Philosophy Now Forum

Thanks for the link. My points about free-will and determinism may be better expressed by the sections I found here and copy below.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/


Proponents of the event-causal account (e.g. Nozick 1995; Ekstrom 2001; and Franklin forthcoming) would say that uncaused events of any kind would be random and uncontrolled by anyone, and so could hardly count as choices that an agent made. They hold that reasons influence choices precisely by causing them. Choices are free insofar as they are not deterministically caused, and so might not have occurred in just the circumstances in which they did occur. (See nondeterministic theories of free will and probabilistic causation.) A special case of the event-causal account of self-determination is Kane (1996 and his contribution to Fischer et al., 2007). Kane believes that the free choices of greatest significance to an agent's autonomy are ones that are preceded by efforts of will within the process of deliberation. These are cases where one's will is conflicted, as when one's duty or long-term self-interest compete with a strong desire for a short-term good. As one struggles to sort out and prioritize one's own values, the possible outcomes are not merely undetermined, but also indeterminate: at each stage of the struggle, the possible outcomes have no specific objective probability of occurring. This indeterminacy, Kane believes, is essential to freedom of will.

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Probabilistic Causation

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causa ... ic/#IntPro


1.4 The Interpretation of Probability
Causal relations are normally thought to be objective features of the world. If they are to be captured in terms of probability theory, then probability assignments should represent some objective feature of the world. There are a number of attempts to interpret probabilities objectively, the most prominent being frequency interpretations and propensity interpretations. Most proponents of probabilistic theories of causation have understood probabilities in one of these two ways. Notable exceptions are Suppes (1970), who takes probability to be a feature of a model of a scientific theory; and Skyrms (1980), who understands the relevant probabilities to be the subjective probabilities of a certain kind of rational agent.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/proba ... et/#ProInt


3.5 Propensity Interpretations
Like the frequency interpretations, propensity interpretations locate probability ‘in the world’ rather than in our heads or in logical abstractions. Probability is thought of as a physical propensity, or disposition, or tendency of a given type of physical situation to yield an outcome of a certain kind, or to yield a long run relative frequency of such an outcome.

.....

Popper (1957) is motivated by the desire to make sense of single-case probability attributions that one finds in quantum mechanics—for example “the probability that this radium atom decays in 1600 years is 1/2”. He develops the theory further in (1959a). For him, a probability p of an outcome of a certain type is a propensity of a repeatable experiment to produce outcomes of that type with limiting relative frequency p. For instance, when we say that a coin has probability 1/2 of landing heads when tossed, we mean that we have a repeatable experimental set-up — the tossing set-up — that has a propensity to produce a sequence of outcomes in which the limiting relative frequency of heads is 1/2.

Causal Determinism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deter ... al/#QuaMec

The discussion of quantum mechanics in section 4 shows that it may be difficult to know whether a physical theory postulates genuinely irreducible probabilistic laws or not.

chaz wyman wrote:

adge wrote:Thanks for the posts, I find the case against free will to be pretty convincing.
Must admit i was already leaning towards that direction.
But what are the implications of this, does this mean that i’m typing this post because of the
Big Bang?
Is everything i am and do somehow predictable (given some hypothetical omniscience about causality), surely
the implications are pretty severe-if our every waking action are straightjacketed by causality.

There is no need to think of it as a straight jacket.
You are able to change and that change is part of who you are and what you are.
But how dreadful would it be if there was actually a thing such as free-will. If you were able to act in spite of your education, motivation, upbringing, genetics etc.. then you would be acting as if you were not the person you are.
Nothing would matter any more; there would be no need for learning or experience if you could simply disregard all that and act as if they were not important.

Hope i get the posting of this right, as it's the first time i've quoted on here.
I take your point Chaz, but my being able to change is dependent on who i am, and who i am is dependent on certain initial states-for example from conception to being a child, which weren't chosen, or at my own discretion.
In other words-I make the choices i do, based on what i am, but what i am is a series of states derived from an interaction of my initial self as a baby and my environment about which i react in a way that is determined by different states of myself.
So even in this limited sense we are governed by our own prior states, which arrive from prior states and so on, I did not cause my own existence, and i become a corollary of them.
Yes i grant you there is change, but it seems a causal as one domino falling against another in a domino chain.