You don’t have free will, but don’t worry. (Sabine Hossenfelder)

[Zinjanthropos]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...out-50-50/

Just thinking, if we live in a computer simulation of a universe would it make sense to say free will exists? Or would it depend on type of simulation?

[Syne]

Do you think that an octopus's arm has freewill, Yazata?

SOURCE

And that's the problem when you divorce free will from reason, or redefine free will into impotence. While instinct may have the possibility to do otherwise, it is not consciously chosen from a motive other than external stimuli and natural programming.

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]

Who said dualism wasn't an option?

Egads! Dualism is a hard pill for me to swallow.

Probably because you've only considered substance dualism, where the mental and physical are two fundamentally disparate substances.

Property dualism asserts that an ontological distinction lies in the differences between properties of mind and matter, and that consciousness is ontologically irreducible to neurobiology and physics. It asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e., in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. Hence, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism.
...
Predicate dualism is a view espoused by such non-reductive physicalists as Donald Davidson and Jerry Fodor, who maintain that while there is only one ontological category of substances and properties of substances (usually physical), the predicates that we use to describe mental events cannot be redescribed in terms of (or reduced to) physical predicates of natural languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80...lism#Types

I doubt you'd object much to the idea that mind is emergent from physical properties, but as such cannot be explained in a reductive manner. Or that our language about mental events does not have a one-for-one correspondence with physical states in the brain.

The problem with physicalism is that neuroplasticity and philosophical zombies seem to defeat the idea. But if we back up to monism, the idea that everything is fundamentally made of the same stuff, we can avoid the logical and evidential problems physicalism presents.

Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:

Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One. In this view only one thing is ontologically basic or prior to everything else.
Existence monism posits that, strictly speaking, there exists only a single thing, the universe, which can only be artificially and arbitrarily divided into many things.
Substance monism asserts that a variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance. Substance monism posits that only one kind of stuff exists, although many things may be made up of this stuff, e.g., matter or mind.
Dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance.

Being a theist, I think the single substance is metaphysical, which can present as either physical or mental (substance and/or dual-aspect monism). But it's often easier to just talk about dualism, as that's the relationship between the mental and physical. For someone of a more materialist bent, you might consider the single substance to be the strings of String Theory, that can both make up physical matter and account for the quantum processes in the brain, as two fundamentally different domains, where the biological matter alone does not account for the mental.

[C C]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...out-50-50/

Just thinking, if we live in a computer simulation of a universe would it make sense to say free will exists? Or would it depend on type of simulation?

Both this world and a computer simulated world feature "appearances" and then what is behind the appearances that is supposedly doing the actual work.{*} So I doubt it would make much difference -- whatever one claims free-will wise about one could potentially apply to the other. Although a special style of simulation can't be ruled-out that might be an impediment for a particular argument.

What's a little frustrating is that today's thinkers can only conceive simulation in terms of computers or colossal brain equivalents (latter either maintaining a coherent dream with a God's eye view or a less resource demanding computational multi-solipsism, George Berkeley mode).

Presentism, or the commonsense view of time, is itself a kind of simulation process requiring something regulating and constantly re-generating each ephemeral state of the world. And that's unlikely to be an artificial or evolved device if one wants to avoid a Matryoshka doll situation of computers or brains endlessly nested inside other computers or brains. At some point you need something completely different to stop the regression, to terminate a recursive fallacy like that which explains itself by repeating itself.

- - - - - footnote - - - -

{*} Scientific realism portrays its "real world" as being radically different from the phenomenal, macro-scale reality that the brain generates from incoming sense information. I.e., constituted of anything from the 24 quantum fields to spacetime emerging from entangled qubits (reminiscent of Leibniz's monads that were relationally connected without any "windows" receiving influences or causal interactions in space).

[Yazata]

Do you think that an octopus's arm has freewill, Yazata?

No, I don't think so.

An octopus's arm does seem to have more autonomy than human or other mammal arms. But there's still the octopus's brain sending the arm orders, coordinating the arms so as to realize the octopus's larger purpose. These may be more general orders, like 'grab that!' rather than detailed 'move this muscle, move that muscle!' commands like human brains produce. Octopus's are more than just their brains to a much greater extent than humans. In the absence of the rest of the octopus like the case of your severed arm, I'd be more inclined to say yes.

I don't want to get too hung up on the idea of 'will' though. Like many of the words in our vocabularies, it doesn't seem to have a precise meaning. We use it to refer to a quality that we vaguely intuit in ourselves and it may not be all that applicable to problem cases. Read it to mean any kind of control process where the behavior of an organism (or a robot I guess) is autonomous and not determined (though influenced is ok) by anything not part of the organism/robot.

When I'm arguing against Sabine, my objection is more to the idea that the past and future are connected in such a rigid way that if we knew the state of the universe at any point in time with sufficient precision, then we could predict the precise state of the universe at any subsequent point in the future. I don't believe that the universe works like that.

I do think that if we know the state of the universe at any time with sufficient precision, then we could at least hypothetically predict the state of the universe a millisecond later with great (if not perfect) precision. On our mesoscale at least if not the quantum microscale. And I've tried to argue that not only is that kind of short-range determinism consistent with free-will, free-will actually seems to require it.

[Syne]

I don't want to get too hung up on the idea of 'will' though. Like many of the words in our vocabularies, it doesn't seem to have a precise meaning. We use it to refer to a quality that we vaguely intuit in ourselves and it may not be all that applicable to problem cases. Read it to mean any kind of control process where the behavior of an organism (or a robot I guess) is autonomous and not determined (though influenced is ok) by anything not part of the organism/robot.

This is a good example of redefining free will into impotence. It's "doing what one wills but not willing what one wills". True agency only lacks a precise meaning once you've watered it down.

[Secular Sanity]

Do you think that an octopus's arm has freewill, Yazata?

No, I don't think so.

An octopus's arm does seem to have more autonomy than human or other mammal arms. But there's still the octopus's brain sending the arm orders, coordinating the arms so as to realize the octopus's larger purpose. These may be more general orders, like 'grab that!' rather than detailed 'move this muscle, move that muscle!' commands like human brains produce. Octopus's are more than just their brains to a much greater extent than humans. In the absence of the rest of the octopus like the case of your severed arm, I'd be more inclined to say yes.

But there's still the octopus's brain sending the arm orders, coordinating the arms so as to realize the octopus's larger purpose. These may be more general orders, like 'grab that!' rather than detailed 'move this muscle, move that muscle!' commands like human brains produce. Octopus's are more than just their brains to a much greater extent than humans.

I'm a little confused. Is that a yes or a no? I thought you’d say yes because "they" say that the arms can work independently of brain.

They found that when the octopus's suckers acquire sensory and motor information from their environment, the neurons in the arm can process it, and initiate action. The brain doesn't have to do a thing.

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-how-...-the-brain

This is consistent with previous research, which has found that not only do octopus arms forage independently of the brain, but that they can continue to respond to stimuli even after being severed from a dead animal.
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-how-...-the-brain

I guess the real question revolves around determinism rather than consciousness, but I think I’m with MR on this one…agnostic. There’s no way to know, but it’s sure weird to think about it, isn’t it?

[Syne]

An instinctual response to stimuli is determined by those. It is not willed.

[Secular Sanity]

An instinctual response to stimuli is determined by those. It is not willed.

I’ll keep it short because I’m on my phone. I’m escaping Cali’s go-stop-os for bit. Dining indoors and shopping. Yay!

I don’t think that they’re just responding to stimuli. They are processing information and making decisions.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuro...ons-321080

[stryder]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...out-50-50/

Just thinking, if we live in a computer simulation of a universe would it make sense to say free will exists? Or would it depend on type of simulation?

Both this world and a computer simulated world feature "appearances" and then what is behind the appearances that is supposedly doing the actual work.{*} So I doubt it would make much difference -- whatever one claims free-will wise about one could potentially apply to the other. Although a special style of simulation can't be ruled-out that might be an impediment for a particular argument.

What's a little frustrating is that today's thinkers can only conceive simulation in terms of computers or colossal brain equivalents (latter either maintaining a coherent dream with a God's eye view or a less resource demanding computational multi-solipsism, George Berkeley mode).

Presentism, or the commonsense view of time, is itself a kind of simulation process requiring something regulating and constantly re-generating each ephemeral state of the world. And that's unlikely to be an artificial or evolved device if one wants to avoid a Matryoshka doll situation of computers or brains endlessly nested inside other computers or brains. At some point you need something completely different to stop the regression, to terminate a recursive fallacy like that which explains itself by repeating itself.

- - - - - footnote - - - -

{*} Scientific realism portrays its "real world" as being radically different from the phenomenal, macro-scale reality that the brain generates from incoming sense information. I.e., constituted of anything from the 24 quantum fields to spacetime emerging from entangled qubits (reminiscent of Leibniz's monads that were relationally connected without any "windows" receiving influences or causal interactions in space).

The simplest method for a scalar form of bound in a recursive form is the inverse square law. The understanding that while indeed something can disappear beyond the scope of a horizon, that there is indeed a limitation into how far we can see or interpret. In the case of a recursive structure of systems where the composition of each system is itself ad inifinitum at smaller and smaller scopes, eventually there is a point where information can easily step between each version level because of the inverse square law. (In an analogue system this is easily enough defined considering there is not necessarily a lower bound, although digital systems could only create a limitless system by emulating analogue.)

If a recursive system of bound rules was in place, we still have the capacity as intelligence not to accept the first answer that comes along. It's a fun one in science because a number of couch sitting home schooled scientists like to refer to "Ockhams razer" which paraphrased in some sense involves accepting the first simplistic conclusion as true, as the more complex conclusions are less probable. Due to our complexity however we tend to allow our imaginations to become rampant and in turn it means that we can literally decide not to follow Ockham's razer as law.

That's what defines us as having the capacity for free will, we don't have to choose to accept something as nature and in some respects we can invent our way out of the box.

Some cosmologist/mathematicians for instance imply the universe is Flat, that's not the topological statement but mathematical one. Such people can get irked by the consideration that the universe is open, as for instance their argument would be that the universe is finite in size and mass (based upon Newtonian Laws etc) so the closest approximation is to flatten it (as opposed to closing it). Again however as intelligences we have a choice, we can accept the universe just as is and think nothing more of it, in which case the events of the universe will always beyond our capacity and we will always consider that we have no real say in events,.... or more drastically we can look in making the universe open. Increasing it's size and scope, increasing it's complexity while increasing our own freedom to have free will. In that situation though mankind becomes itself akin to the path of a wayward AI, forever looking to better, simplify, expand and extend its influence over the universe in which it exists.

[Syne]

An instinctual response to stimuli is determined by those. It is not willed.

I don’t think that they’re just responding to stimuli. They are processing information and making decisions.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuro...ons-321080

The new research supports previous findings that octopus' suckers can initiate action in response to information they acquire from their environment, coordinating with neighboring suckers along the arm. The arms then process sensory and motor information, and muster collective action in the peripheral nervous system, without waiting on commands from the brain.
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuro...ons-321080

"Action in response to information they acquire from their environment" is an instinctual response to external stimuli. They're obviously playing fast and loose with the term "decision" in that article, as brains make decisions (like deciding to have eggs for breakfast) and nervous systems only react to stimuli (like jerking your hand away from the hot stove). Very different behaviors, even when reactions act in concert from the same stimuli.