David Dobbs mentioned the curious topic of the philosophy of the pee-pee dance, and since that’s one of my current obsessions, I had to read about it. I’m currently suffering with prostatitis, which means I’m somewhat, um, clogged. And worse, when I have to go, I have to go…so about every three hours, night and day, I’m standing in front of the porcelain receptacle of pain, weeping as I dribble what feels like gravel through my urethra. This has obviously wreaked havoc on my sleep schedule and my state of mind — and also, supposedly, my philosophical interpretations of theories of free will. I’m supposed to believe less in free will now.
…the researchers next demonstrated that even healthy subjects have less belief in free will when they’re subtly reminded of their own physical limitations. Ent & Baumeister had people respond to a battery of questions not just about free will, but also about their current corporal desires. The desires that negatively correlated most strongly to belief in freedom were: a) the desire to urinate, b) the desire to sleep, and c) the desire to have sex. You read that correctly: when people feel stymied in their desire to sleep or to procreate, among other things, it affects their opinions on one of the most hotly debated issues of all time.
Yeah, I can see their reasoning…but I already didn’t believe in free will, not because it does or doesn’t exist, but because I consider it a really stupid question. It assumes an autonomous consciousness that can make “decisions” independent of the physical being, and some people get troubled at the idea that unconscious activity instead determines what your mind will decide what to do. But I don’t. There is no conflict. All is physical; mind is the sum total of natural, physical activity; everything is input, it’s all processed or discarded or filtered at multiple levels of a complex signal transduction chain. The doer does. To expect something to be operating in a pure shining bubble of perfect thought floating somewhere above the gemisch sounds to me like a vestige of dualism. I’m sorry, poor deluded free-willers, but there ain’t nothing here but physiology all the way through, and if the possession of reliable plumbing allows you to hallucinate dreams of control in your heads, that doesn’t change reality — smoothly running physiology generates delusions just as effectively as badly misfiring physiology.
I feel that way when all of my desires are fully satisfied, so no matter when I took Ent & Baumeister questionnaire, I’d probably set the floor of their results.
No, I’m not just cranky because I need to pee.
With me its kidney stones. They will kick free will out the door faster than a hungry cat after a mouse. And when I pass one, well, I won’t get into the details, but once all of the screaming is over and I’m curled up in a ball on the floor and my wife asks me if I should go to the ER, I smile wanly and say something like, “No honey, it’s a triumph of the will. See? I’m fine now. Now please get me the oxycontin. And my weed.”
Ask your doc about pyridium. Its pretty benign and cheap though its success rate is low, you could be one of those who it works on.
I can remember when some researchers were able to prove brain activity milliseconds before a subject reported to have made a decision (they measured the difference by asking the subject to remember the time of the decision on a clock with milliseconds precision), and all newspapers were full of articles “Researchers find the brain controls your decisions!!111!”.
Was this “most hotly debated issue of all time” ever something else than dualism in disguise?
I’m disappointed to see that Yudkin’s article didn’t use the words “wee problem”. What a missed opportunity!
Well, sure, it’s not always supposed to be “disguised” as something else. Some people simply recognize that they’re dualists, and they’re not inclined to deny it or confuse themselves about it. I’m sure that’s not what you had in mind though.
I don’t really get what the disguise is anyway. It’s like Richard Nixon wearing one of those Nixon masks. What’s the point? They could’ve went with Freddy Krueger or Gandalf or a sexy air traffic controller or something like that, but no….
The “free will problem” is minuscule compared with the phiosophical complications caused by the multiverse hypothesis (also, see multiverse as solution to “Schroedinger’s cat”).
-If there are a million versions of me that have better pay, why has not one of them ever lent me a tenner? Goddamn cheapskates!
(also, see “trousers of time” in Discworld)
Maybe the THC molecules are parasites that have stolen your freedom of will?
“Study shows marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain” http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-marijuana-long-term-effects-brain.html
I can’t say if my lack of belief in free will is partly caused by my unfulfilled desires because I can’t think of a time when I didn’t want a little more sleep. Right now I’m also delaying getting up from my computer to pee, so I must be doubly opposed to free will. And what about when I have to pee, so I can’t sleep, but I’m snuggly in the blankets and don’t want to get up and walk to the bathroom to pee?
I mostly don’t believe in free will for similar reasons to PZ, implied dualism and all. I do think that we basically have to live as if we had free will, when what we really have is a construct of the brain lets us give a bit more order to our view of the world…but how do I know that my ideas on free will weren’t formed, to some extent, when I really wanted a nap? Or to get laid. Actually, given the time period when I became an atheist, if I was also forming my ideas about free will then, I was absolutely not getting either the amount of sleep or the amount of sex I desired.
I would say that maybe sleep deprivation, lack of toilet access, and lack of sex could produce atheists (free will does seem to be born out of some kind of theistic dualism), but I’m afraid we’ve got too many atheists who seem to take their lack of sex out as hatred of women, and we don’t need any more of that.
I’ve quietly updated my definition of free will to mean something like a mind having high plasticity and a larger degree of cognition to alter its own decision-making process. Or more simply, capable of learning and reasoning. That at least sounds coherent to me.
The idea of some ethereal mind capable of inherently unpredictable decisions despite prior knowledge of the subject’s body and circumstances seems either incoherent or blatantly false, implying humans make random decisions, rather than on the basis of reasoning, instinct, or knowable preferences.
Sorry about your suffering.
I think there’s an interesting question about “free will” that is obscured by the fact that it’s always been posed in dualistic terms. At the end of the day, we’re probably still asking, “Is there such a thing as me? Or am I just a machine that fools itself into thinking it’s me?” But it can be posed in non-dualistic terms.
Is our consciousness, which is a product of neurons firing in brains, completely deterministic? Is it possible in principle to get any desired output from my brain by manipulating the inputs suitably? And if not, is it because there are truly random elements to brain function? Or is it because neural nets are chaotic (in which case they would be deterministic, but still not predictable, like the weather)?
Disclaimer: whether or not you call me a dualist, I still think sentience is the damndest thing, and in a sense I can’t (and usually don’t bother to) define, I definitely think I’m more than a glorified toaster.
Can someone succinctly explain what ‘free will’ is supposed to be? Because it seems to be seldom stated in these things, and when it is, it seems it could be replaced with an NPC reaction table from a role-playing game with the same observable effect. (“Roll D100, DMs: -25 if the NPC need to pee, -10 for every hour of sleep debt, etc”.)
“Free will” is a religious concept. It “explains” why people sin even though they know that sinning is against dog’s wishes and could end up sending you to a time-out (except if you use your Get Out of Jail Free card).
The concept of having control over your life’s choices is not ‘free will’. I have and exercise options minute-by-minute, day-by-day, year-by-year, constrained by the laws of physics and my place in space-time. I can’t choose to fly off a 20-story building. I can choose to have the chicken instead of the fish if I see the waiter bring a great-smelling plate to an adjacent table, even though I entered thinking about nothing other than fish.
Thing is, philosophers have melded the two concepts together so completely that it’s impossible to disengage them from one-another. That’s their problem, not mine. And then they come up with the silly obverse of determinism…which would mean that PZ was destined at birth to be having trouble peeing right at this moment … indeed, at the moment of the Big Bang, all of the parameters were set in place for his suffering a balky prostate. It was always going to be that way. Those exact molecules were going to organize into prostate and prostate infection in that way. Nothing to be done.
Color me not convinced.
birgerjohansson
Well, say what you will about the many-worlds interpretation, but it’s at least supposed to be a direct application of our best physics, instead of a direct and explicit violation of it. Proponents at least say that it’s just quantum physics, with no extra funny business — that’s it — which is very different from “I have a soul, therefore magic happens, and that’s why I’m free.”
The reason they don’t lend anything to you is that they (in the many quantum-mechanical worlds, as well as the cosmological “multiverse”* which is not the same thing) do not interact with anything here (wherever here is). That’s of course without going into any detail about what a “version of you” supposedly is, how to count the number of them, or how to make any sense of the probabilities involved in calculating which one “you” will be next.
Anyway, if you were trying to support the idea that your vision of contra-causal free will is just as reasonable and just as compatible with physics as many-worlds, that’s simply not the case, and it doesn’t follow simply from there being “philosophical complications” or from positing that there is “unobservable stuff” or anything like that. The difference is that believing in free will really does commit you to denying physics at some point, not (as in the case of many-worlds, which for the record I don’t agree with) trying to figure out what the implications of physics are.
*Probably. People have looked for something like that in the CMB or in other sorts of evidence, but haven’t found anything. And I doubt they will. In the case of QM, I know it’s at least a standard assumption that if there are such branches of different worlds, they do not interact.
NeIC, #11:
I don’t think it’s possible to give a rigorous definition of free will. Free will is “not unfree will,” where unfree will can be rigorously defined: unfree will means that your thoughts, choices, and actions, are a deterministic product of the inputs your brain receives at the moment, and the structure of your brain at the same moment.
Free will is anything other than that–which could mean that your brain includes a random number generator, or that it’s subject to chaotic effects or race conditions, or of course that there’s a hidden input we can’t account for called a “soul.” Or a couple other interesting ideas: I read a science fiction short story whose climax was the reveal that robot brains aren’t computers at all, but transceivers. So the logical complement of “free will” includes the possibility that your brain is actually a remote control, operated by a Thetan somewhere.
Most people who talk about “free will” assume the false dichotomy that either our brains are deterministic machines, or else the soul exists. False dichotomy is obviously false.
I had long ago given up dualism, and concluded that free will is an illusion. Recently I read Who’s in Charge, by Michael Gazzaniga (a neuroscientist who specializes in split-brain research). Beyond providing further evidence that free will is an illusion, that book has led me further to take the position that it doesn’t really matter, because consciousness and our sense of self is also an illusion.
The question that interests me is that of what mental pieces and parts do you need to have free will. It seems to me that at a minimum, you would need to have a sense of self as agent and at least a rudimentary notion of cause and effect. For instance, if you don’t know that action A is inevitably followed by result B, I don’t see how you can be said to have chosen B by doing A, whether freely or at gunpoint. But my experience has been that the people who are most interested in defending the concept of free will, especially from a theological viewpoint, don’t even understand my question, and the only answer I ever get is a definition of free will that doesn’t include necessary precursors. Of course, it is likely that the problem is that I pose the question badly.
Free will has nothing to do with non-physical processes. It has to do with consciousness.
Let us consider the lack of free will. What kind of organisms lack free will? Those who are only able to respond to direct environmental stimuli, i.e. classical conditioning. The classic case is the Sphex wasp, highlighted by Douglas Hofstadter. The Sphex is a burrower, and when it is time to place egg case in its burrow, it will drag the case to the entrance of the burrow, peek inside to look for predators, then drag the egg case in.
If you move the egg case a short distance from the entrance, when the Sphex comes out it will repeat the process. It will drag the egg case to the entrance, peek in, then come out for the eggs. You can do this over and over again — the Sphex will never realize that it is in a recursive loop, and will never just drag the eggs into the burrow.
This is because the Sphex brain lacks a subroutine that can analyze its past behavior and make decisions based on that meta-analysis. Another name for the subroutine is a conscious mind. Consciousness is essentially a portion of the brain that models the activity of the entire brain and body (on an abstracted level, of course). In so doing, it is able to analyze ‘itself’ — or at least good enough for most purposes, and act accordingly. I can recognize that my love of fatty foods is unhealthy in the long term, and choose to change my behavior. That is free will. A glutton without free will would be unable under any circumstances to choose differently, constrained by his essential nature. We can change our nature, at least haltingly and partially, and so we have free will.
That we don’t meet some Platonic ideal of free will seems to me to be beside the point — our difference from the Sphex is great enough to merit a clear distinction. I am not sure what a being with PZ Meyers version of free will would be like. God perhaps? Certainly an omnipotent being. But we don’t believe in God.
It as if one were to argue that there are no people because the common definition of a person is ‘a human being with a soul’ and there are no souls, so there can’t be people. But the existence of a soul is not, in fact, essential to personhood.
theobromine, #15:
The damn amazing thing about the illusion is that it fools me. It’s not surprising that you appear conscious to me; someday robots will pass the Turing test, and they’ll appear conscious to me as well. But when I appear conscious to me, that’s pretty damned impressive. Because if I’m not really conscious, then who exactly is getting fooled by this illusion? I’m not just pulling a rabbit out of a hat; I’m also pulling an audience out of the same hat, at the same time as the rabbit.
BTW, the most convincing stab at that question that I’ve ever seen came from Dawkins. He suggested, in The Selfish Gene I think, that our brains can construct not only a model of the universe, to project what happens if we drop something heavy, but also a model of ourselves, to project our future state if we do X or Y. He suggested that once a mind can model not only the world, but itself within the world, then it becomes what we call “conscious.” It creeped me the hell out at the time, because I was still a half-deconverted fundie, and it was the first plausible explanation of consciousness I’d been hit with.
A Masked Avenger:
You don’t actually need determinism. That is one point of confusion that we don’t need to keep spreading around. Your actions (i.e., what you will to happen, thoughts or behaviors of any kind) are caused by physical interactions of particles (or strings or fields or whatever the basic stuff of nature is). Thus, to deny that means you think your will is free from causation, at least some of the time, somehow or another so long as it doesn’t include natural physical causes. That’s fairly unambiguous, as far as I can tell. Therefore, if some things are random at the level of basic fundamental physics (again, no matter what that might consist of), and some or all of your own actions are caused by those random events, you don’t have free will. You didn’t will that to happen, and for that matter, it is in fact still a straightforward causal relationship (even if it’s not “deterministic”). No need to confuse the issue with something else or make it any more complicated than that.
But as I just said, if you don’t strawman the people opposed to free will (who aren’t necessarily “determinists” in the Laplacian sense you’re using), then the false dichotomy disappears and the problems with free will remain.
Sorry, I should’ve said “all of your own actions” not “some or all.” If some violate physics, then to that extent you’d be free. I would say “free as a bird,” but much much much freer than that. After all, why bother with some measly thing like flight when your body could just plain ignore everything that happens in reality? I know we’re special and all, but damn, that’s got to be some special fucking stuff that we’re made of.
Theobromine, good! That explains why I don’t have to worry about it.
consciousness razor, #19:
I’d agree it’s reasonably unambiguous, but it’s not the only way to define “free will.” Nor is it obviously the best one. In fact your definition is in some sense “maximal,” in the same sense that mine could be considered “minimal.” For “free will” to exist by your definition, there must be a non-physical component to consciousness–in other words, something we could recognizably label a “soul.” By my definition, it suffices if the output of my brain can’t be predicted given complete information about its physical state and its inputs. That doesn’t require a non-physical component; either a chaotic system or quantum effects are enough.
Since there’s no such thing as a soul, your definition seems tailored to guarantee that “free will” cannot exist. That’s not an interesting discussion for me, though, as an atheist and a methodological individualist who still thinks that in a meaningful sense, my consciousness is more than a deterministic machine producing predictable responses to given stimuli. I.e., in the much weaker sense I defined it, I’m still rooting for “free will.”
myself, #22:
UGH. I misspelled “methodological naturalist.” Obviously need to take a break from reading libertarian shit; my typing fingers seem to be infected.
A Masked Avenger @18:
That sounds like what I remember of Julian Jaynes’ definition of consciousness*, which always appealed to me. Probably because it was the first serious attempt I was aware of to define the damned word.
*How he used the definition is a totally other matter.
consciousness razor, #19 (cont’d):
By the way, I was not “straw-manning people opposed to free will.” I was referring to the PRO free will side, who generally believe that disproving determinism is sufficient to prove the soul. It’s precisely the same false dichotomy that has them attacking evolution thinking that, if successful, they would have proven creationism.
I’d apologize for not being more clear, but your reply was kind of obnoxious, so I’m torn whether to do that or just tell you to fuck off.
I think that worrying about free will is the less productive way of looking at it anyway. The best way of looking at it is to maximize knowledge and choices. If our wills are free in any respect, they are still constrained by what we know and what our resources are.
It seems to me that when ordinary folks debate the existence of free will the argument is about whether dualism is true or not, whereas debates between philosophers concern whether or not we have something that we can call “free will” without dualism (the incoherence of dualism being generally accepted). I can’t for the life of me understand why compatibilism is worthwhile, since compatibilistic “free will” seems to me obviously different and with different implications than the dualistic/libertarian version. But a majority of philosophers seem to subscribe to some form of compatibilism, which baffles me. I wonder if I’m just not understanding their arguments or if it’s all just smoke and mirrors.
PZ, so sorry for your difficulties. When something goes wrong with basic bodily functions, it’s just the worst.
This isn’t about making up our own definitions on the spot. You want to know what contra-causal free will is, then it’s already been discussed at length in the literature (literally centuries of the stuff). You don’t get to pretend that it hasn’t happened just because that literature isn’t sitting here in this thread right in front of everybody. And it doesn’t make sense to me what your claim is supposed to be … we obey the laws of physics at every moment, yet we’re free? Or not our very identities, but just our “will” is free? Free from what? What do you think most people, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, think they’re talking about when they’re talking about their freedom? I think they’re talking about something other than predictability. Do you think they’ve ever heard of souls before? Do they have a tendency to think they’re extra-super-special beings, who’d very much like to think they don’t need to follow “the rules”?
Moreover, talk of predictability is just making an epistemic statement. We do or don’t know, thus we can or can’t predict. Aren’t you claiming that there’s something about the world (and us in particular) that’s somehow different from the “usual” physical law-like behavior that describes particles and rocks and everything except human beings? A claim to the effect that “you just don’t/can’t predict it” isn’t saying a word about what there is or what supposedly distinguishes us from a rock. Isn’t there, at bottom, some murky thing which you evidently don’t want to define with any clarity, which you think distinguishes us from them? That’s your suspicion, right, or maybe what you really want to believe is true no matter what evidence anyone might present? And isn’t the world every bit as chaotic and quantum-mechanical when it comes to rocks as it is when it comes to human beings? So why bring that up at all? What’s the deal?
@Bronze Dog 9
That’s a good addition for mine too. It fleshes out that “maximizes knowledge” part. Now I’m wondering if this can be stated in terms of creating system one responses with system two processes.
@ A Masked Avenger 10
I think that the idea of stochastic is useful here. There is a lot of randomness, but within systems that have form and function. The precision of these systems can be more tight or loose, and different or unusual connections between systems can create different or even new logic.
There are a couple of interesting things related to this that you might consider.
The relationship between creativity and chaos. Basically we have rules systems for how our responses and perception (and more) is governed, but there can be a greater or lesser tendency to break categories, try forming new ones, using the wrong rule on the wrong thing. I suspect that mad prophets, conspiracy theorists, and similar are an offshoot of this. ADHD has been associated with creativity, and there are people too obsessed with the proper order.
Another related thing is that multiple realms of experience such as physical space, social space, and conceptual space all may be run off of the same underlying hardware. This might be related to synesthesia and I can imagine that if the hardware mixes the wrong realms creativity can result. (section 4, Construction of the cognitive niche, discusses how regions of the brain handle multiple realms of cognition).
I’m biased in this view because my own brain has broken brakes in inhibitory processes and I’ll be honest, there is a reason tourette’s syndrome becomes demon possession as you go into history. My brain does really interesting things with patterns real, imagined, and less-noticed. They call it a “gating problem” but many aspects of my system basically like to release stored habits, reactions, responses, urges and more, more easily (including ones one’s ways of analyzing the world). So easily that things get released when I don’t want, and when something in perception triggers a release I get a bigger menu of choices as “closely associated responses” fire together (which can make it harder to select the right choice, not all are “valid”).
Marius #27 wrote:
I think compatibilism is simply an attempt to eliminate the dualistic libertarian- free-will straw man by being clearer and more accurate when we throw the term “free will” around. They think determinism entails humans as unfeeling robots. Therefore, either determinists are unfeeling robots or determinism is wrong. I would compare its value then to that of defining “life’s meaning” in humanist terms.
“If there is no God, then there is no meaning and purpose to life.” Well, yes … and no. “Meaning of life” is a deepity: there is a true but trivial interpretation and an extraordinary but false one. Separate the two and focus on the only way “meaning of life” makes sense to us.
I think “free will” is also a deepity. The point of compatibilism is not to “redefine” free will, but to clarify what the free will worth wanting is…. from our perspective. The true but trivial (ie natural) — not the extraordinary (supernatural) but false.
If there ain’t nothing but physiology all the way down, how do folks here reconcile reductionism with notions of social justice? If there is no free will and Dawkins is being a misogynist jerk because that’s how the wind-up toy manifested from cosmic and biologic evolution, then what are the implications for a just society? If the vibrating strings lead to subatomic particles and then atoms and molecules configured in only one specific way in this universe and thus ultimately shaped the indelible brains and minds of the Nazis then can we really say that prior injustices could have been prevented? Or is the answer that if it’s determinism that made the asshole then determinism also made the person to kick him in the ass and throw him in jail?
@ragdish
I think the problem may be that yo seem to assume that no one can change from interaction with their environment, e.g. learn. If someone is a misogynist jerk from what has happened before, then he can become a non-misogynist non-jerk with the right stimulus. People can change, that doesn’t mean that they have free will.
Well, for starters, contra-causal free will, your actions being caused by nothing at all, doesn’t have any especially helpful moral or political implications. Why do you do bad things? No reason. Why do you do good things? No reason. What can anyone do to change the way people behave? Nothing, because they do any old “free” thing that magically pops into their heads. How is that even supposed to work, just for the sake of argument? I’d rather not say. Great job, free will! You solved a whole lot!
Reductionism doesn’t have any interesting implications as far as I can tell, but it’s helpful to understand that things like pleasure, pain, harm, well-being, justice, fairness, success, etc., (i.e., any good or bad thing you care to describe that has some effect in reality) amount to descriptions of some part of the physical state of the world. They might be really “high-level,” convoluted descriptions involving specific items of interest to us, but at the end of the day, they are still just facts about what people actually experience, what actually works and what doesn’t, and so forth. They are not about some airy notion of “freedom” or some even airier notion of a soul or a god that makes arbitrary commandments. They are about and they depend upon what actually happens to real people in reality. So it’s very obviously true that cutting off my arm is bad for me (for example), because it’s equally obvious that it will cause me pain and disable me in other ways, just as it would for anyone else. If the question is “what, specifically, is good or bad?” then the implication is that we have to actually look around at the world and keep looking around, to find out what that is in all sorts of specific cases. We don’t get to decide ahead of time what’s good for someone or some group, based on nothing other than our own confusions and prejudices and ignorance.
It looks to me like that’s a fuckload less nihilistic than the alternatives, and it doesn’t require the sort of “reconciliation” that religious apologists claim it does. They are scared and say nonsensical things to resolve that fear, but they ought to reconcile themselves with reality, not create even more fictions about it to justify their original fictions. One of those is the fictional “reductionist” who can’t in principle support their claims about morality, meaningfulness, consciousness, etc.. in some fundamental way. That is false.
consciousness razor, #29:
Lots of definitions have been put forward. Mine is one of them. I did not “make up definitions on the spot.” Stop masturbating on me, fuckwad.
@ragdish: “If there ain’t nothing but physiology all the way down, how do folks here reconcile reductionism with notions of social justice?”
There is nothing to reconcile. If all our behaviours are “determined” then “Notions of Social Justice” are behaviours, as “determined” as anything else we do.
This is like a man arguing that he shouldn’t be executed for murder because he is just a helpless puppet of the deterministic universe and so shouldn’t be blamed. But if so then his executors must also be helpless puppets of the deterministic universe so why is he complaining?
@ ragdish
I’m going to reorder this a bit.
Yes they could have been prevented. We have no reason to think that if we rewound the clock to any particular point, different solutions would have manifested. This world is one possible solution set. Humanity might have just died out during the Toba eruption (if that explains the bottle-neck in our DNA. We might be creatures with different social systems. We are about as related to bonobos as we are to chimps, and differences in how they behave imply we have some flexibility in what we can be.
We are “just” matter and physiology, but all that possibility was constrained by how history played out and there are going to be observations in how our behavioral rules are governed that provide places to rationally shape our laws and customs.
We are social individuals. We have individual and social programming with variation in how it’s biased and expressed. We are a network of biological computers and we watch each other, copy each other, learn from each other, and prey off of one another and similar. We tend to think in terms of our individual experience but there are patterns in the group as well. Just because free will might be out does not mean we don’t have choice as individuals or a group. Choice constrained by experience and resources. We can set our own evolutionary destiny as a group. That choice will be made one way or another.
I think a lot of fights between libertarian types and social contract types (simplistic I know) can be related to this.
Determinism probably created the diversity that inform the choices we have based on our experience and resources. So yes.
#37 should have said “We have no reason to think that if we rewound the clock to any particular point, different solutions would not have manifested.”
I always ask for clarification: free of/from what? The initial conceptualization was will free from or independent of god(s), and since I don’t believe in any of those, I’m never certain what the qualifier is supposed to connote. I think usually we can just call it “will.”
These arguments always seem to miss the most interesting aspect of the question, to my mind… Putting aside all the questions about determinism, quantum indeterminacy*, and so on, there’s still the psychological aspect of the question: assuming that I am free to choose my actions, what are those choices based on? In a word, my “preferences”. But can I choose my preferences? If not, then in what sense are my choices free? And if so, then what do I based those choices on?
At the simplest level, when I sit down at a restaurant and look at the menu, I seem free to choose whatever option I like – but that choice is based on preferences which I don’t seem to have any choice about. That strikes me as a far more interesting conundrum than whether my choices are pre-determined by physics.
(* I think quantum indeterminacy is a red herring here. Thermal noise is orders of magnitude more significant.)
Your choices are constrained by your past experiences, some of which are your own past choices. We don’t in any sense freely construct our selves, because, to name just a single salient external imposition beyond genetics, neurology etc., our early childhoods loom large and it’s clear that caregivers’ choices are more important to personal development than the individual’s at a young age. But we do contribute to the construction of our selves; every choice implies a way not taken and represents a constraint on future choices.
Right now PZ would settle for a Free Flow Willie.
I’ve always felt “is there free will” is question similar to “what was there before the big bang”. Time originated with the big bang so there is no “before” that is meaningful in any way so the question is misleading.
Likewise the self exists at the neurological conscious level. At any materialist level lower there is no aspect of self so there is no meaning to words relating to the self, such as “freedom” or “will”. (And at the neurological conscious level, free will is obvious and trivial.)
Both questions are naive, misleading and miss their points.
However they do belie more basic questions. “what was there before the big bang” is actually trying to ask “why is there existence at all” and “is there free will” is trying to ask “what is the process of consciousness and why does it feel like a self”. These may be fun to discuss but they are not necessarily the profound philosophical questions dualists would like you to believe they are. The inadequacy of human perspective and its resulting language might lead to some head-scratching, but a materialist perspective is perfectly capable of addressing these questions.
@39
like john h I remember the first explanation of free will was in conjunction with religion was our ability to make decisions for ourselves on what we should do, without the compulsion of gods will.
Since there is no god who has ever been proved to have had any will of any kind that can effect anything at all we are then are free of it.
I have no idea what else free will could be other than that.
We do not have infinite choice at any time we are always constrained by reality and our understanding of it, which includes our personal experiences and our interpretations of them.
I am reminded of lines from a Dylan song which I have forgotten
the name of “my friends of the prison ask of me how good does it feel to be free I answer to them are the birds free of the sky way”
(probably not completely accurate sorry )
uncle frogy
woozy:
Is that so? How did you learn that? Something Stephen Hawking said thirty or forty something years ago?
If by “addressing these questions” you mean “assuming GR is right even when the equations are practically screaming at you that they aren’t valid, while actual physicists realize that’s not going to do it and talk about ‘quantum gravity’ they still haven’t discovered, inflationary processes they don’t yet have a handle on, even including inflation that goes infinitely into the past, not to mention lots of other possibilities.”
Or you could address them some other way, as a materialist. That much is true, at least: they can be addressed.
Turning back to this bit:
Maybe it’s my problem, but I have no clue what you’re talking about. Neurology is fairly interesting to me, so it seems like I would’ve noticed something obvious and trivial like that, but nothing comes to mind. Instead, I tend to hear neurologists and their ilk saying (fairly convincingly) that there is no “self” in the ordinary sense of the word, as well as saying that free will doesn’t exist (again, in the ordinary contra-causal sense which has caused all of this ruckus for so many years).
You whiney professor. There’s nothing wrong with you a good dose of heroin couldn’t fix.
Go get some and get back to work.
Your friend, JaniceInToronto
This was not phrased as neutrally as I meant.
What I was trying to emphasize was the idea of social memory aspects and individual memory aspects as a division and gave those as examples. I don’t think that what is in libertarian thought is all bad, just not suited to what we are dealing with as an entire set. For example I would agree that competition is a selection process that can inspire creativity and diversity that enriches the system. But if that competition leads to suffering as a result of other human psychological flaws then I don’t want a totally free market. Fuck externalities. Similarly the distrust of government is an expression of distrust of authority which is a fine instinct in a neutral sense. But the authorities that would replace government are just as bad in their own ways and I think the selectivity is purely born out of self interest.
The way that the emphasis of the individual and the social breaks down in our societies is interesting.
@ Dunc
The short answer is inheritance plus experience, and if you are determined enough you can develop new preferences. If you want ultimate origins the preferences would be based on systems that were selected for.
In longer form inheritance breaks down into genes, and gene expression presets that act intergenerationally (epigenetics).
Different gene forms might sway someone preferences and these can be thought of as the more “hardwired part” since a protein is a discrete structure. For example a different copy of CD36 is associated with finding certain fats more delicious. But this is still just contributes to probability because of the rest of the picture.
Intergenerational effects can do things like make your emotional systems sensitive to anxiety if you had an ancestor with PTSD, so you might prefer to be a more private person because your HPA-axis has been primed to react differently. However many of these systems can be overwritten through experience so with early interventions among children many things that can contribute to mental problems later can be reduced or even reversed.
In longer form your experience determines your preferences (probabilistically modified by the preceding), modified by the environment. Society is part of the environment and we are imprinted by messages and role-modeling (consciously and unconsciously). So you can develop a love of bacon, or not if something happened to associate bacon with bad things (or some predisposition made you less likely to like bacon). Or if you came from a bacon hating culture you might not be able to like bacon without some effort. There are “acquired tastes”.
I would say that you have choice, but a lot of what biases your choices (bias is a neutral, there are appropriate and inappropriate biases) is unconscious. The more you know about your own biases and motivations, the more choice you have as you become aware of these unconscious things (see cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation). You become more complex with respect to your available options. Total freedom is more of an abstract. I’m not going to be jumping off of any cliffs because I can.
@43 – I tend to agree with you. Not that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing existed before the big bang – just that asking questions that require the framework of a universe in which to answer them of a time/place that predates said universe becomes a nonsensical question in many respects. “When” doesn’t exist prior to the big bang, as far as the current understanding of big-bang goes. (with a different understanding, the question may become sensical again, however).
And consciousness is an emergent property of lower level simpler biological / chemical / physical systems. To ask questions that only have sense at the level of consciousness of contexts where there isn’t consciousness is making the same sort of categorical or level mistake.
At the level of atoms, there is no consciousness. Yet atoms are a fundamental requirement for consciousness. This is a wonderful thing to be aware of, IMO.
The problem is equivocation between the really-real-world sense of “free will” meaning “the ability to meaningfully make choices and be held responsible for them,” and the undefinably rarified philosophical sense of “Free Will” which….doesn’t actually seem to mean anything.
Prostatitis, eh?
Sounds like a chink in your armour of male privilege.
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) @ 49
This is the main reason that, for quite a while, I assumed all discussion of free will was intellectual masturbation.
#50, Voyager
On the whole, its a small price to pay. The number of ways in which the alternative plumbing can go wrong is quite astonishing. Discovery of the week: vulvodynia. Fun times, to be sure.
consciousness razor
-Thanks for sorting things out.
— — —
More about prostates: “Molecular breakthrough could halt the spread of prostate cancer” http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-molecular-breakthrough-halt-prostate-cancer.html
The notion of a total lack of free will is a dangerous concept. I’ll set aside the question of its reality.
If a criminal has no free will, why do we lock them up as punishment? If a child has no free will, why do we discipline them? If a burglar has no more free will than a fully insane schizophrenic, do we not commit an injustice by locking him up?
In a society committed to social justice, as the USAnian society claims to be, how can we possibly justify punishing anyone for anything they do, if they have no free will over whether or not they do it?
If we are going to set aside the concept of free will, it seems to me that intellectual honest and moral justice demand that we are going to have to push over the cliff two thousand years of moral philosophy and begin again from scratch, building anew. This time, building a system of morality and social justice based on what we presume to know to be true about the presumed compulsory nature of all human behavior.
Are we really willing to do that?
Okay, I’ll try to prepare myself for a bunch of Noble Lies. I’m sure they’re very, very noble.
What the fuck does that mean?
For instance, what about locking them up as something other than punishment? Why do we do that, or in many cases why don’t we do that when we should be doing it?
But generally, please pick one definite question that your sentence is supposed to ask, each of which has some kind of an answer. Because it’s confusing so many different things all at once, you have lots of options. Consider it a favor that I’ll pose a few slightly better questions for you:
(1) Assuming that people in our legal systems believe there’s no contra-causal free will (which isn’t the case for all of them), how do we explain the fact that those people punish others despite what their beliefs are?
(2) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is it the case that we do in fact punish people and how can that sociological fact be explained?
(3) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), should we be punishing anyone?
(4) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is it the case that punishment is the only thing we can do (as opposed to rehabilitation, deterrence, making society safe and stable, etc.), and the only justification for the kinds of things we do, and why is that the case?
(5) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is that the same thing as saying that people are not responsible for what they do?
Maybe asking those questions will help you see where the problems actually are, which are mostly in your assumptions and with the concepts of contra-causal free will, retributive punishment, and so on. They are not on the side which says essentially that magic powers do not exist.
Overstating the point here, in several ways. To start with, our thousands of years of moral philosophy, if you ever bothered to read a word of it, doesn’t all consist of “punish people for doing bad stuff” — not any the stuff that’s worth reading, at any rate.
Secondly, there are important distinctions to make between one kind of “compulsory” behavior and another. The fact that I can’t do ever anything which violates physics is very different from the fact that (sometimes, when things are going well for me) I’m not being manipulated or coerced or forced at gunpoint by some other agent, to make choices I’m not aware of, that I’m not able to reason about, that I’m not able to be in different situations such that I have other available choices, etc. These are distinctions that still matter when we have the “total lack of free will” in the traditional, supernatural, contra-causal sense of the word. You’re still responsible for what you do. You’re still able to decide what to do and why you do it, and you still care that other people aren’t forcing or manipulating your behavior in ways that violate your rights and your autonomy. None of that is being denied when you deny contra-causal free will. And you say nothing interesting when you conflate it all as being the same issue.
If I cannot will myself to want something other than what I want, how can I call my will free? And if I can, how can I claim to have really wanted the first thing in the first place? (No True Freewillman? Solipsism? Were you there?)
To me, Scott Bidstrup is asking, “but if we stop believing in Santa, won’t we have to give up all Christmas celebrations?” No, but we can take a better look at our actions and see which ones we want to keep. We can still get together with family and friends because there are good reasons apart from the myths. There are reasons to put people in prison apart from thinking their free will choices mean they deserve retribution. (He should have at least googled “free will prison reform” before making claims)
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2013/03/13/crime-and-punishment-from-the-neuroscience-of-freewill-to-legal-reform
And reformed criminal systems that focus on outcomes over punishments of a supposedly free will have been doing swimmingly in Scandinavia, for example.
Consciousness Razor writes:
(1) Assuming that people in our legal systems believe there’s no contra-causal free will (which isn’t the case for all of them), how do we explain the fact that those people punish others despite what their beliefs are?
They don’t assume that. They assume there IS free will. That’s why they engage in punishment for decisions presumed to have been freely taken.
(2) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is it the case that we do in fact punish people and how can that sociological fact be explained?
We punish people on the assumption that they are guilty of having made a malicious decision taken through free will, which apparently doesn’t exist, and therefore they are not responsible.
(3) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), should we be punishing anyone?
That is precisely the question I was attempting to raise in my post. Sorry that it was misunderstood.
(4) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is it the case that punishment is the only thing we can do (as opposed to rehabilitation, deterrence, making society safe and stable, etc.), and the only justification for the kinds of things we do, and why is that the case?
Punishment becomes socially unjust, because you’re punishing someone for something they couldn’t help but do. No more fair than punishing someone who is criminally insane. Rehabilitation becomes futile, because you’re trying to reform someone who did something outside his control. So if there is no causal free will, we can all just give up and go home, because we can’t influence outcomes based on punishment or rehabilitation.
(5) If there’s no contra-causal free will (there isn’t), is that the same thing as saying that people are not responsible for what they do?
Of course it is, and that’s the problem my post was intended to raise – notions of social responsibility that stem from moral philosophy go out the window in a cloud of universal, irreversible irresponsibility.
The fact that I can’t do ever anything which violates physics is very different from the fact that (sometimes, when things are going well for me) I’m not being manipulated or coerced or forced at gunpoint by some other agent, to make choices I’m not aware of, that I’m not able to reason about, that I’m not able to be in different situations such that I have other available choices, etc.
The distinctions being made here between violating the laws of physics, and violating moral standards in the community is a valid one as we experience the world, but begs the question of whether or not human behavior is reducible to a reductionist description of the sum of chemical reactions and electrical activity taking place inside the wet computer called a “brain” and acted upon by the body. The distinction you are drawing presupposes that the consciousness making an odious moral decision that is not so reducible.
If one accepts the reductionist view that all behavior is ultimately reducible to a description (however complex) of the consequences of electrical and chemical activity conforming to the laws of physics and never varying from those laws, it is hard for me to see how a distinction between forms of free will can exist IF behavior is so reducible. If it is not, then it seems to me that we’ve got to make way for magic, which I am reluctant to do. Perhaps we need to make those distinctions and elucidate the sources from which those distinctions arise.
So, you’re ignorant, and you’re arguing from that ignorance. Noted.
It’s not clear what you’re even saying now. But I don’t think you understand how this conversation goes. Let’s start somewhere closer to the beginning….
A: Burn the witch!
B: Uh, no, that’s some sadistic fucking shit. We shouldn’t do that.
A: Punishment! Torture her! Tear out her fucking eyeballs!
B: No.
A: But she did something wrong!
B: So the fuck what, if she even did in fact do something wrong? It doesn’t follow, and even if it’s not supposed to follow from anything else, it also doesn’t solve a fucking thing.
C: Hey, everybody, what’s up? Just dropping by to say we don’t have magic powers. Make sense? Okay. Later.
A: Bwuh? How can that possibly be right? We should burn the witch, but if we don’t magic powers, we shouldn’t do that. But we should, therefore, magic powers exist. QED.
B: Look, like I’ve been saying this entire time, that shit still doesn’t make any sense, whether or not there are magic powers. It doesn’t follow from anything. Stop being such a fucking idiot.
Rather than engaging in ad hominems and inappropriate analogies, using unsavory language, perhaps you could explain to me in precise terms why I am wrong, and of what specifics you consider me to be ignorant.
I don’t give a fuck about tone or how fucking savory you find my language to be. Since you haven’t explained what’s supposedly inappropriate about recognizing your punishment-oriented view of morality for the horrific bullshit that it is, I’m going to assume that, as it is in the case of every other person who pushes this nonsense, there is no reason.
Huh? I already pointed out that they’re different fucking things, in so many fucking ways. It is not hard to see.
On the one hand, to put it as simply as I can, my actions are caused, meaning I don’t ever violate physics by acting contra-causally. I am responsible, but I’m not solely responsible or ultimately responsible, as if my choices come out of fucking nowhere to have whatever effects they have. In other words, there are multiple causes which we can identify (depending on what questions we’re interested in asking), and I am one of them, meaning I am responsible for my part (not literally the whole fucking thing from beginning to end) in actually doing whatever the thing in question is. If you don’t like it, too bad, because that’s how it is.
On the other hand, you’re evidently worried about what I’d call political freedom, or a specific legal concept of “freedom,” in the sense that I can sign a valid contract “of my own free will,” because I’m an adult of sound mind and body, and so forth. That’s a sense in which I’m acting freely to do something I wanted to do, without other people manipulating/forcing me and without some relevant impairment of my decision-making processes. I can reason about things, remember past experiences, etc., and come to a decision based on that on stuff. That’s not under dispute here, because it’s a real thing that happens, so it should not be confused with blatantly violating causality. There is no good reason to confuse those, at a superficial level or even at an extremely precise level that you seem to be asking for. Anyway, any such decision-making process involves exactly the causes you think don’t exist if you believe in contra-causal free will. I’m not so impaired (or manipulated, etc.) by physics itself (whatever the fuck that would even mean) because those causes do exist — they’re not absent or distorted or whatever the fuck you were worried about! — whenever I make a decision. But one thing we can’t do, if you’re going to make an issue of it, is just let decision-making be some black box that goes entirely unexamined. So the question for you is just this: how the fuck do you think it would work, if your choices aren’t caused by the physical world? If it makes any kind of sense at all, it should be just as easy for you to explain in some kind of broad strokes, as I just did here. I don’t think you will do that.
The point is that the problem is only with this stupid assumption that you need souls to do such things, or that you need to completely and totally originate your actions, as if every moment you start fresh when a new thought comes out of the fucking void (or was “transmitted” from some “elsewhere” in which the soul lives), or else you’re not really “responsible” for it. That’s a load of bullshit. And I don’t know what else I’d need to explain here, if that’s not obvious to you yet.
Same for the idea that we need punishment, with or without “free will.” As I said before, there are already plenty of better alternatives, which are more moral. If you were genuinely ignorant about them before, you aren’t now. You can willfully ignore them, but you don’t have the same excuse now. You’ll at least have a harder time pretending as if there are no such things as alternatives. That’s (hopefully) me causing a change in your mind, to give a concrete example. But if you learn something from that (or if you refuse), you’re certainly responsible.