SyneOct 13, 2020 06:49 AM (This post was last modified: Oct 13, 2020 06:51 AM by Syne.)
While I see why many atheists would be motivated to espouse incompatibilism, as a complete denial of free will, I'm not sure how many believers in free will are actual incompatibilists, which would require denying determinism. Is it just me, or does incompatibilist free will seem to be used more as a straw man than an actual belief? Granted, a supernatural, incompatibilist free will is naively equivalent to a supernatural, compatibilist free will. So much so that the same definition of free will can be used by both. But seeing as a supernatural free will typically relies on a creator god, belief in which inspired the idea of a scientifically ordered and comprehensible world, it make little sense to deny some features of that creation arbitrarily labeled "natural" in favor of those equally arbitrarily labeled "supernatural".
Alternatives to strictly naturalist physics, such as mind–body dualism positing a mind or soul existing apart from one's body while perceiving, thinking, choosing freely, and as a result acting independently on the body, include both traditional religious metaphysics and less common newer compatibilist concepts. Also consistent with both autonomy and Darwinism, they allow for free personal agency based on practical reasons within the laws of physics. While less popular among 21st century philosophers, non-naturalist compatibilism is present in most if not almost all religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibil...naturalism
But many non-religious compatibilists do tend toward redefining free will as something less than the freedom we actual perceive. "Doing what one wills but not willing what one wills", ultimately being determined by external factors. That is more the illusion of freedom than genuine freedom. And as illusory, it's effectively just hard determinism/incompatibilism.
In both camps of the free will debate, the more nuanced thinkers are compatibilists. I just tend to think that those who have to resort to redefining free will are kidding themselves.
(Oct 13, 2020 02:48 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: In the annals of human literature, never has so much been written about 2 choices for which we may have no choice in.
Consider that humans have all this complexity, reasoning and conscious selection-making apparatus that goes well beyond the capacities of a rock, and yet we're still denied ever having made any actual choices -- no better than a rock. It's rarely even considered how that undermines science and potentially makes suspect the legitimacy of many claims in various areas, including the idea itself that the universe is "fixed" or that it even matters if it is fixed (if there is no motivated intelligence behind it with an agenda to deceive).
(Oct 13, 2020 12:27 AM)Syne Wrote: Ultimately, there is no answer to this question in science alone. Believing someone who asserts there is is unscientific hubris.
I would like to think that because not having a choice (control) is a fundamental fear of all humans.
(Oct 13, 2020 04:07 AM)Yazata Wrote: I guess that I'm arguing for a sort of compatibilism, arguing that free will is compatible with temporally short-range determinism (it even requires it, if we are to say "I did it because I wanted to"). That move requires introduction of some better definition of 'free-will'. Free-will seems to me to require that prior mental states (intentions) need to have a tight short-range temporal/causal linkage to subsequent mental states (volitions). We want to distinguish intentional willed actions from spastic convulsions. On the free-will thesis, our actions are determined in some large part by our minds (which might indeed be described as an inner process in entirely naturalistic neurophysiological terms).
Choices: Complex probability?
Behavioral variability as an adaptive trait?
Free will as a quantitative trait?
Hmm…maybe.
(Oct 13, 2020 06:10 AM)C C Wrote: It's the human body processing information and making its selections, not everything in the environment but the body doing that. Rocks don't have the capacity to choose or decide or scheme to control. Nor do chairs or clouds or lakes or the Moon. They don't even simulate/represent the circumstances of an external environment. They don't have interests.
How about a fly?
There’s this neurobiologist, Bjoern Brembs, that has done some interesting work.
Pulled from another topic to use as an example.
(Sep 21, 2020 09:11 PM)Syne Wrote: If you don't like what he's telling you, here's an idea, quit bothering him. You obviously don't have the expertise to change his mind, and you seem unwilling to learn from him. Brings the definition of insanity to mind.
I thought about what you said. Does insight produce change?
In one of Brembs' papers that I just mentioned, he talks about the unexpected move by your chess opponent. That’s how I’ve viewed my interactions with Remus. He’s a little nutty, which makes him even more unpredictable. I’ve stuck with the chess theme during the debate about color because it reminded me of Bayer’s checkerboard.
I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge on the subject, not from him directly, but because of him. I think that if we have freewill at all the proportion of necessity to freedom depends upon on tolerance of conflict, don’t you?
Brembs has shown that although animal behavior can be unpredictable, responses do seem to come from a fixed list of options. So, if we have a set of constraints, and we look only to those constraints, and think of nothing else, we diminish our freedom, no?
Interestingly, a long time ago, Remus said that he learned from a professional chess player (an international master) the greatest secret in chess. That is that you should never think more than two, maximum three, moves ahead (and three only in special cases). There is a condition attached to this; that those two-three moves are the best under the circumstances.
And there is also an addendum to that condition: That your next move is the best of the two-three step scenario you thought out. This is the best strategy to use in chess, and it's a secret for most. Which is terribly unfortunate, because the wisdom of that strategy should be known by all those who are telling others what they should believe and do.
Well, you know me, I always think I’m funny in a geeky sort of way. Similar to Nietzsche’s sardonic "Why am I so clever?"
I borrowed a bit from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld on fate and topped it off by using total internal reflection (soft pun) to make his checkmate vanish. I thought it was funny but no…he was pissed, really pissed.
I was born with a fair amount of handicapping traits, which made me aware pretty much from the very beginning that I was designed to be one of the many, not one of the few. For a time, after becoming convinced of the fact, I tried to establish if my own load of personal handicaps was ordinarily typical to those of the most. Thankfully it did not take me too long though to realize not only the futility but also the stupidity of rambling in such a roving pursuit, and with that first little piece of self-acquired wisdom in my life I have never since looked at my shortcoming traits with the same eyes and mind. On the contrary, with that little awareness there has, in time, come a quiet desire to learn how to tame--or at least learn to live with by accepting and accommodating them. Needless to say, dealing in earnestness with that kind of beasts is easier said than done, but to my genuine surprise and pleasure over the years I have learned that even in one's most debilitating handicap one can make a great deal of difference in one's personal degree of affliction, affection, or aversion. There is indeed, to my mind, only one deciding and definitive factor in the matter. (And one most obvious at that too, I could tell you.) In spite of all its simplicity and directness, though, the truth still remains that there are no more daunting handicaps in one's life than those one is born with. (Let those who do not believe me tell the world, in truthfulness, how they have tamed their own most debilitating fears, or urges, or indeed any other human traits of significance, which we see every day hampering every soul that is wandering in our present.)
There are not many people in the world who manage to make me truly ireful on a regular basis, but there are nonetheless a couple of them out there. One is a woman for whom I wrote the paragraph above. It is to her, and to her only, that I want to say a few words now, words which for too long I had left unuttered.
About three weeks ago I received the following message.
You have your own universe and your own god. Jeez, how narcissistic of you. Well then, I guess I had better step it up.
*Most gods play dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until it's too late that he's been using two queens all along.
Whatever happens, they say, it must have been Fate. Fate always wins or so they claim.
A shadow fell across the table and the gods looked up.
"Are we playing displacement chess," she asked.
"Aye," said Fate
"Let the game begin," said the Lady.
There was always an argument about whether the newcomer was a goddess at all. She was generally referred to as the American Lady. She always wore a green dress. It was said to be her favorite color.
Fate looked across at his opponent.
"And your move?" he said.
She smiled. "I've already made it."
He looked down. "But I don't see your pieces on the board."
"They're not on the board yet," she said.
Print out the word *CHECKMATE *on piece of paper. Sit your prism on top of the word. Now, slowly move the position of your eye downward. Does your *CHECKMATE* vanish? Methinks so.
There was nothing new or unusual about this message from the American Lady. Indeed it was pretty much like all other messages I have received from her over the 5-6 years since this website's own beginning. With one notable exception though, as I had thought until today. About three months ago, just after I had concluded my 'debate' with Mr. Dutch, I received a different kind of message from her:
Hmm, a dash of the unexpected leaving me *temporally* stumped.
Going Dutch, I see. I know it wasn't polite to barge in when I wasn't invited. After all, chess is only a two-player strategy game, a private soirée.
Perhaps, it's time to start embracing my own vulnerability to cognitive errors.
I was truly surprised to see her apparently acknowledging that my 'Greek' demonstration that red and blue are refracted in opposite directions was good enough to stump her (even if only "temporally"). After all, I thought, at least she appeared to possess more character and strength than all those hundreds of Doctors of Philosophy to whom I had sent my open letters on the subject.
For a good couple of weeks, I pondered how I should deal with the American Lady's message above (the one in red). Finally, a few days ago I replied thus:
OK my American Lady, so you wanna replace Mr. Dutch and play chess with me? No problem. There are only a couple of things you should consider before getting into it. One. I will treat you with the same fairness and in the same manner. Two. I will write every detail on my website, just like I did in all other cases. I'll give you two days from this moment on to reply to this message.
Then, a few hours later I got this:
No, I don't want to play anymore. I know my answer is right.
And that, let me tell you, that got me pissed. Really pissed. So pissed that I immediately put on my headphones and I started writing this page. Pissed. Really pissed.
Anyhow, I’ve decided to be an animal that behaves as it damned well pleases. Is that freewill or simply a rebellious trait? Or maybe...I just like playing chess.
***Even small fly brains can control behavior with minute precision. For instance, male house flies closely track the evading flight maneuvers of female flies with only a lag of about 30ms. Input/output models reproduce these chasing flights with high fidelity. Such input/output systems provide the flies with exquisite control over their turning maneuvers. Nevertheless, bereft of visual input flies produce turning maneuvers, the variability of which would never allow them to stay clear of obstacles, land on food, let alone catch the mate. Where does this variability come from? How does the female fly produce seemingly random turn maneuvers, making it so difficult for the male fly to follow? Obviously, the amount of behavioral variability is in itself variable and must be under the control of the brain. How does the brain do this? Behavioral variability is a well-known phenomenon. It is so pervasive that the semi-serious Harvard Law of Animal Behavior was coined: "Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases."
***The most fundamental brain function is to produce adaptive behavior. Adaptive behavior is the ability to orient toward specific goals in the environment and to control actions flexibly in pursuit of those goals. By and large, the everyday world we live in is Newtonian: predictable and deterministic. If we lose balance, we fall, if we neglect obstacles in our path, we collide with them and if we reach for an object, we can grasp it. Hence, no ambulatory animal could survive without its set of adaptive, hard-wired sensorimotor rules shaped by evolution and tuned by experience. No male house fly would ever catch its mate. At the same time, the world is full of surprises: the unexpected pursuit by a male house fly, the rejection of your manuscript or the next move by your chess opponent (or a predator). In such cases, not even the most complex stimulus-response programs (learned or innate) will help an animal in evading the undesired surprises and obtaining the desired ones. If the evasive actions taken by the female house fly were predictable, males could short cut and catch them with much less effort. It is essential to not leave the generation of behavioral variability to chance (i.e., noise), but to keep it under neural control (i.e., nonlinearity). As such, evolution can fine-tune the balance between sensorimotor mapping and superimposed indeterminacy, defining the required compromise between spontaneous and reactive behavior. The variability of systems under tight constraints will be explained mostly by noise (because the variability under neural control is minimized, such as escape and pursuit responses in flies), whereas noise may play a very small role in generating variability of less constrained behaviors (such as the ones observed here or the evasive actions taken by female house flies). This notion of brains operating on the critical edge between determinism and chaos has also been used to describe human magnetoencephalographic recordings. Analogous to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, much behavioral variability arises not out of practical constraints, but out of the principles of evolved brain function. In ‘‘What is Life?’’ Erwin Schrodinger claimed that fundamental indeterminism would never arise in the living world. Today however, the picture emerges that as much as simple taxis, mate pursuit or course control require deterministic sensorimotor programs, more complex interactions require behavioral indeterminism, as evidenced by recent studies in game theory, exploration/foraging behavior, feeding and pursuit-evasion contests. Clearly, deterministic behavior will be exploited and leaves us helpless in unpredictable situations. Brains indeed do throw the dice–but by refuting the notion of stochasticity our results imply that they have exquisite control over when, where and how the dice are thrown.
If dualism is not an option and determinism is equally untenable, what other options are we left with? Some scholars have resorted to quantum uncertainty in the brain as the solution, providing the necessary discontinuity in the causal chain of events. This is not unrealistic, as there is evidence that biological organisms can evolve to take advantage of quantum effects. For instance, plants use quantum coherence when harvesting light in their photosynthetic complexes. Until now, however, it has proved difficult to find direct empirical evidence in support of analogous phenomena in brains. Moreover, and more importantly, the pure chance of quantum indeterminism alone is not what anyone would call ‘freedom’. ‘For surely my actions should be caused because I want them to happen for one or more reasons rather that they happen by chance’. This is precisely where the biological mechanisms underlying the generation of behavioral variability can provide a viable concept of freewill.
C COct 13, 2020 04:58 PM (This post was last modified: Oct 13, 2020 05:01 PM by C C.)
(Oct 13, 2020 03:37 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Oct 13, 2020 06:10 AM)C C Wrote: It's the human body processing information and making its selections, not everything in the environment but the body doing that. Rocks don't have the capacity to choose or decide or scheme to control. Nor do chairs or clouds or lakes or the Moon. They don't even simulate/represent the circumstances of an external environment. They don't have interests.
How about a fly?
There’s this neurobiologist, Bjoern Brembs, that has done some interesting work.
It's a given that other brained members of the biosphere can make choices that they were innately equipped to make, and controversially even some brain-less single-celled organisms might do that. As I mentioned to Zin, though, the complexity of a nervous system seems superfluous to a philosophical orientation that denies humans or any other life-form (and even computers) really make genuine choices anymore than a rock. The fact that the internal structure is necessary to output a decision just zooms right over -- it's treated as a non-factor, no status above a rock apart from an appearance or illusion of choice.
Randomness or unpredictability just means an event (or sequence of them) or behavior is not a member of or conforming to any pattern, law, algothrim, etc. A block-universe or growing-block-universe (GBU) can contain random items. For instance, a claim that there's a future or current event that is random is still going to have its random status once it becomes fixed in the past of a GBU. It not existing yet or no longer being available in the present would be irrelevant in terms of it lacking membership in any pattern. Although it is necessary that it become "past" in order to verify it (cognition of _X_ is not simultaneous with receiving _X_ in the present moment).
YazataOct 13, 2020 06:15 PM (This post was last modified: Oct 13, 2020 06:59 PM by Yazata.)
I'd say that a fly has free will, provided that its behavior isn't externally coerced and that its internal neural states steer its actions.
I don't want to say that the state of the entire universe years ago, long before the fly's juvenile maggot hatched from its egg, somehow precisely determined those neural states right now in the way that determinism seems to want to assume.
The determinism in a fly's brain (or our brains) is real-time responses to environmental conditions and internal states. Our fly senses a fresh turd and there's a nonverbal "Yay! Yummy!" response and it responds appropriately (chocolate to flies). There isn't any invisible secret controller outside the fly (even if we say that it's the entire universe) exerting precise control over the fly's behavior and essentially flying it by remote control.
One might argue that the fly's evolutionary history accounts for it having that "Yay! Yummy!" response. Fine. But nothing in a fly's evolutionary history accounts for that particular fly behaving as it does on that particular occasion. The best that the fly's evolutionary history can seemingly do is assert that any fly in that situation would behave similarly.
Obviously a fly's behavioral repertoire and range of choice and action is very restricted compared to a human, but the principle seems to be the same.
(Oct 13, 2020 12:27 AM)Syne Wrote: Ultimately, there is no answer to this question in science alone. Believing someone who asserts there is is unscientific hubris.
I would like to think that because not having a choice (control) is a fundamental fear of all humans.
So if we fear something, like having no control, it must be true? That faulty reasoning could be equally used to claim hell, or any number of irrational fears, actually exist.
We have choices in lieu of no external control at all, like how we can choose to view our circumstances. But then, studies have shown that those who don't believe in free will have less self-control.
Belief in Free Will as Predictor of Success in Self-Control
Free will (freedom of choice) is typically defined as the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. And this belief gives people a greater sense of agency and responsibility for their actions. Casting doubts on free will encourage impulsive instinct. The deterministic view diminishes one’s capacity for overcoming internal urges and desires (self-control).
...
The belief that there is no such thing as free will leads people to stop exercising it. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...lf-control
Quote:Pulled from another topic to use as an example.
(Sep 21, 2020 09:11 PM)Syne Wrote: If you don't like what he's telling you, here's an idea, quit bothering him. You obviously don't have the expertise to change his mind, and you seem unwilling to learn from him. Brings the definition of insanity to mind.
I thought about what you said. Does insight produce change?
Yes, insight and self-awareness do produce change.
Quote:I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge on the subject, not from him directly, but because of him. I think that if we have freewill at all the proportion of necessity to freedom depends upon on tolerance of conflict, don’t you?
That's usually how I view science forums, where I don't tend to learn directly from others, but I do learn a lot from the research I do to support my replies. If that's the same for you, maybe poking the bear is useful. Since all freedoms inherently include barriers, defining the freedom by contrast, there can be some, at least internal, conflict or struggle.
Quote:Brembs has shown that although animal behavior can be unpredictable, responses do seem to come from a fixed list of options. So, if we have a set of constraints, and we look only to those constraints, and think of nothing else, we diminish our freedom, no?
I'm not sure I follow. As far as any constraint is a barrier, sure.
Quote:If dualism is not an option and determinism is equally untenable, what other options are we left with? Some scholars have resorted to quantum uncertainty in the brain as the solution, providing the necessary discontinuity in the causal chain of events. This is not unrealistic, as there is evidence that biological organisms can evolve to take advantage of quantum effects. For instance, plants use quantum coherence when harvesting light in their photosynthetic complexes. Until now, however, it has proved difficult to find direct empirical evidence in support of analogous phenomena in brains. Moreover, and more importantly, the pure chance of quantum indeterminism alone is not what anyone would call ‘freedom’. ‘For surely my actions should be caused because I want them to happen for one or more reasons rather that they happen by chance’. This is precisely where the biological mechanisms underlying the generation of behavioral variability can provide a viable concept of freewill.[/spoiler]
(Oct 13, 2020 02:48 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: In the annals of human literature, never has so much been written about 2 choices for which we may have no choice in.
Consider that humans have all this complexity, reasoning and conscious selection-making apparatus that goes well beyond the capacities of a rock, and yet we're still denied ever having made any actual choices -- no better than a rock. It's rarely even considered how that undermines science and potentially makes suspect the legitimacy of many claims in various areas, including the idea itself that the universe is "fixed" or that it even matters if it is fixed (if there is no motivated intelligence behind it with an agenda to deceive).
If everything is predetermined then it should follow that natural selection does not exist. So much for evolution.
A rock slides downhill. It did not consciously decide to slide but is its movement any different than if I purposely slid downhill? There’s no decision, even though we’d like to think so, in a predetermined universe so both actions are the same? I’m just a rock that went down a hill.
If 100 are killed by drunk drivers then it’s easy to say the deaths were all predetermined, we know who died. But if a law is passed that reduces the number of deaths then we cannot say who was predetermined not to die as a result of the law, no different than if there was no predetermining.
(Oct 13, 2020 02:48 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: In the annals of human literature, never has so much been written about 2 choices for which we may have no choice in.
Consider that humans have all this complexity, reasoning and conscious selection-making apparatus that goes well beyond the capacities of a rock, and yet we're still denied ever having made any actual choices -- no better than a rock. It's rarely even considered how that undermines science and potentially makes suspect the legitimacy of many claims in various areas, including the idea itself that the universe is "fixed" or that it even matters if it is fixed (if there is no motivated intelligence behind it with an agenda to deceive).
If everything is predetermined then it should follow that natural selection does not exist. So much for evolution. ...
As a rational object produced by reasoning from species variations, fossil record, genetic research, etc, it can't really be perceptually pointed to in the environment, anyway (only its supposed products).
One might view Eternalism as a kind of embodied version of predetermined Presentism that has discarded the latter's time procedure.
Paleontology (if not evolution also), would arguably be good fit for Eternalism since it abstracts information from chunks of developmental differences in the past, rather than the present. The fossil record it studies is here "now", but it's also sort of like other eras preserved and co-existing with each other -- but in a much more jumbled and incomplete way than a block universe.
Useful cause and effect relationships could still be mapped upon the world in Eternalism, but the causes wouldn't literally engender or contribute to the existence of the effect slash next state (since the latter already exists).
For that matter, particular things don't really have causal potency in Presentism, either. It would be the managing process that was outputting global moments of the cosmos that would be Creator and Cause of everything in each developmental installment of time.
Whereas in Eternalism, we and the world actually exist rather than being ephemeral events outputted by that very limited "simulation process" of Presentism. Which can only realize one state of the universe "at a time", in sequence. Each yoctosecond or however long replacement also signifying the annihilation of the former one since no interval categorizable as past or future is allowed (there can be no co-existence of changes).
C C Wrote:The fact that the internal structure is necessary to output a decision just zooms right over -- it's treated as a non-factor, no status above a rock apart from an appearance or illusion of choice.
Good point. I never thought of it like that.
Thanks, C C!
(Oct 13, 2020 06:15 PM)Yazata Wrote: I'd say that a fly has free will, provided that its behavior isn't externally coerced and that its internal neural states steer its actions.
I don't want to say that the state of the entire universe years ago, long before the fly's juvenile maggot hatched from its egg, somehow precisely determined those neural states right now in the way that determinism seems to want to assume.
The determinism in a fly's brain (or our brains) is real-time responses to environmental conditions and internal states. Our fly senses a fresh turd and there's a nonverbal "Yay! Yummy!" response and it responds appropriately (chocolate to flies). There isn't any invisible secret controller outside the fly (even if we say that it's the entire universe) exerting precise control over the fly's behavior and essentially flying it by remote control.
One might argue that the fly's evolutionary history accounts for it having that "Yay! Yummy!" response. Fine. But nothing in a fly's evolutionary history accounts for that particular fly behaving as it does on that particular occasion. The best that the fly's evolutionary history can seemingly do is assert that any fly in that situation would behave similarly.
Obviously a fly's behavioral repertoire and range of choice and action is very restricted compared to a human, but the principle seems to be the same.
Do you know what I thought about when I read his work? "My Octopus Teacher". If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. You’d love it. There’s a scene where the octopus uses shells to camouflage itself. As you know, they’re semelparous. So, it’s not a learned behavior, and it seems too complex to be an instinct, but what about a severed octopus’s arm? Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms. Researchers who cut off an octopus's arm discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it-and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.
Do you think that an octopus's arm has freewill, Yazata?
Quote:If dualism is not an option and determinism is equally untenable, what other options are we left with? Some scholars have resorted to quantum uncertainty in the brain as the solution, providing the necessary discontinuity in the causal chain of events. This is not unrealistic, as there is evidence that biological organisms can evolve to take advantage of quantum effects. For instance, plants use quantum coherence when harvesting light in their photosynthetic complexes. Until now, however, it has proved difficult to find direct empirical evidence in support of analogous phenomena in brains. Moreover, and more importantly, the pure chance of quantum indeterminism alone is not what anyone would call ‘freedom’. ‘For surely my actions should be caused because I want them to happen for one or more reasons rather that they happen by chance’. This is precisely where the biological mechanisms underlying the generation of behavioral variability can provide a viable concept of freewill.[/spoiler]
Oct 13, 2020 06:49 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 13, 2020 06:51 AM by Syne.)
