The illusion of free will

[C C]

My view might be similar to Yazata's. A biological system would not exist to begin with if it did not conform to reliable patterns of function and structure (i.e., would otherwise just be another disorganized jumble of matter). So "free" cannot refer to an absence of regulation, of being minus the limitations of rule following self-governance; it cannot wholly refer to randomness (though arbitrary factors could play a minor role in creative thought, just as chance / mutability does in an otherwise regulated process of evolution). If "free will" is to be a meaningful term at all, it refers to the autonomy of an entity being able to generate its own plans and responses from inputted data and memory, as opposed to being a marionette totally dependent upon an outer manipulator. Or being like a series of superficial images on a reel of film that are solely guided by the unfolding framework of the movie rather than having their own internal volition-generating components.

The causal contribution of my past states are still MY past states. Any regulating beliefs and innate / acquired tendencies that either compel or prevent me from doing certain things belong to my particular life history (regardless of whether one believes in presentism or eternalism). There are no universal principles / laws devoted to specifically controlling organisms, as gravity determines the paths of celestial bodies and perhaps even the fate of the whole universe. What governs and generates conclusions / behaviors for [from] lizards to humans is neither ubiquitous nor external, but equipment located in those individuals. Decisions and actions are produced by my brain / body -- I'm not a heteronomic puppet of Kim Jong Un, I'm not remote controlled by ridiculous astrological influences of the planets.

Jane Smith may have no choice when she jumps out of the way of a runaway vehicle (i.e., that human body's own conditions for its autonomy would not allow it to be a target). But the decision or reflex to stay alive / avoid injury was produced by her. An old fashioned computer-less robot placed in the road would remain there to be clobbered, because it is a heteronomous agent. Someone / something else external was not around to provide its radioed decisions and behaviors. A blackmailer would be up the creek if the intended victim lacked the capacity to even understand and react to the threat (IOW, at the complex level of intelligent life it takes a will that is "free" from what seeks to control it just to make a judgement that it should be controlled by the outer influence).

 

[barcelonic]

@C C

I guess that makes sense depending on how you see the concept of 'identity'. Like, if I believe that whatever I do, for whatever reason, is still me, then that would be my identity and thus, all choices and actions would be mine. But personally i see that as taking credit for all parts of the body and not just the 'self'.
What i mean to say is like in your last paragraph you touch on what is our 'flight or fight' response. Certainly we can be depressed and stand in front of the car to die, but we cannot take credit for our amygdala which speeds everything up and gets us out of the way double-time

And although there may be no one thing which controls us like the amygdala-free robot, there are too many to ever know, which goes some way to explaining why the idea of illusory free-will can sometimes be seen as a threat and met with contempt. People are afraid of the unknown and they don't like not having answers.

But decisions are many times based on opportunity. Who to marry, whether or not to see a doctor, have a child or many other decisions. The brain must decide what it wants to do by the choices or situations that are presented.

I'm not saying you cannot connect 'opportunity' to free will in some way. I am saying that you mistook what I was talking about (how we make decisions) for opportunity.

 

[Magical Realist]

Libet's conclusions that recorded brain activity signified a decision having been made have been questioned by researchers since then. Here's one study that concludes something entirely different:


Brain might not stand in the way of free will
Updated 14:58 11 July 2013 by Anil Ananthaswamy

"Advocates of free will can rest easy, for now. A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted.

In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet at the University of California in San Francisco, used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain activity of volunteers who had been told to make a spontaneous movement. With the help of a precise timer that the volunteers were asked to read at the moment they became aware of the urge to act, Libet found there was a 200 millisecond delay, on average, between this urge and the movement itself.

But the EEG recordings also revealed a signal that appeared in the brain even earlier – 550 milliseconds, on average – before the action. Called the readiness potential, this has been interpreted as a blow to free will, as it suggests that the brain prepares to act well before we are conscious of the urge to move.

This conclusion assumes that the readiness potential is the signature of the brain planning and preparing to move. "Even people who have been critical of Libet's work, by and large, haven't challenged that assumption," says Aaron Schurger of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Saclay, France.

One attempt to do so came in 2009. Judy Trevena and Jeff Miller of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, asked volunteers to decide, after hearing a tone, whether or not to tap on a keyboard. The readiness potential was present regardless of their decision, suggesting that it did not represent the brain preparing to move. Exactly what it did mean, though, still wasn't clear.

Crossing a threshold

Now, Schurger and colleagues have an explanation. They began by posing a question: how does the brain decide to make a spontaneous movement? They looked to other decision-making scenarios for clues. Previous studies have shown that when we have to make a decision based on visual input, for example, assemblies of neurons start accumulating visual evidence in favour of the various possible outcomes. A decision is triggered when the evidence favouring one particular outcome becomes strong enough to tip its associated assembly of neurons across a threshold.

Schurger's team hypothesised that something similar happens in the brain during the Libet experiment. Volunteers, however, are specifically asked to ignore any external information before they make a spontaneous movement, so the trigger to act must be internal.

The random fluctuations of neural activity in the brain. Schurger's team reasoned that movement is triggered when this neural noise accumulates and crosses a threshold.

To probe the idea, the team first built a computer model of such a neural accumulator. In the model, each time the neural noise crossed a threshold it signified a decision to move. They found that when they ran the model numerous times and looked at the pattern of the neural noise that led up to the decision it looked like a readiness potential.

Next, the team repeated Libet's experiment, but this time if, while waiting to act spontaneously, the volunteers heard a click they had to act immediately. The researchers predicted that the fastest response to the click would be seen in those in whom the accumulation of neural noise had neared the threshold – something that would show up in their EEG as a readiness potential.

This is exactly what the team found. In those with slower responses to the click, the readiness potential was absent in the EEG recordings.

Spontaneous brain activity

"Libet argued that our brain has already decided to move well before we have a conscious intention to move," says Schurger. "We argue that what looks like a pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all. It only looks that way because of the nature of spontaneous brain activity."

So what does this say about free will? "If we are correct, then the Libet experiment does not count as evidence against the possibility of conscious will," says Schurger.

Cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, is impressed by the work, but also circumspect about what it says about free will. "It's a more satisfying mechanistic explanation of the readiness potential. But it doesn't bounce conscious free will suddenly back into the picture," he says. "Showing that one aspect of the Libet experiment can be open to interpretation does not mean that all arguments against conscious free will need to be ejected."

According to Seth, when the volunteers in Libet's experiment said they felt an urge to act, that urge is an experience, similar to an experience of smell or taste. The new model is "opening the door towards a richer understanding of the neural basis of the conscious experience of volition", he says."--http://www.newscientist.com/article...and-in-the-way-of-free-will.html#.Uvu6UGex5y0

Personally, I think freewill is in us in varying degrees and according to varying circumstances. Like your article suggested, who knows if a last minute change of mind isn't in fact freewill vetoing a more determinate and "hardwired" decision. In some circumstances we may have more freewill, while in others we may have little or no freewill at all. I guess it all comes down to what we expect to be able to do in a free state. Can we undo the exigencies of our physical fate? No, but we can certainly act in ways that are less predetermined by the limitations of our physical circumstances. I see freewill like sailing. We may be completely overpowered by the determinative forces of the waves and the wind and ocean currents. But we can creatively albeit precariously coordinate our actions on the cusp of where these forces collide, sailing our boat roughly in the direction we want because of the chaotic indeterminacy of a dozen opposing and interacting causes.

 

[Aqueous Id]

For me there is no issue in philosophy as interesting as free will. I would love to hear from others on this and what their opinions on the matter are. I expect that some will have steadfast beliefs because of Christianity or other religions, but I ask all to have an open mind when discussing this subject.

One shadow hanging over this idea is that it had its roots in religious doctrine. I think it would help to bring it out from under that stigma into the more general realm of science.

As far as I'm concerned science has proven that we do not have free will: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision
Although admittedly this may not be enough in itself to convince everybody.

I don't think so, I just think it's not a scientific term. The more general concept would be "will" (or "motive").

The thing with an illusion is that it seems real. Also, it is important to remember that illusion is not deception, nor does it have to be a bad thing; in this case we have an illusion which is as essential for human life as air or exercise. If we didn't have this illusion then how many of us would become moral nihilists as a result - how many of us would give in to our less empathetic sides.

My tendency is think that at some level of analysis we are little more than animals inhabited by illusion. By that standard I'm not sure how significant the issue of free will is in the overall scheme of things, depending on the context of a person's reason for thinking it. Also, I think that the things that lead us to believe we are slaves or puppets (workers, students, etc.) are unrelated to the underlying nature of the will that motivates us all, and tend to mask out our deeper nature. The same could be said for taboos and rules.

Guilt is a powerful and a very necessary emotion; if I do something bad I need to feel guilty so that I avoid doing that same thing again.

I almost of the opinion that human feelings are rooted in a few essential traits, such as the natural compassion we have for helpless infants. We extend this to all people who are vulnerable or needy, and from this there arises a natural amount of empathy which motivates us to "do what is right". But a lot of life is centered around more neutral experiences. For example, parents will try to make the child smile and laugh out of pure pleasure, not out of an avoidance of any kind of shame. Consequently, they will nurture that child, shelter her and protect her out of the sheer pleasure of doing so. These will turn out to be the most important things they did to further that child's own emergence into the world as a well-adjusted, self-reliant person -- with her own highly developed sense of self-determination -- which you might equate with 'free will'.

It serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

You see the compassion for altricious young most readily in birds. Typically both parents will run themselves ragged tending to their screaming chicks. I mention birds also because they arose in an evolutionary niche that favored the success of dependent young (ancestral reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc generally give birth to precocious young). These genetic causes for our reasons to "do what is right" therefore run very deep.

I'd like to know, among those who believe their will is free, the number one point they would raise to support that position (or the biggest obstacle to accepting the illusory nature of free will).

I think of "free will" as a religious-derived interpretation of biological traits. Organisms make choices as a matter of survival: they choose the best habitat, food source and mate according to a very complex combination of genetic, imprinted and learned behaviors. The brains of vertebrate animals provide for this, so that something as basic as choosing to flick the tongue when a fly buzzes nearby may be just about all it takes, in terms of brain function, to drive the sparrow to sacrifice its own health, comfort and safety in order to care for its helpless young.

 

[Sarkus]

Under your belief system, it was determined a long time (millions of years ago - or billions?) what shirt you would wear today. That's about the height of garbage and stupidity. (Shrug)

The universe does not need to be strictly deterministic (i.e. your example) in order for freewill to be an illusion. Randomness also doesn't allow for a genuine freewill.

To me it depends on what one defines as free-will.
As Yataza suggests, if you define it as the "I" making a conscious and uncoerced selection from among competing options, this is making a "free" choice, and could be seen as being an exercise of free-will.

If that is what one considers free-will to be then there should be no disagreement, for at the very basic level it is defined by what we consciously accept that we are doing: our consciousness would be the arbiter of whether we are "free" in our selection.

However, if the lack of freedom of that selection is actually hidden from our consciousness, then it becomes irrelevant what our consciousness thinks or decides on the matter: it will see freedom where none may actually reside.
I think our consciousness can only be aware of the gross influences, and the more we analyse a situation the more we can consciously understand smaller influences.
But we can never understand the micro- and quantum- level influences in isolation, only once they have manifested into a suitably large influence.

And that disconnect in our understanding, between what our conscious can be aware of and what actually drives the underlying interactions, is what I think leads some (such as myself) to consider free-will to be illusory - in that we hold the underlying activity (at micro- and quantum- levels) to be deterministic, albeit with randomness thrown in.

So, if we are only defining free-will at the conscious appearance level (i.e. how it appears to our conscience) then it exists - and we exercise it all the time.
If we look at levels below consciousness, there are arguments for it being illusory, depending on how you view the nature of the micro- and quantum interactions.

But one can not define free-will at the level of conscious appearance AND then say that this proves that it is not illusory if you look at the quantum / micro levels.
I think those that define it at the level of consciousness only should also be aware that that is the level they have defined it at, and that thus limits the validity of their "free will is genuine" claim.



And no, the colour of my shirt was not determined at the dawn of time, but it was a possibility back then, depending on how the randomness played out.


And least that's how I see this issue, although could go on and on and on and... which I have a habit of doing on such threads, much to the annoyance of others, I'm sure.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

The experiment referred to in the OP is interesting.
But how do you make a "decision" to press a button with either your right or left hand?
It is a decision with no consequences. What factors would you take into consideration to make your decision?
I guess that many people might adopt the same tactics as someone picking lottery numbers.
An attempt at randomness which is not random at all.

I wonder if any test subjects adopted the strategy of picking the same hand all the time?
Obviously, they know that they are free to change that strategy at any time.
If so, how did their decisions differ from someone adopting the "random" strategy?
If there is no free will, the results should be the same.


My current point of view on free will is that we have it, but to a far less extent than we think we do.

Proposal.
It is impossible to defend the view that every act that we perform consciously is free will.
Does anyone disagree with that proposal?

 

[iceaura]

Freedom of the will is what drug addicts and OCD sufferers have less of.

The contribution of neuroscience so far is description of the substrate - if someone is arguing the human will is supernatural, without physical substrate, then the recent findings of neuroscience indicate that they are wrong, if they didn't already know.

Most people here are making no such argument, and so the findings of neuroscience inform rather than contradict them.

The common error of those who deny freedom of the will is to overlook the level at which cause and effect explanations make sense in any given pattern of event. Substrates do not cause patterns - they may constrain them, limit them in some fashion, but not cause them. Neurons do not cause mental events on the level of conscious decision and will. Other mental events on that level cause them. The patterns of firing in the brain are themselves entities, things, that have cause and effect relationships. Ideas cause ideas, not neurons.

 

[barcelonic]

One shadow hanging over this idea is that it had its roots in religious doctrine. I think it would help to bring it out from under that stigma into the more general realm of science.
I don't think so, I just think it's not a scientific term. The more general concept would be "will" (or "motive").
My tendency is think that at some level of analysis we are little more than animals inhabited by illusion. By that standard I'm not sure how significant the issue of free will is in the overall scheme of things, depending on the context of a person's reason for thinking it. Also, I think that the things that lead us to believe we are slaves or puppets (workers, students, etc.) are unrelated to the underlying nature of the will that motivates us all, and tend to mask out our deeper nature. The same could be said for taboos and rules
I almost of the opinion that human feelings are rooted in a few essential traits, such as the natural compassion we have for helpless infants. We extend this to all people who are vulnerable or needy, and from this there arises a natural amount of empathy which motivates us to "do what is right". But a lot of life is centered around more neutral experiences. For example, parents will try to make the child smile and laugh out of pure pleasure, not out of an avoidance of any kind of shame. Consequently, they will nurture that child, shelter her and protect her out of the sheer pleasure of doing so. These will turn out to be the most important things they did to further that child's own emergence into the world as a well-adjusted, self-reliant person -- with her own highly developed sense of self-determination -- which you might equate with 'free will'.
You see the compassion for altricious young most readily in birds. Typically both parents will run themselves ragged tending to their screaming chicks. I mention birds also because they arose in an evolutionary niche that favored the success of dependent young (ancestral reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc generally give birth to precocious young). These genetic causes for our reasons to "do what is right" therefore run very deep.
I think of "free will" as a religious-derived interpretation of biological traits. Organisms make choices as a matter of survival: they choose the best habitat, food source and mate according to a very complex combination of genetic, imprinted and learned behaviors. The brains of vertebrate animals provide for this, so that something as basic as choosing to flick the tongue when a fly buzzes nearby may be just about all it takes, in terms of brain function, to drive the sparrow to sacrifice its own health, comfort and safety in order to care for its helpless young.

There has definitely been a great deal of influence from the Church throughout the years. After all, god created us in his image (haven't you heard lol) and god apparently has free will
One of the reasons this issue is very important is criminal justice. After a war zone, prison is one of the worst places to be and I for one don't like the idea of sending people there who would never reoffend. I also dont like the idea of mentally-ill people being sent there because their crimes were particularly distasteful/disgusting. If we can discover more about the many factors that cause human decisions we can drag our justice system into the next age and be rightly proud of that.
Indeed we grow up with every reason to believe in free will - that is a tough sell from my point of view lol
And our morals are biologically influenced as you point out, rendering useless the idea that we get our 'moral compasses' from religious texts, which is what many still believe.

I had a hamster as a kid and I would be able to predict with astonishing accuracy the precise path it would walk on the rug. And all i had to do to achieve this wonderful feat was to place a series of books down so as to make a maze.

And least that's how I see this issue, although could go on and on and on and... which I have a habit of doing on such threads, much to the annoyance of others, I'm sure.

Thanks Sarkus - good to have you here

The experiment referred to in the OP is interesting.
But how do you make a "decision" to press a button with either your right or left hand?
It is a decision with no consequences. What factors would you take into consideration to make your decision?
I guess that many people might adopt the same tactics as someone picking lottery numbers.
An attempt at randomness which is not random at all.

I wonder if any test subjects adopted the strategy of picking the same hand all the time?
Obviously, they know that they are free to change that strategy at any time.
If so, how did their decisions differ from someone adopting the "random" strategy?
If there is no free will, the results should be the same.


My current point of view on free will is that we have it, but to a far less extent than we think we do.

Proposal.
It is impossible to defend the view that every act that we perform consciously is free will.
Does anyone disagree with that proposal?

Hi CK,

Indeed it is not random even though those subjects most likely thought they were picking randomly. Marketers and magicians know this all too well.
For me, the fact that marketers and magicians can bank on us being dependably predictable means that they must think it's an illusion too.
The reason the results aren't the same is because we're all different; we've been shaped differently throughout our lives and even before that in the womb.
Technically that isn't one reason but an unknowable but near-infinite amount lol

EDIT:

Freedom of the will is what drug addicts and OCD sufferers have less of.

I think you might mean 'willpower'.

 

[Magical Realist]

So, if we are only defining free-will at the conscious appearance level (i.e. how it appears to our conscience) then it exists - and we exercise it all the time.
If we look at levels below consciousness, there are arguments for it being illusory, depending on how you view the nature of the micro- and quantum interactions.

So what are you proposing? That freewill is both real AND illusory? That it is perhaps in a superposition of contrary states, much as was Schrodinger's cat?

 

[Aqueous Id]

There has definitely been a great deal of influence from the Church throughout the years. After all, god created us in his image (haven't you heard lol) and god apparently has free will

This why I think of it more as a religious term than anything else. Notice how neutral it sounds if you just speak of "will". And that's the actual biological trait that's in play. I think the subject reached the popularity it has merely because of the Reformation, and the alternative logic that evolved(predestination).

One of the reasons this issue is very important is criminal justice. After a war zone, prison is one of the worst places to be and I for one don't like the idea of sending people there who would never reoffend. I also dont like the idea of mentally-ill people being sent there because their crimes were particularly distasteful/disgusting. If we can discover more about the many factors that cause human decisions we can drag our justice system into the next age and be rightly proud of that.

Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, waterboarding and "extraordinary rendition" come to mind. Also stuff like this:

Verneal Jimerson and Dennis Williams were two of the so-called Ford Heights Four, a south suburb in Cook County. The primary testimony against them came from a seventeen-year-old girl, with an IQ of less than sixty who police said was an accomplice in the murder of a couple. Seventeen years later, Jimerson, Williams and two others serving lesser sentences were released after new DNA tests revealed that none of them were linked to the crime. Later that year, two other men confessed to the crime and were [put in] prison. Seventeen years! Seventeen years! Can you imagine serving even one day on Death Row for a crime you did not commit?
-- Gov. George Ryan
​

When he was still only known at the state level, Obama was asked to participate in the committee which reviewed discrepancies like this and which basically halted executions there. Of course these are a small percentage of all prisoners. Now you have to wonder about the ones falsely convicted of crimes for which no DNA was involved -- they may have no chance of being freed after serving half their lives in prison. Then you have the ones doing stiff penalities for relatively petty crimes. Finally you have the onces who meet horrific abuse, injury or death -- whether inflicted by fellow inmates, guards or the medical staff.

But I like your idea about eventualy learning more about how the brain works, such that it may lead to more just punishments. I'm reminded of the idea from Star Trek in which future generations arrive at such a better position on this that crime is all but wiped from the face of the Earth.

Indeed we grow up with every reason to believe in free will - that is a tough sell from my point of view lol
And our morals are biologically influenced as you point out, rendering useless the idea that we get our 'moral compasses' from religious texts, which is what many still believe.

At some point I think kids are getting so much better information than their parents got that they will almost universally come to accept that all of ethics, and all human empathy from which it stems, are wired into us genetically.

I had a hamster as a kid and I would be able to predict with astonishing accuracy the precise path it would walk on the rug. And all i had to do to achieve this wonderful feat was to place a series of books down so as to make a maze.

Rodents are several of the many genera that have evolved a nearly photographic memory of routes through space. Considering how strong the trait is in marine animals alone, we can consider it one of those primitive brain functions inherited by the other main classes of animals that followed them. In my view this was one of the primordial causes for the evolution of learning. Something like color or shape of prey, or of mate, could just as well have been conveyed through hardwire programming, or imprinting. But every route is unique and has to be learned on the fly. Even insects (ants and bees come to mind) can be very adept at this, and they can be traced to marine invertebrates(emerging after the trilobites) which speaks to the pressures for brain capacity placed on animals even before the first vertebrates. Obvisouly learning involves a little more than strictly memory. But it's conceivable that once there was pressure to apply memory with spatial processing, the groundwork for higher learning was laid.

 

[Sarkus]

So what are you proposing? That freewill is both real AND illusory? That it is perhaps in a superposition of contrary states, much as was Schrodinger's cat?

No, nothing as grand as that.
I am merely saying whether we think freewill exists or not seems to be, for most arguments I have seen on the matter, whether you define it merely as how our consciousness perceives it, or whether you are defining it as being inherent within the underlying workings of the universe etc.
If you define it as the former, it is not difficult to say that such freewill exists, because you are building into the definition that it is a matter of what we consciously perceive.
If you define freewill as the latter, I can not see how you can think it anything but illusory: I.e. that it is not genuine and it is only an appearance/illusion (I.e. the former).

You will notice that those who claim that freewill obviously exists tend to do so from a definition along the lines of the former, even if they are not aware of it.

Think of it the same way as you might consider a mirage of a pool of water: is the mirage an illusion, or is it real? Well, if you define it as being the water itself, then it is merely an illusion of what you define it to be; if you define it as being a perception of water (e.g. caused by bending of light) then it is real, as you have built into your definition that it is a matter of perception.

With regard those who claim freewill to be real and not a matter or perception, I think what they will struggle with is explaining how it can be anything other than a perception if the underlying nature of the universe is deterministic (albeit probabilistically so), without there needing to be uncaused and non-random effects.
If they are claiming that the water they see is genuinely water, then they should be able to go and take a drink from it, or at least show how it is possible when the apparently probabilistically deterministic (for want of a better phrase) nature of the universe does not allow for it.

Alternative arguments undoubtedly exist if they assume the universe not to be in any way (probabilistically) deterministic, but they'd first need to convince me of the validity of that assumption.

 

[barcelonic]

@Aqueous_Id

Annoyingly, i wouldn't have been able to use the hamster example to a devout Christian because they tend to believe that humans are the only animals with free will because we are the only animals created in God's image.
To me, this is a concept even harder to grasp!

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Have you got a link to that theology?
Obviously those Christians have never dragged a dog on a lead when it wants to examine something,
or tried to make a horse walk over ground it doesn't think is secure.

I don't think that intelligent animals suffer from remorse, but they share most of our emotions.
"Intelligent" does not include hamsters, which are cute and funny, but terminally stupid.
The Einstein of hamsters is one that can quickly find its feeding bowl when you move it two inches.

 

[Magical Realist]

With regard those who claim freewill to be real and not a matter or perception, I think what they will struggle with is explaining how it can be anything other than a perception if the underlying nature of the universe is deterministic (albeit probabilistically so), without there needing to be uncaused and non-random effects.
If they are claiming that the water they see is genuinely water, then they should be able to go and take a drink from it, or at least show how it is possible when the apparently probabilistically deterministic (for want of a better phrase) nature of the universe does not allow for it.

I suppose this all hinges on what we mean by deterministic and to what extent that underlying process either excludes or allows for some element of indeterminacy. Take a chaotic system for example. While clearly it is a deterministic system, there emerges from it a certain non-linear aspect that opens it up to unpredictability. By non-linear I mean the whole process being sensitive to the most minicule of changes. Freewill wouldn't have to be going on all the time in this model. Just say at certain crucial points in the intraneural storm--a shift from some neurons to other ones--which consequently affects huge changes in the course of the process. If brain activity is a chaotic system, we would seem to have an instance of indeterminacy emerging from what was previously a totally determinate system. Freewill could be the top level conscious "whole" exerting its gentle influence back on the bottom level unconscious firings. Paradoxically this entails a system that is as completely determinate as it is unpredictable.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319224532.htm

 

[Sarkus]

I suppose this all hinges on what we mean by deterministic and to what extent that underlying process either excludes or allows for some element of indeterminacy.

By deterministic I mean that if you apply the same inputs you get the same output. By "probabilistically deterministic" I mean that if you apply the same inputs you get the same probability function of output.
Indeterminacy I would see as the probabilistic aspect of this... the crystallisation of a random possibility while adhering to the probability function. E.g. ther audio active decay of a particle seems to be random, yet it follows a probability function from which we derive the half-life etc.

Take a chaotic system for example. While clearly it is a deterministic system, there emerges from it a certain non-linear aspect that opens it up to unpredictability. By non-linear I mean the whole process being sensitive to the most minicule of changes. Freewill wouldn't have to be going on all the time in this model. Just say at certain crucial points in the intraneural storm--a shift from some neurons to other ones--which consequently affects huge changes in the course of the process. If brain activity is a chaotic system, we would seem to have an instance of indeterminacy emerging from what was previously a totally determinate system. Freewill could be the top level conscious "whole" exerting its gentle influence back on the bottom level unconscious firings.

Sure, the mechanism of freewill could be a case of tipping the scales on judgements, feedback loops, any number of means by which it appears that we make decisions.
But if everything is part of the grand chain of cause and effect, the mechanism becomes just a part of that chain, and thus ultimately irrelevant in terms of its detail beyond it following cause and effect and being deterministic (allowing for indeterminacy as mentioned above).

I.e. The mechanism of choice is either part of the chain or it isn't. Now we know that non-random events can seem to be uncaused, but randomness is not freewill, unless we consider dice to exert their freewill when landing on a number. Freewill (to be more than just the appearance of) would seem to require an uncaused and non-random event to influence the existing chain of cause and effect.
Know of any such things?

 

[Magical Realist]

I.e. The mechanism of choice is either part of the chain or it isn't. Now we know that non-random events can seem to be uncaused, but randomness is not freewill, unless we consider dice to exert their freewill when landing on a number.

But freewill and randomness may both be examples of indeterminacy emerging from causal processes. This is not to say that freewill is randomness nor that randomness is freewill. Just indeterminate in terms of their outcomes. Other kinds of indeterminacy would be quantum indeterminacy and closed timelike curves.

Freewill (to be more than just the appearance of) would seem to require an uncaused and non-random event to influence the existing chain of cause and effect.
Know of any such things?

Why uncaused? In chaotic systems we have perfectly determinate causal processes going own at the bottom level, while at the top level we have a sort of emergent indeterminacy. The determinant aspect is linked to linear processes, while the indeterminate aspect appears to be linked to non-linear processes. One trait of brain processes that seems crucial in consciousness and perhaps freewill is the synchronization of neural firings or phase relationship of brain waves. (see article on gamma waves below). With this process you wouldn't even have to change the course of the linear firings. Just slow down or speed up various parallel firings to achieve a fine-tuned self-orchestrated whole. Freewill then more a matter of timing than of actual chains of neural firings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_wave

A lead article by Andreas K. Engel et al. in the journal Consciousness and Cognition (1999) that argues for temporal synchrony as the basis for consciousness, defines the gamma wave hypothesis thus:

"The hypothesis is that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information."

Role in attentive focus

The suggested mechanism is that gamma waves relate to neural consciousness via the mechanism for conscious attention:

"The proposed answer lies in a wave that, originating in the thalamus, sweeps the brain from front to back, 40 times per second, drawing different neuronal circuits into synch with the precept, and thereby bringing the precept into the attentional foreground. If the thalamus is damaged even a little bit, this wave stops, conscious awarenesses do not form, and the patient slips into profound coma."

Thus the claim is that when all these neuronal clusters oscillate together during these transient periods of synchronized firing, they help bring up memories and associations from the visual precept to other notions. This brings a distributed matrix of cognitive processes together to generate a coherent, concerted cognitive act, such as perception. This has led to theories that gamma waves are associated with solving the binding problem.

Gamma waves are observed as neural synchrony from visual cues in both conscious and subliminal stimuli.This research also sheds light on how neural synchrony may explain stochastic resonance in the nervous system. They are also implicated in REM sleep, which involves visualizations, and also during anesthesia."

 

[Aqueous Id]

@Aqueous_Id

Annoyingly, i wouldn't have been able to use the hamster example to a devout Christian because they tend to believe that humans are the only animals with free will because we are the only animals created in God's image.
To me, this is a concept even harder to grasp!

Once science began to explain the mysteries which religions had relegated to their gods, there was a reactionary element which found it necessary to disavow the science, while the mainstream religions were grappling with the discoveries, and a few of them even came out in favor of science. Unfortunately there had been an upwelling of Anabaptist Christianity in America at about the same time (say, Victorian era, when catastrophism was proven false) and that movement captured the hearts and minds of those reactionaries and preserved for us this bizarre anti-science phenomenon that has been so active in the US in the last decade.

It's hard to say for sure how people of antiquity would have reacted to news that the universe was created in a Big Bang, or that humans evolved from ape-like protohumans. But its hard to imagine that they would cling to superstition once the cat was out of the bag. That leaves present-day descendants of the Anabaptists as some entirely distinct species of thinker - one that needs to disavow all evidence which contradicts their presumptions, and to rely on a single most mysterious and illogical statement of all causation, just to make it through the day.

Most all of the "God Exists" blogs rely on raking science over the coals, merely because they wish to retrofit God into the puzzle already largely solved by science. I'm of the opinion that, as to the question of a progenitor for human aspects like empathy, the answers lie in biology, not mythology, and not even physics, so such arguments tend to be off track. Once we note that adverse emotions are mainly nothing more than manifestations of the defense mechanism, while the better behaviors that stem from empathy are traceable to all species that tend to their young -- and who will defend their mate, their pack and even their own kind from predators -- then we can quickly see the irrelevance of any imaginary cause for our humanness. Obviously we need more than just biology -- we have to examine human conduct in the context of primitive cultures, and civilized ones, and we need to introduce the rather unusual human trait of personality into this, and the complex of ideas about behavior as it applies to the thoughts and feelings that precede action. But biology certainly gives us that starting point, since we can now trace so many human traits to even the most primitive of organisms.

Even the simple sperm cell resembles the flagellates that make up sponges and algae, whereas the egg resembles spores used by algal colonies during the evolutionary phase when life forms were crossing over from asexual to sexual reproduction. And in fact we could build a laundry list of examples.

 

[superstring01]

My thought on "free will" is that it's one of those fields that for me is ultimately pointless to ponder. If I'm right (that we have free will, which one day may be demonstrated by our understanding of quantum mechanics), then I'm right and there's nothing left to say. We have choice, we have options and choices have consequences. If I'm wrong (that we are a bag of predestined particles whose trajectory was started with the Big Bang and whose culmination in our bodies is merely an exponentially more complex game of billiards with balls bouncing into each other), then pondering it doesn't matter either. I'm predestined to say it and think it.

It's an important thing to ponder for really cutting edge scientists/philosophers, but for the average person it's meaningless because -- regardless of which side is right -- it will have no meaning or impact. We either have free will or we don't. Even if proven tomorrow (that we don't), I will still happily go through my life, but only under the conclusion that I was destined to be happy and still be happy to be alive.

~String

 

[Yazata]

If "free will" is to be a meaningful term at all, it refers to the autonomy of an entity being able to generate its own plans and responses from inputted data and memory, as opposed to being a marionette totally dependent upon an outer manipulator.

Yes, that's pretty much what I think as well.

As you suggested, part of the problem here is figuring out what the phrase 'free will' means. It obviously doesn't mean totally random behavior. It doesn't mean behavior that's totally unrelated to everything that went before and from one's present situation.

My tendency is to think that a behavior is an intentional action if it derives from the actor's own internal decision processes. It would seemingly qualify as a free action if it derives from the actor's own purposes and motivations, without these being coerced or constricted too grievously. (If I tell somebody to do X or else I'll kill their child, I'm not sure that I'd want to call the resulting decision to do X a free choice.)

The more metaphysical question is, even when we feel that be are acting freely, whether causality determines our purposes and motivations so completely that we are reduced to being, as you say, mere marionettes, with causality pulling the strings. That's the deterministic challenge, I guess.

An idea that's typically associated with free-will is the idea that we could have chosen to do something different, if we had wanted to. I don't think that's necessarily inconsistent with this sort of causal determinism. If we act in accordance with our own knowledge, purposes, goals, judgements and so on, there's no problem in saying that we might have done something else if these had been different. But in order for these to have been different, something in the past would presumably have had to have been different.

By deterministic I mean that if you apply the same inputs you get the same output. By "probabilistically deterministic" I mean that if you apply the same inputs you get the same probability function of output.

That sounds good to me.

Ok, the question at this point seems to be whether there a 'chain of causation' that extends all the way back to the big-bang presumably, that absolutely determines every event that happens in the entire universe subsequently.

I'm skeptical about that.

For one thing, there's chaos and non-linear dynamics. Many dynamical processes appear to be very dependent on precise initial conditions. Even the slightest differences in these might lead to dramatic differences in how a physical system subsequently evolves. There's the so-called 'butterfly effects' and stuff.

It's possible to argue that chaotic dynamics is still entirely deterministic, with the subsequent evolution of the system still fully determined by the initial conditions. But even infinitesimal differences in initial conditions might make a huge difference in how the system evolves.

On the microscale, things might not be totally deterministic at all. Individual quantum events might arguably be better described as probabilistically deterministic. In other words, there might be a lack of clear and precise specification to all aspects of physical reality, down there on the very finest scale.

And there are lots of microscale events taking place. Later ones will presumably be causally dependent (in a probabilistic way) on earlier (probabilistic) ones. So whatever built-in imprecision that exists might compound over time.

Combining that with the chaos idea, suggests that perhaps there's some under-determination, some fundamental unpredictability, inherent in how at least some physical systems evolve.

As a result of these kind of thoughts, my speculation (that's all it is) is that while causality does seem to be pretty much universal, it may not be precisely deterministic for more than relatively short periods of time. The universe might be increasingly stochastic on the longer time-scales. (Entropy may or may not be associated with that.) There might conceivably be a fundamental unpredictability built into its physical nature.

Returning to the free-will problem, our actions do seem to be fairly well determined on the shortest time-scale. Our decisions do seem to be determined by our present physical circumstances, by our desires, by our knowledge, by our values, by our memories, and by our past histories more broadly. But the further back in time we push that, the fuzzier it gets. Eventually it gets kind of ridiculous, as it seems to me to be when somebody insists that my personal choices today were already entirely determined by events that happened long before the Earth condensed from primordial dust and rock.

 

[Sarkus]

But freewill and randomness may both be examples of indeterminacy emerging from causal processes. This is not to say that freewill is randomness nor that randomness is freewill. Just indeterminate in terms of their outcomes. Other kinds of indeterminacy would be quantum indeterminacy and closed timelike curves.

But this seems akin to saying: well, we know things are indeterminate, we deem freewill to be indeterminate, therefore freewill exists.
I have no issue with indeterminacy, but it is how freewill arises from that.
Considering it an emergent processes is just another term for illusory: i.e. it exists as a property of some forms of matter but does not exist at lower forms but is still driven by the causal processes. This is what I would classify as defining freewill so as to include the illusion within its nature.
It may be indeterminate from its underlying causes, but that itself does not make it freewill.
If one accepts the concept of emergent properties, then such an argument would require all emergent properties, by dint of their indeterminacy, to also be considered "freewill".

Why uncaused?

If one considers freewill to be more than just the chain of causation (whether the chain leads to indeterminate processes or not is irrelevant in the case in question) then to influence the chain with a decision that is itself not the outcome of a previous cause (i.e. not itself part and parcel of the chain) requires the influence to be uncaused.
Now while there do seem to exist uncaused events, these are just random - hence the need for freewill (other than when encapsulating within the term/definition the nature of its illusion) to require uncaused non-random events.