"there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams." is quite a strong argument against mental dualism and traditional ideas about free will.
But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?
Exactly, which is why this article is tripe. It basically boils down to, "the driver does not control the car, the steering wheel controls where the car goes, not the driver". That's true, but the driver controls the steering wheel, or at least has influence over it.
You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did.
Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)
A self-driving car is probably a better thing to compare to. And in that case, most people would probably argue that it's behavior would be deterministic, even if it could learn in some capacity.
Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
Certainly! I'm not arguing for any supernatural quality of consciousness. Instead I'm suggesting that free will may be defined as our (apparent) ability to influence the cycle of stimulus-response. We are (or at least I am) conscious, which seems best explained as a product of this cycle occurring. Consciousness may have a top-down influence that can affect the deterministic chain of events. I suppose the answer lies in whether or not we are responsible (even in part) for physical changes in the brain. Which seems hard to prove...
Edit: impossible to prove if we consider this a self-referential first order logical system
As external observers, I think we could equate free will with nondeterminism or randomness. If a system can choose arbitrarily between more than one state with absolutely no outside influence, then by all appearances it has free will regarding that choice.
It's more difficult if we have to consider the internal, subjective state of the system. A radioactive particle probably doesn't experience anything we could identify with when it "chooses" to decay. And the experience we imagine to be free will could in fact be entirely deterministic, even if other aspects of the universe are nondeterministic. But if we can rule out any kind of nondeterminism in the universe, then we can rule out free will.
I kind of feel the exact opposite: free will could only be meaningful if it was completely deterministic.
I mean, think about it for a second. You have a choice between A and B, and you freely choose A. From your definition it seems that if I rewound time to that moment, you might choose B instead. But it's the same situation! If I freely choose to take a walk this morning because it's nice out, I goddamn mean to go out. No matter how many times you rewound time, I would want to go out every single time. It isn't random: there's a reason why I'm doing this, and reasons are never random.
If free will is nondeterministic or random, then I don't want to have free will.
It would seem to me that the act of choosing isn't but deciding which alternative is preferred. And so impossible to separate completely from prior conditions or influences. So the question would then become what does "determined" mean in your definition?
If a person's choice is mostly determined by the state of their brain at the moment of choosing, would that count as a "prior condition"?
It would mean the choice is mostly determined by their "self", but the definition you give isn't clear about whether that would count as free will or not.
An agent's ability to do and not do without external influence or coercion.
The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
I agree that "An agent's ability to do and not to do without external influence or coercion." in the context of a social or political theory of free choice.
But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.
I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
I think if you accept a materialistic ontology, you have no choice* but to accept that you have no real choices - instead, your choices are illusions - every action you take is purely a function the gears of the universe turning (cause/effect).
* some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.
Most of the reasonable definitions I've heard of for what it would mean to have 'choice' can work with Compatibilism, so I don't consider it a cop out. What definition of free will and 'choice' are you using that causes the problem?
A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will.
My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
The problem is not merely ontology, but the definition of free will itself. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonably long page on compatibilism. "Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism" is an interesting take on the subject which is worth familiarizing yourself with, if you are interested in the subject.
I had this revelation when I was 10. Then about 6 months later I realized that the "grand equation" (didn't know about state machines at that age) was irrelevant as I would never be able to see/know all of it (at least in my lifetime).
Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
Even if every action is purely a function of the gears turning, you still have state. As soon as you have state (memories/mood/etc), you have some level of free will in the immediate sense.
Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind.
Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
But your state is also deterministically a function of your prior experiences, per this model. If you consider the input the entire stream of events, rather than each individual event, the output stream will be deterministic even with state.
Internal state makes understanding the output more difficult: your output is now a function of the input plus the internal state. However, it does not make it freer: the same input paired with the same internal state will always produce the same output.
I would disagree that we're better off. Well, maybe some people would be. But personally, that information has actually had the ironic effect of making me more effective at using my 'free will'. It's easier to try and be something other than what you are if you believe you think you have more control than you actually do, and that's a potentially huge waste of energy.
I don't think disbelieving free will requires nihilism. It's not that there's unfreedom of the will, it's that the idea and its converse never made any real sense.
Doesn't the observation that people who believe in free will act differently than people who don't demonstrate that free will exists? I'm perfectly willing to accept that we have less free will than we think we do, and that there's a physical basis for our mental processes. But why should that mean we have no free will at all?
Not a good analogy. I'll put it another way: People who believe they can make decisions for themselves act differently than people who don't. Are the former not exercising some level of control over their actions? The belief itself is neither here nor there. It's the fact that it makes a difference that I think argues for the ability to control one's impulses to some degree. Is that not free will?
It demonstrates that different internal mental states influence actions in predictable ways. I don't think that it kills the concept of free will, but I don't think that it provides evidence for it, either.
What we've learned through neuroscience is definitely invaluable, but it's not like this is a new idea even in the philosophic community. It's telling that the article opens by quoting Kant, who, as Nietzsche said:
> Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes.
Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable:
> Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true.
Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.
I think The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and A Genealogy of Morality are very readable and thought-provoking without going into esoteric ism or experimental style like Thus Spake Zarathustra. I prefer the Kaufman translations, but I understand there are many new, possibly better translations available now. Translation can make-or-break Nietzsche - he was one of the best German prose writers and makes use of a lot of wordplay and neologisms.
The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.
"Free will" is just a phrase that people made up to rationalize their desire for retribution, punishment, and forcible conversion.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
I strongly belive the universe is for all intent and purposes casual [1], I reject dualism and accept that free will objectively doesn't exist (in fact I don't even think you can rigourously define it without invoking supernatural entities).
Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence.
I guess that makes me a compatibilist.
[1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.
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But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?
You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did.
Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)
Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
Which is the aforementioned firing of neurons. Consciousness is not supernatural.
Prove it. And update the wiki while you are at it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Edit: impossible to prove if we consider this a self-referential first order logical system
It's more difficult if we have to consider the internal, subjective state of the system. A radioactive particle probably doesn't experience anything we could identify with when it "chooses" to decay. And the experience we imagine to be free will could in fact be entirely deterministic, even if other aspects of the universe are nondeterministic. But if we can rule out any kind of nondeterminism in the universe, then we can rule out free will.
I mean, think about it for a second. You have a choice between A and B, and you freely choose A. From your definition it seems that if I rewound time to that moment, you might choose B instead. But it's the same situation! If I freely choose to take a walk this morning because it's nice out, I goddamn mean to go out. No matter how many times you rewound time, I would want to go out every single time. It isn't random: there's a reason why I'm doing this, and reasons are never random.
If free will is nondeterministic or random, then I don't want to have free will.
It would mean the choice is mostly determined by their "self", but the definition you give isn't clear about whether that would count as free will or not.
The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.
I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
* some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.
A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will.
My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ReaResCom
Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind.
Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
> We’re better off believing in it anyway.
Nihilism is easy to start but hard to finish.
Hard to finish.
Consider: 'Does the observation that people who believe in [demons] act differently than people who don't demonstrate that [demons] exist?'
> Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes.
Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable:
> Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true.
Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.
The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
[1] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.htm...
[2] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/
Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence.
I guess that makes me a compatibilist.
[1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.