i don’t understand what you mean…
I used to think this was an open and shut case. That free will has been falsified. Hearing Dan Dennett on the subject has largely convinced me that I was wrong though. It’s a slightly tricky argument and I definitely can’t do it justice here so I’ll just post a link. The video is long, but it’s quite thorough and I at least found the arguments very convincing. There are shorter ones, but they’re not as persuasive. It’s well worth a watch if you have time spare.
Really? When and where was this proven? Was it proven for all decisions, or only for some decisions?
I think the reference is to this;
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html
The cerebral cortex is more powerful than the amygdala in most people. Free will lives.
But results aren’t enough to convince Frith that free will is an illusion. “We already know our decisions can be unconsciously primed,” he says. The brain activity could be part of this priming, as opposed to the decision process, he adds.
Science hasn’t decided anything yet, at most it may have narrowed the parameters of the debate.
Sorry, I forgot there are some poor souls who didn’t take automata theory in college. 
A finite state machine (FSM) consists takes one or many inputs. It has a state. Once it gets an input it produces an output based on the input and the current state, and transitions to a new state based on the input and the current state. You can have as many states as you please. There is usually an initial state defined, but in many cases you can prove that a certain sequence will guarantee you to be in a certain state, so a reset is not required.
So the current decision of the FSM (which state it transitions to) shapes its future decisions.
Now the mind is a lot more complex than an FSM, in that it almost certainly modifies. the state transition table, which a computer can do but a traditional FSM can’t. My point was your criteria are too weak, in that they can be met by things which certainly do not have free will.
Hope that helps.
ETA: people who have taken this more recently than I will know that my description is overly simplistic, but I think it will do.
The extreme version of this would make us puppets, flies in amber, never making any decisions but only carrying out the programming that was laid down at the origin of the universe.
This doesn’t model our experiences very well, and also has some information-theory problems (how was this specific SDMB post encoded in energy patterns at the Big Bang?)
A position is needed somewhere in between, allowing for information to be created, but still providing only a material (not spiritual) explanation for human volition.
Free will doesn’t exist. But we have something that’s indistinguishable from free will.
The question is one of predictability. If there is no possible way that someone “might have done otherwise”, then we way their actions are predictable and therefore deterministic.
In principle, if you had perfect information about the internal state of a person, then you could predict their behavior. But if you are off by the tiniest amount–your measurement about the kinetic energy of a particular atom is off by some infinitesimal figure–then you lose all predictability. It’s not just slightly less predictable, but completely unpredictable, because the laws of thermodynamics ensure that the state of a system gets scrambled very quickly.
Furthermore, the laws of quantum mechanics probably ensures that the state of a system is impossible to measure accurately enough such that we can simulate that system perfectly. Nevermind the practical fact that we’re nowhere close to having a computer that can do it.
It will simply never happen that physical determinism leads to, say, a prediction that an infant will grow into a murderer. It may be that we can use biology or genetics or something to make that conclusion, but so far the science doesn’t imply that. The fact that physical law is deterministic is totally useless for these purposes.
Your first sentence answers the question, in my view. I am my ENTIRE mind, not just the conscious part. I can and have learned to be more aware of my preconscious motivations and tendencies, so that the Skald who most obviously helms the mouth and fists is not the simple puppet of the mute monster inside.
Anyway, why does it matter whether my motivations are conscious? My preconscious mind is said to be the majority of Skald. If i revert to the creep I was in my late 20s, does it matter to the people I hurt whether Public!Rhymer or Preconscious! Rhymer is at the helm? They’re both components of me; some part of me is choosing.
Hey, I’m right with Frith on that one. I don’t believe that free will can usefully be described as an illusion. I think there’s a lot of confusion about what it is, but it’s a real thing and it’s not incompatible with determinism.
The absurdity of the notion of “free will” is displayed every time someone says that the mentally ill or the mentally disabled do not operate under their own free will. If someone acts in a way counter to their self-interest (like taking a leap off a bridge) or without any apparent motive (a mother who kills her children without warning), we assume that they are so messed up, that they can’t be acting on their own volition. There must be something wrong with their brains for them to behave so “randomly”. So “crazy”.
But that logic is crazy to me. Seems to me that if so-called sane people only act according to their self-interest and societal convention, then they aren’t acting freely. Are you free to say whatever you want when the punishment for saying the wrong thing is life in prison? Of course not. Unless, that is, you’re crazy or have Tourette’s Syndrome.
Moreover, we are limited only to the choices that are available to us at any given moment. The choices that are available in any given moment are limited by the choices we’ve made in the past–and those choices are similarly constrained. It’s constrained choices all the way down to our primal ancestor. And yet we want to believe we are free.
The concept of free will is useful as a shaming mechanism, though. What is the first thing people tell you when you fuck up and make the wrong decision? “We all make choices.” Translated this means, “Quit your excuse-making and learn dammit!” Perhaps this is what some brains have to hear on a regular basis in order to operate optimally. So personally, I’m not ready to totally let go of the illusion of free will. But I do think it’s nuts how hard people cling to the notion when science shows how wrong it is.
This topic isnt scientific. Maybe when we truly understand how the brain works we can have this debate.
It’s not a question of acting against your interests or of acting randomly. Some people with severe mental illness cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy. As a teenager I did some work experience at a mental hospital. One of the patients who I spent a lot of time with constantly mistook his dreams for things that had happened to him in real life. He would often refer to conversations he thought he had had with me but which were entirely imagined by him. I think his free will was compromised by these facts. He was unable to make informed decisions about the future because, most of the time, he had no idea what was real and what wasn’t.
The vast majority of people with mental health problems have just as much free will as anyone else though.
Indeed, the existence of severe mental illness is one of the strongest pointers toward the real existence of free will. Take a look at someone suffering from severe obsessive/compulsive disorder.
Free will is what we have that he doesn’t.
If everything is predetermined, why don’t we all have self-driving cars already?
What’s obvious is that God is a Roman, and made us to fight for His amusement.
If our decision-making is controlled by the kind of information we’ve been programmed with, where and how does “will” come into play? And how is it “free”?
How likely are you to find an individual who consciously, deliberately chooses an action that goes how they are wired and programmed?
When was the last time you made a decision you could not provide a good, rationalization for? When was the last time you made a decision that you knew beforehand was worse than all the other options? Personally, I can’t ever remember a time I’ve made a choice without being to justify it. When I’m unable to justify or explain a certain behavior, I generally assume that behavior is involuntary–like perhaps it is a manifestation of mental illness or brain disorder or just my innate personality. But maybe the truth is that the only difference between a sane monstro and an insane monstro is that the motivations the former attributes to her actions are plausible (“I’m eating this apple because I’m hungry!”) while the latter rationalizes her actions in crazier ways (“I’m eating this apple because Xenu told me to!”) Perhaps both are fooling themselves about what really is guiding their hand. My brain can come up with any ole crazy illusion, and I’d be none of the wiser because the perception of the world through one’s brain equals one’s reality. I might think I am making an informed decision, when really I’m acting out a compulsion driven by processes completely hidden from me.
I tell myself I have “free will” so that I don’t have to be scared out of my mind about what I’m going to do next.
No, the guy with the severe OCD has severely constrained will.
A person without severe OCD has constrained will too. Just not as severely constrained.
A person with free will would be the person who doesn’t feel anything at all–good or bad–when they are confronted with a decision.
“Free” has a specific meaning. A person in minimum security prison is more free than the guy in super max. But neither are free. They are both constrained.
People with mental illnesses stick out because their lack of conformity makes them stick out in readily discernible, socially stigmitizing ways. But psychiatric diagnoses are just extreme versions of the traits and states that exist in so-called “healthy” individuals. If anything, mental illness allows us to see how much bullshit “free will” is. The mentally ill behave according to their fears, delusions, and impulses just the same as the non-mentally ill. It’s just that the mentally ill have more intense fears, delusions, and impulses, and thus their decision-making is more constrained.
I’ll buy that. But, still, we have something he doesn’t, and that is a pointer toward what will really is. It’s what we’ve got that he doesn’t.
We know our will is not wholly free. Anybody who’s ever lost his temper, and wishes he hadn’t, has experienced one of the limitations.
If will were free, political parties wouldn’t spend millions on campaign advertisements.