Why free will is impossible

I believe you are entirely on the right track in the last half of the post.

The only point I would have is that you seem to be concerned that being predictable removes your ability to freely do as you chose. Predictability isn't the same as predetermination. Predictability is local and temporary. That fact that we can predict a person's actions doesn't mean he isn't doing exactly what he wants to do, after thoroughly considering his alternatives and influences and making an informed decision to act in accordance with his wished. If you had all the information there was about his "input" and "character" you could predict him, and he would be fine with that. Free and predictable. If he has worked on his character and is proud of it, he wouldn't want it any other way.

But that doesn't mean that all eternity is set in stone right now. Because it turns out there are entities (us) who have the ability to understand how things work and what causes result in particular effects. And because we have a will and we want to exercise that will to our benefit (and to the benefit of those we care about) we can manipulate things to turn out differently than the unreflective clockwork mechanisms involved in determining the future of most systems would cause. We can predict results and change them at will.

These guys like to say that we are a clock too, which is ridiculous. A clock can't look at it's mechanism and decide it wants to run faster or slower, or stop and wait a while. It is a mechanism that can't see what the future holds and take action to change it.

 

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There is nothing ridiculous about biological clocks.

Arguably, that's what a living organism--even a single cell--amounts to. To say that we are really only "intelligent" clocks who can look at their mechanisms isn't ridiculous either. Anaesthetists can "stop" some of these internal clocks, neuroscientists can tinker with them. So we can and we do "look" at the mechanisms.

And, you are still arguing from the standpoint that free will is a given. You have not provided anything that could be remotely construed as "proof" that it exists in the first place, or alternatively that it doesn't exist.
Playing around with the meaning of words like "predictable" or "predetermined" doesn't cut it.

What you may not realise is that a "proof" has to show unequivocally that you have free will, that your actions are independent of "compulsion", and that you initiate an action independently of any external cause.

You can't do this, and nor can anyone else. Live with it.

 

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Limited time (it's late), so I may have to come back and respond to some of your post after the 4th...

I see. I likely misunderstood your comment then. Was your point only ro say that when I said "whether there is free will or not, it makes sense to go on living" that some people kill themselves? If so, then I guess mea culpa. I should have been more precise in my statement and said "RoG seems to be suggesting that if we are robots then we should be willing to kill ourselves because our lives are meaningless. On the contrary, whether there is free will or not, it makes sense to go on living and it is understandable why most (though not all) people do so.

I took your point to be that if we were automata, programmed by evolution, then evolution would have no interest in seeing us kill ourselves. As there would be no reason to program us to kill ourselves, then by jumping off a cliff I necessarily defy my programming this proving free will. That may have been my mistake.

(A third possibility...if your point was the evolution would never program us to be self-destructive, because that is irrational, I think that is wrong. Evolution has no goals and certainly doesn't produce rational beings. Evolution has produced all manner of subconscious irrational biases in humans (see wikipedia's list of "cognitive biases") that affect our decisions without our conscious knowledge all the time.

Plus evolution often produces dead ends. People have all manner of "bad genes" that can kill them, after all.

In our case, in this view of the mind, the programming arose as a result of an evolutionary process. In the robot's case it would have been programmed by us...the ones programmed through the evolutionary process.

A "program" does not have to be written by someone with free will. Just look at evolving cellular automata. They have no free will and evolve more complicated behaviors using genetic algorithms. The only reason we need a human involved to create such things is that nature does the same trick too slowly (and in places where we might not notice nature at work).

No. Not "all perceptions are faulty," but rather "each perception may be faulty, and we can't necessarily tell which is true and which is not."

I think holding on to a preferred position is fine. My preference is to believe that deteminism only applies in certain special cases and free will is real. What is wrong is saying that that preference is "obviously true" when there is a perfectly well reasoned contrary position that is possibly correct.

What is the point of acting as if your point is inescapably true when you are now acknowledging that you can't prove it because the contrary position remains a possibility? In effect you seem to be taking the position that because you greatly prefer your opinion on the reality of free will to that of those who deny that reality, that it is "obviously true". But since some of them could "greatly prefer" their position, where does that leave you?

You have a set of subjective tastes, they have a different set of subjective tastes. It certainly makes sense to discuss the issue, and possibly expand one another's appreciation of the counter arguments, but it doesn't make any sense to come in (forgive me, but to come in apparently without having read very much of what philosophers have to say on the topic in the first place) and smugly write:

"Nope, wrong, wrong, muddled thinking, wrong.

[/superior smile],"

without dropping the smug and acknowledging the real truth, which is "Well, I cannot gainsay the logic of your position, but I do not believe that is correct. Here is what I believe..."

Perhaps it's that you do not understand that your dismissing the "theoretical possibility" is not based on anything more than your subjective preference (and that there is no reason to assume your preferences are in any way correlated with objective truth in this case). I suspect that If I asserted that you probably are just a simulated human being in a super computer somewhere that is programmed to believe that you are human and to process simulated sensory inputs, that you'd react just as negatively because your preference for believing that your perceptions are an accurate gauge of reality is so strong that you lash out at any contrary position. Yet there is the argument that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html

One truth we can all agree on, I believe, is that there are many philosophers and scientists who lean in favor of rejecting the idea of free will. There is no proof that they are correct in that, but we can at least acknowledge that there is no known, definitive answer to the question, and that they are not necessarily fools for arriving at their position.

The rest later perhaps, after much sleep and barbecuing, but you're definitely tiring me out. Not because it's hard to respond, but because I don't think you've given this much thought. Normally in counterng someone's refutation I am at least challenged to reconsider my opinions. Not so much with you. It's more just about explaining how you misunderstand them, or are simply being obstinate. I referenced it before, but this is more like the Monty Python Argument Clinic than it is like a Philosophy thread.

I might prefer the Being-Hit-on-the-Head lessons.

 

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Super quick point (I hope), but that is not really determinism. Determinism says (roughly in this case) that if we know the position and momentum of every molecule, atom, photon, electron and particle in a person's brain *and* the state of his or her immediate environment (including information being relayed to him or her) we could predict his or her behaviors in response to those surroundings. We wouldn't see to know "culture" because that is either already included in the information we have on his brain, or it is irrelevant.

The physicalist view is that an emotion or a thought is nothing more than a particular physical state of the brain. If we know the exacts details of everything physical in the brain at time=X, and everything about the environment in which the person is located, then we can show you where everything in the brain will be at t=X+ΔX, where ΔX is any arbitrary length of time afterwards. In other words, the state of your brain the moment before you read this, plus the content of this message plus details of every other things going on around you *completely* determines the state your brain is in right now. As such, because thoughts are physical states in the physicalist view, you do not choose how to react to this message, rather this message has caused a reaction in your brain that was inevitable.

Predicting how the automaton will react is a different story, though. To simplify with an analogy I used previously, throwing a six-sided die is completely deterministic. If you knew precisely the force used, the trajectory of the die, the position the die was in when released, the torque applied, the details of the surface on which the die would land, how sweaty or oily the die-thrower's hands were (and a lot of information besides that) you could with 100% certainty say what number was about to be rolled.

In practical reality, though the rolling of a die is a complex event, and so sensitive to its initial conditions that you can never make a 100% accurate prediction. If you built a machine to throw dice, even a machine would not be able to throw a die in precisely the same way twice, so even then (in anything approximating a traditional die-throw, at least) you would not be able to predict the outcome. Chaos theory let's us know that determinism does not necessarily imply predictability in the real world.

Humans are far more complicated than a die roll...so even harder to predict.

 

Oh, alright then...thought I had it...

Thought that you meant we only have a limited number of choices, further influenced by our backgrounds and selections we had already made...but mostly contigent on circumstance.

Wondered what that whooshing sensation was going over my head...:shrug: I'll see if I can figure it out then.

 

I was thinking along the lines that (efficient) causality implies a relationship where one simple or complex state of affairs (the cause) necessitates the subsequent existence of a resulting state of affairs (the effect). Which implies that if we have accurate knowledge of the cause, then we can accurately predict the effect.

I'm sure that we can often predict what people are going to do. I was addressing something a little different, the idea that a person's surrounding environment necessarily determines all of their behavior. I'm not entirely convinced that's true.

Right, and that was my point. If we include the person's feelings, beliefs, motivations and resulting choices among the causes of his or her behavior, then we don't seem to be doing very much violence to the idea of free will.

The violence seems to occur when we push everything back an additional step and then suggest that all of a person's feelings, beliefs, motivations and choices have in turn somehow been mechanically and necessarily determined by the person's surrounding enviroment.

That's an important idea that raises a whole different set of philosophical problems about the nature of time. I don't really have settled views on time and my thinking is a work-in-progress in that regard.

But yeah, I'm not convinced that the future is already totally determined in all of its fine details by the past, and presumably by initial conditions of the big-bang or something.

My suspicion is that kind of determinist 'block-universe' view might be kind of an artifact of the old 17'th century style of bouncing billiard-ball materialism.

But more recently, quantum mechanics has suggested that other temporal models might be possible, such as superimposed possibility states with the as-yet poorly understood collapse of wave functions occurring at an expanding temporal wave-front. Or something, I really don't know. I'm not sure that anyone does at this point. It's all speculative.

I do think that at least some contemporary thinking is tending towards a stronger modal realism though, where unrealized possibilities aren't automatically dismissed as having been impossibilities even before events happened. Unrealized possibilities may conceivably even have some kind of quasi-reality with effects observable in the laboratory. (Quantum interference perhaps.)

 

I think you are trying too hard to find fault. Of course we are organisms, which is different than a mechanism if you really want to look up the meanings. Obviously the point is that we have a capabilities which simpler organisms don't have. Conscious control of much of our behavior, as well as the ability to evaluate cause and effect and predict what can happen and use that conscious control to change the direction things will go without our interference.

So you take pride in trying to place something we see every day in the category of unverifiable hypothesis? Odd. You have concluded there "can" be no proof. So what are you arguing for? Does that seem like an unassailable position which you can never be challenged upon and can used to bludgeon anyone who disagrees? This is very similar to some of the religious zealots in some other threads asserting what they consider to be irrefutable supernatural hypotheses and refusing to be convinced, claiming that there is no adverse proof.

Are you having trouble with these concepts?

First, that's not how proof works. This isn't a geometric proof. It isn't deductive. Nor is proof whatever it takes to convince you personally. Sure, you can deny and ignore everything that is put forward. Whether it proves the point is for the community addressing the problem. I know that philosophers tend to see "proof" in the mathematical paradigm, but that is a technical meaning and not what scientists talk about when a theory is proven. Proven, is when only crackpots challenge it and demonstrate their ignorance of the entire subject matter by doing so. OTOH, lots of paradigm shifts occur through crackpots.

Second, look at what you said: "that you have free will, that your actions are independent of "compulsion", and that you initiate an action independently of any external cause."

It is that last clause that betrays you. You have fallen for the false dilemma created by this classic problem like every freshman in an introductory "Problems of Philosophy" class. If you think free volitional actions must be actions which are taken "independently of any external cause" then 1) you can't speak English anymore, and 2) you are looking for Sarkus' square circle. And I guarantee you, you won't find it.

It is true that I can't show you any event, whether it be an act of will or not, which occurs "independently of any external cause." (And don't anyone give me that quantum leap bullshit again. Random acts aren't free acts as several of us have demonstrated by reductio several times now.)

And to that fine sentiment, I will say "Bite me."

Thanks for coming. I'll be here all week.

 

Yazata, you have offered a thoughtful and intellectually honest post, and it is much appreciated.

Which is exactly right for a pool table (as you mention) or a clock. But if you are talking about a person who is examining his own set of influences and considering the range of actions he might take to make the future bend to his will, sure his actions will be "caused" by his deliberative process, but he wouldn't want it any other way. He is caused, and his will is free. No problem there unless you make the mistake of thinking "caused" generally, is the same thing as compelled, because, on the contrary some causes are compulsions to act, and others are reasons to act. The former unfree, the latter free. "Free" is a concept about actions of creatures capable of volition, it doesn't really apply to billiard balls or clocks.

It is right up until the point where the subject knows as much as you do about what is influencing him. You are then simply trying to predict, and he is deciding whether to let you. I guess there has to be a time gap between gathering my info and seeing the result, otherwise I'm just defining what I see, and not predicting at all. It is in that time gap where things can happen. Something can happen that I didn't see, or more importantly , the subject can evaluate the same info I had and frustrate the prediction for his own reasons. Yes, time flows smoothly. One state flowing directly into another. Calling something an "event" artificially breaks things up, where no real gaps occur. When I say "if I knew every cause of an event" my knowledge must necessarily include the beginning of the event, other wise I have left some information out which might surprise me and make me wrong. Therefore, to say "if I knew every cause I could predict the NEXT "event" is pretty misleading. If a prediction is unassailable, then it has to include all events up to and including the first action in the predicted event in order to leave no gap subjecting you to predictive error. Any real prediction we make leaves that temporal gap. It is a gamble, because shit happens (intervening shit). And this is exactly how our will works. We predict the future based on all our information, and we have the time between our prediction and that future to change it. So say that if I had known all of the stuff that happened all the way through that process doesn't mean that I diminished that free action in any way. It just means I understood and described the entire process.

I agree totally. In fact, no violence at all.

And I just tried to address that above.

I have to handle that in another way, because even though I am an atheist, I do subscribe to Einstein's statement that God doesn't play dice. I knew too many physicists back in grad school to think that they had anything figured out about whether randomness arose from there methods or was actually "in" reality. I think probability is what you go to when you can't really know what is happening. And that's how the Heisenberg principal was explained to me.

Thanks for the post.

 

pande
i like those propositions
let me try some

*on august 5th 2001, humankind were put to sleep and have been dreaming ever since
*roughly 6000 years ago, god rolled out his first server farm
*aliens, in some unknown spacetime continuum, implemented their brain/vat experiment

in each case there have been glitches. we, the scripted, the envatted, the dreamers, suspect something is not quite right.

to be continued in the next chapter

i share similar sentiments (especially after your last post)

/chuckle

i have a lot of respect for your intellect, perhaps not readily apparent. i'll adjust the rhetoric to reflect that

 

when page 30 is reached, move to religion
that is where creationist shit belongs

thanks
neo

 

I've concluded that there is no proof. What are you arguing against?

That's very clever; make up a whole lot of irrelevant crap to divert the argument. Well done, but irrelevant.

Are you saying we can initiate free volitional actions, but not independently "of any external cause"? What kind of free will is that? Is it the kind that corresponds to an illusion of freedom?

Are you finally admitting that you don't have the capacity to think independently?

 

i suppose arfa's notion of free will consists of yazata's spastic convulsions

/chuckle

just do it, rog

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The spastic convulsions are there for all to see, in various posts by the somewhat misguided, and the kneejerk reactions you see them make.

Talk to the hand, bro.

 

sounds like a good start for a thread..the Never ending story.

 

Nor should you be.

Copypasta'd from the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

Resilience is the psych jargon for those who beat the odds...although considering the number of trauma survivors who don't do themselves in despite often wanting to...I'd say beating the odds could be very broadly defined.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (something I'm keenly interested in) happens when stressor meets physiologic vulnerability. PTSD is actually a process involving multiple physical systems and permanent structural brain changes...and some people are just not going to get it no matter what nastiness they are subjected to.

Interesting reserch study idea: fMRI to get a baseline of a large number of Marines in bootcamp. Then see who develops PTSD. Maybe then we'd improve predictability.

People are such complex and multilayered systems...chaos gets in...slap a monkey brain on top of a mammal brain on top of a lizard brain and get predictability? And then throw the endocrine system in, the entire history of a person...no way you could ever collect all the data necessary.

You can make broad social trend predictions...not tell what individuals will do.
It'a a wonder any of us can tie our shoes.

 

have you read the Foundation series by Isaac Asmivov?

<hangs head in shame as realization that i have only read four of the seven sinks in>

 

If something is perfectly (i.e. 100%) predictable then that fact alone removes the very concept of choice as anything other than a conscious perception of predetermined activity.

If something is perfectly predictable then it is, by definition and logic, predetermined. However, if something is predetermined it is not necessarily predictable.

And his freedom would be nothing more than a conscious perception.

If you hold it to be strictly determined, then it is.
If you hold it to be predictable, then it is.

If something is genuinely and absolutely predictable then it can NOT be changed.
The two concepts are mutually exclusive.
Either it is predictable, or it can be changed.
If it can be changed it is NOT predictable!
Or are you somehow using "predictable" in a different way... as in "only happening as expected the majority of times"?

You do realise that there is a difference between the casual parlance of "making a prediction" and the philosophical meaning of something being perfectly "predictable": the former is making a conscious estimation based on conscious knowledge; the latter means that something is strictly determined... and WILL happen, and nothing can change it.

Somehow, for some odd reason that you have not yet managed to explain, you place certain entities (e.g. us) outside of what you allow to apply to the rest of the universe.

Let me ask you: if there were no conscious entities in the universe, do you think the universe would be more or less automatic, mechanistic, predictable, deterministic etc? Or do you think it would be the same?

Some mechanisms can, and do. Your central heating system... gets too hot, it turns itself off - too cold and it turns on.
The Singapore metro system is entirely automated, for example. No drivers.... it assesses itself and moves the trains faster, slower, gets them cleaned, blows air in whichever direction it's systems are telling it to.

Some can make assessments of possible futures... chess machines do it all the time. It can not predict the future with certainty, but merely make assessments of possible futures, based upon the information it has. And like a chess machine, humans make those same kinds of assessments and act according to those assessments.

But for some reason you place consciousness on a pedestal and put it outside the workings of the rest of the universe. Do you not think it operates according to the same laws that govern the rest of the universe? :shrug:

 

I was thinking along these lines:

Individual human beings have temporal origins. So presumably, whatever chains of causality are currently operating internally within a person must have had their origins external to that person.

The basic intuition in the free-will position seems to be that our choices are the result of our beliefs, feelings, desires, intentions and decisions. That's not inconsistent with a compatibilist account.

The violence against the free-will intuition seems to arise when the determinists go on to argue that all of our internal beliefs, feelings, desires and intentions that seemingly determine our behavior are in turn determined by causal chains that ultimately originated somewhere external to us.

I'm not really ready yet to dismiss all talk of things like beliefs, concepts, meanings, ideas, desires and intentions influencing what people people think and how they behave. I know from my own experience as a human being that these kind of things are relevant in my life. At the least, they appear to be how we represent our own cognitive states to ourselves in our own awareness. It might very well be true that atomic-scale events represent the 'machine language' level of reality, so to speak, and that psychology and psychological language may indeed be 'higher level languages' that are fully reducible to physics. But certainly not very efficiently and not yet.

In philosophy-of-mind terms, that's how a type-identity-theorist would be likely to conceptualize it. I consider myself a physicalist, but I lean more towards a functionalist account.

I don't think that any scientist has ever possessed that kind of complete information about any organism, nor have those kind of predictions ever successfully been made. These kind of predictions may or may not be plausible in principle, purely hypothetically, but they aren't currently possible in real life.

In other words, this seems to be getting out in front of the evidence and begins to look like an expression of a philosophical theory. It's a belief that I share to some extent and I do have quite a bit of sympathy for it.

That's why I'm most interested in compatibilist approaches to the free-will/determinism problem.

That gets us into the question of who the "you" is in that sentence, of what the 'you' refers to. As I've written before, I'm inclined to follow the Buddhists there and opt for an 'anatta' no-self doctrine. In other words, I'm inclined to think of myself, not as a Cartesian-style spiritual substance, but rather as an abstract functional process physically instantiated in a human brain.

But I'm not really prepared to go further than that and embrace the seemingly outlandish belief that the evaluative processes that we employ when we make decisions and choices are simply illusions (even if most of us are causally determined for some incomprehensible reason to think that way) and that in truth we are simply puppets and nothing more.

Put another way, I don't really believe that if we could somehow have read with absolute precision all the states of the sub-atomic particles right after the big-bang, that we would have discovered the entire future history of the universe encoded there in all of its minutest detail -- Every event ever to occur on all of the billions of planets, every idea that would ever be thought, every philosophy ever conceived, and every action that every sentient being anywhere in the universe would ever perform. Already present, somehow, designed as if by God himself in the moment of creation. Predictable like turning a crank, if we only knew all the physical laws and all the initial conditions.

I think that there's almost certainly far more contingency to reality, and to ourselves, than that.

I'm more inclined to think that kind of hard-determinism arises from some sort of philosophical error.

That's not an insult directed at you, Pandaemoni. I don't think that any of us have the answers, least of all me. I'm just feeling my way here, like everyone else. We're surrounded by mysteries at every moment in our lives. Realizing it is the essence of philosophy, I guess.

 

I seem to remember reading one...interesting fiction idea, but...

Reading Yazata's latest...it does occur to me that sentience actually acts as randomization?
Which rather reminds me of meiosis...strikes me as analogous somehow...sleep deprivation...
Anyway...
There seems to be a bending of hard and fast rules for lifeforms.
(AHG train-of-thought-derailment!)

This is speculation alone...but I think that even if you could develop an AI and input every facet of info about a human being into a human simulation...and run it through scenarios, you still would not know precisely what that person would do given the actuality of the situation.

(And if you accurately modeled the functionality of the wetware involved, and then let the simulation run for a few years...there actually develops some strange ethical implications about turning that computer off and deleting the program...)

I often say that if someone pulled a gun on me, I do not know what I'd do. The time someone tried to force me to do something at gunpoint, I ran.

I know I can't always predict what I will do in any given bad situation... I run mental simulations to prepare me for such, and that might not be enough.

 

I'm arguing against your demand for prove of an unverifiable hypothesis. That's a trick to appear to win an argument. Talk about illusions, sheesh.

Do you really not get that you are saying that uncompelled volition is an illusion unless it is uncaused? So in order not to be illusiory volition must be uncaused? Surely you realize how nonsensical that is?

Sorry, don't follow that conclusion at all.