That brings to mind Scott Adams, and his talk about “moist robots.”
You are Daniel Dennett and I claim my £5.
When I was still very young, say barely into my 20s, I met a girl at the beach sketching boats moored at a marina. I liked drawing too so we hit it off and I got her number and arranged a date.
On our first date the subject of eastern vs. western philosophy came up. I said that western philosophy is more about free will, individualism, freedom of choice; whereas eastern is more about the interconnectedness of people and things, and less about the free will of the individual.
She said, “but I have free will! I’ve made important choices in my life that were all me and my free will”. So I asked her (not saying that I disagreed with the existence of free will, just playing Devil’s Advocate) “what’s an important life decision that you made?” She said “I chose which college to go to”. I said “well, your choice was probably influenced by your parents, what colleges your friends and classmates were choosing, your natural talents, abilities and interests, as well as what you and your parents would be able to afford. If you look at it a certain way, what looks like your own decision was really a funnel of influences outside your control that led you to your so-called choice”.
She then had a dawning look of almost panic cross her face that seemed to say wow, maybe I really don’t have free will…
She did choose of her own free will not to go on a second date with me, though 
I’ve often pondered a similar matter - tho I have the perception of free will and support holding persons responsible for their ostensible choices, I also believe our thoughts and actions are the result of electrical impulses and genetic factors. Given that, I cannot understand what causes/permits for free will.
I mention this (briefly and inartfully) just to observe that I have some longstanding interest in this sort of discussion, but am nevertheless unable to understand what the OP is saying.
If this discussion is perfectly clear to the rest of you, perhaps I need to acknowledge that some personal shortcoming impairs my ability to really reach a satisfactory conclusion regarding free will and determinism.
I don’t think you’re the only one. I don’t quite get what the OP is getting at either. Something about how you don’t have enough free will to avoid making choices, but you do have enough free will to decide what that choice will be…? But as @Max_S pointed out above, that’s not always the case.
I’m interested in discussions of free will as well— how much of what we think are choices we make are really free will, or are just inevitable outcomes based on conditions and influences beyond our control? But yeah, I’m not really picking up on the OP’s take on it.
Funny that no one else has replied to this. To me, it sums up the whole issue in a nutshell, a very succinct statement of the facts.
There are several other ways to put this. If you had free will (complete “freedom of choice”) or if your actions were in fact predetermined and predictable, given enough information, how the hell could you possibly ever tell the difference? So is there in fact any difference?
Another way to put it is this. The brain is a physical entity, and it seems reasonable to conclude that it’s therefore a finite state machine. My own belief is that for most practical purposes it’s also a deterministic finite automaton; that is, knowing the detailed state of a brain at any given moment, its response to any given stimulus is predictable. But if it isn’t – if it turns out that it’s in the larger group of non-deterministic automata – it doesn’t matter in the slightest. If our choices are completely predictable (deterministic), then free will is an illusion, by definition. If our choices are not completely predictable, it’s only because of randomness, such as chemical externalities affecting neural response, not because of any sort of magical “will”.
In short, we are very complex machines who have evolved consciousness and greatly enjoy the illusion that we make voluntary choices in everything we do. As long as we think so and are enjoying ourselves, that’s all that matters.
What if that, specifically, is impossible? Not merely very, very hard, but impossible, given the physical constraints of our Universe. It then means complete predictability is likewise impossible. So even if the brain is a finite state machine (I don’t agree it is, but that’s irrelevant here), and even absent random externalities, do we have free will then, if our actions are ultimately not completely predictable?
Personally, I’m a Dennettist, I think arguing about free will in terms of causality is futile, and it’s free will defined in terms of agency that matters.
In a universe governed by physical law the brain is not excluded from determinism.
Why would it be impossible? That sounds more like some religious article of faith than any sort of evidence-based reality. The brain is certainly complex, having an estimated 86 billion or so neurons, but it’s most definitely finite. And the MOSFET transistor counts in many modern ICs are comparable; some models of AMD Ryzen processors have nearly 20 billion transistors, the Apple M1 Max has about 57 billion, and Samsung has a flash memory chip with 2 trillion MOSFETs, each one encoding 4 bits. Modeling the brain is pretty much an engineering problem, not a theoretical or philosophical one.
I actually believe that our actions aren’t completely predictable, but it’s because of a combination of random biochemical externalities and probably chaos effects originating in quantum randomness. This lack of ultimate universal predictability, however, is merely due to chaotic randomness and is completely different from some hypothetical purposeful free agency with imputed magical powers. I maintain that free agency is merely a perspective of consciousness and is indistinguishable from an illusion, which indeed is what it is.
The Universe itself isn’t bound by determinism, why would the brain be?
Because of the impossibility of determining every single aspect of every part of the brain instantaneously to sufficient accuracy. Unless you’re saying the Uncertainty Principle doesn’t apply to knowing the detailed state of the brain.
The brain, while definitely finite, is a lot more than just neurons. A lot of its functioning depends on chemical gradients. Which are continuous functions not state machines. You can’t compare the brain to a digital computer.
I disagree. At least, not the kind of engineering that deals in bits (or even qbits).
And I just wanted to add:
This is unnecessarily hostile and borders on being pure ad hominem. It should have no place in this debate. Attack what I’ve said, not why you think I’ve said it. You’re not a mind reader.
I was recently a panelist for a philosophy debate. Because of my neuroscience background, the organizers assumed I would be taking a “no free will” position, and kept asking me stuff like “Explain to us how Libet’s experiment shows there can be no free will”.
It was a frustrating evening, because my position remains that the whole framing is stupid and the concept of free will is incoherent.
The normal framing is like this:
In a Newtonian, clockwork universe, there’s no free will because all future actions can be predicted in principle. OK.
And in a quantum uncertain universe there still isn’t free will because how does a low-level random fluctuation constitute a choice?
But putting all this together, how exactly are we defining free will? It apparently can’t be based only on prior knowledge and predilection, as that’s back to clockwork. But throwing in a random factor doesn’t help because that’s not a deliberate choice. So what exactly do we mean by free will? In a hypothetical universe that has free will, how are decisions made?
I believe that, in effect, I acknowledged exactly this (that quantum effects, applied in the context of chaos theory, make absolute determinism impossible). But your hypothetical also applies to digital computers and digital information storage, yet these can be perfectly replicated for all practical purposes. The relevance of quantum unpredictability for brain-state replication is purely speculative.
Emphasis mine. Many cognitive scientists and other theorists (and futurists like Ray Kurzweil) would definitely disagree with you. This is not to claim that the brain IS a digital computer, but that much of its high-level functioning is indeed computational, and that arguably all of it can be implemented on a purely digital substrate.
I assure you that no hostility or ad hominem was intended, and I’m at a bit of a loss as to how you could reach such a conclusion. But I apologize if you saw it that way. I only meant that it appeared to be a supposition made without any evidentiary basis, and one with which many cognitive scientists would disagree.
Exactly the point I was making. And yes, I emphatically agree that the word “incoherent” is an excellent description of all arguments about “free will”, and that either the existence of determinism or the absence of it is completely irrelevant.
Expanding in this point, a thought experiment.
Take Universe A which is exactly the same in every way to Universe B except for one thing: Universe A has free will and Universe B does not. How could an outside observer distinguish between them? I say they can’t. Therefore it’s impossible to know whether our own universe is like A or B.
I want to emphasize the (potentially obvious) point that just because something seems incoherent doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. For example, existance of the universe (or in fact anything else) doesn’t seem coherent. Since the universe does exist, it either came from nothing (and how can something come from nothing? that is incoherent), or something has always existed (the universe, a singularity etc) that is now in form of the universe (also incoherent, how can something not have a beginning?).
If something can come from nothing, “free will” can also come from nothing. I still think free will as a concept is incoherent though.
Absolutely. But the difference is, free will is just the concept. It’s just a pre-scientific framing formed in a world prior to neuroscience or computing, and where decisions really did seem to come from nowhere.
It’s very different from, say, the two slits experiment, where it’s a demonstrable phenomenon that science seeks to understand regardless of how bonkers it appears at first. With free will, the “bonkers” is in the concept and discussion, there’s no external weirdness that needs explaining.
Or, put it another way: I would equate free will to Vitalism. Just as rejecting Vitalism doesn’t imply we’re all undead or anything, we should be able to throw out “Free Will-ism” as unhelpful without making any particular claims. But all the flavors of free will are rarely grouped in this way, instead most people are just familiar with the framing of “Do we have free will?”, with the answer “No” being coupled with making claims about a lack of freedom or whatever.
For this reason, and because it’s also famous as being one of *the* big philosophical questions, this shit is going to float around forever.
Do you also believe consciousness, as a concept, is also “bonkers”, i.e. incoherent? Because I think your (and my) arguments about free will apply to consciousness as well. I think what we experience when we experience what we call “free will”, me doing something because I decided to do it (i.e. intention), is as much a part of our own experience of consciousness as (any other?)* qualia.
Just as an outside observer, to our current understaning, can’t in any way distinguish Universe A (with free will) from Universe B (no free will), they would not be able to distinguish Universe C, with beings having consciousness, from Universe D, with no consciousness for anyone, cet. par.
*I’m not sure if the experience of free will counts as qualia or not.
How so? Their state can be captured at a much higher level of granularity.
I agree with the first (so I agree the mind can replicate digital computation) but not the second (because I believe that it is more than just digital, and that the extra bits are not implementable on a digital substrate - you would need some sort of analogue modeler).
I’ll also note the moving of the goalposts to “higher-level functioning”, as though the lower-level states can’t possible impact decision-making.
“You’re arguing based on faith” is nothing but ad hominem, as it has nothing to do with the facts stated and everything to do with the person stating the facts.
The UP is pretty well established at this point.
We’ve shut the door on Mr Ad Hominem, and we’re also not really home to Mr Ad Verecundiam. Many cognitive scientists also disagree with the idea of the purely computational mind. So pretending it’s some settled question is not justifiable IMO.
Consciousness is a label we apply to a set of phenomena so no, I don’t think it’s incoherent, though particular models / theories of it may be.
In terms of the “feeling” of free will, I agree that we make decisions and I agree that such decisions can sometimes feel as if they have come from nowhere (and sometimes feel as if they are a direct consequence of a reasoning process). But this is not the same thing as experiencing any particular conception or model of what decision-making actually is.
The notion that a universe with free will would be indistinguishable from one with it, is your suggestion, not mine. I don’t find the concept of free will has been defined sufficiently (or agreed upon) for that to be clear.
We also don’t know whether a universe with and without consciousness would be distinguishable, the idea that subjective experience is epiphenomenal is just one position, one I don’t agree with. I can elaborate on why.
How does it play out if you base a decision on a quantum fluctuation? Example: if a quantum fluctuation occurs, I’ll turn right, if it doesn’t occur, I’ll turn left. It’s not free will, but not deterministic either.
It is impossible to know when exactly a radioactive element will decay. Does this mean that it has free will?
I don’t think that is what is being done here. What is being said is that the brain could be simulated with a digital computer, given enough memory and processing power.
Is modelling the weather an engineering problem or a philosophical one, in your opinion?
It will take far more processing power to model the weather than to model a single brain, and there is far more that can cause effects that will percolate, chaos theory style, to change the outcomes.
Does the weather have free will?
I don’t see that as being any different from basing a decision on a coin flip or other form of chance. As long as you are not able to predict the outcome, it is random to you.
What has happened, though, is that you have made a choice to follow the direction given by the random chance. And you still have a choice afterwards to not follow through on it.
You wake up in the morning, and say, “Heads I go to work, Tails, I stay home.” You flip the coin, it comes up tails. You rejoice for a moment in fate telling you to stay home, but remember that fate doesn’t pay the mortgage, and get out of bed and go to work anyway.
And that could be related to what happens in your brain. If that atom of potassium decays in the neuron, it will change the electro potential of that neuron enough to make you turn right, if it doesn’t, you turn left.