Good. I’m sorry I over stress the indeterminism argument, but so often you hear “determinism is wrong therefore naturalism is wrong”.
Say you are given five options and you rank them in descending order of preference. Would it not be safe to say that you are only capable of choosing the one you prefer most? But if you are only given one option what choice would you have?
You think I want it to be true? I’m not sure about that, believing I was self-caused might be kind of fun. Being self-caused even more so. >:D
Seriously though, as far as knowledge is concerned, this is not a new idea and as neuroscience progresses there are fewer and fewer places for an immaterial soul to hide.
Sure, most people with a Jewish or Christian background do. You make decisions, how or why would you control yourself controlling them? Is the decision making process (possibly even involving lengthy and anxious worrying) not sufficient control? Why does there need to be another you on top of you controlling the controlling?
Now we have broad consensus on how we understand the concept of naturalistic free will, I want to respond to a previous posting:
Does our decision making process obey rules like a computer program? That is where we lack the knowledge, as Mefiate has pointed out. In this context I posed the question what our default position should then be. Claiming that the brain obeys rules like a computer program presupposes that we do not lack that knowledge.
Have you ever done something you prefer not to do just for the hell of it? Mowing the lawn could become fun!
If you regard picking the preferred option as decision making, then of course it would be difficult to illustrate why one would not consistently pick the preferred option. In my view ranking the options is in fact most of the decision making process - arguably all of it. The free will question then shifts to whether we have freedom to rank options.
Yes, I don’t like the soul idea either. (Sole is nice, though)
The intuitive sense of free will is not faith based. Mrs. Citizen, who has never heard of naturalism, will intuitively sense that she can choose which brand of margarine to buy.
Well the brain is made out of stuff (matter) which obeys rules, just like a computer is. If stuff didn’t obey rules it would be random and not much use for building computers or brains.
Whichever preference (even for the hell of it) overrides your first preference becomes the new preference which then changes the ranking order.
Who’s gonna stop you? The point is that the way you rank those options is determined.
You’d be surprised, most people who hear about free will for the first time find it a rather strange idea. Not even all religions have it.
If asked, “Why did you buy that brand of margarine?” most people will simply respond:
“Because I like it.”
I’d also like to add that it is impossible to increase the freedom of a freely willed agent because they are by definition, free. However, a fully caused agent’s freedom is expanded with improved reasoning and increased knowledge.
You are repeating your assertion that the brain operates just like a computer without being able to substantiate it. There may well be a random element in our thought process - perhaps something like the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.
We do not know that.
If you ask a shopper why she bought a certain brand of margarine and she replies: “Because I like it,” it indicates that the shopper assumes free will. If her answer were: “Because my brain operates like a computer obeying rules and I therefore had no choice but to buy this brand,” it would indicate that she assumes a lack of free will.
I maintain that a person who has never given the issue of free will any consideration, will operate under the assumption that one often has a variety of viable options and is free to choose any one of those. The existence of free will is therefore the ordinary position and the absence of free will is the extraordinary position that requires extraordinary evidence.
Perhaps I did not stress the indeterministic argument against free will sufficiently. Anything which is completely random would be useless for building computers or brains or anything else which had to make decisions. If there are random elements involved in thought then the brain has to find a way to compensate for them. Thoughts which are random cannot be considered choices.
If for options to be real options you must first be consciously aware of them, then yes it does.
Wow, you know this how?
No it would indicate that she is seriously confused about the meaning of the word choice.
Agreed, who could argue with this? The way you exercise that freedom of choice would be deterministic though.
I’m sorry but I cannot let this stand without at least some form of clarification. Why do you have the idea that QM processes are “completely random?” And, equally importantly, have you heard of “quantum computing” and, in particular, how not compensating for the element of randomness in superposed states is the very crux of that idea?
How so? Do thoughts, whether randomly inspired or entirely consequent, not contribute to a widening of the options base?
Apart from the inherent contradiction, how and by what means is the “exercise of choice” deterministic?
I don’t, but the fact that we can probabilistically predict how they will behave is what makes them computationally useful.
It has yet to be shown that the brain utilises quantum computing, but if it did how would that give us free will?
If the randomly inspired options are in some way related to the deterministic thinking processes, yes. Otherwise they are more likely to be useless. However, I would call this creativity not free will.
It wouldn’t be very useful if it wasn’t. For a choice to matter in any sense there has to be a reason for it, even if it is just an emotional one. A causeless choice is meaningless.
What I suggested was not complete randomness, but a probability distribution, which would mean that our conclusions would not be entirely determined.
I’m afraid you’ve lost me. Then what does what?
Why, surely it indicates that she believes she had genuine choice?
I thought I was representing your interpretation of the decision making process here.
My conclusion distinguishes between between what one would consider intuitive and what not. You agree that a person with who has not given the topic any consideration would operate under the assumption that one often has a variety of viable options and is free to choose any one of those. This would be the ordinary view and the opposite would be extraordinary, requiring extraordinary evidence.
I’m afraid you’re mistaken and I strongly urge you to read up a bit more on the subject. What makes QC useful is that it opens the possibility of what amounts to massively parallel searches of the solution spaces of certain classes of problems through superposing of the available outcomes – akin to when your brain switches rapidly between several different possible approaches or solutions to a problem and for a while you cannot reach a firm decision.
I didn’t profess or imply such a thing at all although it’s certainly possible. I mentioned quantum computing in response to your claim that, “Anything which is completely random would be useless for building computers or brains or anything else which had to make decisions.” A quantum computer, if feasible, would quite clearly not be useless, otherwise the technology wouldn’t be pursued so vigorously. At the risk of overemphasising it, QC very much does involve uncertainty and a degree of randomness.
But where did anybody claim that randomness in thinking was completely freeform/haphazard/unselective and/or unconstrained by the problem being considered?
So free will and creativity are, in your view, separable? How so? There is no actual choice in painting a portrait this way rather than that?
I wasn’t talking about “causeless” choices. I think you know this. I asked you to illuminate how – by what mechanism – you believe that “exercise of choice” is deterministic. That is, why do you think that the making of any particular choice has an a priori inevitable outcome? Phrased another way and ignoring the bedevilment of circumstances never being exactly the same, on what grounds do you maintain that if circumstances were exactly the same inasmuch as that is possible, the choice would always be the same?
I’m still considering how best to reply to the last two posts. Providing tech support isn’t really conductive to gathering one’s thoughts, though it does teach one through experience that human behaviour is often depressingly predictable. In the meanwhile, here is a quote from The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker which seems relevant:
People hoping that an uncaused soul might rescue personal responsibility are in for a disappointment. In Elbow Room:
The Varieties of Free Will Worth {177} Wanting, the philosopher Dan Dennett points out that the last thing we want
in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires.5 If behavior were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn't
hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be
ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the
future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behavior. We could not hope to reduce evil acts by
enacting moral and legal codes, because a free agent, floating in a different plane from the arrows of cause and effect,
would be unaffected by the codes. Morality and law would be pointless. We could punish a wrongdoer, but it would
be sheer spite, because it could have no predictable effect on the future behavior of the wrongdoer or of other people
aware of the punishment.
On the other hand, if the soul is predictably affected by the prospect of esteem and shame or reward and punishment,
it is no longer truly free, because it is compelled (at least probabilistically) to respect those contingencies. Whatever
converts standards of responsibility into changes in the likelihood of behavior — such as the rule “If the community
would think you're a boorish cad for doing X, don't do X” — can be programmed into an algorithm and implemented
in neural hardware. The soul is superfluous.
Defensive scientists sometimes try to deflect the charge of determinism by pointing out that behavior is never
perfectly predictable but always probabilistic, even in the dreams of the hardest-headed materialists. (In the heyday of
Skinner's behaviorism, his students formulated the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: “Under controlled
experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damned
well pleases.”) Even identical twins reared together, who share all of their genes and most of their environment, are
not identical in personality and behavior, just highly similar. Perhaps the brain amplifies random events at the
molecular or quantum level. Perhaps brains are nonlinear dynamical systems subject to unpredictable chaos. Or
perhaps the intertwined influences of genes and environment are so complicated that no mortal will ever trace them
out with enough precision to predict behavior exactly.
The less-than-perfect predictability of behavior certainly gives the lie to the cliche that the sciences of human nature
are “deterministic” in the mathematical sense. But it doesn't succeed in allaying the fear that science is eroding the
concept of free will and personal responsibility. It is cold comfort to be told that a man's genes (or his brain or his
evolutionary history) made him 99 percent likely to kill his landlady as opposed to 100 percent. Sure, the behavior
was not strictly preordained, but why should the 1 percent chance of his having done otherwise suddenly make the
guy “responsible”? In fact, there is no probability value that, by itself, ushers responsibility back in. One can always
think that there is a 50 percent chance some molecules in Raskolnikov's brain {178} went thisaway, compelling him
to commit the murder, and a 50 percent chance they went thataway, compelling him not to. We still have nothing like
free will, and no concept of responsibility that promises to reduce harmful acts. Hume noted the dilemma inherent in
equating the problem of moral responsibility with the problem of whether behavior has a physical cause: either our
actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in
which case we are not responsible for them.
I’d greatly appreciate any links you might provide to relevant material. I’m not sure I will understand it, but I’ll give it my best try.
I’ve heard of this being compared to what happens with natural selection, random variation is subjected to a deterministic selection process. I can definitely picture a sort of evolution of ideas taking place in my brain where fitness is determined by own preferences.
Much like evolution depends on random variation for it’s creative driving force, but the selection process is still deterministic.
For will to be completely free it seems it would have to be unconstrained.
This is actually quite interesting because many artists believe exactly that. They describe the experience as being possessed and driven to write or sculpt or paint. Stories of muses and such appear throughout history.
I don’t maintain that the final decision will always be the same. I am arguing that to the same extent which the decision making process can be called a choice it must necessarily be deterministic to that same extent. Some aspects of the decision making process might be random, but we cannot call those aspects choices.
This is about the best online description for the layperson that I have been able to find. It’s not only helpful but in my view essential to understand also the basic nature of the class of problems that are in the centre sights of QC in order to understand how QC itself works (in theory) and why it’s so important. These are problems that, loosely speaking, can be solved by getting lucky; problems where repeatedly asking, “Is this the/an answer?” for different strategically selected values of “this” until you hit on one that fits. Conceptually, the brain seems to take the same approach in solving certain problems by running through, evaluating and refining a series of trial solutions.
Then I must say that you have an odd conception of “determinism” and we have no real points of substantive difference.
Thanks Mefi, that was really interesting. Can’t say I fully grasped all the maths but the plain language explanations were helpful. I particularly liked this bit at the end where he so effectively illustrates the difficulty involved in separating subject from object in an experimental observation:
You see, some quantum physicists aren't convinced that quantum measurement exists.
I’m well aware it’s one of the two or three most fundamental operations in all of quantum theory, and pretty much the basis of the Copenhagen Interpretation. But I’m not sure it exists. In fact, I’d lay better than 3-to-1 odds that it doesn’t.
It’s called “The Measurement Problem” and, to explain, I need to talk about how a measurement actually works in the lab. You see, all the measurements we actually use are really just entangling operations, just like the kind you’d use in a quantum computer to entangle two qubits.
Let’s say you want to measure the polarization of a photon, and so you buy a polarizer (just like in the polarizing sunglasses). So I start with a state like this:
|R?
and I want to measure it using the H/V axis. So I put it through a polarizer. What that polarizer actually does is couple a polarization qubit to a spatial qubit, resulting in a superposition of two possible realities:
|H?|transmitted? + |V?|reflected?
That superposition is an entangled state. Using a different polarizer, it would be straightforward to unentangle it without ever making a measurement, effectively erasing the fact that the first “measurement” ever happened at all. Instead, a photodetector is placed in the path of the transmitted half of the entangled state. If there is a photon there, it will excite an electron:
That excited electron will cause an electron avalanche, which will cause a current to surge in a wire, which will be sent to a classical computer, which will change the data in that computer’s RAM, which will then finally be viewed by you:
|H?|transmitted?|electron excited? … |you believe the photon is H? +
|V?|reflected?|electron dormant? … |you believe the photon is V?
That equation means that every part of the experiment, even the experimenter, are all part of a single quantum superposition. Naturally, you might imagine that at some point, something breaks the superposition, sending the state irreversibly down one path or the other. The problem is that every time we’ve followed the chain of larger and larger entangled states, they always appear to be in a superposition, in this psuedo-magical state where any set of axes are equally valid, and every operation is reversible.
Maybe, at some point, it all gets too big, and new physics happens. In other words, something beyond quantum mechanics stops the chain of larger and larger entangled states, and this new physics gives rise to our largely classical world. Many physicists much smarter than myself think that this happens. Many physicists much smarter than myself think it doesn’t, and instead imagine the universe as an unfathomably complex, inescapably beautiful symphony of possibility, each superposed reality endlessly pulsing in time to its own energy. To be honest, we just don’t know yet.
But as far as we’ve looked, it’s turtles all the way down.
I think you may have hit on the basis of the complexity of human behaviour here, there is certainly an element of random creativity involved. As far as choice is concerned though luck is out of our control, but how we take advantage of it may not be.
I like to think of determinism in the more optimistic sense of “things are determinable”, as opposed to the more pessimistic “things are predetermined”.
I think my reasoning on how I came to the default position I propose is clear. Considering the complexity of the decision making process employed by the brain, one should see it as tentative.
Just so I’m clear on your position, you are OK with free will being random. If I was to decide something by rolling a dice you would call that decision a choice.
Are none of my fellow skeptics also skeptical of “free will”? I thought there would be more naturalists among us.
I still find it odd that anyone would want “free will”. I get it that we all want to be free and I certainly have a will, but I never thought it needed to be free. In fact there are times where I would have liked it to be a little easier to control. Determinism is to me the most important part of choice. Without some form of determinism we wouldn’t know whether our actions would have the desired effect or not, thoughts wouldn’t follow each other in a logical sequence and rewards an punishments would be ineffective. Determine is a synonym for choose.
I don’t think that everything is predetermined, in fact I think randomness might be the ultimate basis of reality and determinism could just be some kind of emergent property, but determinism is what got those first molecules to stick together long enough to start making copies. The descendants of which eventually built brains big enough to start determining culture and politics and science and morality and everything else we value. Without determinism all we would have is chaos.
The whole idea of free will is that we do have control over our decisions, as opposed to determinism where we don’t. It does not imply something beyond your control that does as it likes.
