How physicists handle the idea of Free Will?

Credulous

This is the way I see it: How do we know that Joan "chose" to be burnt at the stake? Well for one we know she told whoever was persecuting her that she would rather be burned at the stake than change her faith. And to tell them she had to open her mouth, inhale, and then exhale while moving the jaw and tongue to manipulate the sounds coming from her vocal chords. And this all happens within a known proces: the brain hears the question ("will you renounce your faith?") via an electrical signal coming down the nerves of the ears, which hits the nerves of the brain, firing off a chain reaction of signals that, through their wiring, end up sending signals down to the lungs, jaw and tongue to formulate the proper response.

Now at what point did free will come in there? Are we inhabited by some kind of ethreal being who somehow modifies that path of this electrical signal? Probably not, the brain simply obeys the laws of physics (which are indeterminate, not determinate actually) and spits out a response.

What would free will mean in this context? How would one be making a response that was "yours"?

josh1492

If i am understanding you correctly you are stating that just because we use our brains to achieve an end result and we cannot achieve the end result without our brains it means that freewill does not exist.

free will comes into play when a choice is made. By choosing and making a determination which then influences future determinations causing a snowball effect...in essence we are always exerting our free will. The factors that one chooses to accept or to ignore are what effect our determinations...and only then if we choose to allow them to. It sounds like, from what you are saying, we have no control over what thoughts we think and if we do its only an illusion of control. If this were true we would not have conscious thought. We would only be organic machines. Maybe this argument holds true for animals but for humans I really dont think so...even though both humans and animals live in the same world governed by the same principal elements.

Goodison_Lad

If the brain really is a machine that inexorably follows the laws of physics, and nothing else, its outputs are, as you say, dictated by those laws and nothing else. There is no room at all for free will in the sense that most people would understand it i.e. could the action of the person have been anything different? As has been pointed out elsewhere, even quantum mechanics doesn’t solve the riddle. The fact that the outcomes of quantum processes are ultimately unpredictable other than on a probabilistic level is still the laws of physics but with what appears to be an element of randomness. Even if free will were somehow tied to this randomness (and there is absolutely no evidence yet that it is), it would not be ‘free’ – it would just be unpredictable. I think this is essentially the materialist view.

The materialist view is based on the assumption, rarely stated explicitly, that every recognised phenomenon is ultimately reducible to the laws of physics. (Accepting the assumption is even considered by many to be a necessary condition for a person to be considered rational: so, by this definition, if you don’t subscribe to the materialist assumption, you can’t be truly rational.) But it is an assumption, and it has certainly not been proved to my knowledge. Is it even testable scientifically? Probably not, by definition.

Materialist arguments against ‘ethereal beings’ etc. (such as how could a non-physical agency possibly affect a physical process?) are, therefore, based on the materialist assumption. So for any phenomenon, the conclusion reached is that no matter how inexplicable it seems to be at present according to physics, it still must necessarily be the result of physics. This is what particle physicist and Anglican theologian called promissory materialism. More often, however, the existence of many phenomena is simply denied and do not require explanation, due to them appearing to lie outside physical law – if phenomena can’t be demonstrated scientifically, they don’t exist – another manifestation of the assumption.

So if the materialist assumption is correct, it seems there can be no free will, and therefore any feeling that there is free will must be an ‘illusion’, which will eventually be accounted for. I think the decision is between promissory materialism or something else.

However, this generates a second question: who is being fooled by this illusion? There seems at this point to be a separation between the conscious awareness of what's going on in our minds and the products being served up by the mechanical brain – the brain as the ‘stage magician’ and our consciousness as the audience. It is possible to conceive of brain process as mechanistic, but where did the audience of consciousness come from? Is it, too, merely a consequence of the mechanical brain, as it must be if the materialist view is true?

I feel another thread coming on!

Pythagorean

It's actually quite explicitly stated by the new terms for materialist (because "materialist" invites irrelevant arguments. It implies only matter; not energy or information, which are also physical properties.

The new term is physicalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

chingel

But what else could happen other than electrical signals going through the complex network of neurons? All the responses don't have to be predetermined and you can "make a decision", but that is just running information through very complex system of "logic gates", along with plenty of random or coincidental factors like mood and so on.

It's like if you make a computer play a video game like GTA, not using a predetermined list of moves and actions, but giving it some basic ability to analyze and a basic urges. You make it analyze the environment, search around, look for things, try different things, hardwire such seeking behavior in. Would you say the program has free will? The specific action wasn't predetermined, but it just wandered around to a specific place, made a decision due to maybe some cues from the environment and a hardwired curiosity, seems like free will or not? Then make the program very complicated, make its mood swing, give it a very good ability to analyze, learn, remember, seek patterns, make it fear some things, want some things, like some things, give it moral values, empathy, make it able to change its likings and wishes somewhat rationally to achieve a goal, somewhat randomly etc. Then you have a complicated program, making "decisions" where and how to go and what to do. Would that be called free will?

Goodison_Lad

The difference had eluded me. Thank you.

I'll happily accept the replacement of 'materialism' with 'physicalism' throughout my last post, as it doesn't materially(!) alter my point.

Goodison_Lad

I'm sure that many people would indeed say that's all free will is - part of a supremely complex computer programme, with the ability to modify itself according to circumstances etc.

So this would be the sort of process that would be used to generate the illusory free will referred to: deterministic yet intricate enough to be not entirely 100% predictable. I think in its essential form it's part of the model of mind that the physicalists would propose.

Personally, I would not accept such a demonstration, no matter how sophisticated, to represent genuine free will.

apeiron

For all those arguing on the basis that they believe the brain to be a computer, time to learn some neuroscience....

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/bvc.html

Credulous

No, I wouldn't say that the brain is a computer, at least in the way that we currently understand and build computers. The brain is structured in what has been called a neural network. But I think that how the brain computes is irrelevant to the fundamental question of free will, so long as we have agreed in the assumption that the brain is nothing more than a combination of matter and energy that can be completely described by the laws of physics. Some people may dispute this assumption, but that path opens up the question of how a physical process would be manipulated by something non-physical or outside it's chain of causation.

If we follow through with our assumption, let us go back to our electrical signal. Before the signal arrives, the brain is in a certain state. There is no way a neuron could be "aware" of the electrical signal's presence in the brain, other than the exact moment when the signal arrives. What is "making a choice" then? Is there any freedom in this system, or is a certain action inevitable? The neuron makes no choice, it either fires or doesn't fire based on how high the action potential is.

Because the results of the stimulus can be predetermined by looking at the physical state of the brain (neglecting quantum mechanics for the moment), I don't think that the choice was made at all. I think that choice is an illusion.

Still, many questions remain. What is consciousness? And now that I think about it, how does quantum randomness come into play in the brain, if at all?

madness

I was thinking about the problem of freewill recently and it suddenly struck me that the whole idea of freewill is based on a fallacy. We believe ourselves (ego) to be some extra "agent" above and beyond our bodies, brains and minds. When we see through this false sense of agency we realise that all it means for us to make a free decision is for our bodies/brains/minds to make that decision, since there is no special agent outside of this that we should call our self. There is no conflict between determinism and freewill, and the apparent conflict is due to our mistaken sense of agency. If we realise that all of our thoughts, actions and feelings are what we are, rather than some extra agent which has these thoughts and feelings and causes these actions, then there is no contradiction between determinism and freewill. The root cause of our sense of agency is an interesting question in neuroscience.

(I should clarify that I do think there is an explanatory gap between our physical brains and our conscious experiences, but that this has no effect on my argument. I am arguing that there is no thinker who has the thoughts - the individual is the collection of thoughts and experiences. I think this dissolves any issues with freewill.)

sophiecentaur

"Mistaken sense of agency" sums it all up. People seem to need a consciousness in the same way that they need a god.

madness

If we accept this argument (which I'm sure not everyone does), then we should reduce the problem of freewill to the problem of why we feel like we have freewill, i.e. why we have a sense of agency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). Schizophrenics, for example, can lose their sense of agency, causing them to believe someone else is controlling their actions and thoughts.

Goodison_Lad

Is consciousness not a self-evident phenomenon, therefore completely different in that it does not require faith?

Quinzio

I was wondering who can claim to be conscious.
I 'd exclude the self: I cannot claim and prove to be conscious, as you cannot claim it, let alone the fact one could be lying*.
So the only way to understand if a third person is conscious is to ask. But can a simple answer be enough to conclude someone/something is conscious ?
What if I train a robot to say it's conscious ?
*: can a non conscious being lie ?

Goodison_Lad

The word 'conscious' has a multitude of meanings, though in this context, I think we're talking about the qualia of consciousness, and this is apparent only to the individual, and does not permit of independently verifiable proof. All things that might be considered evidence of consciousness in a third party are really, either directly or indirectly, evidence of brain activity.

Neuroscientists are undoubtedly achieving much greater understanding of brain processes, and how these correlate with reported states of awareness. However, the philosophical zombie would produce exactly the same results: I might be the only conscious being and everybody else might be a philosophical zombie. So we can only infer consciousness in another, generalising from our own direct experience. This may be good enough for operational purposes, but I don't know of any way to distinguish between these two particular possibilites.

You could programme a robot to 'lie' about being conscious, but, as you suggest, if it were really not actually conscious, I don't think you could call it a lie, in the same way that free will requires an awareness (not just mechanical knowledge) of the possible choices. It would merely be a machine saying an an untruth.

For the record, I claim to be conscious, and nobody can prove me wrong!

pftest

Some of my thoughts on free will:

The experience of wanting something ("will") exists and it has a causal influence on the physical (for example our bodies). If this is so (and i dont think it would make sense to suppose otherwise), there is no reason to think that "what is wanted" and "what physically happens" are always two different things. In other words, "what is wanted" can actually cause it to physically happen. In fact this causal relationship between "the experience" and "its physical consequence" is something that can aid survival, so evolution is at work on it to increase, over time, the match between what is wanted and what physically happens.

As for the "wanting" being free, undetermined by physical laws, i think this option is wide open. I havent seen any physical laws that predict how experiences influence eachother, which is what happens with "wanting", which in turn causes it to physically happen.

Q_Goest

Hi pftest,
Sounds like you're suggesting mental states* influence physical states* and also rejecting the causal closure of the physical. Would you say that we need to reject causal closure to make any sense of free will, and if so, why - what argument do you find persuasive?

*Here I'm using the terms mental states and physical states as Kim uses them.