[QUOTE=Trinopus;18740640
No one here is arguing for a perfected godlike miraculous angelic “awakened consciousness” in terms of free will. We’re just saying that we, as humans, make decisions on a day-to-day basis that are not determined by pre-existing physical states.[/QUOTE]
In that case, you are still talking about something that is by definition magical, even if it’s not always good.
That’s exactly what I believe, but of course if we couldn’t punish wrongdoers that would be a bad thing for society since people naturally demand retribution and it’s the only way to stop some from being violent and tyrannical.
I agree. Putting criminals in jail ultimately makes sense for the same reason that leper countries made sense. Though personally I think prison is very overused as a form of punishment.
I’m agreeing with you, and I don’t think I’m trivializing the point.
What I’m saying is that the hypothetical of having complete knowledge of my neuronal states and sensory inputs, and using that to predict my actions is often used to support some idea of choice being an illusion. But making a prediction by these means is exactly equivalent to making a perfect emulation and asking it what it wants to do. Of course it will make the same choice as me, it’s identical to me by definition.
That’s true, but I think that difference isn’t relevant to the point I was making. I was talking about making a perfect emulation of a situation and expecting something different to happen. It won’t.
(And even in our quantum-mechanics underpinned universe, this statement is not false, it’s undefined, since you can’t make a perfect emulation of a physical system).
I don’t know why I should answer your question when you didn’t bother to answer mine.
I’m not the one loudly claiming that I have free will. The entity who is controlling me isn’t laughing at my arrogance, because I am not claiming anything that I can’t possibly know. I fully concede that my sense of control is merely that–a sense–and that there is no way I can know if it is anything more than that.
But the entity who is controlling you is laughing at you, because you are making this claim without having any proof of it. You are trusting your senses when we have tons of evidence that our senses are wrong. I’m allowing that I could be wrong. You, however, are not.
We can’t distinguish the remote-controlled people from the non-remote-controlled people. Only the “entities” observing us can do that. But I don’t know what this is supposed to prove. I can tell you that it doesn’t prove the existence of free will, though. So I’m wondering why you think it adds anything to the conversation. Do you think it shakes me from my resolve that free will is an illusion, at least for human beings?
(The above applies only if you think free will and volition are different things. If you are using them interchangably, I don’t know why you’re disagreeing with me since I have already told you that I don’t have a problem with the notion of “volition”, at least as I’ve defined it.)
It would not have conscious entities in it. The mere concept of consciousness requires that there is an “I” that can have experiences and make choices. And the concept of consciousness being an illusion is incoherent, because it has to presuppose conscious entities. Who is being tricked?
No, we don’t understand free will or consciousness. But so many people seem to think lack of understanding means something doesn’t exist.
As for the subconscious–well, I don’t know why you think it disproves anything. The concept inherently means there are some things we do consciously think about, which means we do make choices, which means we have free will.
No, the concept of consciousness doesn’t “inherently mean” that we possess control. It only means that we have awareness of (some) of our thoughts and a sense of self. Consciousness does not require anything more than that.
If from an early age you had been instructed to view your consciousness as a small window that allows you to observe just some of the thoughts and feelings being beamed into your head, you would have likely accepted this idea easily because there would be no reason to doubt this. And you would have grown to understand that while your thoughts, feelings, and actions feel like they are under your control, they really are a stream that you’re passively experiencing. For instance, you notice that when you wake up in the morning, the first thought that comes to mind is not something you consciously chose, and since one thought leads to another, that means none of the thoughts you experienced are ones you consciously authored. Only maturity allows you to see this, and once this happens the illusion of free will becomes clearer to you.
But because you were raised to the view the consciousness as the “control center”, all other alternatives seem ludicrous to you. You can’t imagine not being in control, so you take that to mean you are in control.
I can’t say I have chosen to have a more open mind than yours. But it is clearly more open.
I do – or, at least, I think it helpfully clarified your position as one I find acceptable.
And I wasn’t even going for that! I just replied how I would to any such hypothetical!
Take, say, how I routinely pick stuff up and move it from Point A to Point B: far as I can tell, I’m mundanely using my muscles and straining according to how much weight is involved, and nothing mysterious is going on – and if you suddenly posited an invisible telekineticist straight out of a comic book who follows me around and does all the heavy lifting while tricking me into having a sense of physical control, I’d say, well, imagine folks who are doing their own heavy lifting; if you’re right, how could we tell the difference between them and me? Is there any such test?
And cue your latest reply:
You’re wrong about that “You, however, are not”, but put that aside for the moment; the rest of your response is gold: you experience a sense of control, you don’t know whether there’s a remote controller beaming it into you or whether it simply is what it feels like, and you grant that there’s no way to distinguish remote-controlled people from non-remote-controlled ones, and so you allow that you could be wrong, sure as all available evidence is compatible with either possibility.
If that’s your position, then it’s (a) commendable; and it’s (b) also mine, right down to allowing that I could be wrong – despite your quoted claim to the contrary.
I don’t think you can analyze a term by breaking it into its constituent parts. We rarely talk about the will except as free, other than in cases of explicit coercion or manipulation. I think you can read “free” as excluding coercion and manipulation, or you can read it as simply part of the compound word “free will.”
My opinion? In degree, not kind. I think a cat definitely has free will, a baby less so. I think its self-evident that we have greater ability than either to analyze data, reflect on our decision-making process, conceptualize the future, make a decision, and act on it deliberatley in the face of aversive stimuli. I also think it’s clear (though not self-evident) that cats, at least, have some limited form of those abilities, and that babies develop them over time. The fact that there is a difference between a baby’s ability to make decisions about its future and an adults (that is not limited to merely the adult’s greater capacity for physical action) tells us that there is something in our minds that we have that babies lack. “Free will” is the term for that, whatever it is.
I know that I experience qualia (or at least that I seem to, and that seeming would seem itself to be a form of qualia.) I know that I can reflect on my experience of those qualia, and in fact can reflect on my own reflections recursively. I infer that others also experience things and can reflect on them. It seems unlikely that I would be the only being to develop these properties, though it is possible that some people do not.
I can decide what I am going to do in the future and then carry it out. I can change my mind. There seems to be a (limited, non-absolute) causal relationship between what I decide and what I do, in at least some instances. I can test this crudely by deciding to stand up and turn around three times (something I would be unlikely to predict, if I were merely anticipating my own future actions without causing them, and unlikely to actually do even if I predicted it) and then seeing whether I do so. I can imagine what it would be like if I were trapped in a body I did not control, and I believe it would be very different from what I experience in reality.
Awesome! I’ll check it out and probably put it on my list. From what I’ve read so far, there is a lot of evidence that much of what we think is conscious action isn’t, that we do a lot of things on autopilot, and that a lot of what we think are decisions are actually justifications after the fact. That suggests that our experience of free will is much more constrained than we might think. I can imagine neuroscience proving that all of our experience is like this, which would indeed prove that free will either doesn’t exist or is very different than we believe it to be, but I don’t think neuroscience has gotten that far yet. And it is difficult to see how such a discovery would be reconcilable with the experiment I described above of making a conscious decision to stand up and turn around, and then doing so.
It would probably depend on how I ended up conceiving of my “self” (another shaky notion that nevertheless is very difficult to discard entirely). If I conceive of the pre-conscious decision-making process as part of my (as I do now) then I might still regard it as something that could be called “free will.” If it becomes so disassociated from my conscious self, that I regard it as something “other” then I may begin to feel that I actually am trapped in a body I don’t control, and therefore lack free will. (Though if I can at least control my own conscious thoughts, then I have some measure of free will, however minimal and undetectable to others.)
This is subjective because one defining feature of free will is that it involves making decisions internally without coercion from outside. But there’s no innate distinction between what is internal or external to “me.”
I meant to imply “most parsimonious theory that is consistent with all available evidence.” Occam’s razor, in other words. As I said, my ability to say to myself, I’m going to do something, and then do it, is pretty strong (though not irrefutable) evidence that I have free will.
I mean that a universe in which a single person makes a single decision and then acts as a result of that decision is a universe with free will. (Just not much of it.) So to disprove free will, it’s not enough to prove that many of our behaviors aren’t the result of our decisions. You have to prove that all our behaviors are like that. (I’m using “prove” here scientifically, not mathematically. If the best theory to account for all known human behavior doesn’t involve free will, then you’ve disproven free will to my satisfaction.)
It would be very difficult, and perhaps impossible. But clearly the subconscious isn’t completely hidden; psychologists study it all the time. If it’s what is responsible for all of our behavior (including speech), then there is quite a lot of data we have access to.
See, this is why I think you are unintentionally creating a straw man. Or at least we’re talking past one another. You make a distinction between volition and free will, but what you call volition is what I’m saying exists when I say “free will exists.” As far as I can tell, it’s what Daniel Dennett and other philosophers are arguing for when they say “free will exists.” And when most people hear or read arguments from you or from professional philosophers saying that free will doesn’t exist, what they understand those arguments to be saying is that we lack what you call volition. AFAICT, no one actually holds the position that you’re arguing against.
Ok, on rereading, I may be wrong, but it’s not clear. I’ll post more later.
I’d argue that we don’t know if we are being coerced or manipulated if we aren’t consciously in control. Someone asks if I want a bowl of ice cream or a plate of canned asparagus. I salivate over the former and gag over the latter. I have not chosen either of these visceral responses. They just happen. So is it not true that I am being coerced to select the ice cream? It just doesn’t feel like coercion from my vantage point. But that’s what it is.
I could choose to override this and go with the asparagus, yes. But for me to do this, I’d have to be coerced by a fear that is even worse than puking. Like fear of dying from eating too much ice cream. Barring that fear, I’m going to always go with the ice cream.
Babies and adults differ in their use of language. I can ask an adult, “Hey, what’s the thought process you used to carry out this action” and he or she will provide an explanation. It might be a crazy explanation, but they can at least provide one. A baby cannot do this because they have not developed spoken language yet. But for all I know, they are perfectly aware of their thoughts and their sense of agency. Just the same as my cat, or the person with locked-in syndrome. Self-evident does not mean “this is what is real.”
But reflection isn’t the same as control and authorship.
For every thought and feeling that feels like “mine”, I’ve also felt thoughts and feelings that didn’t feel like mine. Now, someone could argue that’s because I have a (slightly) disordered brain. If I had a “normal” brain, everything would feel like mine. But this is quite presumptuous, right? Perhaps my “disordered brain” allows me to see the seams in the illusion that “healthy” people are unable to see.
I would argue that you only feel this way, and that it is impossible for you to know what the reality is. As long as you have a consciousness, you will always have a “just so” explanation to rationalize why you’ve done something.
My mind changes all the time. But am I consciously changing it? For me to do this, I’d have to step out of my self so that I can be cognizant of my cognition’s cognition. And, well, I can’t do such a thing. So all I can confidently say is “My mind has changed.”
How did you come up with this test? As you were formulating this response, did this “turning around three times” idea just pop into your head? Or did you spend a lot of time going through all the possible scenarios–all eleventy-trillion of them?
If it’s the first, then how can you say you made a decision? If the idea just popped into your head, then it doesn’t seem like your consciousness should be getting any credit for putting your body into action. Because your body is likely being controlled by whatever “entity” sent you that idea in the first place. You just feel like you’re carrying out a voluntary act because of your awareness of it. And I think you can see why this would be an important illusion to have. Otherwise you’d always feel like a puppet on a string, never knowing what’s going to happen next.
I think you’d get a lot of David Eagleman’s book.
Why are they using “free will” when “volition” is actually what they mean?!
I know you backpeddled in your next post, but I take offense at your accusation I’ve been arguing a straw man. I have painstakely defined my terms while so many other people in this thread haven’t been bothered to do so. If you think free will is the same thing as my definition of volition, then great! But I don’t think the two things are the same thing at all. This debate is a lot broader than Daniel Dennet and “other philosophers.” I’m not arguing a philosophy. I’m arguing scientifically. Specifically, from the perspective of neuroscience.
I’m sorry if I offended you. I have great respect for you, and I don’t think you are arguing in bad faith. You have indeed defined your terms carefully, but your definition of free will, while common among non-compatibilists, isn’t used by anyone else, AFAIK. That’s fine as far as it goes; non-compatibilists, including you, are free to define terms as you wish. If those terms have established, widely recognized definitions in neuroscience, that’s good news that I wasn’t aware of.
The problem is that no one actually is arguing in favor of that version of free will. Arguing against a position no one has taken is precisely what I mean when I say “creating a straw man.”
Neuroscience can’t tell us the correct definition of “free will.” That’s a purely semantic argument, and there is no real right or wrong, although as I explained in my first post, there is potentially an objective fact about how most people use and understand terms, and about which terms promote communication.
I think (though I need to review your posts carefully and ask some follow-up questions) that we agree on the neuroscience, at least in broad strokes (and where we don’t, I’m eager to learn from you). I think we mostly agree on what the world is like, and are arguing over what words to use in describing it. But I’m not sure, especially because I think I initially misread your definition of volition. I want to follow up, but I have other things in real life competing for my attention and the thread is moving quickly. I’ll do my best.
Alan Smithee, so you don’t think people automatically equate consciousness with a control center?
When people say they have carried something out on their own volition, I really don’t think they are using my definition of volition, but rather a definition that speaks to self-control and self-agency. Those things are illusory, in my opinion.
We do not have enough evidence that the thing we call our consciousness is anything but a passive observer.
If this isn’t at all a controversial idea, then I don’t know why folks have given Sam Harris (or me in this thread) such a hard time.
This post is where I began to question whether I understand what you are saying. When I first saw it, I didn’t read it carefully, and I thought you were saying that there is a difference between having a tic and deciding deliberately where to go for dinner. But when I reread it, I wasn’t sure. You seem now to me to be saying that there is only the appearance of a difference, and that “volition” only refers to the existence of that (illusory), not to any real underlying difference. IOW, we think that making a carefully considered choice is different than experiencing a tic or reflexive muscle spasm, but in reality, the only difference is in the story we tell ourselves. Is that right?
But surely that CAN’T be right! You know more than I about neuroscience, and I concede that a lot (perhaps most or nearly all) of what we do is more like a tic than what we think of when we think about making a deliberate decision, but surely SOME decisions ARE made with SOME input from the conscious mind.
You asked earlier if my example of deciding to stand up and turn around three times was one I thought of by considering all eleventy billion possibilities or whether it just popped into my head. The answer is neither. I certainly didn’t consider every possibility, or even more than a minute subset of them, but I did think of several and consider each one before picking the one that seemed most likely to have the desired effect. Now, I didn’t choose which several possibilities would pop into my head (just like you may not have chosen to dismiss pizza when deciding where to eat; it just didn’t occur to you) but I did weigh the options according to a set of (not entirely consciously chosen) criteria, and I was at least somewhat aware of at least some elements of the process. (We agree on this much, right?) Surely you don’t think that my mental self-dialog had no effect whatsoever on my choice, do you? Was there no feedback whatsoever between the set of neurons sensing the decision making process and those that participated in making the decision?
If it is the case that the neurons responsible for my conscious awareness of deciding had no possibility of influencing the decision-making process itself, then I agree that there is no such thing as free will as I have conceived of it. But if there is any feedback whatsoever, however rare or tenuous, then to just that extent, I have what I refer to as free will, however constrained or occasional.
ETA: I have more to say in response to your later posts, but I think I’ll wait to see your response to this before going further down the rabbit hole.
This post confuses me. I don’t think decision-making or intelligence are contrary to strict Newtonian determinism. A billiard ball doesn’t consider different possibilities. We do. Intelligence and decision-making evolved because they are useful, not because they are unpredictable. A computer can do things a calculator can’t. A calculator can do things a billiard ball can’t. A computer can evaluate things according to preset criteria and make a choice. I can (with effort) evaluate and choose the criteria by which I make future choices. They and I are all deterministic (chaos theory and QM notwithstanding).
Saying there is no free will always looks backwards, and justifies itself by saying it was all meant to happen. No matter what someone else says. If I lay in bed all day because there’s no changing events, they would say I was a slugabed and was going to do that all along. It’s circular, but it never predicts a future event with certainty. Isn’t the default position that this (No free will) needs to be proven?
Can someone distinguish between Free Will, volition, and affecting events?
Re the OP: We make decisions all the time, and we think it resembles will. So this argument will never stop unless it is agreed we have free will after all.
Well, if I affect events such that someone winds up dead, you may ask me whether I did it consciously and on purpose – and I’ll reply no, I didn’t mean for that to happen or I’ll say yes, I did it of my own free will.
And if it’s the latter, you can ask yeah, but did you do it of your own volition? And I’d reply yes, I did it of my own free will; did you not hear me the first time?
Why can’t that be right? Tell me exactly what about that is so hard to believe?
I have a tic disorder. Tics are a thing I live with. I experience motor tics, verbal tics, and even cognitive tics.
My experience of my voluntary movements and my tics are quite different, as I described earlier.
I tic without knowing I’m ticcing sometimes. I am aware of the more grandiose ones (like when I bop my head backwards). But I’m not always aware when I’m squinting or grimacing. Or when I’m being echopraxic. Sometimes I am aware I’m mimicking someone’s actions. But sometimes I’m not. I wouldn’t have known this if someone hadn’t pointed out that I was “doing it again”. And my initial reaction was, "Nuh-unh!!! The idea that I could be moving without knowing I was moving was frankly disturbing to me, so I couldn’t believe it.
Then I realized something. Pretty much all my so-called voluntary movements happen without my awareness. I’m typing right now now, and I’m aware that my fingers are in a flurry. But I am not conscious of each movement. I’m guessing if I was, I wouldn’t be able to type so fast. Whenever I am aware of what I’m doing, I kind of freeze up, choke. It’s almost like consciousness impedes action more than it enables it.
I’m guessing if I were aware of every single one of my tics, I’d be too afraid to leave my house. I’d be too embarrassed, too ashamed.
What’s my point in all of this?
I don’t know. I guess I’m sharing with you why I don’t have a problem believing that my consciousness is playing tricks on me, telling me stories that I can’t verify all by my lonesome. If I am capable of moving without knowing I’m moving, then how can I say that I–my conscious mind–is actually the one calling the shots? And how can I say that I am able to defy the prediction of a deterministic model if I–my conscious mind–is not the one making the actual decisions.
So surely you must be able to describe a decision like this, right?
Because I can’t. I cannot imagine a thought process that begins with a thought that I consciously generated, without any “outside” influences. I don’t have all the possible thoughts swirling around in my consciousness, just waiting for me to sift through. No, I have only a very limited number of thoughts in my consciousness at any given time. I don’t choose what these are. And I don’t consciously control the emotional valence associated with each. So when do I–my conscious mind–make the decision? I can pick the idea that makes me feel the best, but that’s not a free choice, right? That’s me being coerced.
I would say that you had awareness of these possibilities and you had awareness of their different emotional charms.
I can’t say it did. I don’t know your brain; maybe it works differently from mine. I know that when I have to choose among different possibilities, I like to think I’m picking the most reasonable option. And this is what I tell myself when I finally decide upon an option–that it is the most reasonable one. But why wouldn’t I tell myself this? Who chooses an option because it doesn’t seem reasonable, unless they are intentionally trying to be unreasonable? No one does this.
Perhaps when I think I’m making a decision, I’m unaware that the puppet master (subconscious mind, mystical entity, etc.) who is pulling the strings has already made that decision for me, but they’re going to let me believe I–my conscious mind–am in charge. So they feed me the possible choices, knowing I’ll feel overwhelmed if I have to consider more than just three or four. They give the possible choices a different emotional value, knowing that I’m going to pick the choice with the highest value each and every time. And then they set back and laugh as I struggle over this simple problem.
I don’t know.
If we were to do an experiment and ask people to make a movement while wearing a neurosciency thingamabob, and the thingamabob finds that there’s always a significant time gap between when the thingamabob first detects activation in the decision-making part of the brain and when the subject reports making the decision to move, wouldn’t this suggest that people are not reliable witnesses of their own cognitive processes?
And that’s indefensible and pathetic, Alan. It’s like me insisting that the Sun’s orbit should be described as geocentric as long as there’s evidence, however debunkable or misunderstood, that supports it.
What do you lose in giving up “free will”? If the amount of control that the consciousness has on an individual’s behavior is so tenuous and rare, how can you possibly defend the use of this term?