I am not claiming that it IS deterministic. I am asking you to describe the mechanism (deterministic or super-natural) that allows something you perceive as “Me” separate from the brain’s physical presence, to affect the world. I am not trying to shoehorn you- you are free to give any answer to support your belief, but until you support your belief it remains merely an unsupported contention.
I think I have an empirically testable suggestion for how the whole subject works but it involves a fairly deep knowledge of current thinking on Neutral Monism and a stab at possible future scientific progress. I see this merely as a conjecture and would not claim it as a fact or even a likelihood of being right- merely a posibility of interest to future research.
Your claim to some residual Free Will is not couched in those terms and so requires some supportive evidence if you are to maintain the argument.
If on the other hand you agree with my approach that your belief IS mere conjecture, then we can both agree that there is no empirical support for Free Will than any of the above errors, and that we must continue to address the problem philosophically and empirically.
I wonder if there is Free will, why the need for the 10 Commandments? If one doesn’t follow them (according to what I have heard) one spends eternity in Hell fire.
Even if it sounds (because of the syntax of the language we use to describe it) as if this state of affairs requires a “separate me” to mediate between different conflicting thoughts and feelings so as to choose between them, that isn’t really the case.
My feelings are what they are: cognitive input. I engage in a process of coming to understand those feeings better, of getting an interpretation of them. There’s a process of selecting the most elegant interpretation of what I feel, but it isn’t a choosing between conflicting thoughts that somehow requires a “different me” to stand to the side and stare at two (or a dozen) conflicting interpretations of what I feel; the act (or art) of bringing those feelings into interpretive focus is self-referential, consisting in and of itself of an assortment of feelings about interpretations of feelings about interpretations, ad infinitum.
None of them gets discarded, “chosen against”, exactly. I continue to feel and to consider interpretations other than the one that seems most elegant at any given time; everything is perpetually “in the process of”.
The problem is that we have managed to construct an empirical explanation for how living matter emerges from non-living matter with no supernatural input.
I am certain that with some years, decades or centuries of research the same will happen for consciousness and action. Let us not forget that DNA was unknown 75 years ago and evolution by natural selection has only been accpted for a century or so.
I think that like Vital Essence, Consciousness and free will will be dismantled piecemeal.
We have relatively little problem allowing lower creatures to have qualia such as pain and other gut emotions.
“If on the other hand you agree with my approach that your belief IS mere conjecture, then we can both agree that there is no empirical support for Free Will than any of the above errors, and that we must continue to address the problem philosophically and empirically.”
I completely agree, empirical evidence is lacking, it may never be found either IMHO.
However, my strong self, Jupe, located at registry # 57464959366 really has trouble with it.
I apologize for mistaking your viewpoint. Will you please stop mistaking mine? I do not believe that the “Me” is “separate from the brain’s physical presence.” I believe that the “Me” is physical and material.
You keep asking me to support things I do not believe in. We’re talking past each other.
As I see it, it is because of freedom that we need laws! We have to get together and make up a rule: “Everybody drive on the right.” We have to have laws against murder, because some jerks out there will abuse their freedom and kill people. The Ten Commandments are just rules of that sort: they help (somewhat) make society safer for everyone.
I’d argue from Dawkins, from “Climbing Mount Improbable.” Essentially, big jumps in the probability space can arise from many, many small jumps. The eagle’s eye evolved through billions of intermediate stages.
Grin! Can one lone nerve cell “rebel” against the “Me” and overthrow the entire decision-making process? “For want of a nail, the battle was lost…”
Ultimately, this debate is purely philosophical. Some ideas simply cannot be explored scientifically. I mentioned “Last Thursdayism.” It can’t be proven or disproven.
The discoveries being made in brain science are fascinating! Watching, in real time, scans of people’s brains while they are performing mental tasks has taught us remarkable things. As yet, however, it hasn’t settled the “Free Will” debate. (It also hasn’t found the soul, determined between “right and wrong,” or figured out why some people like Bartok.)
What the creationists don’t understand is that complexity arises from simplicity.
They look at the eyeball. They marvel. They’re dumbstruck. They can’t imagine a mechanism of such complexity stemming from what they perceive to be random processes. But of course it’s only “random” from a certain perspective. There is causal purpose in the evolutionary process. Mutations that are better adapted to their situation are naturally selected, and those mutations then breed to fill the niches in the environment. But some people can’t believe the outcome of such a simple process. They’re stuck on the astounding final result, the bewildering complexity that is the end of a tortuous and long causal chain. And so they assume the complexity has its own unique origin outside of any natural process.
The simple steps are so simple, and the final eyeball so breathtaking, that they refuse to accept a connection between that simplicity and that complexity. In their minds, complexity is divorced from any humble origins. Complexity gets its own pedestal, its own special unique origin.
But this is totally wrong, and it’s wrong in every field we examine. Complexity comes from simplicity, and examples abound. Take the Mandelbrot set for an easy math example. We start with the number 0 and then subject it to a simple process. First, we square the number (as part of the process). Then we add a number c from the complex plane. This gives us a new number, and we run our new number through the same process again: square it again and add c again. That’s it. Very simple. We just do that over and over.
By checking different c’s and illustrating the results that are bounded, this simple process results in this.
Complexity arises from simplicity. I should hardly need to say that the mammalian brain is incredibly complex, but was bred from the same causal chain that led to the eagle eyeball. And the human brain is just another extension on the mammalian brain. This upsets the creationists. They want to divorce the beautiful complexity from the humble simplicity of the causal process. They want two sets of rules. They want their special pedestal, so that the tiny micro steps can’t possibly add up to the macro whole because the notion is too emotionally upsetting. Their special feeling of magical complexity doesn’t allow them to accept simple and humble origins.
To believe that something complex couldn’t arise from an apparently simple origin is a fundamental misunderstanding of what complexity is.
So why do you personally dismiss Last Thursdayism?
For a lot of us, there is a very specific reason why we should have extremely little confidence in the idea. And for the same specific reason, I would take Last Thursdayism any day of the week over the empty-suit-of-a-term that is “free will”. It might help bridge a gap if you explained your own approach in dismissing the creation of the universe last week.
Because it is “nonsense” in the technical term of the philosophy of science. It cannot be falsified.
I am gathering that you might disagree with my viewpoints, but I’m not really clear exactly how or why.
I don’t think human volition is as badly defensible as Last Thursdayism. I think there is adequate support for the idea that people make choices. The idea that all such choices are only illusions is difficult to support.
The idea that some choices are illusions is comfortably supported by real research.
The idea that we have no conscious volition is just too big a bite to swallow.
Anyway, disagreement is the soul and spirit of a debate, so, lay on.
Because if free will were not falsifiable, it would likewise be “nonsense” in the technical philosophical sense, and so by the same rule, it would appear (at first blush) that you should dismiss it just as quickly as you dismiss Last Thursdayism.
This is a claim about “support”, but I don’t know what kind of support you’re talking about.
Previously you said this debate was philosophical, and that nothing could be proven or disproven. Like Last Thursdayism. That doesn’t really make this debate unique, though, since nothing is ever proven in science. Everything is about greater or lesser amounts of support. The prevailing theory today might be modified into non-recognizability tomorrow.
But now you’re talking about “support”. You have said that Last Thursdayism is philo-nonsense because it can’t be falsified, which is a rationale for rejecting it, but if some people wearing black trenchcoats and sunglasses started flying around saying they were the programmers of this world that they called the Matrix (or whatever) – and who subsequently seemed able to bring matter into existence out of nothing, including brand new people who claimed to have been alive fifty years, which is to say, they had fifty years of memories even though they appeared yesterday… then I’d take Last Thursdayism a lot more seriously.
But even in that case, it still might not be falsifiable in your terms.
When I’m talking about “support”, then I’m talking about new things that might come to light that would shift the weight of probability as I perceive it. In those terms, I can easily imagine a scenario, however strange, that would shift the probabilities of Last Thursdayism, either the strict form or some variant thereof. If people pop out of thin-air with fifty years of memories that don’t correspond to our world, then that would call into question the reliability of my own memories (or further call into question, since human memory as currently understood is already a muddle).
If both notions are unfalsifiable, but you still think one has more support, than I need to know what for you constitutes support.
I for one would take Last Thursdayism over non-determinstic (/non-chance-based) “free will” any day, because I can imagine scenarios that would move the needle on Last Thursdayism. I reject it now because of needless complexity in first principles. The complexity we see around us can be explained by much simpler first principles, i.e. the laws of physics as we understand them.
I think this is a mischaracterization or oversimplification of “you”. Your fundamental consciousness is based on your survival instinct. Without the survival requirement (the need to avoid permanent extinguishment), you would really not have a need for a consciousness – it is because of this foundation that I have serious doubts that there will ever be a computing device that is “self-aware”, at least in and of itself.
Your thoughts are the complex interplay of the various levels of your brain’s functions, your feeling are either basic chemical responses (lust, laughter, longing, lassitude, et al) along with the conscious-level responses to them, or neural inscription (habits, predjudices and the like). These things are entirely biochemical and/or neurological, there is not much room left for “you”, if any.
My cat has self-awareness, but she does not discuss it. Mostly, anyway. A spider has self-awareness, in that it runs away if it thinks you might be a threat. I have a really hard time discerning how that is different from us, other than the fact that we can write about it and invent invisible beings to explain it.
As far as I can tell, we are just astoundingly elaborate entities that simply have the ability for superficial introspection: the further in we look, the more it looks like that is all there is. Very complicated, possibly beyond our comprehension, but nothing more.
Of course we have conscious volition. The issue is that that volition can be vectored from cause through anticipated result. Consider when your four-year-old broke that blue china jar that your grandmother brought back from France (or maybe a yard sale). Out of the corner of your eye, you saw him pick it up off the side table and fling it on the floor. So, what is the first thing you ask him?
“Why did you do that??!?”
Which is to say, we expect our actions to have a reason. You choose Godiva today, instead of Cadbury. Do you really think there is no underlying reason for that choice? Like, you have become bored with Cadbury, or the Godiva is on sale, or your sister was saying how wonderful the Godiva 72% is. But any way you look at it, there is a reason for your choice.
You find six twenties lying on the sidewalk, do you keep walking? Pick them up and look for who dropped them? Or pick them up and keep walking? If you put a great deal of thought into how you would choose to act in a situation like that, you will see that you are making a calculation. It might be an instinctive one that happens pretty quickly, but it is not that hard to work out what factors affect your choice,
[ul]
[li]The thug-looking guy standing over there[/li][li]What the money is worth to you or someone else[/li][li]How fast you can run (if you need to)[/li][li]Whether it might make you late to your next appointment[/li][/ul]
but any way you look at it, there is a why for everything we do – even if it is just to be contrarian. How “free will” fits into that is not obvious to me.
And we can tell ourselves that we know why. But we can’t really know why. We can come up with a good WAG. But from our vantage points, we can’t know why we do what we do.
The “free will is an illusion” argument says that everyone who makes a choice is being compelled by something, and that that something results from something ultimately external to them. Even if the person is not aware of it.
The way I have it worked out in my head is like this: if I know about all your hidden compulsions, I can accurately predict your behavior. But if you have free will, you aren’t subject to hidden compulsions. You choose what you will do for no reason that could be ever determined by me, the arrogant egghead in the lab coat. So you will consistently defy my predictions. And eventually I will lower my head in defeat.
I’m now picturing someone who lacks free will, but has a hidden compulsion to defy predictions. I’m also now picturing someone who, having free will, decides to commit himself to honest straightforwardness, striving never to mislead anyone.
Where choice and volition enter into it is when the “whys” – the causes – are, in part, internal. They arrive from “votes” from different parts of the self. But these parts are, themselves, open to negotiation. You can barter with yourself. You can cut political deals in the internal committee meeting. The self is complex, but it can be steered.
This kind of steering is “volition.” It’s “me” making choices. The fact that it involves work, it involves persuasion, it involves doubt – this is what, in my mind, keeps it from being subject to external “why” reasoning.
I want to lose weight – and I want that candy bar.
I not only have conflicting urges, I have conflicts in what weight to assign each of the respective rewards and penalties.
I believe it is absurd to claim that all of this effort I put into making up my mind is just stage business, and that the decision was already made the instant I saw the candy commercial on tv two weeks ago. I do not believe that; I believe that I am doing the work, right up until the point I eat the darned thing.
Why would nature bother to evolve such an incredibly wasteful process, if it’s all just insect-like tropisms? The insects get the job done without having to construct a massive illusory theater about it all.
I accept that our mammalian nature has introduced short-cuts into our reasoning process. The principles of reward and avoidance are incentives and goads, rewarding behavior evolution favors and punishing behavior evolution disfavors.
But if free will is an illusion…why should it exist at all? Why bother with a vast bloated bureaucracy of the mind, if it has no purpose other than to ratify urges that exist at a simplified level of brain activity? It would be like the old Soviet Parliament: you get 800 guys to sit and vote “Yes.” Why the hell bother?
I’ve mostly stayed out of this thread because I realized a few years ago that the Dope isn’t an efficient way to address the question, for reasons you’ve mentioned a few times now. What I will say is that, Pjen’s and monstro’s objections notwithstanding, you’ve hit very close to the main thesis of most careful thinkers on the topic. Don’t be intimidated. Hallet’s position, quoted at Post #357is very close to yours. And mine. What you need to let go of, perhaps, is that conscious awareness is the touchstone of volition. Leave out this and our ordinary understanding of responsibility goes through pretty easily. FWIW, this is a compatibilitst stance, but as others have noted, we have good company.
I tried to address that above. Not is defending Free Will but explaining why something like Free Will seems to exist- the feeling of having Free Will.
Evolution deals with simple changes occurring over many generations.All the evidence points towards Homo Sapiens (and its predecessors and neighbours) having had at least two stages of consciousness- A Recent Consciousness and an Historic Consciousness. Historic consciousness is lacking in the very high levels of questioning, model making, complex planning and social construction which explains why humans have essentially terraformed the planet in a manner that no other animal has achieved. Even the claims of consciousness for gorillas, dolphins, crows, ants, bees and termites have not resulted in such manipulation of the environment in the interest of the species.
I do not believe that Modern consciousness has had enough generations to evolve using natural selection. I believe that it is a non-evolutionary process subsequent to evolution- evolution drove awareness to a certain stage and then other forces boot strapped modern consciousness. As I said above I tend towards a late Jaynesian breakpoint of about 1000 bce, but even Jaynes admits that if he was wrong, we still have to explain the gap between animal and modern human consciousness as changing in less than geological time.
So I see a process where complex reactivity that occurs in complex organic molecules is built from simple reactivity in the realm of inorganic chemistry and physics. Such reactivity and reversal of entropy ocurs in simple self replicators, DNA, RNA, Viruses, Prions, complexes destined to become cell constituents, single celled organisms, multi-celled organisms. Each move towards higher complexity raises the coefficient of reactivity and by this stage simple organisms can perceive and react to heat gradients, chemical gradients, light etc. Specialisations within multi-celled organisms allows homeostasis- plants maintaining an internal environment and creating energy from photosynthesis by reacting correctly to the environment, and higher levels of perception, perhaps by now with Sea Slugs and such we get brains which may have a very primitive form of awareness. These brains become more physically complex leading to more aware perceivers, maybe with some form of internal representation of the world that we share at very basic levels. Greater complexity leads to better model making and ability to address semi-conscious questions to the universe. Note no language has yet occurred, so any of this addressing must be consceptual without language. And so we are brought to early hominids. Still basically animals, they react to the environment with precision and skill, starting to make tools and change the universe, yet still only partially conscious. Humans are not individual survivors- they only survivbe in groups. Groups build up communication skills and primitive language develops. This has taken over 14 billion years, 10 billion as inorganic change from sub atomic particles and about 4 billion from the first signs of life. All that time to get as clever as a gorilla! Quite a climb but quite a journey. The Stone Age began about 4 million years ago. so 10 billion years to get to life, another 4 billion to hominids, yet the biggest climb of all in ability has taken only at most 4 million years and maybe as little as 1000 years! I do not see this latter incredible spurt being anything to do with an evolutionary process as we understand it with cell division and survival of the fittest- there is massively insufficient time.
I suggest that the gradient from simple reactivity to Gorilla-awareness over 4 billion years via Natural selection is believable, but a new process started with the ability of socially oriented, language users to turn awareness (whatever in the world that that is- and which I will explain shortly) in on itself, making personal behaviour a subject for the model making abilities previously used on external objects only. This probably started as soon as organisms developed a basic Theory of Other Minds, and became overwhelming when this theory was amplified by the use of representational language. It is a short step from clever animals predicting the behaviour of others using a Theory of Mind, to looking at their own consciousness and making a model of that. Unfortunately the most comforting natural model available is one based on some form of Free Will and Folk Science has shown that this has been the common assumption almost since records of such model making are available. Jaynes suggests that actually the modern mind with current self-awareness only came into being about the time of the writing of the earlier books of the bible and the works of Homer. The Christian/Jewish belief in The Fall and loss of innocence is seen as the loss of previous semi-conscious simple unquestioning awareness and the start of complex modelling of the mind. It was not a tree of knowledge but a Tree of Self Awareness! Even if this break point is 10,000 or 100,000 years ago, there is not evolutionary time to explain the development.
So we return to the question of awareness. What is it if it is produced as part of an evolutionary process in a naturalistic manner (I reject completely any resort to supernaturalism as a dead end every time it has been tried to explain the world- even when a super-natural model has been accepted for centuries, history shows that science eventually naturalises everything. So how can awareness grow out of ‘stuff’. My argument is one from Neutral Monism- basically that “stuff is not as stuffy as we thought”. We have travelled from a universe filled with stuff (I really like the Aristotelian term for stuff which is the Greek for ‘Lumber’- something we have been lumbered with for millennia.) Modern science reduces solid desks to atoms, then to quarks, then to hyperdimensional strings of probability- not very stuffy. My gut feeling is that somewhere at this level of explanation is some sort or set of equations explaining how reactivity works generally in the world from basic sub atomic forces, gravity, electromagnetism, right the way up to conscious highly reactive organisms. We just are not (yet?) bright enough to do the experiments on the right happenings in the right way. We are like the Newtonians before Einstein, Evolutionists before Wallace and Darwin, Physicists before Quantum Theory, Alchemists before Physics and Chemistry were understood.
I do not object to Hallet at all. He is a compatibilist - a determinist with an explanation. He is saying merely that Free Will is essentially a metaphor, a construction and not a force in the natural world. We may proceed ‘As If’ Free wsill existed, but it is not a physical cause. The Atoms of the brain are the physical casue but it is useful to speak As If their joint decisions were something called Free Will.
Evolution is not a thing. It is not a strategy, nor a mechanism, nor a recipe. It does not have goals or targets or ideal results.
Evolution is an effect.
We are not how we are due to being the focal achievement of natural selection, this much is blindingly obvious: if we were the definitive outcome, our physiology would suck a whole lot less than it does.
Our facility with language and abstract reason have not as yet been shown to have a particular survival advantage, in fact, given what we have seen from us, one could make the case that over the long term, it may be a detriment to our survival, as we are ever finding new ways to kill ourselves and each other and most other things.
