Yes, but there’s at least some evidence to suggest it may have been dimorphic. (The most prominent examples of claimed dimorphism in parasaur crest actually seems to represent two species separated by geography and time, so the difference isn’t dramatic, but it seems to be statistically significant).
@Half_Man_Half_Wit let’s just recap exactly what the adaptation hypothesis is, and what it requires.
We have an ancestral population with mental state A = nothing much.
There is a mutation mental state X = “sense of free will”. There exists a chain of causation from DNA designing the brain to the brain modulating behavior. X causes us to reason better and causes us to (say) find more food. Thus there is a fitness advantage over A. Natural selection acts on the entire causal chain from DNA through the brain to the food foraging, the entire causal chain must be present in animals that live or die and pass on ONLY THEIR DNA to the next generation. The entire causal chain is the adaptive phenotype.
The hypothesis certainly also entails that X is better than all MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE mutations that might subsequently arise in the species such as Y = “sense of compulsion”. It thus requires that Y must also have a downstream causal chain that confers inferior reasoning and lower fitness.
So,
(1) It is certainly true that within the universe of all MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE phenotypes that are likely to arise, X must be the best phenotype. But that’s a pretty small range of things. Not too many things are mutually exclusive with X - there is obviously A and Y, and maybe a few others. But obviously X is not mutually exclusive with (say) “tendency to cooperate”. The fact that the ultimate benefit from both “sense of free will” and “tendency to cooperate” might be obtaining more food doesn’t mean that they cannot both evolve by natural selection, because they are not mutually exclusive.
(2) If you postulate that Y could allow us to find just as much food and that evolution doesn’t care how we find food - you are simply denying the hypothesis. The hypothesis is that within the preexisting brain structure mental state Y is an inferior phenotype. It does not allow us to find as much food. The hypothesis does not claim to know exactly why that is, but it’s hardly implausible that a mental state is causally related to behavior.
The hypothesis is certainly not that mental states and food foraging are things that are floating around independently of one another with no causal relationship between them (or where any causal relationship is equally likely) waiting to be acted upon by evolution to CREATE a causal relationship, as you seem to imagine.
I’ll admit that I only skimmed the majority of the thread so I may be repeating what someone else said, but it seems to me that most of the discussion has devolved into an overall discussion of the nature of what it means to have free will and whether we do or don’t have it now. A hard question that has stymied philophers for centuries. But I would argue that to a certain extent this is irrelevant to answering the question in the OP. Its not important as to whether we currently have free will, what is important to the question is what changes to the current “free will” situation would be made by this god in order to ensure peace on earth.
A few possibilities include
- We all become prisoners in our own bodies watching our lives unfold but unable to act in any way.
- We have free will up to and until we try to commit a violent act at which point god takes over and stops us.
- We are prevented from actually thinking of violent acts.
- We are altered so that we could conceive violent acts and could commit them if we wanted to we just never want to.
Unfortunately @a_dudes_thought_s never came back after his thought provoking original post so we don’t know what precisely he had in mind when he says god takes away free will, but based based on the list above I would prefer those lower on the list to those higher and would probably be willing to accept any except the first one in exchange for world peace.
I don’t think I’d be willing to accept any of those.
I have read this thread title as “would you give up free wifi for world peace?” more than once now and would like to register my “yea” vote on the motion.
There’s no such thing as free wifi, it’s just an illusion.
The cost is built into the price of the coffee.
So it’s even a better deal to give it up for world peace! Huzzah!
Well, you still have to pay for your coffee.
I don’t know what the ‘because they are causal’ is supposed to accomplish there. Certainly, mental states can ‘be causal’ and confer the same benefits. Suppose we have the states:
- I love salad, so I should eat some.
- I hate salad, but I want to eat healthy, so I should eat some.
- I love burgers, so I should only eat those.
All three of these states (bracketing, of course, the rather large question of epiphenomenalism for the moment) ‘are causal’ in that they lead to a certain kind of behavior (eating salad vs. not eating salad). States 1 and 2 lead to (‘cause’) the same behavior, state 3 to different behavior. States 1 and 2 leads to the same level of reproductive fitness, state 3 to an early grave. Thus, there is a fitness differential between the disjunct (1 or 2) and state 3; evolution will thus (eventually) favor (1 or 2) over 3.
Now suppose we end up with a love for salad. The argument from selection then would be, we must have this love, because it confers the adaptive behavior of salad-eating. That’s clearly wrong: the love (state 1) does confer the adaptive behavior, but from the adaptive behavior, it doesn’t follow that we must love salads. Whether the state is 1 or 2 doesn’t matter for evolution. It’s not love of salad that’s selected for, it’s salad-eating.
What I mean is that there isn’t a causal connection between that neural state and getting more food (than any other state would yield) in your belly, because there are other states—that where we act out of compulsion in all the same ways, that where we feel subject to ‘alien body syndrome’, that where we’re simply aware of the deterministic nature of our actions, but unbothered by it—that yield the same amount of food, because they lead to all the same behaviors.
This is then not the argument from selection, which says that our illusion of free will is explained in terms of the selective fitness it provides. That initial random mutation is the coin toss of my analogy. It doesn’t explain you getting the million dollars—it is completely irrelevant to it. Other coin tosses, other random mutations would have led to the same adaptive benefit.
And if you assume they’re not, then you’ve already assumed your conclusion. If you assume that only X could ever occur, then you have no need to appeal to anything else to explain why X occurred—you’ve already assumed it does.
Let’s, for concreteness, assume some hunter-gatherer species before the evolution of speech in its modern form (which is at least plausibly necessary for telling ourselves the sort of stories about ourselves that an ‘illusion of free will’ necessitates). Through some pattern of random mutations and subsequent selections, we have arrived at the present state, with a stipulated ‘illusion’ of free will. Now, as far as anyone knows, from that point of origin, we might have just as well developed a feeling of compulsion, or a feeling of being just along for the ride, or an awareness of the actual deterministic nature of our actions. We’d be, fitness-wise, at the same spot we are, today. Hence, there’s some element of randomness to our evolutionary trajectory; and that element of randomness plays the same role in my coin-analogy: i.e., it means that we can’t point to it to explain why (as the argument from selection purports to do) we ended up with an illusion of freedom, because under the same selection process, we might as well not have (just as the coin coming up heads doesn’t explain why you got the million dollars, because it might as well not have without changing the outcome).
Now, you might want to argue, perhaps then at that point, we were already ‘locked in’ to some basin of attraction that only leaves the illusion of free will as a nearby maximum in the fitness landscape. But then, it’s just that stipulation that explains why we ended up with an illusion of selection! If you stipulate only one thing can happen, you end up with that thing happening. Then let’s just go back a few million years, and reiterate—if there then were evolutionary paths leading to either of the options outlined today, we again find that the argument of selection does no work. So it does no work in either of the possible cases.
No, I haven’t:
Now, it’s possible to use a mechanism with the same power to create randomness, but by a different sort of use.
Which reason was basically ‘because science’. To your credit, you now realize that was erroneous:
Then, you appeal to the everyday notion of causation to justify talking about causality. (‘We all know what it means in context.’) But that’s exactly what’s being questioned. You can’t justify being cavalier about causation by an appeal to science, and then justify using causal terms in science by noting that we’re generally cavalier about causal terms!
Both of these are very controversial statements.
That also depends. If you think of randomness as being a sort of external roll of the die that decides an outcome, that’s right. But you can also think of it as simple lack of determination. Take the rules of chess: they don’t decide, for most settings, which move must be made; they leave that open. Yet, you can give a probabilistic prediction, based on the skill-level of the player. But that the next move is not deterministically defined, as far as the rules are concerned, doesn’t mean that there is just some abstract process sampling from a probability distribution; it might just as well mean that the player is free to make their next move.
But this is just question begging. There is no reason to suppose that the illusion of free will causes us to find more food, as compared to the feeling of being compelled. Loving salad and hating it, but wanting to eat healthy, may yield to consuming exactly the same amounts of salad. You can’t say that by hypothesis, loving salad leads to us eating more salad, and then use that to argue for the hypothesis that we love to eat salad because it leads to us eating more of it!
Since I tire of re-phrasing the same argument over and over, I think the way I expressed it above to @Babale captures it about as well as I’m able to:
Let’s, for concreteness, assume some hunter-gatherer species before the evolution of speech in its modern form (which is at least plausibly necessary for telling ourselves the sort of stories about ourselves that an ‘illusion of free will’ necessitates). Through some pattern of random mutations and subsequent selections, we have arrived at the present state, with a stipulated ‘illusion’ of free will. Now, as far as anyone knows, from that point of origin, we might have just as well developed a feeling of compulsion, or a feeling of being just along for the ride, or an awareness of the actual deterministic nature of our actions. We’d be, fitness-wise, at the same spot we are, today. Hence, there’s some element of randomness to our evolutionary trajectory; and that element of randomness plays the same role in my coin-analogy: i.e., it means that we can’t point to it to explain why (as the argument from selection purports to do) we ended up with an illusion of freedom, because under the same selection process, we might as well not have (just as the coin coming up heads doesn’t explain why you got the million dollars, because it might as well not have without changing the outcome).
Now, you might want to argue, perhaps then at that point, we were already ‘locked in’ to some basin of attraction that only leaves the illusion of free will as a nearby maximum in the fitness landscape. But then, it’s just that stipulation that explains why we ended up with an illusion of selection! If you stipulate only one thing can happen, you end up with that thing happening. Then let’s just go back a few million years, and reiterate—if there then were evolutionary paths leading to either of the options outlined today, we again find that the argument of selection does no work. So it does no work in either of the possible cases.
Nowhere does any of that entail that I believe mental states just ‘float around’, or that evolution creates causal relationships, or any of that. Those are just straw men.
Let’s say that the magical, causeless and yet nom-random, free will that religion requires exists.
We can still ask “how does the decision get made”?
If there are souls, we can ask whether souls are different to begin with. If yes, then God (the Creator of your soul) bears responsibility for the initial state of your soul. If no, then your soul is purely shaped by your environment – which God also made.
So, as with all things related to magical free will, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny at all. It’s just a get out of jail free card that you’re not supposed to actually inspect.
But the existence of God gives us an out that we didn’t have previously. If God exists, he could be directing every particle monent by moment, only obeying the laws of physics if He chooses to (which He always does, unless he needs a miracle). But souls could be free agents. That they don’t have real choices doesn’t matter. Imagine a child playing with a train set. Trains with an internal motor have “free will”. They move of their own accord, even if there’s only one place they can go. Other trains can only be pushed about the track. If the child were invisible and all you could see was the trains, their behavior might be identical; but one is “free” while the other is not.
This doesn’t let us choose otherwise, and makes God seem a bit rude for tossing one of the trains drivers into hell for eternal torment because the tracks God laid out took the train to the Gay Zone. But it’s an internally consistent and coherent framework.
Harsh, but fair.
@Babale I’m not sure I’m following you; I don’t think most proponents of free will would agree that what you’re describing could be called that.
Of course the fuzziness of the concept is a problem in itself…
I’ll maybe start by laying out my position:
I think the concept of free will is a pointless dead end. It’s never defined concretely, and is a bad framing for trying to understand human intentionality. It dates back to a time where the whole brain was a black box (indeed, before we even agreed that the brain was the organ of consciousness), but you can’t just call it out as nonsense now because of the long history of great minds debating this topic. So it persists.
I make rational choices. Reasoning is not only consistent with prior causality and instinctive predisposition, it requires them.
I’m perfectly fine with my choices being casually linked; there’s really no other way it could work. And while humans can and should hold me accountable for my actions, a God cannot.
They’re welcome not to, but as has been shown a few times now any other definition is incoherent.
I agree with all of this. I don’t propose the scenario with freedom from a deity because I think it describes our world, but because it is the only context in which I can comprehend the concept.
To be clear, this is the same god that sacrificed himself to himself to remove a curse he put on mankind?
Naw fam, humanity will take it from here.
The entire problem here appears to be that you are under the mistaken impression that the hypothesis that something is adaptive (what you call the “argument from selection”) means that natural selection MADE the trait beneficial. You could only think that if you fundamentally misunderstand evolution by natural selection. Natural selection favors traits that arise by chance that ARE beneficial.
The hypothesis that something is adaptive entails nothing more than raising the possibility that it didn’t arise through random genetic drift, that it is not a spandrel, that it’s there for a good reason because it’s beneficial in itself.
OF COURSE it begs the question “WHY is it beneficial?” But you don’t answer that question by examining the process of natural selection, you answer that question by examining the physiology or the behavior, by looking at how the species employs the trait in its natural environment.
Obviously it means that, given the preexisting architecture of the brain when the mutation “sense of free will” arose, that it CAUSED us to reason better. Under normal circumstances I would not feel the need to say this, but your philosophical stance appears to be to DENY causation, to suggestion any observed sequential association between a mental state and a behavior is as likely as any other.
No, because the “argument from selection” is certainly not making the claim that natural selection CREATES the causal link between subjectively liking salad and eating salad.
Your framework here is bizarre. If I say that “eyes are adaptive”, do I look to natural selection to explain WHY vision is beneficial? If I say that fur is adaptive, do I look to natural selection to explain WHY temperature regulation is beneficial? Of course not. I look to the species in its natural environment, and I note that vision helps it negotiate that environment more effectively, that fur helps it regulate body temperature.
So when someone suggest that “sense of free will” might be adaptive, nobody is claiming that this is an explanation for WHY it is beneficial. This entire exchange appears to be because you misunderstand natural selection, leading you misinterpret the claim as saying more than it could possibly be claiming. The ultimate explanation of WHY “sense of free will” is beneficial (if indeed it is) can only come from neuroscience, not natural selection.
There is certainly an interesting conversation to be had about what subjective mental states are, why they exist at all, and what it means for there to be a causal connection between a subjective mental state and a behavior. But that’s probably for another thread.
You clearly misunderstand evolution by natural selection, imagining that we could use natural selection to explain WHY an adaptive trait is beneficial. Consider this parody:
Let’s, for concreteness, assume some hunter-gatherer species before the evolution of heads. Through some pattern of random mutations and subsequent selections, we have arrived at the present state, with a stipulated presence of eyes. Now, as far as anyone knows, from that point of origin, we might have just as well developed blindness. We’d be, fitness-wise, at the same spot we are, today. Hence, there’s some element of randomness to our evolutionary trajectory; and that element of randomness plays the same role in my coin-analogy: i.e., it means that we can’t point to it to explain why (as the argument from selection purports to do) we ended up with vision, because under the same selection process, we might as well not have.
Now, you might want to argue, perhaps then at that point, we were already ‘locked in’ to some basin of attraction that only leaves vision as a nearby maximum in the fitness landscape. But then, it’s just that stipulation that explains why we ended up with vision! If you stipulate only one thing can happen, you end up with that thing happening. Then let’s just go back a few million years, and reiterate—if there then were evolutionary paths leading to either of the options outlined today, we again find that the argument of selection does no work. So it does no work in either of the possible cases.
Natural selection cannot explain WHY vision is better than blindness, and it cannot possibly explain WHY a sense of free will is better than a sense of compulsion. You would have to fundamentally misunderstand natural selection to think that anyone was making this claim.
Again, the explanation for WHY a sense of free will is beneficial (if indeed it is) can only lie in neuroscience.
You seem to have gotten lost in some bizarre misreading of my arguments, but I’m not sure I can help you get clear of it, since I don’t for the life of me see how the above could plausibly be a reasonable reading of what I wrote, and you steadfastly ignore any attempt of mine to clarify, persisting in this bizarre interpretation despite me repeatedly pointing out that I don’t believe anything of the sort.
But I’ll try to be as explicit as possible for one last time, and maybe then at least you could tell me where our understanding differs. I’ll even paint you a picture.
________ (1)
/
----------x
\________ (2)
We are at the point x, with some ancestral mental state that has no particular preference regarding salads. There are two distinct successor mental states, (1) and (2), with:
(1): ‘I love salad, so I should eat some’
(2): ‘I love burgers, so I should only eat those’
Those confer a different selective benefit, (B1) and (B2), with (B1) > (B2). That’s just due to the fact that those who eat salad typically live longer and have more offspring/care for their offspring better/what have you. In this case, the argument from selection works: eventually, the population will be dominated by those who eat salad, and they will eat salad because they love salad, and hence, we can validly say that they love salad because of the adaptive benefit the resulting behavior confers.
Nothing about this has anything to do with natural selection somehow ‘making’ a trait beneficial. I’m not even sure what that would mean; it’s just that some traits turning up by chance confer a selection advantage, which means that those with the trait will on average have more offspring.
Now consider the following scenario:
________ (1)
/
----------x--------- (3)
\________ (2)
Now, we have the following mental states:
(1): ‘I love salad, so I should eat some’
(2): ‘I love burgers, so I should only eat those’
(3): ‘I hate salad, but I should eat healthily, so I should eat some’
In turn, these confer reproductive benefit (B1), (B2), and (B3). Individuals with mental states (1) and (3) end up eating salad in just the same quantities. As in this simple model, there is no other determining factor, that entails (B1) = (B3) > (B2). Now suppose we are again at point x. Natural selection can’t differentiate between (1) and (3), because it’s sensitive only to fitness differentials, and there’s no fitness differential between the two. Individuals with either will eat just as much salad, and outcompete the burger-munchers in just the same way.
Again, I stress that this is not because of any way by which natural selection might ‘make’ a trait beneficial; it’s just by it acting on differences in benefit generated by these states, and there not being such a difference between (1) and (3).
Suppose we then find a population in which only (1) obtains. In this case, the argument from selection—clearly!—does not work: there is no selective benefit of (1) over (3), so it can’t be preferentially selected. Rather, it might have been genetic drift, or pure chance (the mutation responsible for (3) just never occurred), or the whim of some aliens tinkering with the genome, or whatever.
Again, this is what I tried to make clear by the coin toss example. Both (1) and (3) lead to ‘winning the million dollars’, so to speak, hence, the fact that one wins can’t be explained by (1) coming to pass, because whether it does fails to change the outcome. So, in this scenario, we can’t argue that individuals in this model population have a love of salad because of the fitness benefit this provides. It’s just logically wrong (once more, affirming the consequent) to do so!
What confers the fitness benefit is the amount of salad eaten. We can, thus, validly claim that the individuals eat that amount of salad because of the fitness benefit this provides. But (3) would’ve led to the same amount of salad-eating, so selection can’t account for the prevalence of (1) over (3).
Now, it’s been said that, say, (3) might not be available for a given ancestral population. Say, there’s for some reason no feasible mutation that gets it to the basin of attraction associated with ‘wanting to eat healthy’. Like for a creature with scales, it probably wouldn’t be feasible to evolve fur as a means of conserving body heat, rather than feathers. So, we’d be in a situation like this one:
________ (1)
/
----y-----x
\ \________ (2)
\_____________ (3)
Here, at point x, we don’t have the option of evolving (3). So then, the argument from selection should work, right? Well, no: all that this tells you is just that you chose your point of origin such as to obtain your desired conclusion. After all, why choose x, and not y? As long as there exists a point from which the evolution of a creature that differs from the actual population only in showing (3) rather than (1) is possible, the argument from selection fails. If you could somehow show that such a development isn’t possible, thus restoring a situation like the one in the first drawing (which is the one where there is that necessary connection between the behavior and the mental state I pointed out was needed earlier), then you could patch up the argument. But you can’t simply stipulate it isn’t possible: then, you’re just assuming your conclusion. And since creatures like us, that behave exactly like us, but for different reason are certainly consistently possible, I see no feasible way to go this route.
Again, as I hope the above makes finally clear, I’m very much not saying that. All I’m saying is that as long as a difference in mental state makes no difference in phenotype (e.g. in the amount of salad being eaten), there is no difference relevant to natural selection. That’s an utter triviality. Your ‘parody’ would be apt if, by some means, being blind would yield to exactly the same behaviors as having eyes. But it quite clearly doesn’t. However, being compelled to show a certain set of behaviors, and feeling as if one choses that very same set freely, quite clearly lead to the same behaviors.
The hypothesis is that IT DOES.
Under your contrary assumption that IT DOESN’T, your argument is sound. If we lived on Venus, the sky would not be blue.
The adaptive hypothesis, what you call the “argument from selection”, does not claim to explain WHY it the phenotype is beneficial, it merely proposes that it might be. If you understand natural selection, you could not possibly misunderstand an adaptive hypothesis in this way.
Natural selection cannot possibly explain WHY vision is beneficial, this is like a category error. For that we observe the species using its vision to negotiate its environment more effectively.
Natural selection cannot possibly explain WHY “sense of free will” is beneficial, for that we must look to neuroscience. (And of course we don’t know if the suggestion that it is beneficial is correct.)
Shouting louder doesn’t make it any more true. The argument from selection aims to explain why we have the illusion of free will, by pointing out that it gives a selection benefit. If there are other mental states giving the same benefit, the argument fails. There are such mental states, such as behaving exactly the same way as we do now, while feeling compelled to do so. Against that, you can’t simply ‘hypothesize’ that there are none! That’s just blatantly circular.
But well, I guess I’ll leave you to knocking over your straw men; it’s clear you have no interest in actual discussion.