Don't we just execute programs? Free will is an illusion.

I say we execute programs but we also write (and rewrite) them. Maybe all living things do. We are the programmer and the programmed. As such, there is no absolute free will, but perhaps relative free will. Given our programming and our environment, we have some available choices at any given time.

0 Replies

I don't think we just execute "programs." As a philosopher, Searle, argued, a present day device that runs a program is simply following formal rules. It has no mental state as it simply gives an output for an input. It does not "understand" what the output or input means or what the connection between the two are.

Consider Searle's Chinese Room argument:

A person A, is in a room with a bunch of chinese symbols, a slot to the outside, and a book containing rules.

Person A does not understand Chinese.

A Chinese-speaking Person B, outside the room communicates with Person A by sending sequences of Chinese symbols forming a sentence to Person A inside the room. Person A then refers to the book to find out what sequences of Chinese symbols to send out to Person B.

Person A does this so well that Person B thinks he actually knows Chinese.

However, Person A still does not understand Chinese; he is simply receiving inputs, following the rules in the book, and giving out the output. He does not understand what the Chinese symbols mean, nor what the sequences mean.

A programmable computer works like the Chinese Room.

Therefore a programmable computer do not have understanding.

This does not mean that a machine that can have understanding can't be built; it just means that a programmable computer cannot have understanding.

0 Replies

c-logic,

You asked if "we" are "biological robots". The answer from a philosophical point of view must be negative, because that thing we call "self" has an established property called "will". No "will"..no "self"...no "we".

Now it may be that all three terms function at a "higher level" from a systems viewpoint (sociological, ecological etc) which are not reduclible to "biology". Nor indeed is biology (as far as I know) reducible to physics and chemistry which further undermines your robotic claim. I would however agree in general that "self" has less "control" than "it thinks it has" but not from a deterministic or reductionistic perspective, more from its "commitee nature" which anyone can observe by observation of internal conversations.

0 Replies

TYPOS ABOVE

c-logic,

You asked if "we" are "biological robots". The answer from a philosophical point of view must be negative, because that thing we call "self" has an established property called "will". No "will"..no "self"...no "we".

Now it may be that all three terms function at a "higher level" from a systems viewpoint (sociological, ecological etc) which are not reducible to "biology". Nor indeed is biology (as far as I know) reducible to physics and chemistry which further undermines your robotic claim. I would however agree in general that "self" has less "control" than "it thinks it has" but not from a deterministic or reductionistic perspective, more from its "committee nature" which anyone can appreciate by observation of internal conversations.

The essence of this "debate" seems to lie with Wittgenstein's dictum "most philosophy is about what happens when language goes on holiday". In this case "the person as an individual organism" is assumed to be identical to "the person as a member of society" . The fact that the same word is used tempts us down blind alleys. Wittgensteins resolution of the problem is to examine a words usage in specific contexts rather than as a general term.

0 Replies

aperson wrote:

If I made two identical universes, and free will was existent (and chaotic theory thingamabobby was not), then the two universes should come out completely differently. This is the sort of free will that I am talking about. To me, having the ability to make choices is very different to having free will. You can "choose" to murder Jimmy, but that doesn't mean that you had the ability to choose not to once the choice has been made (sorry if I'm not explaining this well; try to make sense it).

Looks like you are talking about the difference between a determinate or clockwork universe in which the past is immutable and the future predetermined, and a quantum universe in which it is impossible to predict the outcome of a quantum event and chaos theory tells us that a tiny difference in initial conditions (perhaps due to random quantum events) may have such a large effect on the outcome that it is essentially unpredictable. We live in a quantum universe.

Quote:

What makes feeling and emotions more "important" than logic? Of course naturally we as humans think that "thinking" and "feeling" are two separate things (as is evident from the ancient belief that emotions came from a different organ than thoughts), but in reality emotions are just thought processes in the brain.

Emotions arise from different brain processes (limbic system) than logic. They give us incentive to make certain decisions that enhance survivability, such as eating sweet/fat/salty foods (which used to be scarce in our environment), procreating, and gaining group approval. They are faster than logic, but may cause us to forgo long-term benefit for immediate gain.

Quote:

If we all make decisions according to processes ("analyze the situation, recall past experiences in similar situations, generate possible responses, predict the positive and negative effects of each alternative course of action, consider ramifications of actions and reactions, imagine how we (and others whose needs and feelings we care about) will feel as a result, assign weights to every aspect of the outcome, and choose the best course of action to produce the desired result."), then what makes you think that if we rewound time the outcome would be different? The processes have not changed. The situation has not changed. Surely we would make the same decision?

Free will is an illusion.

Why don't you get the same result every time you throw dice? Why doesn't an orchestra play a symphony exactly the same way for every performance? There are innumerable ways a neural network can formulate itself since it involves millions of neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Your brain may be affected by recent and past experiences, something you read or saw on TV, people currently important in your life, how you are feeling (studies have been done on how mood affects decisions), etc. You could never have exactly the same starting point, randomness could be induced by viruses, toxins or stray cosmic rays knocking out neurons, and the process of thinking about a choice constantly adds or subtracts neural connections.

More importantly, the mind that is created by my brain can think, and it thinks that its deliberations and choices are self-directed rather than the result of immutable programs. I don't think that we could have gotten as far as we have if we were just robots.

0 Replies

Quote:

Free will is an illusion

Define free will.

IMO free will is not an illusion. What do we mean when we say a person is acting freely, or of his own volitions? We mean to say that the person is acting on his or her desire(in the sense of deciding to do something) in the absence of compulsion, coercion, or constraint.

This makes sense because choice entails a desired course of action out of a possible set of hypothetical alternatives. In a deterministic world, only one event will occur, but an event is not equivalent to nor incompatible with alternatives. Alternatives, in terms of choices, simply mean the possible course of actions that one can take if one desires to do so. That is, an alternative is a "hypothetical" concept of what would happen if a certain property or condition of interest in that event is different.

0 Replies

Terry,
I am answering your three paragraphs respectively. It saves mucking about trying to get the exact quote that I want.

1) What I am saying is MINUS CHAOTIC THEORY. Sure, I agree with you that we live in a quantum universe, but we are dealing with free will, not quantum physics.

2) Why do you seem to think that emotions have anything to do with free will? Sure, they make us different from most animals (although many animals feel complex emotions such as grief up to a certain degree), and sure, they happen in a different system in the brain, but when it comes down to it, they are still just thought processes in the brain.

3) The answer to your question is simple, perhaps you should have thought over it more. The reason that you get different results every time you roll a dice is that the conditions and environment have changed. The direction, magnitude, wind pressure, wind speed, wind direction, surface friction etc have all changed. If I made a decision, then rewound time to a point before I made that decision, the conditions have not changed. At all. Not even slightly on an atomic scale. So that is why you cannot compare rolling a dice in different locations in space and time, to a person making decisions at the same point in space and time.

Ok, that done, I shall now define free will, but indirectly.

Say you are God (or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

You create two identical universes.

Attached to each universe there are two switches.

The red switches change whether chaotic theory is active.

The blue switches change whether humans have free will.

On both universes you put the red switch off.

On both universes you put the blue switch on.

You then start time in both universes, at the point when humans evolve.

Universe A should come out completely and utterly different from universe B.

If this is not the case then you have the experiment wrong. Please repeat the experiment, making sure each step is followed exactly.

How can I make it any simpler than that?

0 Replies

aperson

If you create two identical things that at some point in time will differ, the things were never identical to start with.

If this is not the case then you have the experiment wrong. Please repeat the experiment, making sure each step is followed exactly. :wink:

0 Replies

Nothing is "identical" - even identical twins.

0 Replies

aperson,

I believe there is a significant flaw in your assumption that "chaotic theory" can bve turned off, yielding something we would agree being called a universe.

As you know chaos, in the mathematical sense, is directly linked to processes governed by non-linear parabolic equations governing their passage from one state to the next. Most known systems of this type exhibit chaos (= deterministic unpredictability) over some range of their operating parameters. The hell of it is that most observable processes in our universe admit chaos in some circumstances. This, as was suggested earlier, also includes neural networks such as our brains. Thus unpredictability is an inherent part of our presumed deterministic universe - with or without whatever is meant by your use of the terms "free will" or "illusion".

0 Replies

Yea k.

Cyracuz,
The reason that the two identical things differ is because of free will, or at least the type that I am talking of. If I said that there were two identical universes with chaos but no free will then they would differ; does this mean they weren't the same to start with?

george,
What I was trying to do was remove the chaos factor, so that we can deal with free will alone, but now you are saying that chaos happens in the brain. My first thought towards this was that it changes the argument completely, but really it wouldn't matter because even if some of the processes in our brains have a random element to them, this does not mean we had the "free will" to "decide" how the random events come out.

0 Replies

aperson

Yes. But how can you be so sure that your application of dualism is correct?

0 Replies

Explain.

0 Replies

aperson wrote:

george,
What I was trying to do was remove the chaos factor, so that we can deal with free will alone, but now you are saying that chaos happens in the brain. My first thought towards this was that it changes the argument completely, but really it wouldn't matter because even if some of the processes in our brains have a random element to them, this does not mean we had the "free will" to "decide" how the random events come out.

I guess it depends on what you mean by free will. Chaotic systems are deterministic but inherently unpredictable. More than that they are self-regulating (in the large) and exhibit recurring patterns in their gross features. I believe these features of natural systems, which were not studied or appreciated for what they are until just four decades ago, profoundly alter the philosophical argument.

At the level of human consciousness, we may be dealing simply with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Habitual patterns of thought can over time create observable patterns of action. Who can say that volition plays no part in such things?

The facts remain that designers of advertising messages and packaging can predictably influence the average behavior of large numbers of consumers, but they can't predict if a given person will respond as intended at a specific moment. Various clinical psychological disorders are associated with observable patterns of behavior, Despite this the actions of individuals so afflicted remain unpredictable. Why?

Unpredictability itself, of course, is no proof of volition. However, as self-conscious creatures we all experience the sensation of volition in choices we consciously make every day. Imagine the complexity of the "program" required to achieve both that sensitive dependence and the conscious illusion at the same time.

Finally back to your thought experiment -- would a universe without chaos, that is, without non-linear parabolic systems, be recognizable as a universe at all? I think not.

0 Replies

Somehow I am reminded of the description of the universe as being finite and unbounded.

0 Replies

dyslexia wrote:

Somehow I am reminded of the description of the universe as being finite and unbounded.

Even so, this doesn't at all affect the argument above. Indeed such a finite, but unbounded universe would be typical of non-linear parabolic systems, chaotic in their basic dynamic.

0 Replies

aperson
What I meant was, how can you be sure your way of interpreting the data is correct?

0 Replies

Helge von Koch curve results in, essentially, a line of infinite length surrounding a finite area. Zeno's paradoxes aside, of course.

Don't we just execute programs? Free will is an illusion.

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know