I think people sometimes treat natural selection as making cold cost/benefit kin-selection decisions on a case by case basis and mind controlling the creatures to make those choices. I am straw manning, but my point is it doesn't work that way. It develops predispositions and behaviours. How those predispositions and behaviours play out is the choice of the individual creature (including the case when the creature is human).
Can't you take 'predisposition' to be a little more hardline, and that it removes all 'choice'. We are so 'predisposed' by biology/chemistry that animals, and humans, don't have any agency of choice, no free will to calculate anything.
It appears that occasionally straying from the hard rules provides an overall better fitness to the organism given that the fitness landscape (or fitness seascape) changes with time
To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.
i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.
I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.
In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective, just assume a choice is being made and roll with it. Don't get tied in knots about the question of free-will, we know we don't have it, but just assume we do in order to make our perspective work out.
> I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.
IMO, no.
> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.
> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,
Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.
Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.
Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv
Not too woo woo. Hard not to get woo woo on this subject.
It's just that you frequently use the word 'deterministic'. -> "facet of that deterministic universe."
And then also talk about how we have agency.
Not sure how to square those both occurring unless you are just saying at different scales.
Like the universe is deterministic, but on our human scale we appear to have a choice. But that is just appearance because at our scale there are so many chaotic interactions that the world really appears random and we are making choices.
What I'm saying is that in the brain, you keep boiling down the science at each scale, and at some point you don't find any 'agent', each layer is explained, and every action is the effect of a previous cause.
For these purposes, I’m not really interested in the whole question of free will. If you want to take a mechanistic approach, you just need to appreciate that the decisions aren’t being made by “natural selection” but agents influenced by “natural selection”. The ideal agent may be also be quite different from what some imagine. Whether or the agent has “free will” doesn’t affect what I’m saying.
