Is free-will an illusion?

Published on Aug 29, 2015
Susan Blackmore
The more we learn about the neuroscience of self, volition, and consciousness, the less plausible becomes the traditional idea of free will. Libet's experiments on the timing of voluntary actions throw free will into doubt; the neuroscience of volition reveals the brain areas responsible for decision-making and self-control; and research by Wegner shows how the feeling of having done something ourselves comes down to attributions we make after the fact on the basis of sequence, similarity and timing.

So if our intuitions are not to be trusted, how should we live our lives?

Despite the mounting evidence, many philosophers and psychologists still believe in free will. Others claim that even if there is no free will we still have to live 'as if' there is. Otherwise, they claim, terrible disasters will befall us -- a loss of morality, the breakdown of our legal systems and even of society itself. I think they are wrong, and indeed that we would be better off not to delude ourselves. In any case, I am not prepared to live a lie. I will discuss the challenges of striving to throw off the illusion of conscious will.

The Illusion of Conscious Will
By Daniel M. Wegner
Overview
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.

Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

About the Author
The late Daniel M. Wegner was Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Reviews
“... Dr. Wegner's critique ... is less philosophical than empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in cognitive science and neurology.”—John Horgan, The New York Times
“Fascinating ... I recommend the book as a first-rate intellectual adventure.”—Herbert Silverman, Science Books & Films
“... very convincing.”—David Wilson, American Scientist
“Wegner has finessed all the usual arguments into a remarkable demonstration of how psychology can sometimes transform philosophy.... [He] writes with humour and clarity.”—Sue Blackmore , Times Literary Supplement
“Wegner is a terrific writer, sharing his encyclopedic purchase on the material in amusing, entertaining, and masterful ways.”—David Brizer, M.D. , Psychiatric Services
Endorsements
“Daniel Wegner is our foremost modern investigator of illusions of conscious agency—our tendency to believe that we really have more control over our own actions and thoughts than we do. In this book, Wegner boldly pursues the claim that our sense of conscious agency is ALWAYS imaginary. His arguments are based on clever experiments and deep analysis of the issues. This book will stand as a challenge to anyone trying to understand the nature of voluntary thought and action.”
—Bernard J. Baars, Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology, The Neurosciences Institute
“Wegner presents diverse, persuasive, and entertaining evidence for his thesis that the experience of conscious will is an illusion. The book is a profound treatise on a central issue in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.”
—Gordon H. Bower, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
“Wegner may well have made a historic breakthrough in the age-old, nettlesome problem of 'free will'—namely, conceptualizing it as an act of causal attribution. His recounting of the history of the issue is rich with fascinating examples and illustrations. This sets us up for what may be the first experimental approach to this nettlesome philosophical problem. Because we know a lot about how people make causal attributions, we may suddenly and for the first time, thanks to Wegner's analysis, know a lot about why people believe so strongly that they have free will. Wegner shows that by manipulating the variables underlying these attributions, one changes the feeling of having acted or thought freely. This is nothing short of 'experimental philosophy' in its application of cognitive scientific principles and methods to previously intractable issues in the philosophy of mind.”
—John A. Bargh, Department of Psychology, Yale University

The reader should realize in advance that there were and are no directly relevant facts to be brought to bear in this discussion. Although his thesis is empirical, Skinner’s book has no experimental data involving the laboratory manipulation of verbal responses which definitively demonstrate that the processes he invokes to explain verbal behavior are in fact involved in its production, although reinforcement has been shown to be effective in controlling verbal responses (Baer and Sherman, 1964; Brigham and Sherman, 1968; Holz and Azrin, 1966; Krasner, 1958; Lovaas, Berberich, Perloff, and Schaeffer, 1966; Salzinger, 1959; Salzinger, Feldman, Cowan, and Salzinger, 1965). Chomsky had no data to disprove the thesis of Verbal Behavior, nor does he yet. This can be said...

Wegner’s argument is based primarily on two sorts of neuroscientific findings: (i) Libet’s work on the timing of mental events, and(ii) the existence of separate neural pathways for the processes involved in the production of action and in the conscious feelings of will....Wegner
misuses both these kinds of evidence, by making two fallacious causal assumptions.

Each of these assumptions, when made explicit, involves a Cartesian disembodiment of conscious will. By Cartesian, I mean the idea that mental processes are not physically instantiated in neural processes, that conscious experience is sufficiently separate from physical processes as to stand in causal relations to them as distinct nodes. It is this disembodiment that leads Wegner to the conclusion that the will cannot be causally efficacious. As I will demonstrate, the neuroscientific evidence, properly understood, supports no such conclusion.

Wegner’s conceptual analysis attempts to demonstrate a breach between experience and behavior by assuming the nonphysicality of experience. It is no surprise that, with such an assumption, one will have difficulties relating experience back to the physical actions of the body – this is the quintessentially Cartesian dilemma, and a large part of why one wants to avoid Cartesianism in the first place.
http://philsciarchive.pitt.edu/3008/1/Andersen_Two_Causal_Mistakes.pdf

Plenty, plenty, plenty of reason to be skeptical

You don't understand much about Einstein's spacetime nor why time is relative do you

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. (Albert Einstein)

This new reality was that space and time, as physical constructs, have to be combined into a new mathematical/physical entity called 'space-time', because the equations of relativity show that both the space and time coordinates of any event must get mixed together by the mathematics, in order to accurately describe what we see. Because space consists of 3 dimensions, and time is 1-dimensional, space-time must, therefore, be a 4-dimensional object. It is believed to be a 'continuum' because so far as we know, there are no missing points in space or instants in time, and both can be subdivided without any apparent limit in size or duration. So, physicists now routinely consider our world to be embedded in this 4-dimensional Space-Time continuum, and all events, places, moments in history, actions and so on are described in terms of their location in Space-Time.

...physical constructs, have to be combined into a new mathematical/physical entity called 'space-time'

Because space consists of 3 dimensions, and time is 1-dimensional, space-time must, therefore, be a 4-dimensional object.

because the equations of relativity show that both the space and time coordinates of any event must get mixed together by the mathematics, in order to accurately describe what we see

No time dimension

They begin by explaining how we usually assume that time is an absolute physical quantity that plays the role of the independent variable (time, t, is often the x-axis on graphs that show the evolution of a physical system). But, as they note, we never really measure t. What we do measure is an object’s frequency, speed, etc. In other words, what experimentally exists are the motion of an object and the tick of a clock, and we compare the object’s motion to the tick of a clock to measure the object’s frequency, speed, etc. By itself, t has only a mathematical value, and no primary physical existence.

This view doesn’t mean that time does not exist, but that time has more to do with space than with the idea of an absolute time. So while 4D spacetime is usually considered to consist of three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, the researchers’ view suggests that it’s more correct to imagine spacetime as four dimensions of space. In other words, as they say, the universe is “timeless.”

“Minkowski space is not 3D + T, it is 4D,” the scientists write in their most recent paper. “The point of view which considers time to be a physical entity in which material changes occur is here replaced with a more convenient view of time being merely the numerical order of material change. This view corresponds better to the physical world and has more explanatory power in describing immediate physical phenomena: gravity, electrostatic interaction, information transfer by EPR experiment are physical phenomena carried directly by the space in which physical phenomena occur.”

As the scientists added, the roots of this idea come from Einstein himself.

“Einstein said, ‘Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it,’” Sorli told PhysOrg.com. “Time is exactly the order of events: this is my conclusion.”


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html#jCp

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html#jCp

NEW MODEL FOR UNIVERSE



In the future, the scientists plan to investigate the possibility that quantum space has three dimensions of space, as Sorli explained.

“The idea of time being the fourth dimension of space did not bring much progress in physics and is in contradiction with the formalism of special relativity,” he said. “We are now developing a formalism of 3D quantum space based on Planck work. It seems that the universe is 3D from the macro to the micro level to the Planck volume, which per formalism is 3D. In this 3D space there is no ‘length contraction,’ there is no ‘time dilation.’ What really exists is that the velocity of material change is ‘relative’ in the Einstein sense.”

Numerical order in space

The researchers give an example of this concept of time by imagining a photon that is moving between two points in space. The distance between these two points is composed of Planck distances, each of which is the smallest distance that the photon can move. (The fundamental unit of this motion is Planck time.) When the photon moves a Planck distance, it is moving exclusively in space and not in absolute time, the researchers explain. The photon can be thought of as moving from point 1 to point 2, and its position at point 1 is “before” its position at point 2 in the sense that the number 1 comes before the number 2 in the numerical order. Numerical order is not equivalent to temporal order, i.e., the number 1 does not exist before the number 2 in time, only numerically.

As the researchers explain, without using time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, the physical world can be described more accurately. As physicist Enrico Prati noted in a recent study, Hamiltonian dynamics (equations in classical mechanics) is robustly well-defined without the concept of absolute time. Other scientists have pointed out that the mathematical model of spacetime does not correspond to physical reality, and propose that a timeless “state space” provides a more accurate framework.

The scientists also investigated the falsifiability of the two notions of time. The concept of time as the fourth dimension of space - as a fundamental physical entity in which an experiment occurs - can be falsified by an experiment in which time does not exist, according to the scientists. An example of an experiment in which time is not present as a fundamental entity is the Coulomb experiment; mathematically, this experiment takes place only in space. On the other hand, in the concept of time as a numerical order of change taking place in space, space is the fundamental physical entity in which a given experiment occurs. Although this concept could be falsified by an experiment in which time (measured by clocks) is not the numerical order of material change, such an experiment is not yet known.

“Newton theory on absolute time is not falsifiable, you cannot prove it or disprove it, you have to believe in it,” Sorli said. “The theory of time as the fourth dimension of space is falsifiable and in our last article we prove there are strong indications that it might be wrong. On the basis of experimental data, time is what we measure with clocks: with clocks we measure the numerical order of material change, i.e., motion in space.”

How it makes sense

In addition to providing a more accurate description of the nature of physical reality, the concept of time as a numerical order of change can also resolve Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. In this paradox, the faster Achilles gives the Tortoise a head start in the race. But although Achilles can run 10 times faster than the Tortoise, he can never surpass the Tortoise because, for every distance unit that Achilles runs, the Tortoise also runs 1/10 that distance. So whenever Achilles reaches a point where the Tortoise has been, the Tortoise has also moved slightly ahead. Although the conclusion that Achilles can never surpass the Tortoise is obviously false, there are many different proposed explanations for why the argument is flawed.

Here, the researchers explain that the paradox can be resolved by redefining velocity, so that the velocity of both runners is derived from the numerical order of their motion, rather than their displacement and direction in time. From this perspective, Achilles and the Tortoise move through space only, and Achilles can surpass Tortoise in space, though not in absolute time.

The researchers also briefly examine how this new view of time fits with how we intuitively perceive time. Many neurological studies have confirmed that we do have a sense of past, present, and future. This evidence has led to the proposal that the brain represents time with an internal “clock” that emits neural ticks (the “pacemaker-accumulator” model). However, some recent studies have challenged this traditional view, and suggest that the brain represents time in a spatially distributed way, by detecting the activation of different neural populations. Although we perceive events as occurring in the past, present, or future, these concepts may just be part of a psychological frame in which we experience material changes in space.

Finally, the researchers explain that this view of time does not look encouraging for time travelers.

“In our view, time travel into the past and future are not possible,” Sorli said. “One can travel in space only, and time is a numerical order of his motion.”

Funny that what these scientists are saying right NOW I have been saying it HERE at A2K for some years now...

The idea of time being the fourth dimension of space did not bring much progress in physics and is in contradiction with the formalism of special relativity,” he said.

“The point of view which considers time to be a physical entity in which material changes occur is here replaced with a more convenient view of time being merely the numerical order of material change. This view corresponds better to the physical world and has more explanatory power in describing immediate physical phenomena: gravity, electrostatic interaction, information transfer by EPR experiment are physical phenomena carried directly by the space in which physical phenomena occur.”

As the researchers explain, without using time as the fourth dimension of spacetime, the physical world can be described more accurately.

Other scientists have pointed out that the mathematical model of spacetime does not correspond to physical reality


The concept of time as the fourth dimension of space - as a fundamental physical entity in which an experiment occurs - can be falsified...“The theory of time as the fourth dimension of space is falsifiable and in our last article we prove there are strong indications that it might be wrong"

Because the ass had no adequate stimulation which would lead him to approach either one instead of the other (bales of hay). Not sure if he ever "scientifically tested" his thesis, though

Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will...The paradox predates Buridan; it dates to antiquity, being found in Aristotle's On the Heavens.

In operant conditioning, the matching law is a quantitative relationship that holds between the relative rates of response and the relative rates of reinforcement in concurrent schedules of reinforcement. For example, if two response alternatives A and B are offered to an organism, the ratio of response rates to A and B equals the ratio of reinforcements yielded by each response...The matching law is theoretically important for two reasons. First, it offers a simple quantification of behavior which is capable of extension to a number of other situations. Secondly, it appears to offer a lawful, predictive account of choice; as Herrnstein (1970) expressed it, under an operant analysis, choice is nothing but behavior set into the context of other behavior.[5] It thus challenges any idea of free will, in exactly the way B.F. Skinner had argued that the experimental analysis of behavior should, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. However this challenge is only serious if the scope of the matching law can be extended from pigeons to humans. When human participants perform under concurrent schedules of reinforcement, matching has been observed in some experiments,[6] but wide deviations from matching have been found in others.[7] The matching law has generated a great deal of research, much of it presented to the Society for Quantitative Analysis of Behavior.

I would do away with [time] once and for all...I would do away with the traditional notion of motion itself. Its an elusive phenomena not an actual thing.

It thus challenges any idea of free will, in exactly the way B.F. Skinner had argued that the experimental analysis of behavior should, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. However this challenge is only serious if the scope of the matching law can be extended from pigeons to humans. When human participants perform under concurrent schedules of reinforcement, matching has been observed in some experiments,[6] but wide deviations from matching have been found in others.

Quote:

I would do away with [time] once and for all...I would do away with the traditional notion of motion itself. Its an elusive phenomena not an actual thing.

Physics has been summarized as "the study of matter in motion." You would do away with motion. So, why, then would you be the least bit concerned (as you have previously said you are) with any supposed disastrous effect that free will would have on "physics?"

Your last video makes points that I have previously made about logic. But it affirms that special relativity insists that motion exists. Neither Einstein nor virtually anyone else (you excluded, of course) is of the Parmenidean persuasion. I am puzzled by your appeal to that theory as "support" for your radical views about "being."

The core of the argument is deeply related with the dismissal of nothingness as a valid concept....when he really think about what nothingness is the more we come to the conclusion nothing is nada, not itself a thing at all...therefore whatever you have existing must keep existing in its line of order of the said "movie" that we experience from within....Whatever exists, whatever is true, is unchangeable it cannot puff out of existence towards a given "nothingness" and exchanged for something different in a given "future"...