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Neurocognitive basis for free will set out for 1st time

#1
C C Offline
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pres..._basis_for

RELEASE: New research from Warwick has worked out how our minds supply all the necessary design features of free will. Philosophers have laid out these design features over hundreds of years. How our brains satisfy these features has been a problem that scientists have been unable to solve. In a new paper, Professor Thomas Hills grounds the design features of free will called for by philosophers in biological reality and sets out a new framework for 'neurocognitive free will', the free will that we have.

Do human beings genuinely have free will? Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries and have set out the 'design features' of free will - but how do our brains actually fulfil them? A University of Warwick academic has answered this question for the first time in a new paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Professor Thomas Hills from the Department of Psychology set out to bridge the gap between the philosophical arguments for free will and the neurocognitive realities. In philosophy, elements of free will include the ability to do otherwise - the 'principle of alternative possibilities'; the ability to deliberate; a sense of self; and the ability to maintain goals - 'wanting what you want'. Drawing on examples from making a morning coffee to taking a penalty kick, and considering organisms from human beings, e-coli, cockroaches, and even robots, Professor Hills argues that our neurocognitive abilities satisfy these requirements through:

1. Adaptive access to unpredictability

2. Tuning of this unpredictability to help us reach high-level goals

3. Goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations

4. A role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives.

Commenting on his paper, Professor Hills said: "Neurocognitive free will - the free will that we have as humans - is a process of generative self-construction. I demonstrate that effortful consciousness samples from our experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing us to explore ourselves in the construction of alternative futures. There is evidence that people who believe in free will are more pro-social. They adopt behaviour that benefits others and society as a whole, and have a greater sense of control of their future - they believe they can influence the future in positive ways. This is important. Neurocognitive free will provides a basis for understanding why they are correct. Neurocognitive free will ties our understanding of free will to something real. It also helps us to understand what it means. I suspect it's not what most people think. As Sartre once said, 'Freedom is not a triumph'. But I think neurocognitive free will gives some hints to how it could be. That will be a focus of future work."
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#2
Syne Offline
It's actually "willing what you will" not "wanting what you want". It's not "maintaining goals", it's creating/originating them.

Our understanding of free will has no need to be tied to (i.e. subordinate to) "something real", and this looks like a lot of arm waving in the attempt to do just that.
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#3
Seattle Offline
This is yet just another story with a title that under-performs as you read the actual article.

The determinism/free-will debate isn't going to be settled anytime soon. The answer likely isn't really one or the other.

Classical physics is deterministic, quantum physics isn't.
Everything we do isn't consciously derived so it depends on your definition of "free will". It's even somewhat like low level and high level computer languages.

It's true that all computing is ultimately binary, 0 and 1, yet most of our interactions with computers are using high level languages so both things are actually true.

It's the same with free will and determinism. It's the same with capitalism and socialism. Smile
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#4
C C Offline
From the original paper: "The design features of free will have been proposed by two primary philosophical camps: the compatibilists—who hold that free will is compatible with a deterministic universe—and the libertarians—who hold that free will is compatible with an indeterministic universe. "

It doesn't matter whether the cosmos is deterministic or indeterministic. Either one is an external factor controlling you if you go down that road of regarding it as an agency (systematic, random, or mixture of both) that has absolute or intermittent command over you. Libertarianism is simply another product of incompatibilism.

So psychology, neuroscience, whatever... this is still "free will" yet again as lofted up into unfruitful metaphysics ("unfruitful" as far anything usually being resolved). Which is not to say that it's the psychologist's fault ... if he didn't have the free will to resist or not choose the more alluring slash interesting "because it's so goofed-up" road. Wink There might arguably be nothing for his discipline to say about the mundane route.

It is everyday contexts and practical meanings of "free will" -- which do not drag the whole universe and ontological speculations into the situation -- that are serious by virtue of actually being utile, like the judgements courts make. ("My client was forced to do those things at gunpoint, by the escaped felon.")

Whereas incompatibilism is metaphysics. It generates at least 3 differing views, which is very much what one expects from such romps: Multiple possibilities which can't be empirically settled. (There is free will but no determinism; there is determinism but no free will; there is neither free will nor determinism.) Compatibilism is metaphysics, too, addressing free will and determinism from a grand scale or ultimate reality POV (unavoidable since determinism is a lofty philosophical belief itself). Albeit compatibilism dissolves the other's declaration of inconsistency between the two.

Refusing to solve or fix such concept games -- by discarding an _X_ position or arriving at a consensus on how to re-define things so that the internal conflicts or whatever difficulties disappear... Is simply the human participants indirectly admitting that they're engaging in a game for entertainment value. They like the quarreling options and showmanship that the "broken"[*] mess of incompatibilism outputs, they like the feuding. It's recreational histrionics, it is not actually of significant import.

Now for academics and intellectuals who potentially make a living or maintain slash promote a career from keeping that train-wreck alive and contributing to it, the affair is indeed a "serious" matter to THEM in that respect.

- - - footnote - - -

[*] Since its very nature is a problem which creates three (if not more) warring sub-schools of thought right out of the chute, incompatibilism is not inherently intended to be "fixable". It's not really "broken" anymore than wild boars doing their rooting and vandalism in the woods and fields are impaired. Whether deliberately or by accident, being a mess is its very identity or way of existing/playing.
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#5
Seattle Offline
I don't get the point of studies such as this. If you are speaking in everyday language about our everyday world, then yes, of course their is free will. Is anyone arguing otherwise?
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#6
C C Offline
(Aug 1, 2019 07:28 AM)Seattle Wrote: I don't get the point of studies such as this.


Who knows what the motivation is. There are those attention-needy researchers, even in more recent decades, who perform tests to see if souls can be measured and other outlandish studies. This probably falls out of an impulse closer to Third Culture, though. Scientists trying their hand at scholarly sectors usually outside their territory, or trying to groove back into the more philosophical-waxing investigators of the 19th-century.

Quote:If you are speaking in everyday language about our everyday world, then yes, of course their is free will. Is anyone arguing otherwise?

Well, some academics and theorists truly are realists about the abstractions they toy with on paper (or sound like it, anyway). Others are just pursuing such because it's "interesting", even without being substantively existential or a having a useful application (kind of like pure mathematics). And then for the population at large (out here in our neck of the online boondocks) a belief, concept, construct or scheme might have a purely recreational function (discussion entertainment, excuse for argumentative combat, poking at as a sci-fi prospect, etc). Many of the published holders of an idea probably flit around amid all three, which engenders an appearance of public importance that thereby attracts the attention of the scientist species occasionally featured on edge.org, who want to take a crack at it.
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#7
stryder Offline
From a theoretical experiment, you could look at Freewill vs Determinism with a bit more consideration (In the long run there is actually something to be had of use from it's discussion other than it being just procrastination but I won't get into that)

The apparatus and method is as follows:

In a controlled environment through programming within a computer a box is built.  The box is virtual but all it's core properties are known, it's make up is completely ordered (in the sense that chaos does not exist).

In the box a life form is created, initially it's make up is of order, it's process of thought follows a programmed narrative; "to live, to thrive and to die."

The observation of such life in a box would conclude that everything it does, even if it thinks it has freewill to break beyond it's programming is still contained within that programmed box, which therefore means everything it does is therefore predetermined.
The form can achieve an outcome that the programming can't handle, otherwise it might cause a fault/crash where it's universe ceases to continue. (From a realworld perspective, A break in continuity would actually prove this variant of universe to be false.)


Now we apply our empathetic view point of what if we, the creators of this box actually built ourselves in this box (So we can understand the viewpoint).  Firstly if we built ourselves in the box, we'd initially not be aware that we were in one, as after all our intellectual and scientific understanding would have to catch up with a point in time where a "Singularity" happens, the point that we make such an experiment happen.   (In some belief systems you could imply that self-conscious becomes aware and apart of universal consciousness.)

So we could imply that we are blissfully bumbling along with no actual control over the universe up until that point, following a pre-deterministic pattern at least until the point of an Ascension (That nexus of a Singularity)  Once at that point however, we can start to consider changing our environment by tunnelling/bridging to the universe outside of that box to make direct changes that are impacted upon the paradox of interacting in part with ourselves.  

One way to think of it is like a Matryoshka doll effect, where the subsequent lower (centralised) universes, interacts with a higher one (next level up), to generate a further universe (the level above that) that is different from both, which in turn interacts with a further level which becomes different from all prior levels etc.
This leads to an infinite fractal of different universes, which we'd currently believe in a cosmological stance as being the universes purest form, "Chaos".

Why do I bring the consideration of the universe to the point of Chaos? Well without chaos you have no choice as it's all predetermined, the more choices you have the less predetermination you have, as predetermination is like a string it doesn't "fork" multiple directions or parallel process differently, it's just one predetermined path like a labyrinth rather than many paths going out in different directions like a maze.

(This is a simplified abstraction on my unpublished thoughts, where I put ourselves in a preterministic box, just to evolve our learning of how to bust out the box with freewill, as although we know escape is predetermined, the method(s) to do so and the result is not known, therefore leading to an ascension of freewill)
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#8
C C Offline
(Aug 1, 2019 05:26 PM)stryder Wrote: . . . One way to think of it is like a Matryoshka doll effect, where the subsequent lower (centralised) universes, interacts with a higher one (next level up), to generate a further universe (the level above that) that is different from both, which in turn interacts with a further level which becomes different from all prior levels etc.


I also relate very much to the Russian doll metaphor when it comes anything "supposedly going on behind appearances", IF going the route of treating such as yet more worlds themselves. Rather than putting an end to that nested sequence -- for similar reasons as killing the so-called homunculus argument by not repeating the same thing slash level via introducing the "and now for something completely different" which terminates the endless iterations.

What you're saying might be vaguely related to Kant's approach to metaphysical free will, although minus the stacked parallel universes gradually descending (or ascending?) to a non-nomological condition. Kant stopped at a Platonic, intellectual, or noumenal level that was merely prior in rank to natural laws and space/time. Possibly "alien" rules and moral rules in contrast to how affairs work in a material realm, but not bereft of rules altogether.

Quote:This leads to an infinite fractal of different universes, which we'd currently believe in a cosmological stance as being the universes purest form, "Chaos".

Yah -- not chaos theory, the mathematical preoccupation or science interest. But "chaos" in a literal sense of being without any order, regularities, lawfulness. etc (utterly free from the latter).

Whereas "will" resides in a wholly different direction of being a special subset or member of organized processes. We want to exist, and function coherently -- not be random activity of disorganized units that are unpredictiable. Accordingly, the "free" adjective should not have anything to do with being liberated from one's own orderliness and restriction of identity that plays its role in outputting one's decisions (leading to our degree of predictability)[*]. But should refer to being free of control or hinderance from another external agent/agency with a will of its own. ([*] Although modifications to one's personality and tendencies will unfold from the overarching "being who I am" over time. One's identity is not static and unchanging in that respect.)

Free will is never absolute since there are numerous occasions where we involuntarily submit to another will. Although voluntarily doing so is still one's own orderly processes outputting what one wants to do for dealing with a particular situation. (There's usually the option of a choice that involves unattractive consequences, but a person doesn't choose that that if rationality or disciplined thinking is part of their identity.)

Incompatibilism is figuratively like an undesirable plant or bush in a yard garden that might attract bugs, have a bad odor, look ugly, or whatever unwanted traits. But despite such, the owner refuses to uproot the thing. The owner subconsciously likes the disturbances it yields or is somehow addicted to the problem of its presence.

Incompatibilism generates three (if not more) differing and feuding stances which are unlikely to be culled down or given up by all concerned parties, and thus there is no progress in incompatibilism. Because it is a problem source, not an approach to resolving anything, as well as not something that is intended to be fixed. Those who endorse it, or subscribe to one of the positions which fall out of it, actually recreationally want or need the argumentative drama swirling around it -- the histrionics, the theater.

If the above is recognized (that incompatibilism is recreational and not a serious project), there is no need for compatibilism, either. It becomes an unnecessary label or distinguishing for what would otherwise normally be the case if incompatibilism wasn't active in human thought and debate. Plus, both incompatibilism and compatibililsm carry "free will" from the local situations where it has practical use and purpose to that grand scale of the cosmos and lofty philosophical (metaphysical) ponderings about such. Via that elevation, free will is ironically reduced to another pie in the sky.

But this isn't intended to diss incompatibilism as a recreational hobby or as alternatively "something that's interesting even if without having concrete be-ing or everyday application" (again, vaguely akin to pure mathematics). It's only to get away from the "mental discomforts" (as Wittgenstein once put it) that an _X_ causes by treating its abstraction as a real or a positive resident of metaphysical country (when it actually can't be validated).
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#9
Secular Sanity Offline
(Aug 1, 2019 05:26 PM)stryder Wrote: In a controlled environment through programming within a computer a box is built.  The box is virtual but all it's core properties are known, it's make up is completely ordered (in the sense that chaos does not exist).

In the box a life form is created, initially it's make up is of order, it's process of thought follows a programmed narrative; "to live, to thrive and to die."

The observation of such life in a box would conclude that everything it does, even if it thinks it has freewill to break beyond it's programming is still contained within that programmed box, which therefore means everything it does is therefore predetermined.
The form can achieve an outcome that the programming can't handle, otherwise it might cause a fault/crash where it's universe ceases to continue. (From a realworld perspective, A break in continuity would actually prove this variant of universe to be false.)

Now we apply our empathetic view point of what if we, the creators of this box actually built ourselves in this box (So we can understand the viewpoint).  Firstly if we built ourselves in the box, we'd initially not be aware that we were in one, as after all our intellectual and scientific understanding would have to catch up with a point in time where a "Singularity" happens, the point that we make such an experiment happen.   (In some belief systems you could imply that self-conscious becomes aware and apart of universal consciousness.)

So we could imply that we are blissfully bumbling along with no actual control over the universe up until that point, following a pre-deterministic pattern at least until the point of an Ascension (That nexus of a Singularity)  Once at that point however, we can start to consider changing our environment by tunnelling/bridging to the universe outside of that box to make direct changes that are impacted upon the paradox of interacting in part with ourselves.  

One way to think of it is like a Matryoshka doll effect, where the subsequent lower (centralised) universes, interacts with a higher one (next level up), to generate a further universe (the level above that) that is different from both, which in turn interacts with a further level which becomes different from all prior levels etc.
This leads to an infinite fractal of different universes, which we'd currently believe in a cosmological stance as being the universes purest form, "Chaos".

Why do I bring the consideration of the universe to the point of Chaos?  Well without chaos you have no choice as it's all predetermined, the more choices you have the less predetermination you have, as predetermination is like a string it doesn't "fork" multiple directions or parallel process differently, it's just one predetermined path like a labyrinth rather than many paths going out in different directions like a maze.

(This is a simplified abstraction on my unpublished thoughts, where I put ourselves in a preterministic box, just to evolve our learning of how to bust out the box with freewill, as although we know escape is predetermined, the method(s) to do so and the result is not known, therefore leading to an ascension of freewill)

That reminded me of this movie that I watched the other night. I admit that I tuned in for the eye candy but the ending was unexpected.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/k3zMlsEK8xA
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