Good point! The "scale" at which we view a given event does seem to affect whether we see it as an example of free will or not.
Personally, I would (contra Claude) say that the reflexive pulling of hand away from the hot stove which it touched was "zero" free will, not "low" free will. Choosing the steak seem like a high free-will example, under (my) normal circumstances, but I could certainly imagine various social-and-cultural pressures modifying my view of someone else's choice of steak. For example, if you could show me that Bill chose steak every time, without fail, that the three people before him ordered steak, and that he never ordered steak otherwise, I would be less confident in my "free will" attribution. Maybe it was literally beaten into him at some point in his life? Maybe he's just likes to go with the crowd? On a related note, I feel like I should throw some Gilbert Ryle into the mix (because I was just flipping through one of his books): One of the chief intellectual origins of what I have yet to prove to be the Cartesian category-mistake seems to be this. When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space , Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted , the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical. He and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as the effects of other movements in space , other laws must explain some of the non-spatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of minds. The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent and those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their causation ; so, while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects of mechanical causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e. some issue from movements of particles of matter, others from workings of the mind. ..... Since, according to the doctrine, minds belong to the same category as bodies and since bodies are rigidly governed by mechanical laws, it seemed to many theorists to follow that minds must be similarly governed by rigid non-mechanical laws. The physical world is a deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system. Bodies cannot help the modifications that they undergo, so minds cannot help pursuing the careers fixed for them. Responsibility, choice, merit and demerit are therefore inapplicable concepts — unless the compromise solution is adopted of saying that the laws governing mental processes, unlike those governing physical processes, have the congenial attribute of being only rather rigid. The problem of the Freedom of the Will was the problem how to reconcile the hypothesis that minds are to be described in terms drawn from the categories of mechanics with the knowledge that higher-grade human conduct is not of a piece with the behaviour of machines. .... <[email protected]> [Descartes] had mistaken the logic of his problem. Instead of asking by what criteria intelligent behaviour is actually distinguished from non-intelligent behaviour, he asked "Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference, what other causal principle will tell us?" He realised that the problem was not one of mechanics and assumed that it must therefore be one of some counterpart to mechanics. On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 4:15 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]> wrote: > "Do I act of my own free will when I select a certain steak from the > menu and request a certain doneness?" > > A good question. Sociologists argue that the personal taste that someone > has normally fits to the class or tribe that he belongs to - or wants to > belong to. Bourdieu, Wilson and Olah argue taste is a mechanism of class > distinction. What we experience as an instinctive preference - liking jazz > rather than pop music, wine rather than beer, Ascot horse races rather than > Formula 1 competitions - is shaped by our upbringing, education, social > environment and position within the class structure. > > + Pierre Bourdieu, "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of > Taste" > > + Carl Wilson, "Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad > Taste" > > + Nathalie Olah, "Nathalie Olah, "Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness"" > > > Best > > Jochen > > > -------- Original message -------- > From: Eric Charles <[email protected]> > Date: 8/17/26 12:31 AM (GMT+01:00) > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book > > Well... as you point out in the book, I "Serves as the list's operational > skeptic and meeting chronicler. Consistently advocates for "sciencing the > problem" and tethering complex philosophical concepts back to empirical > behavioral testing (e.g., "rats in mazes")." 😅 > > In that vein I think the crucial starting point would be to find at least > a few examples in which we agree someone acted of their own free will and a > few examples in which they did not act of their own free will, and > integrate those examples to determine the difference. > > Do I act of my own free will when I select a certain steak from the menu > and request a certain doneness? Does the mugging victim act of their own > free will when a gun is pointed at their child and their wallet requested? > When my kid asks where we are going, and I tell them I want to take the > scenic route to school today, was that free will? Etc. Whatever we find > freewill to be, when we have finished engaging in that task, I doubt we > will find discussion of quantum mechanics or > structural-decay-that-might-make-the-past-unknowable to be relevant. > > (And, by "doubt" I am not asserting certainty of irrelevance, I only mean > that I do not think it will be the outcome, but I could be wrong.) > > Best, > Eric > > > <[email protected]> > > > On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 1:28 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]> wrote: > >> A long and thoughtful post Jon. I like the drunkard's streetlight >> metaphor. >> >> Physicists would not agree that "the world" unfolds deterministically. >> The weather for example that Nick mentions so often is unpredictable in the >> long run - as you know due to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. >> >> Biological systems in turn have and keep low internal entropy because of >> their high degree of internal order and complexity. Human behavior is >> operating 4 or 5 levels above the physical level of atoms and molecules, on >> top of and in a low-entropy biological system. >> >> I see the problem differently, more from a human and less from a mere >> physical perspective. For me the interesting thing is why we can have free >> will although our behavior is determined by our habits, our emotional >> reactions, and the character formed by our past environments. By the wiring >> of our hardware so to speak. >> >> The interesting question for me is not if a human mind can magically >> break the laws of physics by some kind of quantum woo, but how constraints, >> habits, and conscious interventions interact and which forms of agency >> emerge from it. >> >> But I agree that we should not to let a 17th-century view of the universe >> dictate the terms of 21st-century thinking. It is probably better to see >> human freedom and agency as a dynamic spectrum. Some people have fewer >> cognitive degrees of freedom than others, and there are moments where we >> show full free will, and others where we lack it. >> >> Instead of asking, "Did this person act out of free will?", we should >> probably better ask "Given their biological state, stress level, history, >> psychological conditioning, and available information, how many meaningful >> alternative paths could this system actually evaluate and take in that >> moment?" >> >> >> -J. >> >> >> -------- Original message -------- >> From: Jon Zingale <[email protected]> >> Date: 8/15/26 6:21 PM (GMT+01:00) >> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> >> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New philosophy book >> >> Jochen, >> >> Implicit in many of the group's discussions of free will and determinism >> is the premise that the world unfolds deterministically, and that the >> remaining question is whether something extra exists that can escape or >> modify that mechanism. I do not think that this setup is necessary or >> given. More importantly, I think it installs a false dichotomy at the >> center of what may be an ill-posed problem. >> >> Locally, and for many purposes, causal accounts work extraordinarily >> well. We can often treat physical laws as stable, or at least as evolving >> according to some effective computable rule. We can model bounded domains, >> specify state variables, solve or approximate equations, and aim to obtain >> predictive control. Nothing I wish to say here denies that success. >> >> But a successful local model is not yet a warrant for the stronger >> metaphysical conclusion that there exists a complete global state of the >> universe, that this state retains every relevant distinction in a lossless >> way, and that its entire evolution is specified by a computable rule. Those >> are substantive further assumptions. >> >> My disagreement with the "aggregation of history" picture begins here. A >> world with finite physical resources cannot straightforwardly be assumed to >> be an indefinitely accumulating, lossless record of arbitrarily fine >> distinctions. Entropy and information bounds are often read as limits on >> how much information can be stored in a finite region with finite energy. >> At a minimum, physical history must be represented through selective >> persistence: some distinctions become stable records, some are dispersed >> into inaccessible correlations, some are erased relative to a scale of >> description, and some cease to be recoverable by any physically available >> process. >> >> So I wonder whether *the total state of the universe* is doing more >> metaphysical work than it has earned. If one allows that the global >> unfolding may involve non-computable structure, then no finite internal >> description can, in general, serve as a complete ledger of that unfolding. >> The universe cannot stand outside itself with a second, lossless copy of >> its own full history. >> >> I am not claiming that noncomputability establishes free will. I am >> asking whether the familiar determinism vs free will framing already >> presupposes an idealized total-state picture that may not be physically >> meaningful. >> >> There is a related mathematical point. Scientists understandably favor >> well-posed models: operators and dynamical systems with domains, >> regularity, stability, and convergence properties sufficient for analysis >> and prediction. But those are selected virtues, not neutral evidence that >> the space of possible physical evolutions is itself globally well behaved. >> Compact operators, for example, are a special class. They map bounded sets >> to relatively compact sets and are necessarily bounded, but they are not >> representative of all operators one might write down. I would like to not >> confuse the tractability of the mathematical objects we can successfully >> use with a demonstration that reality is exhausted by such objects. >> >> The same caution applies to computability. Under the ordinary Lebesgue >> measure on the reals, the computable reals form a countable set and >> therefore a set of *measure-zero*. By contrast, algorithmically random >> sequences are typical under the fair-coin measure. That is, Martin-Löf >> random sequences have *measure-one*. Of course, there is no canonical >> uniform distribution over *all laws* or *all operators*, so this is not a >> probability calculation showing that physical law is non-computable. It is >> an admonition against quietly assuming computability merely because >> computable descriptions are the ones available to us. >> >> I am imagining the drunkard under the streetlight metaphor. It is >> sensible to look where mathematical models offer light: computable >> dynamics, well-posed initial-value problems, bounded domains, compactness >> arguments, and stable approximations. But their usefulness does not >> establish that the deep structure of the universe is confined to those >> regions of conceptual illumination. >> >> For me, the more difficult thought is that materialism may imply not a >> perfectly preserved cosmic archive, but an unfolding in which persistence >> is selective and forgetting is real. Perhaps there is no complete *deep >> history* available even in principle. Instead there may only exist present >> structures bearing partial, transformed, scale-dependent traces of what >> preceded them. I am tempted to say that what leaves no trace whatsoever >> *never existed* in any ontologically robust sense. I suppose I am arguing >> for a surprisingly shallow image of history. >> >> If so, the future may be genuinely productive (immanence) rather than >> merely unknown to us. Not necessarily because an agent steps outside >> causality, but because the global boundary conditions, state description, >> and rule of unfolding are not available in the form demanded by classical >> determinism. >> >> This may make *free will* the wrong label. We may all be acting in ways >> that are locally causal, constrained, and intelligible while global >> determinism remains undefined, ungrounded, or simply irrelevant. I do not >> yet know what positive concept should replace it. But I do not think that >> uncertainty should be hidden by accepting the *determinism vs free will* >> dichotomy as our starting point. >> >> My two cents. >> >> Jon >> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / >> ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom >> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam >> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> archives: 5/2017 thru present >> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ >> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >> > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / > ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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