# Would you give up free will for world peace? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 28, 2023, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800 "2023-09-28T01:17:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 17
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/321 "2023-10-05T05:13:25Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > But that doesn’t do jack for the explanation of why we have that trait, if there are other (mutually exclusive, as @Riemann pointed out, so the example isn’t great) traits that yield the same reproductive benefit. No, wrong again. You’re just repeating this assertion over and over and it’s still false. Imagine there’s a mutation that makes an organism’s skin blue, and that that trait confers a benefit to the organism. Many generations later, when a majority of the population is a deep blue, it’s a true statement that the reason that they are blue is because – very obviously, indeed largely tautologically – that it gave a selective benefit. Now we can ask a _follow on_ question, of _what_ is the selective benefit, sure. And maybe the answer is that it gives camouflage from predators, say. However, if we were to point out that being yellow would have had equal benefit, that’s as irrelevant as saying that having lasers shoot out of their eyes would have helped protect them from predators even more. Evolution is not a “sum of all histories” equation, it just follows one useful path. It’s why you can have radically different species occupying the same niche in different locales or across time. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > the principle of charity is a simple guideline in debate that ensures you don’t inadvertently attack strawmen Sure, but actually _stating_ that you’re being charitable, unprompted, is to rhetorically imply someone’s argument is weak or unclear. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/322 "2023-10-05T05:18:02Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Imagine there’s a mutation that makes an organism’s skin blue, and that that trait confers a benefit to the organism. > Many generations later, when a majority of the population is a deep blue, it’s a true statement that the reason that they are blue is because – very obviously, indeed largely tautologically – that it gave a selective benefit. So suppose the coin comes up heads, and you get a million dollars. Do you believe, then, it’s right to say that you got the million dollars because the coin came up heads? > [@Mijin](#): > > Sure, but actually _stating_ that you’re being charitable, unprompted, is to rhetorically imply someone’s argument is weak or unclear. Well, it’s implying that the one doing so _believes_ the argument to be weak or unclear. If they are also misunderstanding that argument, then it implies that they both overestimate their own intellectual capabilities _and_ wish to score rhetorical points by bad-mouthing their opponent’s position. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/323 "2023-10-05T08:24:08Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > So suppose the coin comes up heads, and you get a million dollars. Do you believe, then, it’s right to say that you got the million dollars because the coin came up heads? In your non sequitur? Well it depends how you defined it – did you say you’d give me a million dollars _because_ the coin comes up heads or that you’ll give me a million dollars regardless? If I refuse to flip the coin do I get a million dollars? How about if it lands on its edge? Meanwhile, in the situation of a trait conveying benefit to an organism, the answer is unequivocally: yes, blue skin gave the organism a reproductive advantage. It was actually part of the premise. So the answer is “yes” to the rhetorical question for the topic of the thread. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/324 "2023-10-05T08:45:33Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Well it depends how you defined it – did you say you’d give me a million dollars _because_ the coin comes up heads or that you’ll give me a million dollars regardless? No, it doesn’t depend on how I defined it, it depends on whether there is any causal power to the coin coming up heads. There’s not. It makes no difference to the outcome. > [@Mijin](#): > > Meanwhile, in the situation of a trait conveying benefit to an organism, the answer is unequivocally the former. So the answer is “yes” in the case of the actual topic at hand. Then what’s the relevant difference? Both the illusion of free will and the compulsion to act (or the love of salad and the wish to eat healthier) confer the same reproductive benefit. That one of these is selected due to that reproductive benefit then is just as nonsensical as saying that you having the million dollars is due to the coin coming up heads. One of them might turn up randomly, confer that benefit, and hence spread to the population—but that’s a very different thing. The implication runs in the wrong direction in this case: from A implies B (free will illusion yields reproductive benefit) we can’t get B implies A (having the benefit implies having the free will illusion). The two have exactly the same structure. There’s some benefit (having a million dollars or having a certain reproductive advantage) available via multiple different routes (the coin coming up head or tails or having the illusion of freedom versus a compulsion to act, or any of a number of other alternatives, which yields the same behavior). So having that benefit can’t be explained by pointing to any specific one of those routes. That’s not ameliorated by the fact that only one of those routes is actually taken. The coin only actually comes up heads or tails, and we can only either feel free or compelled to act. It just means that getting that benefit does not depend on the route, and hence, having it is not explained by which route was taken. Something else must account for it—random chance, for instance, either of the coin coming up heads, or the appropriate mutation (or series of mutations) occurring. Or the boundary conditions of the universe. Or the meddling of a micromanaging God, programmer, or aliens. But not the details of the route taken. I mean, compare it to the case where the game is such that _only_ if the coin comes up tails, you get the million dollars. Surely, there’s a relevant difference here. In this case, you can actually validly say that you got the million _because_ the coin came up heads, since if it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have gotten it. The difference is in the counterfactual structure of the setup. Likewise, if only the illusion of free will conferred the given reproductive advantage, then you’d be justified in claiming that we have this advantage thanks to out having the illusion of free will. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/325 "2023-10-05T15:52:50Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > > [@Mijin](#): > > > > Well it depends how you defined it – did you say you’d give me a million dollars _because_ the coin comes up heads or that you’ll give me a million dollars regardless? > > No, it doesn’t depend on how I defined it, it depends on whether there is any causal power to the coin coming up heads. There’s not. It makes no difference to the outcome. If you roll a die and tell me that I get a million dollars if it comes up even, and it comes up 2, do I get a million dollars because it came up 2? Yes, I do. Because 2 is even. I didn’t get an “even” though, none of the faces on the die say “even”. They say “2”, “4”, or “6”. If you flip a coin, and tell me I get a million dollars if it lands heads or tails, and I flip it and it lands on its edge, I do not get a million dollars because I got neither heads nor tails. If I get heads, I get a million dollars because I got heads and heads is in the list of winning results. If I get tails, I get a million dollars because I got tails and tails is in the list of winning results. Let me ask you some questions. I’ll provide answers shortly as well, and I’d be interested in @Riemann’s answers or @Mijin, too. I suspect we are talking past one another and calibrating our instruments, so to speak, may be a valuable experience. 1. What is a Parasaurolophus’ crest for? 2. Did Parasaurolophus’ crest have an adaptive purpose? 3. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 1 and 2? 4. What is a peacock’s tail for? 5. Does a peacock’s tail have an adaptive purpose? 6. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 4 and 5? 7. What is our subjective experience/sense of free will for? 8. Does our sense of free will have an adaptive purpose? 9. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 7 and 8? ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/326 "2023-10-05T16:42:03Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Both the illusion of free will and the compulsion to act (or the love of salad and the wish to eat healthier) confer the same reproductive benefit. I don’t know why this is so difficult for you, but the adaptive hypothesis is that THEY DON’T. Nobody is affirming a consequent, because the fitness advantage is not a conclusion that anyone imagines can be DERIVED FROM the theory of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection can never explain WHY a trait has fitness advantage. Natural selection cannot explain WHY it is better not to jump off a cliff. Natural selection is a process that operates when we stipulate that a fitness advantage exists. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > That one of these is selected due to that reproductive benefit then is just as nonsensical as saying that you having the million dollars is due to the coin coming up heads. One of them might turn up randomly, confer that benefit, and hence spread to the population—but that’s a very different thing. The implication runs in the wrong direction in this case: from A implies B (free will illusion yields reproductive benefit) we can’t get B implies A (having the benefit implies having the free will illusion). > > The two have exactly the same structure. There’s some benefit (having a million dollars or having a certain reproductive advantage) available via multiple different routes (the coin coming up head or tails or having the illusion of freedom versus a compulsion to act, or any of a number of other alternatives, which yields the same behavior). So having that benefit can’t be explained by pointing to any specific one of those routes. Yes, of course if you stipulate **contrary to the hypothesis** that there is no fitness advantage then natural selection cannot act. Natural selection cannot CREATE a fitness advantage when none exists. This is a category error. But you are also once again exaggerating the requirement of the hypothesis. It is only necessary that “sense of free will” be superior in fitness to other mutually exclusive traits like “sense of compulsion”, not to “any of a number of other alternatives” that can exist in parallel and cause similar downstream beneficial behaviors like finding food. If we want to explain why the trait “not jumping off a cliff” confers a fitness advantage, we look to human physiology and gravity. If we want to speculate why “sense of free will” might have a fitness advantage over the mutually exclusive “no sense of anything much” and “sense of compulsion”, then that’s a conversation we can have - a conversation about neuroscience, about the way our brains work. But for the love of god stop talking about natural selection and “affirming the consequent”. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/327 "2023-10-05T17:19:15Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > But you are also once again exaggerating the requirement of the hypothesis. It is only necessary that “sense of free will” be superior in fitness to other mutually exclusive traits like “sense of compulsion”, not to “any of a number of other alternatives” that can exist in parallel and cause similar downstream beneficial behaviors like finding food. @Half_Man_Half_Wit to expand on this, because I think it relates to you obsession with “affirming the consequent” and your insistence that there must be a “one-to-one correspondence” between mental state and ultimate behavior. Evolution is about **heritable** traits. Technically evolution is a change in the species’ DNA. Natural selection must operate through a complete causal chain from DNA to behavior in order to change the species’ DNA. So when we talk about a relative fitness advantage in a phenotype, the alternatives that we are ultimately comparing are alternative phentoypes encoded at the **same locus** in the genome - different **alleles**. So when I say that all that is required is for a trait to be superior to “mutually exclusive” phenotypes, what I mean primarily is alternate alleles at the same locus. You are correct that the “A implies B and B implies A” relationship must hold for mental state \<\> behavior - but only for alleles at the same locus, where natural selection is filtering allele frequency in the next generation. This does not preclude a _different locus_ causing the same downstream behavior. If alleles at two different loci encode similar ultimate beneficial behaviors like finding more food, they can both be selected if they are better than the alternative alleles at their own loci. So there is no overall “one-to-one” relationship with downstream behaviors. When we talk about a fitness advantage, what we are really exposing to the force of natural selection is **alleles at the same locus** , not anything that might generate the same ultimate beneficial behavior. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/328 "2023-10-05T17:32:37Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > If you roll a die and tell me that I get a million dollars if it comes up even, and it comes up 2, do I get a million dollars because it came up 2? Yes, I do. Because 2 is even. I didn’t get an “even” though, none of the faces on the die say “even”. They say “2”, “4”, or “6”. That doesn’t change anything about the hypothetical (which is why I brought it up originally). Coming up (2 or 4 or 6) is a compound event (which you may call ‘coming up even’). Whether you get the million is decided by which compound event ((2 or 4 or 6) vs (1 or 3 or 5)) occurs. Varying with respect to this, the outcome changes—so it makes sense to distinguish between ‘odd’ and ‘even’ (to save me some typing). The likelihood of you getting the million changes, depending on whether the result is odd or even—it’s 0 in the first case, and 1 in the latter. That means the event ‘getting the million’ is dependent on (fully determined by) the event ‘the die comes up even’. But whether the die comes up 4 or 6 does _not_ change anything regarding getting the million—it has no further causal power. Consider the analogy to the argument from selection. The die comes up 2, and you receive the benefit. Does now having the benefit tell you that the die must’ve come up 2? No—you would’ve gotten the benefit just as well if it had come up 4, say. Likewise, the illusion of free will confers an adaptive benefit. Does now having the adaptive benefit entail that we must have the illusion of free will? Again, that’s a clear no. But then, it’s not having the illusion of free will that explains our having the adaptive benefit, in the same way that it’s not the die coming up 2 that explains you getting the million. Now, if we vary the result from even to odd, _then_ we have a difference regarding whether you get the million. Consequently, if you get the million, this entails that the die must’ve come up even. Among the million-dollar getters, then, we know that their dies must’ve come up even, because they got the million. We _don’t_ know whether their die came up 2, or 4, or 6: that simply plays no role. I’ll spoiler my answers to your questions, so as not to bias the pool: > **Answers** > > > [@Babale](#): > > > > 1. What is a Parasaurolophus’ crest for? > > Dunno. > > 2. Did Parasaurolophus’ crest have an adaptive purpose? > > Possibly. > > 3. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 1 and 2? > > 100% > > 4. What is a peacock’s tail for? > > I think it’s fitness signaling—to indicate to potential mates that the peacock has enough surplus energy to afford the extravagance of a costly tail, and hence, represents a high quality mate. > > 5. Does a peacock’s tail have an adaptive purpose? > > Yes. > > 6. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 4 and 5? > > 4: about 80%, 5: I’d say 95% (I suppose it’s possible for the tail to just be the result of genetic drift. Maybe?) > > 7. What is our subjective experience/sense of free will for? > > I’m not sure it’s ‘for’ anything; it might just be due to the freedom we actually have. > > 8. Does our sense of free will have an adaptive purpose? > > Again, I’m not sure it has any—it could just be that we have freedom, and hence, correctly have the sense of having freedom. > > 9. With what level of certainty did you answer questions 7 and 8? > > Not sure how to answer that. I’m 100% certain that I’m not sure? > [@Riemann](#): > > I don’t know why this is so difficult for you, but the adaptive hypothesis is that THEY DON’T. I can only repeat myself: > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > What hasn’t been made clear to me, however, is why anybody should accept this hypothesis. Suppose somebody comes to you with the hypothesis that the best explanation for the way things are is that God created the universe last Thursday. You point out that it also might have been created 13.8 billion years ago using the mechanism of an inflaton field decaying to a stable vacuum state. But then they say, but well, the _hypothesis_ is that God created it last Thursday, so that doesn’t count. Would that hold any water with you? > > Likewise, I’m not terribly impressed by the _hypothesis_ that the illusion of free will leads to a unique behavioral fitness in the face of the fact that there are a multitude of simple scenarios that seem to confer the same benefit, and no amount of harping on that it’s _the hypothesis_ that this isn’t the case is likely to change that. > [@Riemann](#): > > Nobody is affirming a consequent, because the fitness advantage is not a conclusion that anyone imagines can be DERIVED FROM the theory of evolution by natural selection. And that isn’t what I’m saying. Again, the argument is that we have the illusion of free will because it confers an adaptive benefit. That doesn’t in any way imply that anybody is appealing to the theory of selection to explain that it has that benefit; just that, because it has that benefit, it was selected. That’s the same as saying that you have a million dollar, because the coin came up heads. If the game was such that you get a million dollar on heads, and nothing on tails, that’s entirely correct. Because you have the million dollars, we know your coin must’ve come up heads. So, if the illusion of free will were the only way to get the fitness benefit, then again, the argument from selection would be correct. Because we have the fitness benefit, we know that we must also have the illusion of fitness—i.e., we have the illusion of fitness thanks to the benefit it confers. But if the game is such that you get the million either way, then what way the coin comes up simply plays no role for getting the million. That doesn’t change if there are also options where you don’t get the million, as in the die game. It’s like taking one of several routes to a given endpoint: that you’re there doesn’t tell us which route you’ve taken (even though you’ve certainly taken one). > [@Riemann](#): > > Yes, of course if you stipulate **contrary to the hypothesis** that there is no fitness advantage then natural selection cannot act. Natural selection cannot CREATE a fitness advantage when none exists. This is a category error. Again, nobody has given any reason to accept _the hypothesis_, so I don’t. On the contrary, I’ve given several scenarios where there are other traits conferring the same adaptive benefit. > [@Riemann](#): > > You are correct that the “A implies B and B implies A” relationship must hold for mental state \<\> behavior - but only for alleles at the same locus, where natural selection is filtering allele frequency in the next generation. I don’t see why that would be the case. Certainly, believing one has a free will and feeling compelled to act are mutually exclusive, no matter whether they’re colocated in the genome. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/329 "2023-10-05T17:49:29Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Again, the argument is that we have the illusion of free will because it confers an adaptive benefit. That doesn’t in any way imply that anybody is appealing to the theory of selection to explain that it has that benefit; just that, because it has that benefit, it was selected. I’m glad that you finally understand this after several days of you obsessively proving from first principles that natural selection cannot prove WHY “sense of free will” has a fitness advantage. A conversation that was very confusing to everyone else here because we are biologists who understand the theory of evolution, and to us it’s obvious that it’s a category error to imagine that natural selection could EVER prove WHY something has a fitness advantage. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Again, nobody has given any reason to accept _the hypothesis_, so I don’t. And none of us here ACCEPT the hypothesis either. But if we are going to discuss it, can we be very clear that we are having a conversation about where the fitness advantage of a “subjective sense of something” could derives from, and that conversation is about neuroscience and how our brains work, NOT about natural selection or “affirming the consequent”? ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/330 "2023-10-05T17:49:38Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I don’t see why that would be the case. Certainly, believing one has a free will and feeling compelled to act are mutually exclusive, no matter whether they’re colocated in the genome. Come to think of it, I don’t even see any reason for insisting the traits ought to be mutually exclusive, as long as they confer the same fitness benefit. So suppose you have the states ‘illusion of freedom’, ‘feeling of compulsion’, and ‘illusion of freedom and feeling of compulsion’ (however that would feel), which all would convey the same benefit—because all lead to exactly the same behaviors. Then again, the argument from selection fails, because the illusion of freedom is not necessary for having that particular benefit. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/331 "2023-10-05T18:01:58Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Then again, the argument from selection fails, because the illusion of freedom is not necessary for having that particular benefit. Jesus Christ, why are you STILL talking about the “argument from selection failing”? Didn’t you just finally agree that there IS no argument being made that natural selection CREATES OR EXPLAINS the existence of a fitness advantage? Here: > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > That doesn’t in any way imply that anybody is appealing to the theory of selection to explain that it has that benefit; just that, because it has that benefit, it was selected. If you want to have a conversation that’s worth having - about neuroscience and the way the brain works and where the fitness advantage of subjective mental states might derive from - I’ll have that conversation. Otherwise I’m done, this is just too frustrating. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/332 "2023-10-05T18:18:56Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > - What is a Parasaurolophus’ crest for? > - Did Parasaurolophus’ crest have an adaptive purpose? > - With what level of certainty did you answer questions 1 and 2? > - What is a peacock’s tail for? > - Does a peacock’s tail have an adaptive purpose? > - With what level of certainty did you answer questions 4 and 5? > - What is our subjective experience/sense of free will for? > - Does our sense of free will have an adaptive purpose? > - With what level of certainty did you answer questions 7 and 8? > **Summary** > > 1. We do not know exactly what a Parasaurolophus’ crest was for. We can make some inferences - based on its size, shape, and strength, we know it wasn’t used for digging or fighting, for example. Analogous structures in modern species are used for sexual display and for differentiating between species; the fact that many hadrosaurs had crests with derived and varied shapes further supports this idea; it is a very strong hypothesis. But we cannot know for sure based on the data we have so far. As new fossils are found we may increase our understanding of Parasaurolophus. > > 2. Yes, the crest did serve an adaptive purpose. We know this because it is a complex and costly structure that would negatively impact the Parasaurolophus’ fitness if taken in isolation, so some selection pressure must have been driving its evolution. > > 3. Since the answer to 1 was “We don’t know”, certainty isn’t exactly applicable. Without observing a live Parasaurolophus, there is a limit to how much we could _ever_ know about these creatures, but new discoveries could definitely increase our certainty - for example if we found fossilized skin or keratin around the crest that revealed fossilized pigments we could identify whether the crest was brightly colored, which would be evidence for visual identification or display being the primary usage. However, for question 2, I am much more certain. Obviously we can’t know _anything_ with absolute certainty - it’s _possible_ that Parasaurolophus looked that way because the devil thought it would look cool when he planted fossils to lead us astray. But I’m about as certain that a Parasaurolophus’ crest served an adaptive purpose as I am about anything else in paleontology. > > 4. A peacock’s tail is primarily used for sexual display. > > 5. Yes, a peacock’s tail has an adaptive purpose - it is attractive to females. Note that the female’s attraction to a large tail is also an evolved trait, although one that is quite common among _Aves_ (including in separate lineages, so it is one that has evolved many times). > > 6. Again, I am as certain about this as I am about anything in biology. We can be much more confident about how a peacock uses his tail because we know the life appearance of a peacock, we have seen peacock mating displays, etc; give wildlife biologists a few years to observe Parasaurolophus in the wild across entire seasonal cycles and we could be similarly confident about the crests. > > 7. I don’t know. It clearly impacts our behavior and cognition (if I am in a bad mood, physiological changes like my body temperature and reaction time are impacted. So my subjective state is causally connected, both in that it is set by my surroundings and past and in that it impacts my behavior. > > 8. Yes, it is adaptive. All complex structures in animals are. For a complex structure to arise by evolution without benefiting fitness is theoretically possible but practically impossible, like all atoms of gas in a room happening to move to one side, doubling the air pressure there and creating a vacuum on the other side. Theoretically there **is** a trajectory that every molecule in the air could take that would place all the molecules on one side of the room, but it’s never going to happen; by the same sense, a complex structure isn’t going to arise without having an impact on fitness. Now, it may be that our subjective experience _in and of itself_ does not provide a benefit, but it is required for something else that does, or is simply a likely side effect of that other thing. But if our subjective experience is required for Ability A, and Ability A increases fitness, then our subjective experience indirecrly increases fitness too. > > 9. Our sense of free will has a more complex relationship with our reproductive fitness than a peacock’s tail does with his. So I am less confident about these answers than about the peacock answers. On the other hand, our evidence about humans is a lot more solid than our evidence about Parasaurolophus, which is really just a few dozen bones and relatively detailed knowledge of some of his relatives. So I am more confident about these answers than about the Parasaurolophus ones. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/333 "2023-10-05T18:31:02Z")
So what are we talking about here? Is it _all_ free will (or the illusion of it, either way I’m pretty partial to it) or is he going to leave us to our own devices until we consciously decide to inflict suffering directly on someone else then he steps in and prevents it? Even that would have some edge cases? What about speeding? Littering? Booking a long haul flight? Does that count? I guess God can come up with adequate answers to those questions, being infallible and all. But anyone short of an infallible deity gets a hard no from me. Any real world attempt to exchange free will for peace, not matter how advanced is asking for dystopia. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/334 "2023-10-05T18:44:06Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > That’s begging the question. Suppose you could walk through either of three doors. There is, you propose, some calculation that you could do to choose one in such a manner as to, in the aggregate, obtain a certain selective benefit. One way is to do that calculation and include some virtual reality display of presenting options as if you could choose between them, then selecting one, while instilling some sense that you could have equally well chosen one of the others. Another way is to do that calculation, skip the VR theatrics, and present you the outcome as the only possibility. Yet another would be to do the calculation, include the VR, and then inform you that there is only that one possibility to take. As long as all of those end with the same door being chosen, there’s no difference, reproduction-wise. And once again, it’s not obvious to me that there is any reason to choose the first possibility over any of the others. But there’s nothing special about “sense of free will”. Your argument here applies equally to all subjective awareness, all emotional states, ALL of consciousness. That’s what makes @Babale 's argument above so compelling: > [@Babale](#): > > Because you are presenting two scenarios for comparison. > > In the first, we have a subjective experience and a sense of free will because this provides some kind of benefit to our fitness. For example, it lets us simulate future scenarios, or aids our reasoning, etc. > > In the second, we have subjective experience that’s quite complex. It is capable of doing everything our subjective experience does as humans. But it _serves no purpose_, because despite being capapble of _wanting something_, some external force compells it to _want something else_ instead. We don’t understand the basis for consciousness at all, we cannot even prove that anyone else is conscious - we cannot tell from their behavior, we just assume they are like us. So it’s very difficult to construct a coherent hypothesis about an ancestral unconscious state into which consciousness evolved and conferred some advantage. But it just seems vanishingly unlikely that our entire complex apparatus of consciousness serves no purpose whatsoever. Of course, this is not an argument that _all aspects_ of consciousness are necessarily adaptive. But it’s an argument that much of it is, and that it’s highly _plausible_ that “sense of free will” is an adaptive illusion. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/335 "2023-10-05T18:59:21Z")
One could also turn @Half_Man_Half_Wit 's argument on its head. If consciousness serves no purpose, why does that make it more likely that any particular subjective state corresponds to reality, why does that imply that our sense of free will is _less_ likely to be an illusion? ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/336 "2023-10-05T20:28:32Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > I’m glad that you finally understand this after several days of you obsessively proving from first principles that natural selection cannot prove WHY “sense of free will” has a fitness advantage. I have never said, argued for, or implied anything of that sort, and I remain utterly mystified by why you would think so. Best as I can tell, it has no relational all to anything in this thread, and I’ve pointed this out several times. What I have been saying is that the argument that we have free will because it is adaptive is unsound, if there are other options for obtaining the same fitness benefit. Anything else is your own fantasy. > [@Riemann](#): > > And none of us here ACCEPT the hypothesis either. But if we are going to discuss it, can we be very clear that we are having a conversation about where the fitness advantage of a “subjective sense of something” could derives from, and that conversation is about neuroscience and how our brains work, NOT about natural selection or “affirming the consequent”? Acceptance of the hypothesis is necessary for the argument to not just be affirming the consequent. Again, all I’m saying is that the sentence “having a subjective sense of freedom provides an adaptive benefit” is (plausibly, at least) true, while the sentence “having the adaptive benefit implies that we have a subjective sense of freedom”, is false, at least as long as there is another option to get the same benefit. But it’s the latter that would have to be true to argue that we have that sense of free will because of the adaptive benefit it confers. Now, perhaps it helps to point out that this isn’t in conflict with the following: if we start out in a state where a mutation (or series thereof) provides an illusory sense of free will from an ancestral state without any particular commitment, and thus, leads to a new state of higher reproductive fitness, then _of course_ this state will in general eventually dominate the population via selection. And this could plausibly be how we ended up with such a sense of freedom. But this is _not_ what the argument from selection attempts to conclude. From having that particular fitness benefit, one cannot conclude that we must have an illusion of fitness, anymore than from getting the million dollars one can conclude that the die must’ve come up 2. > [@Riemann](#): > > We don’t understand the basis for consciousness at all, we cannot even prove that anyone else is conscious - we cannot tell from their behavior, we just assume they are like us. So it’s very difficult to construct a coherent hypothesis about an ancestral unconscious state into which consciousness evolved and conferred some advantage. But it just seems vanishingly unlikely that our entire complex apparatus of consciousness serves no purpose whatsoever. Well, I do have a theory of consciousness on which it’s a consequence of a certain kind of access to intrinsic properties by means of self-referential dynamics ([thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814)), whose role is, essentially, to break an otherwise intractable regress (leading incidentally to just the sort of mechanism I described for realizing free will). In that sense, consciousness is a prerequisite for a certain sort of behavior, in that there is no other mechanism to produce it (provably: without this mechanism, whether to act in a certain goal-directed way is formally undecidable in the same sense the Halting Problem is). But to call consciousness ‘adaptive’ in some sense is still a dicey proposition; rather, it is a prerequisite for what we call a ‘world’ to appear in any form, to anyone, so in that way, we couldn’t _not_ be conscious, as ‘we’ in this sense wouldn’t even exist otherwise. But that’s all rather beside the present point. > [@Riemann](#): > > If consciousness serves no purpose, why does that make it more likely that any particular subjective state corresponds to reality, why does that imply that our sense of free will is _less_ likely to be an illusion? I can’t parse that. Could you try and rephrase it? ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/337 "2023-10-05T20:31:00Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > Jesus Christ, why are you STILL talking about the “argument from selection failing”? Didn’t you just finally agree that there IS no argument being made that natural selection CREATES OR EXPLAINS the existence of a fitness advantage? I hope the above finally clears this up, but there was never anything related to natural selection ‘creating or explaining a fitness advantage’ in anything I wrote, and I can’t see any plausible way to believe there was. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/338 "2023-10-05T20:31:07Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > the sentence “having the adaptive benefit implies that we have a subjective sense of freedom”, is false Nobody has made this argument. If that’s what you have been arguing against, I am not sure why. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/339 "2023-10-05T20:52:09Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Nobody has made this argument. If that’s what you have been arguing against, I am not sure why. That’s just the argument from selection: we’ve got the fitness benefit, hence we must have the illusion of freedom. It’s also what you’re saying if you’re claiming that getting the million in the dice game is specifically due to the die coming up 2, rather than ‘even’. Here’s how I put it originally: > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > There’s often some claimed evolutionary benefit to a subjective impression of freedom, but that’s of course nonsense—selection pressure only works on our external behaviors, so it simply doesn’t matter if we’re happy about what we’re doing, or abjectly miserable, as long as we do whatever we’re doing: they’re completely decoupled. That is, the evolutionary benefit is supposed to explain our subjective impression of freedom. But evolution acts only on our behaviors; so only the equivalence class of subjective states leading to the same behaviors explains our having a certain fitness. But not all of the members of this class, at least plausibly and to the best of anyone’s ability to tell, need to include a subjective impression of freedom, just as not all the members of the equivalence class of ‘even’ outcomes, which determines whether you get a million dollars, are 2. That you get the outcome 2 means you get the million; but that you get the million doesn’t mean you got the outcome 2. It’s precisely the distinction between sufficient and necessary criteria. In other words, there is no way to _select for_ the subjective impression of freedom; what can be selected for is just the set of behaviors it yields. And if that set isn’t unique, it’s not the case that we have that given fitness benefit _because of_ the illusion of freedom, but rather, because of the behavior that might be produced without such a sense of freedom. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2023, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800/340 "2023-10-05T21:15:26Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > What I have been saying is that the argument that we have free will because it is adaptive is unsound, if there are other options for obtaining the same fitness benefit. It’s clear from this that you haven’t taken in anything anyone has said to you. There is no ARGUMENT that “we have free will because it is adaptive”. There is a HYPOTHESIS that free will is adaptive, which is synonymous with “it has a fitness advantage”. That hypothesis cannot possibly be logically “unsound”, because no step of logic is involved. Nothing is being deduced from anything else. The hypothesis PROPOSES THE POSSIBILITY OF a fitness advantage, it does not claim to deduce it. The second error that you clearly have not understood yet is that the fitness advantage proposed in the hypothesis is only relative to mutually exclusive phenotypes encoded at the same locus. The possibility that other loci might generate similar downstream beneficial behaviors is irrelevant to whether natural selection would occur. Please stop talking about the “argument from selection” because there is no argument from selection except in your fantasy world. The adaptive HYPOTHESIS is nothing more than this: a HYPOTHESIS that the trait “sense of free will” has a fitness advantage over the mutually exclusive traits “no sense of anything” and “sense of compulsion”. Other traits that might generate similar downstream behaviors are irrelevant. This obviously begs the question: is the hypothesis plausible? Why might such a fitness advantage exist? And that’s a question for neuroscience, about how our minds work. If you find that hypothesis implausible, that’s fine. But to do so is not debunking any nonexistent “argument from selection”, and my patience is running thin with that tiresome nonsense. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800.md?page=16) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-you-give-up-free-will-for-world-peace/990800.md?page=18)