The Illusion of Free Will: A Scientific Perspective

[Maui]

A process doesn't need to be specifically tailored or "wired" to exist. There also doesn't have to be a point.

You misunderstood something...

A process that produces thoughts on existence does not appear be deterministic(there is something that exists and we are somewhat aware of it, do you agree?). If there is no point in certain animal beginning to ponder existence, then there likely is no point to anything at all. There is no point in logic, after all there doesn't have to be a point as you insist. It seems our processes are waisting everyone's time.

PP. I respect your opinion even if we disagree. We are what we believe we are, that is as concise and correct as it can get. Everyone is born blank and utterly clueless and gradually belief begins to settle in. Bombarded with controversial findings from different fields of study(physics, neuroscience, philosophy...), our ultimate conviction of what constitutes 'us' is belief. In a sense, we are our beliefs.

 

[someGorilla]

How can we explain someone(the self?) taking medication to correct harmful processes like cancer cells, viruses, autoimmune disorders, etc.? Does it make sense to say the processes chose the best medication for themselves or for other impaired processes(or other more qualified processes prescribed the best medication)?

If we had a clear definition of what a "person" (or a "self") is, we could examine whether it can do this or that. But do you think there is such a definition?
For one, I don't think so. I think the problem lies in the self being a fuzzy cloud without a clear boundary separating it from the rest of the world, so that the difference between you acting and you being acted upon is not clear. In Raymond Smullyan's words, which I completely agree with:

Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the “you” and the “not you.” Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called “you” and the so-called “nature” as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.​

I agree we are zombie-like most of the time, this is beyond doubt as far as i am concerned, but there is seemingly more going on - processes can't be happy or sad, a solid case cannot be made that processes can understand, dream or imagine. There still seems to be a small corner to us that is still largely unexplored.

Processes can't be happy or sad - ok. So what can be happy or sad? Can you even talk about being happy or sad without already positing a person, a mind, a soul? This doesn't mean there is a small corner within us still to be explored (which might be true, but is not implied by this). It means that you need a certain conceptual fuzziness in order to talk about emotions, choices, or mental states in general.

By the way, this is what I was referring to a couple of posts ago:
Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J. & Haynes, J.-D. Nature Neurosci. doi: 10.1038/nn.2112 (2008).

 

[octelcogopod]

. I would agree that a wolf's behavior might be framed and understood as entirely deterministic but could we find a deterministic process that is specifically tailored to addressing issues like existence? Why would tissues, brain cells or neurons care about existence? It makes no sense to me to say that someone's brain was wired for it and if we stop making sense, there is no point to anything at all.

Well imagine this then, as speculation. Humans develop a language of symbols to represent the world in their minds, kind of like a more advanced version of animals knowing what their prey is or seeing and hearing things through their senses from the external world. The animals need to develop some kind of internal language that has some amount of object modeling to be able to distinguish objects and feelings. Now humans do the same, except they develop a further 'meta-language', a written and spoken language, and it develops so much that we can build entirely new objects and imagine anything from it.

As the general information in society that is shared within humans advances, and we develop ideas like objects having an existence, creatures having autonomy, differences between the physical and the mental, we start to ask questions about what we learn, and we understand ourselves within a greater context.

Intuitively to me the power of the brain started at the moment where there could be a sensing of external objects, and the second revolution was the ability to refine that language into a symbolic meta-language (the language we have today), and all this didn't need any particular reason, it just had to evolve from a start point naturally. To me, the issue of existence comes totally natural from an animal that can sense the external world. By sensing we are automatically separating ourselves from what we're sensing, just in a very primal form.

 

[bohm2]

Intuitively to me the power of the brain started at the moment where there could be a sensing of external objects, and the second revolution was the ability to refine that language into a symbolic meta-language (the language we have today), and all this didn't need any particular reason, it just had to evolve from a start point naturally. To me, the issue of existence comes totally natural from an animal that can sense the external world. By sensing we are automatically separating ourselves from what we're sensing, just in a very primal form.

An interesting argument that relates to this point is that a lot of these difficulties of trying to understand free will and consciousness/subjectivity/existence may be epistemological in nature:

Conceptually, it is worth distinguishing two versions of mysterianism, one ontological and one epistemological. The former would hold that consciousness is mysterious in and of itself. The latter is the more modest claim that the mystery does not lie in consciousness itself, but rather flows from certain constitutional limitations of the human intellect...

Introspection is our only channel to the properties of consciousness, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of the brain. Sensory perception is our only channel to the properties of the brain, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of consciousness. There is no third channel that affords us access to both consciousness and the brain. Therefore, our concept-producing mechanisms cannot in principle produce a concept for the connection between consciousness and the brain. Consequently, our knowledge of consciousness and our knowledge of the brain are doomed to be insulated from one another. More specifically, we can have no knowledge of the manner by which the brain produces or yields consciousness. The connection between the two is necessarily opaque to us. Therefore, we cannot possibly grasp the solution to the problem of consciousness.

Mysterianism
http://uriahkriegel.com/downloads/frankthetank.pdf

Stoljar also points out that the limitation is epistemological in nature by arguing that we lack knowledge/are ignorant of the intrinsic properties of nature (e.g. physics only deals with extrinsic/relational properties of matter) but it is these properties that we would need to know to understand how stuff like free will and subjectivity/consciousness can emerge from matter.

Introduction to Ignorance and Imagination
http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/people/I&I.Intro.pdf

 

[Maui]

To those who deny the existence of the self - would you believe me if i told you that i whenever i cut my finger i felt pain? Why wouldn't you? There is no empirical evidence or proof that i or you or anyone else feels pain, but you have believed this thousands of times in your lives. It's a very personal thing that we(or at least i know) that exists, yet you cannot prove it in an experiement. If you accept that someone else can feel pain(and is not just acting as if they felt pain), then you accept that there is a new entity(phenomenon), something additional to the physical body.

Furthermore, those believing that determinism is a complete expalnation of their experience, you are aware that discoveries in foundational physics show that neither of the concepts needed for determinism(matter, time, space) are fundamenal or absolutes, but secondary/emergent(quite possibly the biggest riddle of 20th century physics)? What is even more puzzling - conscious experience also appears transient, at least that's what our experiemental evidence suggests.

 

[someGorilla]

I've never negated the existence of the self. I have negated the independence of the self. I have argued that the apparent paradox between determinism and free will depends on assuming the self is - as you say - an entity. Of course I know that others can feel pain, just as I know that I can feel pain myself. But, to me, saying that their being able to feel pain shows there is a new entity additional to the physical body is just like saying that the sky being blue shows there is a new entity additional to the air or atmosphere. You can perfectly well assume that there is no such entity, and I suppose you will agree on this. So, in a sense, there is no sky. Yet, "the sky is blue" is a true statement. Funny, isn't it?

 

[someGorilla]

Also, I don't believe that determinism is a complete explanation of my experience, for the simple reason that I don't believe determinism is an explanation of anything. Determinism is a kind of more or less formalized description of physical events. It's a quite effective description, that's why we take it seriously. But I can't call it an explanation.
Can I call it a description of my experience? Most obviously, no. Could I call it a description of my experience if I knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe? Well in that case I'd be such a different being from what I am that I can't possibly imagine what I would think.
Fundamentally I think that determinism is a property of some of our descriptions of the world, not a property of the world itself. So your critique falls short of its target.
About conscious experience being transient I probably agree but I don't know exactly what you mean and I fail to understand what you want to imply.
The problem with saying there is a "new entity" as you call it is the same problem dualism has always had: either you have to explain how the two planes of existence interact (and explain whether and how this does or does not violate known physical laws), or you have to suppose they don't interact but are magically synchronized by the clockmaker. Both solutions are to me unsatisfactory and plainly wrong. How do you solve the conundrum?

 

[Pythagorean]

Same here. Self exists: it just exists as an emergent property. It arises from several interacting processes and you can still have self by taking away some processes.

I don't think determinism is a complete explanation of experience, but I believe its a complete explanation of behavior.

 

[octelcogopod]

The only reason why we can't describe experience in terms of determinism is because we haven't found a straight-forward way to describe them with the language of the physical at this point.

I think we can quite easily explain experience in plain english from a subjective non-empirical but still deterministic way.
We all know deep inside that we learn most things from the external world. We're either told something, or we read something or we have an experience that enables us to make a connection of symbols. And we can also intuitively know that nouns are abstractions of objects, places and other such things. These objects are tied to symbols, whether words or images or sounds or sequence of memories in the mind, but they are also interchangeable with other such symbols. We can attach the symbol and image "green" to an apple, a forest, and we can attach a stick to an image of a tree or a metal rod.

From this we can know intuitively that as we learn words, and as we learn concepts about relationships in the world, we develop the language that enables us to abstract and think about these things. This is IMO again based on a more primal language of being able to sense the world with our senses. But the language from our senses IS the external world, we sense our arms, we sense the images coming in through our eyes, and we, in a deterministic way, build one thing upon another.

Psychology and psychiatry is one such way of creating deterministic explanations for behavior and emotions. We could in theory trace all emotions, feelings and images back to external deterministic sensory experiences, as it must be built in one way or the other from these symbols of language and the relationships and concepts between them. If we were able to grasp the immense complexity of a specific brain, and also the environment it grew up in, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to create a deterministic account of the subjective experience. We could also then describe the whole history of that brain to the person, whether via images, stories and a full account of its history. If that's true, then it tells me that the deterministic history / process exists.

Of course there is the difficult problem of describing the process that enables the brain to actually have a consciousness, but the more I think about it the more I feel like most of the consciousness comes from sensory experience. That the consciousness is in fact a portion of the external world. My vision IS the room I'm viewing, my touch experience on my skin IS the skin, and the surface of the table I'm feeling. Consciousness is a transparent layer that only manifests itself in the physical. That's strange, and fascinating, but I don't know if it complicates the 'account' of experience just yet.

 

[Maui]

I've never negated the existence of the self. I have negated the independence of the self. I have argued that the apparent paradox between determinism and free will depends on assuming the self is - as you say - an entity. Of course I know that others can feel pain, just as I know that I can feel pain myself. But, to me, saying that their being able to feel pain shows there is a new entity additional to the physical body is just like saying that the sky being blue shows there is a new entity additional to the air or atmosphere.

I can confirm that i can feel pain and if the sky can confirm that it can feel pain too(esp. in a manner that i can relate to my experience of pain), i would venture to say that there's something additional(something that feels pain) to the sky that you likely have ommitted in your examination/description of it. But i am very sceptical the sky has an experience, this is very very unlikely :)

 

[Maui]

Fundamentally I think that determinism is a property of some of our descriptions of the world, not a property of the world itself. So your critique falls short of its target.

You've got it vice-versa. If it were so, there would be no reason for the world to behave in a deterministic manner. You don't think the world is obliged to behave according to our models, do you?

About conscious experience being transient I probably agree but I don't know exactly what you mean and I fail to understand what you want to imply. The problem with saying there is a "new entity" as you call it is the same problem dualism has always had: either you have to explain how the two planes of existence interact (and explain whether and how this does or does not violate known physical laws), or you have to suppose they don't interact but are magically synchronized by the clockmaker. Both solutions are to me unsatisfactory and plainly wrong. How do you solve the conundrum?

You seem to make the typical assumption made multiple times in the past - that what is currently known is all that can ever be known. Here are a few statements that highlight this attitude:

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom."
--Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923

"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." --The New York Times, 1936

"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." Scientific American, January 2, 1909.The best thing one can do when pursuing science(beside learning as much as they can from what has been accumulated as verified knowledge and tentative facts) is keep an open mind. Right now we are exactly in the middle of nowhere as far as an adequate description of the world and experience in concerned. If you have an idea how and under what circumstances time, matter and space have the properties they do as we observe them(classical-like, uni-directional and deterministic-like), do share with us. I have no explanation for anything, i am not ashamed to admit so, it doesn't seem like matter, time, space and experience arise from anything we have considered so far, but i am not qualified to enter speculative territories which are normally a reserved domain of string theorists and nobel-prize winners and which could be allowed to be posted here just because of the authority of the author. I have no explanation for mental experience either, i don't really understand much of anything except the deterministic framework that seems to allow events to unfold in a seemingly causal manner. This is an almost completely unknown and incomprehensible world/experience when examined in depth and detail. And if the world seems to make sense to one, it certainly suggests that one has not yet dug deep enough in its workings.

 

[Vespa71]

A cat washes, it raises it's hairs to look bigger. It pisses on the corners of it's territory, it communicates vocally with other cats and it's owner. A cat has self, but not too much reflection on the matter. Nor has a child.

I'm with octelcogopod on this one. Genetic development of the human, combined with culture, foremost written language, determined self reflection. Free will or not, now that's semantics.

Free will is

 

[someGorilla]

You've got it vice-versa. If it were so, there would be no reason for the world to behave in a deterministic manner. You don't think the world is obliged to behave according to our models, do you?

The world behaves the way it does. How we can build effective descriptions of it capable of correct predictions, why determinism works, why even mathematics works, is deep down a total mystery to me - and I think to many.
What I meant here is just that determinism is part of our description of the world. But this is just an epistemological subtlety and I probably didn't express it too well. In any case it's not important for my argument.

You seem to make the typical assumption made multiple times in the past - that what is currently known is all that can ever be known.

What exactly of what I wrote gave you that idea? Just to understand.
Where I wrote "known physical laws" you can just substitute it with "physical laws known in a distant future" or "knowable physical laws" or "physical laws known to an omniscient god" and my point will still hold.

Namely, you have to explain how a non physical entity (the self) can interact with the physical world. This was my point.
I think that if you assume it does interact, then you have two possibilities:
1) it exists, it interacts with the physical world, and this interaction can be studied scientifically and tested. In this case, its existence is no less physical than the existence of quarks. It would make no sense to call it a non physical entity.
2) it exists, it interacts with the physical world, but its existence cannot be probed in any way - I mean in any way consistent with physical research, so introspection doesn't count. If this is the case, its interaction will have to break the normal course of physical events, but this interaction cannot be tested in any way, otherwise we fall back to case 1). So you have that when an electron interacts with a positron you can detect the interaction, but when an electron interacts with a self you can't detect it in any way, even though the electron's behaviour is changed. I don't say this is impossible, but is this what you think?

By the way... you didn't answer the question in my previous post.

[...]

Be it far from me to say I know everything (see above). But what does this has to do with selves being separate entities or not?

 

[Maui]

I wrote a rather lengthy post but the site logged me out on posting and chewed my post. I'll see if i can get a motivation for a more detailed response later today.

What exactly of what I wrote gave you that idea? Just to understand.
Where I wrote "known physical laws" you can just substitute it with "physical laws known in a distant future" or "knowable physical laws" or "physical laws known to an omniscient god" and my point will still hold.

It was implied in your statement that there exist an understanding of the self(the personal experience) in the determinsitic framework, which is false. Science operates on models, some models are pretty far-reaching, some are more limited and some are virtually non-existent. Conscious experience being of the latter type. Sticking to the models we have and avoiding the possibility of flooding the forum with nonsense, we can agree there is no satisfactory resolution to the conscious experience debate(certainly not through scientific models). Furthermore, all our models are deterministic in nature and to demand that there be an explanation of emergent phenomena through deterministic models is a contradiction in terms. There is emergent behavior at all scales, so the phenomenon isn't new or unfamiliar. The question is can there be a model that describes it?

Namely, you have to explain how a non physical entity (the self) can interact with the physical world. This was my point.
I think that if you assume it does interact, then you have two possibilities:
1) it exists, it interacts with the physical world, and this interaction can be studied scientifically and tested. In this case, its existence is no less physical than the existence of quarks. It would make no sense to call it a non physical entity.

Contrary to many people's belief, among the experts in physics there is no agreeable explanation how a physical entity interacts with the physical world, so singling out the question of how an emergent consciousness interacts with the physical is unwarranted and strange.

Be it far from me to say I know everything (see above). But what does this has to do with selves being separate entities or not?

It has everything to do with causality and determinism(possibly has some rather obscure implications for freewill). At one time it was philosophers' role to examine the assumptions and conclusions of physicists, now physicists themselves have become philosophers examing the foundations of their models. Here is a new article in Nature that addresses the same issues i raised yesterday, and while somewhat speculative(the whole field is), their articles are usually peer-reviewed and considered credible:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n10/full/ncomms2076.html

 

[bohm2]

Contrary to many people's belief, among the experts in physics there is no agreeable explanation how a physical entity interacts with the physical world, so singling out the question of how an emergent consciousness interacts with the physical is unwarranted and strange.

I think a lot of the difficulties it trying to reduce or expain consciousness is this implicit assumption that we have a clear concept of the reduction base itself; that is, we have a clear conception of the "physical" or the "material". The problem is that we don't. So as some have argued it's "not that all reduces to matter, but rather the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist."

 

[Maui]

I think a lot of the difficulties it trying to reduce or expain consciousness is this implicit assumption that we have a clear concept of the reduction base itself; that is, we have a clear conception of the "physical" or the "material". The problem is that we don't. So as some have argued it's "not that all reduces to matter, but rather the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist."

Agreed. It's weird that when cornered by the multitude of experimental evidence people would accept that space and time are somehow one indivisible entity, but they would viciously oppose the idea space, time, matter and experience can be merged in one whole. Some would even claim to understand(make sense of) the unity of spacetime, but such claims are easily dismissed under closer scrutiny. On the whole however, people are more receptive to change in worldview.

 

[apeiron]

Agreed. It's weird that when cornered by the multitude of experimental evidence people would accept that space and time are somehow one indivisible entity, but they would viciously oppose the idea space, time, matter and experience can be merged in one whole.

The problem here is that people seem quite happy about reducing biology to a material basis, so why in principle can't neurology follow suit? If life is not an immaterial force, why should mind be presumed to be any different?

Yes, different explanatory frameworks are required. So biologists are very interested in the material basis of autonomy - the ability of life to make adaptive choices. Life seems neither determined nor random. Instead is seems very good at making choices (or speaking antithetically, not being indecisive).

Theoretical biologists now have developed definite models of autonomy. For instance -
http://informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/sa.html

So there is no need to collapse everything into one simplified merger. Complexity can be discussed in its own right. As they say, more is different - even if it is also just more.

The classical problem of freewill is people can't see how the mechanical determinism of a Newtonian world can turn into the kind of autonomy exhibited by living and mindful creatures.

But biology actually has specific theories about this now. Another good background paper - http://rs2theory.org/files/134_341_844.pdf

Animals exist in a material world, but control it through symbolic machinery that is independent (for all practical purposes) of these material limitations. So this is why the material world can be determined, and yet life is still truly free to make choices.

 

[Maui]

People would shy away from uniting matter, time and space but does our current best theory of micro and macro scale actually support such a view? No. Though gravity is still not included the theory, QFT and the field ontology is currently the only consistent unified picture of the world.

We seem to have stumbled on a seemingly fundamental determining factor in nature(quite possibly the determining factor of how observable causality arises), yet its physical meaning is quite nonexistent - i am referring to "physicalness" of the quantum field operator.

 

[someGorilla]

It was implied in your statement that there exist an understanding of the self(the personal experience) in the determinsitic framework

No.
You can deduce from what I wrote that there might be a deterministic explanation of human behaviour (I avoid saying "the self") just as much as you can deduce that there might be an explanation in terms of free will of a lead weight's fall.

Furthermore, all our models are deterministic in nature and to demand that there be an explanation of emergent phenomena through deterministic models is a contradiction in terms.

This doesn't make any sense... there are thousands of emergent phenomena explained through basic physics, i.e. deterministic models. I don't know what you mean.


I'm not saying that it's possible to reduce everything to a material basis, as apeiron says. I'm saying that "material basis" doesn't mean anything at all, just as "immaterial" doesn't mean anything at all.

 

[Maui]

No.
This doesn't make any sense... there are thousands of emergent phenomena explained through basic physics, i.e. deterministic models. I don't know what you mean.

Consciousness and conscious experience, that's specifically what we were discussing. I also don't know what you mean by deterministic models explaining consciousness through basic physics(if you include conscious experience in the same group as the other emergent phenomena you referred to).