Is free-will an illusion?

@FBM,

...civilization marches very slownly but it marches indeed...
We had agriculture, writing and accounting, philosophy, science and Industrial revolution, and finally the global web...with it you pointed out the next slow process of change regarding our legal system...I am left wondering if this process will require more then one century till its fully and maturelly operational...we shall learn as we go along.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Fits and starts, probably, rather than a smooth progression. I'm pretty sure that progress - as hard to define as that may be - will come in direct proportion to the degree with which we place evidence-based reasoning over traditions, intuitions, subjective preferences and the like.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

How about a world that upholds freedom as some sort of fundamental right?

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

How about a world that upholds freedom as some sort of fundamental right?

What I find most amazing about these "no free will" advocates, Ollie, even more amazing than their wild-ass assertions, is that they actually WANT to see themselves as mechanical robots with no freedom.

What's up with that? That's a rather extreme form of self-alienation, aint it?

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Quote:

In chaotic systems, the uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. Hence, doubling the forecast time more than squares the proportional uncertainty in the forecast.This means, in practice, a meaningful prediction cannot be made over an interval of more than two or three times the Lyapunov time. When meaningful predictions cannot be made, the system appears to be random.

An early proponent of chaos theory was Henri Poincaré. In the 1880s, while studying the three-body problem, he found that there can be orbits that are nonperiodic, and yet not forever increasing nor approaching a fixed point...chaos theory became formalized as such only after mid-century, when it first became evident to some scientists that linear theory, the prevailing system theory at that time, simply could not explain the observed behavior of certain experiments like that of the logistic map.

The main catalyst for the development of chaos theory was the electronic computer...As a graduate student in Chihiro Hayashi's laboratory at Kyoto University, Yoshisuke Ueda was experimenting with analog computers and noticed, on Nov. 27, 1961, what he called "randomly transitional phenomena"...Mandelbrot described both the "Noah effect" (in which sudden discontinuous changes can occur) and the "Joseph effect" (in which persistence of a value can occur for a while, yet suddenly change afterwards).

In 1987, Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld published a paper in Physical Review Letters[49] describing for the first time self-organized criticality (SOC), considered to be one of the mechanisms by which complexity arises in nature. Self-organized criticality is one of a number of important discoveries made in statistical physics and related fields over the latter half of the 20th century, Its concepts have been enthusiastically applied across fields as diverse as geophysics, physical cosmology, evolutionary biology and ecology, bio-inspired computing and optimization (mathematics), economics, quantum gravity, sociology, solar physics, plasma physics, neurobiology and others.

Currently, chaos theory continues to be a very active area of research, involving many different disciplines (mathematics, topology, physics, social systems, population modeling, biology, meteorology, astrophysics, information theory, computational neuroscience, etc.).

Well, so much for the possibility of knowin everything that's gunna happen, eh?

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@layman,

I can only sympathise. Being an adult is hard. Making important decisions is hard, living with the consequences sometines harder. . . "The human condition requires that decisions be made with insufficient information", said your good friend Sartre. Because as you noted, they live ordinary lives during which they have to take decisions and I trust they take them...

All this weight get lifted up while meditating and phylosophizing for 30 mn a day. It's like going to confess in a way, a form of self-forgiveness and supposedly forgiveness of others. In French they call it: "prendre la vie avec philosophie" (taking life with a grain of philosophy). It belongs to the category of stress management.

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@Olivier5,

I'm actually trying to bring in the political aspect: they speak of human progress but a world without freedom doesn't sound so attractive to me.

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@layman,

Quote:

Some would suggest that a system of disorganized complexity may be compared with the (relative) simplicity of planetary orbits — the latter can be predicted by applying Newton's laws of motion. Of course, most real-world systems, including planetary orbits, eventually become theoretically unpredictable even using Newtonian dynamics; as discovered by modern chaos theory.

Organized complexity, in Weaver's view, resides in nothing else than the non-random, or correlated, interaction between the parts. These correlated relationships create a differentiated structure that can, as a system, interact with other systems. The coordinated system manifests properties not carried or dictated by individual parts.

A recent study based on molecular simulations and compliance constants describes molecular recognition as a phenomenon of organisation. Even for small molecules like carbohydrates, the recognition process can not be predicted or designed even assuming that each individual hydrogen bond's strength is exactly known.

To hell with all this "complexity" crap, eh? I like to keep things simple, like this here:

Alla y'all aint go no kinda free will, ya chumps, yas.

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@FBM,

I'm pretty sure that "evidence based reasoning" starts with intuitions, or self-evident truths, or direct apprehension of truth, since all evidence based reasoning consists of finite arguments, which necessarily begin with stipulated (unproven, axiomatic) premises.

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

I'm pretty sure that "evidence based reasoning" starts with intuitions, or self-evident truths, or direct apprehension of truth, since all evidence based reasoning consists of finite arguments, which necessarily begin with stipulated (unproven, axiomatic) premises.

I'm pretty sure you're right, PP. And when you start with the fundamental assumption that everything that happens is a product of mechanistic material forces, kinda funny how you conclude, "based on all the evidence," that you are a bot with no free will, eh?

Of course you didn't "assume" that. The "evidence" proves it.

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@Olivier5,

The difference between cars and text is that the latter consists of symbols whereas the former don't. Because text consists of symbols its form is arbitrary. Text can assume any shape or size, manifest as any material (wood, stone, ink, pixels of light, smoke) or no material at all (mental image) , while still performing its function as symbols. That isn't true of cars. A tattoo of was a car is only the image of a car, not a car.

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@layman,

Information cannot be transmitted. Radio waves can beansmitted. Electrical impulses can be moved. Neither of these things is information until someone creates an isomorphism in which changes in amplitude or frequency or phase are interpreted as symbols, even if the symbols are individually as simple as binary values, which are concatenated into groups of arbitrary size (e.g. eight bits) and then interpreted according to an arbitrary encoding convention (e.g. ASCII) and further concatenated into lengthy groupings representing words and combinations of words.

That is why engineers distinguish between baud (signal elements per second) and bits per second (binary symbols per second). A single physical signal element can encode multiple bits under (for example) phase encoding.

Ink spots on paper are always ink spots on paper, but they are only symbols insofar as they are recognized as such by someone.

The gene scientist in your example is guilty of a category error.

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@puzzledperson,

puzzledperson wrote:

I'm pretty sure that "evidence based reasoning" starts with intuitions, or self-evident truths, or direct apprehension of truth, since all evidence based reasoning consists of finite arguments, which necessarily begin with stipulated (unproven, axiomatic) premises.

I'd say that evidence-based reasoning starts with intuitions, self-evident truths or direct apprehension of some phenomenon (perhaps assumed to be true) and then figures out a way to test them, rather than just accepting them axiomatically. I'm thinking Thales, here. One of the fundamental drives of science is to present a system or system with the fewest axioms.

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@FBM,

It's logically inconsistent to suggest that free will doesn't exist, and then to suggest that individuals can choose how to interpret human behavior (or choose anything else). Under your first premise, Abrahamic religious scripture, and its influence on criminal justice systems, was as inevitable as the solar system.

Besides, Abrahamic scripture is neither the only nor the first historical formalization of moral codes; and it's historically unwarranted to assume that moral codes didn't preexist formal cultural norms.

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@FBM,

Quote:

"....and then figures out a way to test them, rather than just accepting them axiomatically...

Sounds great, eh? Unfortunately, "science" can never conclusively "test" even the most widely accepted axioms. There are always alternate assumptions that can also explain everything that your chosen axioms do.

Many "scientists" are not even aware of this, and smugly insist that their chosen axioms have been proven to be "true."

You can always elect to adhere to your preferred axioms. But don't pretend such a choice is made on the basis of conclusive evidence. They are made at the metaphysical level, and often chosen because they best fit one's pre-existing psychological needs.

By the way, it is impossible to even try to "test" your axioms unless and until you deny them. Your assumptions always dictate your conclusions.

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@FBM,

FBM: "As for the 'mind creating matter' position, I suppose that pursuing that in this thread would result in a major derail..."

I would have thought that an adherent of scientism would be logically compelled to admit the mind creating matter position. Perhaps you don't perceive that your position implies it?

What is matter empirically (which is to say phenomenologically)? It's a mental experience you call vision and another you call touch. Those mental experiences are (you say) epiphenomena of neural activities; but there is no reason to suppose that a particular set of "sense organs" and nervous system and brain design cause those mental experiences to bear an objective relation to a putative objective material world which, even if it exists, you can have no direct access to.

In fact, there is good reason to suppose the subjectivity of such brain assembled mental models of the world. The "material world" sensed by a human looks quite different to a squid or a moth; and the science-fiction premise of aliens whose perceptions -- and even they themselves (as far as our perceptions of them are concerned) -- do not exist for us, is not unreasonable, granted the premises of scientism.

You don't have to resort to the extreme of The Matrix to see how perceptions are reality. Just do drugs, or suffer a seizure, or have a neurosurgeon poke around in your brain, or expose yourself to certain kinds of strong electromagnetic fields.

In fact, you don't perceive or measure an objective material world at all: you merely infer it from your perceptual experiences. Scientism, then, is really just a version of Plato's cave.

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@puzzledperson,

puzzledperson wrote:

It's logically inconsistent to suggest that free will doesn't exist, and then to suggest that individuals can choose how to interpret human behavior (or choose anything else). Under your first premise, Abrahamic religious scripture, and its influence on criminal justice systems, was as inevitable as the solar system.

But I'm not claiming that free will doesn't exist. I'm just saying that there is plenty of science-based data to make it reasonable to be skeptical.

Quote:

Besides, Abrahamic scripture is neither the only nor the first historical formalization of moral codes; and it's historically unwarranted to assume that moral codes didn't preexist formal cultural norms.

I didn't imply either of those things, as far as I can tell. I considered those points before I posted. I live in a country where the judicial system developed without influence by the Abrahamic traditions. It's far less punitive here.

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@puzzledperson,

Typo correction:

My comment reads in part: " Radio waves can beansmitted." This should read: "Radio waves can be transmitted".

The gremlins are very active tonight.

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@puzzledperson,

puzzledperson wrote:

I would have thought that an adherent of scientism would be logically compelled to admit the mind creating matter position. Perhaps you don't perceive that your position implies it?

Am I an adherent of scientism? That's news to me.

Quote:

What is matter empirically (which is to say phenomenologically)? It's a mental experience you call vision and another you call touch. Those mental experiences are (you say) epiphenomena...

Read that post again. I didn't say that. I asked if you were holding that position.

Quote:

...
Scientism, then, is really just a version of Plato's cave.

If I ever take up scientism as a cause, I'll consider that.

There's a big qualitative difference between evidence-based research results and evidence-free claims made based on tradition, emotion and ancient myths. Pointing out that difference does not make one an adherent of scientism.

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@FBM,

FBM: "I'd say that evidence-based reasoning starts with intuitions, self-evident truths or direct apprehension of some phenomenon (perhaps assumed to be true) and then figures out a way to test them, rather than just accepting them axiomatically."

If you prove the axiomatic premises of your original argument, in a new argument in which they appear as conclusions, then your new argument, which is also finite, must ipso facto begin with stipulated (unproven, axiomatic) conclusions. It's simple, and it's inescapable.

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Is free-will an illusion?

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