Free will is not an illusion (Denis Noble tries again)

[C C]

https://iai.tv/articles/free-will-is-not..._auid=2020

INTRO: “My genes made me do it” encapsulates how many geneticists, following the footsteps of Richard Dawkins, think of our genome’s relationship to us: complete control over our mind and body. That seemingly leaves no room for free will, relegating it to a mere illusion. At the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London last month, distinguished biologist Denis Noble sought to dismantle this picture. Our bodies, argued Noble, exhibit agency, an ability to choose between alternatives, even at the cell level, dispelling the idea that we’re mere automata, programmed by our genome.

EXCERPTS: You do what you do because of who you are, and you are who you are because of your genes and your environment. That’s how a contemporary argument against the existence of free will usually goes. The first claim, about the way our genes determine our fate, has come out of an interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution often associated with Richard Dawkins. According to this picture humans are just vehicles for the propagation of genes, and it is them, not us, who are running the show. This seems to leave little room for human agency: for our judgements and actions to be genuinely shaped by reflection and deliberation. Free will is therefore a myth, and the remaining puzzle for geneticists like Jerry A. Coyne seems to be “why evolution bequeathed us such a powerful illusion.”

We all know that water is essential to living organisms [...] According to Noble, water and the controlled stochasticity that it allows of molecules that are suspended in it, is also what makes us free. That’s the key difference between living organisms and computers made of silicon: they are determinate machines, we are creatures of stochasticity, of chance...

[...] The first problem that Noble’s account seems to face is that randomness doesn’t equal freedom. Philosophers have long argued that even if the universe as a whole is shown not to be deterministic, that doesn’t by itself rescue free will...

[...] Of course, Noble wants to deny that the chance involved here is blind. What he’s arguing is that there is a “harnessing of stochasticity” by the organism that “enables a form of creativity and behaviour” which in turn allows things like values and judgements to influence what our bodies do. This response, however, brings up another question: who’s doing the “harnessing” of chance, who is regulating what would otherwise have been random processes... (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (scivillage): The broken paradigm of Neo-Darwinism: The fight for the future of biology

[Syne]

The lesson here is not to waste time arguing with strict physicalists. They will just demand evidence for things they can no more provide for their own arguments.

[Magical Realist]

What he’s arguing is that there is a “harnessing of stochasticity” by the organism that “enables a form of creativity and behaviour” which in turn allows things like values and judgements to influence what our bodies do.

I agree with that. What I believe is that there is a sliding scale from strict determinacy to wild indeterminacy. In between we find phenomena that represent various grades of intensity of those two properties. For me consciousness harnesses the indeterminacy of semi-random synaptic firings and amplifies it into a holistic and semi-free process. But the blending together of determinist and indeterminate factors makes it hard to pinpoint where this freedom actually emerges into existence.

[Yazata]

“My genes made me do it” encapsulates how many geneticists, following the footsteps of Richard Dawkins, think of our genome’s relationship to us: complete control over our mind and body.

That idea seems ridiculous on its face.

Every decision I make and every thought I have is determined by my DNA? I don't think so. For one thing, my ideas and decisions are in large part a response to the situations in which I find myself. DNA doesn't determine those. For another, the memory capacity of the human genome is quite limited. There isn't even enough data encoded in human DNA to determine the precise neuronal wiring of the brain, let alone everything that brain will be doing during a lifetime.

I do adhere to a less exaggerated and far more plausible version though. I think that human beings are more or less hard-wired to behave in certain broadly similar ways. Perhaps the most obvious of those hard-wired behaviors are our social instincts and language instinct. In both cases, our DNA doesn't determine precisely what our social mores will be, what emotions we intuit another person to be feeling, or what language we will grow up speaking. But it probably does determine that all human societies will resemble one another, we all feel similar emotions and all human language will share deep structure grammatical simularities.

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/15...3095968768

[Kornee]

Free will in the absolute sense strictly speaking is meaningless because it cannot be logically defined let alone defended. What does exist is *effective* free will.
Even Richard Dawkins & ilk cannot escape the dilemma of the morality of a jury coming to a life-or-death verdict. 'I find myself...'. The escape clause.

[C C]

“My genes made me do it” encapsulates how many geneticists, following the footsteps of Richard Dawkins, think of our genome’s relationship to us: complete control over our mind and body.

That idea seems ridiculous on its face.

Every decision I make and every thought I have is determined by my DNA? I don't think so. For one thing, my ideas and decisions are in large part a response to the situations in which I find myself. DNA doesn't determine those. For another, the memory capacity of the human genome is quite limited. There isn't even enough data encoded in human DNA to determine the precise neuronal wiring of the brain, let alone everything that brain will be doing during a lifetime.

I do adhere to a less exaggerated and far more plausible version though. I think that human beings are more or less hard-wired to behave in certain broadly similar ways. Perhaps the most obvious of those hard-wired behaviors are our social instincts and language instinct. In both cases, our DNA doesn't determine precisely what our social mores will be, what emotions we intuit another person to be feeling, or what language we will grow up speaking. But it probably does determine that all human societies will resemble one another, we all feel similar emotions and all human language will share deep structure grammatical simularities.

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/15...3095968768

The whole history of biological events and circumstances before one was born does set or determine who one is: A human with that organism's applicable general characteristics and tendencies. But for that to be a problem, a restriction of freedom, implies a more fundamental identity that could optionally have been realized as different classifications than Homo sapiens. 

Which is to say, I can't help but ask what sort of "basic identity" (BI) falls out of some of these ideas, or what seems covertly entailed by them, if unpacked. Even a view (strawman or not, it serves an illustrative purpose) of extreme biological determinism dispensing itself as a hit on free will.

With respect to its version of free will, my BI would apparently be a psychological and physiological blank slate (both) that could have alternatively been any number of living things from a jellyfish to a giraffe -- no necessity to be a human at all (much less having a particular set of past experiences -- environment, nurture -- that contributes to "me" being this particular "me"). But determinism (of some kind) robs this utterly malleable BI of all those potential routes.

IOW, its BI is a formless, memory-less immaterial identity which the subset of incompatibilists who are materialists actually don't believe in, despite conflictingly(?) chaining their meaning of free will to such an idea. 

Thus, this would conveniently make FW dead right out of the starting gate for them, in a view of the universe (absolute or some sufficient level of determinism) that allows no other possibility but one being _X_ specific type of organism and specific body with a specific personal history. 

Whereas compatibilism would allow my basic identity to be this one. If I was instead a centipede or a male human midget named Nswadi born and living in the Congo... then that is no alternative possibility at all, since it wouldn't be me (there is no "If I was instead..."). Even if a copy of this body had been raised by different parents in a different environment it also wouldn't be me (i.e., equivalent to an identical twin not being me).

If absolute determinism was the case as well a reality where there were no immaterial, blank BIs -- I'd still be making the decisions that this identity wants to make because it is not resting on top of a more fundamental identity. That includes deciding to sit down because a group of thugs holding guns directed at me tell me to, because I'm neither the identity of the idiot who does otherwise or the puppet that utterly lacks an interactive system within it that allows it to be autonomous.

Don’t reject the concept of ‘free will’: rethink it.
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-ab...and-effect

Julian Baggini: [...] To take a trivial example, we don’t want the capacity to choose any flavour of ice-cream but the one we think we’ll most enjoy. We don’t want the capacity to vote for any political party but the one that we think will most advance our values. Our freedom to choose matters precisely because it reflects our personalities, preferences and values, not because it can override them. Our moral and political commitments would mean nothing if they were things we could choose to change at will.

In giving up the voluntarist conception, we don’t have to throw out the notion of free will altogether. Free will isn’t an illusion, it’s just that the voluntarist conception of free will is flawed and untenable. It understands the free/unfree distinction to hinge upon whether our beliefs, desires and choices have causes or not, which is ridiculous, since obviously everything is caused. What we need is a ‘compatibilist’ conception of free will, one that reconciles human freedom with the causal necessity of the physical world...