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Author Topic:   The Illusion of Free Will
Modulous
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Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 346 of 359 (653166)
02-18-2012 6:45 PM
Reply to: Message 343 by Straggler
02-18-2012 5:56 PM


Dennett
Good idea. Let's get Dan over here:

This message is a reply to:
 Message 343 by Straggler, posted 02-18-2012 5:56 PM Straggler has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 347 of 359 (653169)
02-18-2012 6:50 PM
Reply to: Message 340 by Straggler
02-18-2012 5:37 PM


Re: The curious case of Dr A and Mr Mits
So you do accept that your use of the term "free will" is very conceptually different to that being applied by the-man-in-the-street? Or not?
Of course we have different concepts about free will. However, the thing that we have different concepts about is free will.
Nor do they generally insist that two people using the same word with different conceptual meanings being applied mean the same.
Nor do people generally insist that pigs ought not to fly, it would seem unnecessary. Clearly people use the same word for the same thing despite having different concepts of it.
At one point you agreed that the revisionist approach was justified.
I still do. Naturally I think something needs revising, namely his concepts about free will.
But then you realised that would actually entail acknowledging that the man-in-the-street meaning of "free-will" would need revising to be compatible with your own.
Not his meaning, but the things he thinks about it.
These are different things.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 340 by Straggler, posted 02-18-2012 5:37 PM Straggler has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 348 of 359 (653171)
02-18-2012 6:56 PM
Reply to: Message 339 by Straggler
02-18-2012 5:22 PM


Re: Concepts and our beliefs about phenomena
If people apply the same terminology to two very different concepts is that not usually known as "conflation"....?
If people apply the same terminology to the same thing even though they have two very different concepts of it is that not usually known as "communication"?
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 339 by Straggler, posted 02-18-2012 5:22 PM Straggler has not replied

  
bluegenes
Member (Idle past 2477 days)
Posts: 3119
From: U.K.
Joined: 01-24-2007


Message 349 of 359 (653175)
02-18-2012 7:40 PM
Reply to: Message 335 by Perdition
02-17-2012 5:05 PM


Re: Language
Perdition writes:
It doesn't matter that the sounds comiong out fo his mouth are the same, he is wrong to call it a tiger, I am right. I would even be correct to tell him that tigers don't exist, because when he hears "tiger" he imagines the hellcat.
So, if you were discussing a hurricane with someone who believes that hurricanes are acts of God sent to punish us, you would be correct to say "there are no hurricanes"?
And if you were discussing diseases with someone who believes that they are things caused by evil spirits, would you say there are no diseases?
And if you were discussing human will with a libertarian who believes it has a completely uncaused element, would you say that humans have no will?
Have I got this right?
I can see this approach having amusing results if it was actually applied on this board when evolutionists debate creationists.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 335 by Perdition, posted 02-17-2012 5:05 PM Perdition has not replied

  
xongsmith
Member
Posts: 2578
From: massachusetts US
Joined: 01-01-2009
Member Rating: 6.8


Message 350 of 359 (653239)
02-19-2012 1:35 PM


Excellent discussions going on!
I have a NEW small opinion to add to my other small opinions so far in this thread. It is this:
The seemingly assumed principle that there is a Law of Conservation Of Free Will is bogus.
When a gun is held to my head, ASTONISHINGLY!, I do NOT transfer any of my Free Will to the gunman. I may indeed transfer some of my ordinary, plain, bodily Will and pick the Red shirt. But the gunman can never, ever take away the fact that I really wanted to pick the Blue shirt. Even if I cannot pick the Blue shirt, I still wanted to. And that, my friends, is the distinction. Free Will is all caught up in what I want to do, not what others want me to do, not what I wind up doing.
Look at the old Zen chestnut: I am being chased by a hell-tiger, who is breathing Universe-destroying flames, to the edge of a cliff and fall off. Down below are the numerous massive ruins of broken MRI-watches with freshly formed razor-sharp knives of broken glass and steel, complete with still inexorably moving, grinding, crushing gear teeth. But, as fortune would have it, I manage to catch and hold on to a branch of a species of plant that is compatible with living on the sides of these sorts of cliffs. On the extremity of this branch is a quantum-flower. My weight, because of eating too many triple cheese hamburgers and french fries, is too much for this poor plant to remain entangled and it begins to rip out of the side of the cliff, decohering it's wave function. There are only moments left before I can still climb back up to the hell-tiger or, if I wait until it gives way, plunge down to the knives. Zen suggests that I devote my attention instead to the beauty of the entangled flower. Dig this: I STILL have 100% of my own Free Will, as illusory as I already have conceded, to devote my attention to the flower!
p.s. - to the admins? a small modest vote here to keep this thread alive beyond the 350 limit....

- xongsmith, 5.7d

  
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 351 of 359 (653248)
02-19-2012 2:33 PM


p.s. - to the admins? a small modest vote here to keep this thread alive beyond the 350 limit
Please, no. There's only so much 'what do you mean by mean' discussion that i can listen too.... Nothing has ever been decided by this sort of tortured word game, it's argument for argument's sake. Bring me some bloody evidence, for god's sake.

Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android

  
nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


(2)
Message 352 of 359 (653272)
02-19-2012 4:42 PM


Free will debates crack me up
Perhaps the most important use of free will is in our ability to rationally analyze evidence, and the decide on what to conclude from that evidence.
Those who deny free will often say something equivalent to:
  • I have rationally analyzed the evidence, and on that basis I have decided that we do not have the ability to rationally analyze evidence and make decisions thereon.
And then there are often comments about how we treat criminals. They are often of the form:
  • The criminal could not have chosen to do otherwise, and therefore we must choose to do otherwise in how we deal with criminals.

Jesus was a liberal hippie

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


(3)
Message 353 of 359 (653284)
02-19-2012 5:39 PM


The experience of choice is sufficient neither to prove that you choose nor that your choices are free. The distinct incompatibility of free will and a deterministic universe can't be reconciled simply by the assertion that they are compatible.
The precise nature of brains need not even enter in to it, but if the fact that the laws of physics are inviolable was insufficient, comes now neuroscience to confirm that our experience of choice is an illusion, that your decisions are not made by your conscious self, but only rationalized by them. Your experience of "rationally analyzing the evidence" is actually the process of developing rationalizations for decisions that were made for you by the laws of physics and chemistry working inside of your brain before you were even consciously aware of the need to decide.
There are zero practical consequences for moral culpability, here, only theoretical ones. Either our existing criminal justice procedures and cultural mechanisms of morality serve the cause of improving all of our lives, reducing human suffering, and disincentivising aberrant behavior, or they don't - in which case we'll develop better procedures and mechanisms but that was going to happen regardless. Because we now know the physical basis of some criminal acts - brain tumors, organic diseases, Milgram-style authoritarian coercion - we're better able to prevent and resolve them at the cost of much less suffering. Far better that a transgressor should be treated and released than languish uselessly in jail - assuming that the treatment is effective. As our understanding of the underlying causes of other forms of criminality increases, it makes no sense to refuse to accept them on the basis that it undermines widespread belief in "free will." Regardless of your stance on free will or moral responsibility, understanding the underlying neurological causes of human behavior and decision-making can only help us.
For those who cannot seem to shake the notion that they're free agents, operating outside of the constraints of physics and chemistry - those who feel like their actions were not predetermined by the initial state of the universe - I ask you to attempt a simple perspective shift:
Don't wonder whether you have free will, wonder whether I do, without recourse to your notion that I'm just like you. Try to prove that I have free will based only on things that you know about me. You'll see that it's quite impossible, and that your only "evidence" for free will is your own personal, subjective experience of having it. But honestly - what's so special about you?
Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

  
Blue Jay
Member (Idle past 2697 days)
Posts: 2843
From: You couldn't pronounce it with your mouthparts
Joined: 02-04-2008


(2)
Message 354 of 359 (653323)
02-20-2012 12:35 AM


I always get hooked by these "free will" discussions, even though I don't have any real expertise or background in anything remotely related to this topic, and I'm too terminally indecisive to have an opinion about it anymore.
Ultimately, it always just ends up being a discussion about how we define this or that particular term, whether or not we should incorporate this or that party's opinions, and how we choose to split this or that particular hair.
Even though, apparently, everybody who participated in this discussion is a determinist of some form or another (that includes me now, by the way), we still have such adamantly different opinions because of our preferences for mechanistic or phenomenological approaches to the topic. Perhaps we should take this as a sign that this particular debate topic is a lot less consequential than our insistence on debating about it would indicate?
It certainly was a (comparatively) civil discussion though, wasn't it?

-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.

  
RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


(2)
Message 355 of 359 (653344)
02-20-2012 9:05 AM


summation: is free will an illusion?
In Message 194 I said
My point with bringing up the issue of worldview and past education, experience etc, is that in essence many things have already been (pre)decided:
I've seen many women that I would on some level like to seduce or encourage to participate in a mutual sexual experience, but I have never considered raping anyone: I've already made that decision regardless of who is a theoretical target.
Likewise I've also previously decided to consider nuns in a non-sexual context, so I don't see suddenly deciding to consider a nun in a sexual context as a viable decision to consider.
Pre-decisions would not necessarily mean predestination nor lack of free will. The problem is personal history muddies when the decision is made in many cases.
Such pre-decisions would give the illusion of a predetermined response, only changing when new input challenges the basis of the predecisions.
In Message 223 I said
It seems to me that everybody is trying very hard to over-think this.
quote:
Will2
noun
1. the faculty of conscious and especially of deliberate action; the power of control the mind has over its own actions: the freedom of the will.
quote:
Free Will
noun
1. free and independent choice; voluntary decision: You took on the responsibility of your own free will.
So it is an independent decision that you voluntarily make on your own, while will (unmodified) can involve others and a social context.
I voluntarily open my browser to my Soduko site and independently select one of four games shown in preview (with different levels of difficulty). Then I start the game in a blank square of my choosing ...
I have exercised free will. I have also exercised will.
The reason I think people are overthinking this issue, is because just free will does not seem to be enough, rather the argument is for ultimate free will. This takes us beyond our personal experiences and understanding of how things work, and dumps us into the world of metaphysics and supernatural determinism.
We experience will. We experience making independent decisions, and thus we experience free will. The difference of will and free will is the simply degree of independence of our decisions, rather than in the kind of decisions made.
Message 254 Straggler:
RAZ writes:
Would not an act of defiance be an act of free will?
Not if your desire to be defiant is itself wholly caused by factors over which you ultimately have no control at all. No.
To me this seems to invoke the same kind of indeterminate question as we have on the existence of god/s, and assuming that god/s and deterministic universe exist.
Of course god/s could easily BE the source of such ultimate determinism (and I have some difficulty with the concept of determinism without god/s), but they are not necessarily linked: god/s could create without inflicting\causing determinism. God/s that create a universe optimized for chaos and then sit back and observe the results would be an example of a universe created without determinism.
We can't know for sure, but we can proceed on the basis of what we believe, knowing that such behavior has served us well so far. We will, of course, proceed to do just that anyway ...
Personally I think that if free will is an illusion, that it is an incredibly strong one, reaching down to determine everything that I think, not just what I do, akin to the illusion that everything we see is illusion rather than evidence of reality, so I'll wear the red shirt on this one.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : clrty

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


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Jon
Inactive Member


Message 356 of 359 (653365)
02-20-2012 11:47 AM


Free by Necessity
Freewill exists because it needs to.
Period.

Love your enemies!

  
Perdition
Member (Idle past 3238 days)
Posts: 1593
From: Wisconsin
Joined: 05-15-2003


(3)
Message 357 of 359 (653398)
02-20-2012 4:22 PM


Summation
First off, I have to say I find it quite interesting that the major participants in this thread were all various flavors of Determinist. A few Libertarians commented, but mostly to agree that determinism and free will were incompatible, but didn't really argue against determinism.
Also, I found the debate rather stimulating. It was quite good-natured and though nothing was decided (or determined) I never expected anything to be. I'd say the biggest "convert" was Straggler becoming a Revisionist.
As for Revisionism, I find the idea of redefining free will to mean something we actually have to be attractive, but I fear it will only increase confudion as long as there are Liberatrians and as long as poor, little Mr. Mits believes the illusion that he can actually choose between two options, all other things being equal.
The debate centered around language, and resulted in some rather convoluted example conversations, such as "Tigers don't exist. That's a tiger." I still asser that, despite it's very evident confusion (confusion which I pointed out and was trying to avoid by not redefining concepts) the conversation, as quoted, was a valid one, as long as we understand that the word "tiger" meant two different things, was two different concepts. If you replace the word with its respective synonyms, the confusion disappears: "Hell-cats don't exist. It's a Panthera tigris."
My entire point was to reduce confusion, and to point out alternatives to trying to convince all the Mits of the world that what they mean by free will is not actually what they mean.
Ultimately, I think the compatibilist and the hard determinist are a lot closer to each other than the length of this debate would indicate. Quite often, and against all logic, it's the minor quibbles that generate the most intensity. My cousin and I used to get accused of having arguments that consisted of us agreeing with each other. In reality, we were debating some very minor point that was lost on the people not involved.
So, I'm a hard determinist. I believe the common perception of free will, and the logical definition, considering the word "free," are incompatibile with determinism.

  
Straggler
Member
Posts: 10333
From: London England
Joined: 09-30-2006


(2)
Message 358 of 359 (653495)
02-21-2012 6:00 PM


Summation
Subjectively we percieve ourselves to be able to make choices which are not wholly deterministic. This perceived ability is absolutely intergral to the common conception of what free will is. And the common conception of what it means to possess free will. As I first said in Message 22 and Message 35 respectively:
Straggler to Dr A writes:
Because what you are calling freewill isn’t what anyone means by freewill when they talk about their subjective experience and the intuitive notions it results in. As wrong headed as such intuitive notions may be — They are very hard to shake. Especially if they go to the very core of who it is we think we are. The sort of freewill people think they have is probably best described as illusory.
Straggler to Dr A writes:
The common conception of freewill is not compatible with determinism. I maintain that the common conception of freewill (or more specifically that we possess such a thing) is probably best described as illusory.
Despite Dr Adequate's characteristically robust and eloquent arguments to the contrary, and for all the talk of tigers and phenomenological events, it isn't Perdition or I who are going to come across as speaking "philsophese" when it comes to insisting that free will exists whilst denying the human ability to make such choices. Choices between "metaphysically robust alternative possibilities" (to use the philosophical jargon). Choices of a sort that deterministically do not, and cannot, exist.
Because the common conception of free will is absolutely entwined with this ability to make such choices.
Now there may be, in fact I would now argue that there are, many very good reasons to abandon this indeterministic conception of free will. Objectively it makes no sense at all. It's dualistic and ultimately philosiophically incoherent. It is also entirely unnecessary in terms of the many practical applications of "free will". Things such as moral culpability.
But no matter how valid the arguments for adopting a different meaning of freewill may be it is unjustifiable to just assert that free will and determinism are wholly compatible without first openly and directly tackling the conceptual differences between the meanings of "free will" being applied. It isn't enough to be factually correct if the use of terminology being applied is ultimately inevitably and indisputably fundamentally conceptually different to that being applied by everybody else.
Any advocacy of a compatibilist definition of "free will" no matter how intellectually justified or phenomenologically legitimate must start with an acknowledgement of the fact that the common conception of free will is incompatible with determinism, and that subjective notions of indeterministic choice making are illusory, if it is to not fall prey to the sort of "philosophese" Dr Adequate is accusing others of invoking.
Perdie writes:
I'd say the biggest "convert" was Straggler becoming a Revisionist.
I'd agree. But then my position on free-will has evolved throughout my time at EvC. I started out as an intuitive libertarian (although I wouldn't have known that terminology at the time). I went through a "Penrose stage" of thinking that quantum indeterminism of some sort must provide an answer as to how we could have the sort of free-will that it seemed so obvious that we do. Then I came to accept determinism but thought that any redefinition of "free will" to make it compatible with determinism was just an unjustifiable exercise in pointless word games to make people feel better about themselves. Now I think that a redefinition of "free will" (or more accurately a revision of the common conception) is justifiable on a number of fronts and the best way of tackling the issue. Maybe after another thread on this subject I'll find myself insisting that the compatibilist use of the term "free will" is what everyone means anyway and that there isn't anything to revise or discuss...... We'll see.
But in summary - I used to have free will. Then I lost it. Now I have it again. And all that has ever changed is my notion of what "free will" is......... This seems pretty symptomatic of the nature of the free will debate.
Anyway - It's been fun. And I personally always find it fascinating when high profile EvC regulars who normally agree on most things find themselves pitted against each other. Contrasting styles and possibly a bit more respect for one's opponents makes the debate interesting whatever the actual topic.

  
xongsmith
Member
Posts: 2578
From: massachusetts US
Joined: 01-01-2009
Member Rating: 6.8


Message 359 of 359 (654194)
02-27-2012 5:39 PM


Summation
First off, let me express my gratitude to all who came and participated in this thread. Thank you.
While I think we may have spent too much time on a certain sub-area of the discussion, I felt that the viewpoints argued forthwith were well-tempered and cogent. Good show.
My own view, perhaps, might be better stated in a tentative format of conjectures.
My thoughts, if you will:
1. The Universe and how we see it is most certainly NOT deterministic. It is damn close and we get amazing accuracy in science. BUT.... We have at the absolute bottom level of things an inherent quantum indeterminancy. An atom here could give off a particle to react with a molecule there*. That molecule might be the one that drifts into another. With the Law of Large Numbers, we can predict the overall behavior to a good degree, but not exactly. We also have the totally intractable predictability of Chaos Theory, even though once the initial conditions are known, the rest follows.... We have Son Goku saying that these 2 realms cannot communicate significantly.
I remember the old ping pong ball Walt Disney show experiment of a roomful of mouse traps set with 2 ping balls each. The experiment is to demonstrate nuclear fission. The guy tosses a ping ball into the room and the movie cameras record the result as he shuts the door before any ping pong ball can get close to him. To me, when I saw it, it was not so much an excellent demo of fission as a much superior demo of chaos. Was the later found-out fact that earlier for breakfast his 1950's Amana wife cooked scrambled eggs on the new range possibly a factor in the muscular motion of his toss?
Maybe we should look at a simple pachinko-style game. Nails on a board bounce a dropped ping pong sort of ball and eventually it falls to the bottom into a slot with a score. Is my proposed Free Will feedback process really nothing more than bending the nails to favor what we want, however stiffly they can be bent?
We have gas laws based on statistics of randomly moving particles. But we cannot determine where every atom in the room will be at arbitrary time T later. To me, Determinism is also a very strong Illusion. At the heighth of the acceptance of Newtonian physics, in all its glory of the Law of Gravitation, it was felt by many that the whole Universe ran like a well-jeweled watch - certainly not an opinion held by any significant population of reputable physicists today. This is an outdated viewpoint. Now, fast forward to MRIs and even to some futuristic machines that could record physical processes in the human brain right down to each and every sub-neuron firing level - given even the simply, pure mathematical intractability of Chaos Theory, which Son Goku has already admittedly allowed in the brain's processing, how could there ever be anything better than, at best, a most likely-hood (probabilistic) forecast of what the subject might pick for a shirt color out of the closet?
..
No - I accept Chaos.
..
2. As any self-awareness in an individual species increases, so does the Illusion of Free Will ("I" will gallop/hop/fly/swim over to that side of this thing "I" choose to call a "rock" instead of to the other side because "I" think it would be more fun=rewarding to "my" world-view as accumulated throughout "my" life) as opposed to some ordinary unemotional stimulus-response evidenced Will (my chemical muscles will retract my protoplasm extrusion away from the acidic levels "I" sense over that way without even thinking "fun" versus "not fun"). There are probably endorphins at the chemical level that do this. But it is very complicated and is changing constantly in a feedback manner, as most things in the natural world do.
..
3. Any such species-level of the Illusion of Free Will is on the same level as the Illusions of all the other imperfect inputs to the individual through the senses of their body and minds. It is NOT a special Illusion. Some people in this thread have commented that it must be a very strong Illusion. I submit that when I look out my window and see the Oak tree across the driveway, that this, too, is a very strong Illusion. In fact, all of our senses provide a very strong Illusion.
..
4. Feedback reinforces behavior that works - in accordance with our self-awareness - which gives us a good feeling when what we learn early gets rewarded in a manner we enjoy when we do it, from the moment of self-awareness. When we experience the sensation of doing what we wanted to do, in spite of the objectively unevidenced Determinism of the Universe - there is always an Error term!!, we experience that as meaning that we have successfully exercised our Free Will in spite of the Error term!!. This sensation of Free Will always occurs after the fact, just like the sensation of burning your finger always occurs after the fact. We live, we learn. What we wish to be our Free Will changes and gets modified to fit.
..
We change what we want constantly. Our sensation of Free Will is the rate at which we perceive that we can successfully keep up with these changes, within an acceptable Error term (IT'S CLOSE ENOUGH!). So Free Will, itself, is merely that part of us which determines that success rate, as honed by our life. Our success rate gets fed back into our Want Complex and thus the next time the we start anew with finding out what our Free Will was, the success rate is different.
..
In this discussion there seemed to be an absence of recognition that there could be more categories than those presented. There was a discussion of libertarianism versus determinism, which was very well presented to discredit libertarianism. But then it seemed to devolve into a false argument: If Libertarianism is False, then we have must have Determinism - and then therefore we have 2 subflavors: the Compatabalist versus the strict Newtonian Determinist. Dr. Adequate was dead-on when he argued that Free Will is linguistically used here with the Man In The sTreet (MITT Romney), but.
But, Hello. Indeterminism does NOT require Libertarianism. We can have even total 100% Chaos and still not require the kind of Free Will as those MITT Libertarians would wish to define it. We most certainly do not need to invoke Dualism (which would seem to imply the Supernatural). But even more importantly, we do not need to invoke Determinism to discredit the Libertarian definition. There is no issue of this sort of incompatability.
They are not exclusive choices. I think the reality is Indeterminism with the Illusion of Free Will as I have attempted to describe it. It is scary, as noted elsewhere. But we can accept it.
..
The next thread I want to explore is:
The Illusion of Determinism.
..
....
* Hey - who's to say that the process that emits a particle isn't somewhere - deep down inside - something out of Chaos Theory anyway and thus theoretically deterministic - but we cannot look that small so we have to treat the process with probabilities. Hello, what's the difference at our macro scale?

- xongsmith, 5.7d

  
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