First Thing's First // Two Paradoxes Choice

First of all, I welcome You warmly, visitor, to my humble corner of the Innernets. Now, let's get down to business.



Watching Roderick Long's "Foundations of Libertarian Ethics" lectures has been taking me some time, mostly because it's pretty thought-provoking and requires pondering the issues at hand a bit. So now, months after the lectures were made available, I'm still at the third one, dealing with two cute lil' paradoxes. I'm not really satisfied with the explanations that Mr. Long gives, so I'll throw in my own thoughts on this.

Being the staunch determinist that I am, I'm inclined to disagree with Mr. Long's disproving of causal determinism. The logic behind the proof goes as follows:
a) One can't aim at a certain past situation that is settled
b) Causation implies that the present/future state of events covaries with the past state of events
c) One can aim at a certain present/future state of events
d) Therefore, one can aim at a certain present/future state of events which implies a certain past state of events
e) d) and a) lead to a contradiction


The problem that I have with this reasoning is that although it is true that it makes no sense to aim at bringing about a certain past, the actor does not know that. The actor operates on his belief that he can bring about a certain future through a certain action, that is, on his belief in free will. The actor thinks that his actions are independent of the past, so if the actor also happens to believe in causation, which is also the assumption here (otherwise the actor couldn't aim at something in the past, because he would not think it covaried with his actions in the present), it should be to no one's surprise that the actor's reasoning is contradictory.

Now what if we were to drop the free-will assumption of our little hero's? Since the definition of 'aiming' is based on free will, we run into a problem - if free will doesn't exist, does the concept of 'aiming at a future' become meaningless? Not nessecarily.
I think it is safe to say that the actor is ignorant of certain elements of the past and certain elements of the future. Therefore, though the actor knows that there is only one possible future, he does not know what the future will be and can have certain preferences concerning it. So he may wish that the future that will come about is the one he prefers. Only then can he make a decision concerning his present actions, and, consequently, the future that he wishes to bring about. Now 'decision' certainly sounds free-willish, but we should note that the 'decision' is based on:
1) preferences concerning the future, which had been settled in the past;
2) analysis of the possible futures given the information about the past and present that Joe Sixpack has access to - also made in the past;
and 3) the biological determination to make decicions according to preferences, which directly precedes the decision itself in the chain of causation, and so must also precede the decision in time
In fact, therefore, though the decision that Joe makes aims at bringing about a certain future, it is determined by events in the past, none of which requires any semblance of free will. Therefore, we can think about decisions and goals in a fully deterministic framework and not run into a contradiction.

I do realise that this is a rather convoluted way of thinking about decision-making and, apparently, nature also thought so. That's why, I believe, denial of the existence of free will seems counterintuitive - because in some weird evolutionary process, humans have been ingrained with the belief in their free will - which certainly makes things easier, but also leads to all sorts of paradoxes, like the ones Mr. Long presents. Of course, this is but a conjecture of mine, but it certainly seems more plausible to me than assuming that human beings are somehow 'special' compared to the rest of surrounding reality, which certainly seems causal.

In the same way, the paradox with the two boxes that Mr. Long presents at the beginning of his lecture can be easily resolved when we drop the implicit assumption of free will. Now, again, Mr. Long assumes that the person making the choice (let's call him 'the decider') can indeed make both choices. But if determinism is true, then, though it may sound counterintuitive and weird, the person's choice is determined by what is in the boxes. Or, more accurately, the situation in a point in time where the infallible predictor predicts the future can lead to only two possible outcomes: one where the decider chooses the opaque box and it contains a million dollars and one in which the decider chooses both boxes and gets only a thousand. One can theoretically make the claim that one 'should' or 'shouldn't' pick one box or the other but the problem is that whether the decider chooses to follow either advice is already determined.
One beef that I have with the example above is the notion of the 'infallible predictor'. I think that it could be proven that even in a perfectrly deterministic framework such a concept is meaningless, but suffice to say, I don't feel up to the task right now and it has little bearing on the example itself.

The second example is a bit more straightforward. I've no qualms with Mr. Long's treatment of it, up to the point, of course, when he adresses determinism once again. This time the reason he presents for determinism's falsehood is that the desire to act is an element of action itself and need not predate it. I fail to understand how Mr. Long came to the conclusion that desire or preference does not predate action, as to me it seems blatantly false. If desire and action occur at the same time then the action one takes is completely baseless and completely random.

Now Mr. Long takes up quantum physics next and here I have to admit I have no way answering to this objection to determinism. Suffice to say that it still doesn't convince me as even though there might be some kind of indeterministic element in reality, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on it - still, virtually all human experiences are perfectly causal. Secondly, this kind of randomness does not prove free will in any way, as free will is applied, by definition, to certain objects that are knwon/assumed to have will. I'm not aware, however, of human brains being built of some kind of quantum particles to a far greater extent than anything else in the world. If we should adopt free will on this basis, we would have to assume that every conceivable object has free will, which would make any coherent perception of the world nigh impossible.

Maybe my musings don't do much as far as formal philosophy goes but it's just a thought.


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