What is free will?

@Olivier5,

Linguistic philosophy post Wittgenstein is hardly "fad of the day", nor indeed is second generation cognitive science whch post Merleau-Ponty has provided empirical support for extension of Wittgensteinian analysis of concepts. The main criterion for investigating paradigms is utility/functionality. Such a criterion tends to be iconoclastic with respect to traditional "analytic philosophy" or with respect to "mechanistic modelling" of cognitive processes.
This tends to be summed up by the observation that most attempts to investigate philosophical or psychological "problems" tend to Geschwätz (word salad). Being familiar with "deconstruction" you will understand that. In short "problems" tlike thatof "free will" are dissipated when it is realized that polar postions such as "determinism" and "choice" turn out to be semantically co-extensive rather than mutually exclusive.
And it is that understanding (transcendent of the law of theexcluded middle) which we might call "wisdom".

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@fresco,

I like the idea that our lives are a mixed salad of determinism and choice; it's not one or the other.

Just look at religion. Most who are born in Italy becomes Catholics; that's more or less "determinism" by its very definition. If you're born in the Middle East, most become Muslims. Determinism.

Quote:

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/determinism‎
a : a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural ...

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Bottom line: the many determinists among us do not seem to understand science very well, and appear to have very little actual exposure to science. In a modern scientific outlook, you don't necessarily explain everything in a determinist way. Sometime you can and sometime you can't. Statistics are everywhere in biology, for instance. You can't do much serious biology without understanding stats. And you accept the fact that you may not be able to predict everything, and that you may not be able to understand everything that apparently exists. Which does not mean stuff don't exist...

In contrast, the "determinists" here (in brackets because I don't want to defame each and every determinist ever) think that if they can't determine free will in their feeble minds, then it must follow that it does not exist. And if they can't think of a procedure to deliver it, how could nature have the audacity of delivering it? Same with randomness: what does not get into their small mind is just inexistent, because they say so. Because they cannot fathom how else it could be.

Can they encompass and understand the whole universe? No they can't - therefore the universe is by obvious necessity just an illusion... You see, you don't need to think too hard about those things when you are a "determinist". If you can't figure it out, explain it away by calling it "Mickey Mouse stuff"...

When they say "jump", the universe says "how high".

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@fresco,

Still, no answer to my question about the status of dissent in your world view.

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@Olivier5,

I assume that Decartes did not "see" a thinker because I conclude that there is none to see.

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@JLNobody,

How do you know there was no thinker to see in HIS case?

In other words, what makes you think that what you see is equal to what others see?

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

I can't explain the entire universe but I can see that there are levels, planes in reality. Like the sub-atomic level, the atomic level, the chemical and 'classic physics' level, the biology level, the knowledge level. Each of this level obeys to rules that are SPECIFIC to the level. There is no simple way to derive chemistry rules from quantum mechanics rules, or biological rules (things such as sexuality, parasitism or ethology) from chemistry rules.

These 'planes in reality' are manmade constructs and they are arbitrary. What you call chemistry or atomic physics or QM or large scale physics. The same rules apply everywhere. Chemical laws and the formation of chemical structures comes out of the rules of QM. Look up atomic orbitals in QM. This is the basis for structures in chemistry.

Little things combine to make bigger things. That is how the world works. If you have deterministic law at the foundation it will be seen in large scale phenomena like biology too. If you have probabilistic law at the foundations governing what particles are doing that is still what is happening when you have trillions of trillions of particles. It is simply wrong to think of chemistry and biology and quantum physics as being independent and disconnected.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

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...oh by the way Tomr a probabilistic model is not an explanatory model although it can make predictions, the only explanatory model is deterministic.
...

I agree completely. It really bothers me that I have to consider it as a reasonable explanatory model. But if you don't address QM you'll have to address it later.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Bottom line: the many determinists among us do not seem to understand science very well, and appear to have very little actual exposure to science. In a modern scientific outlook, you don't necessarily explain everything in a determinist way. Sometime you can and sometime you can't. Statistics are everywhere in biology, for instance. You can't do much serious biology without understanding stats. And you accept the fact that you may not be able to predict everything, and that you may not be able to understand everything that apparently exists. Which does not mean stuff don't exist...
In contrast, the "determinists" here (in brackets because I don't want to defame each and every determinist ever) think that if they can't determine free will in their feeble minds, then it must follow that it does not exist. And if they can't think of a procedure to deliver it, how could nature have the audacity of delivering it? Same with randomness: what does not get into their small mind is just inexistent, because they say so. Because they cannot fathom how else it could be.

I don't think that because I cannot understand how free will works that it must not exist. But that sure isn't good evidence for its existence. And it prevents us from fully knowing what we are talking about when we use the word free will. So it boils down to accepting it on faith and forgetting analysis. Which is never a good argument.

In a modern scientific outlook you explain things either deterministically or probabilistically. There is no other option. And not being able to predict complex events is irrelevant because a deterministic model would still prevent knowledge of future events.

Quote:

Can they encompass and understand the whole universe? No they can't - therefore the universe is by obvious necessity just an illusion... You see, you don't need to think too hard about those things when you are a "determinist". If you can't figure it out, explain it away by calling it "Mickey Mouse stuff"...

When they say "jump", the universe says "how high".

We may not understand the whole universe. But if the basic particles that make up the universe are governed by deterministic laws or probabilistic laws then everything that is made of those particles is also governed by those laws. It is the most obvious and fundamental scientific logic. If you throw away this idea you might as well throw away all your science books too.

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@tomr,

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It is simply wrong to think of chemistry and biology and quantum physics as being independent and disconnected.

You're being simplistic now. Reality is more complicated than you think.

I never said "disconnected". I said the set of rules changes once you move up or down the ladder of complexity. New rules appear or disappear. The type of randomness that seems to occur at QM level appears absent from higher levels. Reproduction is a law of biology (life being defined by the capacity to reproduce one's own form) which does not apply to chemistry. And you cannot derive one set of law from another, at least we have not been able to do so so far. The rules applied in chemistry are NOT derived from QM. Scientists are trying to model simple molecules with QM tools, but it's not working very well.

Logic consists in a set of rules applicable to some mental objects, e.g. mathematical objects. But one would be hard-pressed to derive the entire world of mathematics from the little we know of neurology... and even once we know much more about neurology, mathematicians will still have a job I think.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Still, no answer to my question about the status of dissent in your world view

Alors ! Encore une fois....

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The main criterion for investigating paradigms is utility/functionality. Such a criterion tends to be iconoclastic with respect to traditional "analytic philosophy" or with respect to "mechanistic modelling" of cognitive processes.

...avec (au dessus)...

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Information processing models of the brain "don't work"

.

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@Olivier5,

I agree; I also believe that mathematics is still in its infant stages. I think super computers hint at that.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

You're being simplistic now. Reality is more complicated than you think.

I never said "disconnected". I said the set of rules changes once you move up or down the ladder of complexity. New rules appear or disappear. The type of randomness that seems to occur at QM level appears absent from higher levels. Reproduction is a law of biology (life being defined by the capacity to reproduce one's own form) which does not apply to chemistry. And you cannot derive one set of law from another, at least we have not been able to do so so far. The rules applied in chemistry are NOT derived from QM. Scientists are trying to model simple molecules with QM tools, but it's not working very well.

The set of rules changes for what? Not the individual particles that make up atoms which make up molecules. There are just more particles than what we normally consider under the category of QM.

It is taught in chemistry and in QM that atomic orbitals are the basis for larger structures like molecules. Our modeling techniques may not work on every molecule and we don't have everything figured out just yet either that is typical of science and of computational techniques. The point you should see is that scientists across the board accept QM as the basis for Chemistry. Chemistry should be derivable from QM. If it was not then everything would just be a bunch of disconnected nonsense.

You say the type of randomness that appears at QM levels seems to disappear at higher levels. But that is just the appearance of a bunch of particles from very far away. But the probability is still there and large scale stability is only an illusion (if you take probabilities to be the right course.) The whole object even a planet is still governed entirely by probabilistic rules in QM. We can short cut the complexity by using other simpler laws that approximate that complexity, but if you really want to know what is happening then you want to know each individual particle and then look at the total interactions of all particles.

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@tomr,

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And it prevents us from fully knowing what we are talking about when we use the word free will. So it boils down to accepting it on faith and forgetting analysis.

Not on faith, on the basis of experience. This said, I agree that there's quite some confusion about the idea of free will. For me, free means: 'self-determined'. It does not necessarily means 'undertermined'.

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In a modern scientific outlook you explain things either deterministically or probabilistically.

Explain? Science does not explain. It describes and try and predict how things work. If all you can do is compute probabilities, you just do that. No need to come up with any 'explanation'. That's for the religious among us.

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if the basic particles that make up the universe are governed by deterministic laws or probabilistic laws then everything that is made of those particles is also governed by those laws. It is the most obvious and fundamental scientific logic. If you throw away this idea you might as well throw away all your science books too.

That is simply a mistake. Nothing in science works like this. You don't derive the properties of big stuff from the properties of smaller stuff composing them.

To take a very very simple example, a mechanical clock can measure time, but can cogwheels measure time? No. A cogwheel is solid, and cogged, and that's good enough for what it needs to do inside the clock. New properties appear when you move up from the simple to the complex, and others go away (eg the unpredictability of quantum physics fades away at macro levels).

You guys are really way way back, in pure positivist, reductionist thinking mode. Wake up, the 20h century has gone by and we're in 2013. Paradigms have come and gone. Systemic thinking, anyone?

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@fresco,

Ok, so utility - whether ideas seem to 'work'... Which means? Predict behavior? I can agree to that. Nothing is true of false, certain explanations work better than others. Fine with me.

And then why would you say that "information processing models of the brain don't work"? And what are the explanations that work better? Curious 'un-minds' want to know.

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@tomr,

Quote:

The point you should see is that scientists across the board accept QM as the basis for Chemistry. Chemistry should be derivable from QM. If it was not then everything would just be a bunch of disconnected nonsense.

Nonsense. Chemistry is NOT, repeat NOT, derivable from QM. Maybe one day it will be, and there are a few ideas of how to go about bridging the two, but as of 2013 nobody has been able to successfully resolve several atom's wave functions to predict, say, covalence bounds. Not to my knowledge. In fact, resolving the wave function for something as simple as one single atom is already a challenge, necessitating simplification hypotheses.

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@tomr,

I don't know why you are engaging in debating QM and indeterminism as if anything indeterminism is a far worse scenario for free will...the heart of the matter is that NONE of what Olivier says is of any relevance to the issue just pure side tracking...he is just debating a bunch of well known generalities that barely can be related with the free will problem central points, and when they do, they do it so to make it worse not better. Speaking in holistic system views and probabilities just renders free will and property of decision totally out of the picture.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

In your own mind, because you fail to see that the only constraints humans have is our gene and environment. We are decendants from the ape family which proves that evolution continues on. As we progressed into the 21st century, humans have been able to create language, machines to fly to other planets, and study the environment in ways generations before us could not.

What is predetermined?

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@Olivier5,

I suggest " The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience"
(Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991) for some alternative models. You will find plenty of google references to it.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

That is simply a mistake. Nothing in science works like this. You don't derive the properties of big stuff from the properties of smaller stuff composing them.

To take a very very simple example, a mechanical clock can measure time, but can cogwheels measure time? No. A cogwheel is solid, and cogged, and that's good enough for what it needs to do inside the clock. New properties appear when you move up from the simple to the complex, and others go away (eg the unpredictability of quantum physics fades away at macro levels).

I'm sorry but you are absolutely wrong. This is not how to look at the world and its not what real scientists think. From what you have said you must have very little real knowledge of science like general physics, dynamics, classical mechanics, modern physics, QM, or even chemistry. You are completely wrong here.

Little things that make up big things give those big things their properties entirely. End of story. Name one property of a big thing that did not come from the smaller things making it up. A clock has a cog and that cog can turn around a point and now other things in the clock can have rotational motion like the hands of the clock. You are grasping for nothing with this analogy. To deny that all the properties of large objects come from the smaller objects that make them is to deny the reason an apple is red. Or that a diamond twinkles or is hard. Or any other property.

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You guys are really way way back, in pure positivist, reductionist thinking mode. Wake up, the 20h century has gone by and we're in 2013. Paradigms have come and gone. Systemic thinking, anyone?

You are going where no one can follow with this kind of thinking.

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