Saturday, 10 October 2020

Sabine Hossenfelder and her denial of Free Will

I watched the following video of the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and her arguments against the existence of free will.

I find it exasperating that scientists continually pontificate on philosophical issues such as whether there's free will, whether there's an afterlife etc, when they simply do not have the appropriate expertise.

This video is a case in point. There's 2 claims she makes:

a) Free will is incompatible with the laws of nature.

b) Free will is entirely meaningless.

She addresses "a" first, but "b" is clearly more important. If free will is meaningless, then to refute free will one doesn't have to appeal to the laws of nature or anything else. So I shall address "b" first.

b) She says:

"[Free will] never made sense in the first place. You see that thing you call "free will" should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then it's either determined by what you want, in which case it's not free, or it's not determined, in which case it's not a will."

Determined by what we want... In other words, we have the innate capacity within us to act on our wants, to choose in other words. But this is precisely what is meant by free will! If we have the power to choose as we please, if we are not constrained to act in a specific manner by physical laws or by physical chains of causes and effects, then this is what is meant by free will.

a) The problem here is she assumes reductive materialism. Unfortunately, reductive materialism is incompatible with the very existence of consciousness, hence it is scarcely surprising that it leaves no room for a causally efficacious consciousness! Indeed, science leaves out consciousness in its description of reality, hence the "hard problem" (the "hard problem" is the apparent intractable difficulty in reconciling the existence of consciousness within some type of materialist metaphysic.)

One last point. She says:


 "If you want to define free will in such a way that it is still consistent with the laws of nature, that is fine by me, though I will continue to complain that's just verbal acrobatics."

But no verbal acrobatics are required. We do what we want, what we choose, and the laws of nature, as applied to us, are a simple description of that freely chosen behaviour. Of course, she might complain that only the 4 fundamental forces have any genuine causal agency, but this is both to assume reductive materialism and that these forces do indeed have genuine causal agency. But physics merely describes the world. Assigning innate powers to electrons etc is a metaphysical position. Free will is a metaphysical position too (as is its denial), but at least in our own case we are immediately and directly acquainted with our own causal agency.

I have written an essay on the issue of free will in the below link

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-causal-consciousness-free-will-and.html

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