FREE WILL

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)

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.