Are you saying that humans are partially automatons pre-programmed to behave in certain specific ways in certain situations?
What are the implications of a theory like that for free will?
What are the implications of a theory like that for free will?
To put it in more poetic terms (Leonard Cohen's), I think free will is overrated. We very often act because because we are compelled to act, or not to act.
Back to the original topic or bird warfare... What I mean is that whatever compels (or maybe convinces) woodpeckers to warfare may be similar to what compels or convinces humans to do the same thing. If not birds, chimps.
The debate about free will are poetic in nature, imo. It's a matter of what we call things and how feel about them. Less so about what things are.
I can't tell if you are sarcastic. The internet really sucks this way.
But if not, well, have you really never noticed? And yeah, theories of free will better support only partial freedom, otherwise they have no chance.
Similarly, we can suppress the desire to go to war after a provocation. However, we can't choose to not feel furious, at least for an instant.
Thoughts and feeling tend to arise on their own, and free will is about whether we accept or reject them.
I do think if you unravel how every decision is made and the origins behind those opinions then you ultimately end up with every reaction being a result of either biology or circumstance.
Most decisions are made with emotional compute, influenced by biology, past experience, and present psychological state.
At the same time, being mindful and observing those emotions (predicted pleasure from the flavor, predicted guilt...) does interrupt that emotional processing and allow a "decision" to be reached in a completely different way.
Free will may only exist subjectively, but mindfulness does free the self from the emotional decision-making of the monkey brain.
The positive spin on this is if we are going to apply a software development mindset to free will then you can also argue that the value of software isn’t its sentience but it’s usefulness. For example computer games don’t need sophisticated AI to be enjoyable. So however we argue the definition of free will, that shouldn’t take anything away from the experience of life.
Some things are neither determined nor random, in the "arbitrary" sense of the term. A child that grows up in a musical household is more likely to become a musician. That's neither random nor determined.
In populations, or over repeated instances, these can resolve to near deterministic results. At the individual level, they are more random seeming.
I wanted to propose "stochastic" as a better term, but apparently "random" and "stochastic" are synonyms. [1]
What it comes down to is that "random" to me has a connotation of arbitrary, unpredictable. Whereas "stochastic" to me suggests a deterministic process with random influences.
So maybe the sentiment is better expressed as making sure it is clear that deterministic and random are the two extremes of a continuum, rather than an either/or distinction.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/114373/whats-the-di...
I think our language is lacking here. In technical terms, neither random nor stochastic imply evenly distributed. In casual conversation, "random" does.
"Emergent" may be a better term for what I meant. Randomness (in the casual sense) is an ingredient in a stochastic process leading to non-random, even effectively deterministic results.
The comment I was replying to:
"the inputs that drive that subjective feeling are still either deterministic or random."
The ingredients which lead someone to suddenly sing a son apropos of nothing (seemingly random/arbitrary) are the same as those leading someone to pull their finger away from a flame... seemingly deterministic.
Evolution is not distinctly either, which is my point.
A particular child growing up to be a musician, is either random or determined.
Maybe each child in a population is determined, or random, but at least you can analyze things at the population level.
I don't disagree with you, but I find more subjective meaning in the difference between normal cognition and metacognition, compared to viewing the system up close.
When my computer breaks, I either fix it or replace it. I don't ask if the computer actively chose to break.
Assume there is a robot programmed to walk around punching people, do you ignore it because it isn't making choices?
Similarly, if a person is walking around punching people due to a combination of random and deterministic factors (no free will), do you ignore them?
I will ask why they are punching people and might join if cause is valid. I'm not yet convinced if we have free will or not, whole concept looks a little meaningless when you look at it too closely.
The answer to this possibly ill-posed question about "free will" doesn't need to make us gloomy; it doesn't need to have any bearing on how we feel about our life.