Faced with the choice, I would choice to trust our experience over our understanding, though I know others would choose the opposite. I can live without understanding but I can't understand without living. (Even using the word "choose" there sort of gives the game away!)

Thanks for the discussion.

Secondly, BlackWizardMagus, AC is (I think) aware that 'outside' factors play a role in what he calls emergence, as well as internal physiological factors. And this role can be studied. But he claims they are not the whole story. There's plenty of room for sociology here (and any sociologist will tell you that there is considerable individual variation within any given trend).

I think Adam is right, btw. Indeed I suspect he and AC agree on rather more than they realise...

With respect to emergence, look at this article that gives as conrete examples of not merely strong emergence, but radical emergence, boundary differences in evolution, feedback sytems in neural processing, together with the emergence of live, consciousness and higher-order supervening proertties...

I've read this paper, and it lists only two examples of strong emergence, life and culture. Let's consider each in turn.

If, as this article claims and you seem to agree, life is an example of "strong emergence", then it must be the case that life cannot in principle be explained by laws of chemistry and physics, regardless of the computational power at one's disposal. There is only one word for this position: vitalism. (In fact, the paper describes vitalism as an idea that contains a "spark of truth"). I consider it a sign of just how infeasible your position is that you are attempting to defend it by resurrecting discredited 19th-century mysticism.

Their second example is culture, and this is something which I am even more baffled about. Culture is the pool of memes that exist within a given society, and that is all it is. I really don't see where the emergence is even supposed to come into play here.

The idea in this paper seems to be that the combinatorial explosion of possibilities inherent in life or in culture renders feasible computational simulation of these phenomena impossible. This is true, and at the same time utterly irrelevant. Phenomena whose prediction is merely infeasible fall under the label of weak emergence, as even your reference agrees. The only phenomena that can be considered strongly emergent are those that could not be predicted or simulated even given infinite computing power. Life is not one of these; neither is culture; and nor, I argue, is consciousness.

The authors also say that life and culture can be implemented in other physical substrates. Again, this is quite true and also irrelevant. Just because these phenomena can arise from other substrates does not mean that any particular instantiation of them is not explicable by properties of the particular substrate on which it exists. Similarly, the Sieve of Eratosthenes can be programmed on a computer, written down with pen and paper, or carried out by scratching with a stick in the sand, but that does not mean that its operation on (say) the computer cannot be explained in terms of the functionality of the computer.

Organisms don't die for the purpose of furthering anything — they just die.

Again, organisms do not intentionally die for a reason, but they do die for a reason, even if there are no conscious agents around to appreciate that reason. Just because there is a cause for an organism's death does not mean there is not also a reason for it.

Similarly, male peacocks' tails are large and extravagant because they are a costly and hence unfakable sign of reproductive fitness preferred by females; certain strains of Staphylococcus aureus possess a D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase enzyme rather than a D-alanyl-D-lactate because that mutation confers resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin; Galapagos finches with large, strong beaks prosper in drought years because those beaks allow them to crack the large, tough seeds that become more prevalent in those conditions; spiders spin webs because that allows them to catch the insects which they eat. Evolution is full of free-floating rationales - traits and behaviors that organisms possess for a reason, even if those organisms do not themselves grasp that reason. To deny this is to deny that natural selection happens, which is the same as denying that evolution happens.

You respond that we must because we experience it all the time. Well, we experience agent causation all the time too. When you go to the store, don't you always experience the fact that you could have stayed home or done something else? Don't you experience thinking about what to do and then directing your actions toward that end?

Once again, you are arguing in a circle. I agree that we do experience these things; I do not agree that agent causation is the cause of them. As I have argued, there is more than sufficient reason to believe that consciousness, as wonderful as it is, is fundamentally a natural phenomenon that can be explained in terms of natural laws. We do not need supernatural homunculi living inside our heads to account for it. Nor do we need mysterious, irreducible "emergent properties", which is really just another name for those homunculi.

Your supposes response to the fact that purposeful conduct essentially has properties not present and not explicable in terms of mere event causation is just non-responsive. How does pointing to the supposed magic and black-box of an infinite gradation even begin to respond to what I have stated? In addition, you haven't evenn begun to point to what you have in mind as the coninuum of this supposed infinite gradation. So speaking of magic and begging the question ... your "response" simply ignore that purposeful conduct has essential features that are not at all present in event caustion. Organisms don't die for the purpose of furthering anything -- they just die. So it is Dennett's free floating rationales that magic here. That something occurs and that there is a cause for that occurrence hardly shows that it occurred so that it could bring about something aimed for or for some purpose.

With respec to event cauation, my point was that we don't understand it well. You respond that we must because we experience it all the time. Well, we experience agent causation all the time too. When you go to the store, don't you always experience the fact that you could have stayed home or done something else? Don't you experience thinking about what to do and then directing your actions toward that end? The simple fact is that either you must trust this type of experience of agent causation or your response simply begs the question and expresses a mere prejudice against one type of causation and in favor of another.

Finally, your notion of determinism that you have "stipulated" is just not something you can stipulate. If human conduct isn't determined in the sense that but one possible world is entailed by the past then you are not a determinist -- period. Yoy reject determinism. However, you reject agent caustion only because it is rather clear that you don't grasp it. It isn't mere indeterminism, it is self-determinism. It provides the kind of control and ultimate accountability that is necessary for any conduct for which we can hold another morally accountable. Frankly, I just cannot see any reason to accept your views.

First, a libertarian can accept probablistic causation that leaves genuine options among which to choose. In fact, I am a libertarian and I accept the view of causation that you espouse — so we are in agreement there!

No, we are not. I do not accept or advocate irreducibly probabilistic causation of all human decisions; that would rob us of free will, rather than grant it. As I argued in Part III, I believe that human decisions are, in general, wholly determined by causes, but due to the nature of the physical laws of our world they are in principle unpredictable.

Further, compatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are compossible.

And as I said, determinism is false (at the subatomic level), so if we accept that definition then all forms of compatibilism are trivially false. (One of my few complaints about Dennett's otherwise excellent books about free will is that he doesn't mention this rather important fact.) I'm fully aware that I'm parting with the majority here; I do so deliberately, since I believe that the commonly used definitions do not grant us insight into the nature of the debate. I cannot be a compatibilist by your definition, yet none of the libertarian views of free will accurately represent my position either. The mere fact of indeterminism does not grant us free will, since we could simply be random puppets rather than deterministic ones, which is no improvement. In fact, I believe that indeterministic decision-making would thoroughly destroy free will, even more so than if our decisions were fatalistically determined. Since none of the common terms describe my position, but compatibilism is closer, I am stipulating a new definition for the term.

I also noted that you didn't tell me which theory of event causation you accept.

Would it matter if I did? You'd simply say that there are other versions and therefore event causation is not as clear as I claimed it was. Regardless, I maintain that event causation is intuitively clear and understandable, inasmuch as we encounter it every day, and no one has encountered or experienced any unambiguous examples of agent causation.

So the feature of purposeful conduct that event causal determinism cannot account for is this: purposeful acts are done to bring about some event in order to accomplish some further purpose. Event causes essentially cause only what they do and are blind to any further event that could result from that event. You haven't responded to this argument.

Yes, I have. I pointed out that your argument is trivially circular: it assumes what is in question, namely that there is an essential difference of kind and not just of degree between purposeful and non-purposeful acts. I do not accept this premise. As I said, I follow Dennett in arguing that purposeful acts can emerge (there's that word again!) from non-purposeful causes via the evolution of living things that have a steadily greater ability to model the world in their own heads. There is nothing magical or mystical about this.

Evolution itself is a process that could, from a certain perspective, be viewed as purposeful: it causes some organisms to die because they are not suited to their environment, and causes others to prosper because they are so suited. These are reasons as good as any. The only difference is that they are what Dennett calls "free-floating rationales" - no one explicitly represents them in a mind, but they are reasons nonetheless. The achievement of evolution was to bring about creatures that did not merely unconsciously act according to free-floating rationales, but that could explicitly represent those rationales and others to themselves.

Finally, I have leveled a criticism that you have not answered. Where I part with you is this:

The new level of mind is emergent and not fully or deterministically explainable by the lower level causal data.

That is the definition of emergence I do not accept and that strikes me as ghost-in-the-machine dualism under another name. There is a world of difference between the behavior of a complex system being in practice unpredictable from the behavior of its individual components and the behavior of a complex system being in principle inexplicable from the behavior of its individual components. Call those two weak and strong emergence, respectively. I have no problem with weak emergence, but the kind you advocate, I maintain, has never been observed.

Wikipedia provides no reason whatsoever to think otherwise. The behavior of an anthill, or the shape of a galaxy, is not something in principle unpredictable from the behavior of its components. It arises from the interactions of its components in a straightforward, non-magical way, and only our limited predictive ability might have led us to miss this. But you are advocating something utterly different, and frankly magical in its import. I want to see the evidence for it.

And the agent causation issue; what exactly is the complaint? What I THINK your point is is that Adam identifies agent causation as being the view that agents cause events, but are never caused to do that in the first place. From what I can tell from you, you agree, yet are angry at Adam for being incorrect. Your point was that what an agent does can't be determined from the input that goes in--so what's the problem? Adam is clearly in support of free will, which is what he has revealed so far, and so are you. Adam does argue that what goes in is important, but not in such a matter than we are machines. Are you saying that he is simply classifying himself in the wrong category? If so, isn't this conversation far longer than it needs to be? You could have merely said "Adam, I think you are more of a libertarian than a compatabalist for the follow reasons".

I suppose the reason I am in this debate at all is because I can't say who is right or wrong, but for me, Adam has been clearer, but your posts have been vague. I simply haven't been able to pin down your complaints with Adam's view in particular. Now, it just seems like you are critisizing how he labels himself, but I feel like you must have been saying more in these fairly long posts.

The basic terminology will be 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism', but I think it's important to be clear about what thesis is supposedly compatible or incompatible with what other thesis. To that end, I think there should be three different compatibility questions -- 1) Is determinism compatible with the ability to do otherwise?, 2) Is determinism compatible with moral responsibility?, and 3) Is indeterminism compatible with moral responsibility? There's also a fourth question that's not about compatibility, but which seems equally important, namely: 4) Does moral responsibility require the ability to do otherwise?

Call someone who answers (1) with a 'Yes' an APCompatibilist and someone who answers (1) with a 'No' an APIncompatibilist. Call someone who answers (2) with a 'Yes' a D-MRCompatibilist and someone who answers (2) with a 'No' a D-MRIncompatibilist. Call someone who answers (3) with a 'Yes' an I-MRCompatibilist and someone who answers (3) with a 'No' an I-MRIncompatibilist. Finally, call someone who answers (4) with a 'Yes' a PAPist and someone who answers (4) with a 'No' a PAP-denier. Now, with these positions staked out, we can start to see the different combinations and how they map onto the views people actually hold.

"Official" semi-compatibilism = D-MRCompatibilist + I-MRCompatibilist + PAP-denial

Fischer's version of semi-compatibilism = APIncompatibilist + D-MRCompatibilist + I-MRCompatibilist + PAP-denial

Pereboom's view = APIncompatibilist + D-MRIncompatibilist + I-MRIncompatibilist + PAPist

"Traditional" compatibilism (local-miracle, altered-past, conditional-analysis) = APCompatibilist

Galen Strawson's view = D-MRIncompatibilist + I-MRIncompatibilist (because MR is impossible!)

Kane's and van Inwagen's view = APincompatibilist + D-MRIncompatibilist + I-MRCompatibilist (event-causation) + PAPist.

O'Connor's and Clarke's (former) view = APIncompatibilist + D-MRIncompatibilist + I-MRCompatibilist (agent-causation) + PAPist

Ginet's and Goetz's view = APIncompatibilist + D-MRIncompatibilist + I-MRCompatibilist (no causation) + PAPist

Now, another interesting question is: What views should we associate with labels like 'Source Incompatibilism' and 'Leeway Incompatibilism' and 'Libertarianism' and 'Hard Determinism'? Here is what I'm inclined to do:

Source Incompatibilism = (AT LEAST) D-MRIncompatibilist (because of sourcehood concerns)

Leeway Incompatibilism = APIncompatibilist and PAPist, THEREFORE D-MRIncompatibilist.

Libertarianism = (AT LEAST) D-MRIncompatibilist, and I-MRCompatibilist (whether no cause, event-cause, or agent-cause) -- and by the way, we are morally responsible,so determinism is false.

Hard Determinism = D-MRIncompatibilist -- and by the way, determinism is true, so we're not MR.

First let's get clear on what determinism is. Michael McKenna defines determinism and compatibilism the same way I do and as virtually every participant in the discussion does: "we shall define determinism as the metaphysical thesis that the facts of the past, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail every truth about the future. According to this characterization, if determinism is true, then, given the actual past, and holding fixed the laws of nature, only one future is possible at any moment in time. Notice that an implication of determinism as it applies to a person's conduct is that, if determinism is true, there are (causal) conditions for that person's actions located in the remote past, prior to her birth, that are sufficient for each of her actions." So determinism is just as I defined it: past facts + natural laws = one possible future.

Such a view is not consistent with the probabilistic view of laws and causes that you espouse. On such a view, there are multiple possible futures given the past though some are more probable at the present moment than others. So I conclude that you just don't grasp this most basic feature of the determinist stance. Further, compatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are compossible. Again McKenna: "Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism." See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Further, your complaint that I didn't make it clear that I was discussing a version of agent caustion different from Chisholm's just shows that you don't read carefully. Go back and look -- I stated expressly, twice, that I am adopting Hartshorne's view of agent causation.

Further, you simply don't grasp the basic distinctions in the discussion regarding event and agent causation. If I can show that purposeful action essentially has a feature or propterty that mere event causation does not, then I can show that purposeful or rational conduct cannot be reduced to mere event causation of the type you espouse. That is a simple matter of logic. So the feature of purposeful conduct that event causal determinism cannot account for is this: purposeful acts are done to bring about some event in order to accomplish some further purpose. Event causes essentially cause only what they do and are blind to any further event that could result from that event. You haven't responded to this argument. You have just rejected it without responding or giving a reason as to how it could be inaccurate.

As to emergence, I would suggest that you look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence This article gives several examples of emergence in the biological and physical world, contrary to your assertion that no one has ever observed emergence.

I also noted that you didn't tell me which theory of event causation you accept. I suspect it is because you thought the issue was easy and every just had a common idea on causation. They don't.

As for your charge that I am trying to sneak in the supernatural, you ought to know that I don't accept the categories of natural/supernatural as they are traditionally defined. But in terms of those categories, I reject the supernatural. So your charge is empty and uninformed. You really ought to read something beside Dennett.

And, I have to ask also; are you arguing that if you saw a person react to stimuli in a certain way that, if you were somehow able to "reset" the mind back to that point and inputed the SAME stimuli, that you would get a different result? Clearly, there is definately SOME deterministic actions at play; the entire branch of psychology proves that, as it operates off of general assumptions (such as Freud generally attached problems today to sexual problems or anger problems as a child; theories on that same cause-and-effect principle dominate psychology). I'm afraid that over your second post, you have seemed to add much info to your first that actually cleared up questions.

As much as you seem to dislike Dennett, his criticism of this type of view is dead on target: Too many explanations of how the mind works simply postulate a Central Boss that "tells the rest of the brain" what to think and believe, and whose own internal workings are inscrutable or non-existent. This is a hopeless tactic. It's like the theistic cosmological argument: trying to explain the existence of a complex thing by postulating the existence of another, exactly as complex thing. (One could call it the "turtles all the way down" view of how the mind works.) The only way to genuinely explain this complex thing called the mind is to show how its functions can be performed by an aggregate of less complex things.

Further, emergence is not such a mystery — the zoological taxonomy demonstrates it. The greater the neural complexity, the greater the emergence of properties of mind. So, humans have greater creativity and mental powers than dogs, and dogs have greater mental powers and creativity than slugs. The reason for emergence is that life, mind, consciousness, and higher-order properties cannot be reduced to lower order event-causal properties.

Now this is a genuinely circular argument. Your evidence that emergence exists appears to consist solely of your assertion that emergence exists. We're agreed that humans have greater neural complexity than dogs or slugs; why can't that fact alone be the reason for our superior mental powers, without throwing in this mysterious idea of an extra, emergent layer of mind? I repeat my argument that the type of emergence you describe has never been observed to occur anywhere. Can you provide a counterexample that does not beg the question?

There is an essential difference between conduct done based on instinct (or programmed into DNA) and conduct based on a process of reasoning — and it is in part this very difference that shows that event causal determinism cannot explain such purposive thought.

Again, this is a circular argument. You're assuming what is in question - that there is an "essential difference" between instinctive and reasoned conduct. I don't agree that there is any such thing. There is a difference, but not an essential difference; it is a difference of degree, rather than of kind, and arises from the steadily greater ability of various lineages of living things to create internal mental representations of their environment. You may be familiar with Dennett's concept of the "Tower of Generate-and-Test", which I would put forward here.

The notion that all causes must be deterministic in the sense that only one possible world follows from the natural laws and past events of the world is false. Compatibilism is the view that determinism as I just defined it is true and yet we have free will.

I don't accept that definition. If your definition was correct, all versions of compatibilism would be false for the trivial reason that our world is not deterministic; there is fundamental indeterminism at the atomic level. I prefer to define compatibilism as the view that we have free will in spite of the fact that all events that occur follow definite physical laws, which can be either deterministic or probabilistic.

Finally, Chisholm's view is only one type of agent causal view.

If that is the case, then you should have said clearly at the outset that you hold a different view of agent causation than the one envisioned by Chisholm and others. You should not have accused me of attacking a "caricature" of agent causation, since that charge is inaccurate.