One of the reasons I don’t agree with this is my own practical experience in choosing whether or not to post this rebuttal. I dithered. I thought I would…then I thought I wouldn’t. This went back and forth through several iterations.
The idea that my brain could possibly store so much information as the exact number of times I would change my mind seems absurd. The brain models itself, but not in that insane level of detail.
You’d have to come up with a model for self-modeling that goes into such details as the exact number of times I scratched my head while trying to decide, the number of times I clenched my teeth, etc. The information just doesn’t exist in the physical world.
The brain doesn’t store that much information in the way that you’re thinking. The decision is a result of many, many inputs. When the signal strength of certain inputs reaches a certain threshold, that is perceived by you as “thought I would” and then as the signal strength of other inputs changes, that is perceived by you as “changed my mind.” Eventually, a whole new set of inputs arises to move your fingers, type a message and click submit.
The neurons are “simple” things that combine together to create complexity. It’s like how 1 bit of digital information codes only 2 possible outcomes. 10 bits codes 1024 outcomes. A billion bits of information codes 2^billion outcomes. Neurons are ridiculously complex compared to bits, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are an unfathomable number of brain-states that can be achieved as the neurons work together.
So all you need is a model of how those inputs change and we can predict all of that. (Again, barring any quantum uncertainty issues.) There’s never some special “free will entity” that comes in and says “Well, despite what these brain inputs are saying, I want to do X anyway.” Free will is an after-the-fact explanation of what the brain inputs did. It’s probably not fair to call this perception fictional, but it’s like the speedometer of your car - it doesn’t make your car move, it only tells you how the car is responding to the control inputs.
This is true, but these hypothetically perfect billiard balls represent an artificial scenario where the near-perfection of balance is what allows quantum uncertainty to dominate. In the real world, more predictable forces dominate overwhelmingly: move the perfect billiard balls out of alignment just a tiny bit, and then you’ll see the top one bounce off in almost exactly the same way every time.
Well, it might help to understand my view that I don’t believe in this external “free will entity.” I do believe in the ability of the human mind to make volitional decisions, pretty much at the same time that the brain generates consciousness.
I’m not arguing the “homunculus.” I am saying that we make real decisions, not predictable decades in advance, nor, in any meaningful way, even predictable five minutes in advance.
I believe that our minds are made up of lots of chunks and parts, which wrestle with each other. Sometimes, we’re even consciously aware of it, as when we’re fighting against temptation. That piece of cocoanut pie looks so good…but I promised I’d stick to my diet…
Well, alas, here, I disagree with you still. I think if you move the top billiard ball out of alignment just a tiny bit, then we’ll see it bounce in similar ways each time, but not in “exactly the same way.” There will still be an envelope of trajectories, not a single bright line of only one trajectory.
If the trajectories were exact – if human motivations could balance this exactly – you’d have “Burridan’s Ass” and the guy in my example, above, trying to decide whether or not to have pie, would freeze up in helpless indecision, unable to say yes, and unable to say no. But the potentials are never exact. Some third entity (“I promised my kids I’d go walking with them, and I can’t do that if I’m overweight” – or – “My blood pressure is way down lately, so I can get away with cheating just a little” – or even, “Ah, what the hell, I’ll flip a coin!”) can stick in its oar. Our minds are a “community” of entities, so hugely complex that we can’t meaningfully predict them…and I hold that this is even true in terms of particle physics. When you have that many electrons buzzing around, quantum effects can come forward.
(Staggered by recent discoveries that quantum effects may be involved in photosynthesis. Yikes! That’s astonishing. Also way cool!)
I don’t see that this follows. “Exact” and “reproducible” don’t mean “balanced.” A mind that is poised to vacillate exactly twice between competing urges to eat or not to eat the pie, finally settling on the pro-pie course, might do so in a determined (i.e., repeatable) way without contradiction and without invoking a mysterious suspension of quantum effects. Variations may well exist (in the hypothetical scenario where you can run the same process multiple times) but may be imperceptible on this scale. In much the same way, the bouncing billiard ball may have an envelope of trajectories none of which vary by more than the width of a proton. But I suspect that neither our understanding of quantum effects nor our ability to measure billiard balls is sufficient to say for sure.
I guess my overall thrust is that I feel you may be exaggerating the influence of quantum uncertainty on macroscopic scales over very short periods of time.
Entirely possible. I don’t know enough on the topic to be meaningfully informed. I did take a quantum physics series in college, but it was a long time ago, and didn’t go too deep. This was, I believe, before entanglement was known.
I’ll retreat to the cop-out excuse, this is my opinion, and let the matter go.
(I also acknowledge the problem that all that quantum uncertainty buys me is unpredictability, usually in the form of randomness. It doesn’t much help me defend directed volition.)
The cards are played.
(…and the game is won by some people and lost by others.)
If the game is played fairly and squarely, the outcome of stage #1 is controlled by natural laws and is causally and statistically predictable (the event is governed by both physical determinism and physical randomness). No other causal or conditional aspect seem to be involved in the process.
The outcome of stage #2 is causally and statistically predictable too because it is an event governed by physical determinism and physical randomness too. And things in stage #2 could be analyzed purely from this perspective without being a false description of the state of affairs, except it would be an incomplete one. Because if I were to depict the functioning of my word processor strictly in terms of electron activity, the description would fail to show the system relations between the computer parts or the results of their activity on my screen. Yet, it isn’t just a matter of higher organization in the case of human activity - there’s a new quality present in highly organized systems whose activity is purpose oriented (found in living things), enhanced by self-awareness and intelligence. For me, will is the teleological drive found in all living things, and one’s freedom of will is the capacity to somewhat control a process so that one’s goals can be achieved. It is not a supernatural quality, but it is an emergent one, existent in living things that know what they’re doing.
Yes, identifying an emergent patterns can be a useful way to talk about the high-level behavior of a system: “I decided I wanted to go to the movies” is a reasonable statement to make.
However, if we look at the low-level neural events that underlie an emergent behavior like “deciding” we discover that they are deterministic. There are competing cascades of neural firing that ultimately ground out in one behavior or the other. Within the system there’s never a moment of free choice, even though at a high level it might look to us as though there is one.
So while “deciding” is a useful high-level abstraction for describing behavior, it’s also a misleading one. It implies that we possess a freedom that does not actually exist.
When debating the issue, I think determinists clearly have the stronger position. I agree with William James that compatibalism is nothing but a “quagmire of evasion.”
However, in my daily life, again like William James, I psychologically feel the need to believe that I’m not a complex, yet deterministic, meat robot. It’s such a confusing issue that I don’t have much trouble taking it on faith, more or less, that I have some type of control over my actions.
Another argument I use often – and, yes, it’s been rebutted, but bear with me – is that if our behavior is physically determined, then nature is wasting huge amounts of energy in letting us have these enormous brains, whose function is only to produce an illusion. We could get by exactly as well with hard-wired pre-programmed insectlike brains, and operate on tropisms, which would be maximally optimized to our environment.
What’s the point of rewarding our behaviors with complex pain-and-pleasure systems, if our responses are already decided? “Do the right thing” could be instinctive/reflexive, without wasting all those resources on moral decision-making routines.
(If all crime was shown to be determined by genes at the time of birth, then prisons would still make sense, but punishment would not.)
Well, all other living creatures do get by with simpler brains. We’re a weird outlier.
We don’t know enough about the brain now to give a definite answer, but there are hints that it’s a product of social cognition.
For example, if you have an insect brain that always does the same thing in a particular situation, the I can get a slight edge on you by having a more complicated brain that can simulate what your insect brain is going to do. It’s a trade off, of course. Is the metabolic load of my more-complicated brain worth the edge it grants?
We humans are really good at not only simulating what other brains are thinking, but at simulating what other brains are simulating about us. That’s why we’re such good liars. If I’m going to lie to you I need to be able to simulate how your simulation of me will respond to particular actions: “Hmmmm … if I say I had to work late he won’t know I was out drinking instead.” It’s unclear that this sort of complicated self-referential computation is even possible with the sort of stimulus-response brains that insects have.
I would not be surprised if the entire human umwelt – our whole sense of being conscious and present in a world of sensation – turns out to be merely a computational scratchpad for generating very complex self-referential social behaviors.
As I said in my first post, I’m not sure that determinism should make you feel any less in control of your actions.
We can talk about simulations and hypothetical reproducibility but the reality is that you’re a sample of one, making a decision through a process that will never be repeated. If you’re currently pondering the to-pie or not-to-pie option, go ahead and seize the moment. Do whatever you damn well please. If you want ice cream instead, then get yourself over to that aisle of the grocery store and get it! You can’t whine about how you really wanted pie but determinism made you do something else. From inside your own head, in the here and now, free will looks like a real thing.
You shouldn’t let yourself feel bad just because some omniscient determinist is going to look at this decision and see how the illusion of free will was just one more input into the chain of events that produced your final action.
Everyone talking about bouncing billiards, avalanches, and quantum randomness is dancing around the standard argument. Either way you don’t find free will. Either our choices are determined – not free. Or they’re random – not our will.
This is how I see it, except with chemical reactions in the neurons. The chemical reactions can’t decide to react differently. They follow the rules of chemistry and physics. Maybe a quantum event changes it, but that’s not free will. Unless free will is an invisible spiritual entity causing quantum events.
But we couldn’t get by like that. Our ancient ancestors did, but bigger brains came along and displaced them. How is nature wasting anything? The brains actually do things. They’re part of the causal chain.
(off topic) I’ve seen that argument used to say that being conscious and having subjective experiences is useful for something, or is somehow a necessary offshoot of our brains. In the sense that we aren’t p-zombies. I guess that might be true, but if I think about the hard problem too much my brain dribbles out my ear.
Spiders control their own bodies and shape their environment by making webs or burrows. I don’t think this is freely chosen. They follow complex heuristics and, well, the spider program, for lack of a better term. Do you disagree?
If you agree, why are humans or other higher animals different? Just because we’re more complicated?
The falling boulder has to follow the rules of gravity. It can’t decide not to. The hurricane is crazy complicated and can’t be predicted, but it’s following the rules. I don’t see why spiders and people are different, aside from increasing orders of complication. Free will strikes me as another version of the god of the gaps.
Is that different than a computer following its program? Such a computer can analyze different options and come to a conclusion for the best choice, given a goal. People anthropomorphize computers and, in the past, the weather. I feel like this is leading to that quote regarding behaviorism where the guy asked Skinner if we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people.
Yeah, sorry, that wasn’t really an argument. I was rambling/musing on what I see as a dichotomy between real life and what people like to see in their stories.
As an aside, there’s an argument that more people act amorally if they don’t believe in free will (according to some studies), so arguing against it is wrong even if it doesn’t exist. I hope that premise is wrong. Or that people can be convinced to act morally instead. If not, that’s a poor reflection of human nature.