FREE WILL

Until conclusive evidence arises proving I have no free will, it is my default assumption that I do.

cool wahle movie

The arguments for absolute determinism are all predicated on idealized models of the universe that cannot be verified and appear extremely improbable when compared to reality.

settled

(dusts hands and walks away)

Free will is an explicitly Christian concept and as such is mostly meaningless outside of its theological context

Seems to me that deterministic arguments can be based entirely on materialism, provided one is limited to the discredited version of materialism that arose out of Newtonian physics.

Well, less-than-absolute determinism is sufficient to moot what we generally mean when we discuss "free will, so I'm less-than-satisfied by that response.

Nevertheless, my default is that the subjective perception of decision-making is indistinguishable from decision-making itself, so it's a silly question in the first place. There's also the fact that the progress of the deterministic universe (relative to thinking creatures) is entirely dependent on decision-making. The fact that the decisions rendered are dependent on other factors does not mean that they don't exist - it merely means that they can be predicted.

add another " up there somewhere

Free will is an explicitly Christian concept and as such is mostly meaningless outside of its theological context

this is ridiculous btw

i doubt free will exists but "free will" undoubtedly exists. i think that makes me box c

http://allaccessblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/100110_066wm_jok.jpg

lol

Aren't free will and determinism saying essentially the same thing, that things happen? Like, what does it mean for things to be 'predetermined' in no tangible way... it means that there exists one future.

"Free Will" suggests that there is a magic cause which is uncaused but capable of causation. "Determinism" says bollocks.

predetermination and choice are simultaneous processes

Spiralli OTM, which is to say that I reject Noodle's interpretation. Free will doesn't require an absence of causation and isn't negated by determinism.

i've been pondering but nah, even a freely willed act plucked from an infinite rainbow of possibilities implies a causer doing the willing

but i'm happy to say that even if there was a traceable chain of near-infinite causation it wouldn't matter - the question of it mattering seems like a bigger issue than efforts to prove some metaphysically "free" will imo

i dont have an answer to this question (i mean, come on) but i would argue that you can reject Free Will (especially it's modern version going back to Descartes) without affirming strict materialistic determinism. it's the "will" part that is the problem, not so much that random or unpredictable things happening are possible.

this is ridiculous btw

how so

it's the "will" part that is the problem

*ding ding ding*

we don't even know what consciousness is, pretending that we can determine how consciousness guides events is ridiculous.

yeah, but we don't have to determine how consciousness guides events. in assessing the freedom of the human will, we can limit ourselves to the nature of consciousness itself, setting aside questions about how a free will, if it existed, might extend out from subjective consciousness to influence the objective material world.

so the question is is consciousness an independent actor or are all of its actions governed by other causes...? I don't see how the former is possible, frankly.

yeah, but like, isn't determinism just... part of the big picture, you know? it's like... heisenberg? or, like, that dude's cat? like, we can't even tell what's going to happen because, it's all about, like, i dunno, quarks n shit. it's like we don't know anything at all, man.

you guys i'm so high right now

lol

re shakey:

the question is whether or not people can be meaningfully said to "make their own decisions". there doesn't need to be any more or less to it than that. my take is that even if all human decisions (or decision-like events or whatever) can theoretically be predicted in advance, based on the idea that they are effects of other causes, this doesn't necessarily mean that the decisions in question aren't, you know, real decisions. it merely means that human decision making is another link in the infinite causal chain.

what's the definition of 'real decision' then

Hot dog vs taco

2 C on Ts or not 2 C on Ts

that is the question

http://www.teenidols4you.com/blink/Actors/jjrichter/jjrichter_1215244989.jpg

it merely means that human decision making is another link in the infinite causal chain

seems to me like this implies that the specific will of a specific human involved in decision making has no freedom - it's actions are predetermined

xp

if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

I really don't care if there's free will or not. We all live as if there were.

what's the definition of 'real decision' then

it's probably just semantic sleight-of-hand, but i'm saying that concepts like "will" and "freedom" don't have much meaning outside of our subjectivity, and therefore to the extent that we subjectively perceive them, they exist in the only way that's really relevant.

i don't imagine that response is going to satisfy anybody but me, so here's another: determinism's negation of free will is based on a failure to realize that the decision-making will is part of the universal web of factors that supposedly binds the will. so if the will is bound, it is, at least in part, self-bound, and that creates a sort of paradox. the determinist argument essentially says, "given that the self is of such a nature, it is predictable that it will do x in situation y." but that formulation is crucially dependent on "given that the self is of such a nature," a formulation which subordinates determinacy to the nature of the self. the relationship of determinacy to the nature of the self becomes a chicken-egg loop.

yer subjecthood is externally bound up in various determinisms - physical through to cultural (tho that there is probably a qualitative leap and at the extremes it probably doesn't make much sense to think one in terms of the other) via whatever else onto whatever else - but regardless, that subjecthood is how we identify ourselves as active beings and so its decisions are 'our' decisions. what sense does it make to wish for a free will that doesn't come from the subject that you are?

i like the last two posts and they align pretty close to my feelings. also i think the best engagement with this particular Mobius strip is Emerson's essay "Fate"--which is a totally awesome essay.

more than that, i still think that thinking about this issue in terms of "Will" is very problematic since it presumes a whole host of things id want to question, most particularly the idea that our actions or "decisions" are transparent even to ourselves.

never got the pun in Free Willy until just now. obviously am not even remotely smart enough to have an opinion on this subject

i think this is one of those subjects so tough that everyone is allowed an opinion! (along with: "why is there something rather than nothing?" and "what is consciousness?")

I think I'm broadly on the same page as contenderizer, but it's a bit hand-wavy "the way that can be spoken of is not the true way" to satisfy hardcore determinists - including the one sitting on my right shoulder.

On another note, I read a real interestin' paper that suggested not only does determinism not imply causation, in fact it's in strong conflict with the idea. In short(ish): macro-level cause-effect events can always be defeated by micro ones - it's not physically impossible that your drink could heat up after putting an ice-cube in, or on a more day-to-day level, you might strike a match and it fails to light, with no conceivable macro-level explanation for the failure. So given that the causal connection has to be necessary, and there is no such necessary connection at the macro level, macro causation is a bust. And it's not certain that we can call what happens at the micro level causation either - consider that current laws of physics are time-symmetrical, so it makes as much sense to say that the future "caused" the past as the past causes the future, and that's a pretty weird kind of causation.

I think this has interesting implications for free will - obv hardcore determinists are prepared to bite the bullet and deny free will, and even though that's a pretty big bullet to bite, would they also be prepared to deny causation and the arrow of time?

full paper here: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2071/1/Causality_and_Determinism.pdf

Where are some of those studies about how, in the brain, the muscles and neurotransmitters and everything start firing up to, say, move your finger well in advance of the time that you're "conscious" of making the decision to move it? Like, in a statistically significant way?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#The_Libet_experiment

half a second, pshaw. ambiguities abound.

reading that fuller explanation i'm more in agreement with 'tenderizer's position, tho i'm not sure that this kind of argument doesn't use "free will" in a way that isn't entirely natural. but the first thing i said upthread - "i doubt free will exists but "free will" undoubtedly exists" - is broadly in agreement with contenderizer.

like ledge, my Tao side always wants to arm-wrestle my strict determinist side

also i'm not particularly wedded to classical causation but i am extremely uncomfortable with "uncaused cause" arguments

given that the causal connection has to be necessary, and there is no such necessary connection at the macro level, macro causation is a bust

this feels like a more science-attuned version of Hume tbh?

No I think they're different enough; Hume says we never observe causation just constant conjunction, that article says even the (macro) conjunction we observe is not reliably constant. The micro point might be more Humean but that current physical laws don't talk about causation is perhaps too oft forgotten.

would they also be prepared to deny causation and the arrow of time?

Excellent point. If the course of the universe has only one possible path, based on the causal factors present at some theoretical 'prime' instant and it must travel that path to some 'final' moment, and all the instants between these two are determined, then causality could be said to flow in either direction. There would be no way to choose between the two directions.

Putting aside whether or not this is true, that is just one fucking awesome thought.

Also, even if the subjective experience of making decisions can be 'proved' to be illusory through some mathematically consistant logic, I think Godel might well dispose of that line of proof.

Re the libet experiment etc...

If vision is a construction why wouldn't our own consciousness be a similar construction? It doen't necessarily take away from the function of the brain as mind nor of something like free-will to note that many of our actions are split-second hard-wirings and that we're not aware (capable of reflection, judgment or memory, let's say) of our quick decisions until they get broadcast on the 'big screen'. It also doesn't mean you can't meaningfully agonize over what color to paint your bedroom for days.

I think we have free will but it's a question of degrees, and it breaks down the more you try to define sharply define the self. Ultimately I think the only path to ultimate free will is in knowing that there is not a 'YOU' that has free will over 'THAT'. Once the distinction between personal control and the uncontrollable arrow of time breaks down then we are talking some real free will.

The universe has free will but the individual Ego at odds with the universe does not. Fortunately the individual Ego at odds with the universe is an illusory state, an emotional reaction that is merely temporal. The fortune of this is called Grace.

There's no evidence I'm aware of that our decisions are immediately caused by anything other than the structure and chemistry of our neural apparatus in the moments before we are aware of a decision.

Given a "conscious" "layer" of neural processing largely tasked with rationalizing decisions taken by other, unconscious circuits, our ancestors were spared the navel-gazing whilst pursued by sabertooth tigers.

This isn't to say that the underlying deciding circuits can't be influenced by their environment, including (unconscious) feedback from the conscious layer. Neural networks possess elegant feedback heuristics for strengthening circuit paths leading to valued decisions and pruning paths with outcomes judged poor. But that sort of learning at the axons takes hours, days, years, while the circuits are yielding decisions in milliseconds. There's a temporal disconnect preventing the self-and-world model our rationalizing, conscious circuits synthesize from having much immediate effect on the subconcious nodes where decisions actually occur.

There are some very bright people who accept determinism occurs elsewhere in the universe but not in the grey jelly of their brains. See physicist Roger Penrose for some belabored books outlining how quantum mechanics can save free will. My take is: 1) stochastic outcomes from quantum interactions only displace the determinism to microscopic realms physicists are unlikely to have access to, and 2) quantum interactions are presently ignored in computer modelling of protein binding without much loss, so at axons were millions of neurotransmitters are competing for thousands of receptor proteins, it all averages out.

One vote for complete psychic determinism over here. I suspect most people still believe in free will, and that isn't going to change until Christianity wanes.

There's plenty of feedback going on between the consciousness and the unconscious parts of the brain, so that "the structure and chemistry of our neural apparatus in the moments before we are aware of a decision" is only a small part of thinking about a decision, especially as decisions become complex.

How that structure and chemistry arrives at that point is what's of interest to me, and if there is sufficient randomness in that process in addition to the feedback effects, then calling that "deterministic" seems like a peculiar application of the word and the concept.

Sure but indeterminism is no saviour for free will either, a random act may be free but it can't be willed.

I thought about this some more and now I think I'm on the side of determinism. Free will implies multiple possible futures, but there can only be one actual future that IS going to happen, i.e. THE future. Otherwise, you get into this whole idea of infinite universes branching off from each distinct 'choice', as if that makes any sense; basically, supernatural beliefs. It makes more sense to just go with the idea that the ball was started rolling when the universe began and time is unfolding the only possible way it can, the way it will and has been.

you are aware of the many worlds theory of quantum physics? don't buy it myself, think it has something of a supernatural taint, but plenty of people do take it seriously.

but anyway i don't see why multiple possible futures implies anyhing supernatural.

Multiverse! Multiverse!

Multiple possible futures is totally compatible with a single actual future, dude.

Though I do like many worlds theory. Not as much as I like David Lewis' modal realist theory, mind you. Lovely crazy David Lewis.

It is one thing to assert that only one future happens, but quite another to assert this proves that no other future could have happened. That conjecture seems to rely on a highly unprovable generalization from the existance of physical laws and the repeatability of experiments. But as soon as you enter that territory you have leapt far, far away from the staid Kansas of science and into the realms of Oz.

our ancestors were spared the navel-gazing whilst pursued by sabertooth tigers

I wanna say, hell yes, I agree with this. But it's a pretty big presumption to make. And we all love to sugar-coat the past, make it a simpler, purer time. It's just as likely they had myths and philosophies that are forever lost in time.

Not to mention those which are still shibboleths for fools

I feel the need for a better definition of free will. Because if you're saying that "free will" means that "an individual is able to select a choice from a range of alternatives, without external duress forcing a particular choice upon them", then free will seems plausible to me. Even if you add the riders that "and the choice will be affected by prior events that happened to that individual", it remains so.

In fact, if you also add "and theoretically, given enough detail/knowledge and ability to integrate that detail, you could say with a shockingly high degree of probability what that choice would be", I think you still have a plausible "free will"

But if you take it to some other level where you insist that "free will" requires that there are "uncaused causes", that an individual can make a decision entirely unaffected by previous events, and especially also that the source of the decision-making is identical to what is felt as consciousness, well then I think you get to definitions that are themselves pretty shaky, let alone trying to use them in any sort of argument.

it's not that choices are affected by prior events, it's that there is nothing but prior events, and no point at which a "free individual" is able to make a choice outside of events. there is nothing but chains of events.

that last sentence wasn't supposed to be there. i think i was gonna say "there is no individual will outside of events". i don't understand what such a will would be.

Sure, and that's a much more interesting question to me. But consciousness strikes me as being irrelevant to it. It's a question of causality, not one of whether or not we are making choices we "feel" we are, nor one of whether our brains are somehow "forcing" us like the second option says.

Xp exactly; I don't understand what such a will would be either, which is why the definitions are so problematic in this topic.

i think the definitions are problematic only if you assume that there must be "free will". i'd argue that the evidence is firmly against that assumption at this point in our knowledge, so people making claims for free will are the ones who need to answer the hard questions.

there seems to be another Descartes-esque problem in that if we posit a will or personality that can take decisions uncaused by events, how do we account for that will's ability to cause events to happen?

Agree, but I'd go one further. To me it's not that the evidence is against free will, but that we're at a position where it's not possible to really define a coherent "free will" for the evidence to be against.

Back to what Shakey Mo Collier noted at the beginning of the thread, the concept of free will first existed to justify why an omnipotent benevolent god would permit evil. Dispense with that god, and much of the rationale for supporting the idea also disappears.

xp

oh i see where you're going now. yeah that seems fair enough, the assumptions behind free will are themselves so blurry and contested that there's a lot of ground to cover before we can decide what free will itself is supposed to mean

In my opinion, if one's theory of how a thinking creature makes choices allows the possibility of non-determinent action, meaning an action that could not have been predicted, no matter how much information was available about on the actor's state at the time the choices were presented, then I am satisfied that "free will" is included in that theory. My key distinction being that, even if the actor is not fully and completely independent from prior conditions, the eventual choice that was made was free from dependence on those conditions.

There's no more moral responsibility in having your strings pulled by dice rather than the cogged wheels of 18th century mechanical determinism.

but there can only be one actual future that IS going to happen, i.e. THE future.

― sleepingbag, Saturday, January 14, 2012 2:03 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban PermalinkI don't buy this at all. It's only after the fact (i.e., after the future has arrived) that we can reasonably say that there IS only one future: the one that has now become part of the past. Prior to that, prior to what on a quantum level we'd call wave function collapse, there's no reason to insist that only one future is possible. As Aimless said, "It is one thing to assert that only one future happens, but quite another to assert this proves that no other future could have happened" [emphasis mine].

^ please mentally insert a carriage return

Yeah sleepingbag is mistaking what is soon to be the past for "one actual future".

Kinda settled for me in 1748...

http://bibliothek.bbaw.de/quellendigital/lamettrie/metr_homm_fr_1748/1/LaMettrie00008.jpghttp://bibliothek.bbaw.de/quellendigital/lamettrie/metr_homm_fr_1748/1/LaMettrie00135.jpg

we're at a position where it's not possible to really define a coherent "free will" for the evidence to be against.

― stet, Saturday, January 14, 2012 12:50 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't know about this. Considerations of free will have always been tied to the idea of moral responsibility. The concept arose from a religious question that asked whether human beings could be considered morally responsible for choices that God had designed them inevitably to make. Once the atheists got done killing God, the question was reformulated to deal with the supposedly deterministic mechanics of classical physics: are meatbots morally responsible for choices forced on them by a clockwork universe?

It's only when we attempt to divorce free will from questions of and ideas regarding moral responsibility that it becomes difficult to define.

In this conversation I don't see the future and the past as distinct. The things we 'can' do... either we do them in the past or in the future or else they never really existed other than in our minds. Any thoughts on what alternate future 'could have happened' are pleasant to think about but have nothing to do with reality. Just because we can conjecture about what might have happened if I had waken up an hour later today or if you bought a lottery ticket last week or if anything 'else' had happened other that what did happen doesn't make those things any more a part of reality than if I conjecture about what might happen if I do either A or B (assume mutual exclusivity here) tomorrow -- either A or B but not both will occur, and no matter whether I think I chose A or my brain's chemistry chose A or the butterfly effect chose A, once we get there that's it, it's set and done, and B is/was no longer a possibility. Contenderizer/Aimless are right... it's only when we get there that it becomes the past and no other 'future' could have occurred. I guess I have faith that this will continue to happen as it always has, i.e. time will continue to pass?

The fact that we can't by definition make a number of mutually exclusive 'choices' simultaneously and then revel in the conflicting consequences of each of those choices simultaneously in the past or in the present means to me that we won't be able to do it in the future either (barring aside quantum multiverse nonsense, which like I said, takes place outside the universe and as such is supernatural 'science'). So the future is written to the extent that once the arrow of time passes over tomorrow, we've discovered what the future will be, and whatever things we've done during that time will have been the only things that we could have done during that time. It's kind of irrelevant/semantic whether we believe that I've 'decided' those things or if those things were 'determined', one set of things happens and the rest don't. We're already well along the path of the things that have happened, and they will continue to be the basis for everything that will happen.

It's only when we attempt to divorce free will from questions of and ideas regarding moral responsibility that it becomes difficult to define.

I may not have read enough on this, but whenever I see the moral angle dragged into it, it is more as an undesirable consequence than anything else -- usually some quasi attempt at reductio like "there must be free will, otherwise we could not have moral responsibility and that's absurd and we would have to empty all the jails"

Is there anybody saying "determinism (or whatever else) means there is no such thing as free will and therefore there can be no moral responsibility"?

It seems to me it is much easier to support moral responsibility without free will than it is to support "free will" at all.

Is there anybody saying "determinism (or whatever else) means there is no such thing as free will and therefore there can be no moral responsibility"?

It seems to me it is much easier to support moral responsibility without free will than it is to support "free will" at all.

I don't know that anybody's currently saying anything like your hypothetical argument, but it's how contemporary discussions of free will hook back into the older, religious debate.

At least tentatively disagree with the second statement. Personal moral responsibility is tied to the idea that we have the ability in any given situation to choose to behave in either the "right" or the "wrong" way. To choose incorrectly is to morally transgress, and thus to morally deserve some sort of consequence. This is in turn dependent on freedom of the will - the idea that more than one choice is possible at any given time, and that human will is the agent that causes differing outcomes by making these sorts of choices.

Absent the ability of the free will to make "real choices" of this sort, moral responsibility becomes essentially meaningless. We can label certain behaviors unacceptable, but it's difficult to blame a clock for ticking.

but it's difficult to blame a clock for ticking

I think that's too reductionist. If a clock's accuracy could be affected by shaming it, then it would be very easy to blame a clock that wasn't keeping good time.

It seems that humans are exactly the sort of clocks where blame is a relevant input, for sure. Blame, punishment, reward, all play a part in the causal chain (maybe with some caveats for ledge about this being at a macro level etc).

It may be the case that what was used to *justify* the moral code (at first in terms of religion and later in terms of personal responsibility) needs revising to address a lack of free will, but that doesn't alter the efficacy or applicability of morality itself.

Bad robots still get punished, assuming they're sufficiently complex that this will correct their behaviour.

but there can only be one actual future that IS going to happen, i.e. THE future.

And yet the future is even less real than the past.

Ofcourse the future is less real.

but there can only be one actual future that IS going to happen, i.e. THE future.

This just isn't true, for you can only conclude THE future is the öne actual future" when that future has transformed into being a past, when looking back. There's an infinite number of "actual futures", of futures. The "actual future" you speak of is only actual once it has happened, which goes against the very definition of future: something that has not happened yet.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Someone should have been able to predict this.

every poll should have (I got a complicated answer for you...) as an option

i'm still confused that geddy lee up there appears to be wearing a "RASH" t-shirt.

I got a complicated answer but I still voted "exists, I mean c'mon"

i got a complicated answer but i still voted "I was forced" because epiphenomenalism ftw

I'm really annoyed I missed this thread. I was having just this debate with people over New Year, who all believed in free will, in the sense of meaningful choices and moral responsibility.

I am firmly in the camp of the non-deterministic but unwilled decisions; i.e. mostly outcomes are dependent on inputs, though there may be random events, and these random events may feel like decisions, but they cannot be willed.

If you think about a decision that you felt you made, let's say the colour of paint for the bedroom, anything. If you turned back the clock, and changed nothing, no hindsight, what possible mechanisms could there be for you making a different decision to the one you made the first time?

IMO, it's random events, or nothing, so there can be no such thing as moral responsibility. However, I agree that it's moot. Not only does our response to someone's behaviour influence their future behaviour and the behaviour of every other actor with the same effect as if there were such a thing as moral responsibility, but we have no choice about the response.

\o/

it's random events, or nothing, so there can be no such thing as moral responsibility.
Well, there still can be a moral reponsibility, it's just our understanding of what that means has to change because it was formerly based on unsupportable definitions of will.

really? really

?

that way madness lies

You're right, sorry, I will curb my use of italics for emphasis from now on.

I don't see how. Moral Responsibility is still a pragmatically useful concept to retain. I don't see why we have to abandon it merely because we can't reconcile what we know about the will with hoary old religious conceptions of same.

(but I don't agree that it's random events or nothing. There's a difference between unforced choices and operating on sheer randomness)

it was the idea of changing our understanding that had me smdh rmde. also i still have serious problems with the disconnect between "there is no free will" and "therefore we have to change this". if anything "has to change" that's only because of the cold heartless unstoppable motions of fundamental particles. (assuming no free will)

i can't see any gap between determinism and randomness. where would a choice come from? either it's based on some prior event or events, i.e. determined, or it's not based on anything.

yeah, "there is no free will" = "this debate is happening whatever"

Is changing our understanding -- I may be clearer if I rephrase to say "change our definitions" or "amend our supporting arguments for"? -- so controversial? To me it's a shakier path to say "if something we used to support something else falls down, we have to let the whole edifice collapse" rather than just replacing the bit that failed, no?

also i still have serious problems with the disconnect between "there is no free will" and "therefore we have to change this".

That's because the connect is in the omitted "therefore we have to change this thing that depended on that definition of free will"

Hm. You can recast moral responsibility from something innate to the individual to something that acknowledges that, given the circumstances, the guy who killed your cat and set your gran on fire could not have done anything different. It probably doesn't change your reaction or the appropriate reaction of society.

(but I don't agree that it's random events or nothing. There's a difference between unforced choices and operating on sheer randomness)

A huge difference, and it's unforced choices I can't see a mechanism for. For unforced choices to be real, there has to be a will that can make the choice, and shape the universe by making that choice, and yet make the choice independent of circumstances, by which I mean the state of the universe in that moment. So it has to be outside the universe -and we're back to talking about magic.

xposts

If we aren't free, how can we change anything?

Lack of free will seems like a concept that it's impossible to take seriously, even if it's true.

you just have to be stoical about it

i can't see any gap between determinism and randomness. where would a choice come from?
No me neither. That's what i don't get about Zora's non-deterministic decisions. To me it's mostly deterministic with the possibility of randomness. I don't see what else there can be.

If we aren't free, how can we change anything?
Define "free", especially in terms of the above.

Lack of free will seems like a concept that it's impossible to take seriously, even if it's true.
Consider a chess-playing machine. It is "free" to make whatever moves it thinks will win the game, but it's still wholly deterministic.

If it was as complicated as we are and had interiority, it'd probably feel like it was making the choices it does, but that still wouldn't spring a "free will" into existence.

They're not decisions? I meant the things we think of as decisions; there are no free choices in my model.

Consider a chess-playing machine. It is "free" to make whatever moves it thinks will win the game, but it's still wholly deterministic.

I know, i just don't see how it is helpful or even possible to consider ourselves as determined, or use that to change our ideas of moral responsibility.

I don't think we need to change our ideas of moral responsibility as such. Free will is a convenient fiction we can use -- it feels like we have it (it'd be almost impossible to act otherwise), it feels like others have it, and moral responsibility works for affecting behaviour.

The change I'm really trying to avoid is the one that says "but you say there's no free will and therefore there can be absolutely no responsibility and it's wrong to put people in jail when they couldn't help it so let them out".

Which is equivalent to saying "the chess machine couldn't help making those choices so you can't say it won the game". There's a category or level confusion at work.

on a personal level i think the sense of human beings as determined can alter your thinking about them as guilty or sinning or deserving of punishment or whatever. on a societal level i don't think even a widespread acceptance of determinism wd change much.

more problematic is pondering whether there's an "i" that can think anything but that.

i got genuinely unsettled when i convinced myself of epiphenomenalism. the thought of being a passenger in your own brain is spooky.

helpfully it goes away, roughly as soon as you get hungry.

in all honesty i think "i" is a convenient fiction. it's fun to speak like other people sometimes etc.

stet, is there really a category confusion? I haven't seen anyone suggesting that a lack of free will means you shouldn't punish people. If anything - and I think this is what NV is saying too? - it makes it easier to do that confusing* Christian thing of condemning the sin but not the sinner, but you still have to try to stop people doing 'bad' things.

*Confusing because it's Christian notions of evil and original sin that tie bad behaviour to an eternal supernatural coherent 'self' in the first place.

Badly formed post. I am hungry.

I haven't seen anyone suggesting that a lack of free will means you shouldn't punish people.

Yeah, not here, but it comes up super often in this discussion. You go directly from "no free will" to "so no responsibility for actions you can't help but do" to "isn't it wrong to punish people for doing things they can't help?"

SEP as usual covers it pretty well, but not in c&p friendly soundbites, damn them

there're strains of catholics who are big on 'punish the sinner', tbf, while damn-near worshipping the sin

you just have to be stoical about it

'k, will find some colonnaded walkways to hang around in.

like you have a choice

Epiphenomenalism means the actor is but a link in the causal chain, and perhaps a passenger. One can still convict individuals of crime, but the focus becomes sequestering them from society, deterrence, and rehabilitation rather than punishment.

I doubt any epiphenomenalists actually go about their lives as automatons. Free will is a handy illusion for all but saints, monks, and the stoic doomed. And its very hard-wired. The prefrontal neocortex has been around for 50+ million years.

Slightly OT, but I'd like to recommend Peter Watt's novel Blindsight (Creative Commons, so free) to fans of hard sci-fi here. Blindsight's central themes revolve around consciousness, indeed the alien antagonists are so formidable because they lack this parasitic activity.

One can still convict individuals of crime, but the focus becomes sequestering them from society, deterrence, and rehabilitation rather than punishment.

which, tbh, sounds reasonable enough to me.

If you think about a decision that you felt you made, let's say the colour of paint for the bedroom, anything. If you turned back the clock, and changed nothing, no hindsight, what possible mechanisms could there be for you making a different decision to the one you made the first time?This in no way negates the idea of free will or free choice. It simply suggests that we are who we are. People for whatever reason have a hard time with this: reconciling the straightjacket of identity with the idea of choice. The assumption is that identity precludes choice, because the nature of the self determines the choices we make. But we might just as easily say that the choices we make determine the nature of the self. It doesn't have to be one or the other. And again, even if the choice is wholly determined by the situation, the nature of the choosing self if one of the most important aspects of that situation, allowing no clear line to be drawn between the determined and the determiner.

fug

you can create pseudo-random outcomes from deterministic processes.
why not allow for pseudo-free will from the same principles?

Also, it's a bit self-contradictory to strongly argue that outcome-determining "free choice" is a fiction (essentially labeling all behavior mechanical and beyond individual control), but that the convenient "fictions" of free will and moral responsibility are socially valuable. These concepts are incompatible.

If our expressed position is that human behavior is something that simply happens to us (while the egocentric conscious mind merely observes and takes undeserved credit), then we are working to invalidate the conceptual underpinnings of free will and moral responsibility. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

why do the underpinnings need to be considered at all, though? why can't we view free will from a vendor-neutral perspective? i think we can still make that value proposition using black box modeling.

In what sense are they incompatible? The ways in which behaviour is proposed to be determined is incredibly complex, and may not be possible to fully specify. That the effects of maintaining the fictions of free will and moral responsibility can themselves be causes of further effects is in no way contradictory with such a complex set of causes.

I'm fine with undermining the underpinnings of "strong " free will (eg the uncaused cause) because I don't even think it's a coherent concept. Not at all with undermining the "weak" sense in which we have it as the ability to operate without external duress. I think that's an inescapable facet of our consciousness and we can no more maintain its denial than we can maintain a Cartesian total doubt.

do you mean "free will" in terms of character-fortitude? I was thinking more in terms of choice buffet, where duress by an external agent decreases the amount of "free will" in the room.

In what sense are they incompatible?

My argument is pretty simple. It seems to me that the concept of moral responsibility is much like religion. Just as religion's social power is weakened by the argument that it is merely a convenient fiction, the social power of "moral responsibility" is weakened by the idea that it is fictional. Not a complaint, just an observation.

i don't think it *is* fictional though, or at least, if it is, then it is only in the same sense that qualia is fictional. It's an inescapable one. I can no more imagine myself as agentless than I can imagine food I'm eating as the deceit of a devil.

You did X, you feel like you decided to X, you feel responsible, you're told you are responsible; telling yourself "it's actually all determined" isn't going to be nearly enough to break the whole illusion.

I cannot help but wonder what Whitney would have thought of all of this.

"How will I know? Don't trust your feelings."

I do NOT believe the children are our future. Time doesn't exist!

Now that we have the Higgs bOson in our bosom free will CERTAINLY cant exist

it all looks the same to me

^^^ about as clear an expression of the absence of free will as you could make (if you were free to do so)

omg! the scales have fallen from my eyes! i cannot even blink of my own volition!

what has come over me? i no longer recognize myself. a stranger inhabits my skin.

unheard of combinations of words clamor to the surface of my mind, struggling to be born into the world. like "plinth-ish paws upraised" or "grabass badass vice chancellors now congregate in the quadrangle to inspect my pectorals". Whence this argle-bargle? what has become of me?

(weeps) (looks for a sign that says EXIT) (finds none) (resumes weeping)

how do you know you really aren't sure if you have free will or not?

So I've been trying to be more aware of and responsive to my body, and it occurred to me that believing in free will is sort of the most extreme denial of the body. Once you're not a substance dualist anymore, wanting free will (in incompatibilist view of it) seems like wanting a magic power. You want somehow to be able to control your brain with what you perceive to be your thoughts?

(I was gonna muster some technical philosophy stuff, but I figured given my limited familiarity with it, it wouldn't be worth my time. I'm going to go read all of this then maybe come back to this.)

it's worse than that - whether you buy or don't buy dualism if the dualists are wrong there's no you making a choice about whether you take a view from that - there's just one you and your attitude even to that is unwilled and inevitable. i'll allow the "ifs"

dualism ain't the only game in town.

but free will is a harder problem than consciousness.

good website though, will read.

Cool website. I've read some of this stuff. If you're interested in a couple of highlights, this article by P. F. Strawson is what set the stage for the contemporary free will debate: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm

This fellow Robert Kane is the leading proponent of the position that we have free will and that free will is incompatible with determinism ("libertarian freedom"): http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousKane.html

from a practical standpoint, does it matter to you guys if free will and something that looks like free will work exactly the same?

Are you asking whether the truth of determinism matters for our practical lives? I think that it does. I have trouble seeing how blame and moral condemnation are justifiable if we aren't free. Whether these attitudes are escapable or not is another question.

that the analytic study of free will seems to have settled into a matter of compatibilism vs incompatiblism (i could be wrong there) seems somewhat mental to me, when actual human beings e.g. not analytic philosophers think about what it means to have free will, are they ever really wondering if we can defy the laws of physics?

well let me ask the question differently -- if there were twins who behaved exactly the same way, but only one of them had free will but you had absolutely no way of telling which one it was, and neither did they, then does it matter to you, say, which one gets stuck with the dry cleaning bill when they both spilled coffee on your suit?

not this again! no one has free will!

they couldn't help it

i can't help not caring that i don't believe in free will

u've got it i swear. just not over atoms. or the controls of power. that's where we're boned.

that the analytic study of free will seems to have settled into a matter of compatibilism vs incompatiblism (i could be wrong there) seems somewhat mental to me, when actual human beings e.g. not analytic philosophers think about what it means to have free will, are they ever really wondering if we can defy the laws of physics?

Actually, I think that this is one case where folk intuitions and philosophers' intuitions line up closely. Ordinary people, if they worry about free will, worry about in these terms. It's a very easy problem to motivate - people get it right away.

peoepl are only patterns that are shaped by the ass they are sliding down

Sometimes I think "should I choose to do x or y" but then I think "am I even capable of choosing to do anything if there is no such thing as free will!!!"

"Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will.

It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other" wikipedia

Do people have some kind of limited control? Influence? Perhaps we do take part in the actions and happenings of the universe but not by ourselves, rather as part of a very complex system. We cannot act alone in the universe independently of it.

Our conscious selves are passengers, both interpreting the world and reconciling decisions made further down in the gears of the clock tower. "You" are not a homunculus surrounded by rusty levers, you're more of a jury deliberating on the evidence after the fact. The nonconscious brain contemplates a move, and the the running model of world/self we call consciousness becomes aware of it sometimes after the telegraph message has left the station.

So, sure, choices are made as one neural pattern asserts itself above others, but whether the outcome is 19th century deterministic or a bit random (quantum fluctuations at the synapses, whatever), there's still no part of the apparatus that defies the constraints of matter.

ya i agree with that

The nonconscious brain contemplates a move

So you are prepared to allow for the idea of contemplation? Wouldn't it be acceptable and far more digestible to say that consciousness *is* that contemplation? The very process that damn well looks like the gathering and weighing up of relevant factors, no matter how mechanistic it might be at root, just is identical with consciousness. Libet experiments purporting to show we aren't conscious of decisions till after they've been made are highly questionable.

By "contemplates", above, I gave the subconscious an intentionality that likely isn't there. The subconscious gets visual input of serpentine shadow, or "2+2=", and the pattern is recognized rather promptly by the associative memory of the neural networks, and only after some delay are we conscious of why we leaped in the other direction or thought "4".

One of my problems with that model is that it seems to distinguish reflective consciousness or introspection from other kinds of consciousness, and assume that that is what we mean when we talk about consciousness. I'm not conscious of "4" until I can go *strokes chin* hmm ah yes "4", how delightful. That kind of reflective consciousness is a very small part of our waking lives, but we are conscious all the time. I think it is a confusion to look back, say, after driving a well known road and say "god I don't think I was conscious at all then , I must have been driving unconsciously." Memory of consciousness != consciousness, examination of consciousness != consciousness. Reports of consciousness are unreliable. So I would say that in your example above, the pattern recognition by "the associative memory of the neural networks" or whatever, just is consciousness. I will accept that ultimately this will be confirmed or denied by neuroscience but we are nowhere near that stage right now.

But that sort of just-is consciousness of driving on autopilot isn't what people are trying to give "free will" to, is it? That claim seems to be for the more, uh, "engaged" levels of consciousness, no?

my point is that "autopilot" consciousness is no such thing, it is engaged. it is engaged with the world, unlike reflective - actually reflexive is the better term - consciousness. looking back and thinking "oh i don't recall being aware" means "oh i don't recall being aware of being aware" which is irrelevant. (this is in a sense conjecture, the light in the refrigerator problem applies: how can we tell what consciousness is like when we are not looking at it? but i think any theory of consciousness that writes us off as zombies for the majority of our waking life is not very helpful or convincing.) (also not sure this is really relevant for free will, die hard determinists will of course say it doesn't matter how engaged and er 'pro-active' yr consciousness is, it's still ultimately just a deterministic mechanism.)

consciousness without awareness also plays a pretty important part in philosophies like Zen or meditation techniques that seek to make the individual feel a sense of unity with the world outside them

i say this as a reasonably convinced but by no means die hard determinist

looking back and thinking "oh i don't recall being aware" means "oh i don't recall being aware of being aware" which is irrelevant.

I don't agree -- "I don't recall being aware" means "I didn't record any of 'my' decisions/actions during this time".

Awareness of awareness is not a necessary component: consider times when you're very actively engaged (eg in a complex sport like skiing, or perhaps the meditation NV's talking about). You aren't necessarily aware of being aware -- your full attention is on the activity -- but you do record it all for later consideration.

It's the access to those memories that makes us feel like we were in charge during those times, I'd say. It's the memories that make the whole co-continuing consciousness janitor's-broom thing hang, basically.

Not having access to the memories is what makes us feel like someone else was in control at that time. You're right that the Libet experiments are dodgy, but if they were proved it would fit: even if we're only given the memory of a decision after the fact, that's still sufficient to make it seem like "our" decision.

I don't agree -- "I don't recall being aware" means "I didn't record any of 'my' decisions/actions during this time".

That is a plausible reading (although I would still warn against the error of taking reflexive consciousness to be the only kind worth considering) but I don't think it helps...

It's the access to those memories that makes us feel like we were in charge during those times

Surely how I felt at the time is more important than how I remember it might have felt, after the fact? Memory is unreliable. Are you really taking "I didn't record any of 'my' decisions/actions during this time" to imply "I didn't (consciously) make any decisions/actions during this time"? Would the same apply to perceptions - I didn't record any of my perceptions, so I didn't have any?

"Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other"

I beg to differ. Buridan's ass illustrates a paradox in rationality, not free will. An ass with free will may make its decision about which item it will seek first based on any methodology that occurs to it; it is not confined to rationality as the sole possible method.

btw, the paradox is easiliy solved by permitting action in cases of indifference based on the need to act, not upon weighting. We've all played the game where someone holds both hands behind their back, but only one hand contains the desired item, and the other player is asked to choose a hand. This game could be played between two computers using extremely simple rules and those rules would not make the actions of the computers paradoxical.

i'm pretty sure i've ended up not getting pizza and almost starving to death on more than a few occasions because deciding parties could not agree on toppings.

Surely how I felt at the time is more important than how I remember it might have felt, after the fact? Memory is unreliable.

Is it more important, though? If I don't remember how I felt while driving on autopilot -- or apparently remember incorrectly -- it doesn't change that I feel no ownership of those actions. There's also the work here on split personalities/psychic breaks/accountability for actions during temporary insanity etc. Not remembering the decisions or feelings of consciousness at the time is paramount importance to all of those.

Are you really taking "I didn't record any of 'my' decisions/actions during this time" to imply "I didn't (consciously) *make* any decisions/actions during this time"?

Would the same apply to perceptions - I didn't record any of my perceptions, so I didn't have any?

Yes, I think so. If I didn't record any of the perceptions at all (and hence have no memory of them) I would naturally assume that *I* didn't have any -- as if I had been under anaesthetic.

It would take some outside evidence -- video of me walking about perhaps -- to convince me that perceptions were being had, and then my next question would be who was having them? Was it me and I can't remember, or was it someone else?

Sanpaku otm

i'm pretty sure i've ended up not getting pizza and almost starving to death on more than a few occasions because deciding parties could not agree on toppings.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:34 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The canonical solution is to just order cheese so everyone can eat in a timely fashion

cheese is the lowliest of nash equilibriums

free will #amandapalmer

I dont see why we should say such stuff as "we don't know what consciousness is" - is it not merely apprehension, sensory information held in the brain's memory, interacting within itself to form logical ideas about the things?

Not merely no

I seem to remember thinking it didnt matter but I forget why!

guys im fine

Can't remember anything I was compelled to write on this thread.

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/index.html

mine hovered btw about 57% and 60%. Better than random but not super impressive

i got it to 50-51%

i think the trick is this: your brain naturally underestimates the probability of strings of the same character under pure randomness (they did experiments to prove this), so a naive attempt at randomness tends to closely resemble the sequence FDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFD and he can predict most of your flips. if you throw in what feels like an unnatural number of same-character-strings FFFFFDDDFFFFDFDFFFF you can throw it off the scent

fdfdfdfdfd or
dfdfdfdfdf

will be highly predictable

i tried the ffffffdddddfffdddd but what's vital are the short dfdfff instances otherwise it starts to make accurate predictions

nah i got blasted back up to 60% and can't make my way back down

that's what happened to me try those short sequences of fdfd

it's p good tho isn't it

ah sorry wasn't saying nah to you but to myself, got xp'd

yeah it's addictive

The algorithm is based on recording sequences of five or so key-presses, then predicting that the most often recurrent patterns you produce will reappear. Since pressing f or d is a pointless activity, the average brain will soon tire of producing novel sequences and begin to repeat itself out of boredom with the task. I would predict that the faster you press the keys, the more likely this unconscious boredom effect will assert itself. The more one consciously decides each keypress based on a good understanding of genuine randomness, together with a strong motivation to outwit the oracle by weeding out repetitive sequences, the less effective the oracle will be.

put your theory to the test and show us your results champ

my results square with aimless's theory. going fast and just typing "randomly", the machine was almost 70% accurate. moving slowly and forcing myself to break patterns, i could keep it well under 60%. a good trick is to rotate your keyboard periodically.

A good strategy for lowering the number is to look away from the keyboard and just bash in the general area of D and F.

I can't get it to give me any results, possibly it needs cookies, which I habitually block.

60% is not good btw

A good strategy for lowering the number is to look away from the keyboard and just bash in the general area of D and F.

― jmm, Friday, June 3, 2016 4:39 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i like this

might try this later once everyone at the office is liquored up

did this for a couple mins and hovered around 45-49%, some wills are freer than others

by the time i got bored it had climbed to 51%, look out everyone i'm literally Joker

getting under 50% is impressive but paradoxically means your sequence may be less random??

teach me how to introduce a little anarchy

xp

getting under 50% is impressive but paradoxically means your sequence may be less random??

my sequence is art and this algorithm is a philistine

i had this about 35% for a while last night - played a lot of long sequences of mostly the same key and broke it up for a little bit when the program started guessing right

dude you needed to screenshoot that

i had no idea what a good score was last night tbh. or how many presses you guys have made altogether. i got bored of it fairly quickly, probably only played < 5 mins

Reviving this thread so maybe we can all choose to use it to discuss free will and return to properly slagging off Richard Dawkins in the Richard Dawkins - Anti-Christ or Great Thinker thread.

one's concept/definition of "free will" seems contingent on so many near-ineffable assumptions about the universe and stuff.. seems like it would be hard not to just be talking past each other

oh that was a dumb post, sorry

hey folks what's y'alls favourite freiwillige selbstkontrolle record

Every debate on free will always fucks off because 1) People begin to use moral arguments in an ontological debate (but without free will, how can society...) and 2) People for some reason think completely free will or complete determinism are the only two possibilities.

otm

3) people who aren't interested in the discussion pile in to tell everybody how not interesting it is

like they're somehow compelled to do so

https://twitter.com/ilikemints/status/840645034978480130

^^^the secret vector of all human compulsions

Pretty sure the quote is from Kathleen McAuliffe's This Is Your Brain on Parasites.

The science on flu viri affecting animal behavior is rather weak, but there's tons on toxoplasmosis. Becoming attracted to cat piss in rodents, but in humans, higher testosterone, more risk taking and road accidents, etc.

It would be crazy to argue that our individual wills exist godlike, floating serenely above all mere physical influence, controlling but never controlled. It is obvious that our will is predicated upon myriads of contributing factors, including the vagaries of vertebrate evolution and whether it is raining at the moment, and it can never be disentangled from them. But even if our will is heavily constrained, nevertheless if one can choose between two nearly indistinguishable actions and effectively act upon that choice, then one's will is not predetermined or predestined and the effects of that choice will propagate into the future.

I've decided I'd rather believe in free will than physical determinism(*). After all I do have direct evidence of free will (though it could be an illusion) and no direct evidence of physical determinism (though the indirect evidence is obviously persuasive, for some).

(*) if we are deciding between those two options, ignoring any third ways suggested by this snippet from above: People for some reason think completely free will or complete determinism are the only two possibilities.

This is a really fun read and helps make an intuitive case for compatibilism, highly recommend: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

very entertaining, on morality and religion and logic as much as on free will. I think it cheats a bit by not specifying *physical* determinism.

but mankind has grown up since then