Please describe the evidence that the choices that we make are something other than deterministic computation.
Occam’s Razor: Among competing hypothesis, the ones with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Few people grant free will to 99% of Earthlings. We deny free will to plants. We deny free will to bacteria and protists. As a general rule, we don’t think cats and dogs have it. I’m guessing the majority of humans believe that even the higher primates lack it, which is why we’re not all upset that chimps and gorillas are pinned up in cages and used for research.
And yet somehow supposedly people have it. Even though most educated folks concede that we are animals, genetically related to all other animals.
Now, which hypothesis has the most assumptions? The one that posits that humans alone are able to override their environments and biology to make decisions, or the one that posits that humans, like all life forms, are governed by their environments and biology?
Which requires more magical thinking? The belief that humans are able to make decisions completely independent of internal and external factors outside of their locus of control, such that those decisions can never be predicted? Or the belief that human decision-making arises from internal and external factors–many of which are outside of human awareness and control–and as such, those decisions are predictable by an observer that has collected enough information?
I disagree with you that a world with free will would be indistinguishable from one without it. In a free will world, there would no point in rehabilitating criminals because everyone who does wrong does it because they want to do wrong, not because they haven’t been exposed to enough compelling information. There would be no point in education and no point in worrying about child welfare since kids who grow up abused would be at no more greater risk of making poor decisions as adults than kids who grow up in loving homes. There would be no point in worrying about messages in the media and advertising, since marketing doesn’t work very well when people are constantly aware of when and how they are being marketed to. People wouldn’t struggle with bad habits in a free will world. The desire to be thin would be enough motivation for someone trying to resist a donut. In a free will world, there would be no subconscious/conscious dichotomy. No dreams. No hypnosis. No such things as confabulation or brainwashing. No “going on automatic”. No “being in the zone.” In a free will world, everyone would know exactly why they do what they do and they would know exactly what they have to do to fix their problems. The only people with problems would be those too evil to fix them. So there would be no need for therapy. In a free world world, human behavior would be completely unpredictable. It just wouldn’t be so-called crazy people doing crazy things. So-called sane people would as well, because when you can act any ole kind of way independent of what is going on in the world around you, why the hell not?
I hold that it’s a combination of the two, with the marvelous complexity that the output is fed back into the input over many, many cycles and iterations, mucking up what you are (in my opinion) trying to force into a false dichotomy.
Randomness is involved in it, but it isn’t “just” rolling dice. Initial-state determinism has some weight, but doesn’t absolutely determine the outcome.
When you play Worlds of Warcraft, the result of the battles is influenced by randomness in the game’s algorithms, but the battles aren’t “just” random. The outcomes are also highly influenced by initial conditions – ammunition, weaponry, armor, wound-status, etc. – but, again, these don’t wholly determine the outcome.
I see consciousness as a self-playing game, as if some clever jasper wrote an app that plays WoW for you, so you can just let it go all by itself and rack up points.
Whether you say “No one is actually playing the game” or you say “The new game is its own thing and is playing itself” is a philosophical debate, not a scientific one. The latter viewpoint is not “magical” in any way.
Well…our day-to-day experience, really. We certainly perceive volition. We point to that and say, “There you go.” You experience it yourself, every day of your life.
You’re the one making a positive assertion: “No, that’s not real volition.” Well, okay, you’re the one who has to demonstrate that. If it’s just an illusion, you need to show that to us by cogent argument.
(I readily acknowledge that there is much of illusion regarding the perception of volition. That’s one of the things that really muddies the waters: our volition is crappy coding!)
So you agree that free will does not inhere in determinism, nor in chance; but that it magically appears in some way that you don’t specify when both deterministic and chance elements are present? That is really not convincing.
Of course we all strongly feel as though we could have done otherwise after we have made a choice. If that illusion were not so strong, nobody would support the preposterous and illogical notion of “free will”! But no experience demonstrates that. Contra-causal free will does not correspond to any phenomenon that we experience.
??? I did not say any such thing. “So you agree that the Rams are the world’s best sporting team.”
But there is no randomness, only the illusion of randomness based on insufficient knowledge of the state of the system. There is nothing random about a dice roll–the ending position of the die is determined by factors including the center of mass of the die, the angle it is sitting in your hand just before it leaves it, the amount and direction of the force you apply to the die, and the elasticity and friction of the die and the surface it lands on. If you were aware of and able to control all of these factors, the final resting position of a die would be utterly predictable and controllable.
Brains work the same way–if you knew the exact physical, electrical, and chemical structure of a brain in every detail and the exact inputs that it is receiving, then the output of that brain–thoughts and actions–would be as predictable that an apple falls down from a tree, not up.
QM (depending how you view it) introduces true randomness. But so what? Nobody thinks that “free will” means acting randomly.
Yes, but the activities of the brain are on a macroscopic enough level that quantum effects are below the threshold of mattering (just as you can safely ignore quantum effects in the toss of a die.) The brain operates as the effect of lots of ions/molecules acting on lots of neurons. Whether calcium ion number 67,999,873 at axon pore number 873 on the 17th out of 921 neurons in cluster number 14 has an electron drop to a lower energy state or not isn’t going to change your actions.
Yeah, but you can say 2+2=5 if you want to, even if you don’t believe it’s true (or until I torture you in Room 101 until you do believe 
). The calculator can’t because it’s bound by its programming. The calculator also can’t reflect on its decision either. You can.
Maybe it’s not clear to me what people mean by “free will” in these threads.
They should make it clearer, but it is out of their control after all.
While I agree with the computational model of the brain, you have an overly simplistic notion of what goes on inside a computer. A voltage droop, for instance, can delay the propagation of a signal which can change what gets captured in a memory element, which can change the result. A cosmic ray can flip a bit. So not only would you need to keep the conditions inside the computer/brain the same, you’d have to keep external conditions the same.
This may or may not be free will, but it sure looks like it since it is impossible to predict a choice to be made.
But the prediction would have to be made given conditions at exactly the time the action is made - and the prediction, even if it could be made, would take considerably longer than the action.
Consider a baseball pitcher. When he throws a ball, where it winds up is completely deterministic. But there is no way of predicting it, since it depends on muscle tics, wind speed, his level of fatigue, etc. etc. And practically speaking he cannot reproduce his pitch.
So, while the pitch is free in a sense, it is also not totally free, since it is not going to wind up in the upper deck.
So free will looks like what we have now, even if what we have right now is actually deterministic.
Since I once had the “Of course, free will exists!” mindset, I’ll give my definition of the term:
Free will means being able to make decisions based solely on the information a person is consciously aware of. It means that if I make a “bad” decision, I can’t attribute it to subconscious compulsions or associations. I can’t blame my physiology or my genetics. I can’t blame my brain’s “hardwiring”. I can’t blame my hormones or neurotransmitters or the food I just ate. I can only blame the concept of me that I’m most familiar with. Not the me behind the curtain that I don’t know.
Free will was first introduced to me back in Sunday School, when I learned about Adam and Eve. We were taught that they had been instructed by God not to eat the apple, yet they exerted their free will and did so anyway. My main criticism with this idea boils down to this: If Adam and Eve had known the punishment waiting for them, would they have still eaten the forbidden fruit? I don’t think they would have. If they had emotionally understood the shit they were going to get, they would have been too afraid to even touch the apple. So in the absence of complete understanding, when presented with the apple, the only compulsion they had was to eat the damn apple. They were like toddlers tempted to touch a hot stove, completely oblivious to its danger. They might have intellectually understood that God wouldn’t like the apple-eating business. But the thought wouldn’t have been paired with a strong emotion, at least not one as strong as hunger mixed with curiosity mixed with the desire for more knowledge.
Since no one is able to make him/herself feel a certain way, especially in the absence of an example or first-hand experience, I believe it is wrong to say that Adam and Eve had free will. At the very least, you can only say they possessed the same degree of will that toddlers have. In general, people don’t assume small children have free will. (I think most people would be horrified by the idea of parents casting their toddlers out of the house for disobeying their orders. But that’s a subject for another thread.)
I know other people define the free will concept differently. But I think the definition of free will I just described is consistent with how most people define it. I think most people can’t really wrap their brain around the deterministic arguments, at least those steeped in physics. It’s really the idea that a person can “blame” externalities for their decisions that rubs most Free Willers the wrong way. Hence, why the conversation always turns to criminality.
My assertion is that people are bound by their programming exactly as much as a calculator. A human just has programming elements that allow them to make mistakes or lie. There is nothing that we can or will ever say, think, or do that is not the product of a calculation performed by the circuitry if the brain, and people can no more defy that circuitry than can a calculator. It is all machine, no ghost.
I don’t understand why you consider the circuitry of the brain to be something “other than” the person who has (or, arguably, doesn’t have) free will. So I come back and say that the calculator that is embodied as the circuitry of my brain possesses free will. It’s self-programming, you know.
People have consciousness (or at least I do; I can’t tell for sure about anybody else). That’s one difference between a human being and a calculator; and where there’s one difference, there could be another (i.e. free will).
So, do you think a thermostat has free will?
A supercomputer?
If you accept that what the brain does is computation, what is the difference?
How do you know that a calculator doesn’t possess a consciousness?
If you had to opportunity to ask a computer if it had a sense of self, a consciousness, and it responded in the affirmative, what evidence would you present it to show that it is wrong?
It is incumbent on Free Willers to not only define what it is, but also provide an object way of measuring it.
I just wrote a column for a special issue on self-aware circuits. Most of the papers are about circuits which monitor things like internal power and temperature and adjust based on it. That is commonly called self-aware, but isn’t really, any more than our internal temperature regulation is self-aware.
The best paper surveyed the area, and said that self-aware systems might modify their goals, and that meta-self-aware systems can monitor their self awareness. We can do both of these - calculators and thermostats cannot.
Programming counts.