Is free-will an illusion?

@layman,

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He appears to adhere to a belief in "mind/body" medicine were the mind "uses" the brain to heal mental maladies.

A few excerpts from a presentation made by the Univeristy of Maryland Medical Center:

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Most ancient healing practices, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, emphasize the links between the mind and the body. Western medical views were shaped by systems of thought that emphasized the opposite -- the mind and body are separate....

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a physician named Herbert Benson, who coined the term "relaxation response," studied how meditation could affect blood pressure. More understanding of the mind-body link came in 1975, when psychologist Robert Ader showed that mental and emotional cues could affect the immune system....No longer viewed with suspicion, mind-body programs are now established at prestigious medical schools in the United States and around the world.

While phrases such as "mind over matter" have been around for years, only recently have scientists found solid evidence that mind-body techniques actually do fight disease and promote health. In 1989, for example, a clinical study by David Spiegel, M.D. at Stanford University School of Medicine demonstrated the power of the mind to heal....

https://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/treatment/mindbody-medicine

Many MD's seem to be disenchanted with the routine practice of dispensing drugs to "treat" virtually every ailment that comes along. A tacit assumption which favors that practice may be that the mind and the body are two completely different things and that any physical ailment can only be affected by manipulating the body in one form or another, often by prescribing drugs.

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@layman,

layman wrote:

Thanks for the welcome, Ollie. You and I have had some rather extreme differences on some topics (need I mention special relativity), but I almost always agree with the points you make on other topics.

By the way, that SR thread was interesting. Wanna go at it again?

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@layman,

Two behaviourists make love. At the end of the act, one asks the other: "It was great for you; how was it for me?"

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@Briancrc,

Briancrc wrote:

An organism's behavior being determined really isn't an issue for philosophy to solve. The endless one-upmanship of philosophical gotchas is not the way to answer these questions. Either behavior comes under the control of the environment or it does not. I maintain that it does, not because it is an hypothesis, but because of the decades of empirical research with these types of demonstrations.

Actually, modern ecology consider that individuals are in a two-way relationship with their environment: it impacts on them and they impact on it. Very simple really. Life is not a passive thing, it's a struggle.

For the individuals who gamble excessively, the consequences of gambling behavior (the small and large payouts) is what explains why the person gets "hooked" on gambling. Attributing it to feelings or willpower, or any other hypothetical construct is not an answer, and it is not something that has ever been demonstrated. It also does not lead to solutions to problems. But by getting stuck on specific examples and saying, aha, that example may apply to someone else, but it doesn't apply to me, so the whole idea is meaningless misses the entire point of the principles that inform the examples. It also does nothing to explain what is happening with the individuals for which the example does apply; which conveniently gets ignored in each of these conversational exchanges.
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@Olivier5,

Sorry, this came out all messed up...

Briancrc wrote:

An organism's behavior being determined really isn't an issue for philosophy to solve. The endless one-upmanship of philosophical gotchas is not the way to answer these questions. Either behavior comes under the control of the environment or it does not. I maintain that it does, not because it is an hypothesis, but because of the decades of empirical research with these types of demonstrations.

Actually, modern ecology considers that individuals are in a two-way relationship with their environment: it impacts on them and they impact on it. Very simple really. Life is not a passive thing, it's a struggle.

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For the individuals who gamble excessively, the consequences of gambling behavior (the small and large payouts) is what explains why the person gets "hooked" on gambling. Attributing it to feelings or willpower, or any other hypothetical construct is not an answer, and it is not something that has ever been demonstrated. It also does not lead to solutions to problems.

This is confusing. Feelings are NOT hypothetical, we have them all the time and can testify to that... There is no reason to attribute to them some netherworld quality. Let's be pragmatic here: you cannot deny that your mental life exists.

Many a gambler has fought successively against their addiction and stopped gambling. If we were just machines, how would that be possible?

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@layman,

Why do some people play scratch tickets until their weekly budget is blown? The person will say he wants to stop; he wants to "Kick the habit" Why doesn't he stop despite knowing the important reasons for stopping?

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@Briancrc,

Because of the emotional kick he gets from playing. Addiction is a way humans (and a few animals, usually living with humans) manipulate their emotional reward functions by activating them artificially and repeatedly, through booze or drugs or any other way. Once the trigger-reward habit is in place, it's very hard to get rid of. But it is possible, and that is my point. If we were only machines we could not get the resolve to change ourselves.

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@Olivier5,

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Feelings are NOT hypothetical, we have them all the time and can testify to that...

I agree. And I also do not deny the "existence" of mental life; I only point out that another way to view it is as private behavior that came about for the same reasons as the behavior that everyone can see.

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Many a gambler has fought successively against their addiction and stopped gambling.

If we are free, then what is the struggle?

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@Olivier5,

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Once the trigger-reward habit is in place

I am going to press a bit on this. Where, in the person, is the trigger-reward habit formed? What is the evidence for saying something like this, and is it something other than observing that the person gambles excessively or he reports that he does?

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@Briancrc,

Why behaviors come about is a complex issue, too complex to be left to behaviorists. But you agree that the mental life is just as real as anything else, then no reason to dismiss emotions and feelings and ideas from the equation. They play a role, in my view a crucial role, or they would not exist.

Descartes concluded that God could not lie to him that much, and thus could not have placed him in an illusionary world. Therefore the world must exist. I use a similar argument where evolution replaces God: over the long run, evolution creates and maintains useful organs and functions, and only those (vestigial organs notwithstanding). Thus it could not have lied to us that much to create a purely illusionary sense of agency. Because such an illusion would be useless for survival.

You argue that such a free will illusion is damaging for our well-being, our societies and our survival. But then, how could such a damaging trait have been selected by evolution????

Nature can't lie that much.

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@Olivier5,

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Why behaviors come about is a complex issue, too complex to be left to behaviorists.

Just because it is too difficult for you to conceptualize does not make it so for others.

What about the gambler's struggle? If he is free, then what is he struggling against?

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@FBM,

FBM wrote:

In order for a thought or decision to be an act of free will, it must by definition be a consciously chosen, uncaused cause.

This would require that conscious thoughts and choices precede and direct subconscious brain activity. (The neurological processes that control muscle movement, for example, are subconscious.)

I don't know of any mechanism for this except for the old Cartesian "ghost in the machine." (Ryle's phrase, not Descartes'.) Perhaps this is why free will is so much more important to theists than others. They need us to have a culpable spirit that can be punished or rewarded.

Following up: If you're a proponent of free will, do you posit a ghost in the machine? If so, please identify that ghost. If not, then what's ordering the subconscious mental processes to do what they do that culminates in behavior? Alternatively, please explain how the putative disembodied mind consciously orders the physical brain to do what it does.

If the decision is not a conscious one, then it's not a free-will decision, is it? If my conscious sense of agency is a product of subconscious processes beyond my conscious control, then how can the decision-making act come prior to the subconscious activity?

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@Briancrc,

Not sure what you want to say here. Are you saying the guy may be lying? Or that my interpretation of addiction might be inaccurate?

Experiences have been done on rats that get hooked on electrodes stimulating some pleasure area in their brain. Rats don't lie. They ended up pressing that button constantly.

Baudelaire also wrote about it in "Paradis Artificiels".

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@Briancrc,

He is struggling against the temptation of getting a small immediate reward at the expense of his long-term well-being. In other words, he is struggling to balance long-term and short-term priorities. The most adult part of him knows that he can't be happy over the long run as a compulsive gambler, that only ruin awaits; but the childish part of him says: just another one, just one little other shot and them let's stop... please?

Freedom is never perfect and total, by definition. It's always relates to constraints and forces. The options are not limitless. That's why I personally prefer the term "agency" over the term "free will", as the latter implies that we can choose what we want. In fact we want all sorts of things that we never chose to want.

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@Olivier5,

You are your needs and wants...you dont get to choose to be you...you just are...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

You don't get to choose what you want, but you get to choose what to prioritize among a large umber of "wants", and how you pursue what you prioritize. E.g. we all decide at some point that we will never get some of these things we wanted, i.e. we give up on them, and for other things we don't give up on them.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

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You are your needs and wants...you dont get to choose to be you...you just are...

Coming from you, this is a surprising assertion, Fil.

Don't tell it to J.P. Sartre or them kinda existentialists, eh? He said something like:

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Man is the only critter who is what he aint, and aint what he is.

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@FBM,

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Alternatively, please explain how the putative disembodied mind consciously orders the physical brain to do what it does.

I don't know the mechanism, but if you decide to learn cello (or any other skill), the area in your brain that manages hand movements will progressively grow, if you practice hard enough. In effect, a conscious choice progressively translates into a re-allocation of neurons in your brain.

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In order for a thought or decision to be an act of free will, it must by definition be a consciously chosen, uncaused cause.

Not sure I understand this. Why is there a necessary connection between free will and consciousness? Why can't the subconscious be a part of what makes us free?

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I don't know the mechanism, but if you decide to learn cello (or any other skill), the area in your brain that manages hand movements will progressively grow, if you practice hard enough. In effect, a conscious choice progressively translates into a re-allocation of neurons in your brain.

Well, you're begging the question with regards to the decision to learn the cello. If that decision were the result of subliminal processes, and you have no conscious control over them, then how can that decision be regarded as a freely chosen one?

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Not sure I understand this. Why is there a necessary connection between free will and consciousness? Why can't the subconscious be a part of what makes us free?

If the decision is determined by the subconscious, then how is it a free one? The act of volition is by definition a conscious one. Volition and instinct/reflexes are very different things, by conventional definitions, no?

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@Briancrc,

Ollie Said:

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Many a gambler has fought successively against their addiction and stopped gambling.

Then you ask:

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If we are free, then what is the struggle?

Are you implying that IF you have a choice, then you will invariably make the best/right one? How ya figure? I might as well ask: If people have free will, then why doesn't everyone always score 100% on every multiple choice test?

You seem to be confusing free will with omniscience and omnipotence.

1 Reply

Is free-will an illusion?

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