And what would change if you didn’t feel like you could have done otherwise? If you felt like you took the only option available to you?
Again with the silly drama. I was reacting to the stipulation that there is no objective data regarding our free choices. Well, neither is there regarding causality. Or whether you have a headache. I’m not the one reaching for the philosophical way out, but it’s Ok if those on your case do it, I suppose.
I’m not assuming that. I’m merely stipulating that there are several different internal mental states that yield the same behavior, and have given examples of that. I can repeat them if you like.
Anyway, let’s consider a hypothetical. Suppose you’re entering a game. I throw a coin, and if it comes up heads, you’ll win a million dollars. However, if it comes up tails, you’ll win a million dollars!
Now, suppose I throw the coin, and it comes up tails. As a result, you get a million dollars! Is it now reasonable to say that you got a million dollars because the coin came up tails?
Suppose I modify the game. Say I throw a die, and if the number is even, you get a million dollars. Suppose the die comes up two, and as a result, you get a million dollars. Does it make sense to say that you got a million dollars because the die came up two? Does you getting a million dollars license the conclusion that the die came up two?
Now suppose that we take a look at the game a millisecond after the die has left my hand. Then, plausibly, the actual outcome was the only one left. So nothing but two could have been the result; as a consequence, you must win the million. Does the fact that you’ll get the million license the conclusion that the die must’ve come up two now?
Take your time with the answers; I’m heading off to bed now.
And it doesn’t counter any claim that others have made in this thread. Nobody said such an advantage had to be unique.
If you’re talking about organisms in general, that’s true. But if you’re talking about a specific organism, it’s false.
Not every organism needs water low in salts to survive. But some do. Saying that brine shrimp exist, or that there are saltwater fish, doesn’t mean that humans, or a lot of other species, don’t need fresh water.
So what?
it doesn’t undercut the argument, because the argument is not that adaptive behavior must be why we evolved the behavior. It’s one possibility; it’s not the only one.
The experience of free will does affect behavior. This might be adaptive, or it might be neutral, or it might be counter-adaptive, but not counter-adaptive enough to outweigh the adaptive benefits of some gene or process that it’s tangled up with. Or maybe that experience is affecting our behavior in ways which will eventually cause us to destroy ourselves. Too soon to tell.
That’s not an explanation at all.
Headaches have causes. In some cases, it’s not worth figuring out the exact cause. In other cases, finding out the cause might save your life. But either way they certainly have causes.
Unproven that humans who feel that they have no choice behave the same way as humans who do. And I think probably not true. Humans who feel they’re utterly under some outside control are generally considered to have a pathology, after all – in significant part because they often behave diffferently.
Because you can imagine some other creature entirely who exhibits a human type of behavior without that illusion while in its normal state has no more to do with whether humans are like that than the fact that a chicken has feathers means that my cat can’t have fur. (Or, better yet, considering the example that you gave, the non-existent “fact” that a mythological roc has feathers doesn’t mean that my cat can’t have fur.) Or than the fact that a chicken has feathers means that my cat can’t have evolved to have fur. Or that the fur doesn’t keep the cat warm; or that his immediate ancestors, barn cats or wild cats, could have survived and reproduced just as well if they’d been bald as those furry ancestors did.
You appear to be somehow reading that whole argument backwards, or inside out. It says nothing whatsoever about there being only one possible solution. What it says is what @Babale said:
And of course evolution doesn’t “choose” anything; it doesn’t have a mind to choose with (unless, I suppose, you are a theist.)
This just plain makes no sense whatsoever. It can’t lead to both feathers and fur while not leading to fur!
Cats have fur because of natural selection. Chickens have feathers because of natural selection. I’m quite sure I do have that right.
You’re postulating that we were a different species than we actually are. If we were a different species, it would be because we’d evolved differently.
Oh, nonsense.
Adaptation is to specific circumstances. There is no such thing as being simultaneously adapted to every possible circumstance. Most of the anaerobes died when the atmosphere became oxygenated – what had been a successful adaptation became extremely unadaptive. Some of them didn’t – because those particular individuals/species found themselves a niche where they could live successfully as anaerobes.‘’
Say what?!
According to you, nothing whatsoever can be adaptive. So clearly, according to you, evolution can’t exist.
But you keep talking about evolution as if you think it does exist. Is your argument actually that it doesn’t?
Are you saying that you don’t believe in causation?
Hmm. At this point my simplest option for making sense out of this very long argument is that you don’t believe in either causation or evolution.
For those of us who do, of course, your arguments about either won’t make sense. But at least that gives me some explanation for why they don’t make sense.
A] If the sense of free will is a byproduct of something else, then either:
You got rid of free will by nerfing that capability (in which case I lose fitness)
or you got rid of it by modifying the process to no longer have this byproduct
2.1) In which case it’s hard to believe that function would have identical performance
2.2) But if we somehow did guarantee that, you might be more efficient.
B] If the sense of free will directly serves a purpose, then:
I lose that ability
Or, I gain that ability some other way; again, one would imagine that an alternative method would not beidentical but would have different costs, benefits, and side effects; but, if all abilities were replaced with identically performing and costing abilities, then I suppose nothing would change.
All I can conclude from this combination of posts is that you are making an extremely fine (and IMO nitpicky) distinction between “being large is adaptive” vs. “being large is adaptive for some ecological niches and genetic environments (plus other qualifiers)”. I doubt anyone here would disagree with that, but I also doubt anyone here has said “X is adaptive” without assuming it would be taken with the appropriate context. Of course being large is not universally adaptive, and nor would be free will. Adaptation is always sensitive to the circumstances.
If free will is an evolved trait, then it must have done so in an environment that allowed it to do so. That means an appropriate mental infrastructure, for one. Which might not be available to aliens or otherwise. Within that context, it would be adaptive.
You talk about free will as though it’s something that might or might not exist, like Deepak Chopra. But when carefully examined, the idea of free will crumbles away into logical incoherence. It is an incoherent concept, like most of what Deepak Chopra says.
So what you present is a false choice. When something is not even wrong, there is no conceivable hypothetical universe in which it is right.
Believing in something incoherent certainly does not confer “deep meaning” to my thoughts and actions. I’m existentially perfectly content that I make decisions for good reasons with a sprinkling of purely random whimsy.
The illusion of free will certainly exists, and I’m perfectly happy with the idea that the illusion is an intrinsic part of my nature, and that it may foster better decision-making. I certainly don’t try to fight against the illusion when thinking and making choices.
But debunking the incoherent concept of free will matters because of the strong implications for our justice system, so there is a good reason to “not believe in it” other than the reasons you have described.
As part of my self, my emotions don’t “influence” my behavior. They’re cognitions. They aren’t caused by externalia, they are caused by interactions.
Being able to describe something as a set of computations doesn’t mean that’s what they are. You, for example, are a set of elementary particles that don’t occupy a position so much as they demonstrate a “tendency to exist”, and whose dance generates the phenomenon we refer to as protons, neutrons, electrons. There’s no part of you that fails to fit that description, and yet that is not who, or what, you are.
I’ve been trying to make sense of what @Half_Man_Half_Wit is arguing, and I’m glad you posted this, because rereading the thread I can’t help but reach the same conclusion.
There is nothing special about any particular mental state, so if @Half_Man_Half_Wit believes that the mental state “illusion of free will” cannot be adaptive (because alternatives exist that could generate the same behavior), then by the same reasoning no other mental trait is adaptive. So nothing in the the brain is adaptive, so the brain did not evolve by natural selection at all.
But then there’s nothing special about the brain. For all phenotypic traits there are always possible alternative mechanisms to achieve the same end. If the mere existence of these possible alternatives implies no adaptation… fur is not adaptive because feathers exist, hands are not adaptive because tentacles exist, bones are not adaptive because exoskeletons exist, vision is not adaptive because sonar exists.
There is literally no phenotype for which we could not (fairly easily) come up with another way to achieve the same thing.
And, directly related to this, the misconception that “adaptation” implies “necessity” keeps recurring. In his dartboard analogy, @Half_Man_Half_Wit apparently thinks that all theoretically possible genotypes and phenotypes are always available, so nothing can be said to a result of natural selection unless it is better than all theoretically possible ways of doing the same thing.
There’s also a determined attempt to try to sever the (obvious) causal connection between mental states and behavior. One moment it is stipulated as obvious, the next an assumption appears out of thin air that any subjective mental state could generate the same behavior. The fallacious justification for this was that natural selection only acts downstream of some arbitrary point between brain and behavior. It would be helpful if @Half_Man_Half_Wit could agree that he is simply wrong about this, since he just stopped replying to the exchange where I explained that natural selecion only operates on heritable phenotypes. So there must be an intact causal chain from genotype to phenotype in order for natural selection to operate, and that the causal chain obviously goes DNA > brain > behavior.
Yeah, I don’t understand that either. Especially since core to evolution is that structures that evolved for one reason get repurposed for another. It’s not like evolution made a binary choice one day to evolve fur or feathers. Instead, fur is an extension of hair, and hair most likely an extension of some kind of fiber used to enhance touch sensitivity. That’s still a key use of hair–the fine hairs on my arm are useless for warmth, but I can detect and localize a sub-millimeter movement of a single one of these hairs due to their sensitivity (which is useful to swat mosquitos, etc.).
But the process of starting with these fibers and ending with fur must have been at least partially driven by factors other than insulation. It was only the last stages where that was the main factor.
Which is all to say that fur could only have evolved when all that other stuff had already happened, and which precluded the evolution of feathers. The evolutionary path was already set in motion, but not by the final adaptative factors.
Most people don’t regard Deepak Chopra as a serious philosopher. He certainly did not invent the idea of free will.
If free will is logically incoherent, I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty demonstrating that. I’ll point out that simply stating something is incoherent is not proof.
If you manage that, you can move on to the next step; demonstrate how something being incoherent means it does not exist.
“You” are an emergent property of the behavior of the particles and fields that make you up, with however many layers of abstraction as you’d like. Each of us would place “You” somewhere different along the spectrum that stretches between a fine mist of probability, a cloud of atoms, a soup of organic molecules, a complex web of biochemical machinery, a pile of organs, a clever ape, a human being, a member of your community, or a part of the Galactic Spirit.
When I say that emotions influence your behavior, I’m not suggesting that they are external. They are an intrinsic part of “you”. But I mean “influence” as opposed to “rigidly determine”. It seems to me that emotions are a mechanism discovered by evolution to modulate behavior and direct it toward broad objectives (finding a mate, finding food), while leaving the details of how best to achieve those goals in the current environment to higher cognition, and allowing higher cognition to override them when appropriate.
Absolutely, there are levels of explanation the are appropriate for different purposes.
But the use of a different level of explanation does not change causation. It is likely that “who I am” is so complex that it may be impossible to discern the exact process of cause and effect in my choices. We certainly can’t do it by doing down to the molecular level. But my are choices are, nevertheless, ultimately deterministic.
He is notorious for not even wrong “deepities”. It was a joke, but I probably should have avoided it - I certainly didn’t mean to imply that he is a serious thinker about free will, quite the opposite.
Our subjective sense of free will is the impression that when we make a choice, we could have done otherwise in precisely identical circumstances.
But how could that happen?
One way for your brain to make a different choice is that the causal inputs to the decision change. We make a different decision for a reason. Of course, but that is not precisely identical circumstances. And it’s not a “free” change. It was caused, it happened for a reason.
The other way is that there could be some truly random component to our decision. This is highly plausible, since quantum effects are known to be non-determinisitc, truly random. So that could produce a different choice under precisly identical circumstances. But that’s essentially rolling a dice and abiding by the outcome. That’s not “free” either.
So there is simply no such thing as a “free” choice. Free from what? Free from causation? Then by definition it’s simply random. We have a very strong intuition of an “agent” inside us somehow floating free of causation yet not just acting randomly. But when we examine this intution closely, it is logically incoherent. Outcomes are either caused or they are not, we either do things for reasons or as purely random dice-roll whimsy.
At this point, the burden is on you to explain exactly what you think “free” will is free from, and how it works. I don’t mean a mechanism for how it works so much as the logical procedure it follows.
Well, I’d place “you” (or in this case “me”) on the entire spectrum. Somewhere in that interactive soup are the processes I experience as “me”. But yeah, basically that.
• There’s no real-life reset button. Why posit a hypothetical one as part of defining free will? What does “could have done it otherwise” have to do with anything?
• Why would you do it differently? If you learned something subsequently, now you might do it differently, but that’s cheating because knowing that extra bit isn’t the precisely identical circumstance at all.
Yeah, you’ve got me here. I guess Deepak Chopra’s tweets are incoherent, yet the tweets exist.
Perhaps I should have stuck with “not even wrong”, meaning that there is no coherent hypothesis that is amenable to evaluation as true of false with empirical data (under any conceivable circumstances, I don’t mean practical constraints on obtaining empirical data).
I wouldn’t put it that way. I experienced it as my choice. “Could have chosen differently” implies that the same me, weighing the same things, would pick differently. But I didn’t. There was only one then. No replay. I chose, and I was not compelled by things that aren’t me to choose, that which is me did the choosing. I chose of my own free will. I made it so. And all of the factors that played into making it so, they are participants in the me who made the choice. I did it consciously and volitionally.
