The illusion of free will

It's not like we can work with anything other than our perceptions.

 

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But we can use our intelligence and knowledge to try to understand any difference between what it is we perceive and reality, just as we do so for optical illusions etc.

 

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Right, the 2nd part...

As explained, if you bother to read, it can be argued both ways with regard random events as to what actually causes the outcome that we perceive as random: either it is uncaused or it is caused by a hidden variable. Ask yourself what causes a specific radioactive atom to decay when it does?
Either the cause is hidden from us, or it is non-existent. The qualification I therefore included was to allow for the interpretation that such events are uncaused but in being uncaused they are necessarily random.

it makes no difference whatsoever to the argument I presented, and your criticism here stems from your misunderstanding with regard chaotic indeterminacy as I have explained above, and my premises already allow for quantum indeterminacy (I.e. probabilistic determinism).

Of course you can qualify premises. They're called exceptions. Cause and effect is the primary assumption. That if there are also uncaused things then they are necessarily random is a qualification, an exception, and only needed if you hold to the notion that there are uncaused events.
If you don't hold to the notion of uncaused events (as you claim not to) then the argument stands on the main premise without the need for qualification.

I.e. You work through the argument, which starts with the assumption of all things being caused... And then someone says: "well, what about uncaused events like radioactive decay of an atom?" if the person holds such to be uncaused rather than hidden). So we add in the exception/qualification that there may be uncaused events, but that they are necessarily random (at least within a probability function). The rest of the argument remains in tact and accommodates both views: all things caused, and the allowance for uncaused but random events.

No, that is no what I mean by initiator of action. I have already explained what I meant. It is you who equating this to mean indeterminate agent, when it have already expressly stated what is meant. Initiator of an action is one that is not itself caused. Otherwise it is just another link in the chain. So the conclusion still stands, as your objection is based on a gross misunderstanding on your part.

Perhaps I should have written "or at least still behaves..."
The idea being that they are not mutually exclusive. If they are not randomn they at least still adhere to the rules etc.

There's no problem here. Caused events could be random, and if there are any uncaused events then they are necessarily random. So if an event is random it could be either caused or uncaused, but you would need to know more than merely "it is random" to know which it is.
Are you not keeping up?

Hopefully now you have understood your misunderstanding of what I have said: I.e. I never said that caused events could not be random, and in fact the very nature of probabilistic determinism (remember that stated in the premises) is random but within the probability function.

And, as barcelonic and I have both tried to explain to you and QQ, our own position leads to the same conclusion... That consciousness causes future events. That has never been disputed.
But whereas your conclusion is limited to starting with consciousness as initiator, ours doesn't and it asks what caused consciousness, and takes it back further. Thus we conclude that what you conclude is just a perception.
C leads to D, sure, and that is what we all conclude.
But whereas you are content to say that C is the initiator and that there is genuine freedom in going from C to D, we just happen to say that A leads to B leads to C leads to D and does so without any possibility of genuine freedom.
But we all conclude that C leads to D.

You are on thinking your misunderstanding of what I said. Caused events can also be random.

Yep, C causes D, as we all agree.
But what causes C?

Pathetic, MR. You are complaining about the inclusion of exceptions into an argument, and additional premises that are there to qualify the starting premise?
Seriously?
It's a perfectly legitimate process: start with the basic premise, and then provide for exceptions that may arise.
Let's assume A.
If A then B.
Ah, but what about if there is case C?
Ok, well let's assume D.
If A then B, and if C then D.
Both B and D lead to conclusion E.
If you can not find fault with the premises then find fault with the logic.
It's how arguments are built up.
Is it the cleanest way of stating things? Almost certainly not if this was a formal and concluded paper on the matter.
But it's not.
So to get pedantic about the structure is ridiculousness on your part.

 

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I am referring to the philosophies of (in)determinism. What are you referring to? If you are referring to an indeterminate system then this means merely unpredictable, and you need to distinguish between the practical side (I.e. Accuracy of measurement) and the theoretical side.
Things can be chaotic and unpredictable in a deterministic universe (I.e. Governed by the philosophical nature of determinism) only because of our inability to measure the initial conditions with sufficient accuracy. If we could then theoretically the chaotic system (ie. sensitive to initial conditions) would be predictable.
This is what Lorenz meant with regard chaotic systems, as I have explained... That if we could measure precisely we can predict precisely, but a small inaccuracy at the start equates to a significant different at the end.

 

If it is not predictable, how do we know what the numbers are?
If you mean is it predictable by looking at the pattern of previous numbers, no. But I think that is a rather specific case of what it means to be predictable. But it follows a rule that enables it to be precisely determined for as long as the machines keep going to calculate them (such is the nature of an infinite series). I suggest you look up the Spigot algorithm, as an example.
And since we have a rather good idea of the rule, we can use it to predict what the next digit is.
Only subsequent use of that generated number will tell us if we are correct or not in our prediction.

 

Your knowledge of chaos theory is impressive, but your conclusion that such systems are not really indeterminate is wrong. And since I'm not going to be reduced to another round of my "Yes it is" vs your "No it's not", I will instead quote various authorative articles showing how chaos involves actual ontic indeterminacy and not just epistemic indeterminacy. Let' start with this one:

"An alternative possibility avoiding many of the difficulties exhibited in the chaos+quantum mechanics approach is suggested by the research on far-from-equilibrium systems by Ilya Prigogine and his Brussels-Austin Group (Bishop 2004). Their work purports to offer reasons to search for a different type of indeterminism at both the micro and macrophysical levels.

Consider a system of particles. If the particles are distributed uniformly in position in a region of space, the system is said to be in thermodynamic equilibrium (e.g., cream uniformly distributed throughout a cup of coffee). In contrast, if the system is far-from-equilibrium (nonequilibrium) the particles are arranged so that highly ordered structures might appear (e.g., a cube of ice floating in tea). The following properties characterize nonequilibrium statistical systems: large number of particles, high degree of structure and order, collective behavior, irreversibility, and emergent properties. The brain possesses all these properties, so that the brain can be considered a nonequilibrium system (an equilibrium brain is a dead brain!).

Let me quickly sketch a simplified version of the approach to point out why the developments of the Brussels-Austin Group offer an alternative for investigating the connections between physics, consciousness and free will. Conventional approaches in physics describe systems using particle trajectories as a fundamental explanatory element of their models, meaning that the behavior of a model is derivable from the trajectories of the particles composing the model. The equations governing the motion of these particles are reversible with respect to time (they can be run backwards and forwards like a film). When there are too many particles involved to make these types of calculations feasible (as in gases or liquids), coarse-grained averaging procedures are used to develop a statistical picture of how the system behaves rather than focusing on the behavior of individual particles.

In contrast the Brussels-Austin approach views nonequilibrium systems in terms of nonlinear models whose fundamental explanatory elements are distributions; that is to say, the arrangements of the particles are the fundamental explanatory elements and not the individual particles and trajectories.[8] The equations governing the behavior of these distributions are generally irreversible with respect to time. In addition focusing exclusively on distribution functions opens the possibility that macroscopic nonequilibrium models are irreducibly indeterministic, an indeterminism that has nothing to do with ignorance about the system. If so, this would mean probabilities are as much an ontologically fundamental element of the macroscopic world as they are of the microscopic and are free of the interpretive difficulties found in conventional quantum mechanics.

One important insight of the Brussels-Austin Group's shift away from trajectories to distributions as fundamental elements is that explanation also shifts from a local context (set of particle trajectories) to a global context (distribution of the entire set of particles). Systems acting as a whole may produce collective effects that are not reducible to a summation of the trajectories and subelements composing the system (Bishop 2004 and 2008). The brain exhibits this type of collective behavior in many circumstances (Engel, et al. 1997) and the work of Prigogine and his colleagues gives us another tool for trying to understand that behavior. Moreover, nonlinear nonequilibrium models also exhibit SDIC, so there are a number of possibilities in such approaches for very rich dynamical description of brain operations and cognitive phenomena (e.g., Juarrero 1999). Though the Brussels-Austin approach to nonequilibrium statistical mechanics is still speculative and contains some open technical questions (Bishop 2004), it offers an alternative for exploring the relationship between physics, consciousness and free will as well as pointing to a new possible source for indeterminism to be explored in free will theories."---http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

"In his 1997 book, The End of Certainty, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability."---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism

 

I'm backing out of this debate with Sarkus because frankly its starting to get ridiculous, pedantic, and boring. There are so many premises, many of them contradictory AND unfounded, required to support the thesis that freewill is an illusion that just by Occam's Razor it's proving itself untenable. I otoh present only one premise, that all caused events are also causes, which leads to the conclusion that consciousness, to the extent that is caused, also causes events. This is proof of the REAL causal agency of consciousness, not an illusion of causal agency. We simply have no example in our experience of a caused process NOT being able to cause and influence future events, which appears to be the conclusion?premise?assumption?qualification? of the "freewill is an illusion" thesis. IOW, it really is true that when I choose to move my hand, the hand moves. Conscious decision is obviously causally efficacious in determining our own behavior. There is simply no basis whatsoever for dismissing it as an illusion.

As for this new spin?

Yes it has. You dispute that my conscious decision to raise my hand is not actually causing my hand to raise. That the cause is really something unconscious and physical. You are denying that consciousness plays any role in causing my own actions. That it is only an illusion that I am consciously doing it.

Being caused doesn't invalidate the fact of being a cause. You are saying consciousness is NOT an initiator or cause simply because it is caused by previous events. That's a flawed premise. AS I said, every caused event is also a cause, or intiator of new effects. Since consciousness is caused, it MUST therefore itself cause or initiate affects. It is not an illusion of being a cause.

You're saying consciousness can't be an intiator of future actions simply because it is caused. That's wrong. Every event intiates action and is itself initiated by preceding causes. And as we both know, being caused does not mean that act of initiation is predetermined. Even in daily events there are only probabilistic outcomes from events that are nevertheless strictly caused. With consciousness we have such a degree of amplification of this inherent indeterminacy that it really IS initiating actions that are not predetermined to happen. Real choices and decisions are being made. This is no illusion.

 

Interesting scientific confirmation of attractor-based behavior in the brain leading to decision-making/attention/memory. They're called self-organizing "attactor networks":

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1/abstract


http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/eleme...2b9dcb-a262-3518-a514-47f6b0183a18/c/main.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21731482

 

I guess that I would say that my choice is the result of my 'free will' if it was the uncoerced result of my own internal decision process.

Uncoerced, because if somebody holds a gun to your daughter's head and says 'Do X, or I'll kill her', that's not a free choice, even if doing X came about as a result of your own inner decision process. And if somebody's holding a gun and a sudden seizure makes their finger convulse, firing the gun, I wouldn't call that an exercise of free will, because their inner decision process wasn't involved.

That needn't mean that free choices are uncaused. It needn't even mean that they are locally indetermined. Most of those who argue for the reality of free-will (I'm one of them) would agree that our choices come about as the result of our understanding of the situations we are in, along with our intentions, opinions, emotions, preexisting knowledge and so on. Those kind of things determine our choices and makes them something very different than random rolls of the dice.

And I believe that kind of psychologistic language makes sense of an underlying neurophysiological process that's entirely naturalistic. I'm sure that causality applies to it at that level. (I'm far more of a physicalistic reductionist than many here.)

What champions of free-will are typically arguing against isn't causality so much as it's fatalism. That's the idea that all of our choices were basically imposed on us from outside, because they were already fully determined before we were even born, and likely at the time of the big-bang itself. It's essentially the idea that our own internal decision processes and the choices they seemingly result in are illusory, nothing more than a row of causal dominoes falling down. It's also seems to imply that individuals have no responsibility for their actions and that human life is little more than puppets being jerked around by their strings.

That's where the idea of indeterministic or probabilistic causality is relevant. It allows us to continue saying that every state, event or whatever it is, is the result of an immediately preceeding cause, without necessarily committing ourselves to the thesis that everything that happens right now was already predetermined by the state of the universe in the more remote past.

I think that very likely there's an element of novelty and unpredictability to how things evolve. Put another way, even if we could know the state of the universe in the more remote past with all the accuracy physically possible, we couldn't predict precisely how the universe will evolve subsequently. If we could reproduce the physical state of the big-bang with all of the accuracy physically possible and then fire it off a second time, the new universe would very likely evolve in a very different way than this one, despite the initial conditions being as close to the same as physically possible (I'm thinking of quantum-style indeterminacy here).

Returning to the idea of free-will, let's say that 'free-will' means that our decisions are the uncoerced result of our own inner neurophysiological decision process (however neuroscience eventually explains it) reacting to the situations that we find ourselves in. If indeterminate or probabilistic causality suggests that the situations that we find ourselves in and our own neurophysiological states that causally react to them weren't already predetermined in all of their details long before the situations even came up and perhaps before we were even born, causality (in the less deterministic sense) would seem to be consistent with the existence of free-will in the naturalistic sense I favor.

In other words, I see us as physiological organisms that are in the position of having to react to their environment in real time, ad-hoc. We find ourselves in the position of having to make real choices, choices that weren't already predetermined for us long ago. What happens in our heads matters and our actions and behavior arise from that process.

To the extent that there's still physical determinism, it's the situation that we find ourselves in along with our own intentions, understanding and passions that are determining what we do. If we try to push things back, asking what determined that situation and those inner states, we can probably make it work reasonably well for short temporal distances. But if we push harder, moving further into the past, I suspect that things will get fuzzier and recede into unpredictability pretty fast. That's consistent with our ability to talk about people's personalities and tendencies and our ability to use those to kind of roughly predict in a probabilistic way the kind of things that the other person might possibly do further out in the future. When it comes to predicting what some unborn person is going to do 200 years from now, we're in the dark.

I'm saying that I think that those kind of commonplace observations are likely a pretty accurate description of how many of the more complex sort of natural events evolve. The opposing determinist argument seems to depend on the existence of hidden variables that supposedly still precisely predetermine everything, even if human beings can't know them and despite things not exactly looking that way in our lives. But if we can't know it, then why have faith in that metaphysical belief? Why insist that all our free-will intuitions are just "illusions"?

Obviously I don't know all the things that I just wrote either, but at least it's consistent with how reality looks to me, consistent both with how I perceive my own decision process and with my understanding of science. That's why I prefer my version.

 

If you read the first closely they are talking about how it is modelled, not what it actually is, through their use of probabilistic distributions. As soon as you look at probabilities you of course open the model to indeterminacy.
What they suggest is that where there are too many individual particles to make individual calculations for each and every particle of the model, you instead look at the distribution - i.e. probabilities.
So what you are posting here is nothing to do with reality itself but to do with modelling that reality in a new way.

Let's move on to the second:
Oh, look, it's nothing but an argument that the universe is not deterministic.
Wow, have you looked at the assumptions I used... see where it said probabilistic determinism, which as explained is inherently indeterministic, which looks at probability.
Wow, go figure.
It also has nothing to do with chaos, as you suggest it does.

 

You have singularly failed to provide valid reasoning as to why any of the premises are unfounded, and not only that you continually misunderstand them despite great pains to explain them repeatedly.

Occam's razor would actually prefer the notion that freewill is an illusion, unless of course you define freewill merely as being what we consciously perceive. And as explained, there has never been a disagreement that that definition of freewill exists, but it also limits the understanding you can reach.
Occam's razor would prefer it because it does not require the underlying particles to operate contrary to the laws of the universe as we currently know them, as repeatedly explained.

You present one premise that concludes that consciousness is part of a causal chain. As is a rolling dice. As is each element in Newton's Cradle.
But, as is your want, you jump from "it is a cause... freewill is genuine!" with no further explanation other than repeating your notion of freewill that limits itself to what we consciously perceive.

Further, you fail to understand that whether freewill is illusory or not, because you are not consciously able to experience freewill as anything other than how we perceive it, judging it by how we perceive it is no basis for an argument - as whether it is illusory or not we experience it in the same way.

So perhaps it is better you back out as you have claimed much but offered nothing, despite your insistence to the contrary.

 

Your semantical tapdancing is really starting to nauseate me..

Uh no..calculating out the next digit of pi isn't predicting anything. Prediction means to be able to know in advance. In advance of what? In advance of knowing what the next digit is by calculating it out. Got it? The sequence of pi's digits is totally unpredictable and random. Any math teacher can tell you that.

"Alas no: despite some surprises like finding 999999 at position 762, and 314159 at position 176,451, statistical tests have shown the digits in pi are completely random."---

"The ratio between the circumference (distance around) of a circle to the diameter (the length across). Approximately 3.141592653... This constant is represented by the symbol pi. The digits of pi have been proven to be unpredictable and unstopping."

"In mathematics irrational numbers are numbers that go on forever, but moreover the digits are completely unpredictable. Pi (π) is a good familiar example, the ratio between the diameter of a circle and it’s circumference. π = 3.1415926535…"

 

The illusion of cause and effect as a premise?
Or are you claiming "cause and effect" are existent?

Also how can "nothing" cause anything?
Is "nothingness" an illusion too?

 

Nice!
Have you ever considered that the ability to freely choose between alternatives is different to the provision of choices available to choose from?

Also have you considered the possibility that even if fully predetermination exists, freewill, autonomy of choice, agency etc could be predetermined into the scheme of things?
That the existence of freewill and freedom to choose accordingly is predetermined?

 

One thing I do know and believe quite strongly is that "creativity" is directly related to oppression of freedom. The essence of creativity is freewill.

The predetermination of the existence of freewill is essential for sustainable evolutionary success. As it takes creativity to provide the evolution.

With out free will this universe would be entirely dead, as life and (pro)creativity are directly associated.

The greater the freedom the greater the creativity.

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To say that evolution is a fully determined process contradicts the current believe in random selection

So we have a paradox, of those believing in a fully deterministic universe and the simultaneously held belief in Darwinism.
It is also why one face [organism) is never absolutely and exactly the same as another. [therefore infinite diversity requires freewill [determined in-determinism] to be a reality and not a mere illusion]
@ Sarkus,
Do you hold to the belief in the validity of Darwinism?

 

I can't be held responsible for your inaccuracies.

Yes it is.
Prediction applies to a system. You have assumed the system to be "look at the previous digits and try to establish the next state (i.e. predict the Nth digit)".
Other systems exist in which Pi is predictable. And it is so predictable that we can actually establish it with 100% accuracy.
We merely need to use algorithms.

I repeat, if you are referring to the system of using the previous digits to try to establish the next, then yes, as stated up front, it is unpredictable.
But that does not make Pi unpredictable... only that system (of trying to guess digits from the preceeding ones, which will be the system referred to in any quote you try to post).

Pi is a number. It exists as a number independent of any calculation. It is not a system in and of itself. It can not therefore, in and of itself, be "unpredictable".
There exist numerous systems of trying to predict the next digit: one of which is using previous numbers. And in this regard, the next digit is unpredictable.
But there exist systems of establishing the next digit that do not rely on the previous numbers, and they can have 100% predictive ability, which is why we can use them to actually calculate those digits.

But heck, you'll just refer to this as semantic tapdancing.

 

Are you talking about the temporal nature of cause and effect being illusory? If so, then it may be, but the illusory nature does not impact the argument presented. Time is irrelevant to the argument which purely premises that events are caused (and I know we use temporal language, but that is because if time is illusory it is a damn good one and our language has developed around it).
If you mean that the concept of events causing another (even if it all happens at time t=0) is the illusion, then the argument would not hold up, since its premise is that cause and effect holds. If you disagree with the premises, as I said from the outset, you will reach a different conclusion. I have no issue with that. Never have. But if you accept the premises then I think the argument holds.

Please define "nothingness" and show that it is a possibility that requires consideration.

 

nah! If you were truly interested in the subject at hand, you would define it yourself. You would also explore the ramifications to your position.
A bit like a moderator suggesting I run a thread in Physics and Math about the unaccounted EM energy propagating throughout the universe and how this invalidates the need for dark mass/ energy.
No.. if he was genuinely interested in the truth about his beliefs he would run a thread himself.
However I do not believe you, Sarkus, are actually interested in discovering the truth about your beliefs. Your request for me to explain the influence of "nothing" to you for a third time is evidence of that. Go figure it out for yourself, is all I can suggest...
At t=0 (duration) the universe... blah blah blah!

well that says a lot hey?

the premise is that "cows can jump over the moon"
If you disagree with the premise then that's ok.... :m:

 

Not sure I'm following all this, but you think it requires creativity to provide evolution? As in biological evolution?
It requires no creativity at all... merely random mutation that get passed on and result in survival in an environment where non-mutated versions can not survive.

Do you think plants have freewill?

"Random selection"? You need to be careful that when you refer to random you are no merely referring to a pseudo-randomness - i.e. which looks random due to our lack of knowledge, but which might actually be determined.

I am not sure I understand how you are using or understanding the term freewill, if you think that genetic diversity in our features requires freewill.
No two rocks in the universe will be identical... so do they have freewill?

Validity as in whether his conclusions logically flow from his assumptions (irrespective of the soundness of his assumptions)? I don't know his works sufficiently to comment.
If you mean do I believe his theories to be true? I think some of his theories may still hold water, but I think on the whole they have been superceded.
Or do you mean something else by the question?

 

The use of the Pi digits was only to exemplify the issue of determined indeterminism to the debate... why have you missed this?