This YouTube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, features biologist Kenneth Miller and theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy discussing atheism and religion. Lisa Miller of Newsweek moderates.
It’s one of a series, but I find this video particularly telling because Ken Miller, who professes himself a materialist when it comes to science, waffles when Lisa Miller asks how pure materialism of the mind can lead to freedom of choice. I find Miller’s answer confusing because he first spews out a lot of scientific facts, and then drags in the issue of “emergent properties,” which, he says, leads to our ability to make moral decisions.
True, but that doesn’t mean that we have free will or make any kind of real “decisions” (that is, we may have the appearance of having decided something, but that doesn’t mean that those decisions don’t rest entirely on the material components of our brain). I think what he’s trying to do here is, as a devout Catholic, to somehow suggest that maybe one emergent property comes from God.
But maybe I’m wrong. Nevertheless, the interesting part starts at 2:23, when Miller says, “I have always been a very strong proponent of the idea of free will.” He then says that if anyone is a are true materialist, and thinks that materialism militates against free will, then that person “wasn’t paying attention to physics.” (Note Murphey’s enthusiastic nod of agreement at 2:45.)
What? Quantum mechanics to the rescue! Miller continues:
“At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable. And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, and that’s how we become autonomous beings; that’s how we make judgments; that’s how we decide to seek the truth and how we make moral decisions.”
The obvious problem is that Miller equates unpredictability with free will. I’m willing to grant that perhaps events on the quantum level would lead to two universes, started off at the exact same physical configuration, winding up at different states in the future. What neither I nor any other competent thinker is willing to concede is that quantum unpredictability has anything to do with “free will”. A “decision” does not become free if it’s merely the result of the unpredictable movement of an electron somewhere in our brain. How can anyone believe that stuff?
If you can tolerate that, try another segment of the discussion, “What the new atheists get wrong.”
What I want to know is this: why was this discussion presented at the New York Academy of Sciences? What does it have to do with science?
This is a first-year philosophy student mistake: why do people persist in thinking that randomness gives you the free will that determinism can’t?
Miller didn’t claim that it does; in fact he specifically said it doesn’t in the passage Jerry quoted above.
What he did say, as I understand it, is that complex systems are unpredictable due to emergent behaviors that are invisible (but not undetermined) at the micro-level. It’s the information-processing power of our brains that gives us (the appearance of) free will. (“I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain…”) This doesn’t seem all that woo-ish to me; it’s the standard compatibilist position.
Now he may hold other opinions on minds and consciousness that are distinctly woo-ish, but if so I don’t particularly see them on display in this clip.
If that’s his statement (a deterministic free will, Daniel Dennett-like position), why involve quantum mechanics? It (seems to me) has nothing to do with emergent behaviour from the complex organizations of the brain, or at least won’t make a difference to the free will part.
Miller is a Catholic — he cannot believe that humans merely have the appearance of free will and remain faithful to official Catholic teaching.
That may be so, but if Jerry wants to take issue with Miller’s Catholicism, he should do so directly, instead of picking some random film clip and then criticizing Miller for things he didn’t actually say in that clip.
more from Ken on free will:
Hmm .. is that an apology for why prayer doesn’t work?
(Or, as a corollary, why prayers are only answered randomly)
People need to accept that determinism only exists in nature as the result of aggregate behavior of particles. Determinism always breaks down on the smaller scale (and some would say on the larger scale as well). Everything is probabilistic and the exact state and future of complex systems are fundamentally incomputable.
“(that is, we may have the appearance of having decided something, but that doesn’t mean that those decisions don’t rest entirely on the material components of our brain)”
This is only a threat to free will if you, rather bizarrely, think your “self” is somehow different from the material basis that is the brain. If the mind is indeed just the brain in action however then there is no apparent problem, at least on a cursory basis. Brain makes decisions = Me making decisions. Like many incompatibilists you seem to confuse epiphenomenalism with determinism.
Right, because real decisions are the incoherent, impossible, out-of-thin-air kind, whereas the kind that real people actually make by using their brains to process information are somehow fake.
That’s true if one takes the religious view of free will.
Taking the religious view certainly does not make that view true. It just means you’ve adopted incoherent definitions of words like “choice”, “decision”, “real”, and so on.
I would call consciousness an ’emergent property’, and to build a castle in the air, the idea of a god is an emergent property of consciousness. However as a materialist myself I cannot see a refuge for free will in this, only an illusion of free will.
Free will again!! Quantum mechanics refutes determinism, which is often part of the argument against free will. That is all it does, but that is not uninteresting.
By the way, recently I heard an astonishing new physical argument against free will. Quantum nonlocality, now confirmed experimentally, causes problems for local realism. However, proofs of non-locality depend on the experimenters having free will (one makes a decision about which quantity to measure on his or her end of the experiment, and another in a distant location makes an independent decision about what to measure on that end of the experiment). If the decisions were actually not truly free, the nonlocality problems would disappear! It is even possible to calculate the amount of determinate-ness needed to escape nonlocality paradoxes: if the freedom of choice of one of the experimenters is reduced by about one bit of information, the nonlocality proofs are voided and we can preserve local realism.
I’ll try to find the citations to this later…
It’s a good thing I read to the end of the post, because that last sentence poses the exact question I kept asking myself as I read and watched.
Cheers,
b&
…besides which, if they’re gonna go all quantum cosmic consciousness woo on us, why not just skip to the chase and have Chopra on the panel with Oprah as the moderator?
b&
I don’t know what the big deal with the concept of free will is. Even if you had a soul operating independently of your brain, you still make decisions based on experience, rational thought (even if you rationalize bad things because of, say, religious influence) and what you desire. Otherwise, you’d be an unpredictable sociopath.
To me, “free will” is a nonsensical term that can only come from those darned philosophers. It’s the same thing as arguing about brains in vats.
For religionists, it’s just another thing to worry about becoming an atheist due to materialism, just like automatically being completely amoral and “just another animal.” However, religion contains no morality and doesn’t impart free will or specialness.
Theologians not philosophers. Philosophers are just the ones left to clean up the mess.
I disagree. I find philosophers almost as odious, and just as useless. “Free will” is a philosophical concept. “Theology” is a subset of philosophy — or the “philosophy of god,” if you will.
Theology isn’t a subset of philosophy. None of the drivel that Jerry read would qualify as philosophy. Philosophy of religion is a subset of philosophy, but it isn’t the same as theology. Philosophy of religion certainly has its problems. It is certainly different from many other philosophical subjects in that many participants are trying to justify prior conclusions rather than pursuing the truth in whatever direction the arguments go. (Human) free will has nothing to do with the philosophy of religion. It falls under the philosophy of action.
this is a good point, and one that many of us have raised when presented with little more than the Courtier’s reply from so called “sophisticated theologists”
Use of phrases like “the appearance of having decided something” itself indicates considerable confusion about free will.
Certainly, if one can believe that a chess-playing computer can take inputs, apply logic, probabilistic reasoning, etc., and thereby reach a good decision about the best chess move to make, one can believe that something roughly equivalent is going on in the human brain, however much more complex and however many more subjects human decision-making can operate on in addition to chess. This is real decision-making, not “the appearance” of it. Even if one concludes it’s an entirely materialist process and entirely predetermined by physical law (this second is unlikely, in my opinion, due to quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc.), it can still be real decision-making.
Chaos theory is not at odds with physical determinism. It says that outcomes are in general unpredictable (but not undetermined) since you can never have enough information to predict them accurately.
That said, I agree that by any reasonable definition, real decisions are the kind made by real people in the real world.
“What I want to know is this: why was this discussion presented at the New York Academy of Sciences? What does it have to do with science?”
yeah, i’m not sure it has anything to do with anything. i’m not a believer, but it’s always the atheists that get it wrong when critiquing religion. self criticism within the religious community? MY ASS.
Randomness disproves pre determinism, it does not mean we have free will.
If we could rewind the clock and get everything exactly the way it was we would make the exact same choice, the fact that some of our past experiences were affected by something random doesn’t mean we have a choice in what we chose.
How do you demonstrate that something is random? How can you tell there is any randomness at any level? What is randomness?
He may be wrong, but I wouldn’t call Roger Penrose an incompetent thinker.
You simply cannot protest against philosophers using the term ‘free will’ in a compatibilist way on the grounds that “that’s not how most people actually use the term” and then say that we only have the appearance of making decisions, as if our everyday uses of the word ‘decision’ and phrases like ‘decision-making’ have anything whatsoever to do with contracausality. They don’t. There’s nothing metaphysical about them, insofar as we use them in normal contexts (e.g. deciding what shirt to wear in the morning, or deciding what the moral course of action in some situation is).
This is philosophy at its very worst (attaching a metaphysical meaning to an everyday word, and then denying our use of the word on those grounds), and is far worse than anything in compatibilist philosophy, since compatibilist philosophy at least only deals with ‘free will’ as a technical term in philosophy (and has precedent for its use of the term that dates back at least to Spinoza in the 1600s), and doesn’t try and pollute everyday language, where we use terms like ‘decision’ (and even ‘free will’) in decidedly non-metaphysical ways.
If you’re going to show the disdain for philosophy that so commonly appears on this blog, and especially when it comes to free will and decision making, then you need to not make the same mistakes you accuse them of making, and you need to not make them way more blatantly and egregiously.
I think you are being unfair to the phenomenology of choice (the experience of choice) that occurs when people make decisions, and then later call them “decisions.” The idea that individuals do not import their experience of decision making into their understanding of the term “decision” is surely wrong. What they experience as thoughts and behavior is opaque to the functioning of the brain and to the historical and biological contingencies that are structuring and determining their choice. We feel a necessity to choose without understanding why we are choosing the way we do—due to the opacity of brain structure.
When someone’s says I “chose” this shirt to wear, it seems that such a statement is more than likely hooking up to the experiencing of “choosing” which shirt to wear, which necessarily is experienced in a contracausal way (or at least not in a determined way, one can claim that the experience is neutral, but we experience an “I” choosing without that I having the first clue to why (ultimately) it is choosing the way it does), that is unless one is hooked up to some fMRI machine with someone predicting some simple decision that one is choosing from and cannot fool the experimenter. You can also think of Dostoevsky’s example about predictably here. It is from such experiments and from a more theoretical and post hoc stance that we can dislodge our belief in the absolute power of our choosing, and to accept that the experience of choice making is misleading. That is not to say that the term “choice,” like the term “free will,” is not also used in the more tame way or could be used in such a way, which is why there is such controversy around statements like, “She could have chosen otherwise.”
I apologize in advance that this is less succinct and certainly less tightly argued than I would have liked. Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to go through and give it the edits it deserves. I hope my points nonetheless come through reasonably clearly.
I don’t think so. I think most people spend most of their time not thinking about metaphysics. We use the words ‘choice’ and ‘decision’ and their variants in the cases where we’ve learned to use them, and it is those situations where we use the words that determine what those words mean. I don’t care what metaphysics (or, rather more preferably, neuroscience) someone adds onto the experience later.
I don’t see any basis for your claims that the experience of choosing is “necessarily experienced in a contracausal (or at least not in a determined) way” and that we “experience an “I” choosing” in doing so, insofar as these claims amount to something like: we have these experiences in a way that automatically imply some metaphysical interpretation. As far as whether we experience an “I” in such cases, I think it’s enough to provide the example of Hume’s introspection to show that this isn’t necessarily the case, since Hume famously spent quite a bit of time trying to find the “I” behind his perceptions and ultimately concluded that all he could perceive was the “bundle of perceptions.”
I think it’s quite likely that how we perceive these cases is influenced by what metaphysics (or science) we add on to them. Certainly I don’t experience my actions as being contracausal, probably because I don’t believe they are. The worst I think you could say is that we have a natural inclination to interpret these cases in these ways, but surely then you could equally say that people (at least before Darwin) had a natural inclination to treat animals as created—but this is no reason to say they had the “illusion” of animals, because the explanatory account you give of some term isn’t constitutive of the term. They simply gave a wrong account of the origin of animals.
Likewise, there are cases where people make decisions, where they choose between two (three, hundreds, etc.) options, and so on. Positing a contracausal soul (or some equivalent) as the mechanism behind them is a wrong explanation, but I don’t see any reason to deny our everyday use of the terms just because a lot of people have given wrong explanations of them in the past. The correct response is to say “our best neuroscience tells us that when we make decisions, we ______.”
Also, what is the Dostoevsky example you mentioned? I’ve read a fair amount of his work but I don’t know (or don’t remember) that specific example. I’m intrigued.
I believe it was Dostoevsky, probably the Brothers Karamazov, if not Dostoevsky it was in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Maybe someone else can chime in.
The example went something like tell a man what he is going to do and he will do the opposite. Show them you predicted that and they will do something else different. Show them that you can predict whatever action they are going to do next and they will go crazy. I assume he (either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy) took that from somewhere else.
And while I’m barraging you with replies, I should state explicitly my general stance (which I’ve said before here, but before I got a wordpress account and so not under this name), which is that I can see the reasoning for abandoning the term ‘free will,’ since it is a term fraught with a long and largely dubious philosophical history (I believe it was St. Augustine who first developed it, but I might be wrong). I personally find it useful in select cases, and so have no aversion to using it myself, but I understand why people would reject a broadly compatibilist account.
I don’t think the same can be said of ‘choice’ specifically. It’s an everyday term used in everyday contexts and the particular metaphysical or scientific explanation you build up around the concept is by and large irrelevant to these contexts. (Not always: our scientific understanding of mental illnesses might change how we use the word ‘choice’ in these cases, but this still doesn’t impact most uses of the word.) To saddle these contexts with a particular explanation (in this case, a horrible metaphysical one) and then attack our innocuous uses of the word on the basis of the faults of that explanation is really the worst thing a philosopher can do (qua philosopher): it lets philosophical/theological excesses mutilate innocent language.
Neuroscience provides a fascinating opportunity to tell us what physical events take place in those everyday cases we call ‘making a decision’ or ‘choosing.’ One implication of this is that a family of explanations of these cases that have historically been put forth have to be dropped (these explanations of course being those that posit a soul or metaphysical free will, and the like). But this isn’t regulative of how we use words that have a life independent of these explanations (except, of course, in particular cases like mental illness, discussed above).
I was going to say this earlier but was trying to be succinct, and I was doing my best to stay away from metaphysics/ontology. The idea that we can separate language from our beliefs about the world and what behaviors are and what properties different objects possess, including humans, seems wrong to me. Surely we make some kind of metaphysical or ontological (I prefer the latter term) assumption when we talk about something like “choice making” or rocks rolling down hills or gravity exerting force. Human behavior, and especially something like choice making which is closely attached to complex reasoning some of the time, has to trade in what we believe exists about the world and how it is functioning.
That gets confusing because when we utter things like she “could have chosen otherwise” it feels like such things are part of our categorizing and developing of our own ontology. Such utterances and inductive recognitions are framing and creating our beliefs about the world, which gets updated as we continually interact with that world and the behaviors of people. Language is closely connected with the process of dividing the world into objects and their properties and the expectations of outcomes. Much of that language and hence much of the “world” [hic rhodus, hic salta] is given to us by the linguistic structures of the society and parents giving us that language. And on top of all that such societies add even more convoluted notions such as the “moral” worth of some behavior, which takes us into an even deeper and perhaps more constructed ontological structure- complex social institutions and behaviors.
Anyways, thats my take. I find it difficult to believe that people are using the term “choice” without cross-referencing with the existentialist experience of being “forced to be free,” that is, feeling the power and freedom to choose without being able to tap into the underlying and constricting structures of that choice making process.
Perhaps I am not understanding this, and someone here can educate me.
Can anyone here give a good definition of free will?
What possible “proof” or demonstration would satisfy anyone here that free will exists?
When someone says my decision is just “neurons firing in my brain” isn’t that what decision making IS? I don’t doubt that decisions have a material basis, but isn’t that “material” called ME? (I think this is what Juan is saying).
Can free will be defined as the sense one has of being in charge of his/her actions and the belief that they could have acted otherwise?
Also, isn’t the point of quantum/randomness argument one that if things cannot be completely predicted, then they are (at least sometimes) under the influence of some other unknown (possibly unknowable) factor, and might we not call that factor “free will”? That is, it is not deterministic in the sense that it is not predictable.
If not, how do you define “determinism”? How can you assert that every effect has a cause if you are unable to reliably link cause and effect in a predictable manner?
Thanks for your help on these questions.
Not if you believe in an immaterial soul that is somehow responsible for your consciousness and/or cognition.
Religionists traditionally do.
Wow! I’m unable to control my fatty molecules so that they are eliminated as waste when I have an abundant store of eatable food stuff and don’t want or need any more fat storage on my body. But, you are far beyond that and already are to the point of being able to control the randomness of subatomic particles to aid in your decision making, how do you do that?
No, he doesn’t. Or at least I don’t read him as equating them. It seems to me that when he says “… which certainly doesn’t explain free will” he is admitting that one does not imply the other. He sees apparent quantum randomness as defeating some arguments that have been used against free will. But, beyond that, he is simply saying that he believes that we have free will, but is not able to explain it.
My reading of this:
is that although Miller disclaims quantum effects earlier as giving us free will, he waffles and implies somehow they play into the “unpredictability” that he mentions at the beginning of the quote, an unpredictability that IS the essence of making judgements, seeking the truth, etc.
And in his book Finding Darwin’s God, he floats the idea that God works through quantum indeterminacy, which is why we can’t see God’s actions in the real world.
My reading is that Miller is aware that he is waffling, and more or less admits that.
how does that help Miller’s argument?
What argument?
He is expressing an opinion, rather than making an argument. His reference to QM is to criticize arguments that have been made against free will. But I don’t see that he is actually arguing for free will. He is just expressing his own view that we have free will, but admitting that he cannot explain how.
so what’s this then?
it’s an argument, is what it is.
and it’s Ken Miller saying it.
That must be from the other video, which I did not have the patience to watch.
So quantum effects are now rebranded “free will”? Lovely. Does this mean that subatomic particles have free will? Is there a heaven for strong nuclear force carriers? Did the leptons have a Jesus? Does the concept of original sin apply to phoons?
I would like to think so, I hate the little bastards and want them to suffer (needlessly) in the afterlife!
For serious, how anyone can invoke quantum mechanics as an explanation for free will is truly beyond me. Makes no sense.
Maybe he’s taken a page out of Deepak Chopra’s playbook.
There’s a lot of disagreeing over semantics while agreeing over mechanics, at least as far as I can tell, in our (atheist) discussions of free will.
As far as I see it, whether you call it free will or not the important issue is whether you are responsible for your decisions. The other issue is whether those decisions are truly yours if they are simply made by the brain and not in some dualist magic box.
For the latetr, I understand almost, if not all atheists, I tend to read today to hold the position that you and your brain are one, that dualism is not in evidence and that saying your brain is making a decision is the same as saying you are making the decisions. Consciousness is an emergent property of our brains.
For the former I see some disagreement on whether or not to use the term free will for something as simple as “responsibility”. Some stick to free will as a magical duality and hold that we don’t have it, some re-frame free will as the idea that decisions are ours and we are repsonsible for them, regardless of determinism and so on. This includes the compatibilist view as expressed by Dennett.
Ultimately I think most agree that the important issue, morally, is responsibility and that defining free will differently doesn’t make one not responsible for what one does. Am I simply projecting my ideas onto most of the people I identify with when in fact some believe we’re not responsible for our decisions (regardless fo whether they label them ours?)
So on the one hand we have the idea of “free will”. However that is defined.
On the other hand, we have “physically-determined-yet-completely-impossible-to-predict will” where your actions and decisions are the outcome of an emergent property of the physical brain.
Can you describe, even in theory, any experiment that could in principle tell these two scenarios apart? Because if not, then this entire discussion is moot. Either we have “true” free will, or we have a perfect simulation of free will.
The more I listen to arguments about “free will” the less I understand what the hell it is supposed to be. If someone’s actions could be predicted with mathematical precision, then their “will” cannot be “free”? Unpredictability in decisions can spare free will from this problem? Is “unpredictable will” a useable synonym for “free will”?
I don’t get it.
I’m with Tom Dobrzeniecki (#13). Give me a definition of free will that does not involve an impossible time travel experiment. Give me a test that can be applied to a decision that can determine if it was the result of free will or not. Until then, the term remains meaningless to me.
I suspect free will is just an ad hoc rationalization for why god does not stop bad people from doing bad things. Without a god I have found no utility for the term.
It has legal utility, but can likely be replaced by “non-coerced.”
Good example. Not really the kind of “free will” being discussed here though. It is such a vague term the discussions tend to be rife with equivocation problems.
I have never heard of unpredictability as a requirement to show a lack of coercion. 🙂
lol. Maybe Kenneth Miller’s hemoglobin molecules freely decide to pick up oxygen molecules in his lungs. They do so every time because these molecules know that it’s for his benefit.
Q. How does the existence of a god result in Free Choice?
A. Magic!
Q. How does the existence of a Grand Periwinkle result in Seas of Beer?
A. Magic!
The counter intuitive confusion with “free will” emerges from a misunderstanding of consciousness.
As conciousness is passive (not active), our experience of self is much like watching a Fox News (credulously biased) live report (with a 7 second delay) of our brain.
Our choices where neuro-computed long ago (a 100ms or more), and highly predictable. Note that “unpredictable” people are usually considered dangerous.
Some time after discovering this blog I was pleased to learn that Jerry Coyne, whom I admired for his excellent contributions to evolutionary biology, is as skeptical about free will as I am.
I’ve been following the free will-related posts for some time now, and most of your arguments make perfect sense to me, being similar to conclusions I’ve reached myself some time ago.
But back to this post. As someone has already pointed out above, introduction of quantum mechanics as a lifebuoy for free will is not a new idea and has been actively promoted by Roger Penrose, one of the more influential physicists of our times. Unfortunately, I’ve never read Penrose’s book and learned of his ideas only second-hand from other sources. In my search for some brief presentation of his ideas I have stumbled upon a website of a physicist/mathematician/programmer discussing the problem of free will from this particular point of view. I find this statement particularly interesting (and pretty much summing up my opinion about free will):
“Let us assume that free will, as commonly defined, actually exists, and is not an illusion (as is sometimes claimed). Then the above points would seem to imply trouble for mathematics and physics as commonly known and practiced today. How is this? One manifestation of classical (19th century and earlier) physics is its deterministic nature. Clearly this is at odds with the idea of free will. The 20th century quantum mechanics posits an underlying stochastic and indeterministic element. This is equally at odds with the common notion of free will: just because human action is unpredictable does not imply its random.
So if determinism and randomness are not acceptable, what is? Well, lets try to imagine some mathematical framework that might conceivably fit the notion of free will. It would have to be odd: not predictable, so one couldn’t use the ordinary vocabulary of algebra and geometry in the ordinary sense: free will seems at odds with statements such as ‘if A and B then C’, preferring instead ‘if A and B then maybe C or D, depending on the choice made’. Nor is it stochastic, so we can’t talk in the following fashion: ‘if A and B then C 37% of the time’. So how can we talk about free will? What sort of a physical theory, rooted in mathematics, can we construct, that will somehow be shown to support and allow free will? It is not obvious that this is even possible.”
Immediately after this he makes a point that this is not the proof that no free will exists, although I think it still makes a pretty darn good argument against it. Especially coming from a person well versed in logic, quantum effects, chaos theory, emergent properties etc.
He also tries to tie this the problem of free will to consciousness, time and nature of quantum phenomena in his other essays. I haven’t read everything yet, and his writing is sometimes a bit difficult, being apparently hasty and assuming a good deal of knowledge from the reader, but I think it is interesting nevertheless.
Maybe there is not much more to say about free will, but I would be still curious to see some clever physicists weighing in on this, preferably someone working on AI and quantum computers.
Source: http://linas.org/theory/freewill.html
The philosophical issue has always been a bramble bush. It’s a tangle of imprecise language with no hope of operational definitions.
Colloquially, what we mean by free will is having the ability to imagine alternate futures, imagine the consequences of behavior, and steer a path.
It makes no difference whether and when decisions are made. Decisions are always going to have an emotional base, grounded in associations with consequences.
The key necessity for free will is the ability to imagine alternatives. Even cats and dogs have a rudimentary ability to see that one choice closes down another.
Adding a bit:
My understanding of free will bypasses unanswerable questions. Anything that can generate novel scenarios and associate them with consequences has at least rudimentary free will.
One might say that evolution, viewed as a system, exhibits free will. As would some genetic algorithms. My understand of cellular automata is that they would not. Their behavior is not modified by consequences.
Getting caught up in how the consequences are evaluated is where the arguments go off the rails. Is it mechanically deterministic, Bayesian, or whatever? It doesn’t matter.
What matters is the ability to imagine alternatives, and that is something that varies from individual and species to species.
I think Marek (#22) sums it up nicely: We can choose between “if A and B then C” (determinism), or “if A and B then maybe C or D” (non-determinism).
I agree that many (but not all) phenomena seem to fall into the first category.
The second category may be divided into (a) “unknown in practice” and (b) “unknowable in principle”.
We must admit that (a) exists…if anyone disagrees with this, please furnish me with future lotto numbers and stock market tips! The future results of a flip of a coin or a chaotic system are unknowable in practice, but the presumption (not proof!) is: we _theoretically_ could gather enough information to predict future results. But we have, at least, the appearance of non-determinism in the sense that we can’t reliably link cause and effect in practical real-world cases. We only suppose that enough information is out there to predict — it can’t be demonstrated or proven.
There is also some work to suggest that (b: unknowable in principle) exists as well. Heseinberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that some information is forever beyond our reach — even in theory it could not be gathered. The double-slit experiment suggests that we cannot know through which slit the photon will pass.
Once you gather your (available) information, you must surmount Godel Theorem, which states that any logical system for evaluating information is inconsistent or incomplete. So, if we cannot construct a theory of free will rooted in mathematics, the problem may be with mathematics and logic rather than with free will!
Marek’s physicist/mathematician/programmer speaks of “physical theory”
but physical theory is itself rooted in stochastic process. You do not “prove” a hypothesis, you merely fail to reject the null hypothesis. Admittedly, if B follows A through thousands of experiments, it is likely that A and B are linked — yet there is the “black swan” phenomenon. Just because light has moved away from me at 186,000 mi/sec in the past does not guarantee that it will do so in the future. Some research suggest that even the “constants” may change over time. If so, we cannot reliably link cause and effect and therefore cannot guarantee determinism.
Free will is applied to systems that respond to consequences.
Determinism describes systems that respond only to antecedents.
Any system that can generate alternative behaviors and store those that are favored by consequences has rudimentary free will.
I’m sure there are better ways of phrasing this, but at least it suggests an operational definition of free will.
On might argue that the system itself is deterministic, but I find that kind of discussion pointless. It’s no more fruitful than counting angels.
In the everyday sense of free will, and in the accountability sense of the term, the question is whether it makes sense to apply consequences to behavior.
If the system (person, animal, GA) modifies itself in response to consequences, it makes sense to associate consequences with behavior.
Wouldn’t computers or flow charts meet this definition of free will? Also, as there is no obvious issue with predictability, I don’t think many people would agree to this definition.
To be fair though, I think many people are using an unfair ‘sky hook’ to make the distinction between the decisions of computers, people, or animals when it comes to free will. That is what my earlier complaints about the definition of “free will” in general were about to begin with.
Oddly enough, I make sense of everything in terms of evolutionary metaphors, and have done for the last forty years. I see the operation of brains as being analogous to biological evolution.
My operational definition of free will is the ability to evolve.
There are multiple possible definitions of evolution. There is unfolding. My understanding of cellular automata is that they unfold in a completely deterministic way. Restart the system and get exactly the same result.
This is different from a system that changes its structure as a result of feedback. That is, a system that learns. (Of course biological entities change first and some changes are differentially saved, but the population learns.) So I would say that any system capable of learning has rudimentary free will.
A system that can’t generate multiple alternative behaviors can’t learn. That would be the brain equivalent of a perfect replicator that never has copy errors.
That seems to by why quantum indeterminacy is attractive in the discussion of free will. It’s a source of stochastic alternatives. I don’t personally think it’s necessary. Brains seem to have stochastic behavior at the ordinary macro level of chemistry.
I think my biological analogy is completely consistent with the observation from neuroscience that decisions are made before “we” become aware of them. That seems to be the way evolving systems work.
Change first, followed by feedback.
Feedback changes the probability of the behavior in the population of responses.
There’s even a behavioral analogy to neutral theory. Behavioral psychologist call it superstition. It refers to behavior that is reinforced adventitiously. Walk under a ladder and have bad luck. Scratch your head and win at the slot machine.
Note that even your coin-flip is quantum-indeterminate.
“I don’t think many people would agree to this definition.”
+++++++++++++++++
And how far has the discussion of free will progressed in the last 2500 years in the absence of an operational definition?
I’m not touting mine as the best or only possible one, just as a start toward a discussion that could break the impasse.
I admire your attempt at a coherent definition. Again, it is not your responsibility that the public embraces such an amorphous definition. I never supposed that you put forth your definition as the best or only one.
I still struggle to define free will without more murky terms such as “intelligence” and “learning”. Once I can find a test that can be applied to a decision to determine if it is the result of free will or not, then I will be in business.
I have been unable to do so, and need to file “free will” under “meaningless”.
Once I can find a test that can be applied to a decision to determine if it is the result of free will or not, then I will be in business.
+++++++++++++++++
My rather limited definition solves that problem. It simply asks, does the system generate and test alternatives?
In some systems this can objectively be observed. Within our own private worlds we can observe ourselves generating alternatives and imagining consequences. We can also observe our inclinations changing as a result of consequences. This is the private “feeling” of having free will. We are limited only by our ability to imagine alternatives.
I realize there remains a pesky philosophical issue, but I see no way to make progress on that. I don’t see that anyone ever has made progress, except in the sense of exhausting the pool of possibilities. It’s no more tractable than asking why there is something rather than nothing.
My formulation solves the social problem of whether it makes sense to apply consequences to behavior. It also suggests that one could test methods to optimize the utility of various methods.
I see no reason to believe that maximizing utility world favor authoritarianism. Quite the opposite.
Jerry, what I think you still haven’t sufficiently made clear is what you think ‘free will’ could mean. From your categorical denial of the existence of free will, it seems that your definition is that of “spooky free will”—which, AFAICT, nobody thinks possible. But could you spell it out and say why you think that definition worth talking about?
Also: if I’m hungry and weigh different option, a sandwich and a steak, say, and decide to eat the sandwich–how is that not a decision even if it depends on my prior mental state, on my prior tastes, and on how good I imagine the steak to be? Of course these things determine my choice. But that doesn’t change the fact that the choice is mine, since it is me who makes it. Denying that it is a choice because I would just repeat it in the same circumstances seems nonsensical to me.
As to the physics part of your post: Miller doesn’t really seem to understand too well what he is talking about, I think. Quantum physics in no way implies radical and pervasive indeterminacy, on the contrary: it makes some things definitely determinable. For a better take on quantum physics and free will, here is a piece from David Deutsch’s absolutely outstanding book The Fabric of Reality—read it if you haven’t yet!
This echoes Dan Dennett’s Elbow Room – The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. What we want, or perhaps what we sensibley should want, out of free will is to square our actions and ideas with our self-image. And I think that’s entirely possible.
And, of course, in Deutsch’s multiverse view of reality I do choose the steak–at least in some universes. That turns out to be the meaning of having a choice.