What is free will?

@Olivier5,

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Whats stopping you?

Fear I suppose. Plus what's in it for me?

All the chocolate your heart desires I guess. Just kidding you really should direct that question to some one who is gay.

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@reasoning logic,

I already eat chocolate, thank you...

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@Olivier5,

I love chocolate. Even have chocolate syrup in the frig to put on my ice cream.
I'm not sure whether that's free will or addiction.

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@tomr,

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Anyway, I don't think those who believe in free will are that much in the majority. At least not with people who really have considered the idea. Just take this site for instance. Of the people willing to participate most have been determinists. That may not always be true. But has been for the last few threads.

That's very true, and sad I think. Wink

The saddest thing is, they all say the same thing but can't answer the most simple question. Like: What is knowledge, how does it emerge, and what roles can it play, what value does it have in a determinist, no free-willy world?

I have been asking this simple question for a while now and in their multitude, the determinists all go... <cricket><cricket>

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@Olivier5,

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@Olivier5,

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I believe there are many reasons why such a system would have some randomness of outcome, which in effect would get rid of the determinist distraction.

I do not believe randomness is an actual occurrence of events independent from determinism. As chance, it is a concept which was originally related to the fall of dice. It represents a lack of knowledge of the underlying process that gets us from one state to some future state when there have been or seem likely multiple observed outcomes.

Like the idea of free will, you cannot proceduralize randomness. In other words you cannot write down a series of procedures that will tell you how randomness works. So you cannot know what it really is. You can talk about the outcomes but determinism can be shown to produce those outcomes too with the added benefit of being functionally understandable. This is really the main problem with free will too. You cannot know how it can function. Because if free will is based on a procedure then it is really a deterministic process. But if it is not a procedure then the how of free will cannot be known. So even if we knew everything about the brain we still could not say if we had free will or not. This is the paradox of free will and randomness.

But for the sake of your argument, lets say there is a real meaningful phenomena called randomness that is not the result of determinism but is completely independent of that idea. Quantum mechanics works on probabilities. And organs like the brain must count on the odds that something is going to happen the same way over and over again to operate in any useful way. So whatever scale the brain is operating on the probabilities need to give consistent results. Randomness does not get you the brain circuitry or chemistry that is required to produce something as sophisticated as our mental worlds. Randomness can only take away the order required to build up that world however that world is constructed.

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This virtual world is constructed for a reason: so that the subject can model the real world, and play with different scenarios, different actions available and their likely outcome. That's why it comes complete with a 3D euclidian space into which senses's feed are uploaded, pattern reognition software, intuitive sense of time, motion, accelaration, short-term and long-term memory, and a sense of agency.

The question is: is this sense of agency real? I believe it is. Entities within that virtual world are operative, they can cause an effect. The fact is that you can chose to raise your arm.

I like the way you have described your subjective world. This kind of idea is how I see what is happening also. Its not really a virtual world though. Not in the sense of a computer world. Because that is just a trick that we use on ourselves so we can have a different experience or mental world. I like the term mental world that you offered better. Nothing that we see in the world really compares to this and it makes it hard to explain deterministically and procedurally how the mental world might come to be. But this is more a fault of our senses than of our procedures. We know these conscious states exist because we personally experience them. But we are not equipped to detect mental environments outside our own so simply with our senses. We could perhaps one day with enough information about the brain experiment on people. Turning circuitry/chemistry off and on in their brains until we hit the circuits that make the mental world happen, asking them questions did you loose consciousness or your vision or a part of you vision until we could pinpoint the exact pathways involved. But that would be impossible to do now.

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@Olivier5,

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That's very true, and sad I think. Wink The saddest thing is, they all say the same thing but can't answer the most simple question. Like: What is knowledge, how does it emerge, and what roles can it play, what value does it have in a determinist, no free-willy world?

I have been asking this simple question for a while now and in their multitude, the determinists all go... <cricket><cricket>

Knowledge in my view is a collection of collections... of related mental phenomena. For instance, to know what a tree is is to associate a lot of memories of sensory stimuli of trees, thoughts related to trees, emotions surrounding them all together under the umbrella concept tree. A forest is a collection of trees and a bunch of other stuff too.

Knowledge emerges through experience of the world and through thinking about those experiences.

Knowledge provides me with options to inform my decision making. If I know a snake is deadly and I come across it I will know that I am in danger.

Knowledge in a deterministic world has the same purpose it does in a free will world. It informs our decision making.

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@tomr,

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Knowledge emerges through experience of the world and through thinking about those experiences.

Knowledge is what happens when a subject can fuse sensory information into a model representation of one-self and the world, recognise patterns in it, and start thinking about what those patterns mean. If we could make self-aware and world-aware (and curious) computers, we could start some serious IA.

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Knowledge in a deterministic world has the same purpose it does in a free will world. It informs our decision making.

Therefore you agree there is a process of decision making, otherwise known as choice. Ideas matter, our mental world matters since it can lead to choices. The only question is whether these choices are free or not.

My answer to this question is that as long as choices are determined by prior thoughts, eg the analysis of prior choices and their outcome (rather than by aminoacids), these choices are 'free', determined by 'me', my mental world and nothing else.

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@Olivier5,

You wrote,

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My answer to this question is that as long as choices are determined by prior thoughts, eg the analysis of prior choices and their outcome (rather than by aminoacids), these choices are 'free', determined by 'me', my mental world and nothing else.

Why can't people see and understand this very simple explanation of free will/choice?

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@tomr,

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Like the idea of free will, you cannot proceduralize randomness. In other words you cannot write down a series of procedures that will tell you how randomness works. So you cannot know what it really is. You can talk about the outcomes but determinism can be shown to produce those outcomes too with the added benefit of being functionally understandable. This is really the main problem with free will too. You cannot know how it can function. Because if free will is based on a procedure then it is really a deterministic process.

Our mind is weak, I grant you that. But just because you cannot understand how something works doesn't mean you're entitled to negate its existence. For a long time people couldn't understand how gravity worked, and they didn't doubt the force of gravity... Just because we cannot 'proceduralize' what exists inside a black hole or the big bang doesn't mean they don't exist or didn't happen.

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@tomr,

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We could perhaps one day with enough information about the brain experiment on people. Turning circuitry/chemistry off and on in their brains until we hit the circuits that make the mental world happen, asking them questions did you loose consciousness or your vision or a part of you vision until we could pinpoint the exact pathways involved. But that would be impossible to do now.

It's done with diseases and accident victims.

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@Olivier5,

Just keeping an eye on you Olivier !

I see you think we "know how gravity works". What we actually have are alternative models (Newtonian versus Einsteinian) used for prediction and control purposes.

I note too that you are now advocating pathological conditions as an aid to "knowing how the brain works", despite the fact that you denigrated such usage by Merleau-Ponty within his alternative analysis of perception.

The point is that the concept of "free will" is transcendent of naive realististic views of "knowing". It is essentially a social convention which functions within psycho-sociological structures. It has a history of religious and anthropological connotations which constitute its "meaning". Such meaning has about as much relationship to mechanical "causality" as the impact of Beethoven's Fifth has with acoustic analysis.

I suggest you acknowledge the sociological functioning of the concept of "me" to avoid wandering around in circles.

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@fresco,

If knowing is naive, how do you know any of this?...

Your contradictions are getting easier and easier to pin down, fresco.

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@Olivier5,

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Therefore you agree there is a process of decision making, otherwise known as choice. Ideas matter, our mental world matters since it can lead to choices. The only question is whether these choices are free or not.

Yes I agree.

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My answer to this question is that as long as choices are determined by prior thoughts, eg the analysis of prior choices and their outcome (rather than by aminoacids), these choices are 'free', determined by 'me', my mental world and nothing else.

There is nothing in our mental world that is giving us control over what we desire. And what options we pick. Desires float up into that mental world from nowhere and we can associate reasons to them to justify them but the desire to attach a reason is still a desire. You can say I have free will because I can use restraint and ignore the desire. Well then you had a desire to ignore that desire, where did that come from? You did not choose to have that desire. Or perhaps you did choose to have that desire, you said I want to have two options one is to desire to ignore a desire or the desire to attach a reason to the desire. Well where does the desire to pick between one of those options come from? Do you get to choose it? If there is no choice how can it be free? This is just like the "pick a city" game.

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@Olivier5,

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Our mind is weak, I grant you that. But just because you cannot understand how something works doesn't mean you're entitled to negate its existence. For a long time people couldn't understand how gravity worked, and they didn't doubt the force of gravity... Just because we cannot 'proceduralize' what exists inside a black hole or the big bang doesn't mean they don't exist or didn't happen.

If free will is like gravity, then propose one hypothesis that could explain how free will can arise through the brain given our current state of knowledge. It doesn’t have to be correct, but it must not contradict its own definition.

There is a difference between free will and gravity. People were allowed to hypothesize about how gravity worked from the moment they were able to recognize it as a distinct property. You simply can never hypothesize about how free will works. Since, to make a hypothesis about how a phenomena works you need to propose conditions and rules of interaction between constituent parts. Rules of interaction imply either quantum mechanical rules or deterministic rules. These rules cannot be combined in a way that escapes these two concepts. Rules that force outcomes probabilistically or deterministically leave no room for free will.

People before Newton had Aristotle’s view about gravity that solid objects where attracted to solid things like the ground and gases were attracted to the air. There is no analogy with free will because once you start to speculate about how and think about a mechanism in the brain that might create free will you invoke rules and you fail.

Take the simplest possible set up. There is a ball. There are two cups. Now create an independent free will decision making process. Try to use ramps to direct the ball. You cannot use a single ramp since the ball will be forced down one path. You need a split ramp so the ball can go down into either cup. You add gates. But what holds one gate open while the other is closed. You put sensors on the gates with motors and the sensors react to light to open and close the gates. Light hits one gate and it opens but that is still determined by the way the motor is connected to the detector and gate. So you add electronic memory that records the pulses of incoming light. Then this changes the way the motors react to the signals based on the number of detected signals on a gate's side. Everything we do to the setup makes it a determined process. There is nothing we can do to change that. We can keep going and add a thousand more alterations and it will be just as determined as it was when we started. This is the problem. We have no evidence of anything but deterministic explanations. It puts free will in a very awkward place.

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@tomr,

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Well where does the desire to pick between one of those options come from? Do you get to choose it? If there is no choice how can it be free?

I thought you agreed there WAS a choice... Whenever you pick from several options, that's a choice. Desire is just a motivator of the choice, reason can be another. You can think stuff like: "last time i bought shoes (or tools, or electronics) from this store, they broke after a couple of days, so even though their stuff looks good or cheap, I'm not buying from there anymore".

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@Olivier5,

English is presumably not your native language. That would account perhaps for your confusion of my "naive realistic views of knowing" with your"knowing is naive". My phrase implies that "knowing" is not about objective facts...it is about what is socially agreed to be the case. From this position I know that the model of the brain as an "information processing device" is NOT an agreed functional paradigm amongst current workers in the field. I also know that the meaning of the phrase "free will" (like all linguistic fragments) is considered by current philosophers of language to be context dependent. (I will not bore you with a plethora of references).

BTW You should perhaps consider whether your simplistic dismissive posture with respect to my posts is worthy of your obvious intellectual ability. Perhaps too you need to consider moving on from your decision to "ditch phenomenology". A lot has happened in the literature in the last fifty years regarding the deconstruction of such terms about which you appear to be unaware.
.

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@tomr,

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Rules that force outcomes probabilistically or deterministically leave no room for free will.

Except if those rules are mental rules. To be determined by one-self is freedom. Freedom is to go by your own rules, or rules that you have accepted. Freedom is not infinite choices, or the freedom to want something you don't want, or the absence of rules.

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We have no evidence of anything but deterministic explanations.

This is a distraction. The point is not whether you can imagine randomness, but whether you have any empirical evidence that the world is determinist. We cannot imagine infinity either. We cannot imagine any procedure to create time or matter either. The limitations of your mind are not necessarily laws of the universe. Let's not assume too much about the power of our mind to impose its desires and limitations on to the universe.

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@Olivier5,

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I thought you agreed there WAS a choice... Whenever you pick from several options, that's a choice. Desire is just a motivator of the choice, reason can be another. You can think stuff like: "last time i bought shoes (or tools, or electronics) from this store, they broke after a couple of days, so even though their stuff looks good or cheap, I'm not buying from there anymore".

But something pushes you to pick one thing over the others in the end. That thing is a desire too.
So what made you pick that reason over others? Maybe you could have said, "Even though the shoes broke I'll give the store another try but buy a different brand."
You can witness this impossibility for you to be the source of your choices. Really consider the 'pick a city' game. Or any similar decision. Map out the entire process and analyze it.

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@Olivier5,

1 - ...you manage to bypass his all point...and yes freedom is the ability to do otherwise, tbe soft deterministic compatiblist shift n bait explanation is not what most people mean with free will.

2 - the remark about infinite freedom or some degrees of freedom is for lack of better wording silly as there is simply no way to map a mechanical model of the world with any degrees of freedom in place...it very much reminds me the atheisthic cartoon about Inteligent Design, "in step 4 a miracle happens"...either you have a mechanical causal relational model or you have magic n Mickey mousse in play...

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