How physicists handle the idea of Free Will?

Quinzio

Definitely. I think this is the heart of the problem.
During sleep normally people are unable to do anything but the basic bodily functions.
Yet some people who suffer of somnambulism talk while they sleep, walk, eat food, etc... and yet it does seems they are unaware of what they're doing.
My question is: why can't we perform our superior ability and still be unaware of what we do as if we were sleeping ?
Is it a chance that we can do e.g. math only when we're awake and conscious or there is something more profound to be understood. There are some "intelligent" activities like reading, writing, doing math that seems to be incompatible with an unconscious state of mind.

Pythagorean

You commit learned activities to automated processes in the brain. Lots of unconscious behavior is already going on when you read or write. You don't have to eXplicitly construct a grammatical sentence of what you want to say: you have a general idea and other parts of your brain automate the process that you once had to perform manually for your english teachers when you were learning the process.

Also remember that people with abnormal sleeping behavior probably have matching abnormal brain physiology.

pftest

I think mental states influence physical states yes. It may be tempting to deny causal powers to consciousness, and that it may seem like it saves the day for physicalism. However, i say the opposite is true and it would actually be completely selfdestructive for physicalism.

Personally i do not believe the physical is causally closed, but it is possible for it to be causally closed while at the same time also allowing mental causation. This is possible if the two are identical.

sophiecentaur

I meant that they 'explain' what they feel in terms of 'consciousness' IF they actually stop to think about it at all. It seems to me that it's a very similar thing to having a god sort of concept. Faith if you like but what is that in the end?

Goodison_Lad

I'm not very familar with the examples you must have encountered, but certainly, if consciousness is offered as an explanation, and that's it, it's completely unsatisfactory because it is no explanation at all, just another set of problems.

It strikes me that this thread, and similar ones, exists in the first place because people feel the have free will, whether they're right to or not. If free will doesn't exist then the feeling of it being real is worth as much consideration as the question of whether it exists.

pftest

Yes, what does consciousness achieve physically that cannot be achieved by nonconscious physical processes? I think we must conclude that consciousness is necessary for at least some physical processes to occur. But if we do so, then it will imply that consciousness is required for far more than just what happens in brains, since physically speaking what happens in our brains isnt very different from what happens in other physical objects.

John Creighto

As possible a-side. Many often think of the macroscopic world as if it is determined by the random motion of particles but the very fact that the macroscopic particles are organized into structures and systems poses constraints and order upon the behavior of the microscopic world.

Microscopic motion is thought of as stochastic. Particles randomly collide with each or are detected with complete uncertainty based on some quantum function. However, these microscopic particles are not acting in a world devoid of structure. There are fields, even wave phenomena is a form of macroscopic organization.

We as a system are to a degree independent of our environment in that our behavior is as much determined by what is internal to us as what is external to us.

This of course doesn’t address the question of consciousness but someone mentioned sleep walking. One thing that distinguishes this from conscious daytime action is that we remember things in the day time and we perhaps reflect on what we do more deeply.

Thus consciousness must at least in part consist of reflecting on sense data and remembering the results in an organized (probably chronologically) fashion so that through some combination of reason and memory we can make better choices in the future.

madness

Or that consciousness inevitably arises during certain processes. We don't know that consciousness actually does anything, it may just be a biproduct or epiphenomenon associated with certain physical processes.

Pythagorean

unless the feeling is just a spandrel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

madness

Why should that make the feeling of freewill not worth consideration? I think that is exactly the point - the feeling of freewill exists, and that is what we can study scientifically. This is what I was getting at when I was discussing the sense of agency.

Goodison_Lad

Well, suppose we agree for now that the feeling that we have free will is worth consideration, unless it is a spandrel.

The question is: is it possible to ascertain whether it is a spandrel, so that we don't need to bother with it if does turn out to be one?

Deicider

Didn't really read the thread so this post is to the point of why free will is nonsensical.

Free will is an impossible concept.
Because either all physical interactions are pure random or determined there can't be no -what you call- "free will".

If they are all determined then the outcome is fixed, if its random then its not 'will' of any kind, just randomness.
People justifying "free will" using examples like self sacrifice are poorly educated individuals, just open any evolutionary biology book and you will understand why someone makes seemingly unreasonable choices.

The only shelter "free will" can take is dualism ( a.k.a. magic).
Dunno why but almost everyone can't see the obvious, that even if god existed he would be deterministic, because any kind of pattern implies laws/rules, otherwise it wouldn't be a pattern.

That means even if something magical existed "outside" of physical reality that cause consciousness, that too would be deterministic, because it would have a purpose, a structure, a pattern, it would be just another type of physics.

Free will is not something "unlikely" or "wrong" its plainly stupid.

The only type of free will we have is the causal one, like picking which ice cream flavor we eat, chocolate or vanilla?
Our wiring, and all other physical interactions brings you into a "choice", that is the only acceptable form of will.


"TemplarKnightOfStuffTemperature", if you seen this before then you should be embarrassed.

John Creighto

I can't help think that it is tautological to try to define something that exists outside of reality from within reality.
Gödel's theorem says:
“A meaningful axiomatic system cannot be shown to be both consistent and complete except by using axioms from outside that system. Those additional axioms must come from a system that logically encompasses the system under study.”
http://www.sexandphilosophy.co.uk/pe..._evolution.htm
Aristotle thought the first cause should be from something which is un-perishable.
So if there is a first cause, and it is possible for us to prove (or at least understand) we must find laws of physics which don't break down at the beginning of time. The other possibility is that there is a larger system of which our universe is contained within but we cannot see the whole picture (hidden variables) and consequently cannot discover all of its laws. Plato's allegory of the cave is a good metaphor to describe this.

Determinism is one law of nature we perceive in this world but it is temporal in that it rests on the principle of cause and effect. If tachyons existed what would that do to our notion of cause and effect. We presume that all information travels forward in time but even time is not an absolute quantity. Relativity tells us that even the sequence of events depends on the observer.


Still though from all reference frames we are left with causality being forward in time and hence the possibility of determinism. Well, the notion of cause gives us comfort we know that in complex systems there is never a single cause and at quantum scale systems everything is to a degree random and uncertain.

Everything I said though does not suggest a notion of free will but where did it all begin. Was all the information needed to create everything we see today encoded in the big bang or are we where we are today purely by chance. Whatever part chance played there had to be enough order for complex systems to form. Even if chance played a part in creating what we see today there still needed to be enough rules (cause and effect) for the complexity and order we see today to be a likely outcome. For by chance a lone it would not be possible for such complexity and order to evolve to a scale which gives the appearance of having properties which transcend the physical nature of the universe -- as our notions of free will and consciousness appear to transcend what we perceive as material. What a paradoxical outcome from such an apparently disordered beginning.

If the universe is defined by the laws of physics and it was through these laws of physics from which we evolved -- then as Aristotle would ask, did these laws always exist? For if time is linear and cause and effect always follow the arrow of time then either they always existed, or they originated from some other principles. He would then ask what caused these other principles, or as Atheists ask today, "Who created God"? If cause and effect is an un-perishable principle and always forward in time then either for each event there is always a prior cause or there is a first cause but does the notion of first cause even make sense. Did time exist before the universe and if not there could be no notion of cause before time.

Our perception of time consists of how our memory relates to cause and effect. Without memory we would have no concept of time. Without a concept of time we would have no notion of a cause. All quantum scale dynamics need macro scale order to impose structure. It is only from the perspective of the macroscopic which the laws of the microscopic can be observed but without a frame of reference to observe some order in what sense would such notions as cause exist?

pftest

The problem i see with the idea that consciousness cannot influence anything, is that nothing can influence consciousness either. I would compare it with kicking a ball. You cant kick a ball away without it touching your foot also.

pftest

About the causal closure of physics: isnt this a necessary consequence of math? The only options it offers are deterministic or random processes. The idea of something being caused by a conscious force (will) is ruled out a priori. The idea of causal closure then depends on the assumption that everything can be described by math. Is this a reasonable assumption?

madness

If consciousness is an epiphenomenon then it is completely determined by the physical and hence is influenced in the strongest possible sense by physical processes. I have no idea what you mean when you say that physical processes cannot influence consciousness.

pftest

When you say "C is determined by the physical" do you mean "C is physical"? In that case, the causal powers of C are identical to the causal powers of the physical, and it is not an epiphenomenon.

If you do not mean that C is physical, then i dont understand how the physical can influence C, but C cannot influence the physical. Or going back to the ball metaphor: how can a ball can be kicked without it touching the thing that is kicking it?