Does Neuroscience Challenge the Existence of Free Will?

[Pythagorean]

There’s literally tons of papers out there that show how neurons are made to act exactly as local causal physics would have them (ie: weak emergence). Yes, neurons are highly nonlinear and yes to some degree they exhibit stoichastic behavior - to the experimentalist; which begs the question of whether or not they truly are probabalistic or are there ‘hidden variables’ so to speak, that we simply haven’t nailed down? Even if we find that neurons exhibit truly probabalistic behaviors such as for example, radioactive decay exhibits, is that single feature of a neuron truly going to lead us to finding “free will”?

Well, first, I think we all agree the notion of "free will" is already construed, don't we?

If we have any willpower, it's severely limited. Besides being confined by physical laws, as you probably know, there are a number of experiments that can show, at the least, that short-term free will is questionable. We can mark a lot of correlations between education, social class, and crime. We can find genes that link to behavior. If there's any free will in a single individual, it's a very weak force.

I don't see what "downward causation" really means. Physically, it doesn't seem any different from constraints. Constraints can be reduced to particle interactions themselves. And even if those constraints are holonomic, they can still be modeled as function of more degrees of freedom (though stochastic models are sometimes more successful). At some point though, you have to talk about what the initial conditions are for those degrees of freedom and how they arose. Once you model the whole universe, that becomes paradoxical... do you just weave them back into your system so you have one big closed loop? If matter and energy are to be conserved, it would appear so; and that would relieve the paradox (but I'm obviously speculating, here).

To me, "downward causation" seems to be an anthropomorphic desire to inject the subjective human quality of "willpower" into interpretations of global physical events. The only thing, to me, that makes global events significant, is the observer that sees several small events occurring at the same time and makes up a story so that it's all one big picture; that way the observer can have a stable world view. Evolutionary, of course, this makes sense, because it helps us (though bayesian learning) to instigate behavior towards food and shelter and away from danger.

Do I deny that, for instance, language and society influence the personality of an individual? Not at all. But it could simply be the case of the right reduced events happening at the right time that are often correlated together (so we see the global event as significant with our human brains).

That there's a subjective experience arising is another thing that so far, we can't touch, but through our research, we begun to gain an understanding of what the subjective experience is and is not... hopefully this will lead us to a mechanism for subjectivity (I don't have the slightest inkling how you would even begin to explain subjectivity with any more than story telling).

 

[Pythagorean]

I think there’s a common desire for humans to believe that our feelings and emotions (our phenomenal experiences) actually make a difference. We want to believe we are not automatons, that we have “free will” and our experiences really matter. We intuitively feel that there is something different about our experience of the world and that of an automaton, and therefore, the computational paradigm must somehow be wrong.

That's not completely true. It goes the other way, as well. I posted a Human Behavioral Biology lecture series in the Biology forum (excellent series, you should really watch it if this kind of stuff interests you). The lecturer discusses the history of the debate between the southern US scientists, and the european marxist scientists at the time.

The US scientists were promoting this largely biosocial view in which everything was predetermined and wild nature and it's largely speculated that they had a political agenda to justify their behavior at the time. There was even an outbreak with angry Marxists shouting and screaming "There will be law!"

So there is an allure to the opposite effect which we have to be equally careful of. To take accountability away from criminals and tyrants, particularly (but I'm sure we've all, at some point, justified our own behavior in some small trivial way as "it's just who I am").

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi aperion, I honestly wish there was more to agree on. Anyway...

The FEA approach you describe only works because the global constraints are taken as already in existence and so axiomatic. What does not change does not need to be mentioned when modelling.

So take a benard cell. An entropic gradient is presumed. The source and the sink are just there. The model does not seek to explain how this state of affairs developed, just what then happens as a consequence.

Order then arises at a critical temperature - the famous hexagonal cells. Local thermal jostlings magically become entrained in a global scale coherent motion.

Now these global scale cells do in fact exert a downward causal effect. As just said, they entrain the destinies of individual molecules of oil. This is what a dissipative structure is all about. Global constraints (the order of the flow) acting to reduce the local degrees of freedom (the random thermal jostle of the molecules become suddenly far less random, far more determined).

So benard cells are frequently cited as an example of self-organisation due to the "mysterious" development of global order.

There are other features we could remark on, like the fact that the whorls are hexagonal (roughly) rather than circular. The fact that the activity is confined (globally constrained) reduces even the "local degrees of freedom" of these benard cells. Circular vortexes are the unconstrained variety. Hexagonal ones are ones with extra global constraints enforced by a packing density.

Note too that the macro-order that the benard cell is so often used to illustrate is a highly delicate state. Turn the heat up a little and you have soon the usual transition to chaos proper - whorls of turbulence over all scales, and no more pretty hexagonal cells.

There are no "global constraints" in FEA unless you consider the local, causal influences "global". I honestly don't know what you mean by global constraints unless those are the boundary conditions on the overall physical system. See, we can just as easily extend the boundary in FEA, such as by extending the liquid pool out past the area where it is being heated, to form Benard cells. When we do that, everything stays the same. The boundaries on every element have only the local, causal forces (momentum exchange, conservation of energy, conservation of mass, gravitational field strength, etc...) ascribed to those boundaries, and those boundaries on every volume must be in dynamic equilibrium with every other volume and with the boundary on the system being modeled overall as if the boundary overall was just another layer of finite elements. FEA is truly an example of weak emergence as Bedau describes it in his paper.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Pythagorean

I don't see what "downward causation" really means. Physically, it doesn't seem any different from constraints.

If you're not familiar with the term "downward causation", please read up on the topic. Here's a couple of papers I can recommend:
Chalmers, "Strong and Weak Emergence"
Emmeche et al, "Levels, Emergence, and Three Versions of Downward Causation"

From Chalmers

Downward causation means that higher-level phenomena are not only irreducible but also exert a causal efficacy of some sort. Such causation requires the formulation of basic principals which state that when certain high-level configurations occur, certain consequences will follow.

From Emmeche, strong downward causation is described as follows:

a given entity or process on a given level may causally inflict changes or effects on entities or processes on a lower level. ... This idea requires that the levels in question be sharply distinguished and autonomous...

Basically, it's saying that local level physical laws are over-ridden by these other physical laws that arise when certain higher level phenomena occur. I'm not sure what way "constraints" is being used in some of the contexts used here, but certainly, "strong downward causation" is something well defined and largely dismissed as being to much like "magic". Strong downward causation is largely refuted by everyone, at least on a 'classical' scale. There are some interesting concepts close to this that might apply at a molecular level, but that for another day.

 

[apeiron]

There are no "global constraints" in FEA unless you consider the local, causal influences "global". I honestly don't know what you mean by global constraints unless those are the boundary conditions on the overall physical system. See, we can just as easily extend the boundary in FEA, such as by extending the liquid pool out past the area where it is being heated, to form Benard cells. When we do that, everything stays the same. The boundaries on every element have only the local, causal forces (momentum exchange, conservation of energy, conservation of mass, gravitational field strength, etc...) ascribed to those boundaries, and those boundaries on every volume must be in dynamic equilibrium with every other volume and with the boundary on the system being modeled overall as if the boundary overall was just another layer of finite elements. FEA is truly an example of weak emergence as Bedau describes it in his paper.

Yes, I am sure there is no way to change your mind here. But anyway, boundary conditions would be another name for global constraints of course.

Immediately, when challenged, you think about the way those boundary conditions can be changed without creating a change. Which defeats the whole purpose. The person making the change is not factored into your model as a boundary condition. And you started with a system already at equilibrium with its boundary conditions and found a way to move them so as not to change anything. (Well, expand the boundary too fast and it would cool and the cells would fall apart - but your imagination has already found a way not to have that happen because I am sure your experimenter has skillful control and does the job so smoothly that the cells never get destabilised).

So FEA as a perspective may see no global constraints. Which is no problem for certain classes of modelling, a big problem if you are using it as the worldview that motivates your philosophical arguments here.

And as I said, a big problem even if you just want to model complex systems such as life and mind.

As asked, I provided examples of how top-down constraints such as selective attention have been shown to alter local neural receptive fields and other aspects of their behaviour. You have yet to explain how this fits with your FEA perspective where this kind of hierarchical causality does not appear to exist.

 

[Pythagorean]

Hmmmm... I like it... any good reading you could recommend?

Nonlinear optics: past, present, and future
Bloembergen, N.

Is what I found to answer your question (looking mostly at the history) which might be a goodd background to go and find your particular interests from. I think it really depends on your specific interest, but I've very little exposure to nonlinear optics.

 

[Pythagorean]

Hi Pythagorean

If you're not familiar with the term "downward causation", please read up on the topic. Here's a couple of papers I can recommend:
Chalmers, "Strong and Weak Emergence"
Emmeche et al, "Levels, Emergence, and Three Versions of Downward Causation"

From ChalmersFrom Emmeche, strong downward causation is described as follows: Basically, it's saying that local level physical laws are over-ridden by these other physical laws that arise when certain higher level phenomena occur. I'm not sure what way "constraints" is being used in some of the contexts used here, but certainly, "strong downward causation" is something well defined and largely dismissed as being to much like "magic". Strong downward causation is largely refuted by everyone, at least on a 'classical' scale. There are some interesting concepts close to this that might apply at a molecular level, but that for another day.

Yes, I've seen the definitions, but my point was I guess, that I stand along side the people that think it's "magic". It seems rather mystical to me, which means either I don't understand it or it's bs. I chose to say I didn't understand it, I didn't mean that I didn't know the definition.

I can definitely accept that there's global behavior that doesn't occur at smaller scales (a water molecule does not manifest a wave). I work in systems that can be considered weakly emergent. It seems to me that it would take omniscience to judge strong emergence. Or a really simple and perfectly closed system (but then you're chance of even weak emergence dwindles). Otherwise you're ignoring the rather high probability (as dictated by history) that there's another aspect ("hidden variable"). It will take a lot of evidence to rule out the higher probability.

 

[apeiron]

Basically, it's saying that local level physical laws are over-ridden by these other physical laws that arise when certain higher level phenomena occur. I'm not sure what way "constraints" is being used in some of the contexts used here, but certainly, "strong downward causation" is something well defined and largely dismissed as being to much like "magic". Strong downward causation is largely refuted by everyone, at least on a 'classical' scale. There are some interesting concepts close to this that might apply at a molecular level, but that for another day.

Chalmers and others might like to stress irreducibility, but that is not actually what I've been saying at all.

The argument is instead that both local and global causes are reducible to "something else". Which is where Peirce's logic of vagueness, etc, comes in.

So Q Goest is presenting sources and ideas he is familiar with, not the ones I am employing.

 

[Pythagorean]

Chalmers and others might like to stress irreducibility, but that is not actually what I've been saying at all.

The argument is instead that both local and global causes are reducible to "something else". Which is where Peirce's logic of vagueness, etc, comes in.

So Q Goest is presenting sources and ideas he is familiar with, not the ones I am employing.

Good to know; this is what I mean by "hidden variable" but "variable" is too specific of a word and is attached to an irrelevant history. But this appears like weak emergence to me; I had the impression you were a proponent of strong emergence.

 

[apeiron]

But this appears like weak emergence to me; I had the impression you were a proponent of strong emergence.

How much stronger can you get in saying everything emerges?

So mine is super-emergence. The uber, premium brand stuff! None of this namby pamby so-called strong stuff, let alone alone the wilting weak, that others want to palm off on you.

 

[Pythagorean]

Ok, but what doe that mean functionally? I don't deny that, for instance, the star dust that makes us up was generated by gigantic thermodynamic processes.

But all I see is a bigger, possibly recursive, chain of weak emergent events.

 

[apeiron]

Ok, but what doe that mean functionally? I don't deny that, for instance, the star dust that makes us up was generated by gigantic thermodynamic processes.

But all I see is a bigger, possibly recursive, chain of weak emergent events.

Well, this is a whole other thread if you want to start it. And I've given about 10k references already in many previous threads you have been involved in.

But you can check this thread I created on the notion of vague beginnings.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514&highlight=vagueness

 

[nismaratwork]

Nonlinear optics: past, present, and future
Bloembergen, N.

Is what I found to answer your question (looking mostly at the history) which might be a goodd background to go and find your particular interests from. I think it really depends on your specific interest, but I've very little exposure to nonlinear optics.

Exposure... heh... I'll get on that, thanks Pythagorean!

 

[Maui]

How much stronger can you get in saying everything emerges?

So mine is super-emergence. The uber, premium brand stuff! None of this namby pamby so-called strong stuff, let alone alone the wilting weak, that others want to palm off on you.

The fundamental 'stuff' that everything is supposed to emerge from is still missing. For more than 100 years scientists have been failing to identify anything that resembles fundamental building blocks from which matter, time and space emerge(i reject strings and loops as idle speculation at this time and wavefunctions and Hilbert spaces as too ill-defined and ambigous mathematical tricks). One begins to wonder if the hidden variables lie within reality at all. If causality(this is crucial for the "free-will vs pre-determination" debate) is proven to be not fundamental(there are good hints that it is not), science as a tool for discovering truths goes out the window completely. A whole plethora of top physicists indulged in mysticism because of this in the 1950's and 60's and the sad thing is progress on this issue has stalled.

 

[apeiron]

I don't see what "downward causation" really means. Physically, it doesn't seem any different from constraints.

Here is a good primer on downward causation (the whole site is a good one)...
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DOWNCAUS.HTML

Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle above: the behavior of the parts (down) is determined by the behavior of the whole (up), so determination moves downward instead of upward. The difference is that determination is not complete. This makes it possible to formulate a clear systemic stance, without lapsing into either the extremes of reductionism or of holism

Heylighen also wrote a good review paper on complexity and philosophy...
http://cogprints.org/4847/1/ComplexityPhilosophy.doc.pdf

Also the concept of emergent property receives a more solid definition via the ideas of constraint and downward causation. Systems that through their coupling form a supersystem are constrained: they can no longer act as if they are independent from the others; the supersystem imposes a certain coherence or coordination on its components. This means that not only is the behavior of the whole determined by the properties of its parts (“upwards causation”), but the behavior of the parts is to some degree constrained by the properties of the whole (“downward causation” (Campbell, 1974)).

John Collier wrote about downward causation in Benard cells...
http://www.kli.ac.at/theorylab/jdc/papers/BC-ECHOIV.pdf

The understanding we have of Bénard cells,
including the careful analysis by Chandresekhar
(1961) assumes the convecting state, and compares
that with the conducting state to derive the critical
Rayleigh number. There is no known way to derive
the convecting state from the microscopic movements
of the molecules or local fluid dynamics. It is very
likely impossible, a) due to the impossibility of
solving the equations of motion, and b) likely chaotic
at the molecular level. The Bénard cells are genuinely
emergent in the sense of Collier and Muller (1998).

 

[apeiron]

The fundamental 'stuff' that everything is supposed to emerge from is still missing. For more than 100 years scientists have been failing to identify anything that resembles fundamental building blocks from which matter, time and space emerge(i reject strings and loops as idle speculation at this time and wavefunctions and Hilbert spaces as too ill-defined and ambigous mathematical tricks).

And I agree. I said that even local stuff (substance, matter, atoms) would be emergent. That is why a logic of vagueness is required here.

The belief in elemental building blocks is precisely what I have been arguing against.

 

[apeiron]

A useful book on the complexity theory view of free will is Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown's, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

Murphy gives a summary of some of her arguments here...
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10865/Default.aspx

The topic of downward causation (and its opposite, causal reductionism) is an interesting one in its own right. But it would also be an interesting topic from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge. What I mean by this is, first, there are many ardent reductionists among philosophers and scientists, and I would state their position not in terms of “I have good grounds for this thesis,” but rather: “I can’t imagine how reductionism can fail to be true.” On the other hand, one can do a literature search in psychology and cognitive neuroscience and find hundreds of references to downward causation. Presumably these scientists would not use the term if they thought there was anything controversial about it.

 

[Q_Goest]

Yes, I am sure there is no way to change your mind here.

Thanks apeiron. That's probably the one thing we'll always agree on! lol

But anyway, boundary conditions would be another name for global constraints of course.

Immediately, when challenged, you think about the way those boundary conditions can be changed without creating a change. Which defeats the whole purpose. The person making the change is not factored into your model as a boundary condition. And you started with a system already at equilibrium with its boundary conditions and found a way to move them so as not to change anything. (Well, expand the boundary too fast and it would cool and the cells would fall apart - but your imagination has already found a way not to have that happen because I am sure your experimenter has skillful control and does the job so smoothly that the cells never get destabilised).

So FEA as a perspective may see no global constraints. Which is no problem for certain classes of modelling, a big problem if you are using it as the worldview that motivates your philosophical arguments here.

And as I said, a big problem even if you just want to model complex systems such as life and mind.

As asked, I provided examples of how top-down constraints such as selective attention have been shown to alter local neural receptive fields and other aspects of their behaviour. You have yet to explain how this fits with your FEA perspective where this kind of hierarchical causality does not appear to exist.

I don't see anything in those papers that would seriously suggest there are something like "top down constraints" that influence local causation. If conservation principals (conservation of mass, energy, momentum) are valid at every level, there is no room for downward causation, top-down constraints or any other uber, super premium level forces influencing local causation. It's all just weak emergence, and that's all we're entitled to (per Bedau).

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Pythagorean,

Yes, I've seen the definitions, but my point was I guess, that I stand along side the people that think it's "magic". It seems rather mystical to me, which means either I don't understand it or it's bs. I chose to say I didn't understand it, I didn't mean that I didn't know the definition.

What is "it" you're referring to?

I can definitely accept that there's global behavior that doesn't occur at smaller scales (a water molecule does not manifest a wave).

I accept there's "global behavior" as well, just as Benard cells for example exhibit a higher level behavior that "doesn't occur at smaller scales". But that doesn't mean there's a global orchestra conductor or any kind of functionally relavant top down constraints that alter what physically occurs at a lower level. Weakly emergent systems (as defined by Bedau for example) such as The Game of Life exhibit similar "global" behaviors. However, there's nothing but local, causal interactions that create those global behaviors. That's the philosophy behind FEA* and it's the philosophy behind the compartment models used in neuroscience today. Programs like NEURON and Genesis and the Blue Brain project demonstrate exactly the type of behavior we would expect given nothing but the weakly emergent rules set up by compartment models. There's no need for additional, higher level physical laws that somehow crowd out or take over the lower level laws. In fact, there are no such laws. When we talk about levels in nature, we're not talking about higher level laws, we're merely talking about the weakly emergent regularities that emerge from those lower level physical laws.

Bedau's paper regarding weak emergence can be found on the web here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bedau+weak+emergence&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&safe=active

I think you owe it to yourself to look at how neuronscience is treating the interactions of neurons at the level where computational modeling meets physical testing both disociated neurons and in vivo. There's an interesting talk by Henry Marlram on TED describing in broad terms how they're doing this on the Blue Brain project. He doesn't come out and explicitly state how they use the compartment method but that's what's being done. I have another link that discusses how the Blue Brain project is using this method in my previous post (the one with the picture).
http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html

*Note: FEA also models dissipative and nonlinear systems.

 

[Maui]

I accept there's "global behavior" as well, just as Benard cells for example exhibit a higher level behavior that "doesn't occur at smaller scales". But that doesn't mean there's a global orchestra conductor or any kind of functionally relavant top down constraints that alter what physically occurs at a lower level. Weakly emergent systems (as defined by Bedau for example) such as The Game of Life exhibit similar "global" behaviors. However, there's nothing but local, causal interactions that create those global behaviors.

Local, causal interactions between what? To be certain that your worldview holds, you have to get to the bottom of it. Let's see what the biggest names in physics have come up with so far:

1. Non-local relativistic and deterministic wave structures(though 'relativistic' undermines the whole idea of cause and its effect)
2. Abstract fields
3. Your own fantasy
4. Our collective fantasy
5. Strings
6. Loops
7. Add anything you like

 

[Q_Goest]

Local, causal interactions between what? To be certain that your worldview holds, you have to get to the bottom of it. Let's see what the biggest names in physics have come up with so far:

1. Non-local relativistic and deterministic wave structures(though 'relativistic' undermines the whole idea of cause and its effect)
2. Abstract fields
3. Your own fantasy
4. Our collective fantasy
5. Strings
6. Loops
7. Add anything you like

Let's not get silly. Local causal interactions are well understood and modeled mathematically by engineers and scientists. Examples being the Navier Stokes equations, Hooke's law, etc... I really don't understand why that's a problem.

 

[Ken G]

I think Maui's point is that even local causal interactions do not form a fully consistent ontology of the situation. So he/she might be saying that not only is there the issue that local causal interactions might be incomplete in regard to additional top-down mechanisms of the type apeiron is raising, it's even worse-- they are internally inconsistent in that they require we adopt an incomplete ontology even as far as local causal interactions go. This relates to the difference between computed trajectories and "true" trajectories, which raises the difference in the ontology of practical calculations versus what reality itself, even if we imagine it actually is deterministic, is doing. This seems a small issue, because the computed trajectories should mimic the "correct" ones in a statistical way, but there's always the chance that something underlying is going on that doesn't show up until you look for the right kinds of correlations.

 

[Q_Goest]

I think Maui's point is that even local causal interactions do not form a fully consistent ontology of the situation. So he/she might be saying that not only is there the issue that local causal interactions might be incomplete in regard to additional top-down mechanisms of the type apeiron is raising, it's even worse-- they are internally inconsistent in that they require we adopt an incomplete ontology even as far as local causal interactions go. This relates to the difference between computed trajectories and "true" trajectories, which raises the difference in the ontology of practical calculations versus what reality itself, even if we imagine it actually is deterministic, is doing. This seems a small issue, because the computed trajectories should mimic the "correct" ones in a statistical way, but there's always the chance that something underlying is going on that doesn't show up until you look for the right kinds of correlations.

The only problem I see with this is that there is nothing 'functionally meaningful' that is gained by reducing classical scale phenomena (such as Benard cells or the interactions between neurons) to quantum scale interactions. By functionally meaningful, I mean that we choose to use classical descriptions because they account for the statistical agregate of all the particles (molecules) and there is nothing else in the configuration of those particles that can influence the system in a way that matters. No one is arguing that the classical description of the world is an exact one. The point is only that reducing a system of Benard cells or brain cells to the level of particle interactions doesn't gain us anything when we talk about the overall phenomena being studied.

In fact, the "dynamic systems" approach would agree with this. That approach holds that there are classical scale interactions and "global constraints" that don't need to be reduced to the quantum scale. The emergent structures emerge BECAUSE of the classical scale interactions (ie: nonlinear ones, etc...). Not that I agree with that approach.

 

[Maui]

The only problem I see with this is that there is nothing 'functionally meaningful' that is gained by reducing classical scale phenomena (such as Benard cells or the interactions between neurons) to quantum scale interactions. By functionally meaningful, I mean that we choose to use classical descriptions because they account for the statistical agregate of all the particles (molecules) and there is nothing else in the configuration of those particles that can influence the system in a way that matters. No one is arguing that the classical description of the world is an exact one. The point is only that reducing a system of Benard cells or brain cells to the level of particle interactions doesn't gain us anything when we talk about the overall phenomena being studied.

In fact, the "dynamic systems" approach would agree with this. That approach holds that there are classical scale interactions and "global constraints" that don't need to be reduced to the quantum scale. The emergent structures emerge BECAUSE of the classical scale interactions (ie: nonlinear ones, etc...). Not that I agree with that approach.

If one is certain that causality will hold after the foundational issues are solved, then one hasn't poked deep enough.

There are obvious problems with causality related to the implications of relativity as well - causality doesn't exist except as a description of a serious of seeming causally related events. No need to stick your head in the sand - if our knowledge of the world is in trouble, there is nothing to lose by figuring it out, as we are all here for the truth, whatever that may be. For all i have been exposed to, and the opinions I've seen on the subject by researchers working on the foundations of physics, causality is not fundamental and all of our knowledge of the world is incomplete, if not drastically false.

 

[Maui]

Let's not get silly. Local causal interactions are well understood and modeled mathematically by engineers and scientists. Examples being the Navier Stokes equations, Hooke's law, etc... I really don't understand why that's a problem.

The problem is(and it's very deep) what those local causal interactions are between. The ontology of Newton is wrong and doesn't work. What does work, does not always favor causality and when it does, it involves more magic than weak and strong emergence...

Your model, whatever that may be, is just a model. It's neither reality, nor HOW reality is. It's awefully easy for anyone to shoot it down, as reality is much weirder than human imagination would accommodate. In philosophy, we are seeking(at least striving towards) truths and complete ontologies and naive models are always easiest to demolish. As one of the great thinkers once said - if your theory is not crazy enough, there is no hope for it.

 

[Q_Goest]

The problem is(and it's very deep) what those local causal interactions are between. The ontology of Newton is wrong and doesn't work. What does work, does not always favor causality and when it does, it involves more magic than weak and strong emergence...

Your model, whatever that may be, is just a model. It's neither reality, nor HOW reality is. It's awefully easy for anyone to shoot it down, as reality is much weirder than human imagination would accommodate. In philosophy, we are seeking(at least striving towards) truths and complete ontologies and naive models are always easiest to demolish. As one of the great thinkers once said - if your theory is not crazy enough, there is no hope for it.

Sorry, I really don't see anything deep here. Let's just say we disagree and leave it at that. :(

 

[Maui]

Sorry, I really don't see anything deep here. Let's just say we disagree and leave it at that. :(

Just one example and i am leaving - the satellites that keep the GPS system working measure time differently, because it runs differently for observers in different referential frames. This is a fact backed up by hardcore science and thousands of expereiments. The implication of time 'flowing' differently is that your NOW has already happened(passed) in another frame of reference(e.g. that of the GPS clocks). It renders causality apparent(for some reason things seem(just seem) to have causes in the world of relativity). The other implication is that of free-will and free choice. It must also be just apparent. Add fields(the most consistent contemporary model we've build so far) and not just causality but everything observable is just excitations of a field(for some reason the excitations of the fields tend to conspire towards a seeming classical causality).

 

[Ken G]

By functionally meaningful, I mean that we choose to use classical descriptions because they account for the statistical agregate of all the particles (molecules) and there is nothing else in the configuration of those particles that can influence the system in a way that matters.

But this is just the issue-- how do we know a priori what is an "influence that matters"? You start by choosing what will matter to you, and this will then motivate the models you create, and when you will declare success. But when trying to model something like free will, when will you claim success? It seems very possible that when the only influences that matter are the ones that achieve gross bulk statistical behaviors, expressed within preconditioned degrees of freedom (to borrow from apeiron's language) and boundary conditions, you will not learn what kinds of special correlations might lead to quantitatively different outcomes, and will not know if you have succeeded because you might not even be trying to model the right things to get free will. I'm not saying you know you'll fail, I'm saying you can't know you'll succeed, and there might be reason, for some at least, to suspect you will fail.

In fact, the "dynamic systems" approach would agree with this. That approach holds that there are classical scale interactions and "global constraints" that don't need to be reduced to the quantum scale. The emergent structures emerge BECAUSE of the classical scale interactions (ie: nonlinear ones, etc...). Not that I agree with that approach.

For a second I had to check this wasn't coming from apeiron! I'm not saying we need to connect to the quantum scale, I view the quantum scale as simply an example of the kinds of unexpected correlations that emerge only when you know what to look for. For example, in a quantum erasure experiment, there is no hint in the raw data that any correlations exist there, they are embedded in the entanglements in ways that require clevel manipulation to extract. If someone happened to do a similar experiment prior to the days of quantum mechanics, they would have no idea whatsoever that they were missing anything using a classical mixed-state analysis-- and they might be tempted to use language about their assessment of their success that is similar to yours in the context of nonlinearly coupled systems.

 

[apeiron]

I don't see anything in those papers that would seriously suggest there are something like "top down constraints" that influence local causation.

Yes, but you never actually made the argument against what has been said, only stated that you "don't see it".

You asked for the evidence with regards to the brain and I supplied references about top-down constraints shaping neural receptive fields. That evidence still stands because you have made no arguments against it.

Perhaps you don't realize how critical this is. The supervenience view of emergence says that given the same fixed set of micro-causes, we must always logically expect the same macro-outcome. So therefore, even if there appears to be top-down effects, these are merely supervenient on the micro-causes.

But if the micro-causes can be shown to be not fixed, but instead shaped actively by downwards causation, then supervenience fails. Instead the systems view rules.

So when presented with evidence of global constraints shaping the micro-causes - attention and expectation changing local neural firing characteristics - you have to explain why this is not what it appears to the neuroscientists who have done the studies.

Saying you don't see it is neither here nor there.

 

[Ken G]

There are two themes I see emerging in apeiron's comments that I find intriguing. I don't have the expertise to recognize how critical they are for free will, but neither can I reject the possibility that they may be critical. Those themes have the flavor of a kind of "balancing act" or "tennis match", choose your metaphor, between different types of phenomena, which achieve greater power and richness by virtue of the interplay than they would have on their own.

One of those dichotomies of phenomena concerns microcauses vs. system-wide self-organization of the constraints/boundary conditions/degrees of freedom that affect the microcauses. This seems to allow a type of information exchange between the two aspects of the combined behavior, perhaps akin to how a brain interacts with its sources of perception. A brain with no perception is not a brain because it is not functioning like a brain, and a perception with no brain is not a perception because it is not being perceived.

The other dichotomy concerns deterministic vs. random behavior, or predictable and unpredictable if you prefer. I tended to see those as separate issues from free will, because they are concepts that relate to different kinds of questions, but apeiron's comments have suggested value in looking at the "razor's edge" between them, where "too much determinism" is the difference between a machine and something mentally alive, and "too much randomness" is the difference between the weather and something that can think. Perhaps an important element in the tennis match of the first dichotomy is maintaining the necessary balance in the second. That's at least an interesting insight, I think, even if Q_Goest can point to a wide range of current successes in the area of microcausation. I think to some extent, you get your returns in the places where you make your investments.