Is free will a paranormal concept?

Do y'all believe in free will? If so, do you think it's paranormal by definition?
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Well, in the context of human sentience, intelligence and control over base impulses define that. However, someone with free will, technically, would be completely at rest.
 
Thinktoomuch said:
1) nobody knows enough about brain function yet to say with reasonable certainty how thought is produced
2) free will implies that thought is not produced by the physical brain
3) therefore we can not yet say whether free will is real and produced by a hypothetical "mind" or a fiction produced by our brain.
(oops - that looks dangerously similar to a sillogism - maybe I have stepped out of line!)
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I believe that "free will" is simply a human way of abstracting all the probably deterministic factors that make up our behaviour. We will never know down to the last quantum particle what makes us decide to do one or the other thing, and that is why the decision feels "free".

I do not believe it is necessary to discout the experience of having a free will, just because we also believe that the world is deterministic, because the world is at the same time impossibly complex.
 
IllegalArgument said:
Here's she states that she is not a Zen Buddhist. I would agree she is using Buddhist ideas in her current work.
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Zen/intro.htm
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Thanks for the link; it's nice for someone to do the 'spadework' for me when I'm in the middle of all this revision. Saves my contibution to the debate fizzling out!

I have always been fond of her, she's quite a character in person.
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At this stage, I haven't read her first hand so I can't comment

Just curious why do you have a concern about her Buddhist leanings? I'm always interested in criticism of Buddhism.
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Ok, we could end up hijacking the thread on this one if we're not careful, so I'll try to stay relevant to the topic. A basic premise of Buddhism is the influence of karma inherited from previous lives. This has implications for free will, because it could be argued (as Blackmore does, I think) that free will is illusory because of karmic imprints from previous incarnations. In other words, metaphysical and spiritual issues are being given a validity claim.
 
Mercutio said:
If this is considered evidence of Freud predicting, I suggest that we have two different usages of the term.
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I was thinking along the same lines. Symbolic epistemology does not lend itself to the formulation of experimental hypotheses. I don't want to get into a drawn-out debate on Freud, so I think I can finish by saying that Freud was trying to have a foot in both the objective and subjective camps.
 
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jskowron said:
Free will and determinism were common topics of the behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner. In his biography of Skinner, Daniel Bjork writes

"He (Skinner), like most Americans for much of our history, preferred to
emphasize the ability of people to shape their environments- except
that he reversed the relationship: Environment determined how people
acted, rather than people freely creating their environments." (p231)

This seems contradictory to me- Our behavior is determined by the environments that we shape.
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I'm typing this reply to you using a PC composed of hundreds of parts. From start to finish, there have been hundreds of people involved in the manufacture, delivery and usage of this PC. Behind me are 3 bookcases, upon which are hundreds of books, from which I've inherited a considerable amount of knowledge. I'm looking out of the window and seeing houses as far as the eye can see. I am saturated every day with advertisements using powerful imagery and emotional appeal that someone created with the intention of influencing my buying decisions. I also see people driving around in their vehicles polluting the environment.

I hope you meant that we shape our environment as well as it shaping us, thus referring to a reciprocal relationship.
 
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Thinktoomuch said:
Does the statement
"Free will" suggests that we can never understand human behavior scientifically"
imply that statistical analysis of collective human behaviour has no heuristic value?
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I would say that if you were referring to measurement, reliability and objectivity, then we have to hold our hands up and admit we do not yet have the understanding we seek (and if we include non-scientific inquiry, the search has taken thousands of years so far).

To answer your question directly, do we need to separate consciousness from behaviour in order to get a grasp of its possible purpose? If so, we would need to separate out biological perspectives from experimental. In biology, there is no dispute about adopting the methods of the natural sciences, it is an inherent part of the subject matter. We can observe activity in certain brain regions to make (relatively crude) inferences about the brain regions responsible for different functions (although we have to be very careful not to extrapolate causal factors from correlations). Consequently, the field of cognitive neuropsychology is making some tremendous progress towards improving the human condition following brain damage (e.g. Wilson's neuropager being an aid to memory loss). CNP gives us a living, breathing snapshot of brain structure and function at the same time as a certain thought or behaviour is occurring (instead of relying upon post-hoc data following brain trauma). The only problem with this level of analysis is that it takes place at an almost exclusively intra-personal level.

In contrast, psychology has a veritable gamut of perspectives to draw upon; a number of methodological approaches is available. Experimental psychology can go beyond the intra-personal and analyse at an inter-personal, group and societal level. But then comes in the question: what should psychology be trying to do? Are we content with looking for general laws of cause and effect, or do we need to gather a more diverse range of data? For example, experiential and humanistic approaches can examine the qualia of human existence. We can merge these different kinds of data with the material data uncovered by the kinds of studies I mentioned in the previous paragraph. To date, Baars' global workspace theory provides, to me, one of the most coherent accounts based on this kind of approach.

But our understanding of consciousness and free will is still very rudimentary. Simply stating that there is no free will or there is definitely free will at this stage is an extremely premature conclusion to propose.
 
EGarrett said:
Actually, if you go from what I said, determinism requires an equal amount of woo. Simply because of the chaos in the universe.
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Deterministic (-ness) and predictability are very different things. It is very easy to inductively create deterministic chaotic functions in which their next step forward is based on their current state. It's just very hard to predict where they will be in k steps time.
 
Thinktoomuch said:
1) nobody knows enough about brain function yet to say with reasonable certainty how thought is produced
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Probably true, depending on what you mean.

2) free will implies that thought is not produced by the physical brain
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No, because apparently "nobody knows enough about brain function" to say that.:)

3) therefore we can not yet say whether free will is real and produced by a hypothetical "mind" or a fiction produced by our brain.
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Or real and produced by our brain.

The unpleasant part is that, by the same logic, free will is a matter of belief, therefore by accepting its existence you have to make an exception to your skepticism... Did somebody mention something about casting first stones?
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No (again). As a skeptic, I expect science to explain the phenomenon of free will as I empirically experience it. It may well be an illusion emerging from the fantastically complex activities of our mechanistic brain. It could equally be the product of an unknown (but natural) process. It could be angels dancing on our neurons for all I care, as long as the hypothesis is properly constructed, tested and validated. How many angels can dance on the head of a dendrite anyway?

N.b. while I can find bias in my choices, particularly if summed over time. I have no evidence or experience that all of those choices are precisely constrained by external agencies. If they are, I'd like proof that they are.

The brain does not behave mechanistically unless proven otherwise. Nor does it exhibit supernatural behaviour until explained by science. The brain behaves as it does. Gather your data. Make you hypothesis. Test and confirm them. Publish.
 
Mercutio said:
"Free will" suggests that we can never understand human behavior scientifically; fortunately, if we start out with the assumption that we can, we don't have to give up before we begin. And if you take that 10 or 20 years, I think you will find that over any given 10 or 20 year period, we have come to know more and more about our behavior. "Free will" would suggest that should not be the case.
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Straw man. In what way would free will invalidate the study of human behaviour? That the brain inherently retains a mechanism to resist its internal biases, however strong, does not prevent research into these biases. That the probability of a particular response never rises to 1, or falls to 0, does not stop you studying it. In fact, even without free will, the brain may still ignore any strength of bias, and respond or not respond regardless of whatever the circumstances driving it. A few molecules of GABA diffusing in the wrong direction and suddenly the brain comes down on the wrong side of a tipping point and the predicted behaviour goes *poof*. Free will suggests that we cannot study ourselves about as much as Brownian motion does.
 
Thank you DB, I totally agree with your analysis.

The reason for the apparent stupidity of the second premise is that I relied on your statement

DeviousB said:
Basically, if all thought is a product of the entirely naturalistic processes of the brain, then free-will is an illusion. You would be physically incapable of ever thinking or deciding anything other than what the output of the hypercomplex state-machine in your head was inflexibly bound to do.
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supported by others to that effect (excuse me for not going back to pick them all, those like brain = atoms etc)

to infer, not seeing them disputed (or missing/not understanding the contrary arguments if there were any), that this was part of the bits of brain function about which we DO know about. My reading in this area is very limited, it seemed to agree with my vague recollections.
 
Thinktoomuch said:
My reading in this area is very limited, it seemed to agree with my vague recollections.
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Mine is probably woefully out of date. For example, who the 'far canal' are Martin, Wallace and Fuchs
[*]?

:confused:

[* My copy of From Neuron To Brain is my Kuffler and Nichols, period!]
 
Not much new Latin literature in recent years, so I'm a bit more up to date here: is it "discinctus atque in otia natus"? If you do not claim copyright, I might use it myself...
 
DeviousB said:
Straw man. In what way would free will invalidate the study of human behaviour? ...
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I see no straw here. It's just that any science tries to discover the causes of the phenomena it studies. Psychological science assumes behavior is caused and then looks for causes. If free will were true and behavior had no causes, then there would be no point in looking for them.
 
simonmaal said:
I hope you meant that we shape our environment as well as it shaping us, thus referring to a reciprocal relationship.
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That is what I believe (or should I say, have observed). My job is to alter environments in such a was as to increase the future probability that another human being will engage in specific behaviors while nopt engaging in other behaviors. It is my perception that I have free will, especially in situations where what I know about my environment is sufficient to give me reasonable certainty about the consequences of my behavior, but I also question whether or not my perception is reality.

Though I somewhat understand the atomic/particle level observations that contraindicate super-determinism, I still find it difficult to understand the role of true "free-will" in human behavior.

Another quote from Skinner:

"We act in such ways because our environments have determined that we shall do so. It is always the environment which must be taken into account. A culture is an environment an if it induces people to behave in ways which strengthen the culter it will be more likely to solve its problems, meet emergencies and survive....You and I are both strongly inclined to act with respect to the future of mankind because we have lived in an environment which has hit upon devices which strengthen such behavior. If our culture fail to induce others to do the same it is on its way out."*

I believe that Skinner acknowledges environmental accidents, but felt humans were programmed to respond to such accidents in a manner that promoted survival, but also chang the environment so that affects futures behaviors differently.

*from a 1972 communication between Skinner and a 16-year old who had recently read Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Cited from: Bjork, D.W. (1993) B.F. Skinnner. New York: BasicBooks.
 
Jeff Corey said:
I see no straw here. It's just that any science tries to discover the causes of the phenomena it studies. Psychological science assumes behavior is caused and then looks for causes. If free will were true and behavior had no causes, then there would be no point in looking for them.
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1) Quite a lot of quantum behaviour has no causes; science still studies quantum behaviour. Regardless of whether free will exists or not, not all psychological behaviours will have precise causes because of the stochastic nature of many neurophysiological mechanisms. Of course, psychology no more needs precise causes that QCD needs a mechanism to predict particle decay.

2) Science is constrained to provide naturalistic explanations for phenomena, and not explanations derived from what we already know. Any putative mechanism for true free-will will be required to demonstrate its validity same as everything else. That we know of no such mechanism is not evidence that there is no mechanism. Claiming that the existence of any such mechanism invalidates science is not only an argument from adverse consequences, it is wrong.
 
IXP said:
It seems to me that all discussion of a free will has the implicit assumption that there is some entity different than the physical body that possesses the free will.
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Welcome to the problem wannabe materialists should examine ... just before they become 100% illogical in-the-closet dualists.
 
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