1. Here’s a cartoon from reader Pliny the in Between’s website, “Pictoral Theology. . . and other Stuff.” This one’s called “I had no choice but to post.” (Click to enlarge.)
2. Here are two frequently asked questions about free will (I should write a “FAQ” about this because the same objections arise repeatedly).
a. Doesn’t determinism preclude you from ever changing your mind? Answer: No, for changing your mind can occur via deterministic influences of the environment on your brain. Watching a lifelong smoker whom you love die of cancer, for example, may be a powerful impetus for you to quit smoking. Humans are evolved to reason (think of our brain as a computer, even though, dear readers, I am perfectly aware of the differences between brains and human-constructed computers), and we can process inputs into outputs which are generally adaptive. So you can change your output in light of different inputs. What I maintain is that you cannot by your own conscious will alone change your mind, for that presumes a “ghost you” that can affect how your brain processes information. Nor can you ever be able to truly choose either of two alternatives at a given moment in time.
b. Doesn’t determinism preclude us from reasoning about problems and arriving at conclusions? Answer: No, for the same reason given above. Our brains, as Daniel Dennett has told us repeatedly in his books on compatibilism (I disagree with his compatibilism but agree with much of the other stuff in his “pro-free-will” books) are very complex meat computers that have evolved to process a variety of inputs before giving an output—a decision. And those brains have evolved to arrive, in general, at outputs that are good for our well being: “good” decisions. Some people have better onboard computers than others, and those people are called “smarter” or “deeper thinkers”, although they are that way through no effort of their own. So, yes, you can reason and arrive at rational conclusions, which is exactly what computers do when they arrive at outputs after absorbing a lot of information (think chess-playing computers).
I’ve found that a lot of objections to free will that aren’t very cogent can be overcome by simply thinking of our brains as complex computation machines, evolved to help their possessor’s well-being (i.e. reproduction or the proxies of reproduction).
3. Here is a Baby Hili dialogue in which she ponders free will (these “Baby Hili” dialogues don’t appear on this website, but can be found in the Hili Dialogues Tumblr Site curated by Miranda Hale (go to “archive” and look back, for example, from August through December of 2012; Hili was born in the spring or early summer of that year). And don’t forget that all the Hilis, young and old, are posted on Twitter, where you can follow the Queen’s feed. Hili is of course concerned that not enough people are following her.
This dialogue shows that Hili was already reading my website as a youngster:
I can tell you with near-certainty which of those two brands of milk Hili would elect if given a choice. And that’s based only on my crude observation of her behavior, not on feline brain scans.
The 0% milk is just water colored white.
#2 is very informative and concise. Someone, on one of the threads, said determinism is not predeterminism. That should go on a T-shirt.
Yes. Determinism is not fatalism (or predeterminism, is that a word?:)), because it’s the calculation that takes place in your brain after you are presented with a choice that determines the actual outcome of that choice.
A determination arrived at after consideration, perhaps (aka a decision)?
I agree with JJ @#14 below about defining terms.
I could make the standard joke about the reasoning process I went through to arrive at this conclusion, but that would only exacerbate a presently insoluble row.
Every moment of our lives is the result of quadrillions of chemical reactions…none of which involve any decisions. Their combined interactions are equally decision-free. We make no decisions. Are behaviour is meaningless. However complex any phenomenon is in a hard-deterministic universe … is it still robotic, meaningless and decision free.
That’s a bit of a simplification. Due to random mutation, there exists a wide range of meat computers in the population. In most human ecosystems, most of the time, it is probably true that the meat computers we call “smarter” have a competitive edge over the ones we don’t call smarter. That competitive edge is what we call better. However, in ecosystems and times where that isn’t true, the smarter ones will not be better.
As one example of when smarter isn’t better, instinctive biases will be favored when the cost of being wrong in your reasoning is very lopsided. This is the old “we are pattern-seeking animals” mantra. Having a bias towards finding patterns in randomness isn’t smart – it’s dumb. We have this trait because (this is how the hypothesis goes) the cost of missing patterns that are there is much higher than seeing a pattern that isn’t there. This is a case where the better onboard computer is the one which is a little bit dumber.
I think he means that, on average, “smarter brains” have an edge. Given the right context, even thinking 2+2=5 could be better than thinking 2+2=4, but generally, operating on that idea is clearly not optimal.
Adaptive or not, the fact is that becoming an effective thinker requires considerable training and practice. So there is effort involved, effort that is expended by the brain being trained. Deep thinkers get that way through a laborious (albeit deterministic) bootstrap process in which their own past behavior figures prominently. Saying “they are that way through no effort of their own” misrepresents this reality.
I agree. One could equally say that Olympic athletic champions “are that way through no effort of their own”, because it was their genetic inheritance and their environment that made them do all that training.
This is true, but rather beside the point. We can admire the beauty of a rose or a sunset, even though neither the rose nor the sunset decided to be beautiful of their own dualistic free-will, and in the same way we can admire and respect human achievement, even though it is a determined product of genes and environment.
Human emotions are actually pragmatic (because evolution is pragmatic) and don’t actually depend on any dualistic v deterministic metaphysics.
I dislike the “genes and environment” formulation. At best it’s an empty tautology; saying that behavior is determined by genes plus everything that’s not a gene is about as enlightening as saying it’s determined by our shoes, plus everything that’s not a shoe.
And if “environment” means something other than “everything that’s not a gene”, that’s even worse, because it implies an overweening genetic determinism in which plans and intentions don’t matter, since they’re doomed to be trumped by genes in the end. I don’t think Jerry means it that way, but his “genes and environment” mantra is open to that interpretation.
Yes, our behavior is determined, but it’s determined by a multitude of factors, internal and external. Genes undoubtedly play a role, but it’s not obvious that it’s the dominant role, and whether it is or not is largely irrelevant to the broader issues of determinism and compatibilism.
Someone’s been reading Pinker’s answer to the Edge question of the year.
Actually I thunk that up myself. But if Pinker says something similar, I’ll have to go check it out.
You are right of course, but we use words that are clearly just abstractions all the time, to make it easier to talk to eachother. I find the distinction genes/environment to be useful in thinking about the individuals within the whole sandbox. (Individuals, another word that is just an abstraction!)
To suggest we retire the distinction entirely is not helpful in any important context I can think of.
In some sense, I disagree with the last bubble in the first pic.
Many OSX users are religiously fanatical about their Apple fandom. 🙂
I actually edited out a comment from the panel about Unix being the only religion anyone ever needs!
But *nix has already schismed into many different sects… the commercial Unices, the BSD’s, and the 257 distros of Linux…
(I’m a Debianite, converted from Red Hat several years ago… all hail the mighty Penguin!)
Arch Linux forever !!! 🙂
Infidel!
sub
More on topic, I’m in Jerry and Sam Harris’ boat, totally on board. Reason and neuroscience really leaves no other option than to conclude that.
Find Daniel Dennett’s point of view on this whole thing really perplexing…
One of his main beefs appears to be that determinism is often mistaken for equating a fixed future as an inevitable consequence.
His notion of free will appears to simply be the ability to weigh pro’s and con’s against a desired outcome, but to be honest I haven’t read much of his work so maybe there’s a bit more meat on it than that.
Well, I don’t think the science is out on whether physical reality is actually deterministic. But if it was (or wasn’t), what would Dennett’s philosophical objection be exactly? The future would still be unknowable, since even the precise current state of reality is unknowable (Heisenberg).
Regardless, I don’t see how there is any way to describe reality where free will exists without resorting to supernaturalism. I’d have to read Dennett’s book to see how he solves this issue (if he even does).
Aye, it’s a tricky subject, but I think it’s safe to say that much of our observable and measurable physical reality displays deterministic behaviour that can be calculated and predicted to a certain extent.
Depending on the definition of free will, that pretty much settles it for me.
Dennett’s position is that an entirely deterministic universe is the best environment for making choices that are “down to us”.
All QM would add to the mix is randomness and something happening randomly can not be an agent’s choice.
Also, although the universe may or may not be deterministic in it’s entirety, our brain processes probably are, according to current theory as to how brains work.
I believe I have seen good work on how neuronal tissue may be posed on the border of deterministic chaos, because it facilitates long range signaling. (Just “right” attenuation of signals.)
Such chaos is also fundamentally non-predictive of course. (Exponential divergence.)
And neurons are working with a certain amount of randomness in Na/K pores opening and closing as the signals transmit.
Is such work rejected now?
[Incidentally, Hammerhoff and Penrose has released a new review over their “spiritual” quantum woo theory for consciousness. Ho hum.
Notably even Chopra [!] was permitted in the journal – critiquing the paper! (O.o)]
That’s interesting. I’m not familiar with the research, but rulesets for cellular automata which lead to chaotic behaviour tend to produce much richer Life worlds, whereas those that don’t tend to stagnate quickly. So one might expect that neural network wirings would need to be similar. Likely, in order to solve problems via pattern matching, one needs to evaluate lots of possibilities, like trying out different keys in a lock. Of course, that doesn’t make decision making processes indeterministic…
Dennett (in his two books on the subject) suggests that there is a distinction between different levels of agent capability and what he calls “free will” is essentially an emergent property that arises when a brain gets sufficiently complex. For instance, in Elbow Room, he compares the human ability to avoid compulsive behaviour (through subtle feedback mechanisms, subsystems etc.) with the unvarying routines programmed into the nervous system of the Sphex wasp.
Dennett’s point (as i understand it) is that deterministic processes are the only way that leads to us having the kinds of freedom we might want. I agree with that, but the question remains as to whether it’s confusing to use terms such as “free will” to describe these capabilities in the light of many people immediately jumping to the conclusion that libertarian free will is meant (I think this is Jerry’s main (only?) point of disagreement with Dennett). Personally, I think that people get confused whether one says that “free will” is compatible with determinism or not. But maybe Jerry is right that a belief in libertarian free will is the most insidious.
Having waded through Penrose’s original stuff (New Mind etc.) not sure that is likely to be going anywhere and Chopra’s involvement isn’t a good sign :).
I forgot:
Ever since I’ve seen the movie over tetra fish embryo synaptic firings [IIRC; they were likely using luminescence to see them] that this site featured a while back, I have a hard time seeing how brain processes are not so contingent that they verge on random processing (with useful, constrained outputs).
That brain baby was all over the place!
Oooh, Jerry, that one is a deliberate red flag to Vaal, isn’t it?
So if one brand of milk is poured into one bowl, so that Hili has no “choice”, then Hili drinks it. But if both brands are poured into adjacent bowls, so that Hili’s deterministic brain can set about acting on its preference, then Hili “chooses” one.
What a most excellent use of the good compatibilist word “choice”!
I agree.
Of course compatibilism is compatible with the predictability of people’s actions, both in principle (if you had enough knowledge, quantum concerns aside, you could predict everyone’s actions) and in practice (we often can predict how people we know will act – in fact if we couldn’t, human interaction would be chaos).
Vaal
One of the key ideas that confuses many is that having a greater range of motion or greater access to experiences is not predicated on contra-causal cognitive mechanics.
“I’ve found that a lot of objections to free will that aren’t very cogent can be overcome by simply thinking of our brains as complex computation machines, evolved to help their possessor’s well-being (i.e. reproduction or the proxies of reproduction).”
Does that mean that Jerry is really a homunculus that can stand outside his physical brain and think about it?
What the hell. I’ll sign on for another go-round on this topic.
OK, you convinced me to, too.
I like to think about it like this:
awareness of thoughts and behaviour can influence the thoughts and behaviour, but this doesn’t mean that either a) there is any agency in this or that b) this influence comes from outside in this case.
The cartoon conflates the different levels of abstraction in free will discussions by seeming to imply that the lack of free will means that people can’t change.
Looks like the author is making fun of the incompatibilist position.
I agree that, if our brains are meat computers (the current scientific consensus I reckon), then the decisions we make can be no different in principle than those of a chess computer choosing a move. That means that what we call a “choice” consists of calculating a *single* outcome that best serves the current state of the brain, according to the software running in it.
The difficulty is that compatibilists call this kind of choice “free will”, whilst incompatibilist say it isn’t. So, given acceptance of the first para, the difference between these two positions is a purely semantic one.
After long disucussions it often boils down to that, it seems.
“That means that what we call a “choice” consists of calculating a *single* outcome that best serves the current state of the brain, according to the software running in it.”
I think it would be more analogous to an analog computer where the input sets are weighted. I also don’t think a *single* choice is correct always.
The point is that it doesn’t matter what kind of computer the brain is unless it’s doing something that isn’t possible for a universal Turing machine (UTM). Computational theory of mind holds that any UTM could do any computation that the brain can do.
And computers always calculate one outcome (which can of course be a set of results) at the expense of other outcomes. e.g. If you get to choose between vanilla and chocolate ice cream cones and you grab both of them, that’s still one outcome that precludes you choosing either the vanilla or the chocolate on their own, which would be other possible outcomes from your brain’s ice cream choice calculation.
I think this has been tried. Soon, compatabilists were suggesting that free will isn’t a binary quality, but something ranging from not-free-at-all (an inert rock) to super-free (people, when not at gunpoint) and fairly-free (airplane autopilots) to barely-free (an arrangement of dominoes).
At this point I sort of lost interest, because it is clear that while dualists and materialists are actually discussing something coherent, compatabilists are just saying that -if we pretend that free will means something entirely different, then it would sort of make exist-.
Which is trivially true even for something as false as God, if we pretend God just means -the totality of all that exists-, so atheists are obviously wrong.
I think that what compatibilists such as Dennett are really saying is that the whole concept of libertarian free will is incoherent, simply because you can’t pick yourself up using your own bootstraps. In the light of that, if the term “free will” is going to mean anything at all, a compatibilist definition is the only game in town.
Indeed, and then you get stuck in this lovely debate instead:
Materialists: free will, in the dualist sense, is an illusion, and the way people make choices is not qualitatively different from primitive IFTHEN logic, with output determined uniquely from input. Our experience of choice is is an illusion, because we couldn’t have done otherwise without either the situation being different or our self being replaced with someone with different information or priorities. People have no more free will than does an ATM.
Dualists: but for free will to make sense, it can’t be taken in the dualist sense, so we must instead use free will to refer to those situations in which it is our own evaluations and preferences which guide our actions. So while we don’t have free will in a dualist sense, we have the only sort of free will that is worth having, that is, the freedom to run our mental program code exactly as it is written. This isn’t as much redefining free will as discovering how it should have been defined all along, and the great thing about it is how we can keep using ‘choice’ and ‘responsibility’ as we are used to.
Dr. Coyne,
I think you have misunderstood the questions, as least as I would ask them.
1- Doesn’t determinism preclude you from ever changing your mind?
Rephrase: Doesn’t determinism preclude a human from consciously affecting the end result of any choice he/she will make in the future?
If you feel that we can, in reality, consciously affect the choices we will make in the future by altering our thoughts, thus changing our behavior and/or our environment, why doesn’t that ability qualify as ‘free will’?
2 – Doesn’t determinism preclude us from reasoning about problems and arriving at conclusions?
Rephrase: Doesn’t determinism preclude reasoning about problems and arriving at conclusion from affecting the end result of a choice made in the future based on that reasoning?
If you feel this is true, why would this ability evolve since it has a cost w.r.t. resources and would provide no benefit with respect to outcomes?
If you feel this is false, why doesn’t this ability to reason about problems, come to a conclusion and change thoughts and actions to increase the probability of success qualify as ‘free will’?
Free will implies one is _free_ to act in a certain way, as opposed to some other way. Thoughts simply arise in the mind as a result of processes in the brain, you aren’t their author. Your conscious behaviour is determined by your conscious thoughts, which aren’t of your making. That you are their author is the illusion underlying the false notion of free will. Why do you think a certain thing at a certain moment? Did you decide to think that? If so, how? Or did the thought simply appear in your consciousness?
Excuse me, but why I think that I am NOT the author of my thoughts?
What definition of ‘author’ and ‘thought’ leads you to think otherwise?
I couldn’t parse your post grammatically, so I’m honestly not sure what you are trying to say with that first sentence. No disrespect intended.
Can you clarify by adding perhaps a missing word or correcting one of the words? Then I can answer any objections you were trying to voice.
Sorry. I dropped the word ‘would’.
Why would I think that I am NOT the author of my thoughts?
I’m quite tempted to interpret that question literally and reply “because those thoughts would be arising in your mind from processes in your brain”.
Assuming you didn’t mean for it to be interpreted like that:
Let’s turn your question around. Why would you think you are? Think about it. What if I ask you to pick a number between 1 and 100? How did you settle on the number you settled on? Did you decide instantly? If so, why did that particular number pop into your head? If not, what made you discard that first number? Could you really have picked another? Or is it simply an illusory observation, in hindsight, that you could have picked another: a desperate bid to reassure yourself that you do indeed have free will.
I’m sorry, but I’m not understanding you at all. How are you defining concepts such as *author* and *thought* such that you do not consider a person to be the author of his/her thoughts?
As for why I think I make choices, such as picking a number between 1 and 100 – it’s because I can sense myself doing so. If you want to convince me that this sense of making choices is an illusion rather than an accurate representation of reality, you need a convincing explanation of how the illusion is created and what is *really* happening instead.
If you put a computational device such as a brain in a particular state and give it a set of inputs then it will always produce the same outputs when in that state and given the same inputs. That’s a consequence of deterministic operation. So the only possible way to change your mind would be if the brain were in a different state somewhere during the calculation. Since brains consist of many interacting sub systems and are constantly getting input from the senses, they are never going to be in exactly the same state from one decision to another. So “changing your mind” is just a consequence of your brain being in a different state when you reevaluate a decision.
1. There is no reason to assume that our brain processes are deterministic. I think the default assumption should be that they are probabilistic.
2. “Changing your mind” is a statement equivalent to “your brain is in a different state”. It’s a tautology, not an supporting argument.
3. Do you think that you can consciously choose to alter your thoughts in the present and if so, doesn’t that allow you to change future outcomes? Why doesn’t that qualify as ‘free will’?
Neurons appear to work deterministically, in fact you can simulate their operation programmatically. And brains, for the most part are neural networks. So there is good reason to believe that brains, like computers, operate entirely deterministically. In fact everything that works according to the principles of classical physics operates deterministically and it seems unlikely that quantum indeterminacy plays a part in decision making (although it has been mooted). In any case it’s not clear how random quantum events could play a part in making a decision more “free”, whatever that might be taken to mean.
We can’t predict human behavior other than with probabilistic models. To the best of our (human beings) ability to determine, nature at the lowest levels can only be described by probabilistic models. While deterministic models can be developed for higher levels of physical phenomena, they are considered approximations.
So why should I assume that the human brain is deterministic.
Any decision with a probabilistic outcome has some element of ‘freedom’ as opposed to a purely deterministic model that allows only one possible outcome.
A random input allows a probabilistic decision making process, thus allowing multiple outcomes from the same input. Hence, it could play a part in making a decision more ‘free’, whatever that might be taken to mean.
Consider a computer program that self-generates a random number as part of a decision-making process. The programmer has the “freedom” to define different outcomes using the same inputs and the value of the random number. The outcome is no longer “determined”.
All it means to say that the brain is deterministic is that computations in the brain are a consequence of cause and effect, just as they are in computers. Noone is claiming that humans are capable of predicting what decisions a brain is going to make. In fact due to classical chaos, that’s likely to be impossible for much brain activity.
The point about randomness (made by Dennett, for instance) is that if an agent’s decision is affected by randomness, then clearly it isn’t a decision made by that agent to the extent that it is random. If you are forced to act one way or another based on a random coin flip, then it isn’t down to you what decision you take. For a decision to fully reflect the intentions of an agent, then it must be calculated by a deterministic process connecting that agents state data (memories etc.) to the inputs for the decision.
Random numbers produced by computers are actually pseudo-random, that is they are generated by deterministic means. If you want to generate a genuine random number you would need to hook up to some from of quantum indeterminacy, such as radioactive decay (that is assuming QM doesn’t have some deterministic underpinning, which no one really knows right now). But I don’t think this is relevant to arguments about free will for the reason stated in the second para.
I disagree with that point. The use of a random seed to make a decision does not imply lack of choice in the same way that a deterministic outcome without any randomness does.
If a programmer builds an if/then logic tree based on a random number, then the probability distribution for the outcome would have been chosen by the programmer despite any particular outcome being indeterminate until it occurs.
If the agent can make a conscious decision to alter the probability distribution of outcomes, then I think it is meaningful to say that the agent has made use of randomness in order to exercise choice.
In your mind then, what is a “random” number? One six-sided die will produce a random number, but the probability distribution is very well defined.
Could you build an IF/THEN logic tree based on a random integer from one to infinity?
I’m probably not understanding you, but it seems like by talking about probability distributions being conscious choices, you’ve ruled out randomness itself.
The basic textbook definition of a random event (number or otherwise) is one that cannot be predicted with certainty. A roll of a six-sided die is generally considered to fit that definition although I have heard that some people can develop enough skill to alter the probability distribution from the assumed uniform.
Sure. Let k be a random integer from one to infinity. If n < k, then do a. Else do b.
However, generating a random number between one and infinity is a bit trickier and the probability of the random number being < k cannot be computed since there is no finite limit to k.
No. Consider the example of a six-sided die. If someone is able to develop enough skill to toss the die with the number 6 having a higher than 1/6 probability and the number 1 having a correspondingly lower than 1/6 probability, that doesn’t imply any given die roll isn’t random.
Beth, my actual day job is in the field of practical applications of AI. As we test progressively more complex AI systems (more inputs, more variables, more decision nodes, analogs to local and distant agonist/antagonist neurochemistry, etc.) the types of decisions and the intermediate processes displayed by the systems looks more and more ‘natural and nuanced’ to human observers. The systems mimic (or replicate depending on your perspective I suppose) familiar cognitive processes with greater precision and make better decisions. Part of this is because they process data faster and part of it is that the systems are designed to avoid some of the cognitive biases to which flesh is heir to. But clearly the fundamental processes are those present in any computer. The progressive layering of sophistication begins to blur that, but it’s still computation limited by hardware. The more I work in this area the more convinced I become of the basic naturalism of what we have chosen to call mind.
As impressive as some of this stuff is, it’s still orders of magnitude less complex than our brains (the AI’s have only been intelligently designed in the last few decades and evolving for only a few years – give them time).
AI is, as far as I’m concerned, in its infancy… Less than embryonic stages or development.
Ray Kurzweil is completely delusional about “the singularity” being near in a way, in my opinion.
Do you agree?
Delusional? The guy is a billionaire who hob-nobs with people like Stevie Wonder.
Questionable dates for AI’s surpassing human intelligence? Probably.
90% Doctor Who and 10% real science? Maybe.
But delusional? No way.
(I’ve met him twice, btw.)
I qualified it, delusional about the supposed imminence of the singularity.
PS. I reject your assertion that billionaires can’t be delusional.
And I reject the assertion that having successful musicians as friends defends against delusion. (Phil Spector anyone?)
Yes and no Paul. I think we are early in the lifecycle of what AI will ultimately accomplish, but in some technical areas, AI is at least matching what humans can do and responsive enough to come close to beating a Turing test.
But I also want to emphasize that the real utility of AI as I see it is not so much replicating human ways of thinking (defined as they were by our particular course of evolution) but creating new ways of thinking that avoid human cognitive bias.
I think the importance of the Turing test has been overstated. It is still held up as the gold standard in AI research today?
Depends on the purpose of the AI. Systems intended to work directly with humans may need to be humanlike in their behaviors. More industrial applications would not.
My day job is photons, electrons, and whole atoms. None of them are free, but I can not predict where they will be when I want them.
There is a lot of room for ambiguity in a deterministic universe when virtually none of it is predictable with arbitrary accuracy.
I find it difficult to believe in a deterministic universe when a) we know that at it’s very lowest levels, nature is NOT deterministic but probabilistic and b) we cannot make deterministic predictions about anything but concepts (ex: mathematics) and well-defined finite bounded subsets of the material universe.
I’m a bit curious about how randomness at low levels disqualifies determinacy at higher levels.
What could possibly lead you to conclude that we and our environment are independent of cause and effect and indetermant?
Randomness at lower levels does not completely disqualify determinacy at higher levels. However, it makes the assumption of determinacy unjustified for higher levels unless a mechanism exists to eliminate ALL effects of the randomness on outcomes.
What could possibly lead you to conclude that I think that we and our environment are independent of cause and effect? Indeterminate does not imply independent.
That’s where I can’t follow you.
You recognize that randomness at low levels does not dissolve the mechanisms controlling higher levels. Yet you appear to transfer this indeterminacy from low levels to higher levels because we don’t know what mechanisms underlies all the levels.
How low and how high are we talking exactly?
Applied Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, but currently there is no single accepted theory of what may underly it. The Many Worlds interpretation, for instance, is entirely deterministic, although odd in its proliferation of realities. However other theories,such as Copenhagen variants, which rely on indeterminate events are equally if not more problematic. So the jury is still out on this one.
I completely agree. A sophisticated enough computer program (including many, many layers of recursion and “self-monitoring”) will one day pass the Turing Test. How could it not? The real question is whether or not the big-brained ape brand of intelligence is really worth simulating, other than for purely narcissistic/recreational reasons. As IBM’s Watson has recently demonstrated by winning at Jeopardy, computer technology may have already re-defined what the word “intelligence” should really mean. Dedicated, focused, “narrow-minded” yet ultra-high-speed systems may ultimately be more useful to mankind than human-like AI programs.
Jerry said: “So, yes, you can reason and arrive at rational conclusions, which is exactly what computers do when they arrive at outputs after absorbing a lot of information (think chess-playing computers).”
Even completely unique and novel conclusions can be outputs from a deterministic brain. The math behind General Relativity did not break any rules or require any new mathematical concepts, yet nobody would disagree that the Einstein Equation was a work of creative genius.
“…computer technology may have already re-defined what the word “intelligence” should really mean.”
The human meat machine is influenced by emotions, which are hormones and are just inputs, but not necessarily advantageous for “intelligence”.
I propose a new rule:
That before any discussion of free will occurs, the people having that discussion must agree on the definition of “free-will.”
After much reading and occasional commenting on the issue, the big disagreement seems to me to be a matter of semantics.
Consequently, I propose that the debate should be shifted to the matter of semantics before we decide on anything else.
Full disclosure: I have always interpreted the term “free-will” in the same manner as JAC and SH has.
I sort of like the non-defined way comments can flow. It makes it better for future commenters to think about a) what has been said in a comment and b) does this person follow the general definition of JAC and SH. Constrained by definition, comments tend to follow guidelines. When the commenter is clueless about freewill, the comment may or may not have value (generally none). But when the commenter is just trying to explore an idea knowing vaguely what is meant by free will, interesting thought experiments can sometimes result.
I am in favor of well educated free will commenters, but loosening up their belts on which ‘wrong ideas’ are forgivable and which are not can be interesting.
I like your new rule. Hopefully others will too.
Agree entirely. I suggested something similar a year or so ago, and I think there is a bit more defining of terms these days (not that I’m claiming any causality there). But there is still a lot of arguing at cross-purposes.
“And those brains have evolved to arrive, in general, at outputs that are good for our well being: “good” decisions.”
With respect, I’d argue that our brains have evolved to arrive, in general, at outputs that our good for our chances of reproduction. Our well-being is evolutionarily cogent only to the extent that it keeps us happy enough to survive until reproductive age. There are many things about the way our brains are wired up that reliably cause us to pursue ends which we know will harm our well-being, especially in the long term. An example is the constant background anxiety many people feel most of the time. While being constantly nervous surely helped our ancestors avoid being eaten by a lion or killed by a rival, today it is less helpful, and can lead to depression, panic attacks, ulcers and other problems.
Obviously your time and patience are limited, but perhaps if and when you should ever do a FAQ, would be willing to consider including answers to the following questions?
—
When you write things like ‘you cannot truly choose’ or ‘you are a slave of your genes’ or ‘your neurons decide for you’, what exactly is the ‘you’ you are writing about?
Follow-up 1: If the ‘you’ or self is a ‘ghost you’, does that not rather presuppose dualism and is thus irrelevant from a compatibilist materialist or naturalist perspective that assumes that ‘you’ is a bodily human being?
Follow-up 2: If the ‘you’ or self is a human body with a material brain, it follows that genes, life experiences, subconscious brain, and neurons in general are the constituent parts of the ‘you’ or self (just as engine, wheels and seats are constituent parts of a car). How does it then make sense to say that ‘they make the decision for you’ or that ‘you are their slave’? Are you not then your own slave? (Does a car not truly drive to Washington because the engine ‘does the driving for it’?)
Is there any evidence supporting the view that the true meaning of ‘you’ or ‘self’ is identical with that of ‘supernatural soul’ or ‘ghost in the machine’ as opposed to ‘a human being’? (When somebody says “I did that myself”, does that mean that a soul did it?)
The compatibilist position is that even in a completely deterministic universe it still makes a difference whether somebody has done something voluntarily, under coercion or out of madness. Given that you are known to advocate differential treatment of the mentally ill and the malicious, or of a fallen tree that has killed somebody and a murderer who has killed somebody, is there actually any difference between your stance and the compatibilist one apart from terminology?
Are there any empirical data supporting the view that the majority of people hold a supernatural definition of the term ‘free will’ as opposed to a compatibilist one, as in ‘deliberately and without coercion’?
Are there any empirical data supporting the view that the majority of people hold a supernatural interpretation of the term ‘choice’ as opposed to a compatibilist one, as in a chess computer making the choice to move a certain pawn?
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I would honestly and seriously be interested in direct answers because they might clarify a lot.
The “you” in most contexts is your consciousness, I’m thinking Jerry means. Clearly, it’s wrapped up in the brain, which is connected with the rest of the body via the central nervous system. In the context of free will, agency, the interesting “you” would be the consciousness. If your thoughts arise in your consciousness, your awareness, your mind, through reasons you aren’t conscious, aware of, and your actions are based in your thoughts, it seems pretty clear that free will is illusory as your thoughts haven’t consciously been authored by your mind.
Don’t know about the contexts you mention, but for materialists (i.e. for all and any compatibilists Jerry Coyne argues with) the ‘you’ is the body, or at least I would never in my wildest dreams have come up with anything else. I mean, consciousness is just a process going on inside my body, not a thing, so I don’t know how it would even make sense to say that thoughts arise ‘in’ it.
When my body loses an arm then quite literally *I* lose an arm. Yes, that’s me. (And even dualists would use that phrase!) And when a thought arises unconsciously it is still *my* thought and not somebody else’s, and that means that if my meat computer makes a decision then *I* make a decision. The one and only context in which that sentence is false is dualism, and no compatibilist espouses dualism because then they would not be compatibilists.
But perhaps the perennial insistence on knowing better than the compatibilists what the compatilists actually mean is the problem here, as opposed to any tangible disagreement. Figuring that out is just what my suggestions for FAQ entries are about.
Indeed. A lot of the arguments seem to boil down to different definitions of “you” crossed with different definitions of “free will”.
You should read Sam Harris, he can explain these ideas better than I ever will be able to. Consciousness isn’t a process, it’s an emergent phenomenon resulting from processes in the brain. I think you may have use for an introductory philosophy class. The body is essential is the formation of your mind, but it isn’t your mind (obviously) or part of it. Given a machine that simulates your body perfectly, the consciousness arising it in would be exactly the same.
To add to my previous post, if you amputate a part of your body, sensory perception signals relating to that bodypart stop being relayed to your brain via the central nervous, meaning that certain information will no longer be integrated into your consciousness.
Basically, in the first paragraph of your post you disregarded the entire essense of mine and just went back to your own, wrong definition of “you”, leading to your confusion.
Your mind, consciousness has no arms.
Why do you get to decide that my concept of what I am is ‘wrong’? And again, from my perspective the idea that we are our bodies should be an absolute no-brainer, the direct and logical consequence of the conclusion that there are no immaterial souls. Before I got dragged into these discussions here on WEIT I would never have thought it possible that any non-religious/esoteric person would promote such a stealth dualism. Restricting ‘ourselves’ to the conscious part of our thinking is like claiming that Mozilla Firefox 26.0 is my computer.
Alex, I can understand your perspective and there may be a considerable number who consider themselves “their whole body”, but I think most people have the conception that they are the consciousness that inhabits and wills the body. The illusion of separateness from our body I think is rather strong. You may argue that this is just an illusion and you would be completely correct. But I would respond with the concept of soul which seems to be a popular concept throughout the world, not universal but something quite like it probably is for a majority of the human race. This concept suggests that there is a separate conscious entity that is distinct from the body. Why is this an almost universal concept, well the illusion the illusion that we are a separate homunculus is very strong. So I think those who support the idea of the self being defined as the part of the body/mind that is conscious and self aware have the stronger case.
Another thought experiment that will put this in better perspective. It we were able to perfectly record and make an exact copy of your nervous system and then simulate it in a sufficiently advanced computer-like device, I would argue that the simulation would have an experience and that experience could be labeled “you”. Conversely, If we used an extremely potent general anesthesia that precluded any awareness yet did no damage either to your brain or body would “you” still exist?
Not sure where you are going with that Firefox thing. I’m sure it sounded like a smart thing to post when you posted it. I don’t see how it relates to emergence of consciousness.
I’ll try another analogy. Consider the so-called “gut flora”, no doubt considered by you to be a part of what you call “you”. Now, given that, you hold that being given an enema changes you in the sense that a portion of the intestinal bacteria are flushed out of your body. Furthermore, consider the impossibility of even delineating what even constitutes your body and what is not your body.
Contrast that with my view that the experience of the enema happening, anything you consciously felt during the procedure, information relating to that experience being encoded in some way in structures in the brain (to be accessed at a later time for integration into your then-present mind) is the real change occurring to what is “you”.
If you consider both views and don’t conclude the first one is a strange, naive way to think about what is “you”, I see no further point in this discussion, sorry to say.
P. S. I noticed you entirely disregarded my point about the machine simulation of the body. Can I ask you to reconsider that point?
As another thought exercise, consider this.
During (at least) non-REM sleep the amount of information processed by your brain is sufficiently diminished, due to decreased neuronal activity, that you cannot be said to be conscious. Your body is there of course, but would you really say that “you” are there? If so, you really hold a strange view, shared by almost no one, the failure to recognize experience as something in some sense transcending (have to be careful with that word, don’t want to sound like deepak) the physical.
Yes, I would say that someone is ‘there’ during non-REM sleep. Do you honestly believe *you* cease to exist while you are sleeping? And *you* are then created anew in a slightly different form when you awake? If this is your belief, why do you believe that?
It’s an interesting conundrum. I agree, there is something that is *you* that transcends the physical. When a person dies, their body remains but the *soul* that inhabited the body is no longer there.
If you believe that *you* could be separated from your body and instantiated on a different substrate (i.e. a perfect simulation of your body that isn’t your physical body), then you are implicitly accepting the existence of a non-material *soul* that materialists explicitly deny exists.
I don’t care for the word ‘soul’ here. It’s an arcane word for a supernatural thing, that has all kinds of nonsense attached to it.
Let me ask you this: What are the kinds of things you like to get up to when you are in non-REM sleep, Beth?
It’s unhelpful to think of your consciousness being destroyed and recreated every day. Think of it as diminishing and reemerging, as a consequence of reduced neuronal information transfer in your brain.
A dream state is in this sense an intermediate type of level of experiencing, between unconsciousness and “plain” consciousness. Dreams are weird, because, while the physical processes taking place are generally comparable, clearly the input from sensory input one has during an awake state are for the most part absent. Lucid dreaming occurs when the level of experiencing is sufficiently “high” that you are aware on a somewhat comparable level as when you are awake.
Again, let me reiterate the point that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, arising from the physical. It is not something that exists beside it, but something that emerges as a consequence of it. Note that it also doesn’t exist in any physical sense.
To answer your question from another subthread:
Yes, your own consciousness, your mind is the only thing you can be absolutely sure of exists. It is in fact the only thing that cannot be illusory, how could it? It it didn’t exist, how could you be thinking these thoughts?
Well, technically, I can’t be sure *you* exist, but I mean “you” as a self-reference to the person considering his own consciousness.
Forgot the mention the most important debunking of your view. I’m fairly certain this will convince you.
Consider Descartes. You cannot, strictly speaking, even be certain that you like body exists. The only certain thing is the existence of your consciousness.
*My phone keyboard turned your into you like
Is consciousness an illusion or is it the only thing we can be certain of?
Simply put:
Label entity “you” A.
Label entity “your body” B.
We want to rationally investigate whether A equals B.
One cannot rationally doubt your his existence. Entity A therefore has property “certain to exist”. On the other hand, one cannot rationally be certain of the existence of their body. Therefore, entity B has property “not certain to exist”.
Clearly, A and B have incompatible properties, so rationally we must conclude that they can’t be equal.
Wish this blog allowed editing comments…
“Wish this blog allowed editing comments…”
me too!
Well WordPress doesn’t allow me that feature, so let’s stop kvetching about it.
It might be doable.
see:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/allow-users-edit-comments-wordpress/
Paul,
This is utterly bizarre. You believe in the existence of a soul. You believe that your soul is the real you and the body is simply some external machine you inhabit for a time. You believe that this soul gets copied or transferred into a duplicate when such a duplicate is built. You appear to believe that your soul floats away from the body or something like that when you sleep. While most other determinists here appear to have convinced themselves that the consciousness or the self are illusions, you believe that they are the only thing we can be sure does exist…
strongforce,
There are two possible angles to answer your first question:
(1) Compatibilists are materialists who believe that it makes sense to speak of choices and of free will / volition / agency (take your pick) even given determinism. Being materialists, they do not believe that there is a soul-me in the first place so pointing at completely different people who believe completely different things does not work as a strategy to convince compatibilists that they are wrong. What the majority of people blieve becomes relevant only when we examine claims about whether e.g. ‘choice’ has a supernatural meaning or not, which is why I asked those “is there any empirical evidence” questions above.
(2) As for the supernaturalists out there, there is an important difference to be made between what they claim to believe and what they actually believe as shown by their actions. When you chop off somebody’s arm, how many even very religious people do you think will react with something on the lines of ‘ah, who cares, I haven’t lost anything because I am not my body but my soul’?
Seeing as how you and Paul both seem to believe that brain uploading is possible and would entail something like my soul-essence being copied into a computer, I am more and more convinced that you, and perhaps all incompatibilists, must be dualists. The only difference between your position and that of, say, a Christian is merely that the Christian claims to believe that the soul-me can influence the body while you believe that the soul-me is a passive prisoner inside the body, helplessly watching it shamble along according to physical cause-and-effect.
There is no scientific evidence for the existence of a soul-me. The physical body is all there is. Thus the physical body is me, and thus I am my genes, neurons and the sum of environmental influences that shaped me, and thus if the physical body decides something I decide something. Every other position presupposes dualism, i.e. the existence of a soul-me separate of the body, and I had kind of hoped that the atheoblogosphere (websitetosphere in the case of WEIT?) would have rejected that idea.
It would just be nice if incompatibilists could either acknowledge that their stance presupposes dualism or alternatively give a coherent account of how they can square the rejection of immaterial souls with their ideas about the illusion of choice and suchlike. ‘We’ have to be something, and the only options appear to be a meat machine or something immaterial. If in your account we are meat machines then we make bona fide choices in the same sense as a chess computer (i.e. in the only coherent sense of that term), and if we are something immaterial then incompatibilists are dualists.
If you honestly doubt the existence of your own consciousness, I see no point in discussing anything with you. No offense… 🙂 If you want to explain to me how you could do that, I might perhaps be tempted to reply.
Let me reply really quick on the “copy” or “transfer” thing. You misrepresent my view here. The consciousness arises as a result of physical processes. If you build an exact copy or simulation of my body, it doesn’t copy the consciousness with it. This consciousness will necessarily arise in the copy/simulation as a result of (unknown and certainly unverifiable) laws which govern the generation of experience (or what I call experiential reality, which isn’t physical).
Also refer to my reply to Beth on “soul”, which I find a distasteful arcane word with all kinds of absurd metaphysics associated with it.
I do not doubt the existence of my consciousness or self – but quite a few people here on whose side you perhaps consider yourself to be in the incompatibilism discussion do! Of course it isn’t an illusion but it isn’t all there is to ‘me’ either.
Your views (and sentences like ‘the neurons made the decision for me’ which are often seen around here) only make sense if the real self is immaterial. I am merely using the established term for such a thing, partly to point out the indefensibility of such a position.
That is just my point: Compatibilism follows logically from materialism, so incompatibilists must sneak in a soul-me for their ideas to make sense; but when that self-contradiction is pointed out it is ‘distasteful’. Too bad.
Where is the contradiction? That which is “me” _is_ immaterial in my view. It arises from the physical, but isn’t itself physical.
You really are claiming absolute certainty about things without any support for it.
As you seemed to be denying the existence your own consciousness in your previous post (I don’t think it’s possible to interpret your previous post as anything other than entailing that, seeing how you derided how I thought about it), and – after being pressed on it by me – now say you don’t deny its existence, perhaps I’ve initiated a still ongoing paradigm shift in your mind 😉
Here’s a hint that should help you get started on your way to accepting my point of view: it seems from your posts, to me, that you’ve never been introduced to the concept of solipsism. Or if you have, you rejected its main premise; for what reason I really cannot fathom… I suggest you (re)consider its main idea.
I’m not sure I want to jump into the middle of this, but this sentences stands out to me as completely unsupportable:
There is no evidence for such a thing, and I am doubtful there ever could be. It doesn’t seem a bit different from the religious idea of a soul, other than marginal matters of when it enters a body (or “arises”, if you prefer).
So now do we get to discuss how many of those “me”s can sit on the head of a pin?
In this subthread, I stated as much (or it might be another subthread). I did suggest a reasoning for the fact that my “me” cannot be physical: I am sure of the existence of my thoughts, but I cannot be absolutely certain anything physical exists. Given that something cannot have properties “certain to exist” and “not certain to exist”, the “me” cannot be physical. (I needn’t presuppose the view that the “me” arises from the physical, for this argument.)
Any rationalist realizes all of existence is guided by laws. We know many of them, or at least we have fairly accurate abstractions to model them.
Yet, nothing even touches on the subject of experiencing. This leads me to rationally conclude there must be laws that govern how experience comes about. Given what we need about neuroscience, the most logical thing than is that it arises the accessing of information by physical mechanisms (neuronal information transfer activity in the brain). If you read some of my other posts, I concede that the exact nature of these laws would be never completely verifiable, due to their subjective nature. I think Tononi’s hypothetical qualiascope is something that cannot exist. You could still use them to predict and explain things, however.
I don’t mind you jumping into the discussion at all, by the way. I find this the most interest post on the website in a while. Lots to discuss and exchange ideas about.
Also note that I don’t attribute any strange metaphysics to what you want to tell me I should “soul”. It’s just consciousness 😉 Nothing holy or divine about it, neither does it have any agency to it.
I’m fairly ignorant regarding about “things qualia”, having only read about them in Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained, where he basically dismisses the idea.
Still, it strikes me that this “thing” you call the emergent immaterial “me” is nothing but the operating behavior of your meat machine. I see no particular need or value in reifying the chemistry and electronic processing of your nervous system into some new “thing”. I don’t see how doing so advances our understanding of anything.
I’ll repeat. As far as laws of nature go, science has provided not a single iota of explanation for subjective experience, while “pretty much” everything about the physical is known (there are still some unknowns, sure, but we know incredibly much about the matter and energy etc, the four forces, etc). This leads me to think crucial stuff is missing (experience is the only thing that even gives the universe meaning).
As for my reasoning that the “me” cannot be physical, what about is do you reject? Do you find any fault with it? I’d be interested to hear your objections.
The behavior of physical things remains part of the physical universe. A cat tracking a mouse across the kitchen floor is a physical process enabled by the laws of the physical universe. It isn’t some extra-physical manifestation of spirit (or something). Do we know precisely how the cat’s brain manages to accomplish this? No. But there is no reason to doubt that it does it using neural electronics and chemistry to construct internal models (manifest in wetware) based on physical inputs via eye sensors (and others, perhaps).
I object to the “science has provided not a single iota of explanation for subjective experience” framing which probably untrue in fact and is largely a “god of the gaps” argument (substituting some poorly defined “me” spirit-thing for “god”).
Behavior isn’t experience. Can you reconsider your reply, since this one didn’t relate to what I am saying at all.
Experience is the internal representation, the “maps”, in the behaving meat machine.
Why do you need to insert a ghost into the machine?
I think you really need to read about the hard problem of consciousness, and qualia in general. You’re pretending there isn’t any issue here, which is sort of crazy.
Saying “internal maps” and waving your hands won’t do. What is special about the physical nature of these “maps” that they are able to physically “constitute” your thoughts? Do you contend that there is “some collection of particles” and their interactions that – when you think about the word “monkey” – _physically constitutes *your thinking of the word “monkey” in that exact instant*_? I find that a stranger proposition than an immaterial consciousness.
Care you clarify?
P.S. I don’t insert a ghost into the machine. The “ghost” arises from the machine. 🙂
Except, Paul, there’s nothing but your assertion for the existence of these ghosts. Demonstrate them and I’ll find your position more convincing. “There must be more than this!” isn’t any more convincing in neuroscience than it is in theology.
It seems to me that any arm waving being done is on behalf of ghost hunters.
Again, I’ll repeat:
“As for my reasoning that the “me” cannot be physical, what about is do you reject? Do you find any fault with it? I’d be interested to hear your objections.”
Can you answer this?
As a reply to your last post, there’s is as much evidence for your “somehow really special” “physical incarnations of thoughts”, which I’m sure you are now realizing. Otherwise, you’d have actually responded to my query about them. Instead, you completely ignored that query, just like the one I’ve now repeated at the top of the post.
PS. you introduced the silly word “ghost” into this discussion, not me, derogatorily no doubt. Hardly helpful to then link to a “ghost hunter” video in your attempt to avoid actually answering my questions.
Alex, I think you are either unintentionally or I suspect intentionally failing to distinguish between analogies/metaphors used for illustration and the actual positions held by incompatibilists. This has allowed you to argue against the straw man you have been diligently constructing in this series. You are now at the point of declaring that incompatibilists are all closet dualists. Congratulations.
I would enjoy further discussion on this topic if you would commit to cease with the strawman-ing and instead demonstrate an honest desire to share insights from others that have a differing opinion than the one you hold. I hope to do likewise.
I think you give him to much credit. From my discussions with him he just seems utterly confused, redefining what he means (and everyone else means) between different posts, unaware of what the relevant philosophical concepts actually entail. I can’t believe I have seriously been going back and forth with him while he constantly moves the goal posts, as it were. Still, I pressed him on replying to a purely logical refutation of one of his claims in another subthread. Let’s see if he actually replies coherently.
@Paul: I didn’t introduce the word “ghost” to be derogatory. I introduced it because I don’t see a significant difference between your ineffable “me” and a ghost (or “soul” if you prefer). They are all equally legitimate ideas as far as I can see.
The video was an attempt at levity. Perhaps you don’t share my sense of humor. Or humour, for that matter.
Again, it looks more like an evasion tactic. Are you ever going to give me any straight answers to the questions I posed to you? Specifically the two I explicitly asked you about again two posts above?
Off topic, I can assure you I appreciate humor as one of the greatest human creative activities. Just didn’t think it was funny here, especially in light of you dodging every question I pose.
OK, Paul, this will be my last comment in a thread I suspected I’d regret jumping into.
I reject the existence of ineffable things that have no physical manifestations. When you assert the existence of a non physical “thing” (your “me”) you assert the existence of something that I can not distinguish from a soul or a ghost.
I assume you are going to respond with a demand, yet again, that somehow you are being dissed, that your questions aren’t being addressed, that your fellow commenter is avoiding some critical issue. I believe I’ve told you (repeatedly) why I think your position makes no sense. If you don’t accept it, fine.
Fair enough, that is the first time you explicitly stated your actual rejection of everything non-physical as opposed to just saying you haven’t been presented with any evidence for them 🙂 there is a crucial difference, of course.
I can respect your thinking that. It’s a rational enough position, though I disagree obviously that it is necessarily more valid than my own.
Just wondering how your rational mind deals with being presented with ideas like solipsism etc. Do you just shrug it off? The fact that it is philosophically or, more generally, intellectually irrefutable doesn’t bother you? What about other ideas that could fall under the banner of philosophical skepticism?
strongforce,
Sorry for not replying earlier but after some time I only looked at the lower part of this thread, and I failed to sign up for comment alerts.
Yes, I have come close to saying that some people here are closet dualists because as I see it there are two options:
Either you can be a monist and materialist OR you can say that your ‘genes, neurons, whatever make a decision for you’.
If you are really a a monist and materialist, then such a sentence is nonsensical because it follows from monism that you are your genes, neurons etc.
If the sentence makes sense to you then only because you consider the you or self to be something immaterial riding along in the body, which is precisely the official definition of dualism.
So faced with this conundrum, one possible interpretation is that people who say ‘my neurons made the decision for me’ are unconsciously operating under the premise of dualism, perhaps through cultural osmosis and because they have failed to reconcile two discordant beliefs. An alternative interpretation is that they really are monists but have not thought the meaning of the aforementioned sentence through before using it.
The same goes for related expressions on the lines of ‘we are the puppet of our genes’ or ‘the self is an illusion’. Because in the first case we would be our own puppets and because in the second we are hopefully agreed that our bodies aren’t illusions, all of these only make sense if we aren’t our bodies, i.e. if dualism is presupposed.
Okay, so you call it analogy or metaphor, but for what? What can ‘my neurons made the decision for me’ be a metaphor for except ‘I don’t make choices but my neurons do’ which again assumes that my neurons aren’t part of myself? These phrases are pretty straightforward and non-metaphorical as they are.
The only ways to provide ‘an insight from others that have a differing opinion than the one you hold’ that would resolve the contradiction I perceive would be to say that you are a dualist or to say that you don’t actually believe that the neurons and genes aren’t part of us in which case, as mentioned before, those sentences above should make no sense to you, metaphor or not. And note that Paul, at least, has resolved the contradiction in one of those two ways: he explicitly *does* believe that we are something immaterial riding around in our bodies.
a. and b. as Jerry says. The answer is no. Read his explanation if you are confused afterward…Ceiling Cat help you.
If I had to summarize my views about this whole thing, I guess I’d say it all boils to this.
The idea of free will, that is, the suggestion that is some “actor” inside a body _capable of manipulating brain states by some non-supernatural mechanism_ is, based on what we know from neuroscience (amongst other things), a delusion in much the same way as belief in the existence of a (personal) god.
It’s an false belief that’s hard to shake, this free will business, but once you realize the lunacy what it actually entails, as stated above, it must be accepted by any rational mind.
The assumption of an “actor inside a body” is an assumption of dualism.
I find this (and your differences with Alex SL) baffling:
If you take the phrase “John Stewart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill”. Then does that mean anything if the universe is deterministic? If it does then free will, as used colloquially in that verse, is compatible with determinism, if it doesn’t then it isn’t. And, of course, it does mean something and we can rephrase it as follows: “John Stewart Mill made the decision to drink shandy, but it made him ill”. i.e. It was John Stewart Mill who made that particular decision (and not Immanuel Kant) and he did it on purpose, which is what “of his own free will” means here: Noone forced John to drink the shandy, he was just thirsty.
If you insist that the term “free will” must mean the incoherent doctrine of libertarian free will, that was invented by apologists to justify the existence of evil (as you seem to do here), then of course no we don’t have “free will” in that sense and it’s not compatible with determinism. But, the term has a perfectly valid every day usage, which corresponds with what compatibilists are claiming, when they say that free will is compatible with determinism.
And was John responsible for drinking the shandy? Yes, he was certainly proximately responsible in that the shandy drinking occurred in the part of the universe (and time) that we denominate as John Stewart Mill. Ultimately, though what was responsible for the shandy drinking was the interaction of the particles and forces that created him and he didn’t have any choice in that.
So should we drop usage of terms such as “free will” from the language (or say that it is illusory), just because apologists use the term incoherently? It’s just not going to happen.
I think the idea that you can’t change what’s in your brain is a bit wrong – you can also get external input that says “go think about this for a while” and you’ll often change your mind. It isn’t a new input per se.
Since brain activity consists of processes running in parallel, you can change your mind when one process communicates with another. A simple example being a process that monitors your state of tiredness might cause you to not do something you were planning earlier. You are also monitoring a constant stream of inputs from the environment of course. So a combination of those factors can cause you to change your mind. None of that implies that we are somehow able to tinker with determinism and effect changes that are not part of pre existing causal chains.
My deep belief is that there is no free will, that we are all meat-computers.
However that free will is disguised through so many layers of other influences – genes, environment, today’s weather, what clothes we are wearing, what religion we were brought up in .. that with the current tools and level of knowledge in neuroscience it is impossible to find any real evidence to prove the hypothesis.
Do simple animals display free will or are they wholly predictable? I’d like someone to point out how far down the evolutionary ladder have we seen what appears to be free will – anyone?
It depends on who you ask, really.
Some compatibilists se free will as a continuum that doesn’t exclude non-living entities from displaying it. In varying degrees, of course.
As an incompatibilist I see it as on/off thing and all signs point to off.
Interesting. To me half the problem here is the insistence on a binary yes/no either way.
I massively agree with Richard Dawkins’ Edge essay on the folly of “essentialism”.
http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25366
The on/off analogy is only in relation to free will, not consciousness which is very much a property of living entities, for the time being.
Unless we go full Chopra and declare all matter as consciouss.:-)
Prof. Coyne: “I can tell you with near-certainty which of those two brands of milk Hili would elect if given a choice. And that’s based only on my crude observation of her behavior, not on feline brain scans.”
I certainly believe Prof. Coyne could predict that choice.
That we can in many instances predict with decent reliability the “choice” an animal, or person, will make, is very important. This is something I get into with theists all the time on their “free will” move to alleviate God of responsibility for the evil in the world.
In the same way theists have a separate contemplation of the nature of morality, when applied to humans vs a God (the everyday human morality is virtually turned on it’s head, to allow for God’s evil or inaction) they also have a separate contemplation of Free Will when they process that idea WITH God in the mix.
We atheists, for instance, often point out that in the stories of Genesis, God is clearly responsible for the Fall Of Man. God designed a “set-up” virtually ensuring his two creatures would eat the apple and become cursed.
Christians respond “No, because God gave them Free Will…so Adam and Eve were responsible for the choice, not God.”
But if one asks “Why did Eve choose to eat the fruit?” the answer “because she had Free Will” is a non-answer. All that says is “because she had a choice.” But that’s assumed in the question, as it is in any question about the motivation for someone’s choice. Yes, she had a choice, but WHY did she make THAT choice, to eat the fruit? And that is a question theists just don’t want to get into, because it leads to God as the Creator of human nature. Eve didn’t “choose” how she was created – God created her with a specific nature. And to the degree Eve would find a shiny, fresh piece of fruit tempting to eat, or that she would be curious in testing God’s claims about the fruit, or that she would be vulnerable to coercion by a talking serpent…the traits that help EXPLAIN her choice derive from those placed in her by God. (Along with God placing the fruit there and allowing the serpent in, etc).
That there are reasons and causes for people’s behavior that allow prediction of behavior is really obvious from the standpoint of everyday interaction: we regularly predict human behavior based on traits we observe people to have, or on their past experiences, etc.
I don’t have to be omniscient to regularly predict lots of my wife’s behavior. But an omniscient God, who would know EVERY trait Eve had, and EVERY REASON Eve had for her actions, “couldn’t” predict her actions in the scenario he set up? That’s ludicrous. But here Christians wave “free will” in an unthinking “magic” sense that…and this is crucial…they do not normally conceive of for actual everyday choice-making and understanding human behavior. In their everyday understanding of people’s choices, theists don’t imagine some magic contra-causal disconnect between causes and human choices. They look to causes for people’s behavior and predict other’s behavior. It’s when thinking of choices in the context of certain religious propositions that they start special pleading, and turn this into “magic” for theological convenience.
This is why I am unwilling to jump on the bandwagon of claiming that “people think our free willed choices involve magic.” Or, the idea that one can point to religious people at some point thinking magically about human choices, and then say “see, that shows they think our free will/choice-making is MAGIC and contra-causal.”
No. Because they are not consistent in how they think about human choice-making. As in the case of the religious and morality, where they have ONE conception of morality when they try to think about it in their religious context, and ANOTHER one that they apply to everyday life, the same appears to happen with “free will.” They impute a magic disconnect between human choice making and what causes our choices IN THE CONTEXT OF THEOLOGY, but NOT in everyday real life, where such a disconnect from causation would leave the unable to explain human choices, or even interact predictably with anyone else. They are making different assumptions when considering choice-making in different contexts.
Vaal
“Why did Eve choose to eat the fruit?”
I love you analysis of the Eve story, but it is just a fictitious story written millennia ago, and I doubt the author would have any clue to your explanation of why the choice was made.
Well said, Vaal. I would go further and say that every sane person is a compatibilist determinist in practice regardless of what they believe they believe or pretend to believe:
Determinist because as you point out every sane person looks to causes for people’s behaviour and predicts other’s behaviour. Compatibilist because every sane person nonetheless differentiates between somebody having caused harm under duress, voluntarily (AKA out of their own free will), or unwittingly.
A true magical free will dualist would not be able to predict other people’s behaviour and would thus go insane. A true incompatibilist would have to treat a natural catastrophe the same way as a murderer. If they don’t they are simply a compatibilist who doesn’t want to admit it.
I disagree with your view on incompatibilism. There are still good reasons to not “treat a natural catastrophe the same way as a murderer”. I don’t get your assertion about this at all. Can you clarify it perhaps, so I can then point out where your thinking goes wrong? 🙂
The stance of compatibilism is this: Despite determinism, it still makes sense to differentiate different degrees of agency or free will, such as whether somebody did something instinctively, or voluntarily after careful deliberation, or under coercion, or accidentally.
That. Is. It. That is compatibilism
Unless I have severely misunderstood something, the stance of Jerry Coyne, for example, at least in practice (!), appears to be this: Despite determinism, it still makes sense to differentiate between whether somebody did something instinctively, or voluntarily after careful deliberation, or under coercion, or accidentally. But I really dislike using any long established terms to describe this, be it choice, agency or free will, because I think they all have supernatural connotations.
In other words, compatibilist in practice, differing only in terminology. And the question whether these terms do actually have supernatural connotations is an empirical one.
Wish somebody would answer my questions for a change.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what being incompatibilist entails. I suggest reading Sam Harris on this, he explains my (and I believe Jerry’s) point of view very well. But I’ll give an example here…
If someone deliberates and plots, for, say a month long, a murder. Having contemplated it for so long he decides to go through with it. This person clearly has “a more murderous mind” than someone who does all that, but decides halfway through that he cannot go through with it. (Note that I’m purely linguistically attributing agency for the sake of brevity.)
Note that this person has had no influence in any of this. Through no fault of his own, he has been born with the (in some sense bad) genes he has, has been deterministically been exposed to a certain environment which may have put certain ideas in his mind.
None of this has any bearing on the fact, that, realizing the fact that this guy is a murderous individual, we should take care to adequately make sure this individual is prevented for doing more harm, more so than we would in another case where it might be less clear how much “deliberation” went into the act. Compatibilism or “degrees of agency” doesn’t come into play at all. The guy simply is simply a murderous type of guy and it makes moral sense to take note of that fact and “act” accordingly.
Well no, you (as many others here) do not understand compatibilism. Please read it again: its stance is even given that every action is completely predetermined, it still makes a difference, for example, whether somebody deliberately murders or whether they kill somebody by accident.
The rest is semantics: I would say the first person acted out of their own free will and the second didn’t. Others dislike that term and thus delude themselves into thinking that they are not compatibilists. But unless they conclude from the fact that everything is equally predetermined that there is no relevant difference between a rock falling onto my head and my neighbor clubbing me onto the head they are.
Take your time before you compose a reply. Read over that a few more times, especially the first paragraph. Do you understand what compabilism entails?
To round out the picture, here is what it does NOT entail:
– We can make decisions independent of physical cause and effect, of our genes, of environmental influences, and of brain chemistry.
– Actions are not predetermined.
– We should build our system of justice on the principle of retribution.
Again, take your time and let those points sink in.
There really is no practical difference between incompatibilists and compatibilists except for an irrational dislike of certain words and conceptual confusion (i.e. writing sentences that presuppose the real self to be a soul).
Sorry but none of what you said made ANY SENSE whatsoever.
It’s perfectly possible to be incompatibilist and still treat an ax murderer differently than a puppy dog.
_An assumption of the existence of free will doesn’t factor into it at all. Your assertion that it must is entirely unwarranted._
I stress the entirety of these last two sentences, since you seem to be _totally missing the point here constantly_.
You are constantly presupposing the existence of free will, as if that assumption is valid.
I think you need some basic philosophy lessons and perhaps an introduction to logic.
You need to read Sam Harris, and read (about) some of Giulio Tononi’s work. Basically, you need to inject more neuroscience into your thinking on these issues.
In short, in your “refutation” of incompatibilist determinism, you assume the existence of free will. If you don’t see the problem with that, logically, I think an introduction to pure reasoning is more helpful for you than a philosophy lesson.
I’ve thought some more about what’s confusing you here and I think I have pinpointed your error in thinking precisely.
You equate the realization of incompatibilists like myself, that some entities are more likely to cause harm than others and therefor need to be more restricted from further negative interactions with others, with an attribution of different degrees of agency. Precisely this is your flaw.
No differing degrees of agency are attributed, either explicitly or de facto. These policies are simply “good practice” in achieving well being of civilizations of experiencing entities.
In case you’re still not convinced, consider this analogy that occurred to me during a 10km run just now.
Suppose I have two deterministic computer programs, set to run, perhaps periodically, perhaps only once (this detail is inconsequential).
Now, there is another, third deterministic program running in parallel. This third program deterministically removes one of the programs after analyzing both of them and then exits.
Suppose one of the first two programs deterministically zeroes the first thousand nonzero bits it finds. The second one zeroes the first million nonzero bits it finds.
Based on whatever goal the programmer of the third program has, it makes sense for him to program it to remove a particular one of the two programs instead of the other. Say his goal is the retention of as much entropy as possible, then he programs the third program to remove the second one (it erases more entropy than the first one).
Now, there is nothing fundamentally different about this situation as opposed the legislation of murder in first and second degree etc. And I am sure you wouldn’t suggest here that is any agency attributed to any of the three programs. They have no agency at all, no differing degrees. Nothing.
QED
Ye gods Paul, how do you expect me to reply exhaustively to your Gish Gallops here and up there? I have got stuff to do.
Cliff notes version:
– A lot of the people here think that consciousness or the self are illusions.
– I, on the other hand, do not think that consciousness or the self are illusions.
– But I think that ‘me’ is more than my consciousness, it is my entire body.
– The previous point follows logically from materialism.
– The belief that the body is not the true self but that there is something immaterial in the body that is the true self is the definition of dualism. If that is your view, then you are a dualist.
– Everybody who says something on the lines of “the body/this part of the body makes the decision for you” must be a dualist and not a materialist, whether they realize it or not, because that sentence only makes sense if a person is an immaterial something apart from the body.
– Because most people here would consider themselves to be monists and materialists but many still subscribe to a sentence like the one paraphrased in the previous point, I consider them to have a self-contradictory stance.
Now for the stuff down here:
– Yes, it is perfectly possible to consider yourself an incompatibilist while taking the compatiblist stance that an ax murderer needs to be treated differently than a puppy dog.
– But that is the frigging compatibilist stance so the incompatibilist would do well to realize at some point that the only remaining difference is semantic.
– The semantic difference is what words to use to describe an entirely agreed-on reality. The compatibilist does not ‘assume’, as you put it, the existence of free will or agency. They use the terms to describe the agreed-on difference between the actions of a thief and a kleptomaniac. The incompatibilist does not use these terms to describe the agreed-on difference.
– But the two sides do not disagree about the presence or absence of any additional factor in the behaviour of the thief or the kleptomaniac.
– If you doubt the previous four points then you do not understand compatibilism. You are straw-manning. Until you realize that there is little we can do.
And by Jove, stop with bringing up Sam Harris. For one, I have read enough of him to become fed up with his paranoid torture apologetics and gun nuttery, his failure to grasp the is/ought problem, and his esoteric bend.
Second, despite some widespread illusions to the contrary, neuroscience is completely irrelevant to the discussions around compatibilism and suchlike. People have been discussing what follows from determinism hundreds of years ago, because thoughtful people will quickly realize that there cannot be ‘contra-causal’ free will regardless of what neuroscience comes up with (determinism and randomness exhaust the available options). In other words, as far as human decision making is concerned determinism is true anyway, we don’t need neuroscience to realize that.
OK, this is gonna be my last post responding to you, since you are being really incoherent and self-contradictory throughout your posts.
I quote you here:
“The stance of compatibilism is this: Despite determinism, it still makes sense to differentiate different degrees of agency or free will, such as whether somebody did something instinctively, or voluntarily after careful deliberation, or under coercion, or accidentally.”
“A true incompatibilist would have to treat a natural catastrophe the same way as a murderer. If they don’t they are simply a compatibilist who doesn’t want to admit it.”
How awkward (or convenient) of you to ignore my entire last post above yours, the programs analogy.
The (entropy decreasing programs + watchdog program) vs. (first and second degree murderer + legislation) analogy totally works and pretty much demolishes what you assert in the second quote here.
If you fail to see this, well, I can’t help you further. I’m starting to doubt you even KNOW the meaning of the word agency, to be honest, from all the rubbish you’ve been posting here… A frustrating affair this has been.
I know what the term means to a compatibilist; you only know what it means to yourself and argue from there. It is like trying to discuss evolution with a creationist who has convinced themselves that evolution means a duck being born from a crocodile egg.
Starting to think the problem is that you think in compatibilists _naively attribute some kind of “specialness”_ to humans – in the way compatibilists seem to do, when considering their “freedom” to “do” what they “want”. That odd move elucidates how intellectually bankrupt the entire idea of compatibilism is, really. Anyway, if you are going to be replying further, do remember to reply to the analogy I posted.
And I think you got that thing backwards. You are asserting that incompatibilists are really compatibilists by projecting your naive (re)definition of free will onto the incompatibilist’s position. I think the analogy I posted shows the flawed thinking behind it all. Waiting for your response to it still.
I do not know what your analogy has to do with anything. The programmer needs to see a difference between the two programs to decide which of them to remove. The difference is that one always makes many zeroes and the other always makes less, it is not that one of the programs always makes a set number of zeroes and the other one can be bargained with to make as many as the programmer needs. In that case you would be talking an analogy that makes sense.
When you treat a murderer different than a landslide, you also need to see a difference, otherwise you would treat them the same. And yes, that means incompatibilists also make a difference, they also ‘naively attribute some kind of “specialness” to humans’ because otherwise they would throw the landslide into prison. How hard is it to understand that simple concept? The fact that you don’t jail a landslide proves that you see a difference. How do we call that difference?
Now here is the grand total of how the compatibilist position differs from that of the incompatibilist: The compatibilist calls the difference that we all see between the murderer and the landslide ‘free will’ or ‘agency’, the incompatibilist doesn’t.
You may consider the first position intellectually bankrupt, suit yourself. But you do not get to pretend that the incompatibilist does not see the exact same difference that the compatibilist does unless you can show me all the incompatibilists who argue that we should prosecute the landslide because it has the same degree of agency as the murderer, or let the murderer go free because he has the same degree of agency as the landslide, i.e. none.
I’ll just reiterate my point. You wrongly attribute certain things to incompatibilists by redefining what elements of that philosophy entail, because you just can’t fathom everyone doesn’t secretly share your point of view. You project your definitions of words into other philosophies to either make them conform to what you think (and then assert that everyone who doesn’t share YOUR point of view actually doesn’t even know what THEIR is) or “prove” some kind of imagined internal inconsistency.
I’m really done with this. I can’t believe how much time I wasted debating someone who turned out to be either a lunatic or a exceedingly dishonest person. Sorry for the harsh words, but I suggest you think my last few posts over and see what is wrong with your philosophical stance… For the love of all that is holy.
Paul, you will apologize to Alex immediately for calling him “dishonest or a lunatic” or I will ban you from this site forever. The rules are that you cannot insult or engage in name-calling with another commenter, and that is WAY across the line.
You have one day to apologize.
@moderator
you’re right. My frustration got the better of me. Perhaps if you have read back any of the discussion you can relate to it. But it doesn’t excuse it. Thanks for the moderation.
@Alex
My sincerest apologies. I went over the line due to my frustration on your inability to see the flaw in your reasoning, despite it having been pointed out again and again. I feel my post above should adequately clarify what the problem with your insistence that incompatibilists are closet compatibilists is, namely the circular reasoning: the assumption of its truth in the proof of it.
It seems that post about the circular reasoning has disappeared. I’ll restate the gist of it here. In trying to show that incompatibilists are really closet compatibilists, by suggesting incompatibilism is internally inconsistent, you assert their motivation for treating a murderer different than a landslide must be due to your compatibilist notion of different degrees of agency, a notion incompatibilists reject. Therefor you make an EXTERNAL ASSUMPTION of the truth of your assertion (that incompatibilists consider these degrees of agency as something that exists) in trying to prove it, a circular argument.
I am also sorry for what I realize has been a quite agressive tone in some of my comments because that has surely contributed to the escalation.
As my argument has been all along that the major difference that is being debated here whenever the topic of compatibilism arises is more one of semantics than of significantly different worldviews I find it particularly sad to see how such a minor difference leads to such strong emotions on both sides.
Glad we could clear the air at least a little bit.
Let’s be clear, the discussion wasn’t about whether incompatibilism or compatibilism makes more sense. It was about your contention that incompatibilists are really de facto compatibilists, which I’m guessing is still your viewpoint.
The fact that you argue here about the issue being semantics, shows me that you really still have some fundamental misunderstanding about what incompatibilists believe about the world.
I’ve tried to demonstrate it with the programs analogy, the fact that nonexistence of agency doesn’t mean you can’t analyze the behavior of distinct entities and respond differently to differently behaving ones. Your counterargument to it assumed that incompatibilism is wrong to begin with by positing that the analogy was false because one of the programs had no “agency” – so you thought “it was not a good comparison”.
Bottom line, in all what you have said in trying to blur the distinction between incompatibilists and compatibilists your fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of incompatibilism bleeds through when you falsely try to show it is internally inconsistent by positing that agency actually is a thing an incompatibilist acknowledges as existing.
I think you may be ultimately confusing arbitrary, imperfect, but rational abstractions incompatibilists use in order to not have to think about everything in terms of elementary particle interactions with some kind of free will or agency business, which is a misrepresentation I object to.
Paul,
I’ve tried to demonstrate it with the programs analogy, the fact that nonexistence of agency doesn’t mean you can’t analyze the behavior of distinct entities and respond differently to differently behaving ones. Your counterargument to it assumed that incompatibilism is wrong to begin with by positing that the analogy was false because one of the programs had no “agency” – so you thought “it was not a good comparison”.
No, I do *not* assume that IC is wrong or internally inconsistent. If that is what you think then there has been a misunderstanding.
In one line of argumentation I argued that a sentence like ‘my neurons/genes make the decision for me’ is inconsistent with monism / materialism.
In a second, unrelated line I argued that the one and only difference between C and IC is that C calls the difference between a murderer and a landslide agency or free will. Further, that C and IC equally acknowledge the difference between a murderer and a landslide because they demonstrably both treat the two differently. The IC just doesn’t call the difference agency or free will, that’s all!
Look compatibilism up on Wikipedia, even they get that one right.
Also, the analogy was false not because one of the programs did not have compatibilist agency but because *neither* of them had.
I think a quote from the bard is useful here, then, as a conclusion.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
That is, you can choose to call some arbitrary abstraction “agency” (even though everyone except compatibilists understand the word to mean something else entirely, namely something that is a fiction in light of determinism), but this doesn’t change the reality underlying it.
What is the point behind the compatibilist’s insistence to muddy the philosophical waters with their redefinition of the conventional understanding of free will onto some meaningless, arbitrary abstraction, which is based on some naive conception of specialness of humans?
Is it a strangely constructed defensive, even patronizing move, motivated by some kind of desire to prevent civilizational anarchy which might stem from misinterpreting the reality of determinism?
(as far as your correction about your counterargument goes: OK then change “one” into “two programs not having compatibilist agency”, this still doesn’t change my argument that you then assume meaningfulness of compatibilist agency, from the perspective of an incompatibilist.)
That is, you can choose to call some arbitrary abstraction “agency” (even though everyone except compatibilists understand the word to mean something else entirely, namely something that is a fiction in light of determinism), but this doesn’t change the reality underlying it.
Yes, I think you are beginning to understand. The underlying reality is the same, it is even understood in the same way (determinism is true), only the terminology differs. That is why the terminology is the only difference between C and IC. This is not some irrational attack on IC but plain fact, that is how C and IC are defined.
Of course, the C would argue that calling it ‘some arbitrary abstraction’ might be just a tad of an understatement considering that this arbitrary abstraction leads us to throw one person into jail, provide the next one with psychological help, and let the third one go even if they have all killed a human being (murderer, insane murderer, landslide). Seems like a bit of a big consequence for something arbitrary and abstract I’d say.
And they would argue that the difference is not a fiction either: an insane person is different from a sane one, and a human is really quite different from a landslide. I mean, we have got some empirical tests to figure out which is which in those cases so I wouldn’t call these differences fiction.
And finally, the C would argue that there being empirical differences, differences that obviously matter for our treatment of these cases, wouldn’t it be nice to have, you know, actual words to describe these differences? (What terms does an IC have to describe the difference between a landslide and a sane human if choice, decision, agency, volition and free will are all considered contaminated?)
And here we come full circle to my original questions. Is there any empirical evidence that “everyone except compatibilists understand(s) the word to mean something else entirely”? What does the majority of people actually believe, how do they use those terms in practice? Does freedom, for example, carry a supernatural connotation in mechanics, law or statistics? Does choice carry a supernatural meaning in psychology? I am willing to be convinced but well, from what I can see it looks as if it is the incompatibilists who misinterpret the meanings of these terms.
(Of course, I used 1st and 2nd degree murder as opposed to natural disaster and murder like you did, but this doesn’t hurt the validity of the analogy; just replace these terms).
So the guy that murdered someone had no choice in the matter(1), but people can change their minds and reason about problems to arrive at conclusions. Got it. That’s not incoherent at all.
(1) “if McGuire, as I believe, had no choice in his actions, and could not have refrained from killing Stewart”
Yes, and if you could lay off the snark, you’d realize that you can change your minds if the environment alters your thought patterns in a way that alters your subsequent thoughts and behavior. And I explained reasoning as the working out of a mental computer program yesterday. Both of those comport with determinism.
At a given moment, though, you can’t go either way.
This has all been explained in previous posts, so you need to get up to speed.
In the meantime, you need to apologize to the host for calling him “incoherent”. Insulting your host is a violation of the rules.
He had no choice. He could also go on the internet and plead that he is a victim of affluenza.
DALLAS (AP) – A North Texas man who paid $350,000 for the right to hunt an endangered African black rhino said he’s had to hire full-time security due to death threats after his name was leaked onto the Internet.
…
“I’m a hunter,” Knowlton told WFAA. “I want to experience a black rhino. I want to be intimately involved with a black rhino. If I go over there and shoot it or not shoot it, it’s beyond the point.”
…
He told KTVT that threats made to organizers before the auction led the Safari Club to contact him and see if he would bid. Knowlton and a silent partner raised the money to make the bid, he said.
His name was posted on Facebook and then picked up by websites that publicized his involvement in the auction. He told KTVT that since then, he’s feared for his family’s safety.
What point, if any, are you making? The people making threats also have no free will. Yet, the fact that they make threats influences this man’s “actions” in the future. The fact that you and others are (presumably) critizing the backlash – not of your own free will – will in turn influence the future behavior of the threateners. Nonexistence of free will is not a reason to have a lawless, ruleless, civilization (I presume that is what you were going for?) where “actions” have no consequences.
Oddly enough, the meat that is the biocomputational entity housed in a cranium which copied the story about the rhino hunting hubbub did not seem to consider the threat-making individual human entities as the subjects associated with capacity to choose behavior in that report.
Of course, it is impossible for this meat to verify that claim, so meat takes it back. Meat can’t choose subjects. Damn. It is frickin’ hard to avoid personal pronouns when discussing human activity. Meat in cranium requires different output vocabulary.
That potential confusion is the reason God created the quotation mark, so you can talk about “choices” and “actions” in an argument about the illusion of free will, with the understanding that they are just (somewhat) flawed abstractions of the real situation.
If you do what you just did in that post, the whole thing becomes almost unintelligible. Seriously, I have no idea if you conceded my point with that post or not 😉
Jerry,
I have great admiration for you… have read your book and closely follow your blog… have promoted it to friends…am amazed how you’re able to do it all. So, “Many Thanks.” The issue of free will and choice or the illusion of both that you present is one that is challenging for me to both understand and embrace. I am currently reading The Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel and the neuroscience of the brain especially regarding emotional attachment. His research presents a view of the brain as a social entity…it’s relational… and our brain has plasticity (which is not NEWS) most acutely in the first 3 to 5 years of life but throughout our lives. Our brains do not reside entirely within our skull. Psychotherapy can be effective in making changes to our early emotional attachment style by the therapist establishing a rapport that allows the client to experience a new way of relating emotionally. Whether it’s appropriate to use such vocabulary as “free will” and “choice” which I am well versed in is certainly problematic. The question Siegel is raising is that CHANGE is possible…we do not have to be endlessly driven by our past but if we can experience a loving, caring relationship or network of relationships, then change is possible. The work in neuro-esthetics (see Semir Zeki)is also helping us understand what our emotional relationship is to our environment and how we can be changed by the experience of the sublime vis-à-vis the beautiful. See “The Art of Walking in Paris” by Alan T Marty, MD The brain is always active, always subject to internal and external influences; it is not static but extremely dynamic. So whether through formal relationships such as psychotherapy or the encounter with the sublime while walking in Paris or a certain work of art, the brain can shift and change. So using other language than “free will” or “choice” may be the best option for understanding how the brain works. Siegel has an interesting term called “Mindsight” where by one is able to realize that the “other” has mental processes like oneself. To contrast this, he references “mindblindness” (a term used by other researchers) to refer to those who don’t have such ability.
So as always, thanks for your dedication to this blog.
Leon
Determinism does not preclude change. Your mind can be changed, because it isn’t an isolated system and is reactive to external stimuli. And, in a sense, you can change your own mind, because the subsystem in your mind that is calculating your next action is subject to input from other subsystems in your mind that you may not even be aware of, but that can also be considered a part of your self.
Evolution has designed our brains as avoidance machines, so that we can avoid harmful interactions with other parts of the universe long enough to reproduce. If you watch a fast flowing river you will see vortexes form and due to internal forces, for a brief period they can maintain their integrity as they are swept downstream. A good analogy for our lives.
And, if I did have the freedom to circle back and alter my past self, I would add some commas to the last paragraph of that post.
Wow, so much new stuff since I last posted. I add a few responses to some of the previous stuff.
This is mainly to/from Paul. I’ll note when it isn’t.
After reading the posts up through yesterday morning and mulling it over a bit, here is my assessment/definition of the two positions.
Free Will: The belief that a conscious entity, such as a human being, has the ability to think about possible future actions and choose between different alternative actions based on the those thoughts. The future is not set, but can be shaped as a result of those choices.
Determinists: We cannot choose what thoughts we think. Consciousness is an illusion. All things that happen are destined to happen that way. Or randomly happen that way. Either way, human beings have no agency and no control over their future actions.
Is this a reasonable restatement or are there important aspects that have been left out?
roqoco from thread 24
Determinism precludes agent initiated changes to the future. Is that a correct statement?
It seems to me that by treating them differently, you are implicitly acknowledging their *differing degrees of agency*. Isn’t that precisely why you need to treat them differently?
Thread 13
Yes, I think that the only reasonable assumption is that indeterminacy at lower levels will result in indeterminacy at higher levels. I recognize that I can’t conclude that it always will result in indeterminacy, but it certainly may. Given that and given the fact that the only known deterministic systems are limited to isolated subsets of the material universe and theoretical constructions such as mathematics, it seems to me the onus is on the determinists to show why I should assume otherwise.
The low level would be quantum probabilistic models. High goes up to the cosmological scale.
Thread 16
Yes it does, but the core definition or concept is the same across different cultures: that ‘you’ are not your physical model, but an immaterial essence. Even as even atom of your body is exchanged over time, as your grow and age and change, the something that is “you” is this eternal immaterial *soul* not your physical body. That description really seems to fit what you talking about. I think you by rejecting that word, you are attempting to avoid acknowledging the metaphysical assumptions implicit in your position.
I’m fine with consciousness diminishing and reemerging. I just don’t think that *you* equates to consciousness. I think the body is an essential part of whatever it is that *you* refers to.
When we suggest consciousness is an illusion we are saying the following:
Conscious awareness gives the impression that IT(the conscious mind) is in command of both our mind and body. The conscious mind is ‘the decider’. This sense is very strong and most people would find it impossible to entertain the possibility that this might not be the case. Almost everything we ever experience leads us to make this conclusion. In addition, the basis of our society, religion, and philosophy is based and supports this conclusion. It is only science that suggests that this is not the case. That is not quite true. If one is paying careful attention it is possible to see ‘cracks’ in the conscious awareness system that hints at a deeper more complex process. Part of this underlying complex process is somewhat crudely labeled the unconscious mind. Even diehard contra causal dualists will agree that an ‘unconscious mind’ exists. By that I mean there are actions our brain takes that our consciousness is not aware of or only aware of a posteriori.
The concept of ‘self’ can mean different things as has been amply demonstrated by the back and forth in this discussion. I think it is a bit tangential to the main argument but adopting a particular definition is probably more important to the compatibilists, but still important to the incompatibilists. So how does an impartial arbiter decide on the proper definition of self? I had suggested earlier in a response to Alex that we should consider what the majority of humans consider the ‘self’. I had argued that the core concept of ‘self’ to most people is their conscious awareness. The term ‘conscious awareness’ would likely be used mostly by the scientifically inclined and the rest would use colloquial terms like, soul, spirit, psyche, etc. Whatever label used, the concept seems to be nearly universal. I will use the most common word for this concept in my society, i.e. soul. I know the danger using this word as it carries a supernatural connotation for most people. So let me be perfectly clear on this, I am using the term ‘soul’ only in the context that is the word that describes what most people consider the ‘essence of their being’. As a materialist/naturalist I reject the concept of the supernatural. I am therefore not a dualist in any shape or form. I simply contend when discussing the concept of free will that the best definition for ‘self’ is ‘the consciously aware mind’. Again, I do think this is a bit of an unnecessary diversion from the main points we should be considering. Whether the ‘self’ is our conscious awareness, our conscious and unconscious mind, the whole nervous system or the whole body; really is only useful for those that want to redefine free will in such a way so as to try and save the concept.
Now for my almost complete capitulation…..Even though we don’t have free will, we must act like we do. Well not completely. We will need to slowly change our concept of ourselves with this new understanding. Punishment and reward among numerous other long held and unquestioned behaviors will have to be reassessed. We will learn to cope with yet another ‘hit’ to our sense of self importance. Science keeps doing that;-)
The problem with your indeterministic model is that you don’t give a mechanism whereby randomness can add anything to decision making and there probably isn’t one: Events are either random or they are caused and that exhausts *all* the possibilities. But, our characters are the sum of the historical data that has been built up from our genes and environment to the current moment. So when we take a decision, it must be based fully on that retained data, otherwise it isn’t the best decision that we could have made that most accurately reflects our character.
It is certainly feasible that the mind may make use of randomness as a computational method to approximate results (no doubt it does), in a similar way to how a programmer would write a monte carlo simulation. But if the mind could come up with exact solutions by some deterministic method, as fast or faster, then that would more accurately reflect the agent’s intentions. Consequently, any randomness in the mind or inefficiency in it’s algorithms can only result in a loss of information that diminishes an agent’s ability to pursue it’s goals. Sometimes, of course, a quick and dirty calculation is all you need: If a rock drops from the sky onto your head, what you are looking for is the quickest calculation that gets you the hell out of the way!
I should also point out that if you want to show that true randomness is somehow essential to consciousness, free will (or whatever) you would need to explain why deterministically generated pseudo random numbers wouldn’t do as good a job.