How physicists handle the idea of Free Will?

Pythagorean

Of coursre, causation != correlation: you may have a "feeling" and perceive "qualia" at the same time because they are both internal physical effects of a single external physical stimulus, not necessarily that they are in a cause and effect relationship with each other.

And in deed, we can influence "feeling" states on people without them experiencing the qualia, the work of subliminal stimuli.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

Goodison_Lad

This is true. We do now have a mechanism for gravity – the curvature of spacetime by mass-energy. But the obvious next question, ‘how does mass-energy cause the curvature of spacetime?’ has no answer. We just know the mathematical relationship between the two.

I agree. Qualia is the single megafact of a person’s life – by definition, it is the only thing they can experience, since it is the essence of experience itself. This makes me think it is a subject worthy a serious consideration, notwithstanding the seemingly insuperable obstacle of examining it in a scientific way.


The thing about explanations of qualia is that, because of the fact that it is qualitatively completely different to everything else, they tend towards the descriptive.

I can’t imagine how qualia can be studied other than through associations between subjective reports of internal experience and external stimuli. But, of course, would be no explanation as to the nature of qualia. While good science is always chasing the next explanation, this problem seems to me to be of a completely different order to the rest, and will be particularly intractable.

So as indicated by Q_Goest, maybe this is why some have said it doesn’t exist - and if it doesn't exist, there’s no need to explain it!

Pythagorean

It actually isn't completely different; that's exaggerative rhetoric. Every model we have requires qualitative descriptions. If we remove qualitative descriptions, we no longer have physics or science. We just have mathematics. 1+1 = 2 is false if you put units of apple, orange, and apple, respectively. Mathematics is necessary but insufficient for quantitative analysis. We need qualitative descriptions for everything we do.

In the same light, aspects of phenomenology can be quantified, but it requires qualitative descriptions. For instance, you can count how many objects you experience vs. the next person. And you can get a different answer depending on your focus (and there can be a third, more objective answer).

We can also quantify what kind of blindness people have and how it impacts their perception. We can also quantify the effects of drugs on people and choose a limit beyond which their perceptions are so messed up, they shouldn't operate heavy machinery or drive.

Maui

I think he means losing objectivity - how do you objectively describe 'feeling pain' or what it is that is feeling pain? Or 'i understand the meaning of what he says?' or how would you objectify my inner world? You can't. This isn't even a scientific question, no matter what one would like to believe science implies.

BTW, it's impossible to prove to a sceptic that i am not a p-zombie(most of the time) in the same way that it's impossible to technically prove beyond any doubt that an outside world exists. I think your reasoning was completely correct until 30-40 000 BC when the first cave paintings emerged laying the foundations of primitive human arts. Art has no connection with survival, i find it rediculous that some researches would push the TOE to explain away everything, from cold beer to CERN and my late arrival at the hotel tonight.

madness

I think this is putting things back to front. We are well aware of our subjective experiences, literally everything you have ever known has been a subjective experience. The whole notion of an objective viewpoint is incoherent. If you take your subjective experiences out of the picture, there's nothing left.

Maui

Very true. As soon you discard the mental images we all agree upon as a random side-effect of natural evolution, science shoots itself in the foot. It's the mental images that we agree upon that brought forth the theory of nonexistent mental causation, not the Big Bang or the infinity of Big Bangs that suposedly existed forever. What exists if not the mental? The Grand delusion? He can't frame objectively what exists according to his philosophy, so he must believe it's indescribable, unknowable and completely beyond human reach. I guess that's the end of science.

BTW, it seems impossibe to explain the mental experience through the events that unfold within it. I have seen no good argument or scientific theory so far. Nothing even close to making a coherent argument, esp. in view of the weakening and poorly understood causality that's supposed to explain everything from within the mental experience as a chain reaction of something as oscure as the Big Bang.

Goodison_Lad

You’re talking about the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness. I’m talking about the ‘hard’ one.

The very nature of the subjective experience immediately sets it apart from objectively investigable phenomena. How you would go about quantifying conscious subjective experience to any degree is beyond me. This experience is not simply the correlation it may or may not have with some other brain functions. You might be able to probe somebody’s tolerance to sound levels – you’ve got a measure of the input (decibels) and they can tell you, with some degree of accuracy you might accept, how much they can stand it. But you’ve gone no way to describe, let alone explain, the nature of the actual conscious experience of sound itself.

So it is this that puts the problem in an entirely different category to everything else science investigates, and this is why David Chalmers has called it the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The other stuff is ‘easy’.

Pythagorean

Right, but you missed my point in the previous post about the hard problem existing in gravity, too. Above, I was demonstrating they both have an easy problem. The point is that all rational studies have a hard and easy side to them. Remember that the problem is with the loaded word, "explain".

If you want to reject physicalism approaches to consciousness, your arguments would apply to physicalism approaches to gravity as well. Physicalists reject dualist arguments because they move forward and make grounds in prediction with the core physicalist assumption (cause and effect).

So no, we can't explain how the right arrangement of matter can have a subjective experience, but we can't explain how gravity arises either. But we know rules and operations for both (what arrangements are more likely to produce what effects).

Pythagorean

Nobody's pushing TOE and phenotypes don't have to have anything to do with survival to persist. In fact, the less they have to do with survival, the more inert they are. They're not going to get pushed or pulled by evolutionary forces; It's called a "spandrel" and all biological systems have them. (Not that art is necessarily a spandrel, but you paint it to be one in your post. Evolutionary psychology is a difficult realm to talk about evolutionary story's in.)

Interestingly, higher consciousness could have initially just been a spandrel, as most of our survival functions are handled by unconscious processes. Obviously, though, it's become a huge advantage to us, allowing us the largest expanse of habitat and diet of any other animal.

Q_Goest

Hi madness,
You might be interested in reading Lowe, "There are no easy problems of consciousness". Your views seem to parallel his, so I suspect you'll enjoy reading his paper.

Q_Goest

Hi Pythagorean,
Not everyone in these philosophy forums has a good background in philosophy, so it's difficult sometimes to distinguish between knowledgable arguments and those that come from the perspective of a non-expert, say someone with a background in engineering or a background in biology. Those folks with no background in philosophy are sometimes difficult to identify, especially if you have little or no background in the field yourself. There is an entire branch of scientists who specialize in the logical arguments made to conceptually understand topics such as consciousness. They call themselves philosophers. Some of us frown upon their work because we don't understand it. They use words we're not familiar with and say things in a way that confuses us. At times, we ridicule them because what they say makes no sense to us. But what they're discussing has everything to do with the science.

I wouldn't walk into a microbiology forum and, as an engineer not understanding what they're talking about, tell them they are missing my point. I wouldn't tell them they don't need all those words to describe molecular interactions since I obviously understand chemistry and don't use those words. Unfortunately, many people tend to feel that their background in some other area of science has prepared them for discussions regarding the philosophy of mind.

It's diffucult to explain to someone without the background why there is no "hard problem" of gravity, dark matter or even of dark energy. It's difficult without the background to explain why subliminal stimuli has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Because there's an entire field of research and logic that can't be funneled into a single post just as it would be impossible for a microbiologist to explain to an engineer such as myself, details regarding microbiology.

I have no doubt you could understand this topic if you really wanted to understand it. But it seems like you really aren't interested in understanding it, and that makes it frustrating for anyone with a background in philosophy to try and measure up to your expectations.

Pythagorean

Insinuating ignorance isn't a solution to the problem. That's not what we do in the biology forums. We might even report somebody for trying to slip a subtle ad hominem in. Your post makes no argument and contributes nothing to the understanding of the problem.

In the science forums, we do patiently break it down and explain it as long as we can. You should expect us to not "need all those words to describe molecular interactions" because that's the point of the forum. To explain things without jargon because it helps exclude silent pretense.

The only reason you would say "oh I can't explain it to you, you're ignorant" is if you don't have any real substance.

Pythagorean

I realize that the "hard problem" is specifically defined for consciousness, but what I'm arguing is that it's analogous to "problems" in gravity. We don't know why matter has gravitational or electromagnetic fields in the same way we don't know why subjective experience can arise from matter. These are all enigmatic properties that we just accept to be true.

madness

I agree with this to a large extent. What we need is a theory which can relate physical or informational quantities to conscious experience or qualia. The only real attempt that I'm aware of is Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/5/42). We may never understand how subjective experiences arise or what they are, but we can describe observed relationships mathematically just as we have done for gravity and electromagnetism. For me though, there is a big difference between applying this type of explanation to gravity and qualia. For gravity, we are modelling the correlation between very similar physical quantities (basically speed, position, acceleration). For consciousness, we are modelling the correlation between entirely different categories, physical (possibly informational) and experiential.

Pythagorean

But to me it appears to me that you are comparing:
1) only the easy problems of gravity
to
2) the gap between the easy and hard problems of consciousness.

The hard problem of gravity is essentially the same as for consciousness: there's an explanatory gap: we know about speed/position/acceleration just fine, but that doesn't explain why gravity exists in the first place. How this property (gravity) can emerge from particles and their interactions. We can't even explain why there are particles and interactions in the first place. We can't explain why there's something instead of nothing. These are all hard problems of science. Science doesn't just fail at explaining consciousness, it fails explaining a lot of human questions about the universe.

But it's possible that the questions are meaningless, too. It's easy to see why "does fist eat orange?" is a nonsensical question. But other questions that are more emotionally appealing to us might seem more reasonably when they're really not.

One huge difficulty is that it is an ill-defined question in the first place: there's no reliable definition of consciousness.

micromass

Right, so if I get you right, then you are saying that philosophers know more about science then the scientists themselves. If I want to ask people about gravity, then I'll ask the physicists, not the philosophers.

This entire argument is an argument by authority and is a logical fallacy.

madness

But the problem is that there is no "gravity" that emerges from the particles and their accelerations. All there is are the particles and their speeds, positions and accelerations. Gravity is a piece of conceptual machinery to model their evolution in time. With consciousness, there is something else other than the particles and their speeds and positions. This is what the fundamental difference is. The gravitational field is just a mathematical trick to explain the observables, which are fundamentally just position and time.