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Can the Objectivist view on free-will be considered a form of agent-causation?

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Agent causation, or Agent causality, is an idea in philosophy which states that a being who is not an event—namely an agent—can cause events (particularly the agent's own actions).

I was researching the general views on the subject of free will, when this made me think of Objectivism. It made me wonder whether the O'ist view would fit under this, as it embraces both free will and causality, while dismissing the need for physical indeterminism such as the Epicurean Swerve or Quantum Mechanics. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_causation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_(metaphysics)

Thoughts?

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27 minutes ago, Gnome07 said:

I was researching the general views on the subject of free will, when this made me think of Objectivism. It made me wonder whether the O'ist view would fit under this, as it embraces both free will and causality, while dismissing the need for physical indeterminism such as the Epicurean Swerve or Quantum Mechanics. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_causation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_(metaphysics)

Thoughts?

Objectivism holds a few things as fundamental (these are not all axioms):

Existence is Identity - Implies everything is what it is, and nothing else.  That includes what a person is, at a particular time.  Of course things can and do change over time. 

The concept of existence also encompasses everything, so nothing is supernatural in any sense.  Things simply are and are natural.

Free Will -  means a person could have chosen otherwise and hence things could have been different.

 

I am not very familiar with the theory of Agency but it smells of a dualistic mind-body dichotomy or worse supernaturalism which Objectivism rejects.  Agents being causes which are not events, takes a specific part of natural existence and divorces it, in essence creating the supernatural, a dimension of souls.  All existence would be shorn in two.

In place of physical indeterminism one has foisted a sort of subjective indeterminism.  The effort to side step events of the natural world by introduction of agents, would be untenable to Objectivism, since all of existence is identity, all things including agents in their own dimension would be subject to acting in accordance with their nature, and that nature would in effect need to be causal as a corollary of identity... instead of looking at protons and electrons and scratching our heads about how minds work, we would be inventing Agent-atoms and Agent-schemata and what-nots to describe how and why agents behave as they do... and even more complicated inventing heretofore unknown mechanisms for causality to flow from events in the real world to the agent-choices of the souls-world and vice versa. Soon we would be forced to look at both worlds as simply part of one existence and all of it subject to identity and causation.

Furthermore we would be no better off trying to hand wave away the supernatural Epicurean Swerves of choice etc. in the soul-world... i.e. we are no closer to understanding the underlying arrangements and processes which constitute and bring about Free-Will in the soul world than we are in our world, and an invocation of arbitrary subjectivism is not an explanation, certainly not one in keeping with identity and causation.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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12 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Objectivism holds a few things as fundamental (these are not all axioms):

Existence is Identity - Implies everything is what it is, and nothing else.  That includes what a person is, at a particular time.  Of course things can and do change over time. 

The concept of existence also encompasses everything, so nothing is supernatural in any sense.  Things simply are and are natural.

Free Will -  means a person could have chosen otherwise and hence things could have been different.

 

I am not very familiar with the theory of Agency but it smells of a dualistic mind-body dichotomy or worse supernaturalism which Objectivism rejects.  Agents being causes which are not events, takes a specific part of natural existence and divorces it, in essence creating the supernatural, a dimension of souls.  All existence would be shorn in two.

In place of physical indeterminism one has foisted a sort of subjective indeterminism.  The effort to side step events of the natural world by introduction of agents, would be untenable to Objectivism, since all of existence is identity, all things including agents in their own dimension would be subject to acting in accordance with their nature, and that nature would in effect need to be causal as a corollary of identity... instead of looking at protons and electrons and scratching our heads about how minds work, we would be inventing Agent-atoms and Agent-schemata and what-nots to describe how and why agents behave as they do... and even more complicated inventing heretofore unknown mechanisms for causality to flow from events in the real world to the agent-choices of the souls-world and vice versa. Soon we would be forced to look at both worlds as simply part of one existence and all of it subject to identity and causation.

Furthermore we would be no better off trying to hand wave away the supernatural Epicurean Swerves of choice etc. in the soul-world... i.e. we are no closer to understanding the underlying arrangements and processes which constitute and bring about Free-Will in the soul world than we are in our world, and an invocation of arbitrary subjectivism is not an explanation, certainly not one in keeping with identity and causation.

Thanks for your quick response!

Hmm...I think you are right. Agent-causation basically treats the agent as some sort of separate substance that causes an event, apart from anything else which is subject to classic chain of events put forward by determinism. 

While Objectivism would count as a form of metaphysical libertarianism(Incompatibilism that takes the side of free will), it wouldn't count as any of the established popular theories, as they all seem to be influenced by some sort of dualism or supernaturalism.  

My main issue is in finding a short term/label to refer specifically to the Objectivist position on the free will vs determinism debate, one that would more or less indicate to a reader that has no prior knowledge of objectivism what its fundamentals are. If you have any suggestions, I would be most grateful. 
 

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53 minutes ago, Gnome07 said:

Thanks for your quick response!

Hmm...I think you are right. Agent-causation basically treats the agent as some sort of separate substance that causes an event, apart from anything else which is subject to classic chain of events put forward by determinism. 

While Objectivism would count as a form of metaphysical libertarianism(Incompatibilism that takes the side of free will), it wouldn't count as any of the established popular theories, as they all seem to be influenced by some sort of dualism or supernaturalism.  

My main issue is in finding a short term/label to refer specifically to the Objectivist position on the free will vs determinism debate, one that would more or less indicate to a reader that has no prior knowledge of objectivism what its fundamentals are. If you have any suggestions, I would be most grateful. 
 

I think the thing which sets Objectivism apart is its amenability to non-deterministic causation/action  flowing from absolute identity.

Things behave according to their nature, lawfully, but not all things do so strictly in a deterministically Leibnizian manner. 

Free-will is not the ability of a person to choose against his or her own nature/identity in some arbitrary way, but the freedom to choose from a number of possible choices perfectly consistent with the person's nature/identity.

 

Free will is non-deterministic but not completely arbitrary.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
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20 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

I am not very familiar with the theory of Agency but it smells of a dualistic mind-body dichotomy or worse supernaturalism which Objectivism rejects.

If you’re not familiar with it, you should probably not completely make something up about it.

Agent is from the Latin agens which just refers to the subject of action. Agent causation refers to change caused by an agent rather than event. Agents can be rocks, birds, a match being lit, ice melting, or people acting. Some theorists use agent for humans specifically, or for any particular substance that persists through time.

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14 hours ago, 2046 said:

If you’re not familiar with it, you should probably not completely make something up about it.

Agent is from the Latin agens which just refers to the subject of action. Agent causation refers to change caused by an agent rather than event. Agents can be rocks, birds, a match being lit, ice melting, or people acting. Some theorists use agent for humans specifically, or for any particular substance that persists through time.

Would you then argue that the Objectivist position qualifies as agent-causation after all? Ayn Rand does state that "All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act" . In that sense, is an "agent" just an entity that has volition? 

 

 

13 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

As I understand it, Objectivism follows Aristotle in viewing actions as caused by entities which act.  The more "modern" approach views events as caused by earlier events.

 

Indeed, that is the view called event-causal in regards to free will and ties in with the whole mechanistic view of an endless chain of events. Agent-causation does deal away with this view, though it is still a bit unclear to me if Objectivism agrees with the notion of agent as being the cause.


Edit: I should probably leave a definition for what an agent is, to further clarify things: A being who has the capacity to act in a given environment, that can perform intentional actions and has a will. It is different from an object, which merely reacts but does not act. 

Edited by Gnome07
clarification
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UPDATE: Upon further research, there are three theories in regards to this, which I will present briefly: 

  • An event-causal approach says that agency is when an agent does something because of some states or events in their mind, like beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. These states or events cause the action in a chain of events. For example, if I want to drink water and I believe there is water in the fridge, these mental states cause me to go to the fridge and drink water. This is a reductive approach because it explains agency by reducing it to the causal roles of mental states and events.
  • An agent-causal approach says that agency is when an agent does something because they have the power to cause actions directly, without any intermediate states or events. The agent is a substance that can act on its own. For example, if I want to drink water, I can just decide to do it and cause myself to go to the fridge and drink water. This is a non-reductive approach because it does not explain agency by referring to anything else than the agent’s power.
  • A volitionist approach says that agency is when an agent does something because of an act called a volition. A volition is an act of the will that is not caused by anything else and that causes other actions. For example, if I want to drink water, I can form a volition to do it and this volition causes me to go to the fridge and drink water. This is also a non-reductive approach because it does not explain agency by referring to anything else than the volition


    I will have to read a bit more, the third one seemed promising but I'm not sure yet if it's compatible with what Ayn Rand meant by volition.
Edited by Gnome07
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  • 2 weeks later...

Gnome07, welcome.

Rand was clear that she thought we perceive things as they are and that this is by subsidiary processing by the nervous system making the perception possible. I don't think Objectivism should depart from that approach when it comes to doing human actions like opting to double-tie my shoe laces this evening. I choose to do the deed, I move my physical fingers rightly with the physical laces. That really happens. Also, there is the underlying nerve and muscle operations at work in doing all that, which we learn from the scientists, and this is not knowledge I put to work in getting the skill or in engaging it this evening. The directness in choosing and performing the act is real, and so are the subsidiary physiological processes.

I do not see how entity-causation bars an infinite regress. If one buys that every alteration in the world requires an entity (meaning the entity-category of Rand's) causing it and every causing entity requires other entities bringing IT about, one is stuck in the usual, tired infinite regress. One should NOT accept that every alteration requires an entity to cause it (though it still needs entities to bear the alteration), for Galileo-Descartes-Newton made new thinking caps for us to put on: motion (an alteration of location) of a body requires no propelling cause if the motion is at constant speed and in an unchanging straight line (and without air resistance); every deviation from that sort of trajectory DOES require a causal explanation, that is, THESE deviation-alterations DO require causal explanations, and we will profit by looking for those causes.

I'd balk at the idea that "entity" in Rand's sense is the only sort of thing that can cause anything to occur. What causes me to feel warmth of the sand on the beach or coolness of the water I'm splashing through is rate of heat flow into or out of my skin. We have receptors evolved to detect that feature of the action that is heat flow, namely the rate of the heat flow. Actions are a different category from entities in Rand's metaphysics. We may note that the heat transport is because one of two bodies is hotter than the other, but that does not change the fact that the living sensor is responding to rate of heat flow, that being the cause of its activation. 

 

 

Edited by Boydstun
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  • 2 months later...
On 5/6/2023 at 9:21 AM, Gnome07 said:

UPDATE: Upon further research, there are three theories in regards to this, which I will present briefly: 

  • An event-causal ...
  • An agent-causal...
  • A volitionist approach ...

    I will have to read a bit more, the third one seemed promising but I'm not sure yet if it's compatible with what Ayn Rand meant by volition.

All of these are wrong.

The most important point to keep in mind is that volition is epistemological in nature.  If we are determined by prior events to spout certain opinions then choosing between valid arguments and fallacies or truths and falsehoods is impossible and epistemology is pointless because nobody can ever claim to know anything.  Any form of determinism or denial of volition that undermines the possibility of knowledge therefore refutes itself.  The only question worth asking is "how does volition work?"  Rand does not presume to even attempt to answer that.

Objectivism accepts causality and Rand accepted that causality reaches into the human mind from the external world in its normal operation by means of the mechanisms of sensations and perceptions.  Rand's identifies volition as the very delimited scope of choosing to focus or not, to engage in conceptual thought or not.  An unfocused mind is drifting and determined.  A focused mind that willfully chose to accept a certain idea may also be determined in its logical and psychological consequences (examples from Rand's fiction: Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead and Robert Stoddard from Atlas Shrugged.)  The moment of choice is not characterized as an exception to causality but as an instance of it.  Rand simply accepts volition as an attribute of the human mind and moves on because both rejecting volition or trying to explain volition are show-stoppers for philosophy.

A reductive approach is possible in further researching what volition is and how it works (as a scientific not philosophical endeavor), but a reductive interpretation that attempts to explain away volition or deny it are obviously wrong.  A non-reductive theory that is equivalent to a supernatural or 'quantum random swerve' theory is also rejected.

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