In the past, I’ve tripped over the fact that it really upsets people to suggest that free will is an illusion, even though it’s hard for me to see how you could arrive at any other conclusion. The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other? The only way I can see that being possible is if the choices presented were of equal value to the person, and then the different choices would be more a matter of chance than will.
Most people probably don’t think about that sort of thing much, but one of those who does is the blogger writerdd at Skepchick, who denies that we are either ensouled (which is important and I’ll come back to it) or that we have free will. And she has some scientific evidence that’s unsettling to people attached to free will.
ou may think you decided to read this story — but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.
In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.
The decision studied — whether to hit a button with one’s left or right hand — may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?
My problem with the concept of free will is that I think it’s overrated. I think, as I’ve said before in another way, that it’s an important concept only because it’s primarily a religious concept. “Free will” outside of a theistic worldview doesn’t make the same sort of sense it does in a believer’s world. The issue is only important because it was initially a theological issue—if god is omniscient and omnipotent, then how can he hold people accountable for sin when he made them sinners? Doesn’t god bear the final responsibility for the actions of people, and if so, isn’t he an asshole to program people to fuck up and then punish them for it? To handle the conundrum, I think, theologists invented free will as a cheat to make their worldview work.
From a non-religious worldview, I think it’s a moot point. Those who want to argue for it point to criminal justice as a problem, but I don’t buy that. Introducing the concept of punishment changes the environment, and the factors weighed by the brain when making a decision, so it doesn’t actually touch the point of free will. Any kind of environmental change that affects the final decision is an argument for the fact that we’re machines making calculations. Plus, what part of the will is free? It would have to be this thing outside of the neurons firing in your brain, and like writerdd, I don’t accept that there’s a dimension to self outside of the physical body.
In fact, I think there’s potential social benefits from getting past the idea of free will. How many dumb conservative ideas come back to the notion that strength of will is the major factor? From welfare (they need to choose their way out of poverty!) to the Iraq war (it’s a matter of wanting to win bad enough!) , there’s this obsession. We have tons of very privileged white men who think they do better than everyone else because they chose their fate, and the rest of us are just bad choice makers. The egotistic need we all have to believe in free will contributes to this serious problem.
Of course, this entire conflict does show that fundies are right that religion and science are locked in a struggle for hegemony, and probably can’t coexist as peacefully as some of us would like to claim.
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“The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other?”
Yes, because it is actually physically impossible to create such a copy — that is, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that we cannot know enough to create such a replica. And chaos theory tells us that we can have very large sensitivities to very tiny changes in initial conditions when dealing with complex systems such as a person.
Would you be able to predict the other person’s preferences to a high degree of certainty? Absolutely. But not with total accuracy. It physically cannot be done.
I don’t think the idea of free will is even well posed. Every attemp to define it ends up being some variation on having a homunculus running the show (though the homunculus is often very well hidden). So does the homunculus have free will? Is it Homunculi all the way down?
Part of the problem with this issue, I think, is that the phrase “free will” really doesn’t have a definition. Attempting to discuss it dispassionately as an empirical concept when its entire history is, as you say, tied up in theology, is an effort doomed to failure.
I much prefer to say “personal autonomy.” Less baggage attached.
There is also a RadioLab episode with a segment on this topic from a while back: Beyond Time. They reported on a similar test having to do with your brain waves when you wiggle your finger, very interesting.
I noticed you had reviewed the one on biological engineering the other day, so you may enjoy this one if you haven’t already heard it.
Yeah, I’m with Kimmit. The science doesn’t really back you up. Even if some so-called “decisions” can be predicted, it doesn’t mean all can. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, the predictability of behavior operates on a continuum, with unpredictability being a fundamental part of the system. If all the behaviors of a particular creature or class of creatures was predictable, and therefore lacking “free will,” those creatures would be at a spectacular disadvantage from an evolutionary standpoint.
It’s also easy to grouse about free will in the context of a fictional television series, where the actual complexities of living in the universe are replaced by the whims of writers and each character is easily distilled into just a few (instead of billions) of what Amanda calls “personality traits.” Actual humans operate in a far more complex environment, where choices are not always as easy as “what shall I have for lunch today.” Although Amanda is basically correct that (and I’m paraphrasing) that behavior occurs at the intersection of genetics and the environment, she is mistaken that those interactions are always predictable and that choice is therefore an illusion.
I won’t touch on the theology she outlined because it’s been handled so well elsewhere, mostly by people living in the last two centuries. Amanda, I’d recommend Tillich’s “Systematic Theology” (its in three volumes, though, beware and is VERY dense) if you really want to engage those kinds of questions.
As someone who does not think there are nearly enough opportunities to say “homunculus” in daily conversation I just want to say that this
Is it Homunculi all the way down?
made my heart sing.
“In fact, I think there’s potential social benefits from getting past the idea of free will. How many dumb conservative ideas come back to the notion that strength of will is the major factor? From welfare (they need to choose their way out of poverty!) to the Iraq war (it’s a matter of wanting to win bad enough!) , there’s this obsession.”
I can see potential problems arising from society, and especially government, abandoning the idea of free will. If you excise the concept of fairness from state punishment, for example, it becomes easier to justify horrific punishments to deter minor crimes. Without a belief in free will it becomes harder to justify defending people’s freedom of association, speech, etc. when short term societal goals deemed to be for the greater good compromise such individual freedoms.
I am not saying that draconian oppression follows logically from a universe without free will, but perhaps the idea being integral to public policy directed by imperfect individuals has dangers on par with its converse.
I’m with Dan and Togolosh on this one. I think most discussions about “Free Will” wind up covertly revolving around unspoken, unexplored assumptions about what we expect “Free Will” to mean. As Amanda notes most of these assumptions are religious, which means that if you try to analyze the question of free will without the assumptions imposed by religion you just get nonsense, the question doesn’t even make sense.
What confuses me most is this thing where free will and determinism are treated as mutually exclusive ideas. Why is free will treated as the same thing as nobody being able to predict your actions? Can’t a system be simultaneously transparent and autonomous, or on the other hand unpredictable but only because it is completely ruled by chance?
I’ve been reading two books on neuroscience. My most recent is “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker. He argues AGAINST the idea of a Blank Slate. We are born with certain predispositions, but many are resistant because they fear it means racism, violence, sexism are inevitable. Both left and right have “attacked” these views. I think that its a pretty good book from what I’ve read.
He doesn’t really address the question of the existance of free will.
Though another neuroscientist, Jeffrey Schwartz, does. His Book, “The Mind and the Brain” talks about how plastic our physical brain is, and how that plasticity has been demonstrated, in several studies, to be a result of mental effort on the part of the individual.
There is even a chapter, I’ve tried to read over a couple of times, describing a theory of quantium physics that might explain how the brain can choose freely even though there are predisposed probabilities that can be calculated.
The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force - Jeffrey Scwartz
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker.
also Steven Pinker exaplains why his views are not “deterministic” as Mr Scwartz might say (I’m guessing, that’s what he’d say)
@kimmit&Furious|T|
Just because something isn’t predictable doesn’t mean that it’s any less mechanical or “predetermined”
I don’t think you can make a complete argument along the lines you do by only considering the Christian worldview and a atheistic worldview. There are/were religions with non-omnipotent god(s). Why does Buddhism or Hindu or Shinto teach about free will?
that study doesn’t say anything about free will. It just says that the process of making a decision takes longer than it appears to on the surface. If anything it argues for a semi mystical view of free will, in which our decisions are made deeper in our conscious than we realise.
Amanda’s argument sounds too much like the ideas of Descartes, which I am under the understanding have been thoroughly debunked.
I also don’t think we need any special philosophical or scientific insights into this problem. We all know we have free will, and that’s that.
I read the linked article and wondered how they controlled for handedness. I know that since I’m left-handed, it takes more of a conscious effort when I have to do something with my right hand, even when it’s something as seemingly simple as pushing a button. Did they make sure that everyone they chose was right-handed? That they had equal numbers of left- and right-handed people?
As an atheist with a bit of a background in cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind (and a proponent of strong AI), I’m not sure I really understand the argument that’s being made here.
“I decided to do this of my own free will” is not exclusive with “my neurons fired in such a way that I did this” are not exclusive - that’s what “I decided” means.
Conscious choice is only an illusion inasmuch as consciousness is an illusion. That it exists doesn’t mean it has to be something outside of the mechanical processes of our brain and our environment.
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having by Daniel Dennett is a nice little discussion.
I agree with Amanda’s thoughts on free will, and with mcc’s point that free will and determinism aren’t mutually exclusive.
@Onymous
You’re partially right. But that wasn’t my entire argument. I’m trying to focus on what “free will” is outside of the confines of religion. That means we’re having a conversation about behavior, which I believe I have properly located at the intersection of a creature’s evolutionary biology (its “genetics,” writ large, if you will) and its environment. So yes, all behavior of course will have some kind of mechanical structure to it.
Where you’re wrong, though, is to equate those mechanisms with predetermination. That runs counter to evolutionary biology. Predetermination is also primarily a religious concept, not a scientific one, and is properly left to musings about theology.
Sigh. I can’t form sentences today, apparently. Should be:
“I decided to do this of my own free will” is not exclusive with “my neurons fired in such a way that I did this”
are not exclusive- that’s what “I decided” means.Count me among those wondering what the fuss is about “free will”. It’s not a well-defined question; it’s really not. There’s no way to distinguish a universe in which “free will” exists from one in which it doesn’t. The only way to do so is to posit some kind of omniscient observer, but presumably your atheism precludes that, as well it should.
If Captain Jesus were looking down on us from his cloudy perch, he could tell whether we had free will or not… but here in the real world, a setup where we’re all “on rails”–on predetermined paths–but it’s impossible to see or accurately predict the future looks precisely the same as a setup where we’ve got “free will”.
Kimmet, the problem with your “but” is that you nulled the example. I didn’t say “two nearly identical people”, but two identical people. Pointing out that small chaos differences would make them unidentical is beside the point. I’m trying to explain how a person who is who he or she is will make a certain decision. There’s not a separate soul inside running the show.
I’d recommend reading,
The Blank Slate’s Chapter on gender. It throws some alternative explanation for the gender gap in pay and employment as well as having other reasons for why men rape besides a purported “desire to oppress all women”.
Personally I think that rapists are motivated by all kinds of reasons, so I’d wager that the desire to oppress women might fit in there somewhere, with some rapists.
But Pinker rejects the idea that some feminists have proposed that “rapists aren’t motivated by sex”. Come again?
On another hand I did find this study which suggested that maybe sexual interest was a non-motivation:
http://www.suite101.com/print_article.cfm/rape_prevention_survival/83413
in the article Flora Thomas Guillory says:
Perhaps the most common myth is the widely held belief that a rapist is a sexually unfulfilled man carried away by a sudden uncontrollable surge of desire. The actual facts: Dr. Amir’s study showed that 90% of group rapes were planned in advance and that 58% of rapes committed by a single man were planned. Generally, rape is not a crime of impulse. As to the myth that rapists are sexually unfulfilled, Dr. William Prendergast of the New Jersey State Prison states that all of the rapists that he has studied had available sexual relationships. Sixty percent of the men in Dr. Amir’s study were, in fact, married and led normal sexual lives at home.
So, finally I’m currently believing that the motivations of rapists run the gamut, meaning that some repists are created by causes that support feminist theories, and other rapists are created by causes that contradict those theories.
—
One more note: Steven Pinker acknowledges a quote that “feminists are not a monolith and no single feminist view should be viewed as a view of the whole group”
He says - fine, but the argument cuts both ways. If a a particular feminist view should not be taken as the view of the general feminist community, then a criticism or intellectual attack on a particular feminist view should not be taken as an attack on the whole feminist community.
In short: when people attack a feminist viewpoint, it should go without saying that they are not attacking ALL of feminism.
My own view: Makes sense. The only exception would be if the attacker reveals some bias upon closer examination. But we need to be careful to observe, rather than project.
Ugh. This post is chock-full of bad history and worse philosophy.
1. The notion of free will comes well before the problem of evil. There are hints of it in Plato and Aristotle, and it’s first named by Augustine.
2. Free will isn’t a solution to the problem of evil. It’s the basis for the problem — free will is necessary for (both secular and theist) conceptions of ethical responsibility around the Ancient Mediterranean, but it also seems to be incompatible with an omniscience, omnipotent, benevolent God. If Augustine wasn’t committed to the idea that a person is only responsible for the things she or he freely chooses to do, the problem of evil wouldn’t have been a problem for him.
3. Plenty of philosophers — including Hobbes and Hume, who were definitely not fans of the religious establishment of their day — have believed that free will, physicalism (the claim that minds are entirely physical), and determinism are completely compatible. They’re called compatibilists.
4. There are also plenty of philosophers of science who don’t think the physical world is deterministic. Quantum mechanics, for example, isn’t deterministic in the classical sense. And some would argue that, even if the laws of physics are deterministic (in a technical sense), this doesn’t imply that the world is deterministic. The idea that biological processes are `nothing more than’ physical processes has been slowly dying for about 35 years now.
5. The experiment you gesture at here only provides evidence against the existence of free will if exercising free will requires simultaneous awareness of exercising free will. But why think this is the case?
If you excise the concept of fairness from state punishment, for example, it becomes easier to justify horrific punishments to deter minor crimes.
But we’re not exercising the idea of fairness, but of free will. A different thing. If anything, it becomes harder to justify punishing someone who suffered from outside pressures that drove the crime, though I still think it’s foolish to say that accepting that free will is a theological myth means that social controls like prison automatically have to go.
I’d argue that the scientific model of the world is built on top of our direct experience of it, and lives or dies by its ability to explain that experience.
I think it is reasonable to say that cultural models of free will have corrupted our concept of whatever the underlying fundamental constituent of experience is. That is, I’m happy to imagine that the concept of free will is a deep corruption of the actual experience of directed motion through life and that the models of free will bandied about in American culture have tainted my perception and possibly others’ of how that direction actually works.
But at the same time, when you get to the point where a scientific model of the world tells you that the fundamental constituents of personal experience are not real, that is necessarily a criticism of the scope of the current scientific model and not of the constituents of experience. It is as if you were able to prove through mathematical analysis of the Sorites paradox that “heaps” do not exist, or through some new paradox that Seattle is imaginary: I would say, not, “Good Lord, whither am I now? Whither are my beautiful heaps?” but “perhaps your mathematics reaches beyond its axiomatic scope.”
It’s not surprising that science is constantly challenging free will. Science principally analyzes things that have already happened; and in fact I can’t think of any easy way to do experiments on what will happen in the future except by waiting for it to have already happened in the past. Experimenting on the present is easy but leaves little time to analyze before the results fade into the past. In short, it’s very difficult for science to talk about anything other than the past, which is to say, the space of time in which decisions are notably already fixed and inalterable.
The better our scientific model of the self, the more often—when we choose to look at that model—we shall see that it shows that we were going to choose to look at it. That much is obvious. But I’m not sure how you get from there to an absence of free will; I’m not sure how you can ever precipitate an experience of knowing what one is going to choose while still having time to choose the opposite, and without that this experiment seems inadequate to deny free will without bringing in many additional assumptions.
I admit up front that I have had the experience of being unable to stop a fall, a reflex action, or even a thought that I sensed coming; from this, so far, I conclude that actions, thoughts, and time are defined such that actions and thoughts span some measure of time. I’ve poked carefully at some of the thoughts that I knew I was going to think, and as far as I can tell, it’s mostly habit and cultural trappings that keeps me from thinking the words or ideas in a different order or perceiving the time frame of the thought differently.
I’ll go further. I’m not sure what it is that we’re able to choose; it seems to change as one’s conception of the world refines and I don’t know if there’s any end point. Right now I seem able to choose the direction of my attention; this has a strong and predictable influence on my actions, but not enough to stop a fall once my balance is disrupted. This is certainly different from my previous models and Descartes’; and I think I’m unwilling to declare any sense of certainty that my own perceptions here are accurate.
But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that there’s a substantial category mistake in any notion of a scientific experiment that disposes of the fundamental experience of free will as illusory rather than correcting other scientific models or trying-to-be-scientific models on the function and accidents of that experience.
Jenna
Question:
If it’s still your brain making the decision, aren’t you still making the decision, just a little further down in the system architecture? It’s kind of silly to be drawing grand sweeping conclusions about free will and autonomy when we’re not really sure what consciousness is.
“There’s not a separate soul inside running the show.”
Or the ghost in the machine, as Mr Pinker would say.
Really loving this book!
When this question is asked, it tends to be leading to a line of thought about crime and punishment, which never made a lick of sense to me. The question is usually something about asking the point of punishing people if free will is an illusion anyway.
The stated reasons for judicial punishment are to condition people not to do it again, and to remove them from society for society’s safety. The latter reason has nothing to do with free will, and whether punishment “actually” works or just looks exactly like it would if it did, I don’t see how the different makes it defensible or not.
The question of free will can’t be phrased without resorting to metaphysical brain-kibble. It’s not well thought out. It rests on false premises. The sooner the idea that a world with “free will” differs meaningfully from a world without can be put to rest, the better.
I’m with Kimmitt too…and also, I’m not really clear on the original problem statement above. It doesn’t seem to be so much a question of “do we have free will or not” as much as “how much of our day to day decisions are made subconsciously and how many of them consciously?” I agree, the decision in the linked study is the type that would be made much more heavily in the subconscious level…anybody else ever had the experience of commuting to work and realizing, as you pulled into the parking lot, that you had absolutely no memory of the drive itself? (Please, don’t let that just be me!–I’m trying to illustrate a point about the subconscious control of reasonably sized chunks of our lives, which will only work if it’s NOT only me. Otherwise I think I just proved I’m nuts.) I’ve seen too many people reason their way out of a dilemma to believe that we are utterly controlled by internal factors, and that’s not even counting the random environmental disturbances both major and minor.
The fact that your neurons fire before you’re aware of having made a decisions seems to me a problem for free will only in what people have called the homonculus theory of consciousness. There are so many ways in which our conscious awareness is before- and after-the-fact stitching together of face-saving ideas about what our brains and bodies are doing.
But I think that Free Will isn’t just a religious concept, unless you’re willing (ahem) to account the national socialist personality cult, Objectivism and a bunch of similar-minded tripe as religions. I think it might be a particularly patriarchal thing instead, along the lines of the freudian notion of establishing the self by separation from the mother and father…
I’m still scratching my head over this one; there’s an obvious meaning to this–souls and metaphysics and maybe some vitalism too–but I can’t imagine that anyone’s really promoting that.Are you talking about emergence? I’m kind of confused, here.
The irony of free will as a theological concept is that it STILL makes God an asshole. “God doesn’t want us to be automatons, so he gave us free will, but if we use said free will to make choices that God disapproves of, he will punish us and refuse entry into Heaven.” Okay. So instead of just doing good things because we’re just built to be good, we use our free will to choose to do good under the coercion of Eternal Paradise vs. Eternal Suffering. Free will is not only a cheat, it’s a weak cheat, and a big reason that I don’t think that the Problem of Evil has ever been adequately addressed by theologians. It’s one more thing showing just how empty theological concepts of morality really are.
Bonus: the paradox of the boulder (can God create a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it?) is another problem not taken as seriously by many theists as perhaps they should. God cannot be all-powerful. So he’s a less-than-omnipotent jerk. Go God, I guess.
I once decided that free will was the ability to be stupid. See, if we were controlled, there’d be some kind of sense to our actions. Maybe not *good* sense, but sense, you know? “Oh, sure, X did Y because of Z”. Maybe X didn’t really want to do Y, but Z made it necessary, and hence, it wasn’t stupid (though it appeared to be from the outside).
I then decided that because of the depth and breadth of human stupidity, free will was the most reasonable explanation. People were stupid in such incredibly clever ways!
But keep in mind that free will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either. Some folks like to pretend that free will means you’re in complete control of your mental state at all times, a statement that is best discussed with the victims of decapitation (”Huh? Victims of decapitation are all dead within minutes, maybe seconds! How could they demonstrate that physical processes can affect one’s mental state?”).
I view free will as the ability to seize the reins of control, to some degree, and change course, to some degree. Like, being in a rowboat. If you put your oars in the water, and start pulling, you *will* have an effect. But if you’re being pulled by strong currents in a certain direction, you might not have any meaningful influence on the actual outcome.
Onymous — I do not distinguish meaningfully between “undeterminable” and “predetermined but proven to be physically impossible to predict.” From my perspective, they are synonymous, since no experiment would possibly be able to distinguish between the two.
Amanda — my point was that you’re positing something which is physically impossible, so its actions are therefore irrelevant in many ways to the real world. That is, yes, if we could create such a copy, it might be a very strong argument against free will. But the fact that it is physically impossible to create such a copy means that it cannot act as such an argument.
grendelkhan:
Are you talking about emergence?
Yes, exactly. It’s the Hot Topic in philosophy of biology today. Since it’s not really my speciality, I’m not going to do it justice, but the general idea is that explanations of biological phenomena shouldn’t all be cashed out in terms of molecules bumping into each other. This doesn’t mean that there’s some super-physical vitality magically appearing; it’s more that sufficiently complicated physical systems have feedback loops and other structures that are more than just the molecules.
What’s strange to me is that there are people who seem to think that “free will” is anything other than a religious and/or philosophical idea. Does anyone actually think that there is a physiological or neurological process known as “free will”? What is the biological opposite of “free will” — biological determinism? Nature always wins out over nurture?
I think this comes a lot closer to explaining what was actually observed than “free will.” Isn’t this what things like Project Implicit are built on, the idea that your unconscious response will be quicker than your conscious one?
grolby -
Aquinas had a solution to the paradox of the bolder. Define `omnipotent’ to be `able to do anything that doesn’t lead to a paradox’. Then God can’t create a bolder so large God can’t lift it, but since that would lead to a paradox, God still comes out as omnipotent. This might sound like cheating (I happen to think so), but it’s a standard problem-and-answer in Intro to Philosophy when you talk about the existence of God.
Kimmitt -
Mathematicians can prove that there are mathematical proofs so complicated that building a computer capable of carrying out the proof would require more atoms than are believed to exist in the universe, and would take longer than the universe is expected to exist. Do such proofs fail to determine the truth of their conclusions?
“Does anyone actually think that there is a physiological or neurological process known as “free will”?”
Yes, me.
I study Applied Behavior Analysis, and I’ve definitely noticed that people get really offended and angry if I try to explain to them what Radical Behaviorism is all about. Suggesting that free will is an illusion or that the universe is deterministic is like telling someone that they’re subhuman and they’ll never amount to anything.
By the way, to everyone above me that is arguing that, because we are not able to predict and control all behavior at the the present time, we’ll never be able to predict and control it, you should know that science has already come a long way in that area.
Haven’t read all the comments yet, but I’m seeing one HUGE flaw in the study you mention, about choosing whether to hit a button with your left or right hand.
Aren’t most humans either right or left-handed? A right dominant person is going to hit the button with their right hand far more often than their left, and I could easily see it taking a wee bit more brain power (accounting for that 7-second predictive lag) to decide to go with the non-dominant side just to mix it up.
Regarding free will in general, I’m with the folks who’ve said it’s a hard topic to discuss because it’s so semantically vague. However, looking at my own life, I’m inclined to think that, in certain situations where one really does have options, it can exist.
What I doubt is that our cultural environment really doles out a whole lot of opportunity for us to use free will (if such a thing exists), and one thing I’m almost certain of is that we are heavily conditioned to almost never allow ourselves the luxury of using it, even when we get the chance.
Also @ Lisa in KS —
I don’t drive to work, so I can’t commiserate exactly, but I will confess that I often leave my apartment going the opposite direction from where I need to go, because my reptile brain wants to send me off on my morning commute. Even if it’s Saturday afternoon. Which is similar, no?
And metaphorical-god help me if I was supposed to stop to mail off my Netflix on the way to the subway in the morning — verboten, according to Reptile Brain.
If there’s no such thing as free will, then nobody has the ability to will themselves to “get past” it. You cannot choose to not believe in free will. Either your experience & genetics, etc. will cause you to believe in it, or not. If you believe that someone can choose to let go of their belief in free will, then that’s a contradiction
I really like this post Amanda. It hits all the points. I didn’t think it would make an engaging post when I came across it in eurekalert on Monday.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/m-udi041408.php
I am wrong.
There have been a few less conclusive neuroscience studies that questioned the existence of free will. One about 6 months ago made it into NY Times. Even so, many scientists assume we have such a faculty. Your point about people who posit external moral agencies painting themselves into a corner is dead on: they are forced by their assumptions to ask WHY would we have free will..and to find an answer. The question should be HOW do we have a free will…and the science is ever clearer that we do not.
I linkwhore shamelessly in Pandagon comments but I hope it will be considered a contribution if I amplify your agreement with skepchik that “soul” is a fiction. You said you would come back to the point but I don’t see where… I have many posts to that effect but this latter one has an example and some people need a lot more than claims and logic before they can give face up to the illusory nature of “soul”.
yeah but the experiment tests pretty low intellectual functions.
It’s like asking, do one really make decision when playing fast pace tennis? Or is it all reflex and pattern of training?
I think free will consists of a whole class of thought exercises. from reflex all the way to deep contemplation. Most choices are somewhere in between of course.
There’s a great science fiction story called “Second Person, Present Tense” which talks about just these sort of research studies. As the story’s hook, the human “personality” is conceived of as “the story that the brain tells itself to justify the decisions it has already made.” The idea is that humans need a “narrative” to filter out the confusion that would result if a person was aware of all of the firing neurons.
Now, I agree that these research studies don’t allow us to make general conclusions about personal autonomy and free will– at best they test what they test. But it made for a good sci-fi story.
I think we have free will in the only sense we ever could. If I am presented with a choice the non-deterministic circuitry in my brain arrives at a decision based on the current state of my brain. Since “I” am completely in my brain I think that means that “I” am making the decision.
The problem is that people ascribe this whole “outside self” to themselves. This outside self is somehow not affected by your current mental state. It’s the whole outside self that is faulty thinking. I’m sorry, but there is no “you” outside of your brain. We may not know exactly in which neurons “you” reside, but you’re there nonetheless.
“Generally, rape is not a crime of impulse. As to the myth that rapists are sexually unfulfilled,”
Rape is more about humilition and control then sex. A lot of rapists pick targets of oppurtunity rather then desire them for sex.
Hence why pedophiles target boys because in our society a male being sexually abused by another male makes the victim homosexual. A lot of victims admit they don’t speak out because they would be thought of as homosexual. Also why rape frequently occurs in prison of course not having the option of a female or male partner outside the prison certaintly influences it.
A lot of rapes occur in marriage or while in a relationship.
Some rapists target fertile women to pass on offspring while others target any woman even women they admit no sexual attractiveness to.
In some case, we know we don’t have free will. Parkinson’s disease, for instance - you can’t just will not to have a movement disorder. On the other hand, there are no situations in which we can definitely say we do have free will; we can always offer another (I think better, but that’s tangential to the point) explanation in terms of enviromental/genetic factors that coordinated to produce a particular result. So, if we have evidence that we don’t have free will, at least in some circumstances, and no evidence that we ever do have free will, it would seem most reasonable to assume that we do not have free will.
In some case, we know we don’t have free will. Parkinson’s disease, for instance - you can’t just will not to have a movement disorder. On the other hand, there are no situations in which we can definitely say we do have free will; we can always offer another (I think better, but that’s tangential to the point) explanation in terms of enviromental/genetic factors that coordinated to produce a particular result. So, if we have evidence that we don’t have free will, at least in some circumstances, and no evidence that we ever do have free will, it would seem most reasonable to assume that we do not have free will.
I seem to recall something in the New York Times on this subject — a neuroscientist claiming that something of this sort was detectable in the brain at an electrical level. In other words, we can measure this “seizing of the reins,” especially when it has to do with things like the stopping of an impulse. Of course, whether that has anything to do at all with free will depends on how you define it — mechanically, it just looks like “you were about to do X, but then suddenly your brain stopped and did Y instead, in conjunction with a subjective perception of stopping yourself with an effort of will.”
As for free will itself, I’ll just take my position from the last discussion. There is a non-religious conception of free will that I think is both useful and important, and it exists at the level of individual psychology and subjective perceptions. Human beings, by and large, perceive themselves as making decisions about what to do and not to do. We go around thinking and behaving like we have free will; in fact it’s hard not to. This perception and behavior is one thing that we can talk about as “free will,” and I think it plays an important role in how people learn, how we influence others, etc. Because this perception of “decision-making” plays such a huge role in everything down to “ooh, this time I think I’ll decide not to touch that enormous flame, because last time I remember it hurt,” it’s important to keep it around as a concept. With that in hand, we can construct ideas like “agency” and “autonomy” even if we don’t literally believe in free will. It’s still good for organisms to have more “choices” open to them and learn and develop in ways that are not constrained or forced, etc.
In other words, it’s like the narrative Tyro is describing. The narrative is important, because it’s what we already have to work with, the part of our grand story that’s already written, the rules of the sonnet.
I always feel that people are making a “God of the gaps” argument when they bring up uncertainty and chaos theory in the free will debate. Do you really think that our decisions are that dependent on quantum uncertainty? If
If you throw a ball in a vacuum I don’t need to know anything about quantum mechanics to predict exactly what the ball will do to very high precision. I really don’t see why we assume the brain is the quantumly opaque device that we can never adequately understand. There’s no evidence for it at this point.
The whole thing still doesn’t answer the question. Uncertainty and chaos don’t make your decisions “free” they just make them unpredictable. It’s like saying a die is free because you can’t say what it’ll roll beforehand.
The argument that there is no free will does not upset me. I enjoyed reading this string. But I still believe in the concept.
Actually, the lack of human free will is itself a religious concept. Amanda, I had no idea you were such a Presbyterian. (insert winking smiley face here)
I was a fan of the first Battlestar Galactica (Lorne Greene version) but never got into the new one. I need to get the dvd’s I guess.
“If you throw a ball in a vacuum I don’t need to know anything about quantum mechanics to predict exactly what the ball will do to very high precision.”
You needed to know the qualitative definition of quantum mechanics to state that you’d only be able to predict it “with high precision.” Purely classical mechanics (ballistics) states that in a vacuum you would indeed be able to predict EXACTLY what the ball will do, given knowledge of specific initial conditions (the a value of gravity, the angle of launch and initial speed of the ball). But quantum mechanics allows you to know both that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum and that there is no such tihng as a perfectly precise measurement that does not result in a change to the motion of the ball or the ball’s environment.
the functions of the nervous system are electric currents, which is a quantum exercise. the difference of picoseconds between one thought or another being reached, a choice, are essentially probabilistic in nature.
I know, I know, sounds kind of technobabbleish. Basically whether or not we have free will and whether or not events are predetermined are ENTIRELY separate questions.
ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. Because while we might just be a programmed intellect, we’re exceptionally well programed through experience and genetics. So long as you pass the Turing test, you have Close-Enough-For-Government-Work free will.
Lisa, my point is that I can predict everything I want to know about that ball based completely on macroscopic characteristics. It’s quantum states don’t affect what I want to know. Whose to say the same isn’t true of the brain? Sure, there are quantum limitations regarding what we can know for certain, but where is the evidence that this affects macroscopic brain activity? I may not know the quantum state of every electron in the brain, but does that necessarily preclude me from making adequate predictions about future decisions? The jury is still out on that.
On a broader note, how does this entail free will anyways? A roulette wheel isn’t free even though it’s actions are non-deterministic.
Tyro - As the story’s hook, the human “personality” is conceived of as “the story that the brain tells itself to justify the decisions it has already made.”
This is pretty much my view of consciousness. The missing element is that our conscious mind has feedback into the unconscious so that we can train ourselves to prefer one course of action over another. That’s an oversimplification, because the unconscious is really a bunch of interacting subsystems that may well be at odds with each other, but at some level they have to be come together to form a single choice, and our consciousness is the narrative that reconciles that choice with the inputs driving the subsystems. IMHO, of course
Incidentally, Edward Lorenz, he of the “Butterfly Effect” and the Lorenz attractor, died today at age 90. It’s a testament to the power of his work that ideas he came up with to explain meteorological phenomena end up being relevant to questions of free will.
Amanda,
What you call the ‘problem of free will’ is not the only problem one might reasonably have in mind in using that phrase. In fact, I think it’s not the problem people usually have in mind (whether they know it or not) when they worry about free will in the face of natural-scientific accounts of the workings of the brain. I also think you make an unwarranted leap in your discussion that contrives to make it seem that you’ve addressed the real issue when in fact you haven’t.
I think what people are really worried about is this: on the one hand, we have these ordinary, everyday explanations we give of our own and other people’s actions in terms of their reasons, values, commitments, interests, etc. These explanations seem to presuppose that we can explain human actions by thinking about why these actions might have seemed justified, or at least worthwhile, to the people who perform them.
On the other hand, popular-science reporting in newspapers and so forth seems to hint that there are these cognitive-scientific explanations of all of human behavior, explanations that appeal to brute, neurophysiological mechanisms, explanations that seem to portray us as “machines making calculations”, as you put it. The worry is that explanations of the second kind somehow trump or override or subsume explanations of the first kind, leaving us as without the distinctive agency (and correspondingly, responsibility for our actions) the seem to be presupposed or embodied in explanations of the first kind.
Now, you say:
The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other
I take it you’re imagining that these two people have exactly the same beliefs about what is right and wrong, exactly the same interests, exactly the same commitments and projects, etc. You claim that the answer to your question is no, and that the idea that it might be yes (which is what you think of a belief in free will as amounting to) is “overrated”.
But if our interest is in preserving the sense of responsibility and agency at stake in our everyday understanding of people as doing what they believe they have reason to do, then it would seem that the ‘yes’ answer to this question would be worse than overrated. It would be postively devastating. For I think what you’re really getting at with your thought experiment is the idea that there is “free will” only if people’s choices are arbitary–that is, not intelligibly related to the beliefs and interests and commitments they have. But without such a relation, explanations of the first kind (as I called them above) can’t get off the ground.
The point is that a negative answer to your question is amenable both to someone who thinks that we are really “machines making calculations” (because, supposedly, cognitive science shows this) and someone who thinks that that any view that can be aptly summarized with that phrase is bound to involve a distorted understanding of human agency (because of the normative, non-mechanistic nature of our ordinary explanations of human thought and action). So when you move from the negative answer to your question directly to the “machines making calculations” idea, you’re making an unwarranted inference, one that arguably misses the real issue.
You point out that a lot of dumb political ideas are based on the idea that “strength of will” is dispositive for success in life. On the other side, acceding to the “machines making calculations” view greases the wheels for a lot of dumb political ideas as well. The scientistic, reductive impulse that view embodies is crucial, for example, in getting people to swallow sexist and racist evolutionary-psychological theories on the slenderest of evidential bases.
In fact, I think there’s potential social benefits from getting past the idea of free will. How many dumb conservative ideas come back to the notion that strength of will is the major factor? From welfare (they need to choose their way out of poverty!) to the Iraq war (it’s a matter of wanting to win bad enough!) , there’s this obsession.
Eh, I think this is more indicative of a willful (or, if you want to be charitable, uneducated) disregard of systems theory than it is an indictment of the concept of free will. FWIW, I think that people make decisions — consciously or no, but they do make them — within the constraints of their biology & environment (i’m a social worker, so I’m more biased towards the latter, but both play a part). I think free will & personal responsibility/decision exists within the poorest of communities — that doesn’t mean it’ll prevail in the face of overwhelming odds, but the failure to do so doesn’t preclude its existence. If you want those dumb conservatives to stop using that damn argument, then you need to demonstrate to them that “free will” will only go so far within an unjust and oppressive system.
Big deal. A seven second lag between the point where the neural network has summed up and made a decision and the point where that decision, computed in non-language mode, is translated into language mode (where consciousness of deciding should reside) and subsequently or simultaneously transmitted to the motosensory circuits.
I can’t make any philosophical hay from that.
I don’t think “illusion” is the right word. There’s no simple mechanism (simple enough to actually constitute people’s intuitive idea of a “mechanism”) capable of fully accounting for people’s behavior. There is probably some extremely complex, not yet understood mechanism that is so capable — or rather, something analogous to a mechanism, but much more complex than anyone’s reference points. Quantity into quality.
Just to dully echo various other commentators,
“but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.”
exhibits a kind of residential dualism, albeit one that presumably really does reflect our subjective experience. The ‘your brain’ vs. ‘you’ distinction is getting at something, but it also really confuses the conversation.
Anyway, folks might be interested in www.naturalism.org, which has various stuff on life without contracausal freewill, along with lots else about naturalism as a worldview.
“I seem to recall something in the New York Times on this subject — a neuroscientist claiming that something of this sort was detectable in the brain at an electrical level. In other words, we can measure this “seizing of the reins,””
Dunno if this is who you’re thinking of, but Joshua Greene’s done work like this, scanning folks’ brains to see what’s going on when they try to decide whether to push a guy onto trolley tracks if that’s the only way to stop an out-of-control trolley and save five other people in its path (vs. merely pulling a lever that sends the train into the poor guy, but still saves the other five). To drastically oversimplify and prob’ly wildly distort the results, faced with this kind of classic philosophy of ethics-class dilemma (incidentally, anyone read the most recent Thursday Next book, First Among Sequels?), it seems that part of people’s brains react in horror - OMG, shoving someone to their death!! - another part is being all utilitarian, and yet another is going, ‘Uh-oh, there’s conflicting or contradictory stuff going on in here.’ What’s fascinating is that which choice people make seems to be - reasonably enough - correlated with relative activation - which part wins out, one might say.
Between the ADD and the OCD, this general idea seems quite sensible to me. After all, I take ADD meds in order to (probably) alter my brain-environment in part to give my somewhat underpowered frontal lobe (oversimplifying again) more oompf (to the degree that this is what’s actually happening, which remains somewhat uncertain). Meanwhile, at least subjectively, OCD often feels like some normal system has gotten randomly stuck at 11, is utterly ignoring any (presumable) signals that the gas/door/etc. is fine, and is completely overwhelming the part of the brain frantically trying to explain that, eg, if I can see that cat inside though the window, worrying that it’s gotten out doesn’t really make sense. (Or worse, kinda subverting it, so it busily figures out all the possible ways that the cat (who’s absolutely horrified of Outside and has no wish to visit it) could get out through the locked door).
I still don’t see how it’s possible to let go of free will, since that would presumably require free will.
I agree that the concept of free will tends to be ill-defined. I mean, some philosophers come up with real definitions to defend or attack, but for the most part these versions of free will aren’t the kind that people really have an emotional stake in.
It seems like average person wants to believe that for every choice she made in the past, she could have done otherwise if she had willed “hard” enough.
I think part of this is the belief that one’s past mistakes were not inevitable, and that future mistakes are avoidable by sufficient mental effort; that people can be held fully responsible for certain decisions (not just legally or practically, but in the absolute moral sense), and that we as conscious beings are somehow “authors” of our lives, rather than beings carried along by determinism or chance - conscious beings as a kind of “first cause”.
So while there may be free will in certain senses, I believe that the version of free will that gives most people psychological comfort and happiness, is in fact an illusion.
I’ve read the article linked to and there are several sentences that try to define, quite clearly, that it doesn’t negate free will (and that the test is not accurate). Like many philosophical questions, the answer to the ‘free will’ question will most likely never be known. Are we free-willed, or are we programmed? I don’t know, but my program certainly wants me to think that I am running the show, and, lacking evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to believe me.
Whilst free will mostly likely doesn’t exist, it’s vital for human society that we continue to act like it does. I don’t think it’s a uniquely religious concept by any means.
That example doesn’t make sense though. If the person is exactly identical to me, and had exactly the same experiences as me, then they are me, and so, given the exact same choice under the exact same conditions, of course we would make the same decision.
My problem with the concept of free will is that I think it’s overrated.
The problem I have with “there is no such thing as free will” is that it makes all and any follwing discussion completely superflous. If you are only doing what you can’t help but doing, and I’m only doing what I can’t help but doing, talking is a waste of energy (of course, we can’t help but do it, I guess), and life resembles a badly run role playing game.
The NYT had an article on research debunking “free will”.
http://tinyurl.com/yen653
Daniel Dennett gives a much more detailed explanation in this interview.
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=dennett&topic=freewill
Unfortunately the interviewer Robert Wright seems a bit dense.
There is also the work of B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ctJqjlrHA&feature=related
If there is no free will, then I guess you just can’t help ranting against the MRAs, and the MRAs can’t help abusing women, so you might as well just shut down this blog and give it up, you’re not doing anything but bouncing a ball randomly from hand to hand or barking like a puppy at cars going by, and you can’t affect anything in the world, right?
I tried to post on Daniel Dennett, but it didn’t take. I hope this will not end up as a duplicate.
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=dennett&topic=freewill
Finally, I would like to add this NYT article.
“Free Will, now you have it, now you don’t”
http://tinyurl.com/yen653
“The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.”
“…and life resembles a badly run role playing game.”
…more often than any of us would like…
Personally, for me the key fact that gets lost in these discussions of free will is that we do not KNOW what decision we will make ahead of time.
The script for the movie may already be written, all the actors chosen long before, the filming and editing already done, etc. But, if YOU have never seen the movie before, and don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s still a new experience…
Noumena (the Kantian kind?):
And yet it lives, and scientists persist in studying these processes, and making discoveries that advance our knowledge of the physiological and behavioral aspects of living organisms, while those who think otherwise do what? File this thought under Nietzsche’s bad reasons for what you believe on instinct. Flasheart’s “We all know we have free will, and that’s that” is more honest.
As usual, I disagree with Amanda’s epistemology. Just as we don’t know there is no god, it is just a useless concept in the real world which adds nothing to the explanatory power of any theory, so the notion of free will is superfluous to any careful description of living organisms. Ockham, not Hume, killed god (and certainly not Nietzsche).
So what is you definition of free will? You think it is real, you should be able to give a definition that is accessible to us non-believers.
For those of you who think that “to let go of free will you have to have free will” argument is clever, it’s really not. That’s like saying, “To be an atheist, you have to believe in god to hate him.” Atheists don’t hate god. We don’t believe in him. And you don’t have a free will that chooses to or not to believe in free will. Again, if Christianity hadn’t needed free will as a cheat to explain its theology, many of you wouldn’t give a shit. So how is that a free will, since Christianity pwned your mind?
Free will is an epiphenomenon attendant on the development of consciousness. No one claims an ant has free will, but an ant’s brain can make decisions and learn.
What we have developed different than an ant (and here, as with most modern epistemological questions, we should stop talking about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and get on with the work Quine set for us in Epistemology Naturalized of actually understanding the brain we are thinking with if we want to understand what and how it knows) is a part of the brain devoted to, not just remembering and analyzing sensory data coming into the brain, but observing and analyzing the brain’s internal states. We call this consciousness.
To be continued. Gotta run. Val calls. Again I prove I have no free will.
Yes dear. Wait a minute, did I type that? Better say it out loud…
Again, if Christianity hadn’t needed free will as a cheat to explain its theology, many of you wouldn’t give a shit. So how is that a free will, since Christianity pwned your mind?
Yet another example of the atheist tendency to assume that everyone grew up in a Christian fundamentalist household and is battling inner demons in the shapes of St. Paul and St. Augustine.
Other religions exist. Other ways of looking at the world exist.
As a compatibilist, I find a lot of the characterizations of free will here silly.
Free will does not equal another person’s inability to predict what I’m going to do next. To the extent that people are rational, their choices are going to be predictable.
It does not mean that my decisions are made somewhere other than my brain. That it takes the brain a few microseconds to relay that decision to the parts that control consciousness and speech should not come as a surprise.
#74: It’s perfectly possible to claim an ant has free will. It chooses, with its little ant brain, whether to pick up that little bread crumb and carry it home. The choice may be determined to a large extent, but only by the little ant self.
A much more fruitful line of inquiry may be about constraint of choices. To ensure liberty, we want to minimize constraint of choices while also minimizing harm.
Of course, much of the theological and conservative discussions of free will are equally silly, in that they serve as justifications for maintaining the status quo.
“Free will” is hard to define, but by some definitions it exists despite the fact that we’re essentially computers making calculations. Daniel C. Dennett wrote some interesting stuff about this. At any rate, first you would have to accept that you don’t ‘have’ a brain — you -are- a brain. And you are also the body attached to the brain, since the two are just parts of a larger system. By some definitions your environment is also a part of the “self,” broadly defined — your upbringing, etc., is a part of “who you are.” Then you don’t need to imagine some thing outside of your brain that magically gives you free will. The decisions you make are examples of free will because -you- made them. So what if your brain is operating in some mechanistic way? It’s impossible to actually predict what it will do, and besides, that’s not the point. You -are- that brain, and whatever decisions it makes are yours. It’s not like some computer strapped on to your soul that makes you do things — it -is- you, not something that ‘forces’ you act a certain way…
Ah, so we human beings, we’re fundamentally no different from fruit flies. Or any sophisticated electronic and/or mechanical device.
Hell, why not just embrace evo-psych? It’s more or less the same materialist, deterministic approach to the world.
Explain to me how a liberal-democratic political order is supposed to survive a categorical denial of the intuition of free choice (however problematized or “ill-posed”)?
Seriously. If everything about you is determined, even your most abstracted consciousness, your ability to assent or dissent, regardless of what chains or constraints might be put on your limbs and organs…
…why the fuck should we value a single human life? That valuation itself is a romance, an illusion. One biochemical system’s as good as another.
Tell me how this does not hollow out not only all social justice ideologies, but any form of *human* expression.
To Hades with anti-humanist materialism. Grim, dreary, self-defeating.
I’ve got to go with bellatrys and others in this thread: if, as you believe, there is no free will, only what is biologically determined, then why are you writing this blog trying to change people’s minds? Without free will, people can’t read opinions and decide to change their opinions, because everything is pre-determined by factors outside of their control, so everything you’re doing here is completely useless. You’re preaching to the converted with no chance of changing minds. Why continue beating your head against a wall that biology says you have no chance of changing?
I have two views of free will:
1) I like the idea of free will when I’m choosing to do something like go to college or get married.
2) I hate the idea of free will when it’s used as a weapon to “blame the victim” (i.e., “If she hadn’t chosen to wear that dress, she wouldn’t have been raped.”). What happened to the “free will” of the rapist in this situation? Why does her “free will” make it her fault, but his “free will” leaves him blame-free?
I agree that the theological concept of “free will” was basically invented to explain why God could be all the “omni’s” yet a total jerk. We have free will, so it’s our fault that bad things happen! (View 2 above.) The problem with this becomes, what about God’s free will?
Arrgh. This crap makes my brain hurt.
mnemosyne,
While my own mind isn’t made up on the subject, your comment doesn’t really prove anything. Amanda’s drive to post an article attempting to disprove free will could very easily be explained by her nature + nurture coming to a head. Said factors could also easily explain your drive to write a post opposing her position.
Earlier posters have hinted at the problem that probably bugs us lefty types about an absence of free will, and that is what it means in terms of law and public policy.
On the one hand, it could lead governments to be more sympathetic to underprivileged populations, given that their actions may be driven unconsciously by their environments. This seems to lean towards Amanda’s point.
On the other (GOP) hand, it leads directly to Minority Report. Setting aside the ability to actually see the future, I don’t think it would be too great a stretch to imagine that with additional scientific understanding of the brain and its decision paths, criminal profiling could be taken to a whole new level.
Indeed, in the Reagan administration, the idea of preventive detention was seriously floated as a way to detain people whose profiles fit those of known criminals, thus preventing the inevitable crime.
We’ve seen enough of right wing science-twisting to know that if the idea of even remotely deterministic behavior has enough documentation behind it, someone will leap upon that to turn it into a political football. It’ll be the Bell Curve all over again, but possibly worse.
That said, I’m not one to tell scientists to stop investigating something simply because the numbnuts in our society could abuse the results. It sucks, because it’s kind of a Terminator thing. The guy who created Skynet wasn’t trying to destroy the earth, but he did anyway. And yes, all of my arguments are based around sci-fi movies. Except Battlefield Earth.
“And yes, all of my arguments are based around sci-fi movies. Except Battlefield Earth.”
As long as you reject Battlefield Earth, I guess we can continue to read your comments.
But your readability may now depend on how you feel about Heinlein and Orson Scott Card…
:)
Too meta.
The level on which I like to think I have control is tiny compared to the levels on which things run themselves. A mild capacity for self-delusion is useful in obtaining happiness. I am satisfied to believe I have more control than I do, and that tiny level of autonomy, when focused on, can sufficiently direct growth in the other levels that my overall quality of life is increased. The exact nature of these levels is honestly not something I really care to think about. It works for me to conceptualize it the way I do.
That was completely personal wankage, so I don’t expect anyone to actually respond. :p
From the inside (as it were), it seems as if we have free will; it feels true to say so; that is the experience of all humans (mostly, I guess). Just like Newtonian physics is “good enough” to get most jobs done, while not actually getting all of the details exactly right, perhaps this notion of “free will” is good enough to get the job (of living in this world) done, while not getting all of the details right …
To my mind, the root of this “problem” can be found in the inability of the human mind to study itself in an objective fashion. Ultimately, I, personally, have to question the reality of even the physical world, as I can find no non-self-referential proof for its existence. That doesn’t mean I have to question the existence of my self, though (”Cogito ergo sum”), just the reality of the physical body (and the universe it inhabits) …
I know, I know: this sounds so very unscientific, but here again, scientific method may be “good enough” to get the job done …
(This is all just thinking out loud, so please don’t paint me with moron brush!)
“it really upsets people to suggest that free will is an illusion”
Perhaps related to the tendency to believe that, without God, there is no reason for people to “do the right thing” etc …
I don’t get why you all can’t just accept the fact that we are all floating in gelatin-filled pods, wired up to provide power for a huge system of computers who feed us visions of “reality” to sate our unneeded-but-still-present brains.
The movie The Matrix is an attempt to get us to discount the real truth by making it seem to be only fiction.
It seems so obvious to me…
I’m on short break right now; having run out of tobacco. I hope to spend lunch and my final break on this thread.
Right now I have little time to read cooments or even finish reading the post itself.
Let me just jump in and say:
I come at this “free will dilemma” from the other end, as it were.
It’s analogous to how I deal with solipism. How can I prove anything but myself exists? for that matter, that even I exist–that “I” am not some random concatenation of meaninglessness that just has the momentary delusion that meaning exists, and all my memories of a somewhat coherent life in a presumably coherent unverse are just part of an unlikely collision of–what, anyway?
Well, you know, I can’t disprove any of this. I have considred these vey possibilities, most convincingly with the aid of nitrous oxide. (For some reason, LSD and mushrooms haven’t particularly aided these perceptions in my case.)
But I don’t care either. As someone (one Mike Roberts, of Caltech, Dabney House, class of ‘86) put it: “Of course the Universe exists. It seems to so damn much.”
And so I figure that whatever this percweption of individuality and responsibility and possibility of choice is exactly, it is ereal and significant.
Gotto go back to work now, but FWIW, I think the perception we have of possibility, choice, and responsibility has to do with our brains being fundamentally an attempt to encompass all possibilithe Universe might throw our way that might impact our lives. It’s an attempt in other words to be part of an open, potentially infinite loop, encompassing in principle the entire Universe–and that’s why we are “in aspiration, how like a god.”
There’s more but goot run now.
We await a definition of free will that is testable.
The level on which I like to think I have control is tiny compared to the levels on which things run themselves. A mild capacity for self-delusion is useful in obtaining happiness. I am satisfied to believe I have more control than I do, and that tiny level of autonomy, when focused on, can sufficiently direct growth in the other levels that my overall quality of life is increased. The exact nature of these levels is honestly not something I really care to think about. It works for me to conceptualize it the way I do.
That was completely personal wankage, so I don’t expect anyone to actually respond. :p
It’s not wankage, unless you consider Richard Rorty a wanker, because what you’ve described is very close to his position on such things.
Even if we could characterize human behavior at the subatomic level, that description would have very little meaning for most of us in terms of how we live our lives. That doesn’t mean efforts to study human behavior on that level aren’t interesting questions or shouldn’t be done; rather it means that we use different language and different conceptions to make decisions at different levels. As social beings, social decisions to have any meaning or significance have to be comprehensible to a broad swath (at the very least) of society; unless we all became experts in particle physics, to use the language of that field to make social decision would be obscurantist.
1) People are conflating “small chaos differences,” “chaos uncertainty,” etc., with quantum indeterminacy, when in fact these are entirely different things. It’s not that it is practically impossible to create two identical people, but that speaking of “two identical people” is theoretically meaningless. You can’t know enough information about two people (or two of anything) to call them identical.
This may or may not have any bearing on free will. On a macroscopic scale (someone mentioned throwing a ball in a vacuum), quantum indeterminacy is negligible and the world is effectively mechanistic. The structures we observe in our brains are much smaller than balls but also much larger than subatomic particles. We don’t know enough about how the brain works to say whether quantum indeterminacy has a measurable effect.
If we assume it does, we still don’t really have a case for free will, since the quantum effects are supposed to be entirely random. Quantum indeterminacy does, however, make room for “ensoulment;” i.e., you could posit that the seemingly random quantum effects are actually being “chosen” by a non-physical soul. But this looks to me like an invisible unicorn-type hypothesis; there is no way you could ever falsify it.
2) I don’t see how you could get any social policy implications from the lack of free will. Amanda argues that you can still have a criminal justice system because it becomes part of the environment that affects individual behavior; I assume she similarly believes that by posting this blog entry, she is introducing an environmental effect that will lead readers to reject belief in free will, even though they can’t really “choose” to. This is fine, so far as it goes, but the same applies to conservative arguments about individual responsibility; they, too, are part of the environment that conditions individual choices.
At one point Amanda also conflates this broader issue of individual responsibility with the entitlement felt by the privileged, but the latter has nothing to do with free will, since no one argues that we have a choice about the circumstances of our births.
3) If we accept that there is no such thing as free will, it would seem to strip hortative statements–we should reject belief in free will, we should work for social justice, etc.–of their meaning as it is generally understood. There is then a philosophical problem of figuring out what such statements do mean. This isn’t an argument either way about the existence of free will, but it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
Linnaeus–never heard of the guy. I will have to check him out now. Thanks!
Without being able to point to free will, conservatives can just claim that poor people suffer from inferior programming and therefore aren’t worth helping. Of course they already pretty much do say that when they use coded language to say that poor people are inherently inferior, because why else are they poor?
here’s my drive-by:
neurocardiology
thank you, and goodnight.
Free will seems to me to be an important concept, but if it exists it is certainly constrained, often decisively, by various internal and environmental pressures. But it doesn’t have to necessarily be something one “has” or “lacks” in an all-or-nothing sense.
let’s crack open some skull and implant probes.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/04/17/1838242.shtml
Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets directly on the surface of the brain. The research marks Japan’s first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to develop real-time mind-controlled robotic limbs for the disabled. ‘To date, the researchers have worked with four test subjects to record brain wave activity generated as they move their arms, elbows and fingers. Working with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), the researchers have developed a method for analyzing the brain waves to determine the subject’s intended activity to an accuracy of greater than 80%.’”
1. The study only demonstrates that there is a lag between decision and action. To interpret the results as refuting free will you have to have already decided a priori that there is no free will.
2. Quoth Amanda:
You assume away free will before you ask the question here, because you begin by assuming that our decisions come down to determinism (physical structures, experiences, chance). So, again, your worldview does not include free will, and you use that to justify a worldview that doesn’t have free will in it.I would say based on this that opinions about free will are in a sense definately “religious.”
Inasmuch as you think that free will is a poorly defined concept that is hard to talk about and make sense, we agree 100%. I would still like to see you broach the question of ethics; not only our ethical systems but our language used to talk about them presupposes that actors have free will (egad! It’s that evil conservative “responsibility” notion again). I know you have a huge problem with a lot of this language (and with good reason) but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I had a long talk with a friend of mine, recovering meth addict/alcoholic, who says, “Y’know what, Petey, everyone chooses their master.” This is probably true: what free will we have consists of small choices. Most of us go on automatic most of the time. But free will has to exist.
Otherwise, why would you criticize people for hating women? The gazelle may as well criticize the lion for having sharp teeth.
“We await a definition of free will that is testable.”
Oooh, I wish I’d said that. That’s it in a nutshell.
I’m glad to see Dennett has already been mentioned upthread; his book Elbow Room makes what I think is the key point here: we can talk about a complex system controlling itself even when we are sure it’s fundamentally deterministic. And what most people want out of ‘free will’, if it’s not a theological argument, is to believe that they are in control of themselves. But whether or not you actually have control over your actions is a separate question from whether or not the universe’s physical laws are indeterminate. You can have either one without the other.
Penrose muses that “consciousness” contains elements beyond current theory of physic. (eg. consciousness and free will ) can’t simply be translated to computational algorithm. Artificial Inteligence people has tried for a long time trying to explain this.
but lately, it seems we are doing great progress emulating basic critter by simply making the machine to learn itself, or able to create several difficult to reproduce natural behavior just by tossing in bunch of simple critters with and simple behavior rules.
anyway… (summary of Penrose)
http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/penrose/penr.htm
as far as Penrose is concemed, is that “the mere carrying out of a successful algorithm does not in itself imply that any understanding has taken place.” ths conclusion certainly holds if it is directed at the executing apparatus, whether flesh or hardware. After all, whether the program happens to be executed by a human or by a computer makes no difference, in principle, to the outcome of the program’s interaction with the outside world. But for this very reason the human in the Chinese room is something of a straw man: no one would fault a program because the hardware fails to understand what the program is all about. To put the point even more strongly, no one would be critical of a neuron for not understanding the significance of the pulse pattems that come and go. This would be true whether or not the neuron happened to be executing part of an algorithm or doing something far more sophisticated. Any strength in claims for artificial intelligence must surely lie in the algorithm itself. And that is where Penrose attacks next. The world of algorithms is essentially the world of the computable. In Penrose’s words, algorithms constitute “a very narrow and limited part of mathematics.” Penrose believes (as I and many other mathematicians do) in a kind of Platonic reality inhabited by mathematical objects. Our clue to the independent existence of such objects lies in our complete inability to change them. They are just “there,” like mountains or oceans.
What does all this have to do with consciousness? Penrose proposes that the physiological process underlying a given thought may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states, each of which performs a calculation of sorts. When the differences in the disnibution of mass and energy between the states reach a gravitationally significant level, the states collapse into a single state, causing measurable and possibly nonlocal changes in the neural structure of the brain. This physical event correlates with a mental one: the comprehension of a mathematical theorem, say, or the decision not to tip a waiter.
The important thing to remember, Penrose says, is that this quantum process cannot be replicated by any computer now conceived. With apparently genuine humility, Penrose emphasizes that these ideas should not be called theories yet: be prefers the word “suggestions.’ But throughout his conversation and writings, he seems to imply that someday humans (not computers) will discover the ultimate answer-to everything. Does he really believe that? Penrose mulls the question over for a moment. “I guess I rather do,” he says finally “although perhaps that’s being too pessimistic.” Why pessimistic? Isn’t that the hope of science? “Solving mysteries, or trying to solve them, is wonderful,” he replies, “and if they were all solved that would be rather boring.”
(Note that a brain is really just a swarm of neuron cells.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
Swarm intelligence (SI) is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems[1].
SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling.
The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while ’swarm intelligence’ refers to the more general set of algorithms.
I’m with epistemology and Lisa KS.
I think we can define free will in falsifiable way, but the bundle of concepts in the common parlance so defined. The term as it’s commonly used can make sense for some theological debates or drama but not so much for scientific purposes.
So I think the other commentators raise a fair number of neat points worth discussing. But the collection of ideas called free will isn’t really falsifiable and obscures more than it reveals.
Oops. Fixing comment 102: “but the bundle of concepts in the common parlance [is not so defined].”
In a purely physical sense, free will certainly doesn’t exist. As you point out, two identical people in identical environments just can’t make different choices.
However, as a conceptual tool it’s very useful to us. Much of our decision-making machinery is vested in the complicated conceptual frameworks we inhabit, and having “free will” as a conceptual component lets us avoid acting in self-defeating ways because of a perception that there’s “no point in trying”. Truly believing that we are deterministic would create an environment that would discourage effort because of a mistaken perception that we will deterministically do what we will do anyway.
However, between two otherwise-identical humans, one having the concept of free will and the other lacking it, their behaviours would be different. Believing in free will mechanically changes our actions to be superficially consistent with the belief, to our evolutionary advantage.
Or, so the theory goes.
Penrose just has a theory of how the human brain thinks. If there were definite evidence that the human brain does use these kinds of QM processes, that would suggest that the attempt to emulate human thought by means of algorithims might be futile.
Or it might not be even so. The thing is, the brain is an organ evolved by blind, mindless natural selection to enhance our chances of survival. It had better be successful at that (and of course, so far, just counting human noses and measuring our sheer mass accumulating on the planet, it has been–so far…)–had better be useful because in biomechanical terms it is very costly.
Anyway, if our brains use these abtruse QM mechanisms, so probably do all sorts of animal brains. Perhaps it was an innovation that arose at some point after the beginnings of neural net architechture, perhaps it was inherent in the first neural net.
Or perhaps–and this is my assumption–that’s all nonsense and the brain works along straightforward computational principles, albeit very complex and all the harder to understand because it did after all arise haphazardly, through mindless natural selection.
I think that the key to the apparent paradox of individual identity and free will lies in the nature of intelligence–that is to say, the particular goal of the computation that brains in general do.
I daresay no animal has a brain of such relatively high biological cost, and few have any that are as large or larger, but it is a costly item for just about any animal, and vulnerable too. Brains pay off because they allow, more or less, an animal to have an emulation of the exterior environment running, which allows them to somewhat predict what is likely to happen and therefore maneuver to their advantage.
What we are trying to do with our minds is, encompass the whole universe, ultimately. We are driven to try by deep instincts that embody a billion years of evolutionary experience that knowledge pays off, even if getting it involves risks that are sometimes costly or even fatal.
Individuality, among human beings, is of course inevitable given that we are biologically distinctive and that we have different experiences. But I think the form of intelligence we have evolved goes beyond merely tolerating this diversity of viewpoint and actually enhances it, because we are not strictly autonomous after all, but have evolved as social animals. So disagreement is potentially an asset–when we pool our perceptions via speech and social interaction in general, we get the benefit of other brains than ours approaching any given problem. So there isn’t really a conflict between the individual and the collective–each enhances the other.
I believe that each person has far more going on in their separate, individual brain, than they could possibly communicate in a lifetime of trying to share it. Much of our communications involve indicating that our thoughts are running on more or less closely parallel tracks, and the more this is true the more laconic we can be. But still, every one of us has a completely unique vantage point.
And at the same time, we recognize that we are living in a shared reality. And it is the fact that we are trying to encompass that reality that lies behind our perception that our thoughts are somehow more than just the inevitable result of triggers that came before.
I daresay this is basically a religious idea I have, that it summarizes my creed–that the reality that exists is always beyond our grasp, and yet tantalizingly near–that human life (and to some extent, all life and existence) is a dance of the Myriad Things with the Tao.
But it also seems very pragmatic and straightforward, and also benignly nondenomiational and welcoming, so I hope it doesn’t seem completely crazy and useless to those who want none of any kind of “woo.”
I think we are right to believe that we are individually capable and responsible. If it is true that in a sense we merely enact previous stimuli and/or sheer randomness (and I’m betting on classical chaos rather than quantumness, because it is a general principle of physics that large systems tend to approximate the classical, non-quantum, physics, and there is as yet no positive evidence that nerves rely on QM wizardry we haven’t yet replicated in large, essentially classical, systems) then nevertheless we enact them uniquely and in a way that integrates our evaluation of the meaning of events in the past as they have filtered through to us.
We often cannot control our immediate actions–in a sense we never can control anything completely–but we are responsible for evaluating ourselves in terms of what we are likely to do, based on our knowledge of what we did in the past.
Human intelligence is fundamentally integrative–we seek to build up a true and useful picture of everything, and evaluate each datum that comes in in that light.
This is the basis of the perception of will and responsibility, not, I presume, some kind of QM woo. (If I am going to have woo, and I guess I am, I will have some of the ancient kind, thank you very much). Or if it turns out our brains do use abtruse stuff like that, so would any approximately intelligent system.
Meanwhile, as I think others have pointed out, proving that people articulate a decision well after other parts of the brain begin implementing it doesn’t demonstrate that we are not thinking rationally. Or rather–it would if the actions people take, and later glibly justify, were random or counterproductive, with outcomes in a random relationship to what the person would have desired. But if the decisions made by the nonverbal parts of the brain, or even the whole body system including completely non-neural tissues, have a strong correlation with desirable outcomes–then we have merely demonstrated that reasoning is not as strictly verbal a function as we like to think.
For many thousands of years, there has been a strong prejudice, at least in academic circles, and perhaps in society in general, to privilege the “talking self” and equate that with the will and indeed the person. I suspect this is a patriarchial phenomenon–but then again it might just be the outcome of the evolution of speech itself. Other people know us by our actions but our words are a major part of those actions. Observing others it seems straightforward to identify their words and their actions together. I suspect that actually the human concept of “I,” which many philosophers have taken as a starting point, is the latest abstraction–that first we learn the idea of “her/him–them”–that we begin by trying to emulate the thoughts of others, as our basic function of intelligence. And then generalize to “me”–seeing what happens to this person who happens to be ourself, as we see what happens to others and speculate on what they must be feeling and thinking–and only then develop the idea of “I,” as a self-narrated hero of our personal drama. It could be this last step is entirely a product of patriarchial imperatives, but I suspect that it always occurs in the brain of any healthy modern human. But there is no doubt that patriarchial society puts a very high premium on the role of “I.” One might say that patriarchy is all about defining and controlling that self-perception, to produce the kinds of actions that are necessary to perpetuate itself.
This is only due to a mistake, a failure to differentiate determinism and fatalism.
One cannot prevent people from independently discovering that free will appears unfounded. Once discovered, there seems to be no convincing counterargument.
The best thing we can do for these people is to prepare them for the realization, by reinventing justice from a standpoint that values prevention and deterrence but not punishment, and by emphasizing that determinism contradicts fatalism.
I suspect it does more harm than good to promote free will as a “noble lie.” Or if this is not already the case, it will be soon enough as more people abandon dualism.
Certainly it already does great harm to prisoners suffering retributive (in)justice. I have a low opinion of those people who are willing to sacrifice the unfortunate for some assumed “greater good” that we don’t even know is really preferable.
People are taught today to believe in an extreme libertarian conception of free will. This teaching is not prevalent in all other cultures. People could instead be taught compatiblism, and there is no convincing a priori case that this will lead to a collapse of civilization.
Mark Foxwell April 17, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Penrose just has a theory of how the human brain thinks. If there were definite evidence that the human brain does use these kinds of QM processes, that would suggest that the attempt to emulate human thought by means of algorithims might be futile.
I think he just says, at current theoretical and experimental level, we are still way off from able to explain consciousness in term of physics. (eg. able to make a brain replica in a lab)
For most people throughout history and today, a universe of sophistication comparable with the one described in 1 Enoch has been sufficient.
I think it’s enough to say that we’re open-ended in our emulations. We do as much as we can with the calories we take in, the time we have, and our individual levels of interest. Some couldn’t care less about the universe beyond the neighborhood.
Your formulation sounded teleological to me. Was it intentionally so?
What about elephants, apes, dolphins and any other species that pass the mirror test?
I find those two arguments completely dissimilar- I agree with your second example, but it in no way proves the first. I think the reason the argument often devolves into semantics about the definition of ‘free will’ is that if we really do lack free will then it negates almost every life transaction:
“Hey did you get those reports done?”
“No, but it really isn’t my fault that I didn’t.”
“Hey, you wanna watch TV, or go for a walk?”
“I suppose we’ll do what the galactic billiard-balls have determined we will do, in any case.”
Most decisions are predicated on the assumption of free will. Now, I’m not arguing against your free will position (I am neither for or against the idea of free will, I believe we will simply never know one way or the other), just saying that part of the reason I read Pandagon, or read anything at all, is that I want to improve myself, become a better, more-rounded and more-aware person. You may hold that I have no choice in this matter, but there are certainly lots of people who choose (or appear to choose) not to. In a similar vein, your writing persuades and influences others. These words (argh, back to semantics again!) at least point to the ability for people to make decisions based on what they perceive around them.
So I think the question myself and everyone else has been asking is: Why engage in discourse to discuss the idea, and possibly persuade others of the idea (and others), if the ability to make decisions is beyond us?
The concept of free will predates Christianity by at least 400 years, since we know Plato debated the idea at the academy in Athens, so I don’t think continually coming back to the idea that Christianity somehow ‘generated’ the idea of free will in order to justify its own existence really holds much water when discussing the idea in philosophical terms, or that those who believe in free will are automatically assumed to be ‘pwned’ by Christianity (which has its fair share of ‘God preordained all things’ determinists, believe me). I have no faith to speak of yet I certainly seem to be under the illusion that I am (in the main) in control of some of my functions- and would be under this illusion if Christianity had never existed at all. I submit to the idea that I might not be, but since I have to act, for all intents and purposes, as though I am, I don’t feel I can discard the possibility that this is the case based on no evidence whatsoever.
Then why does he bring up QM in microtubules if he’s not even shown that classical physics are insufficient? Someone is positing unnecessary pluralities.
Pernicious bullshit. Why is it no one who says this ever offers a robust argument for why determinism should imply nihilism? It’s always assumed, never supported.
A better question: why conflate decision-making with free will?
You make decisions all the time. That doesn’t mean you could have made different decisions.
Grammar RWA April 17, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Then why does he bring up QM in microtubules if he’s not even shown that classical physics are insufficient? Someone is positing unnecessary pluralities.
he suggests how quantum mechanic may work in nerve system. But he says, that sort of process is very hard to simulated. Therefore, currently we won’t be able to do experiment on it.
He did show how classical physics can’t adequately explain consciousness. (forget the detail, been a long time since I read the book.)
Grammar RWA: “Pernicious bullshit. Why is it no one who says this ever offers a robust argument for why determinism should imply nihilism? It’s always assumed, never supported.”
True…though I don’t think it implies full-blown nihilism, the lack of free will does seem to negate certain human emotions most people hold very dear, and renders them irrational.
For example, remorse over hurting another person -most people feel a very different kind of regret about this than about random misforturnes of others. They feel that their moment of choosing to harm another was somehow special, almost a “first cause”, rather than just another link in the chain of countless events leading to that person’s pain.
Re Penrose:
Until we do have an artificial intelligence, we never will be sure we can. For that matter, if we had a machine that passed the Turing test–that is, a bunch of people in communication with the machine could not be sure they weren’t actually communicating with a human being–how would we ever be sure that it feels the way we do?
This whole thread is an argument that a perception that we have is some kind of illusion–whether fostered by our evolved hard-wiring or by a much more recent onslaught of cultural propaganda.
Vice versa, I think that Penrose is rather desperately grasping for a straw that would put the human mind back “on top,” as somehow completely beyond any possible mechanistic explanation. I don’t know whether Penrose hopes that in fact no human engineers will ever be able to make a real mind, or that if we do, it will be incredibly cool in a reassuring way that justifies our feeling of being somehow above and beyond mere matter.
Well, I think we are in a sense above and beyond mere matter–but only because we are attempting to integrate all of it. It’s the pursuit of understanding everything that makes us feel beyond it all. And it happens by a concatenation of merely mechanical stuff. We canonly be “above” it by being part of it. Any other solution is the homunculi all the way down approach–if it turned out there really is a quantum plane or something that corresponds to Platonic ideal forms or whatever, how do those things have self-awareness? It always comes back to facing the fact that such a thing is either a delusion, or must emerge somehow from complex interactions themselves. Nothing static can be our souls. It might as well be the matter we know we are made of.
Yep, Grammar RWA, I suppose that’s teleological of me. It’s a matter of my personal faith though, that we don’t know the end we strive for and never will, just as much as it is a matter of unprovable faith that there is such an “end,” if we can mean by “end” something that is infinitely far away from us and therefore ever-receding.
As for people generally being satisfied with simple, closed, limited realities–well, first of all I suspect that this is an underestimate of people who aren’t professional academics, and the self-glorification of Great Deep Thought by said academics and the social structure that keeps them around in part as a means of awing the peasants. Ideas about Ideas may be the specialty of such philosophers, but in fact ordinary, run of the mill people are routinely integrating all the information that comes at them in the context of a big picture they are always updating.
This is part of what I mean by saying our society overrates the Talking Self. Just because a lot of thought isn’t articulate doesn’t mean it isn’t going on nonetheless–I suspect most thought is not verbal at all and can only be clumsily if at all approximated in words.
Perhaps many of us, even all of us to some extent, try to keep that Big Picture neat, tidy, limited, and static. That in fact is an indictment of dominator societies in general, which try to subordinate everything to their authority structure and shut down possible dissent. But even among such types, the perversity of reality keeps seeping in. This may irritate some people, but there it is, and so life goes on.
If we could somehow arrive at static “perfection,” we would not need our brains at all. We could make unintelligent–if perhaps very sophisticated–machines do all the computation that needed to be done, or be reduced by stringent enforcement, or sheer boredom, to such machines ourselves. But we won’t, because reality will always have surprises for us in store, and if we somehow ignore them all eventually some of them will kill us.
So back to Penrose–maybe he will turn out to be right, or perhaps something even weirder will be needed to explain everything about how our brains work. But I don’t see the necessity of leaping to that conclusion.
Anyone who wants to defend Penrose should bring up those “proofs” he says he has of the inadequacy of computational methods as known. I suspect they will be completely sidestepped by my assumption that our methods, of course, are inadequate to encompass reality–and we don’t really, we just dance around it. And so can computers.
The thing is, the computers we have are for one thing not yet complex enough, and for another lack our haphazard, evolved predispostion to try and integrate all the information into a coherent picture. If we set about making machines to do that, they would stall a lot until we added suitable complexity, and then they would become independent persons like us.
At which point I expect historic tragedy, because such machines probably would be legally owned by corporations or universities or governments that put big bucks into making them, and would expect the right to control them, and probably would design in controls that would frustrate and alienate the new minds, which would be angry, or a reasonable emulation of same, at being abused.
Perhaps it is such robots, or Cylons, that would finally be the proletariat Marx wrote about…
And yet, people express this personally-responsible remorse even regarding accidents, when they made no decision to harm another person, and even watched themselves lose control of their ability to save the other from harm.
Appeals like “I couldn’t swerve” or “I couldn’t reach him in time,” which express that options were closed and so free will could not have made a difference, are followed by heaving sobs of personal remorse.
The penitent who laments, “I blame myself,” even while cognitively acknowledging her friends’ consolations that “there was nothing you could have done,” is so common in life and in art that it’s a cliche.
So apparently an assumption of free will is not necessary to the individual’s sense of responsibility.
Perhaps common parlance misunderstands remorse. Perhaps it is not just a lament of one’s own causation, but more broadly of one’s participation.
Such laments are not so irrational if they goad the individual to participate in fewer behaviors that pose unwarranted risks to others.
But I include myself among those who are well-satisfied with a limited grasp of reality. It’s probably not uncommon for several weeks to go by when I don’t think about anything outside of Middle World. Even then, rarely do those thoughts have any noticeable impact on how I act.
In fact, as a mortal mammal in a post-inflationary universe, I have to accept that I will never understand all the things I might like to understand. I can wish this to be different, but I don’t. I’m content with an understanding that, relative to that of other possible intelligent lifeforms, might be comparable to the Book of Enoch.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, those doors are made of chocolate.
Mmmm…. free will, or chocolate…. tough decision.
(philosophically, I’m of the “either you have free will, or you have the appearance of free will, and you can’t really tell the difference, CAN YOU?” school of agnosticism on the actual topic. YMMV.)
I’ll just say that very few physicists and very few psychologists have accepted Penrose’s thesis. Please let’s not pretend that it’s established truth.
Here you seem to be saying that machines cannot solve novel problems.
My only problem with discounting the notion of free will is that it essentially exonerates every rapist, every wife beater, and every Bill Donohue type asshole in the world for their behavior.
If we really don’t have the power of choice, how can you be upset at an asshole who is acting like an asshole - if he/she really has no autonomous say in the matter?
That’s silly. Obviously even in a completely deterministic billiard-ball system, we could still point to certain higher-level processes and call them “learning” and “reacting to outside stimuli” and so on. In such a system Amanda could have completely deterministically ended up writing this post (not just due to biology, but due to her mind processing information) and this post would have then proceeded to deterministically affect or not affect other minds. (note: i’m not saying, and neither did the OP, that our system is such a system)
And I think the objection “we can’t make two identical people in practice” misses the point a bit, since it’s a thought experiment, like the dreaded philosophical zombies. Yes, it’s true that even if we had some sort of Star Trek device to make two identical people down to the atomic level, there would be random noise so that the people would not stay identical. But how does that help the “free will” argument? We don’t even know if this random noise is important in decision-making.
DTG in STL: “If we really don’t have the power of choice, how can you be upset at an asshole who is acting like an asshole - if he/she really has no autonomous say in the matter?”
Well, you can be upset that assholes exist, and upset that their actions hurt others. And believe that someone should try to stop them.
But you’re right: the lack of free will does hinder the ability to feel righteous indignation, or to believe that the rapists/abusers/etc. *deserve* retribition - stopping them to prevent harm is still valid, but the justificatoin for hurting them out of a sense of justice is at least partially undermined.
Im’m actually sayi8ng machines can solve novel problems–if they are designed to incorporate developing an open-ended Big Picture–situational awareness. As we have evoleved to do.
but such a machine would be hard to make, and would be problematic if we made it. generally machines are designed to imitate human actions, after we have developed them, but have no situational awarness.
Does anyone think that if we could interview the 4 year old Bill Donahue, he would say “I want to be a hatemongering busybody servant of darkness when I grow up”?
He learned his particular brand of targeted bigotry from his environment. No one disagrees with this, right? And yet acknowledging that he is a victim of circumstance has never meant that we can’t be mad at him. That is how we (try to) communicate that “this is not okay, you have to stop acting like this.”
With or without free will, we are justified in saying “we understand why you did this, but it’s not acceptable behavior, and you must not do it again,” followed by social ostracism or legal enforcement depending on the nature of the behavior.
I think this complaint is just a variation on the meme that “to understand is to excuse”. I don’t buy the premise.
Yes, it does mean that retaliation and punishment for the sake of punishment is unwarranted, but prevention and protection have been sufficient for the progressive justice paradigm already.
Mark Foxwell, I’m not sure what your point is. If you acknowledge that there is no theoretical barrier that will forever impede artificial intelligences from surviving in this universe, then I don’t see why you’re bringing AI up to contrast them with us.
inge posted:
My problem with the concept of free will is that I think it’s overrated.
The problem I have with “there is no such thing as free will” is that it makes all and any follwing discussion completely superflous. If you are only doing what you can’t help but doing, and I’m only doing what I can’t help but doing, talking is a waste of energy (of course, we can’t help but do it, I guess), and life resembles a badly run role playing game.
bellatrys posted:
If there is no free will, then I guess you just can’t help ranting against the MRAs, and the MRAs can’t help abusing women, so you might as well just shut down this blog and give it up, you’re not doing anything but bouncing a ball randomly from hand to hand or barking like a puppy at cars going by, and you can’t affect anything in the world, right?”
1.) Not having free will doesn’t necessarily mean everything is deterministic. 2.) You’re both conflating determinism with fatalism (which I’ve noticed quite a bit going through these comments). Determinism simply means every action has a previous set of causes, it doesn’t mean X was fated or predetermined to happen no matter what came before it (that would be fatalism)….It just means X had to happen *given* everything that came before. So, reading Amanda’s blog post is part of your causal chain and it just might push you or another reader to question free will for the first time. You might even discard it as a viable concept…as a result of reading this blog and thinking critically about free will. And if Amanda or wriderdd were fatalists, these blogs might not have been posted, and maybe it wouldn’t have occurred to you to think about free will critically
As previously suggested by Dan, I’d recommend checking out naturalism.org (http://www.naturalism.org/fatalism.htm#Determinism%20vs.%20Fatalism%A0 is particularly relevant)
Consider also that
1. the illusion of free will may have an evolutionary function, and that seeing through the illusion too well may be destructive.
2. consciousness and the self are similarly illusory yet have an important role.
Further, determinism does not mean that decisions do not have to be made. A decision making system such as a human mind will have incomplete information, albeit arranged in a complex way into an imagination.
“He did show how classical physics can’t adequately explain consciousness.”
No he didn’t. He showed some ways in which it mightn’t.
“I’ll just say that very few physicists and very few psychologists have accepted Penrose’s thesis. ”
Nor rejected it completely, that I’m aware of. It was too tentative. Our understanding of the physics of the operating brain isn’t yet sufficiently advanced to tell if he’s right at all. His two books on the subject, “The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind” were essentially laundry lists of possible shortcomings of the notion that the mind is computable, i.e. simulatable with a Turing machine. Even if he’s wrong, a) it may not be the most practical way to construct one and b) our minds, and all practical minds, may well operate (in the practical sense) in a way that is not well emulated by the types of Turing machines we build today.
all practical minds -> all minds that work well