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Science and free will

UndercoverElephant said:
The word "soul" is loaded with various meanings I don't want to imply. For example, I'm not implying that each of us has one of these things and that it goes to heaven when we die. All I am saying is that if libertarian free will exists then there must be something more than just brain activity - some additional component of the explanation.
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Why?
 
paximperium said:
Why?
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Because brain activity, considered on its own, is like the computer program. There's nowhere for the acausal or different-sort-of-causal stuff to occur. You already know my answer to this: I think it is something to do with quantum mechanics. The only way I can see for free will to get its foot in the door is if the percieved randomness of QM isn't actually true randomness but is being determined or influenced by factors which are hidden from us under normal circumstances. This is all highly speculative of course. I'm just considering the possibilities.
 
I understand. But what justifies Libertarian FW claim that "the same input could give a different output."?
 
The only way I can see for free will to get its foot in the door is if the percieved randomness of QM isn't actually true randomness but is being determined or influenced by factors which are hidden from us under normal circumstances.
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That doesn't really change this:

Give it the same inputs and you'll always get the same outputs. LFW implies that the same input could give a different output.
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LFW is attempting to provide an alternative to this:

If it's not a deterministic mechanism then it has to be non-deterministic.

Saying "it's got something to do with QM," and "QM might not really be totally random," doesn't address the fact that the LFW is attempting to break this dichotomy and that this doesn't.
 
paximperium said:
I understand. But what justifies Libertarian FW claim that "the same input could give a different output."?
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Nothing. I can only offer a justification for why I think it is possible. There is no scientific or philosophical reason for actually believing it is true (although Kant claimed that we have to believe it in order to be moral beings...) It's a kind of religious belief.
 
cyborg said:
That doesn't really change this:



LFW is attempting to provide an alternative to this:

If it's not a deterministic mechanism then it has to be non-deterministic.

Saying "it's got something to do with QM," and "QM might not really be totally random," doesn't address the fact that the LFW is attempting to break this dichotomy and that this doesn't.
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I think that depends on your ontological/metaphysical position. If, like Schopenhauer, you believe that Will is the root or foundation of reality then the dichotomy is broken.
 
Matt the Poet said:
Fair enough then, I mean some self-consistent set of rules of the sort that at least appears to completely determine the behaviour of all objects above a certain scale in the physical world.
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That's not quite what I was asking, but okay.

The point(s) being that a) however you arrange it, any given heap of stuff appears to have exactly the same relationship to the stochastic processes of quantum physics which supply the only physically plausible source of ‘free will’ as any other and b) there is (as yet) no mechanism by which anything, including my brain can influence those processes.
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I'll ask you the question I asked Westprog in another thread - though with rather more hope of an answer, I think: If you take a couple of million transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors and a few miles of wire and dump them all on the floor, do you get a working computer?

I can’t change the half-life of the Carbon-14 in my body, so what makes you think I can decide what to have for lunch?
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Well, there's the fact that you do decide what to have for lunch.

Seems fairly convincing to me. Doesn't appear to contravene any physical laws either.
 
UndercoverElephant said:
Because brain activity, considered on its own, is like the computer program. There's nowhere for the acausal or different-sort-of-causal stuff to occur. You already know my answer to this: I think it is something to do with quantum mechanics. The only way I can see for free will to get its foot in the door is if the percieved randomness of QM isn't actually true randomness but is being determined or influenced by factors which are hidden from us under normal circumstances. This is all highly speculative of course. I'm just considering the possibilities.
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Actually, I think it is a bit if a stretch to say that the brain activity is like a computer program.

The only computers we know (apart from various experimental devices) are binary von Neumann devices. Such a device is highly deterministic, because it is carefully constructed to be so. The brain is an analog computer with an enormous amountof inputs, and both due to QM, but also countless other noise sources, it is far from deterministic.

The dichotomy, IMHO is really between determinism and non-determinism: Either we are acting in a deterministic way, in which anything we do, say, and construct follows causally from some initial state of things, or there is some level of will involved.

Hans
 
UndercoverElephant said:
I think that depends on your ontological/metaphysical position. If, like Schopenhauer, you believe that Will is the root or foundation of reality then the dichotomy is broken.
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I don't really see how that is achieved by what I have read in the last 30 seconds from the wiki article on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Philosophy_of_the_.22will.22

"The Will to Schopenhauer is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself"."

If the Will "simply is" then it is non-deterministic.
 
cyborg said:
I don't really see how that is achieved by what I have read in the last 30 seconds from the wiki article on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Philosophy_of_the_.22will.22

"The Will to Schopenhauer is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself"."

If the Will "simply is" then it is non-deterministic.
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Yes, for Schophenhauer Will is the non-deterministic root of the whole of reality.
 
cyborg said:
I don't really see how that is achieved by what I have read in the last 30 seconds from the wiki article on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Philosophy_of_the_.22will.22

"The Will to Schopenhauer is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself"."

If the Will "simply is" then it is non-deterministic.
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I just took ten swigs of Bourbon and it still doesn't make sense.
 
PixyMisa said:
That's not quite what I was asking, but okay.


I'll ask you the question I asked Westprog in another thread - though with rather more hope of an answer, I think: If you take a couple of million transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors and a few miles of wire and dump them all on the floor, do you get a working computer?
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No. But if you then assemble them into a working computer, it won’t change the physics of the underlying components. You could assemble them into, I don’t know, one big, weird massively redundant AND gate, or something. When current is passed through either structure, every single component will do exactly what it was going to do.

PixyMisa said:
Well, there's the fact that you do decide what to have for lunch.

Seems fairly convincing to me. Doesn't appear to contravene any physical laws either.
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And here’s why using natural, everyday language for this sort of thing is like trying to eat soup with a hammer. Yes, I ‘decided’ in the sense that I had the internal sensation of choosing between a number of options. What this means in practice is that I did a bit of introspection and planning (How hungry am I? Am I likely to have a big dinner? Do I need to be alert this afternoon? What looks tasty?). And then I had the fish.

I have no evidence, though, that what my brain was doing could in principle have led me to have the chicken instead, or that in ‘choosing’ the fish I was doing anything more special, physically speaking, than a steel ball does when it ‘chooses’ to bounce to the right after hitting a circular wooden peg, or more pertinently what a molecule of Carbon 14 does when it ‘chooses’ to decay into Carbon 12.
 
Matt the Poet said:
No. But if you then assemble them into a working computer, it won’t change the physics of the underlying components. You could assemble them into, I don’t know, one big, weird massively redundant AND gate, or something. When current is passed through either structure, every single component will do exactly what it was going to do.
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Exactly.

What's different?

The structure.

And here’s why using natural, everyday language for this sort of thing is like trying to eat soup with a hammer. Yes, I ‘decided’ in the sense that I had the internal sensation of choosing between a number of options. What this means in practice is that I did a bit of introspection and planning (How hungry am I? Am I likely to have a big dinner? Do I need to be alert this afternoon? What looks tasty?). And then I had the fish.
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And that's what decision is. What else could it be?

I have no evidence, though, that what my brain was doing could in principle have led me to have the chicken instead, or that in ‘choosing’ the fish I was doing anything more special, physically speaking, than a steel ball does when it ‘chooses’ to bounce to the right after hitting a circular wooden peg, or more pertinently what a molecule of Carbon 14 does when it ‘chooses’ to decay into Carbon 12.
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Sure you do. Because sometimes you choose the chicken.

There's no magic; nothing contradicts the laws of physics. You just decide. You can look at it at the psychological level, or at the level of neurobiology, or electrochemistry, or quantum mechanics, but it's all the same. You process information, come to an answer, and act on it.

If you took your brain and ran it through a blender to get tasty brain puree, it could not decide to eat itself for lunch.

What's different?

The structure.
 
cyborg said:
Then the dichotomy stands does it not?
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Yes and no. It's like the natural/supernatural dichotomy. I don't have a natural/supernatural dichotomy because I think there are a whole range of different sorts of possible causality, and while it is quite easy to label some of them as being natural (e.g. plate tectonics) or supernatural (e.g. intelligent design) there are many things which fall somewhere inbetween (e.g. karma, synchronicity and the various different sorts of libertarian free will).

My own view of LFW comes somewhere in the middle. I don't believe it is entirely acausal. I think it is a combination of something acausal and something which is causal, but not in the normal sense of natural causality, because the connection between cause and effect is necessarily hidden and may also be temporally-reversed. This is also something that I still haven't come to firm conclusions about, partly because I don't have enough information and partly because I am well aware that this is just about the most complicated and hard-to-comprehend area of metaphysics. If I ever work out the answer then it'll probably be the last answer I ever work out.
 
For example:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousKant.htm

IMMANUEL KANT: FOR DETERMINISM IN A WAY AND ALSO INDETERMINISM, AND FOR FREEDOM OF ORIGINATION BEING CONSISTENT WITH THE THE DETERMINISM

-- The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website --

One summary of the great Kant's view, to the extent that it can be summed up, is that he takes determinism to be a kind of fact, and indeterminism to be another kind of fact, and our freedom to be a fact too -- but takes this situation to have nothing to do with the kind of compatibility of determinism and freedom proclaimed by such Compatibilists as Hobbes and Hume. Thus Kant does not make freedom consistent with determinism by taking up a definition of freedom as voluntariness -- at bottom, being able to do what you want. This he dismisses as a wretched subterfuge, quibbling about words. Rather, the freedom he seeks to make consistent with determinism does indeed seem to be the freedom of the Incompatibilists -- origination. Is he then an Incompatibilist? Well, against that, it can be said he does not allow the existence of origination in what can be called the world we know, as Incompatibilists certainly do.

Kant's main idea, whatever sense can finally be made of it, depends on his fundamental two-worlds doctrine. He locates determinism in the empirical world or world of appearances, and freedom in the world of things-in-themselves, the world of reason. It is important that the latter world is not in time.
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It's a bit like QM: anyone who claims they understand it, doesn't.
 
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