Free Will

Gate2501 said:
Can your brain(a physical thing), violate causality. If it cannot, then that means that given sufficient information on the variables(causes) that process in your mind to create a "choice"(effect), could be calculated beforehand, rendering free will an illusion.
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This statement sums it all up fairly well.




ETA: Now that's just spooky. Piggy and I shared brainwaves.
PIGGY! Stop precalculating my brain patterns!
 
Gate2501 said:
I consider myself quite the determinist(incompatibilist, hard determinism).

For me, it all comes down to one thing.

Can your brain(a physical thing), violate causality. If it cannot, then that means that given sufficient information on the variables(causes) that process in your mind to create a "choice"(effect), could be calculated beforehand, rendering free will an illusion.
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That would be so, if (A) your brain and the world around you was actually deterministic, and (B) if you actually had enough information to always do the best choice, instead of taking a guess between 2-3 choices that look good enough.

The reason the world is not really deterministic is: quantum mechanics and brownian motion.

E.g., you constantly get C14 from the air, and you don't really know in which mollecule in you they'll end up. Maybe it will be in a sperm cell, maybe in your brain, maybe who knows where else. You get about 2000 DNA breaks per year due to just C14 decay. Some are repaired right, some aren't.

I'll give you a dramatic example of where a random mutation arguably changed history: Queen Victoria. Nobody before her in her family had Haemophilia, but she obviously had that gene broken in one of her two chromosome sets. And gave it by royal marriage to half the royal families of Europe.

Arguably: the Russian heir's bad case of haemophilia (made worse by idiot doctors treating it with aspirin, ffs) caused the resulting influence Rasputin gain of power and influence at the court. (Rasputin's prayers only "helped" in as much as he chased the doctors away when he was on the case, so no more aspirin for the prince, so the horrible suffering ended. But it sure looked like Rasputin could work miracles as a result.) And both combined arguably filled the glass and caused the communist revolution.

One gene randomly broken in a sperm cell => half of Europe plunged in totalitarianism, and tens to hundreds of thousands killed by Stalin. That's the kind of thing that minor things cause.

It's things that you just can't predict. Not in the sense that "you don't know enough", but as in, "nuclear decay is truly and fundamentaly random and non-deterministic."

Even in a guy's brain, take things like alcoholism. Some synapses get hyper-sensitive enough to fire randomly and cause seeing pink flying elephants, others not so much. Again it's things you can't really predict because they rely on one mollecule being here instead of there.

Etc.

So basically even if you could actually know _everything_ at a given moment, down to the state of every single atom and electron, the world is fundamentally unpredictable from there. You _can't_ look at that and say what will happen in 1000 years.
 
HansMustermann said:
That would be so, if (A) your brain and the world around you was actually deterministic, and (B) if you actually had enough information to always do the best choice, instead of taking a guess between 2-3 choices that look good enough.

The reason the world is not really deterministic is: quantum mechanics and brownian motion.

E.g., you constantly get C14 from the air, and you don't really know in which mollecule in you they'll end up. Maybe it will be in a sperm cell, maybe in your brain, maybe who knows where else. You get about 2000 DNA breaks per year due to just C14 decay. Some are repaired right, some aren't.

I'll give you a dramatic example of where a random mutation arguably changed history: Queen Victoria. Nobody before her in her family had Haemophilia, but she obviously had that gene broken in one of her two chromosome sets. And gave it by royal marriage to half the royal families of Europe.

Arguably: the Russian heir's bad case of haemophilia (made worse by idiot doctors treating it with aspirin, ffs) caused the resulting influence Rasputin gain of power and influence at the court. (Rasputin's prayers only "helped" in as much as he chased the doctors away when he was on the case, so no more aspirin for the prince, so the horrible suffering ended. But it sure looked like Rasputin could work miracles as a result.) And both combined arguably filled the glass and caused the communist revolution.

One gene randomly broken in a sperm cell => half of Europe plunged in totalitarianism, and tens to hundreds of thousands killed by Stalin. That's the kind of thing that minor things cause.

It's things that you just can't predict. Not in the sense that "you don't know enough", but as in, "nuclear decay is truly and fundamentaly random and non-deterministic."

Even in a guy's brain, take things like alcoholism. Some synapses get hyper-sensitive enough to fire randomly and cause seeing pink flying elephants, others not so much. Again it's things you can't really predict because they rely on one mollecule being here instead of there.

Etc.

So basically even if you could actually know _everything_ at a given moment, down to the state of every single atom and electron, the world is fundamentally unpredictable from there. You _can't_ look at that and say what will happen in 1000 years.
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I do not buy the idea, that quantum uncertainty can "bubble up" onto a macro scale. Even if it could, it would not magically create free will, it would just make everything psuedo-random, and based on probabilistic algorithms, instead of strictly deterministic ones(and I wouldn't doubt that some of it is on some small level).

Unless your brain, can violate causality, there is only one outcome to a choice, and that outcome is the result of all processed variables involved(and the processing itself), some of which being your own memories, creating a strong illusion of free will.

Its srs bsns.
 
HansMustermann said:
So basically even if you could actually know _everything_ at a given moment, down to the state of every single atom and electron, the world is fundamentally unpredictable from there. You _can't_ look at that and say what will happen in 1000 years.
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True, but given that information, QM says we can, in principle, calculate the probablilities (although obviously that wouldn't be practical!).
 
1. I don't mean "pseudo-random", I mean that the real world is random at a fundamental level.

And... "Bubble up"? We're not talking about what happens to two tons of one substance in a vat. We're talking about a single atom of C14 breaking up in the sperm cell of a king, that can end up moving history down the other trouser leg.

Or it just takes just one DNA break that isn't repaired right for someone's mom or child to get cancer, and turn their view of the world upside down. One single UV photon in the wrong place and at the wrong time can give you skin cancer.

2. As I was saying, you almost never have enough information for any choice to be a clear case of "case A is 100% the right choice, case B is 100% the wrong choice." There are plenty of cases where you have to choose between two wrongs. E.g., "do I go to war and maybe get shot, or run away and go to prison?" There is no good choice there.

3. I think you have too much faith in the rationality of the human brain.

Both the final judgment and the acquiring the data for it in the first place, can and _will_ be filtered and influenced by your interests, beliefs, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. There's plenty of room for your personality to shape both your use of that data, and the data being acquired in the first place.

Some stuff doesn't even make it to the brain at all. Stuff is filtered out of the input stream mercilessly, apparently to save on the very limited bandwidth, based on what you focus on. E.g., if you're focusing on the breasts of the girl at the wheel, you won't even notice the license plate... or the pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background. It's stuff that doesn't even end in memory at all. (Though someone could create a false memory of it later.)

Even the way you formulate the question/problem, or how someone else formulate it to you, that can create vastly different results. E.g., after some people viewed a short movie of a car driving down a street _without_ a stop sign, they got asked something like, "how fast was the car going when it went past the stop sign?" Suddenly a lot of those people were distinctly remembering a stop sign.

So at the very least I'd say, "it's not so simple." I wouldn't rush to proclaim it that deterministic yet.
 
dlorde said:
True, but given that information, QM says we can, in principle, calculate the probablilities (although obviously that wouldn't be practical!).
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Yes, but that's only practical when you have a large enough population that such probabilities even up.

In the Queen Victoria example, there was a population of exactly one: the sperm cell that created her. Either the DNA break that made her a carrier of Haemophilia happens or it doesn't.

Even such a thing as a break happening later (e.g., because of the inherent randomness of nuclear decay), can make all the difference in the world. If that break had happened a year later, there'd be just one broken cell in her entire body. By happening in the sperm, it made sure she has that broken gene copied everywhere in her body, ovaries included, and could give it to her kids.

Statistics can still be done, don't get me wrong, but they don't average up like would happen in a smoke detector.
 
HansMustermann said:
1. I don't mean "pseudo-random", I mean that the real world is random at a fundamental level.

And... "Bubble up"? We're not talking about what happens to two tons of one substance in a vat. We're talking about a single atom of C14 breaking up in the sperm cell of a king, that can end up moving history down the other trouser leg.

Or it just takes just one DNA break that isn't repaired right for someone's mom or child to get cancer, and turn their view of the world upside down. One single UV photon in the wrong place and at the wrong time can give you skin cancer.

2. As I was saying, you almost never have enough information for any choice to be a clear case of "case A is 100% the right choice, case B is 100% the wrong choice." There are plenty of cases where you have to choose between two wrongs. E.g., "do I go to war and maybe get shot, or run away and go to prison?" There is no good choice there.

3. I think you have too much faith in the rationality of the human brain.

Both the final judgment and the acquiring the data for it in the first place, can and _will_ be filtered and influenced by your interests, beliefs, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. There's plenty of room for your personality to shape both your use of that data, and the data being acquired in the first place.

Some stuff doesn't even make it to the brain at all. Stuff is filtered out of the input stream mercilessly, apparently to save on the very limited bandwidth, based on what you focus on. E.g., if you're focusing on the breasts of the girl at the wheel, you won't even notice the license plate... or the pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background. It's stuff that doesn't even end in memory at all. (Though someone could create a false memory of it later.)

Even the way you formulate the question/problem, or how someone else formulate it to you, that can create vastly different results. E.g., after some people viewed a short movie of a car driving down a street _without_ a stop sign, they got asked something like, "how fast was the car going when it went past the stop sign?" Suddenly a lot of those people were distinctly remembering a stop sign.

So at the very least I'd say, "it's not so simple." I wouldn't rush to proclaim it that deterministic yet.
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I am willing to concede that the algorithm(s) my be partially probabilistic and not strictly deterministic. However, this would in no way change the fact that free will is an illusion. It would also still not create an environment in which the human brain violates causality.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional in any sort of fields of research regarding human consciousness.

I do, in fact, come up with most of this stuff on my crapper.
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, but that's only practical when you have a large enough population that such probabilities even up.

In the Queen Victoria example, there was a population of exactly one: the sperm cell that created her. Either the DNA break that made her a carrier of Haemophilia happens or it doesn't.

Even such a thing as a break happening later (e.g., because of the inherent randomness of nuclear decay), can make all the difference in the world. If that break had happened a year later, there'd be just one broken cell in her entire body. By happening in the sperm, it made sure she has that broken gene copied everywhere in her body, ovaries included, and could give it to her kids.

Statistics can still be done, don't get me wrong, but they don't average up like would happen in a smoke detector.
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This is an interesting point, and something that I will think about, but I don't see how it is relevant to free will?

Randomness != Free will.
 
I believe that free will is necessary for moral culpability. In a determined universe, my actions or the actions of another are merely cogs in a clock turning. Sure, we can ascribe relative responsibility and causation, but the deep, absolute culpability is missing, because each of us would be determined in acting the way we do before the "choice" even came up.

I think I have more to say, but I might be going off topic. But I think the above is why many people like free will.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
I believe that free will is necessary for moral culpability. In a determined universe, my actions or the actions of another are merely cogs in a clock turning. Sure, we can ascribe relative responsibility and causation, but the deep, absolute culpability is missing, because each of us would be determined in acting the way we do before the "choice" even came up.

I think I have more to say, but I might be going off topic. But I think the above is why many people like free will.
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I totally agree that it is a massive ethical dilemma!

I just don't think that has any bearing on the reality of the situation :(
 
Gate2501 said:
Unless your brain, can violate causality, there is only one outcome to a choice, and that outcome is the result of all processed variables involved(and the processing itself), some of which being your own memories, creating a strong illusion of free will.
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Yes, that's how it seems to me - however complex the feedback involved, and however sensitive it is to initial conditions (chaotic), causality allows you to trace the history. With hindsight, life looks deterministic. But is there more - if free will is an illusion, does that suggest that consciousness itself is in some sense an illusion - an illusion aware of itself? Or does free will and the awareness of free will exist in some meta-context, riding on complexity and feedback - emergent properties?
 
dlorde said:
Yes, that's how it seems to me - however complex the feedback involved, and however sensitive it is to initial conditions (chaotic), causality allows you to trace the history. With hindsight, life looks deterministic. But is there more - if free will is an illusion, does that suggest that consciousness itself is in some sense an illusion - an illusion aware of itself? Or does free will and the awareness of free will exist in some meta-context, riding on complexity and feedback - emergent properties?
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I am of the mind, that consciousness as a continuous entity is an illusion, I do think that the present moment of processing is very real however.

I only recently came to this conclusion over in the transporter thread though, so I haven't thought it out as well as I have the free will bit.
 
Gate2501 said:
Randomness != Free will.
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There are those who say that the world is either deterministic or not, and if it is not deterministic, there must be an element of randomness (probablility = biased randomness). But if deterministic, wherefore free will?
 
Gate2501 said:
I totally agree that it is a massive ethical dilemma!

I just don't think that has any bearing on the reality of the situation :(
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It's a terrible dilemma - how to assess responsibility and culpability? If we know a certain genotype or upbringing predisposes to antisocial behaviour, are these mitigating circumstances? What are the lines (how should we draw them?) between abnormal behaviour, criminal behaviour, and mental illness?
 
dlorde said:
There are those who say that the world is either deterministic or not, and if it is not deterministic, there must be an element of randomness (probablility = biased randomness). But if deterministic, wherefore free will?
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Well, even if the base "randomness" of quantum mechanics somehow does affect our minds, I don't see how that would translate into free will. The mind would still not be violating causation, it would just make some of the variables(causes) in the thought process "random". Those causes would still lead to a calculable effect(if we had the processing power and full knowledge of entry variables in a "choice").

Randomness wouldn't cause free will to emerge, it would just add another level of wackiness to the whole process. Even if it could somehow add possible outcomes to a choice, it wouldn't put "you" in control of the selection thereof.

I say either deterministic or random, you still don't end up with free will(unless you want to add an immaterial aspect to the mind).
 
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