Science and free will

[Ron_Tomkins]

In a chapter from his book "A brief tour of human consciousness" , V S Ramachandran writes about an experiment on free will, in which two scientists were experimenting on volunteers exercising free will by instructing them to do things like wiggling a finger. A full three quarters before the finger movement, they picked up an EEG potential (known as the "readiness potential") which ante-ceded the subject's sensation of consciously willing to move the finger

Supposedly this cause a huge controversy in terms of what free will is. Since the brain is sending a command before the subject's sensation of consciously deciding to move the finger, there's the controversy that this will create a sense of lack of free will in the person

But then I thought: What difference does it make if my brain is sending the command before I sense my "free willingness" to move it? It does not make me any less an owner of myself. After all, the brain that is making that choice is my brain, not someone else's. And my brain, as well as every single cell of my body, is me. So why should this posit a philosophical issue at all on wether I am the owner of myself or not?

But I would like to share this with everyone else and see if they share the same point of view, or not

 

[UndercoverElephant]

In a chapter from his book "A brief tour of human consciousness" , V S Ramachandran writes about an experiment on free will, in which two scientists were experimenting on volunteers exercising free will by instructing them to do things like wiggling a finger. A full three quarters before the finger movement, they picked up an EEG potential (known as the "readiness potential") which ante-ceded the subject's sensation of consciously willing to move the finger

Supposedly this cause a huge controversy in terms of what free will is. Since the brain is sending a command before the subject's sensation of consciously deciding to move the finger, there's the controversy that this will create a sense of lack of free will in the person

But then I thought: What difference does it make if my brain is sending the command before I sense my "free willingness" to move it? It does not make me any less an owner of myself. After all, the brain that is making that choice is my brain, not someone else's. And my brain, as well as every single cell of my body, is me. So why should this posit a philosophical issue at all on wether I am the owner of myself or not?

But I would like to share this with everyone else and see if they share the same point of view, or not

Free will can't just be something happening in your brain.

To clarify: we are talking about libertarian free will here, not compatibilist free will (which is something else entirely). There's a basic problem in your usage of the word "I". You are using "I" to mean "my body". A believer in free will is using "I" to mean "my soul" or "the agent of my free will".

 

[paximperium]

Free will can't just be something happening in your brain.

To clarify: we are talking about libertarian free will here, not compatibilist free will (which is something else entirely). There's a basic problem in your usage of the word "I". You are using "I" to mean "my body". A believer in free will is using "I" to mean "my soul" or "the agent of my free will".

Would you care to define "soul" and explain what is Libertarian Free Will to the lowly peasants here?

 

[paximperium]

In a chapter from his book "A brief tour of human consciousness" , V S Ramachandran writes about an experiment on free will, in which two scientists were experimenting on volunteers exercising free will by instructing them to do things like wiggling a finger. A full three quarters before the finger movement, they picked up an EEG potential (known as the "readiness potential") which ante-ceded the subject's sensation of consciously willing to move the finger

Supposedly this cause a huge controversy in terms of what free will is. Since the brain is sending a command before the subject's sensation of consciously deciding to move the finger, there's the controversy that this will create a sense of lack of free will in the person

But then I thought: What difference does it make if my brain is sending the command before I sense my "free willingness" to move it? It does not make me any less an owner of myself. After all, the brain that is making that choice is my brain, not someone else's. And my brain, as well as every single cell of my body, is me. So why should this posit a philosophical issue at all on wether I am the owner of myself or not?

But I would like to share this with everyone else and see if they share the same point of view, or not

The question is did you ever have choice or is the decision already "pre-determine" by all your prior experiences, your brain chemistry and physics?

At that split moment of decision, the "I", which encompasses all you are(experiences, physical, biochemical etc.), do you really have a choice to react or was the reaction to the stimuli a reaction to everything that already happened and is active at present?

In other words, are your decisions nothing more than a program running based on its programming, prior information and data inputs or do you have some magical ability to counter causality? Is this feeling of Free Will just your neural process informing you of a decision that your never really had input in?

UE and some free proponents say free will is acausal(whatever the heck that means), I believe free will is nothing more than an illusion. But like you said, so what?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Would you care to define "soul" and explain what is Libertarian Free Will to the lowly peasants here?

I'm not going to try to define "soul", no. It's a bit like trying to define "God."

Libertarian free will is easier to define, or at least to contrast it with compatibilist free will.

CFW is the view that free will is compatible with determinism. "Freedom" in this case means "free from external oppression". In other words, a person who has been locked in a cell has in effect been deprived of their free will by the person who locked them up. Locking a person up in cell can't deprive them of LFW. LFW is the view that free will isn't compatible with determinism. It is the belief that humans (and maybe other entities) have the capacity to be uncaused or originatory causes.

 

[paximperium]

Libertarian free will is easier to define, or at least to contrast it with compatibilist free will.

CFW is the view that free will is compatible with determinism. "Freedom" in this case means "free from external oppression". In other words, a person who has been locked in a cell has in effect been deprived of their free will by the person who locked them up. Locking a person up in cell can't deprive them of LFW. LFW is the view that free will isn't compatible with determinism. It is the belief that humans (and maybe other entities) have the capacity to be uncaused or originatory causes.

Please relate this to a brain process or reflex such in the OP.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Please relate this to a brain process or reflex such in the OP.

I can't. I'm missing key information. If Penrose/Hameroff had succeeded in what they were trying to do then the question might be easier to answer. We don't know what it is about brains which allows their owners to be conscious. Until/unless we find a definitive answer to that question, I can't answer your question.


Message to all:

I've just discovered that I've been accepted on a TESOL course (teaching English as a foreign language). It starts in two weeks and I have a reading list as long as my arm to get through. I'm not going to be able to waste hours on end talking about philosophy to the good people of the JREF.

I'll drop back in later, but you aren't going to be subjected to any more long, complicated posts.

 

[Iconoclast08]

I've just discovered that I've been accepted on a TESOL course (teaching English as a foreign language).

Congratulations!

It starts in two weeks and I have a reading list as long as my arm to get through. I'm not going to be able to waste hours on end talking about philosophy to the good people of the JREF.

Waste?

Those EEG studies mentioned by RT are fascinating. Kind of reminds me of the mirror neuron studies where watching someone move a certain way can activate neurons that respond as if the watcher were moving (I think, but I admittedly haven't read these studies in awhile). Except here, it may be more reflexive/self-focused. Just conjecture.

 

[Iconoclast08]

Supposedly this cause a huge controversy in terms of what free will is. Since the brain is sending a command before the subject's sensation of consciously deciding to move the finger, there's the controversy that this will create a sense of lack of free will in the person

Do we really know that it's a "command" per se? That it's your "brain" saying "do this?"

 

[MRC_Hans]

I have read about those studies, in several places (and probably similar studies), but it is a bit more complicated than that. You see, other studies show that before presenting a sensation to the conscious brain, the brain adjusts the time to fit the actual observation. Thus, we experience a simultaneous observation, even if it actually takes some time to reach our consciousness.

So, the basic question of free will (whatever kind you will label it) is not really enlightened by this. This is because it is entirely possible that the free will part of the brain sends a message to the simpler parts, something like "wriggle a finger in a moment". This is much like a commander telling soldiers to "Fire when in range". So, now the muscle control centres send a signal to the finger, the sensory complex records the action and sends feed-back to the brain "mission accomplished", and the while thing is adjusted for timing and presented to the consciousness, which perceives the whole thing happening simultaneously (instead of during some fraction of a second).

Note that this whole explanation is equally valid whether you assume that 'consciousness' is an emergent property of a physical brain or not.

Hans

 

[Matt the Poet]

It’s formally undecidable, isn’t it? What sort of experimental setup would be required to test the hypothesis that, given a precisely identical set of circumstances, I might have behaved in a different manner than I actually did?

If you somehow went back in time and verified that my behaviour did diverge it wouldn’t mean anything – you’ve already changed the circumstances by being there. If you, slightly more plausibly, arranged for some sort of ‘mind-wipe’ of one of my previous decisions and then got me to make it again you’re still on a loser because the initial conditions are altered – at the very least my cellular chemistry will be different.

That said, in order for us to have free will there would need to be something very, very special about things with brains that doesn’t apply to any other physical object in the universe. So it seems unlikely.

 

[paximperium]

It’s formally undecidable, isn’t it? What sort of experimental setup would be required to test the hypothesis that, given a precisely identical set of circumstances, I might have behaved in a different manner than I actually did?

I disagree. Hypothetically? When we figure out certain neural pathways that are linked with specific behaviors/emotions etc.

Hook a brain up to electrodes and a computer.
Present Stimuli X. Record response.
Present Stimuli X, Stimulate with electrodes. Record response
?same?different?

If it is different, you have determined that the response is physical and causal ie. a pure neural process with no extras.

 

[Matt the Poet]

I don’t think this works. The conditions for the two experiments can never be the same – the second time round, at the very least, I remember the first time, which means that my overall ‘brain state’ is different. Say that I’m a thoroughgoing believer in free will and I want* to prove that it exists – the memory, plus my awareness of the purpose of the experiment, will cause me to decide to confound you by making the same decision. Do you have a way out of this loop?


*As usual in this sort of discussion, natural language is vague and rubbish. ‘Want’ here is colloquial shorthand for ‘have some sort of impulse, the ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’** nature of which is not relevant to the point at hand’


**As usual in this sort of discussion, etc. etc.

 

[Beth]

The question is did you ever have choice or is the decision already "pre-determine" by all your prior experiences, your brain chemistry and physics?

I'm as baffled by the idea that this as the OP is. What are you if you are not the sum of all of your prior experiences and your physical/chemical makeup?

At that split moment of decision, the "I", which encompasses all you are(experiences, physical, biochemical etc.), do you really have a choice to react or was the reaction to the stimuli a reaction to everything that already happened and is active at present?

This is clearly not the case given what we know about quantum physics. There are random events that contribute to the outcome.

 

[paximperium]

I don’t think this works. The conditions for the two experiments can never be the same – the second time round, at the very least, I remember the first time, which means that my overall ‘brain state’ is different. Say that I’m a thoroughgoing believer in free will and I want* to prove that it exists – the memory, plus my awareness of the purpose of the experiment, will cause me to decide to confound you by making the same decision. Do you have a way out of this loop?


*As usual in this sort of discussion, natural language is vague and rubbish. ‘Want’ here is colloquial shorthand for ‘have some sort of impulse, the ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’** nature of which is not relevant to the point at hand’


**As usual in this sort of discussion, etc. etc.

Hmmmm...good point. Let me see if I do a work around with some super mystical tech we haven't developed yet...

 

[Professor Yaffle]

There was an interesting version of that experiment which was looking more at "free won't" than "free will".

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_brain04.htm

 

[paximperium]

I'm as baffled by the idea that this as the OP is. What are you if you are not the sum of all of your prior experiences and your physical/chemical makeup?

But is the "I" really able to make decisions or is it pre-programmed to do so?

This is clearly not the case given what we know about quantum physics. There are random events that contribute to the outcome.

I do not believe quantum effects have any measurable effects on larger scale things like neurons and frankly, quantum effects make things random so your stuck with randomness being dumped into brain processes, no free will there since "you" continue to not have any input in this process...unless you want to claim that "Free will" lives in quantum weirdness?

 

[Matt the Poet]

Hmmmm...good point. Let me see if I do a work around with some super mystical tech we haven't developed yet...

I don’t think you can get out of it even with hypothetical tech. Say you managed to recreate my original situation, right down to wavefunction (or whatever) level. One of those conditions would be you not knowing what my original decision was either. Even if you preserved just your own memory and nothing else, that would be a change in the initial conditions. There may be no obvious mechanism for your memory affecting what I do, but as by definition it’s the only thing different about the experiment it would be the most scientifically obvious conclusion to draw.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Free will can't just be something happening in your brain.

Why not?

You are using "I" to mean "my body". A believer in free will is using "I" to mean "my soul" or "the agent of my free will".

But not all believers in Free Will believe in a soul
What about them?

 

[rocketdodger]

In a chapter from his book "A brief tour of human consciousness" , V S Ramachandran writes about an experiment on free will, in which two scientists were experimenting on volunteers exercising free will by instructing them to do things like wiggling a finger. A full three quarters before the finger movement, they picked up an EEG potential (known as the "readiness potential") which ante-ceded the subject's sensation of consciously willing to move the finger

Supposedly this cause a huge controversy in terms of what free will is. Since the brain is sending a command before the subject's sensation of consciously deciding to move the finger, there's the controversy that this will create a sense of lack of free will in the person

But then I thought: What difference does it make if my brain is sending the command before I sense my "free willingness" to move it? It does not make me any less an owner of myself. After all, the brain that is making that choice is my brain, not someone else's. And my brain, as well as every single cell of my body, is me. So why should this posit a philosophical issue at all on wether I am the owner of myself or not?

But I would like to share this with everyone else and see if they share the same point of view, or not

This is a double blow to opponents of strong A.I., in that it demonstrates self-observation is not reliable when it comes to what is happening in one's own mind.