it becomes possible to choose to develop a new desire, humans must ACT to do so. Thus, desires also follow the axiom of human action.

Lucretius, you misread me (as I admit I left open). I wasn’t talking about origins or evolution. I’m talking about the use of teleology in Intellegent Design. ID doesn’t explain evolution, as you mention; but it’s never been intended to. It was intended to show that there are some things that can only be accounted for by allowing for the possiblity of purposeful action, as opposed to purposeless random-walk mutation followed by (purposeless) selection.

You don’t have to believe that there’s any purpose in the actual history of the Earth to accept that as a possible field of study. The ID movement as such believes (on the basis of surface appearance) that such purpose will be discovered; but you can reject that possibility if you wish. What you can’t do is deny teleology, because that is the ultimate foundation of economics and praxeology.

-Billy

I apologize for all my typing mistakes above.

This is especially bad if my guess is correct and our dispute is largely about language (rather than about a man who rapes or murders could have chosen to other than he did).

So by being careless with typing (as well as with being careless with reading before – really replying to positions that I faught years [actually decades] ago rather than the positions that either Allen or Billy actually held) I may have generated a false dispute.

Classic old man’s mistake – “what is that blur over there?”, “it looks like [mutates into "it is"] one of my ancient enemines – once more I raise my trusty sword against the forces of darkness……”

Ok Billy, now I agree. Teleology is not to be thrown out. If I thought so I wouldn’t be visiting mises.org. Though it’s not always that easy to discern purpose from the organization of the products. E.g. laws and other human institutions.

By the way I don’t think the Darwinian theory of evolution is complete either. It “basically” works, but there are a few problems. ID theory of evolution doesn’t work at all.

Lucretius:

I believe most paleontologists would point out that your statement “…I don’t think the Darwinian theory of evolution is complete either.” is overly generous to Darwinian Theory. The statement suggests the theory has some semblance of having proximity to being complete. The plain fact is, the fossil record (the scientific evidence) is simply void of any support for Darwin’s theory of Evolution.

You’ve probably heard of Punctuated Equilibrium. That is the evolutionists’ answer to the “but where’s the evidence?” question. Darwinism has been discarded in the evolutionist inner circles, due to a lack of evidence, and this is a secret they prefer to keep to themselves.

Hi Lucretius:

I’ll take your word for it that punc. eq. doesn’t refute natural selection, and that Gould never made that claim.

What Gould did say was that the fossil record does not suggest Darwinian evolution occurred:

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic [which I read as Darwinian] accounts of evolution. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism, I wish only to point out that it was never “seen” in the rocks.” (“Evolution’s Erratic Pace”, Natural History, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 1977, p.13)

Niles Eldridge similarly said this:

“If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.” ( The Guardian Weekly, 26 November 1978, vol. 119, no. 22, p. 1 )

My point was simply this: Saying that the Darwinian Theory of evolution is not quite complete is putting it so mildly as to be highly misleading. Based on the observations of renowned Paleontologists of the world I would say Darwinism has not yet passed beyond the unsupported hypothesis stage, given that the fossil record in no way supports it. And this is the “trade secret of paleontology” that Gould is talking of and that so many otherwise scientific minds seem highly prone to overlook.

I concur with Paul Edwards “Saying that the Darwinian Theory of evolution is not quite complete is putting it so mildly as to be highly misleading.” I believe that the Darwinian view is excellent when it comes to gradual occurrences, but does not account for qualitative breaks, when something truly new occurs. This is reminiscent of Velikovsky’s view of “uniformitarianism” which purports to deal with matters that are better explained by what he calls “catastrophism”. He wrote this long before the notion of punctuated equilibrium was defined, which implies that some things are not explained by incremental change.

Yet I am neither a biologist, geologist, or paleontologist, so I am not in any position to discuss this substantively. The reader is justified in concluding that I do not know enough about this matter to justify having an opinion. Why then do I believe that there is a dichotomy between the gradual and the breaks in evolution?

It is because that is how I see history, science, changes in individuals, and generally all developments in the universe. There is much that one understands by incremental processes, while there are events that break, which are not only very different from what precedes them, but reverse their essence. Here, I directly depart from reductionists, who view life as reducible to non-life, conscious life as reducible to non-conscious life, free will as reducible to deterministic processes, etc.

Allow me to exemplify this contrast (or dichotomy) between process and event, by mathematics. It starts with an integer, then another, and with their combination. There is then the process of addition, which builds the integers, and by subtraction, the negative integers. Multiplication and division continue this process, as shortcuts for addition and subtraction. Here all goes well, and everything is reducible to combinations of integers. (Pythagoras for example holds that everthing is made of integers.) However, there arises the diagonal of a square, and the circumference of a circle, which are not reducible to integers. Somehow the notion of irrationals and transcendental numbers arise, which not only violate the requirement of deriving numbers from integers, but which derive all numbers, including integers, from them. Another break occurs with complex numbers, which at first violate the requirement of being real numbers, but then reduce real numbers to being only a special case of complex numbers. Moreover, the exception to the laws of arithmetic, where it is impermissible to divide by zero, becomes the essense of complex analysis, where functions are reducible to poles and all sorts of singularities (in terms of how division by zero occurs).

An example from physics is the concept of matter, where energy is viewed as the motion of matter. Enormous developments occur within this paradigm where everything derives from “stuff”. Yet a reversal occurs somehow, where energy is seen as fundamental, and matter is merly a special form. We can take endless examples of events in all areas of existence, where what was essential to a process beomes reversed.

So whereas I cannot seriously address the Darwinian theory of evolution, I am skeptical of it from a philosophical point of view. I aver that while there are gradual processes, there are also events that reverse them.

Hi Lucretius:

I do agree with you that lack of fossil evidence for Darwinian Evolution is not conclusive evidence falsifying the theory. I would, however, argue that fossil evidence is at least required to verify the theory.

When you say “…the key point is that the fossil record by itself is a deficient source of evidence. It does not preserve everything. and if something is not there, it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist” i wonder if you mean it is an unnecessary source of evidence, or that it will simply not likely provide this necessary evidence.

Paleontologists such as Niles Eldridge as I quoted above felt that if evolution were to happen according to Darwin’s theory, the fossil record would definitely confirm it. And it has not confirmed it: “…geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them.” Our impressive collection of prehistoric fossils leads me to question the argument that it is natural to expect all transitional fossils should have so inconveniently disappeared.

Regarding how I feel about natural selection as a mechanism of evolution, I would say I would find it more interesting to first see evidence that evolution did in fact occur, before moving on to the more intricate question of by which mechanism it was obtained.

As a silly analogy in physics, I would first want to be convinced that apples do in fact fall from trees towards the earth, before moving on to the study of mass and gravity.

In connection with your contention that molecular biology provides convincing evidence of Darwinian evolution, although we won’t be able to discuss it here, I would have to say that the arguments I have read from this angle have been anything but convincing. The simplest living cell possesses such an immense degree of complexity and inter-connected functionality that it defies imagination how their complex and interdependent functions could develop accidentally to operate synergistically as they do. Not that reality can never defy my little imagination, I just ask for evidence before I believe it really has.

Anyways, I guess we won’t be solving the world’s problems with this issue. But still, it’s a fun topic.

This is the most relaxing and pleasant disagreement i have had in a while. Especially on this topic. Thanks!

The way the scientific method works it is generally assumed that some theory is prevalent in the scientific community. It’s one thing to say that a particular theory is deficient or incomplete, but it still doesn’t get supplanted until a better modification or better theory comes along and holds water.
Evolution theory has simply been modified since Darwin’s time because nobody’s come up with a better theory to replace it with.

The first article by Lucretious (Does Neuroscience Refute Ethics?”) provided some insightful critical insights about conclusions drawn in Greene, et al.’s article in Science, “An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.” I expected similarly cogent insights in Lucretious’s second crtique of Greene’s work.

I was therefore shocked to find that “Does Neuroscience Refute Free Will?” does not even accurately describe the position of Greene and Cohen in their article, “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.” How can one criticize ideas if those ideas are not described accurately?

Here are two examples of many mischaracterizations.

Lucretious says, “Greene and Cohen compare two opposing sources of agency — either your brain or you — as if they are mutually exclusive.” What Greene and Cohen actually say is that some people think of “brain” and “you” as two separate agents. They suggest that such a dualism is false.

Lucretious says that Greene and Cohen want us to believe that “the concept of personal responsibility is obsolete.” What do Greene and Cohen actually say? On page 1776: “Because consequentialist approaches to punishment
remain viable in the absence of common-sense free
will, we need not give up on moral and legal responsibility.”

For readers who want to know what Greene and Cohen actually said about free will, I strongly suggest reading their original article.

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