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Are we free? Neuroscience gives the wrong answer - Daniel Dennett

#1
C C Offline
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/are-we-free

EXCERPT: ...The mistakes are so obvious that one sometimes wonders how serious scientists could make them. What has lowered their threshold for careful analysis so catastrophically? Perhaps it is the temptation of glory. What a coup it would be if your neuroscience experiment brought about the collapse of several millennia of inconclusive philosophising about free will! A curious fact about these forays into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views worked out by mere philosophers. For instance, all the experiments in the Libet tradition take as their test case of a freely willed decision a trivial choice—between flicking or not flicking your wrist, or pushing the button on the left, not the right—with nothing hinging on which decision you make. Mele aptly likens these situations to being confronted with many identical jars of peanuts on the supermarket shelf and deciding which to reach for. You need no reason to choose the one you choose so you let some unconscious bias direct your hand to a jar—any jar—that is handy. Not an impressive model of a freely willed choice for which somebody might be held responsible. Moreover, as Mele points out, you are directed not to make a reasoned choice, so the fact that you have no clue about the source of your urge is hardly evidence that we, in general, are misled or clueless about how we make our choices....
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
All the more evidence that the question of freewill and agency in our own actions is infinitely subtle and nuanced, descending into a mist of inscrutable motives within motives within motives as recorded in Dostevsky's "Notes From the Underground". What for instance do we make of the will to be predetermined by brain states? The will for instance to loose our own willpower and give in the chemical juggernauts of alcohol or drugs? What of the choice to take no action and to let things run their course as any devoted Taoist can affirm? Dennett/Mele is spot on to expose limitations of science in the explorations of freewill, a mind state that in the end may be so mobiusly self-entangled and unconsciously involved that we will never resolve how it can occur at all.
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#3
Yazata Offline
Yes, I'm aware that this is an old thread. No, I'm not a spam-bot.

(Oct 26, 2014 05:28 PM)C C Wrote: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/are-we-free

EXCERPT: ...A curious fact about these forays into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views worked out by mere philosophers.

It's ironic that these "scientists" want to weigh in on the 'free-will/determinism' problem without recognizing that it's a philosophical problem. So if they ignore the subtleties of philosophical views of the problem, they end up creating caricatures and tilting against windmills.

My impression is that many of these "scientists" imagine 'free will' as meaning some intrusion into the physical universe by minds or souls, imagined as some kind of spiritual substance or something. So that if they can show that a choice was preceeded by a neurological process describable in physicalistic terms, they imagine that they have discredited free-will.

As for me, I'm a stout compatibilist. I interpret 'free will' to mean something like 'absence of external coercion' or something like that. In other words, a decision of mine is free if it is the result of my own neurological process, and not dictated by my environment. I identify my "self" as my inner process, not as a hypothetical 'soul' riding around in my head like the driver of a car.

I think that the idea of physical determinism arose from a particularly 19th century view of how causation works in classical Newtonian physics. That's the idea that if one knows the laws of physics and the universe's precise initial state, then all subsequent states of the universe, including ourselves, can be calculated to any degree of accuracy and hence are already pre-determined. (That sort of view seems kind of implicit in the 'block universe' idea.)

There seem to me to be two closely related meanings of 'determinism'. According to one, 'determinism' means that all physical events are determined by immediately preceeding physical causes. I accept that definition (with quantum/probabilistic amendments on the micro-scale). According to the other, an event is 'determined' if it's predictable from prior conditions and from physical law. I'm more skeptical about that one.

In other words, I'm inclined to think that future events may indeed be determined by their immediate causes, yet nevertheless be largely unpredictable and unknowable. That's probably more and more the case the the longer we extend our causal chains. If we imagine our neurological state at a particular moment, it's probably going to be pretty well determined by our immediately prior neurological state. But the further we push things into the past, the less predictable the end state becomes.

Perhaps part of that is due to non-linear chaotic dynamics, where infinitesimal differences (micro-scale differences?) in initial conditions can diverge into large differences in ultimate results. "Butterfly effects".

So what do we have instead? A situation where IF (big if) somebody already knows how I perceive the world and all of my motivations and tendencies, he or she can predict my behavior with a high degree of accuracy. Of course, in that case my behavior would still be determined by my own motives and perceptions, so that wouldn't violate free-will in my 'absence of external coercion' sense. My behavior would still be the result of my own inner process, as close as I think I come to my own "self".

But if somebody cuts me and my inner process out of the picture entirely and just describes my surrounding environment for as long as I've existed in the past, all he or she will get is a probabilistic prediction of what somebody with that environmental history might do. If somebody knows all of my childhood, educational and subsequent life experiences, they might be able to form rough predictions. The further back in the past the descriptions of the environment come from, the more vague things become. A complete description of the physical universe in 1816 probably wouldn't allow anyone to even predict my personal existence, let alone all of my life decisions. Time seemingly unfolds in a much more fortuitous manner than that.    

So bottom line: I question physical determinism in the form it usually appears in the free-will/determinism debate, and I question how free-will is often conceived. Make some adjustments in those, and compatibilism becomes quite possible.

I don't picture myself or others as puppets, just acting out a precise script established (by God?) at the beginning of time (the big bang?). I perceive human beings as being forced to react to events around them, pulling their own strings in real time. Achieving our own chosen goals requires no end of mid-course maneuvers during the course of our lives.
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