Free will is an illusion, biologist says

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by constantwonder

 

The theory of determinacy eliminates free will altogether. Without the aid of the supposed "hidden variable" (convienient that their hidden huh!?) determinacy falls apart in the face of quantum theory.

Curious that you should see indeterminacy as a prop for the concept of free will. Surely indeterminacy should be, if anything, an obstacle to the exercise of will?

Besides, I don't think quantum theory eliminates determinism at a macroscopic level. There is certainly no evidence, nor any mathematical grounds for claiming that it does.

Probability is everything. Every state has multiple possible outcomes some of which can occur without a measurable causal link.

But do those acausal outcomes ever, in fact, occur? How could we even know if they did?

However one major difficulty in arguments that free will arises from quantum indeterminacy has been the lack of an agreed physical mechanism by which quantum effects can affect cognition.

I know there is work being done on quantum correlations in the brain I'll post the article I'm thinking of when i find it.

Anyway. . .

That is exactly the problem Asty. Even if free will is in fact true you could never even in theory prove it. All I'm really saying is the OP sounds very newtonian.

You are right that even having probablities of acausal event does not mean they will happen, or even could happen for that matter.

Still it's hard for me to accept the absence of free will. Sure it would be a great scapegoat. "Of course I did I had no choice."

When an individual observes the universe, he can observe and conclude about nearly any part of it. However, the incompleteness theorem prevents him from making consistent conclusions about his own conclusion-making device, his brain, in the same way that a ruler can measure anything but itself.

Let’s assume the ruler can be manipulated by the environment in the same way our brain can. If it’s stretched or contracted through whatever interaction, it can’t tell. As far as it knows, it’s still 12 inches long. Instead, it would perceive every other object in the universe as changing in length.

Just like the ruler can’t perceive its changing length because it’s using itself to measure, we cannot perceive our own decision-making process because we’re using that subsystem to come to conclusions about itself.

essays.dayah.com...

Godel's incompleteness theorem (which doesn't actually say anything about free will) according to multiple interpratations causes a sensation of free will that is but an illusion.

The mind needs to create plans for complicated actions. It creates a
model of future behaviour in the (unconscious) mind and then follows
through on this step by step, revealing what is to be done only at the
point it needs to be done.

www.math.yorku.ca...

I hate Godel for this but love him for the Godel Metric .

I know it's rediculous to to hold out against the evidence even when its weighty as is it is. That being said a deterministic brain in an indeterminate universe can still allow for free will. Compatabilism reconciles the two.

Yes I am probably just being stubborn but I really (for better or worse) can't make my brain believe that I have no control. Even if it is just a wishful human notion it seems to be one I'm rather attached to.

Because we are talking philosophy allow me to to throw this out there. . . .

William James, the American pragmatist philosopher who coined the term "soft determinist" in an influential essay titled The Dilemma of Determinism, held that the importance of the issue of determinism is not one of personal responsibility, but one of hop He believed that thorough-going determinism leads either to a bleak pessimisem or to a degenerate subjectivism in moral judgment. The way to escape that dilemma is to allow a role of chance. He said that he would not insist upon the name "free will" as a synonym for the role chance plays in human actions, simply because he preferred to debate about objects, not words.

An argument can be made which claims that the aspects of reality that are important to hope are unaffected by determinism. Whether or not the universe is determined does not change the fact that the future is unknown, and that a person's actions help determine that future. In fact, it is even conceivable that a lack of belief in determinism could lead to 'bleak pessimism', or fatalism, since one could potentially believe that their actions did nothing to determine future events.

en.wikipedia.org...

Now anyone who has read even just a few of my posts will know that I'm terrible when we leave the realm of data.

Philosophy bothers me because there are too many assumptions too much conjecture. So I will say I'm probably way off base in my philisophical stance on free will, but it's just not something my brain is ready to let go of. Chalk it up to a character flaw i guess

Thanks Asty for making me read a bunch more essays and causing me second guess my own position. . . It's just not a position I"m ready to let go of






[edit on 9-3-2010 by constantwonder]

reply to post by Astyanax


Okay. What I was leading up to in my previous post is that whatever happens to Mary when she sees the red thing has to do with the fact that her experience of red can only be had by "being" the brain that is having the experience. It is not something that can be predicted or had by observing the brain, or any of its physical constituents. The fact that there is some unpredictable novel element which only arises when the observer "is" the brain in question is all that we have to agree on. As long as we agree that some new property comes into play for the observer who "is" the brain in question, then we have to admit that the materialist understanding of the brain is incomplete. It it incomplete because there is no such notion within the materialist paradigm as "being" anything. Awareness is not accounted for within this paradigm. This is the paradigm of modern physical science.

Since awareness is not accounted for within this paradigm, yet we can point to some real property that only arises when we include awareness in our description of what's going on, then the materialist paradigm leaves something of real importance out. The thing that it leaves out is awareness/consciousness.

If the physical/material decription of the brain leaves out consciousness, and that description is indeed a complete description of the physical reality relevant to our brains, yet consciousness is available to our brain-based cognition, that means that something(consciousness itself) above and beyond the material level addressed by materialist science must be acting on/with our brains. That's a convoluted sentance but upon close inspection I assure you it is what I mean to say.

Speaking in those terms, though, is immediately rejected by most westerners who have given the subject serious consideration, because it implies that something spooky is going on; something akin to duelism, which is most definitely not valid within the modern scientific paradigm. I personally feel that same hesitation - and even outright dismissal - of duelism on the principal that physics seems to be complete, and in order for anything like duelism to be true, it would mean that we(as western scientists) have very badly misundertood or missed something along the way.

Yet, consciousness cannot - in principal - be accounted for within a materialist paradigm. Something happens to Mary that cannot be addressed without accepting the notion that something different happens when you "are" the brain i question than when you observe it. No such notion exists or can exist within materialism. The contents of consciousness are not observable without "being" that consciousness. Therefore they are not measurable in a way that is meaningful to materialist science. Therefore science cannot have anything to say about them.

Yet we have things to say about them. So, they must interact with our brains. So they are not epiphenomena.

Edit to add: This post is more duelistic than I want it to be. I think that the issue of consciousness really cannot be dealt with effectively within the paradigm that we opperating in, for reasons mentioned above. Evidence for this is that whenever we try to talk about it we either end up in a position of being a duelist, or ignoring the real phenomenon of awareness/consciousness/being the brain. Duelism is untenable. But, consciousness exists and cannot be fit into the picture of reality painted by the physical sciences with mathematics as their basis. I think the issue is very fundamental and has to do with how we conceptualize reality, and whether or not we do so from a physicalist/materialist perspective.

In order to try to avoid the problems of duelism - and still provide an interpretation of the phenomena which is in total agreement with established physics - I like to imagine that the physical happenings of the brain are concurrent, parallel, and inseparable from a mirrored process which we experience as mental. The mental/conscious part is real, and is not made of anything, but is a different aspect of the physical stuff and goings on of the brain. This sounds awfully duelistic, and epiphenomenal, which is not what I intend.

The problem of consciousness is a deep and real mystery, and no one knows the answer to it. We can however prove certain aspects of this phenomenon, and I believe that within the set of things we can and do know about consicousness is the fact that it is not epiphenomenal, for reasons described above.

[edit on 3/9/10 by OnceReturned]

Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form.

"You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it."

Twain's views get a boost this week from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Chieti, Italy. In Nature Neuroscience, scientists report that a simple decision-making task does not involve the frontal lobes, where many of the higher aspects of human cognition, including self-awareness, are thought to originate. Instead, the regions that decide are the same brain regions that receive stimuli relevant to the decision and control the body's response to it. . . .


Scientists concentrated on regions of the brain that are responsible for planning actions (eye or hand movements) in the parietal lobe. Activity in these different regions would increase in correspondence with the type of stimulus a subject was being shown (face or building) and the type of response they were planning as a result (eye or hand movement). When the stimulus had less noise and subjects were more confident in their choice, brain activity levels in the appropriate area rose proportionally. In addition, these regions showed activity that related to the choice even when the stimulus was ambiguous.

"This suggests that these regions in the parietal lobe processed all the sensory, decision and motor signals necessary to make and act on the decision," Tosoni says. "In contrast, no area in the frontal lobe, thought to be involved in decision-making, significantly increased its activity at the time of decision."

The training period that preceded the scans could have involved the frontal lobes, Corbetta notes. Those areas may have delegated responsibility for the decision to premotor brain regions as the volunteers learned the task. But once the task was learned, the frontal lobes were silent.

"Even for arbitrary and somehow complex visual decisions, it seems to be purely a matter of the amount of sensory information pushing the brain toward one choice or another " he says

www.physorg.com...

The evidence scientifically speaking seems to be mounting against free will.

Is it, however, a detrimant to mankind if a definitive proof against free will can be found? Does personal responsibility get back burner treatment? Can we excuse criminal behavior based on the fact that their crime may have been predetermined?

It just seems so much like an excuse to behave however you wish (which if there is no free will i guess is not an excuse). I'm just having so much trouble reconciling absolute determinism with ideas like creativity.

It just doesn't make sense to me. I guess I almost require a belief that ethics and morality are more than words place on unchangable behavior. Surely discretion has to have a place in the universe. There is no meaning in a deterministic universe no reason to press on.

I think humans need that meaning that sense (even if it is just illusion) that they can make a difference or not. I like to think I can achieve something on my own without some predetermined set of circumstances leading to an inevitable outcome.

I don't know guys I think I'm pretty tapped out on this one. I'm going to stop rambling now as i need to process some of the things I've ingested since I began reading on the subject. Honestly it makes me feel kind of sick

[edit on 9-3-2010 by constantwonder]

It seems pretty obvious to me. We have a certain genetic makeup, and have different life experiences from each other. From this comes all of our information gathered, abilities acquired, and skills performed. I see no reason to think that the will isn't directed by whom we are genetically, and our external influences.

Free will is an illusion, IMO. We're bound by our subconscious. Nobody is enlightened. We've still got instincts that run too damned deep to entirely override on a consistent basis. Will is mostly inherited, and never without consequence, IMO.

reply to post by DjSharperimage


Reg Self-Actualization and free will : morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

I see no reason that any one of these must have "free will".

[edit on 9-3-2010 by unityemissions]

Originally posted by ghostsoldier
reply to post by bobs_uruncle

 

What's your definition of Free Will?

Of course we don't have control and autonomy over our microscopic identities (directly that is). Are you suggesting we are nothing but rocks? A construction of sub-atomic particles that just exists and reacts to other sub-atomic conditions? If that's the case we have control and autonomy over the sub-atomic structures (macro-sized) we come into contact with. Does that not reflect a degree of Free Will?

Free will would require that you were in a state where there is no outside interference or action that could effect sentient processes. In our reality, this cannot occur since we live inside of a system with a multitude of interfering processes. Say gamma rays or some other form of EM hit a molecular system in your brain which cause electron covalance and changes the "state" of small part of a sensor or decision making process. Can you say you arrived at the decision or the interference did it for you? If you sum all these interactions, you increase the error state from the true possibility of independent control/thought. Years ago it was even postulated that higher energy cathode rays coming from TVs could interfere directly with thought process. Whether that is a fact or not, I don't have the time to verify, so it remains hypothesis and speculation.

But imagine it this way... It's noon and you decide to go have lunch and you're just a single neuron in a brain. Your co-workers are all EM functions. On the way leaving your desk to go to Applebytes alone, your boss accosts you to do something which delays you, another worker running late wants you to go with him to Burgerthing, but the seriously pneumatic blond walks up to you on the way out the door and suggests the Have-A-Nap Notel Motel Bar down the street. So you turf the buddy and head on out with the blond. Five hours later, you wake up totally exhausted, the blond is back at work hours ago and you limp home. Your wife who tried to reach you at work finds out you were missing and lays into you, you spill your guts and she leaves. The next morning you find out your fired for not getting that job done your boss accosted you for. Speed forward 6 months, you find out 'ole blond had AIDS and your life is cut short by 50 years. By the way I made this scenario up as an example, my life is considerably stranger.

Now, how many particle interactions did it take to limit the life of that poor little neuron and kill it? Looks like 3 to me.

Another simple example is the sealed water container and the computer. Take a totally sealed system of water with known energy content and a computer with sensors that can monitor every molecule from outside the sealed system. Produce algorithms that can learn interference and interaction prediction patterns after which you will with 100% certainty be able to predict the position and energy level of every particle until entropy reaches its final stage. Now, if you can predict these positions and energy levels from now until the "end of time," make the sealed container the universe and the computer sits "outside." Can there be free will, no, as every particle and every interaction can be predicted until the end of time.

Incredible and massive changes can occur through interactions and interferences and you can never know all the outcomes because they are probabalistic inside the reality system in which we all exist.

There is no free will in this reality, just the illusion while you're here. The only free will you had was when you weren't here and you decided which "character" you wanted to play this time 'round.

All the universe is a stage, we are merely players dancing to the tune of powers we can neither perceive or understand.

Originally I thought this was a simulated reality used as a video game and we are simply players (pretty real feeling game eh!). I figured the PTB happened to have all the cheat codes. But, since there appears to be precognition of future events, it has to be more like a holographic 4D movie. I could be wrong, my character was once.

Cheers - Dave

[edit on 3/9.2010 by bobs_uruncle]

reply to post by OnceReturned

'Ah, so that's what red looks like!'

Poor, deprived Mary.

All its life, the biological computer of that name has been forced to learn about the world, and interact with it, through an information transducer that radically filters out data of fundamental relevance to its proper operation, data it needs if it is to work the way it is designed to. Finally, the transducer is removed; the proper routes the data should take to the processor are unblocked. Mary at last experiences reality the way she is built to experience it. Obviously it's going to look different--and better, more 'right'.

What, if anything, does this prove?

*

reply to post by constantwonder

The incompleteness theorem prevents (an observer) from making consistent conclusions about his own conclusion... (If a) ruler can be manipulated by the environment in the same way our brain can. If it’s stretched or contracted through whatever interaction, it can’t tell. As far as it knows, it’s still 12 inches long...
Just like the ruler can’t perceive its changing length because it’s using itself to measure, we cannot perceive our own decision-making process because we’re using that subsystem to come to conclusions about itself.

Fantastic. I totally agree, actually--and this is why science will never some ideal, 'essential truth' about reality; we can only interpret reality in ways the organisms we are have evolved to do. But that's reality, all the same way.

I believe I could show you how abolishing free will doesn't necessarily abolish responsibility--just blame--but that's a different (and difficult) topic of discussion. Some other time, perhaps.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by OnceReturned

 

'Ah, so that's what red looks like!'

Poor, deprived Mary.

All its life, the biological computer of that name has been forced to learn about the world, and interact with it, through an information transducer that radically filters out data of fundamental relevance to its proper operation, data it needs if it is to work the way it is designed to. Finally, the transducer is removed; the proper routes the data should take to the processor are unblocked. Mary at last experiences reality the way she is built to experience it. Obviously it's going to look different--and better, more 'right'.

What, if anything, does this prove?

That data is lost - or not present - in the totallity of a materialist description of the brain. A mathematical/physical description of the brain contains the answers to all of the questions that materialist science can ask. But, as Mary saw, it doesn't contain everything. The fact that something is left out - and that that thing turns out to be conscious experience - is important. This is a real phenomona which completely eludes description or assessment from the materialist scientific perspective.

And, the fact that we can directly reference this phenomenon with our physics-based brains proves that it is not epiphenomenal.

Free will cannot be proven scientifically because consciousness cannot be proven to exist scientifically.

However, consciousness is really a synonym for freewill. It is impossible to have one without the other.

Freewill is really the only characteristic of consciousness because everything else is the brain.

For example, the knowledge within your brain creates the possibilities for freewill to choose from however something MUST be engaging a direction.
Awareness is fundamentally an aspect of freewill because knowledge actually makes something a decision. If you stay in a building when you KNOW an earthquake is coming your knowledge of the earthquake changes the action.

When you are told to pick a number between 1 and 10 the knowledge and memories within your brain obviously influence your decision but your consciousness must eventually commit to one option. That moment of choice my “feel” random but your consciousness is still freewill.

(this is a bit of a jumble)

I think the mind operates as a kind of controlled pathos.
Pathos alone is mindless, & control systems without something to control have no meaning, they stagnate & idle, they pointlessly thrash.

The mind exists as an idea that it is somehow isolated, removed, separate[d] from the Universe.

I think if free will does exist it operates in the zone between the conjunctive pathos & control.

It is however not inconceivable that the idea of freewill is an illusion created [filtered for] by evolutionary biology, as some kind of psychological placator. [psyche-candy]
Creatures who have the 'sensation' of 'control' are more pathologically worry free ['what, me worry?'] to quickly, efficiently perform the acts of survival & reproduction.
And perhaps conversely if you are not sure if you are in control or not you may have a more activated awareness to your will.

It is also not inconceivable that we have taken that driving illusion & made it real.

We sometimes treat willfulness as exercising free will, but if one's compulsions are making the choices, is that really free will or just mindless pathos? [reflexes]

Obviously if there are no choices to make, free will is meaningless.
So our imaginations must perceive, remember or construct alternate/multiple scenarios.
And somewhere between emotions & intellect is where the choice[s] would have to be made.
I think there is some requisite randomness involved. Which depending on the nature of a mind might have variant characteristics.

Also weirdly if we have choices but never actually choose, we have the freedom of choice, but not the will to actually make one. Randomness is retained, but will is not exercised or experienced. Which in some sense surrenders our will to the Universe's own events.

We tend to operate with (first) action/pathos, (second) observation/perception of outcomes/effects/results, (third) calculus using observations with possible recalibrations/adaptations to alter/contain/expand future actions. A neural training feedback loop.
But adapting based on previous experience do we come under the thumb of past experience & thereby surrender some of our free [kinetic?] will?

the free part is the randomness & its quality, as well as the array of imagined choices;
the will part is the action/pathos part.

Maybe a part of free will is the freedom to not-choose.
The quirkier & more fine grained the animate randomness [of thought?] the more freedom there is in our choices.
A chimp who has no concept of permanent shelter won't have that as a choice of something to build.
A person who doesn't have the concept of a bow & arrow won't have that as a choice of something to construct.
Hybrid notions that meld two or more others in a melange make additional selections.
So it is about scope & scale of freedom, which is quality of mind/imagination dependent.

I think it is the freedom part that is trickier to maintain, both in randomization as well as creative construction of many imagined choices.

The will part is about as easy as reflex.

In a sense freewill IS an imaginary idea,
but because we have good & vital & well exercised imaginations it IS real.

Additionally we observe different individuals in similar circumstances making different choices of action, which seems attributable to some notion of free will.

Perhaps the more cogent question is not do we have free will to act on choices, but if they have any actual net effect in the world.
Technology would seem to answer that in the affirmative,
. . . . until we go extinct.

[edit on 3-4-2010 by slank]

Originally posted by slank
In a sense freewill IS an imaginary idea,

True.

This is exactly why freewill is an unavoidable result of consciousness.

Freewill presumes there is some autonomously pre-determinable branch-decision point. [a 'fork in the road']

One wouldn't actually have to suspend time for this, one could do a fractional split point prior to some given instant [although usually one isn't referring to single instants] and still retain continuity of timeflow.
Also if one can string along a whole line of fractional instant split points one can operate on a quasi-alternate time [space?] reference frame.
Probably with angled dovetailing into this reality. One has to imagine some potential time drag to it.

From my book: 'Life on the Half Instants: The Downslant on Time'

(oh wait, my bad, i wrote that in another dimension)

Operating one's mind on double frequency. You just need a stronger buzz.

That is the real reason the CIA-mafia wants to keep drugs illegal

But seriously maybe one might create temporal stretches that would be equivalent to lateral blackhole infinite stretches where entire continuities of time stretch off between some given two standard instants. Probably a non-standard unitization of time. Irrational units might be especially good at evading re-co-option by the main-standard time increments.
Doing so without disrupting the current flow of time instants would the the art & high engineering.

flashpoint Universes.

So as you pass through time you might glance sideways & occasional spot some alternate reality, perpendicular to your/our own.

Another thought is using reverse instant records to sort of store up an alternate continuity. Very tachyonish. Then you could do a reverse feed off that & have a reverse tachyon that would parallel our current reality.
It can all be done with mirrors.

Tangent thought:
Does [the notion of?] verticality actually arise out of chaos?
Probably linearity arises similarly from a point via chaos [vibration?]

Higher dimensions may become accessible through chaos [pressure? referentially? variability? frequency?]
One simply overloads the surface carrying capacity of a given dimensional system & the pile-up goes into another dimension? Either logically or in fact.

And then there is scaling to think about . . .

Damn, not again.

[edit on 3-4-2010 by slank]

[edit on 3-4-2010 by slank]