Free will .......

pswfps

In rejoinder to your reductionist points.

1. "A brain" may be a necessary but not sufficient basis for sentience and awareness. (Biological evidence plus Ryle's view of the physicality of the mind as a "category Mistake")
2. Laws of the universe are not "physical" per se. " Physicality" is a contruction of sentience. Also physical modelling of the brain is an ad hoc occupation extending even to quantum levels.
3. "Choice" is an anthropomorhic projection as might be the concept of "an animate universe".

Okay...so this you may say is merely a demolition exercise....but it highlights the problem of axioms when speaking of human behaviour.

Hi fresco, thanks for interesting reply. I'm afraid I have no formal philosophical training and had to lookup "reductionist." Whilst I find that viewpoint quite comfortable and rational for everyday use, I am prepared to keep an open mind.

1) I think we can say that a brain is necessary on the basis that sentience is not apparent where there is no brain function. You say that sentience needs more than just physical brain function to exist. However, this assertion seems to be based on lack of knowledge rather than actual knowledge, ie, the nature of sentience and any relationship it may have with a brain. I'll have to lookup "Ryle's view" - would you mind posting a v.brief summary?

2) OK, but the point was to suggest that the material of the brain is fundamentally no different to the material of anything else and thus all matter follows the same mode of existence, at a fundamental level. If a brick has no choice, how then a brain?

3) All human concepts and understanding are anthropocentric - how could they no be? I do not believe that the universe has a conscious choice about how it unfolds, at least not in the humanly understood way. Thinking about it more, even if the universe has some unknown decission making property, a brain still could not be said to operate freely.

Are choice and will different? ie 'I have the will to choose' .... 'I choose to have the will.'

pswfps

On failure of reductionism.

Ryle's concept of "category mistake" ....naive tourists having been shown around the colleges and libraries of Oxford asking "but where is the University"....(Buildings and infrastructure = Brain University=Mind).

The endocrine system and the immune system are both thought to compliment the brains "cognitive activity".

Some theories of cognition (Maturana) see it as a mere extension of general life processes. Homo sapiens is not unique in his "cognitive abilities". Instead we are offered a nested systems view of "life" from "cell" to "ecosystem" in which each level is "explained" by its functional status relative to the next. This is non-anthropocentric and non reductionist.

I have found this proof for freewill by Lucas. Be it sound or be it not sound, I think that it is still important.

1. (Freewill) Determinism <=> for any human h there exists at least one (deterministic) logical system L(h) which can completely reliably predict H's actions in all circumstances.
2. For any logical system L a sufficiently skilled mathematical logician (equipped with a sufficiently powerful computer if necessary) can construct some statements T(L) which are true but unprovable in L.(this follows from the proof of Gödel's theorem)
3. If a human m is a sufficiently skillful mathematical logician (equipped with a sufficiently powerful computer if necessary) then if m is given L(m), he or she can construct T(L(m)) and
4. Determine that they are true which L(m) could not do.
5. Hence L(m) does not reliably predict m's actions in all circumstances.
6. Hence m has freewill.
7. But there is insufficient qualitative difference between mathematical logicians and the rest of the population for it to be plausible to believe that the former have freewill and the latter do not.

Extropy,

That entire argument rests on the concept that there is a coherent integrated "self" with respect to time. Simple "self observation" yields the opposite. Indeed any form of "logic" based on static set theory is suspect when applied to the dynamics of cognition. This is why I argue for the "social functionality" of the concept of "free will" rather than its "actuality".

Hi fresco, sorry for delay, was away over the weekend...


I think this example misrepresents reductionism. Firstly, one does not go to the colleges and libraries and subsequently discover a university, rather one goes to the university and discovers the buildings. Reductionsm, from what I have read, works from the top down, ie the whole (university) is explained by an examination of it's components, in this case the builings. Secondly, a reductionist would be entitled to argue that an intermediate level of abstraction must exist between the concepts of libraries and the university if libraries et el are insufficient to explain the university.


I can accept that it is not anthropocentric in the sense that it does not insist on the universe revolving around human existence. However there remains a tacit acceptance that the human perception is a valid description of something which is in a sense anthropocentric. However, I may have missed that mark on that one and don't think it is useful to pursue it further.

As you know, in a reductive framework of understanding, each level is explained by the operation of the level immediately below. From what I've read on Wikipedia, the nested system of "levels" you describe seems to be in accordance with reductionism. Have I missed something there?

Reductionism is the view that the whole is merely the sum of its parts. In the case of the university, it is clearly more than the sum of its physical components and Ryle argues by analogy so is "mind".

As for human perception necessarily succumbing to the ultimate level of "anthropocentrism" we need to consider that perception is active not passive. Therefore if we deliberately set out to collect data in accordance with some non-anthropocentric model (e.g. the gaia hypothesis) it could be argued that we avoid that pitfall. Indeed Maturana is interpreted by Capra as an example of such avoidance because he sets out to model the "sustainability" of living systems rather than their "predictability" as would be sought by mainstream science which seeks to "control". This brings us full circle back to the significance of "will" which may simply be an evolutionary desire to "attempt to control".

Well, according to Wikipedia, reductionism is a little more subtle than that. Whilst it says that the whole is explainable by an examination of its parts, it further says that it is only explainable by examining the parts which are , conceptually, one level below in a tree of understanding. The example it gives is of a modern computer system. A computer in all it's functional prowess cannot be explained in terms of electrons, NAND gates, OR gates etc. It can however be explained in terms of processors, graphics cards, hard disks etc. Eventually, as you descend through the hierarchy, you will get to the stage where a very small component can be explained by logical gates, semiconductors and ultimately electron migration.

So whilst the university cannot be explained in terms of buildings or books etc, a reductionist will quite rightly argue that there must be at least one conceptual level of understanding between a building and a university, which is why a university cannot be explained in terms of buildings and so on. Similarly, if a mind cannot be explained by the neurological function of a brain, there must be a missing level of understanding between the two concepts.

Based on this, I think we can quite safely dispense with Ryle's "university" argument as presented.

pswfps,

Look at Wikipedia "denials of reductionism" to see where Ryle and Capra are coming from. This "missing level of understanding" which you raise is the very crux of the inadequacy of reductionism ! Components are subservient to the logic of "the whole" not vice versa.

OK, I've had a quick look.

I would say that emergentism is a valid alternative to reductionism but nothing more. Both views seem to suffer from the same problem in that absence of knowledge is filled with an assumption. We both agree that a mind cannot be explained by the neurological activity of the brain - there seems to be no way to connect these two phenomena in a cause and effect manner. Now in the case of emergentism, the assumption is that since a mind cannot be explained in terms of neurological activity, the mind will forever remain an inexplicable and emergent phenomenon. In the case of reductionism, the assumption is that a "gap" of unknown size in conceptual understanding exists and which if filled would satisfactorily connect the brain and mind. To me, both views seem equally valid at first glance, although emergentism could be considered a little defeatist.

You might find this interesting though. About a year ago I was thinking about thinking and it occurred to me that one can never actually understand the nature of "self." Basically, to understand the nature of my thoughts and my own sentience, I must run a thought process to examine my own thought processes. However, the job can never be done since I would then have to run another thought process to understand the original thought process and another to understand that one, then another and so on ad infinitum. Maybe this is a strike against reductionism since it seems to deny the possibility of ever filling in the supposed conceptual gap between brain and mind?

pswfps

"Self-observation" is certainly problematic ! It has linkages to (a)spiritual concepts of "self dissipation" Krishnamurti(b) esoteric concepts of different levels of consciousness Gurdjieff (c) second order cybernetic models of "the observation of observation" Von Foerster and (d) deflationary views of "consciousness" as an epiphenomenon indulged in by a "social self" reified by language.Dennett
I have included key players in italics should you wish to follow up.

As I've said many times in these A2K forms, I consider the issue of free will (vs determinism) to be a false issue. To begin with, there is no agent of freedom or object of deterministic forces. We are the world, the field of forces. We feel free or determined only so long as we identify with a "self", an agent of actions and a center or recipient of impressions (what we call the experiences "happening to" the self). As I see it, I AM the world (and so are you). Every experience that comprises my life IS me; it does not happen to a "me." The Cosmos is free and I am that cosmos. To think that I am in the middle of it, that I suffer its directions is based on the false assumption of the "I" or ego-self. All the forces acting on me (this organism) ARE me; therefore its freedom is my freedom, that is to say, the freedom of my true (extraego) self. In summary, I am not determined, because there is no "I" to be determined, and there is no freewill because there is no self to be an agent of freedom. There is only the spontaneous self-determining Cosmos, Dharma, Brahma, God, Allah, whatver you wish to call it. No SEPARATE me.

We are the "victims" of our genes and environment. Our realities are what they are as we function in our environment. Our minds can only perceive what we think we see and do, but our minds are not always a reliable transmitter of factual, objective, information.

JLN,

Yes "self" type (d) admirably illustrates "no-self" type (a).

BTW You might like this BBC discussion of "relativism" which has at the end of it a reference to Foucault's views on "language molding reality".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20060119.shtml

JLN, if I read you correctly, you seem to believe that all your perceptions of self and the universe are nothing more that the creations of your own mind. Whilst I can notionally accept this, the natural progression of this type of thinking is to mistrust your own perceptions, or even develop contempt for them, which seems like a recipe for madness.

Do you really believe that perceptions of self as distinct from an external universe are illusory?

I'm starting to feel claustrophobic inside my own mind...

pswfps,

Not to pre-empt JLN's answer to that but I suggest you might analyse the term "madness" with reference say to Llang's view of it as "a sane response to an ijnsane society"

But according to JLN, "society" is nothing but a perception conjured up by his own mind. It is of his own making so if society is perceived as insane, he has made it that way, which means he is insane.

I'm not sure about the possibility of a sane response to an insane self.

Is there a difference between 'adaptation' and 'evolution'? Would either require or entail active participation of the organism affected?

What influence, if any, would/could 'free will' affect the outcome of either?

Adapt is a good word here, because we are the "consequence" of our genes and environment. How we evaluate our ability to adapt is subjective at best based on values we learn. We might be all wrong.