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The unsolved problem of "free will"

cyborg said:
No. It gives an insight into the insanity lurking below the surface when your brain is disconnected from all inputs to the outside world. With nothing to mediate the thought processes they are simply left to their own devices.
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I don't think it is safe to say that the brain is ever disconnected from outside inputs. It is well known that dreams are affected by outside inputs, sound in particular. The brain is left to "interpret" the sounds that that dreamer hears. But I have direct experience that sounds when the dreamer interprets correctly, the dream takes the course given it. Once I fell asleep during a Dolphin/Bills game, and the dream was about that.
The Bills were down by so much, that someone must have said something about them not being able to come back, and the dream was about them doing just that. When I woke up, I told someone about it, then we watched as the Bills did just that. The dream experience also shows that the conscious does indeed have a short term memory-otherwise we would remember that we are dreaming.
 
Dancing David said:
No.

There are different levels of consciousness during sleep as well. Coma is a level of conscious ness. I don't see that you have demonstrated your core consciousness.
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Dreams show an "I" that is somewhat independant of the brain that makes up the overall "I". The dreamer knows that is them, makes decisions based on what they know (except-mostly-for the fact that they are dreaming) but it is all generated by their own mind-mostly.

And when you say thoughts do you mean verbal cognition?
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No. All thoughts cannot be explained verbally. That is when they enter the realm of "feelings". "I can't explain it... but..."
 
rocketdodger said:
The latest iteration of my beliefs on this issue goes something like this:

Our consciousness is completely dependent upon our past experiences (including internal ones), because these are the only things that can affect us in any way. Thus, at any given time, our response to a certain stimulus is completely determined -- by our consciousness, which is in term completely determined by our experiences.

Thus, "free" will is basically just our ability to modify our experience base (and hence our consciousness) in order to affect future decisions. Of course, the decision to do this is also determined, and so on and so forth.... But at some point this deterministic tree becomes so complex that, coupled with the myriad of possible experiences the outside world can offer us, we effectively end up with something pretty darn close to libertarian free will.
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Cool by me, but I still operate under the illusion that free will might exist.
 
lightcreatedlife@hom said:
Dreams show an "I" that is somewhat independant of the brain that makes up the overall "I". The dreamer knows that is them, makes decisions based on what they know (except-mostly-for the fact that they are dreaming) but it is all generated by their own mind-mostly.

No. All thoughts cannot be explained verbally. That is when they enter the realm of "feelings". "I can't explain it... but..."
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Dreams are a product of the brain? Mind is what and where?
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Is that different from randomly?
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Well, as I was trying to explain earlier, randomness can be perfectly consistent - even orderly. Really the problem for the libertarian free willers is that they are left trying to define behaviour as something that cannot be explained either by something random or by something non-random or some combination thereof or simply asserting that even though it can be explained that way it isn't that way which is quite problematic for any empirical exploration of it since those are the conclusions we are forced to make (And again, as I have tried to demonstrate earlier, both conclusions are possible and we generally choose one or the other based on which is the simpler summation of the process rather than on what it actually is since we can never determine what that mechanism actually is).
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
You mean libertarian free will? How does it work?

~~ Paul
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Um, sorry Paul, I can't remeber what the libertarian part means.

My reasoning has a number of ideas that support it:

In cognitive behavioral therapy people learn to modify their responses to situations. Thoughts and acts seem to influence each other.

having lived under the grip of compulsive behaviors i feel there are times I have lost the ability to make choices, under treatment i have regained that ability.

I conceded a while back (to you in fact :) ) that is could be an illusion. It is one of the things that has changed for me as a result of the JREF.
 
Dancing said:
Um, sorry Paul, I can't remeber what the libertarian part means.
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Libertarian free willies claim that they can make decisions that are not just a combination of predetermination and randomness. There is some third "mechanism" by which decisions are made, and this mechanism is "free."

In cognitive behavioral therapy people learn to modify their responses to situations. Thoughts and acts seem to influence each other.

having lived under the grip of compulsive behaviors i feel there are times I have lost the ability to make choices, under treatment i have regained that ability.

I conceded a while back (to you in fact ) that is could be an illusion. It is one of the things that has changed for me as a result of the JREF.
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I don't think that part is an illusion. Your brain generates compulsive behaviors in some circumstances and not others. Purely mechanical.

Cyborg said:
Really the problem for the libertarian free willers is that they are left trying to define behaviour as something that cannot be explained either by something random or by something non-random or some combination thereof ...
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Yes, this is the problem. I don't believe that free willies can provide a coherent description of the mechanism of free will.

~~ Paul
 
Hi Paul,

I have stated since that point some years ago that it is a personal belief and one that I certainly don't cling to. I just feel that there might be an ability to make choices in the mechanism.

So if I can't make choices how do I tell the autonomic compulsions (fortunately very rare) from everyday life? There are times where I swear my body has acted in a robotic fashion and it wasn't disassociation. (More illusion most likely).

Probably there is no asnwer.
 
David said:
So if I can't make choices how do I tell the autonomic compulsions (fortunately very rare) from everyday life? There are times where I swear my body has acted in a robotic fashion and it wasn't disassociation. (More illusion most likely).
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Some decisions are nonconscious and others are conscious. Unfortunately, just because a decision is conscious doesn't mean that it wasn't predetermined/random.

I feel that many of my decisions are free, too. I just can't figure out how they can be libertarianly free.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Libertarian free willies claim that they can make decisions that are not just a combination of predetermination and randomness. There is some third "mechanism" by which decisions are made, and this mechanism is "free."

...

Yes, this is the problem. I don't believe that free willies can provide a coherent description of the mechanism of free will.

~~ Paul
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Or a coherent description of why we should need such a mechanism to account for the normal experience of making choices.
 
Dancing David said:
Cool by me, but I still operate under the illusion that free will might exist.
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I still don't understand this. If you say that you have an illusion that free will exists then this implies that there is a meaningful concept called 'free will' that we could have, but don't.

What would it be like to make a choice that had no cause but was non-random?

If I make a choice and somebody asks "why did you choose that?" then either I can answer it and there is a conscious determinant to the choice, or I can't answer and there is a non-conscious determinant to the choice.

But if libertarian free will existed, how would I answer the question - "why did you choose that?"

I would hold that we have no illusion of free will, if we cannot describe what free will would be.

On the other hand if we just define free will as the characteristic that conscious intentions can be the proximate cause of our actions then it is not an illusion and we do have free will.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Some decisions are nonconscious and others are conscious. Unfortunately, just because a decision is conscious doesn't mean that it wasn't predetermined/random.

I feel that many of my decisions are free, too. I just can't figure out how they can be libertarianly free.

~~ Paul
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I don't know, I think it is more like the house of representatives coming to a consensus. But the illusion is still likely to be an illusion.
 
Dancing David said:
I don't know, I think it is more like the house of representatives coming to a consensus. But the illusion is still likely to be an illusion.
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But can't just about everything but said to be an illusion? Like how we see images on tv, we see a certain picture, but it is "filtered/modified/put together" by the brain. Or how sight is a combined illusion of all the things involved in putting the picture together.
I once heard it said that one of the reasons why we blink when we are startled, it to check whether or not we are dreaming.
 
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