Free will redux: What is true free will?

[Piggy]

I get your analogy; so does he.

Well, ok. The babble at the end made it seem to me that he was portraying my analogy as gibberish.

 

[hammegk]

It was, and is. Category errors do seem to excite you.

 

[RandFan]

Well, ok. The babble at the end made it seem to me that he was portraying my analogy as gibberish.

I got your analogy also. Flight is another good one and perhaps in some ways better. Emergence, see Dennett.

 

[Mercutio]

Have it your way. Radical behaviorism explains away acts of creativity, including those
including information impossible for the individual to have previously known.

I am very sorry to say that you have dissappointed me. I had had such hopes. You listened to the entire lecture on having a poem (major points there), but your post here demonstrates that you continue to either misunderstand or misrepresent.

Shaping through successive approximation (this is elementary stuff, Pres.!) routinely results in behaviors well beyond the starting repertoire of the individual. Scientific discovery, like shaping, builds upon what has come before ("shoulders of giants", anyone?); your claim that behaviorism and acts of creativity are incompatible misrepresents either behaviorism or creativity...or both.

Could you perhaps simply be straightforward and state what it is that bothers you about [your understanding of] behaviorism? You seem to find it offensive far above and beyond your understanding of it. You seem so certain, yet make very elementary mistakes. I would honestly expect someone with your level of understanding to be more uncertain, to acknowledge a lack of complete understanding. You demonstrate a certainty out of proportion to your understanding.

Have you recently taken a class in cognitive psychology?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I don't have the patience to read my own thread. Did we figure out what libertarian free will is?

~~ Paul

 

[Piggy]

I got your analogy also. Flight is another good one and perhaps in some ways better. Emergence, see Dennett.

Hmmm... I didn't think PB was going for the emergence angle. Anyway, I'll lurk and wait for a response.

Note to hodgy: Thanks much for your post. I'd been treating the "i" as a black box, which is sloppy. Now that I try to formulate the idea more completely, the entire model may fall apart, even if strong emergence (including downward causation) were granted.

I still haven't thought it all through -- tricky stuff to get the head around. But muchas gracias for pointing me to that door.

 

[RandFan]

Hmmm... I didn't think PB was going for the emergence angle.

Hmmm.... me neither. I thought you were.

It seems to me that a cake is more than simply the sum of its parts. If we put the ingredients together, throw in some chaos (mixer) and add a bit of energy (heat), something emerges that isn't easily recognizable as its constituent parts. I apologize if I misunderstood your analogy.

 

[Piggy]

Hmmm.... me neither. I thought you were.

It seems to me that a cake is more than simply the sum of its parts. If we put the ingredients together, throw in some chaos (mixer) and add a bit of energy (heat), something emerges that isn't easily recognizable as its constituent parts. I apologize if I misunderstood your analogy.

Oh, no, I wasn't referencing emergence there. I just wanted to know where he thought the missing information was. Given his examples, I don't see anything inexplicable from a behaviorist perspective. Seemed to me like he was merely looking at the outcome, not seeing it in the inputs, and inferring some "missing information" that's not actually missing.

 

[RandFan]

Oh, no, I wasn't referencing emergence there. I just wanted to know where he thought the missing information was. Given his examples, I don't see anything inexplicable from a behaviorist perspective. Seemed to me like he was merely looking at the outcome, not seeing it in the inputs, and inferring some "missing information" that's not actually missing.

Cool, thanks. I agree with you.

 

[President Bush]

I am very sorry to say that you have dissappointed me. I had had such hopes. You listened to the entire lecture on having a poem (major points there), but your post here demonstrates that you continue to either misunderstand or misrepresent.

Shaping through successive approximation (this is elementary stuff, Pres.!) routinely results in behaviors well beyond the starting repertoire of the individual. Scientific discovery, like shaping, builds upon what has come before ("shoulders of giants", anyone?); your claim that behaviorism and acts of creativity are incompatible misrepresents either behaviorism or creativity...or both.

Assuming controversial points not agreed to by the other side is known as begging the question, Mercutio.

That you're disappointed has little to do with my understanding of Skinner's point in on having a poem. When it comes to acts of creativity of real magnitude Skinner's lecture IMO doesn't come mean a thing.

Can you explain - using the theories of Radical behaviorism - how Nikola Tesla came up with his idea of a rotating magnetic field?

 

[President Bush]

I just wanted to know where he thought the missing information was.

Prior to an act of creativity what is, subsequently, created is missing?

 

[Piggy]

Prior to an act of creativity what is, subsequently, created is missing?

Funny you should phrase that as a question b/c that's my question to you.

This is like saying that when a 6 year old assembles a square with tinker toys, this can't be explained, because there was no square earlier, just tinker toys.

I ask you again -- what information is missing?

Don't just point to the poem and say there was no poem before. That's obvious.

What information is unaccounted for in the process?

 

[Mercutio]

Assuming controversial points not agreed to by the other side is known as begging the question, Mercutio.

Controversial? We haven't reached those yet--this is the elementary stuff still.

That you're disappointed has little to do with my understanding of Skinner's point in on having a poem. When it comes to acts of creativity of real magnitude Skinner's lecture IMO doesn't come mean a thing.

Is "of real magnitude" moving the goalposts? Are creative leaps "of real magnitude" distinguishable from those that are incrementally achieved, but which you are ignorant of the incremental progress?

Can you explain - using the theories of Radical behaviorism - how Nikola Tesla came up with his idea of a rotating magnetic field?

Funny thing...I am far out of my field on this one, and thought about simply saying "I don't know enough about it". Still don't, really, but I do want to comment just a bit. First, it appears that he had been working for some time on "trying to solve the puzzle of rotating magnetic field". The work on induction had already been well established, since Faraday and before.

Perhaps one of our resident experts knows more about the particular story of this discovery, but it appears to me to be the result of lots of hard work by an intelligent person building on what had been discovered previously.

If you can get me more information about what was going on in his life and in his lab, I can try to translate it to behaviorism for you.

 

[President Bush]

Funny you should phrase that as a question b/c that's my question to you.

This is like saying that when a 6 year old assembles a square with tinker toys, this can't be explained, because there was no square earlier, just tinker toys.

I ask you again -- what information is missing?

Don't just point to the poem and say there was no poem before. That's obvious.

What information is unaccounted for in the process?

Who's going to win the NFL Denver at New England game this weekend?

 

[President Bush]

Funny thing...I am far out of my field on this one, and thought about simply saying "I don't know enough about it". Still don't, really, but I do want to comment just a bit. First, it appears that he had been working for some time on "trying to solve the puzzle of rotating magnetic field". The work on induction had already been well established, since Faraday and before.

Who holds this? The international unit of magnetic flux density is not called a Faraday, is it?

Can you explain - using the theories of Radical behaviorism - how Nikola Tesla came up with his idea of a rotating magnetic field?

Why don't you just say 'no'?

 

[Piggy]

Who's going to win the NFL Denver at New England game this weekend?

Why do you respond to my questions with babble? If you just pulled the "new information" business out of your ear, just say so, and I'll drop it.

 

[Piggy]

Why don't you just say 'no'?

Because to say "no" would give the impression that he could describe this event, but not explain it behavioristically. It would be misleading.

I'm starting to think you're just trolling now.

 

[Mercutio]

Any explanation, after the fact, would be a sort of "just-so story". This would include Tesla's own account; it is easily demonstrated that we are often unaware of influences on our behavior. In order to adequately establish causality, one would have to be able to manipulate the variables, not merely observe correlations.

So in that sense, not only can behaviorism not explain the event, but neither can any other theory. But that, while true, is trivial. We constantly try to make attributions about behavior in the absence of sufficient information. So I interpreted the question as "would it be possible to explain it, if one had access to the information?" It could, after all, be the case that someone with no training in physics, no experience with the problem, no exposure to the volumes of information available to Tesla, happened to be drinking schnapps at a local pub when it hit him: the answer to the rotating magnetic field! In this case, the more we know about the person in question, the more improbable the discovery becomes. With Tesla, though, each new bit of information shows a piece of his puzzle solved here, another there...it was still one of the greatest discoveries of all time, but the myth of it springing from his head like Athena from Zeus is just a myth.

And the benefit of this particular "just-so story" is that, unlike some of the previous explanations of human behavior (say, Freud), this one generates testable hypotheses. What is more, these testable hypotheses have yielded substantial results. When we treat human behavior scientifically (which includes the working assumption of "no free will"--after all, if gravity had free will, Newton's laws would never have been discovered), we harness the same process that made Tesla's discovery possible to the problems of human behavior. By assuming, until evidence points otherwise, that our behavior is lawfully controlled by our environment, we have made lives better.

"Free will" as an assumption might make some feel better about their special status, but it is a dead end. Clinging to it does not allow progress to be made in understanding one another. In a world where we can easily see problems brought about by our behavior, I would much rather understand its reality than take comfort in an illusion.

 

[President Bush]

If you just pulled the "new information" business out of your ear, just say so, and I'll drop it.

Take an entirely novel idea: E=MC2... was it "missing" prior to Einstein?

You seem to be saying so and it's hard to take that seriously.

 

[President Bush]

By assuming, until evidence points otherwise, that our behavior is lawfully controlled by our environment, we have made lives better.

You're refering to public schooling and autistic children, I assume. Where will uninstitutionalized adults such as you or I benefit from the theories of Radical Behaviorism in our life today?

Not referring to your job teaching Radical Behaviorism, of course.