True. But the nature of the phenomenon is the same. There’s no new fundamental mode created, as posited by physicalism.
Well, it can be made applicable to the thread. A lot of people, if they accept panpsychism, will find it much easier to believe there’s no free will, given that the keyboard in front of me, certainly doesn’t seem to exhibit it.
Of course, then one could restrict applicable domain to those entities which we humans consider alive. But it just gets more contrived.
I think you are making an assumption that 1) you can use it, and 2) it is useful.
If the brain merely takes input and produces output, and the configuration of our brains (along with everything else in the universe) was determined at the big bang (due to being set along one path of many potential paths) then you can’t use “free will” and it isn’t useful.
Some questions:
Does the weather have free will? (I think most would agree not)
Does a virus have free will? (Is it even alive?)
Does a cell have free will?
Does a tree have free will?
etc.
Actually, the key would was “use” which generally carries with it a host of phenomena like intention and volition. The paradox only presents itself by considering the will an object like a baseball, or an impression like any qualia. Do determinists wonder how it is that I intend something? For instance, I am motivated by thirst, and so I head out to a water pump intending to get water. As I sit there and pump, a determinist might rightly suggest that the underlying cause of my pumping is my thirst, and my thirst is a biological mechanism. But that is hardly what I mean when I told my wife that I was heading out to the pump for some water.
On the subject of Libet’s experiment, I’d like to point out that the website did not give a complete synopsis of Daniel Dennett’s explination. He mentions that the experiment seems to assume that the self exists in some specific part of the brain. This is not true. The self is spread out in time and space. Libet’s experiment tries to determine the instant when you become aware of a decision, but no such instance exists, because conscious decision is smeared out in time. What Libet’s experiment, and others (he mentions one directly), prove is that all conscious decisions take time, specifically around 300 milliseconds, the time found in Libet’s experiment. This all comes from Dennett’s book Freedom Evolves, pages 227-242.
A question for SentientMeat or anyone else who responds: What do you want free will to do? You seem to be denying its existance because all the brain can do is make decisions based on the the situation at hand, person’s own inclinations and personal history (with, of course, some errors thrown in), and perhaps a random number generator thrown in when two options sound equally good. That sounds like a pretty good definition of the will to me.
There may be a middle ground (literally) that you are missing. What if, for instance, the “path” chosen at the big bang was very wide. Your exact course within that path could indeed be chosen by you as you travel it.
Quite so, especially the decision part. 
My objection is essentially the same as Dr. Love’s.
I consider myself to be a determinist, but I don’t believe determism to be incompatible with free will. That’s because, even granting a deterministic universe, I seem to get everything I want from free will. That is, what I consider to be my “self” has a prominent role in determining what actions I take. Now, perhaps it was pre-determined that I would choose to write this paragraph, but, all the same, I made the choice.
In other words, what’s the point of saying that free will is an illusion, unless you’re defining free will as merely “not determinism”?
How do you know? The only reason you believe that this “self” made a choice to act is because you remember it that way. But how do you know the action didn’t come first, and the memory later? Experimental evidence suggests that may very well be the case.
what i want from “free will” is to have it refer to something. when people say “free will”, i think they tend to mean that the “self” can select between various options “freely”. the problem is, what do we mean by “self” and “freely”? even if we don’t consider physics, all our decisions are made based on what we believe, and those beliefs, if we trace their origins, eventually come from something over which we have no control. so we either have some physical process over which we have no control (indeed, what do we mean “we”?), or we have some “self” making decisions based on something over which he has no control. so what is the “self” and what is the “free will”?
my personal belief, and this is what i assume people truly mean when they say “free will” (even if they don’t know it), is that since we say “i”, we assume there is something referred to by the term the self, which creates outputs based on the inputs, and though we can only make but one choice, we may have several options, so we think we are “free” to choose among them.
it doesn’t really matter by that formulation, since we define self as the mechanism that makes the choice.
My response depends on exactly what you mean. If you’re basically holding that the self is "simply the unique string of memories arbitrarily labelled ‘myself’” – in other words, that it is the self which is illusory – then I won’t be the one to argue with you. If you’re arguing that there is no chooser making choices which are distinct from itself, but instead there are only choices – I would agree.
On the other hand, if you’re suggesting that conscious beings do have distinct identities, but have no effect on the physical word and are merely “along for the ride,” I just don’t see the point. As long as I’m speaking of my memories, emotions, and predilections as being “myself” – whether or not it’s merely a term of art – I may as well describe any choice which is significantly affected by same as being an expression of “free will.”
The choice is there – if there’s anything that “I” do, it’s choosing.
An intention is a decision in itself, surely? Translated into (admittedly oversimple) computer-ese, a calculation outputs that a given action is necessary or desirable, and this ouput is “buffered” while it scrolls though if-then’s based on senses and memory in order to calculate a means of realising that action. You used language to encode that buffered output and transmit it to another computer familiar with your encoding protocol (language), in order that “she understood your will”.
Me too, but is that really “will”? You speak of the brain, and inputs such as environment, feedback, errors, memories and random inputs, , rather than the ‘soul’ (or even the self). The fundamental question is could I do something different to what I actually do? The computer cannot help but output the decision based on its inputs and algorithm, even if some of those inputs are effectively random. I argue that humans are the same: it is irrelevant to speak of of you might do, since all we can reasonably explore is what you actually did. Like I said - “do, or do not. There is no ‘choose’.”
Again, if ‘calculation’ is all that is necessary for ‘will’, then surely other ‘calculators’ have it too: the thermostat ‘chooses’ the room temperature, the amoeba ‘chooses’ the warmer region, the computer ‘chooses’ the chess move, and so on?
Of course - like I said, free will is a useful fiction rather like, say, Hell: it acts as an input to some of those human calculators which ultimately prevents outputs which other computers find undesirable.
Once you’d written it, you couldn’t unmake the ‘choice’. If it had never been written, you couldn’t have unmade that ‘choice’ either. Our actions, like the weather, have many causes. But the weather has no ‘will’.
Well I believe we make decisions and choices, but I think they’re made completely systematically - we don’t make them freely.
I think the reason we appear to have free will is because when we spend a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons in a decision, it is unlikely that we’d know the outcome in advance. If we had known the outcome in advance we’re wasting our time spending so much time in making the decision.
Another reason why I think we might believe we are making our decisions freely is because a strong factor in our decision-making are the mysterious intuitive/emotional aspects when we weigh up the possibilities. i.e. apparently are reptillian and mammalian brains have a large affect on our decisions and they can be the source of irrational phobias, etc. Also, sometimes we deliberately try to make random decisions but I think they involve systematic processes… I mean I think our alledgedly “random” ideas just involve a chain of associations where each association is the strongest association with the contents of your short term memory [stimuli] (including recent trains of thought and sensory experiences).
BTW, the most convincing way to test that would be to get a time machine and repeat history lots of times and see if people react in exactly the same way to the same stimuli… e.g. like in “Groundhog Day”.
I don’t think it is irrelevant really. I mean in decisions we weigh up (intuitively and/or rationally) the merits of possible courses of action. Even though we didn’t carry out the alternatives they had some effect. e.g. some of our memory and brain power (or whatever you call it) was devoted to it, and we’d often have a conscious memory of considering that course of action and we might use that memory to carry out that course of action in the future. BTW, I don’t think that quote is very useful. I mean decisions (choices), doing things and not doing things are all distinct. I mean we might decide to drive to work - but not end up doing it due to having a car accident on the way.
(to add to my last post…)
I think it is quite useful. Basically that involves predicting your future decisions. Saying you might do something means that you think that it is possible, but you don’t know whether you will want to do it or whether you will be able to do it… And there could be things that you’re quite certain that you won’t do.
e.g. you could tell your friend that you might buy a new car next year. (i.e. you’ve thought about it but your decision-making process is incomplete)
It would make perfect sense to look at it that way from the perspective of some hypothetical “God,” who views the whole of the universe as simultaneously beginning and ending (i.e., without time).
From our point of view, however, I believe that “free will” is not merely a “useful fiction,” but a reasonably accurate way of describing that which we commonly refer to as “choice.” I fail to see why God’s perspective is preferable to ours.
No, you’re leaving something out. What is understood as necessary for free will is calculation plus at least some degree of sentience. It’s an arbitrary distinction, perhaps, but one which is nonetheless universal.
I disagree. I think this question is, at best, independent of the issue of free will. The vast majority of imaginable cases where something could have acted differently are when the actions are due to randomness. Similarly, the vast majority of decisions that most would say were undertaken freely (even in the perfect libertarian universe (philosophical libertarianism, completely unrelated to political libertarianism)) are made up of a though process that is mostly deterministic. The process of rational thought, whether it be from some immaterial soul or from our own brain, limits the possible actions we could take, from every possible action to the ones that seem appealing, is a mostly (or fully) deterministic process. At this point, there are only a few possible choices left, and the choosing mechanism is unimportant, because you have already decided that each of the possibilities is about equally appealing.
When you look at the experiments a certain way. I gave Dennett’s interpretation of Libet’s experiment, here’s another one that I just thought of:
Libet told his subjects to “Let the urge to act appear on it’s own any time without any preplanning or concentration on when to act.” In the experiment, the decision to act came before the Readiness Potential because that’s exactly what Libet asked them to do; to act on the RP rather than to create the RP. This seems not completely unlike Libet yelling “Don’t think about an apple!”, and then denying free will because you were affected, in a rather predictable way, by the outside world.
He is leaving out the significant effects that occur when intelligence reaches a certain level. At this level, decisions can be based on self and others, not just genes and hormones. Knowledge of Right or Wrong is a magnitude higher level than Knowledge of Reward or Punishment”.
Think of intelligence reaching the quanta or “spirit” dimension of knowledge: a level of intelligence where distinction between existence and non-existence, self and non-self can be understood: New questions to ask, new choices to make.
This is the Realm of Free Will.
Any questions?
I knew you were going to say that!
rwj
It is no more accurate to say “hand me that stick with straw attached by some twine” than it is to say, “Hand me that broom.” I do not understand what we are to glean from an exposition or uncovering of will as an “illusion”. I intend to sweep, and so I grab the broom. Did I will the room clean by sweeping it? I would say that it was my will that it be clean. So mote it be.
It is the strange act of willing as some kind of mental event which is precisely what leads us down what I think are nonsensical paths. That is simply not how we use the word will.
Take, for example, the bromide, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” What account of will is this? Does it coincide with “free will” as people sometimes take it to mean? I do not believe so. Or consider a long distance runner, who achieved his feats through an act of will. We should not let that turn of speech necessarily suggest that willing is a singular action in a philosophical sense.
It is as if we take a particular case of willing, of choice, and in that seek this singular act of willing, seek to lay it bare. As if it were something to be uncovered. But what particular case exists that is an exemplar of will? And if we do not find one, have we really shown that will is an illusion, or simply that our methods were not looking for this “will”?
Why would we look to action to find will? Because we will our actions? But in what sense can we say so? I might say, “I tried, but failed,” but not, “I willed it, but it wasn’t so”–unless, of course, we speak of willing matchboxes to move across the table without touching it. But the proper response there, of course, is that I cannot will anything in that manner. I rather think this is a comment on the use of the word rather than a statement about the facts of “the will.” We find the will in the actions, when the consequences of our actions coincide with our intention. That it is grammatically a noun sometimes, a subject, does not require that it be a thing that is referred to. Language has never required that of subjects. And that it is grammatically a verb sometimes does not require that willing is an activity like running.
I think that is the mistake we deal with here. One, viewing the will as a proper, or shall we say empirical, subject, just because it can take the role of a subject in a sentence; and additionally, viewing “willing” as an activity like “running”, just because it can play the role of a verb in a sentence.
What will we require of “will” that it be “free”? That it is not causally determined? But then it is clearly powerless, for it could not respond to events nor intentionally bring them about. It would be a blind and impotent god–which is, of course, how some seem to view it. I should not be able to will any consequence if my will were so disconnected. But neither is it right to say that I am helpless to bring anything about. If it is my will that this room be cleaned, and I clean it, then surely we have a useful application of the word, which would be the successful completion of an intended task.
And then the question is just what is this intention. But that is not free from causality, either, or it would be clueless to effect anything at all.
Was I free to not clean the room as I was to clean it? Well, nothing forced my hand by any use of the word “force” that we are accustomed to. That it may turn out that my intentions are merely epiphenomena is an interesting sidetrack, but it would not suddenly overturn our use of the words because that isn’t how we were using them in the first place. What is beyond my will is beyond my power to affect. I cannot will myself to fly, but that merely means that I cannot fly, not that I have no will.
That the will as a mysterious subject seems to vanish upon inspection is a facet of interpreting the will in a way that does not coincide with its use in description. Think of the long distance runner, so exhausted, but pushing on. When we say it was her will that enabled her to finish the race, do we mean that there were certain physiological responses happening in her body? Would it explain the event any better? But willing is not meant to be such an explanation in the first place. Consider, “Why did you do that?” “Because I wanted to.” Is that an explanation?
When do we use will, and its “freedom”, as an explanation? That is, normally? I do not find it so. And so not amount of explanation can replace it.
But our definition could be wrong; isn’t that the whole point?
Well I agree with you to the extent that it affects my everyday life. I’m certainly not going to do things differently based on whether my “self” is an illusion. But then we’re here to discuss interesting things, not to develop practical strategies for day-to-day life. Really, you could say “so what?” about pretty much any advanced knowledge. But I don’t see anything wrong with knowledge just for knowledge’s sake. I agree that for all practical purposes, it’s free will, but it’s still an interesting avenue of discussion to talk about whether it really is.
But you understand the distinction that’s being made here, right? Yes, your brain receives input, and then outputs impulses that may result in actions, and in that sense, your “self” is doing it. But the “self” or “soul” has traditionally been thought of as somehow being a self-contained, coherent, singular entity that consciously regulates all actions other than purely automatic ones like heartbeat and breath. So I think it is interesting that we’re beginning to discover that maybe there isn’t a single miniature Blowero inside my brain that does everything, but that maybe it’s just a bunch of disparate impulses that we think of as being coherent only because it’s convenient to do so.
Nice post, eris.
blowero:
I didn’t mean to say that it was merely practical to think that there is such a thing as free will even if that isn’t actually the case (see my last post regarding the “useful fiction” argument). Rather, from our point of view, I would say that there really is “free will.” Now, this is largely a matter of how I want to use the words, but I don’t see how our understanding is furthered by using the words differently. (This is my pithy and perhaps inadequate rephrasing of what I understand erislover’s point to be.)
On the other hand, if you’re using “free will” mostly as short-hand for the question of whether determinism is true, then my argument is moot. All I would add is that a deterministic universe doesn’t necessarily obliterate will because of the problem of perspective.
You’re preaching to the choir. I’m all about the philosophical, Zen-like denial of “self” – it’s always rung true for me. Is this inconsistent with my support for the existence of “free will”? I don’t think so, but I’d be hard-pressed to put into words why not. If you think it is inconsistent, I’d be interested in hearing why.