You HAVE Free Will (Alex O'Connor Critiqued)

Here I argue we have free will by presenting my own, event-causal libertarian theory of free will, and by critiquing the argument used by Alex O'Connor and others to say we don't have it.

To make my case I must discuss related topics like causation, natural laws, determinism and how to analyse 'could have done otherwise' claims.

#freewill #alexoconnor #cosmicskeptic

For more ways to connect with me you can:

Book philosophy sessions with me (limited spaces) via email: drnathanhawkins _AT_ gmail _dot_ com.

To become a member please hit 'join' (much appreciated).

____Video Contents____

00:00 - Introduction
01:02 - Defining free will
02:48 - Alex O'Connor's definition of free will
04:33 - Alex O'Connor's 'wants' argument against free will
06:50 - Intellectual deliberation criticism
09:55 - Alternative motivation criticism
14:37 - My free will theory
18:33 - Alex O'Connor's causal determinism argument
20:43 - Determinism and physics (causal and mathematical)
27:03 - Determinism, natural laws, and 'could have done otherwise'
35:44 - Peter van Inwagen's determinism argument against free will (by O'Connor)
39:20 - Peter van Inwagen's determinism argument critiqued
47:38 - O'Connor's argument against Ben Shapiro
50:03 - My critique/view vs Ben Shapiro's
53:19 - How free will makes causation intelligible

____References and links (in order)____

Philosopher's survey:
Bourget, David & Chalmers, David J. (2023). Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. Philosophers' Imprint 23 (11).

O'Connor's videos on free will:

Free will technical accounts:
Kane, Robert (1989). Two kinds of incompatibilism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (2):219-54.
Davidson, Donald (1969). How Is Weakness of the Will Possible? In Joel Feinberg (ed.), Moral concepts. London,: Oxford University Press.

Causation in Physics:
Russell, B. (1912). On the notion of cause. Scientia 7 (13):317.

Determinism's epistemic paradox:

Developmental psychology article:
Kushnir, Tamar ; Gopnik, Alison ; Chernyak, Nadia ; Seiver, Elizabeth & Wellman, Henry M. (2015). Developing intuitions about free will between ages four and six. Cognition 138 (C):79-101.

Peter van Inwagen's argument:
Inwagen, Peter Van (1975). The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism. Philosophical Studies 27 (3):185 - 199.

VSauce video on kinds of infinities:

Multiple realisability and free will:
List, Christian (2014). Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise. Noûs 48 (1):156-178.

____Channel description____

I am a graduate of Cambridge University with a PhD in Philosophy. My thesis was on the nature of truth, and I specialise in metaphysics, logic, and the history of analytic philosophy. I believe philosophy should be made accessible to the curious and philosophers have a duty to reenter the public debate on the questions of importance to our age. This channel is my attempt to do that!

____Memberships____

To take the ideas I explore on this channel to the next level with in-depth videos and more academic content, please become a member. Most of the videos I produce are exclusive to members. There are also options here to get in touch with me and do philosophy together. Also, with your support I will be able to spend more time reading, thinking, writing, and shooting video content for all you good people! But I need to keep my family fed too, so your membership is GREATLY appreciated.

It's a simple equation: more members = more videos. Thanks!

Join this channel to get access to exclusive videos:

____Lessons____

I supervise Cambridge students and have some private students too. If you'd like to learn philosophy casually or on a course, then get in touch and I can help guide you through your learning. Get in touch to find out more: drnathanhawkins _AT_ gmail _dot_ com

[AbsolutePhilosophy]

Thanks for the comments all! I do read most of them. Lots there to respond to, which I'll do properly in a follow up video (so subscribe if that interests you). But just quickly:

(1) I deal with causal determinism and how that relates to the laws of physics later in the video, so please watch that section before assuming I ignore that major issue. (I have labeled the sections to make this easy). It is a very detailed discussion as the nuances are often overlooked in the debate.
(2) O'Connor's first argument is a psychological argument, so I don't deal with causal determinism in my response. See above, and skip to the later arguments if that's more your thing.
(3) If you say all reasons have to be wants (as many seem to suggest), then the claim we can't choose our wants becomes implausible. E.g. in the chess example, if you insist I must 'want' to move the knight if I moved it, that 'want' would arise _from_ my deliberation about the best move and so be a want that arose from my decision. Also, in the gym case O'Connor mentions, this thinking would result in a contradiction: the person both wants and does not want to go to the gym. To avoid contradiction you should say: they want to get healthy and do not want to go to the gym, so the want to get healthy is their _reason_ for going to the gym. This is because going to the gym is a means to an ends, and the ends have been calculated by our capacity for causal reasoning (which I discuss nearer the end of the video).
(4) In the free will debate you should not assume materialism (O'Connor doesn't), i.e. don't assume the mind-brain identity thesis. So appealing to brains and their behavior as discussed by neuroscientists is beside the point. And since I made this video about O'Connor's arguments, which are purely philosophical, I saw no reason to engage in a topic outside my discipline (if only neuroscientists would do the same). P.S. The Libet experiments have been heavily critiqued regarding their import for the question of free will.

[bobalouba]

Everyone has free will if you define it however you want

[gabri]

One can freely do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

[Alanpoeta]

Literally all his alguments can still easily be explained using Alex's simple premises

[SnakeWasRight]

If you pick duty over desire, all that means is you desire duty over pleasure. It's not that hard to parse. Choose to abandon your deep desire for duty, you can't unless something causes you to think it's pointless. Zero free will.

[thesuitablecommand]

Here's how I think about free will.

Consider a person sitting in a chair in an otherwise empty room. We wait until the person chooses to stand up. Then, we rewind time back to the start of the thought experiment. Every atom, every quark, every quantum wave fluctuation is precisely the same as it was the first time around, and we hit play without changing anything, and we wait for the person to stand up again. If the person always chooses to stand up at exactly the same time, they have no free will, else they would eventually choose to stand up at a different time.

If the person does choose to stand up at a different time, it is still not clear that they do have free will. It could equally as possibly be explained as the macroscopic consequences of randomness on a smaller scale cascading to impact a decision about whether to remain seated or stand. But for the sake of the thought experiment, let's suppose that we've somehow predetermined any and all truly random processes to always resolve in the same way between experiments. Only then, if the person chooses to stand at different times experiment to experiment, would that demonstrate free will.

I believe we have will, but not free will. We make choices, but making a choice is a physical event, like two rocks colliding. It is a physical process, like everything else, and like everything else, it is deterministic in nature. We just intuit that it is special because it is something that we do, that we can't easily observe like how we might observe two rocks colliding.

[GodlessCommie]

I think you failed to disprove Alex’s premises. With the chess example you don’t have choice over the rules of chess, why you’re playing the game, or why you want to win. You may be able to delineate on which piece to move, and that may be very close to what we see as free will, but doesn’t get you there.

In the duty example one may not even want to choose duty. However they may be forced to. If you’re the kind of person to believe that duty exists you may also have had certain values placed into your head without your own freedom. You may get a feeling of unease or displeasure from not “fulfilling your duty” which may force you to do this. Duty is either something you want or something forced upon you by moral intuitions. Everything you do is because you want to or because you’re made to.

[radicaltransformationmentor]

You moved the knight because the sum total of your past experiences was the cause. All of this can be predicted if one has all the data points.
Interviewer: "Is the universe predetermined?"
Dr. Stephen Hawking: "Yes, but we don't know what is predetermined".

[Psypumas]

How can a person with a Cambridge phd in philosophy, fail to understand the argument against free will this badly, I’m genuinely baffled.

[sigigle]

12:54
"Perhaps their desire to do their duty is just stronger than their dislike of fighting.
But I think such a conclusion is just mere prejudice.
It would be perfectly reasonable for your friend to say that no, they don't want to do their duty at all. The only reason they're doing it, is because it is their duty.
In other words, the explanation they give for their action, is one that appeals to duties and not to wants."

This makes no sense.
They must 'want' to fulfill their duty for one reason or another, otherwise they simply wouldn't do it.

[naturoganism]

Saying reason motivates our ‘wants’ is simply moving the goalpost one step further.

[Nighthawkinlight]

The drunk wills to drink, but he also wills to have a good relationship with his family. The choice he makes to either pick up a bottle or go home has an effect on what his will will be inclined to do the next day, week, year. Whether he is a lifelong drunk or a good father is not rooted in his "will", but rather in a series of decisions by which the inclination of his will is built like a tower, brick by brick. The question is unchanged: are each of those decisions simply a result of molecules bumping into each other, or is there something more? Does anyone have a choice in anything they do/say/believe? If not, why keep talking?

[Ugeen-Huge-Jeans]

It’s simple: is your will dependent on anything? Careful, it’s a trick question:
If no, then your will must be random, since only truly random things don’t depend on anything.
If yes, then how can you call it free?

[derendohoda]

Great video. I really like the point developed around 50 minutes in where the very semantics behind "cause" are shown to be intimately tied to the prior conception of free will. I think it's a very powerful point that ties well with the earlier point about how mathematical relationships between variables don't necessarily have a built-in frame of cause. I almost never enjoy free will / determinism discussions but this was quite good.

[BenStowell]

13:50 - The deliberation process is bounded by time, by our intelligence, our psychology, by all these things that we do not have control over. We have freedom (options to choose from), certainly, and we certainly have will (the power to choose). But having options and the power to choose (and even reason-sensitivity) just entails that you will engage in a deliberation process when faced with choosing. But that deliberation process is not self-determined. So what you ultimately choose is not self-determined. What misleads people into thinking there is free will is the sense of choosing. (I bet folks are confusing moral responsibility with causal responsibility too.) We are witnesses to our own choices, but that witness is not control. You are merely along for the ride, and that ride happens to include complex things like introspective choosing.

Galen Strawson lays out the argument like this (Norton introduction of philosophy, chapter 13):

1) You do what you do because of the way you are.

So

(2) To be truly morally responsible for what you do, you must be truly responsible for the way you are.

But

(3) You can’t be truly responsible for the way you are, so you can’t be truly responsible for what you do.

Strawson takes premise 1 as incontrovertible. I agree.

Robert Kane challenges premise 3, saying that some of our actions are Self-forming Actions (SFAs). But on what basis do we perform SFAs? They must be performed on the basis of "N", with N being our nature, or our values, preferences, etc., (all of the ingredients of a deliberation process) at the time the action is taken. But where did N come from? If it was not self-determined, then we are not free. If N _is_ self-determined through SFAs, then again, on what basis were _those_ actions performed? At the time _those_ actions were performed, you must have had nature N+1 that served as the basis for the deliberation process for those actions. But where did N+1 come from? It's a regress. It's impossible to have a self-caused nature that would serve as the basis for the SFAs needed for moral responsibility.

This explanation also defends premise 2.

Strawson puts the argument another way:

A) Nothing can be _causa sui_ —nothing can be the cause of itself.

B) To be ultimately morally responsible for one’s actions, one would have to be causa sui.

C) Therefore, no one can be ultimately morally responsible.

I believe this applies to even an all-powerful being like God. Even God cannot have free will, which means free will is impossible.

[gabrielmaximianobielkael]

This video really opened my mind. I used to think that freewill was impossible, and I couldn't make sense of it. I'm still not entirely convinced that it exists but I feel these arguments deepened my understanding of what it means to have freewill

[RandalKoene]

I would absolutely love to see a longform debate between Alex O'Connor and yourself. Both wonderfully careful thinkers.

[oaktreet]

I know a lawyer who will write up a will for free. Free Will. QED.

[WojciechDobosz]

You have a strong desire to believe in free will at all cost, no one's going to blame you for it, as you did not choose what you desire. Your fear of unknown chose it for you.

[mmediocahyt]

Probabilistic causation doesn’t undermine Alex’s argument of effects without causes being random.

Probabilistic causation is a mix of determinism and indeterminism; take radioactive decay, if we know the half-life of a radioactive substance, we can predict the average time it will take for half of a sample to decay. This means that, in a large enough sample, we can determine the decay rate with precision, leading to predictable outcomes based on the initial conditions.

Conversely, from an indeterministic standpoint, the exact moment when a particular atom will decay is inherently unpredictable. Each atom behaves randomly, with a certain probability of decaying at any given time. This randomness means that while we can predict trends for large groups of atoms, individual decay events cannot be determined, illustrating the fundamental uncertainty present in quantum mechanics.

This duality highlights how the same phenomenon can be viewed through both deterministic and indeterministic lenses, depending on the scale and context of observation.