It doesn’t matter what I think of the free will or lack thereof of a thermostat or a supercomputer.
What matters is what the thermostat and the supercomputer think.
No! You can’t make me!
Well, yes…and no. You’re close to right…except that you’re wrong: studies of die-rolls show that the results fulfill all the necessary qualities of a random sequence. i.e., if I show you a series of numbers from a thrown die, and another series of numbers based on radioactive decay…you will not be able to tell which is which.
Dice are sufficiently random to keep Las Vegas casinos in business.
And, anyway, shrug. You can substitute radioactive-decay systems in your World of Warcraft game if you really want. It won’t change anything, and doesn’t affect the principles I’m arguing for.
If our personal actions are determined by initial conditions (even if those conditions are only, say, one hour in the past, rather than at “the beginning of time”) – how does human creativity produce information? If a poet cannot “choose” which word to use next, but has the decision already made for him by causal circumstances…who is actually writing the poem?
(I know that information can be created without intelligence, as via evolution. But poets do not use evolutionary techniques to write sonnets.)
The longer the term is on determination – one hour? One day? One year? – the harder it is for determinism to explain creativity.
Then your definition of “free will” is completely meaningless and useless. To me, “free will” means* the ability to make different decisions given the exact same conditions*. In other words, the circuitry of the brain is ignored and replaced by magical supernatural woo-woo–the idea that the human mind contains something magical and special that reaches beyond the material. It is a religious concept, not a scientific one.
And what is your alternative? That human creativity is not a product of the structure and chemistry of the brain? Where *else *do you think it comes from?
Well, we have no way to know that. Although it would be an interesting experiment to subject two completely identical clones to the same identical VR world and see if they behave in exactly the same way.
Again, what other option is there? Either thought is determined by the circuitry of the human brain, or magic. Can you propose a different naturalistic option?
If it’s the exact same condition, it’s the exact same moment, the exact same occurrence. If you think otherwise, feel free to explain the difference between these two exact sames.
Nothing whatsoever is supernatural or magical and I haven’t the vaguest idea how you came up with it here. I certainly didn’t introduce it, so it’s all yours.
Edited to Add: I will, however, acknowledge that I don’t think material reality is the fundamental reality. It’s not. Materialism is fundamentally wrong. Interactivity is where it’s at.
Your definition is not testable, and is therefore useless. And I’m not saying anything mystical by this - just scientific.
Dude, you are making the same damn point I am. Except I’m calling that condition a lack of free will, and you appear to be calling it a presence of free will. That’s what I take free will to mean–the belief that given the exact same condition, you could have done differently.
Then we are in absolute fundamental irreconcilable difference of opinion.
Morever, creativity exists on a continuum. Some people have a whole lot of it, while some people have none.
If creativity is the manifestation of free will and we all have free will, why aren’t we all creative? Why aren’t we all creative in the same ways?
Personally, my own creativity fluctuates with my hormones. I’m always full of ideas right around the time when my eggs are bursting out of my ovaries. Does the amount of free will I possess follow the same pattern? Is my will the most “free” when I’m ovulating and the most “constrained” when I’m PMSing?
If creativity is the manifestion of free will, why does society in general routinely deny free will to folks with schizophrenia and mania? These folks tend to be crazy creative. Their associations tend to be crazy loose. They are so creative their behavior tends to be quite unpredictable to the people around them. So why don’t they have free will? They seem to fit the very definition of “free” to me!
People also report to having heightened creativity when they are under the influence of psychedelic drugs. But we usually think of people who are hopped up on something as not being in control of themselves…lacking free will and all. Why is this? Seems to me that if creativity is the manifestion of free will, then it is only fair to deem those with the most creativity as having the most free will. It is weird and funny that conventional wisdom says otherwise.
It is, of course, possible that we’re holding the same opinion and expressing it differently, but I don’t think that’s the case. Here’s what I think you were asserting (using my own words, not yours): “Rewind the entirety of reality to Moment X and replay it. Won’t you behave exactly, precisely, as you did before? Then gee, you don’t have free will, your behavior is entirely predicated on your exact circumstances at the time”.
Here, in contrast, is what I was asserting: “The act you refer to as ‘rewinding’ is merely a fancy way of saying ‘lets once again consider what you did’; the ‘rewound’ version is not a second occurrence of reality unfurling, it’s the same damn occurrence. I did what I did when I did it. If you ask me a second time what I did, the answer is the same because it isn’t a second event that resembles the first, it’s the same damn event. You aren’t comparing one thing to another and observing them to be the same, you are comparing one thing to itself and declaring it to be itself”.
Well, we kind of knew that, didn’t we? 
You are entitled to your opinion. I have no objection to you remaining wrong on the internet. There’s a lot of that going around. But reality is not composed of “things”, particles, objects, nouns. Reality is composed of interactions, relationships, verbs. Every noun is a byproduct of other nouns doing a dance, and the dance itself is often viewed as a noun. It’s forgiveable that people would observe that much and still assume that the bottom of the pile would consist of nouns, the final indivisible component of reality would be a particle that isn’t something else behaving that way as a verb. But that does not appear to be the case. The “nouniness” or particle-like character seems less the ultimate building block than the interaction, counterintuitive though it may be for us. And so it is for macro reality: we live not so much in a world of things that mean what they mean and are what they are, but instead in a world where things mean what they mean to an observer, the meaning existing in the relationship rather than being either subjective (only in the observer) or objective (only in the thing). Materialism is so 19th century. And wrong.
Because it’s not like matter ever interacts with other matter. What a ridiculous world that would be.
I think it comes from ordinary material processes…but that these processes are not “determined.” There is sufficient variability in the outcome to allow for “choice” and especially for intelligent creativity.
If events were determined, how would creativity work? Where would new ideas come from?
We’re all physical creatures, but some of us are stronger than others. Some of us can run faster. Some can digest lactose and others can’t.
Creativity is only a material/physical thing, but some people have brains that are better suited to it.
Well…possibly. Do you sometimes make bad decisions when the cycle is in the wrong phase? A flood of hormones can alter cognition; so can a flood of alcohol! We may have free will…but it is a physical process and thus susceptible to physical interruption.
Their creativity is, alas, often dangerous to themselves and to others. We put a lot of restraints on free will. I desire to eat a gourmet meal at an expensive restaurant and not pay for it. Oops.
Actually, I believe that these kinds of drugs only provide an appearance of creativity, much the way alcohol does. Many people think they’re funnier at parties when they’re soused…but are they really?
That said…maybe there are creativity-enhancing drugs, either in reality, or not yet discovered. There’s no reason that can’t be. There are drugs that enhance physical performance, as in sports (and sex.) Again, thinking is a physical process.
But aren’t these people still constrained by the limits of their brains? What makes them “free”?
Now you seem to be arguing that free will is having a low rate of bad decision-making. That doesn’t make sense. My cat is a very well-behaved companion. He sleeps in all the places I have trained him to sleep. He doesn’t poop or pee outside his box (most times). He doesn’t bite or scratch me, even when I probably deserve it. So you’re telling me he’s got free will because he never messes up?
To answer your question, yes, I have noticed that my ability to make decisions is affected by my hormones. I don’t know if you can say that my decisions tend towards “bad”, but I definitely have to work harder to make decisions, regardless of their righteousness. And this is because my obsessional nature is kicked into high gear during PMS. At my worst times, I experience motor freezing while crossing intersections and doorways. It is like my brain suddenly forces me to deliberate over each microdetail of movement, when normally these “decisions” wouldn’t even be in my awareness. Because these “choices” are rarely paired with emotions, I become stuck (literally), unable to make a choice. It is best described as obsessional slowness.
If free will is the ability to choose from all available options, it seems to me that my free will is never as “free” as when I experience this obsessional slowness. But most people–likely you included–would view someone experiencing obsessional slowness as having an absence of options. Can you understand why that’s so bizarre to me?
This makes no sense to me, sorry. Sounds like you’re trying to have your spiritual woo cake and eat it in the world of matter too.
What?
If creativity is the essence, the manifestion, the unassailable proof of free will, then it is only logical to grant someone who possesses it in large degree the same degree of free will. To do otherwise is to be completely unreasonable. It’s like stating that “Mathematics is proof of human ingenuity” and then capriciously decide that mathematicians who like reality TV must not be smart. Just because you don’t like the mathematician’s taste in entertainment doesn’t mean he can’t be smart. Just because you don’t agree with the schizophrenic person’s choices doesn’t mean he isn’t freely making them, using his own free will.
Some people really are, yes. Just like I’m much more likely to crack jokes and participate in banter right after my caffeine has kicked in versus the end of the day, when I’m maxed out. Drugs can heighten and lower our inhibitions. They can depress us and energize us. They can make us feel happy and sad and all other kinds of emotions. Why wouldn’t these states be correlated with creativity?
You keep conceding this point but then reiterating that we have free will. The two are mutually exclusive.
Personally, I am impressed by human creations. But maybe bees are also impressed by their creations, along with ants, and songbirds. Imagine a songbird thinking “Surely our complex song structures could not be the result of mere biology. Surely they must have arisen through some higher-order process that separates us from the unfeathered beasts.” While most bird songs are complex, they aren’t so complicated that they can’t be simulated by a human. Perhaps our songs (and our poetry and our music) seem special to us because they are created by us, but to a more sophisticated organism they have the same predictability and orderliness of a honeycomb.
I’ve tried to emphasize, from the beginning, that we are not absolutely free. There are things we simply can’t do. You can’t “choose” to murder your best friend. It just isn’t something that your mind, no matter how free it may be, will ever choose to do.
Does that mean you also cannot choose to go on a diet tomorrow, or choose to postpone your dream vacation for another year, or choose to adopt a stray dog from a shelter? Of course you can do those things!
You can probably jog a mile in, say, ten minutes. You almost certainly cannot run a mile in four minutes. The fact that there are limitations upon your physical abilities doesn’t mean you have no physical abilities at all!
Good…because that isn’t what I said!
I didn’t say that. I asked where the information comes from, if decisions are determined in advance. If we do not have choice, and a poet does not “choose” the words he writes…then where does poetry come from? How does intelligence work, if we aren’t able to make choices?
I hadn’t thought of caffeine, but I did acknowledge that chemicals could possibly enhance creativity, and that’s a decent example of one that does.
The issue here is that “randomness”, the word itself, introduces sufficient philosophical fuzziness and incoherence that a correspondingly fuzzy thinker can easily fit their god-of-the-gaps argument right into that space.
Our minds treat lots and lots and lots of situations like a “black box”.
There are countless circumstances where our brain just doesn’t have the information or the processing power to make any reasonable computation about what will happen. So it doesn’t. We just wait for the output of reality, and then treat that output as its own independent event, totally unconnected from any previous cause, as if that event was a Brand New Phenomenon that sprung forth from the Void, as if a new First Cause had entered our universe. Tossing some dice, or flipping a coin, or Plinko from the Price is Right, or shuffling cards, are examples of this phenomenon.
The die landed on one of its faces, rather than stopping on one of its edges, for reasons of basic physics. The die stopped moving, instead of tumbling endlessly until the end of time, because of the friction of the surface it landed on. The die only spent a certain amount of time in the air, rather than staying suspended above the table for five minutes, again for plain physical reasons. It bounced based on the material properties of itself and the table. It changed direction when it hit the table for the first time based on the angle it came in, and the particular part of the die that hit the table. Physics. All physics, all the way down.
But as far as the brain is concerned, this becomes: the number 2 came from nowhere!
Superman might be able to see the speed of the die as it left the thrower’s hand, the relative spin as it arcs through the air, the air temperature, the pressure, the relative bounciness of the surface, etc, and Superman might know for absolute fact when it left the person’s hand that it would end up as a 2. Superman might also know that with the slightest increase of temperature in the room, the exact opposite face of the die would’ve shown, and it would’ve been a 5 instead of a 2. But these changes are so minuscule that no ordinary mortal could manage the observations, let alone the subsequent computations. A mere centimeter difference of the point of release might contain within it six billion observable-to-Superman differences in trajectory and final outcome. But because the die is fairly weighted, approximately one billion of those outcomes end up with a 1 facing up, another billion or so end up with a 2 facing up, and so on. Nothing is “random” here. The die follows physics, just like everything else. Our minds just can’t handle it.
And so the Black Box of our thinking. We skip the stuff that we can’t possibly observe or calculate and just think: the magical Black Box creates a number out of nowhere using the power of RANDOM, and that is why we see the number 2.
It is absolutely essential that our minds work in this way, rather than wasting our concentration on problems that are well and truly beyond our ability to solve. But as soon as that Black Box of RANDOM is introduced – as if new First Causes appear each and every day out of nowhere – then the inherent fuzziness of the “How exactly is that supposed to work, anyway?” immediately becomes large enough for other fuzzy concepts to peak their way in. And that’s how we have questions like this:
The deep puzzle here is why this question was even asked.
Seriously. We can flip the question 180 degrees, take out the “not” and see what happens:
There is no way to answer this question in a satisfactory manner. The question is mysterious regardless of whether the “not” is removed or retained. What’s happened here is just another Black Box.
And that’s just the thing. Psychologically speaking, Black Boxes just do not seem confusing or contradictory or unsatisfactory to a great number people. They seem natural. They seem explanatory even, as if the world makes perfect sense with the aid of this Black Box, at least as long as that Black Box is given a suitably mystical/emotionally resonant label. “How does that work?” “Well, the Black Box just spat out some words. Spitting out words is exactly what the Black Box does!” That’s exactly what is happening here. How does poetry work? How does intelligence work? Well, there is this Black Box, this wellspring of new physics that introduces First Causes into our universe out of the Void, and this Black Box creates new words and new ideas out of nowhere.
It used to be “creativity” when humans were better than computers at chess. But now that computers are better, the Black Box just gets pushed back to other things. Go players were absolutely astounded at the amazing moves the new computerized world champion was doing. The computer’s “creativity” was opening new worlds of play… through computation. We don’t gain understanding by giving a fancy name to our ignorance. We don’t gain understanding by stating “The Black Box is responsible!” We gain understanding by opening that box and seeing how it works. This is exactly the issue with “randomness”. I see logical people like you, Riemann, wondering what the hell this whole “random” thing is supposed to be about, since it shows up so often in these threads and provides no help at all for the underlying discussion. But it makes perfect sense. “Random” is just another undefined Black Box. What does that word actually mean if we were to try to define it coherently?
If we were to take the sequence 3141592653589793238462643383279502884197…, we could make certain comments about it. Each digit shows up about a tenth of the time. There are no repetitions, no immediate patterns to be seen within the numbers themselves. But of course… this is not random. This is pi.
It’s possible to define randomness rigorously. Mathematically. That definition is something like: it has no pattern. The sequence above is not even remotely random, because it has a definite pattern. A true random sequence wouldn’t have that pattern, wouldn’t be compressible, wouldn’t be able to be expressed in any other manner than by writing out the numbers. A true “random” number has extraordinarily high information content. There is no way to describe the number, except by giving the digits one after the one. A true random number – according to this definition – is extremely complex.
This sense of randomness, of having no pattern, is the anti-Ockham.
To say the universe is (this kind of) random is like saying that the universe is as maximally complex as possible. To believe that the universe works by a random process, in this sense, is to dig up poor old Friar William’s bones and take a gigantic shit in his mouth. Presumably, the people who think the world might possibly work by a “random” process don’t believe that. But that just leaves open the question, well, what exactly do they believe? That the universe is using digits of pi to determine the outcome of apparently “random” processes? That could be the case. Why not? I don’t mean to be too dismissive here, there actually are legitimately intelligent people who have given serious thought to what this funny word means… but it does not include the majority of people. Deep thought on the meaning of “random” is the exception, not the norm.
The norm is just another Black Box. The universe needs to decide the outcome of some event that seems (to us, from our perspective) “random”, so it just goes to its old Black Box random-number-generator, and that Black Box spits out a number – just as the other Black Box right down the hall spits out poems.
A Black Box is not an explanation.
But it can feel like an explanation. Why did that die land on 2? Because it’s random! Sometimes it’s 4, sometimes 1, sometimes 3. It’s “random”, it comes from the Black Box of Randomness, and that’s the entire story. For a sufficiently shallow curiosity, this non-explanation can satiate sufficiently. “Oh, you say Black Box explains it? Well, I’m totally satisfied now!” This is exactly where “random” comes from in these discussions. The ability to bring “randomness” into a conversation is a free license to use a Black Box non-explanation for literally anything that we don’t understand. Saying “Black Box” is just a helluva lot easier than saying anything else. For example:
Computation.
The same reason a computer can show “creativity” in human games in ways that the programmers of those computers could not have predicted in advance. The computer is a better and more creative player than the original programmer could even hope to be. Our brains are computational machines, and they create poems and other creative tasks by the same physical processes by which literally everything else in the universe works. The universe managed to create living computational engines by the process of evolution, and now those computational engines crank out poems using myriad inputs and very, very, very difficult programs that are stored by the pattern of neurons inside their squishy meat brains.
How do I know that?
Well, I don’t “know” that. Not for certain. But as far as I can see, everything else in the universe works by the same pattern of strict physical rules. Even the strange phenomena that we observe on very small levels has a potential explanation that works according to the same principle of fixed rules chugging along. Of course, I don’t know that this is absolutely a fact. There are certain legitimate problems interpreting those strange and very small phenomena in this manner. But as it happens, there are problems interpreting these very strange and small phenomena in literally any manner, but there are smart physicists who make compelling arguments for this one. So this is, at present, my own explanation.
But naturally, I don’t know for certain.
But this, at least, is a plausible candidate for a legitimate explanation. It could very well be wrong, but at least it is not a Black Box non-explanation that just papers over the difficulties with a non-defined term over an opaque process. Giving a fancy label to something that we do not understand is not an indication that we suddenly understand it. But supposing for a second that my own preferred explanation is right… then it is legitimately an explanation. If someone asks me how I think brains work, I just point to physics. Look at physics. Right there. That’s how brains work, and that is where the answer is going to lie. Obviously we haven’t figured this one out yet – it’s not like we can yet create artificial brains that can think as generally as our own – but at very least, that is where the answer lies. No god-of-the-gaps here. We don’t know how the squishy meat between the ears works, but we apply science to it, and we keep applying it with the anticipation that it will eventually unlock its secrets. Again: this could be wrong. But unlike with empty Black Box labelling, this particular explanation has a legitimate chance of being right. And if it is right, we’re eventually going to figure that out. (If we don’t blow ourselves to hell first.) There will be no more gaps for a silly Black Box non-explanation to hide.