The illusion of free will

My body urgently wanted to sleep. I decided against the biological imperatives screaming in my brain-mind construct. I made an 'illogical' (according to the non-free will choice imposition being attempted by my physiological needs) choice to stay awake. That 'illogical choice' was free will in action; ie, breaking 'programming'. That is what humans are best at when compared to closed loop brain-mins states/programming of lesser animal intellects.

That is an objective observable capability that free will represents. Animals have various levels of curiosity/boredom driven "excursions" from hard-wired loop-programming, sure; but human intellect has taken that to an altogether different level, and can "Imagine Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast", as Alice put it in hat equally imagination free will driven FICTION which the human intellect is so noted for above all other primates/animals.

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I pointed out often, elsewhere and long ago now, that the neuronal processes of the brain SUPPORT and FACILITATE such higher level imagination and other 'world construct' perspective/interaction/evolution etc. They do NOT actually CONTROL or DIRECT them except in AUTONOMOUS LOOP "programmed survival response situations" (like "fight or flight" reactions; or "breathing" and other system-maintenance hard-wired routines etc). When it comes to the above-the-survival-immediate response situations, animals and humans display various levels of 'gaming' and 'chance' and 'free will' decisions which start a decision chain which may lead to survival-improving serendipitous "Learning/lessons" which may stick with the world construct or fade away.

The point about HUMAN free will and curiosity/boredom and 'just for the hell of it' breaking of programming and imagining possibilities not immediately evident in the existing world construct/programming choices, is that in humans that capability is way more developed in power and scope of application according to greater degrees of freedom for free will action/choice which our much greater (in scope, time, complexity etc) brain-mind attributes and capacities afford us in this area of 'unbidden' creation of one's OWN 'world construct' at the drop of a hat (witness Alice in Wonderland imagery which no 'pre-determined causes' can ever claim to have 'produced' as 'a matter of predictable course'.

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No, no religious arguments based logics/info from me, mate.

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These are objective observable/measurable variations of the said capabilities for free will degrees of freedom amongst the animal kingdom and the human kingdom. The human intellect capacity/scope and degrees of freedom from animal level "Eat or be eaten" specialized/limited loop programming are entirely different once the imagination can encompass the concept of abstract infinity, mathematics, universal possibilities beyond the obvious, etc etc.

Please read the other responses I made to various posters for more info on the rest of the issues that you mentioned above. Thanks.

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No it wasn't. Any decision you make can be considered a product of cause and effect in your brain. Whether you choose to sleep or choose to do something else, that decision making process was influenced by pre-existing memories, your (instinctive?) need for intellectual stimulation happened to win out.

 

I disagree; for the following reason. The 'weight' which you place on any 'physiological imperative' signal and any 'intellectual stimulation need' is also UP TO YOU to place on same. Once you free will allocate such 'weight' to each chioce, you make your choice according to that 'weighting'. It is a conscious effort in that case.

Only when one is brainwashed or making subconscious 'automatic responses' etc, without any further free will weighting between competing choices/demands, does the non-free will 'cause and effect' process take control. You can over-ride such brainwashing and autonomous responses at anytime if you are conscious of the process (which Indian Yoga practitioners and deep 'freedivers' do all the time by their free will whenever they control their breathing from the automatic rate/patterns caused by the underlying physiological 'norms' wired into the body-brain processes at subconscious level).

Like I said to others elsewhere, the brain-mind processes SUPPORT/FACILITATE decision making, but they don't actually cause or control what that decision will be in all instances, especially in the instances I already exampled where your free will overrides all other 'causes'. Your imagination creates reasons/possibilities that YOU introduce, not your body-brain processes as such.

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How do you know that your decision making process was free from the prior influence of all the other things you experienced?

 

The key word in all this is "display", which has never been denied.

it is indeed way more developed. As is our consciousness itself.
But at its core it is a (probabilistically) determined process (per the assumption on which this is based) with the complexity hidden from us, and our consciousness only being aware of what it considers significant influences.
So again, nothing here disputes the concept of freewill as illusory, other than if you define it such that it's reality is judged solely by its appearance.

 

I completely agree with OP, there is no free will, and I do not agree with compatibilism, as I think what they refer to is more appropriately called "freeDOM."

Sam Harris has an excellent youtube video on the debate over free will. Watch it!

The most important aspect is its relationship to religion. All religions pretty much require free will, and thus God is able to judge his creations, as they are responsible for their actions. It all falls apart under close inspection, though.

All criminal behavior, violence, and murder is ultimately traceable to neurological conditions - not some ephemeral notion that people "choose" to do evil, for no apparent reason.

 

He has quite a few but I hope you are referring to the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas that he did in Sydney Opera House. It's the best you'll find and really does cover all of the stuff we've been discussing in this thread.
I second that recommendation and challenge anyone here to try to refute his points. Watching the video it became clear to me that he's thought about this topic a great deal in his work as a neuroscientist.

Guys it seems quite long but its so fascinating you won't mind the length once you're watching it, and the first 30 mins really is a must-see.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3raA1EwrI

 

They aren't "our limitations", they are properties of the universe, constituents of its physical nature, unless all our current theory is simply and completely wrong. Chaos is no more a "convention" than the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, or the relativistic modifications of Newton's Laws for handling high speeds. Bell's Theorem is not a "convention", it is a rigorously mathematical derivation from hard core physical theory, and its empirical confirmation has been replicated thousands of times.

According to all modern physics, what we call cause and effect is an illusion. What we call probability is not. One's philosophy should be adjusted accordingly - the option of just carrying on with some kind of bottom up reductive determinism in which all mental events (and by laddering down, all events above the bottom level whatever it may be) are epiphenomena without the causal import one attributes to that bottom level, is irresponsible. Yes, you may be shown correct after the next big discovery has led us to discard all current theory, but that's not the way to bet, eh?

No. "We experience" (with the caveat that there is no "we" outside of the whole of this experiencing) not the connections of neurons but entities made up of the firing patterns - the substrate, the neurons and their connections, is static in the moment - you can freeze it in liquid nitrogen and examine the structure unchanged for months; the patterns of firing this substrate supports exist only in motion through time, must be maintained and recreated continually to exist.

The bulb is not the light. The ink is not the letter. The substrate is not the pattern. The pattern is an entity, an event - it exists, itself. Its causes are not neurons.

Harris is brilliant and entertaining, but he is wrong to take as the basis of his argument that freedom of the will requires that it be supernatural. I suspect his alertness to religious hooha and its common employment of supernaturally bestowed free will has led him astray there.

The central observation is that substrate does not cause pattern. It can constrain pattern, influence pattern, etc, but it does not cause pattern. One is simply misusing the term, if arguing that neurons cause ideas. Mental events in the human brain are patterns of patterns of neuron firing, taking place over time and space, and to some significant degree -> causing each other <-. Ideas cause ideas. The direction of causation, if any, is the reverse - Dreams motivate decisions, cause mental events which lead to behaviors. One of the categories of these patterns of influence of patterns we term "will", and it has degrees of freedom - in some people more than others.

 

Yep, that's the video. Post count is not high enough to link yet. I found another one of his equally thoughtful and accurate, called "who says science has nothing to say about morality." Maybe I'll post a thread for a discussion of that topic on its own, because it certainly deserves one if there hasn't been one yet. That topic is even more controversial than free will and I have argued it extensively.

As far as I can tell you just did a bunch of fancy gymnastics and re-arranging but didn't change the fundamentals going on at all. Harris does address quantum theory; he states that throwing an element of randomness into the mix does not create free will any more than throwing dice to make decisions every so often would.

Regarding "ideas causing each other" it still doesn't seem to change anything. I'm not in control of those ideas. I don't choose what my next thought will be. Thoughts just appear in consciousness.

 

Which is one good reason nobody here has ascribed free will to quantum effects. Why do you think Harris bothers to say that?

(btw: the ability to rest a decision on the result of a throw of dice is an odd example of absence of degrees of freedom in the will)

The reason I mentioned quantum stuff above was to get banish one particularly confusing deterministic fallacy - that higher level phenomena are caused by lower level ones, with the physical world determined by a chain of subatomic cause and effect stretching forward and back through time. It seems to help, in these discussions, if we can clearly establish that there is nothing special about the human shorthand approximating heuristic concept we label "cause and effect". It's a useful concept, but it isn't any more fundamental an aspect of reality than several other concepts - and at least a couple, such as probability, can claim more fundamental roles.

It prevents you from ascribing your thoughts to the static physical structure of your brain.

So you cannot, say, choose to have your mind add a couple of numbers you see in your checkbook?

 

No one is doing that, and it seems you are equating cause and effect to some form of reductionism. This is not necessary.

Take Conway's Game of Life, for example. If you start with a random jumble of cells within the game, eventually some patterns emerge, and at one level you can clearly see that one pattern "causes" another.
If you weren't aware of the underlying rules that the game runs by, and one of those patterns was the arbiter of your perception, such that all it could see were those patterns, then it would conclude that patterns cause patterns etc.
But this is to ignore the rules that the game operates by, which the arbiter of perception is unaware of.

So while patterns undoubtedly "cause" patterns (as patterns in the Game Of Life can "cause" other patterns) this is simply to ignore the nature of what those patterns are, and how they are allowed to even exist.

 

How do you feel about timing and freewill?
eg. "A man sitting on a park bench determining exactly when he moves off that bench to catch a train to a yet to be determined place. To arrive at a yet to be determined time.
1 millisecond either way, and his and every one elses entire future is changed.
As an aside: Is he dictating the future for every one or is he the supplicant?

 

The poster who claimed we might experience the connections of neurons as ideas was at least threatening to do that.

Meanwhile, I am specifically and explicitly attempting to prevent the equation of cause/effect with reductionism.

You would conclude that even if you were aware of the underlying rules etc. You would even name the patterns and talk about them as causing or doing this or that. People build launchers to emit gliders, etc.

Not at all. It is the valid use of the word "cause", rather than the empty assertion that the rules of the game and the initial distribution "caused" this or that complex, multigenerational pattern.

 

Say you place a billiard ball out in deep space, floating in the vacuum.
It is being acted upon by an infinite number of influences. Yet If the correct amount of effort is placed at any point on it is surface it will move as directed. It is entirely free to act as is required of it and the laws of this universe. Now consider if that billiard ball was self willed and self animated. It is free to move in any direction it chooses. Is this not freewill in action?
The point is, what it chooses is irrelevant. The fact that it is free to choose between an infinite number of options [directions] is. Especially at exactly what moment it enacts on it's decisions.

 

Understood. As long as you don't assume that everyone who argues for the illusion is arguing a reductionist position.

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Sure, and in doing so you limit the nature and scope of what you consider "cause" to that level of activity.
But that does not negate them being caused by, brought about by, the underlying activity. Remove the underlying activity and you remove the pattern. The pattern is an expression of that underlying activity. It is an interpretation of how the underlying rules and laws manifest.

It is "a" valid use, if you limit the term to only be applicable at the level of pattern you're looking at.
But if the patterns are not caused by the initial starting conditions and the individual elements adhering to the rules and laws of the game, what are they caused by? Or are you suggesting that they are uncaused?

 

This seems to be commenting to something quite at variance with my comment.

That's not right. A real cause has a real effect. Randomness is the illusion because there are things going we on don't see, so we basically guess using probabilities.

That doesn't come across very clear. About irresponsibility one should speak for oneself.

It's not a bet yet new verifiable knowledge reduces uncertainty.

It's not no, that's basically expounding on my thought.

Where was Harris mentioned in my writing.

 

Firstly, there are some physicists who believe causality is an illusion but they make up an overwhelming minority of living physicists today. If you believe that ALL OF MODERN PHYSICS subscribed to this idea then surely there'd be an article or webpage somewhere you can link us to in order to better understand where you are coming from on this?

Secondly, the underlined could be rephrased to this: 'the basis of his argument that freedom of the will does not exist'.
That is all 'supernatural' means, and given how the talk is asserting as it's point that free will doesn't exist I'm struggling to understand how the primary assertion could ALSO be the basis of the argument??
That is like the many religious people who form arguments from the basis that God does exist. It's insane and I think we're all smart enough here to see through something so illogical.

Similarly, I can stand in a gymnasium and move in any direction along the floor. I can choose out of an infinite number of directions too. I don't think this changed the essential question whatsoever.
If you were unable to choose in such a scenario then both of our arguments would be equally false, because mine depends on the illusion of free will being entirely indistinguishable from your notion of free will; in both we would require the same 'choices'.

 

"Physics, particularly 20th century physics, does have one lesson to impart to the free will debate; a lesson about the relationship between time and determinism. Recall that we noticed that the fundamental theories we are familiar with, if they are deterministic at all, are time-symmetrically deterministic. That is, earlier states of the world can be seen as fixing all later states; but equally, later states can be seen as fixing all earlier states. We tend to focus only on the former relationship, but we are not led to do so by the theories themselves.

Nor does 20th (21st) -century physics countenance the idea that there is anything ontologically special about the past, as opposed to the present and the future. In fact, it fails to use these categories in any respect, and teaches that in some senses they are probably illusory.[9] So there is no support in physics for the idea that the past is “fixed” in some way that the present and future are not, or that it has some ontological power to constrain our actions that the present and future do not have. It is not hard to uncover the reasons why we naturally do tend to think of the past as special, and assume that both physical causation and physical explanation work only in the past present/future direction (see the entry on thermodynamic asymmetry in time). But these pragmatic matters have nothing to do with fundamental determinism. If we shake loose from the tendency to see the past as special, when it comes to the relationships of determinism, it may prove possible to think of a deterministic world as one in which each part bears a determining—or partial-determining—relation to other parts, but in which no particular part (i.e., region of space-time) has a special, stronger determining role than any other. Hoefer (2002) uses these considerations to argue in a novel way for the compatiblity of determinism with human free agency."---http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

"It seems to me that the most common notion of determinism (probably inspired by classical mechanics) is this: given a specification of all facts, and given comprehensive deterministic laws of nature, then the future is fixed. There is no reason here to even mention causation – it adds nothing to the scenario. One could be a Humean about causation and still endorse the deterministic picture. And given the fact that in this physics-inspired vision the mathematical depiction of laws is symmetric with regard to time, it would be equally true to say that the past is fixed by the specification. This is inconsistent with causation, which is not a symmetric process. One might believe that the mathematically specified physical laws comprise a model of a causal world, but the laws themselves don’t constitute a theory of causation, and may very well be inconsistent with the idea of a causal process.

On this last point, I recalled a paper I had read a few years ago by Carl Hoefer: “Causality and Determinism: Tension, or OutrightConflict.” In this paper, Hoefer defines a deterministic world specifically as one governed by deterministic micro-physical laws, and then goes on to argue that this definition is inconsistent with the presence of causation, using several philosophical theories from the literature as examples of how causation might be characterized."---http://guidetoreality.blogspot.com/2011/12/determinism-doesnt-imply-causal.html