The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

BRUTE wrote:both groups discount emergence.
A lot of the confusion with determinism/free-will lies in the fact that different people are using different definitions so It would probably be helpful if you were to define what you mean when you say emergence.

Riggerjack
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Riggerjack »

"For instance, I heard this story yesterday and it blew my mind.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/"

Taleb brought this up in antifragile, relating details of color being less important in an action based culture. That being the reason for lack of words for colors in early languages.

Back to the topic, I seem to be missing some key elements of these mental models.

Some seem to feel that the universe is deterministic, and since we don't have a sufficient model, we can't predict the future. But the only thing stopping us from such a perfect prediction is lack of an appropriate model. There seems to be some contradiction in whether we have choice or not in these models. Ego seems to be the only one who believes choice is illusion.

Have I got that right?

Riggerjack
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Riggerjack »

Now, the primary argument for all this is physics, plus a study showing discordance in what influence conscious has on decisions.

I don't recognize the discordance. If the decision happens, then the sportscaster makes up the story afterward, that hardly matters. What MATTERS is the storyline. From identical experiences, completely different reactions can happen. Post traumatic stress vs post traumatic growth from the same battle being an excellent example.

Now, there are those who will say that one guy was just programmed to react better to traumatic stress. I agree, but I also believe we program ourselves.

Look, we know all our thoughts are just the firing of neurons. And we know that the more our brains practice a pattern, the more ingrained that pattern. This leads to all our proclivities.

I believe we have the ability to choose our reactions, that we choose the bias of the sportscaster, however you want to put it. That choice then feeds back into the subconscious decision making process. Thus the conscious choice influences future choices.

I believe my choices are mine.

Now, I could be wrong, and choice could be an illusion. A trick of the mind, like Ego's analogy of the eye. The universe could operate like an elaborate clockwork, and me finding and marrying my wife was predictable from the big bang.

But I don't buy it, and the science doesn't support it.

Dave
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dave »

Do people who believe in free will think animals or other simpler organisms have free will? If not, why are humans different? It seems clear to me that ants follow programmed actions in response to environmental stimuli. I admit the human comparison is much more complex, but I see it different in degree, not kind. Presence of mind does not diminish this in my opinion. Having a mental dialogue is part of how humans process their environment.

Free will seems a narrative that is emotionally pleasing ("I have a say"), but I just don't see a strong argument for it. Saying "I feel it" isn't enough for me, since this presumes we have 100% awareness and control of our thoughts/mental activity, which is almost certainly false.

batbatmanne
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by batbatmanne »

The standard positions on free will that I am familiar with are the libertarians, soft determinists and hard determinists. The soft/hard distinction is in regard to the issue of what is called compatibilism. Compatibilism is basically the question of whether "free will" is conceptually compatible with determinism. A libertarian accepts free will and rejects compatibilism. As a consequence the libertarian will reject determinism in what I interpret to be a stupifyingly anti-empiricist argument. They might attempt to use a particular metatheoretic interpretation of quantum mechanics that supports metaphysical probabilism to bolster their view, although of course it is worth considering that a probabilistic universe might be just as incompatible with free will as determinism. I don't think that this view is very popular among philosophers although I haven't looked at any statistics on the matter.

It seems to me that the nuts and bolts of the issue has to do with finding a more coherent definition of free will and therefore with the possibility for compatibilism. A soft determinist believes that determinism is compatible with free will. This view was popularized by Hume, who argued for a compatibilist view (see the SEP entry). The hard determinist is an incompatibilist just like the libertarian but instead makes the reverse argument: the world is deterministic and compatibilism is false therefore there is no free will.

I have found myself firmly in the soft determinist camp ever since first becoming familiar with the terrain. My view is largely deflationist in character. In a secular society it seems most plausible to me to say that to have free will is to be an agent: it is the ability to reliably assess the consequences of different actions made under the same circumstances and to then to act in light of this information. There is no prima facie reason to think that this conflicts with determinism.

The philosophical problems come up when we attempt to reduce our choices to a series of physiological interactions. The reductionist claims that we have not made a "free" choice because our actions can be explained solely with reference to our previous physiological states and environmental (sensory) input. By conceiving the event in this way we are struck with the inevitability of our choice and so are led to believe that the behavior could not be considered freely chosen. I think this response by the reductionist is just as convincing as being told that a log of wood is not on fire but rather that there are so many oxygen particles in the air that are interacting with the particles in the log in the way described by the chemical process of combustion--this is just what it means to say the log of wood is on fire, there need not be any mysteries here unless you think that the term 'fire' has special metaphysical status. In the case of free will there is a long history in Western philosophy and religion of ascribing a special metaphysical status, but I argue that it is conceptually unnecessary.

BRUTE
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by BRUTE »

Riggerjack wrote:The universe could operate like an elaborate clockwork, and me finding and marrying my wife was predictable from the big bang.
clockwork yes, predictable no. that's the emergence part.

as Riggerjack can tell, brute also believes choice is an illusion.

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

Riggerjack wrote: I believe we have the ability to choose our reactions, that we choose the bias of the sportscaster, however you want to put it. That choice then feeds back into the subconscious decision making process. Thus the conscious choice influences future choices.

I believe my choices are mine.
In his talk and book on free will Harris did an interesting mental exercise to show why the choice is certainly made by "you", but the part of you making the choice is your unconscious mind which your conscious mind does not control.

(runs from 16:50 to about 25:15)
https://youtu.be/pCofmZlC72g?t=16m56s
Riggerjack wrote:Now, I could be wrong, and choice could be an illusion. A trick of the mind, like Ego's analogy of the eye. The universe could operate like an elaborate clockwork, and me finding and marrying my wife was predictable from the big bang.

But I don't buy it, and the science doesn't support it.
I could be wrong, but I do NOT believe it is predictable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy

This is where much of the confusion comes in..... the word determinism.

I believe I am the result of genes plus experience. If I am the result of those two inputs then any decision I make is based on them. When offered the opportunity to pick any city in the world, I would be unable to choose one that I did not know existed and I would be unable to understand why my sub-conscious mind spewed up the one it did.

BRUTE
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by BRUTE »

talking of Harris, brute remembers agreeing with Dennett on consciousness/free will and disagreeing with Harris (in his book Wake Up). unfortunately, brute doesn't remember what their dispute was about, but brute thinks Harris is a compatibilist and Dennett isn't.

edit: brute is full of shit. he just looked it up, and apparently Dennett is the compatibilist. brute will investigate further.

Dragline
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dragline »

Dave wrote: If not, why are humans different? It seems clear to me that ants follow programmed actions in response to environmental stimuli. I admit the human comparison is much more complex, but I see it different in degree, not kind. Presence of mind does not diminish this in my opinion. Having a mental dialogue is part of how humans process their environment.

What humans have that animals do not possess in any significant manner, among other features, is the "theory of mind" feature discussed above. Yes, the neuroscience says that the human brain/mind is different from animal minds.

In my experience, this fact -- which was not confirmed until relatively recently -- causes a lot of cognitive dissonance because people still want to believe, or base other beliefs, on what was known as the "Big Brain Theory" that was thought to be correct from the 19th through the mid-20th Century, but was shown to be in error.

Here's the history of that research:

"During the 1960s, research was conducted to determine whether human brains were functionally different from animal brains or were just “bigger animal brains” as had been theorized since Darwin’s time – the so-called “Big Brain Theory.” The research revealed that human brains were in fact organized in fundamentally different ways from those of animals, even those most closely related. Based on that research, evolutionary biologist Charles Oxnard concluded: “The nature of human brain organization is very different from that of chimpanzees, which are themselves scarcely different from the other great apes and not too different even from Old World monkeys.” In other words, as the human brain evolved, it was not that additional skills are simply being added on as once was hypothesized under the Big Brain Theory, but that the whole brain was rearranged and reformulated in different ways.

Further subsequent research over the next 40 years revealed that the brain was formulated in a series of modules, with greater numbers of connected neurons within the modules and fewer connections between the modules. Neuroimaging studies show that these modules operate like parallel circuits that processing different inputs simultaneously. One part of the brain reacts when you hear words, another particular part of the brain reacts to seeing words, still another area reacts while speaking words, and they can all be going at the same time.

Figuring out the organization of the modules proved to be a devilishly difficult task. The brain is asymmetric, having a dominant half, which is usually the left brain in most people. Certain modules appear in both hemispheres, while other modules appear in only one. And they are not in the same place or of the exact same construction in every person. Moreover, the same structures in animals often act differently in the human brain, making scientists more wary of cross-species comparisons. Indeed, research in the past ten years has revealed that the neurons themselves may be different from species to species and perform different functions even if there are similarities in form. As Professor Gazzaniga relates it: “All neurons are not alike, and some types of neurons may be found only in specific species. Moreover, a given type of neuron may exhibit unique properties in a given species.” This called into question what could be concluded from much of the prior research that had only been conducted on animals."

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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I will take a shot at defining emergence.

Emergence: A qualitative change in the state of a complex, open system with defined boundary as input of energy increases or continues over time OR the description of the state of the region defined by the intersection of two previously boundary-defined complex systems OR the undetermined state of order or information in an open system over time.

IOW, the second law of thermodynamics states what will occur in a closed system over time (determined), but it does not and can not state what will occur in an open system over time (not determined), but the possibilities increase with the availability of energy for work. (Or something maybe vaguely like that. I am still too lazy to read "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Shannon.)

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

Dragline wrote: What humans have that animals do not possess in any significant manner, among other features, is the "theory of mind" feature discussed above. Yes, the neuroscience says that the human brain/mind is different from animal minds.
Let's say for the sake of discussion that human and animal brains are very different. What is the difference that allows for free-will?

Theory-of-mind allows me to imagine myself in the head of others, which is a very useful skill. Perhaps part of the evolutionary advantage of theory-of-mind is to help us to figure out what our own subconscious mind is going to do. We imagine ourselves in our own subconscious in the same way we imagine ourselves in the mind of others. Metacognition.

People are often troubled by churning ruminations where they constantly regurgitate thoughts and turn them over in their conscious mind before setting them to rest again. These ruminations might be the subconscious warning the conscious mind in advance to prepare for the executive order and could be the reason for the illusion of free will. But my ruminating mind just made that up so what do I know?

Dave
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dave »

@Dragline - I'm in agreement with you. I understand the theory of mind humans possess that other life doesn't.

What I don't see is how it implies we have free will. I don't see having such awareness as evidence of free will. The human brain certainty has a lot more going on. But having more computing power and more programs running just makes the human a more complicated organism, in my opinion. It doesn't make it immune to causality chains and environmental influence. In fact, by definition nothing is immune to causality and environmental influence. Everything is a product of its conditioning and environment.

Dragline
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dragline »

It doesn't if you are defining "free will" in the Aristotlian or DeCartian sense, and if you are only looking at one brain -- although we haven't really talked about feedback loops and how one person sitting meditating or thinking without any outside stimulus can change their own thoughts, heart rate and other things. In other words, your "environment" also includes you.

What Ego mentioned above about post-hoc justifications/narratives for unconscious behavior is correct -- this is called "the interpreter" function of the brain and is an emergent property of the dominant hemisphere. But the brain can also imagine things that have not happened -- or have not happened yet. Memory and imaginations are created in the same way -- this is why some people get them very confused and cannot keep them in order.

"Free will" really only makes sense and becomes a useful concept when you are talking about a multi-brain environment -- i.e., a different level of order than one brain thinking to itself. Due to our innate "theory of mind", we attribute agency to others by default -- i.e., we believe they are acting through free will, or at least what they are doing doesn't have anything to do with us unless we have an interaction with them. Which in turn means they also attribute us to be acting via our own free will and we know they view us that way. Which then leads us to act/believe as if we have free will for the most part. Its a basic consequence of the emergent properties of the brain that include the "theory of mind" and "the interpreter." Its also a basic organizing principle of any society with more than one human in it.

This is also the reason that the question is a rather academic one -- one-brain environments are pretty unusual and limited and you can't study a brain and deduce anything about what its actually thinking. The point of saying its a complex system with emergent properties is that you are saying that reductionism will not work is that its not a matter of "not having enough data" to figure it out -- its just an impossible task.

And just to be clear as to what emergent properties are, here is how Michael Gazzaniga (pre-eminent neuroscientist) defines it:

"Emergence is a common phenomenon that is accepted in physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, and even art. When a physical system does not demonstrate all the symmetries of the laws by which it is governed, we say that these symmetries are spontaneously broken. Emergence, this idea of symmetry breaking, is simple: Matter collectively and spontaneously acquires a property or preference not present in the underlying rules themselves. The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies. . . .

The key to understanding emergence is to understand that there are different levels of organization. My favorite analogy is that of the car, which I have mentioned before. If you look at an isolated car part, such as a cam shaft, you cannot predict that the freeway will be full of traffic at 5: 15 P.M. Monday through Friday. In fact, you could not even predict the phenomenon of traffic would ever occur if you just looked at a brake pad. You cannot analyze traffic at the level of car parts. Did the guy who invented the wheel ever visualize the 405 in Los Angeles on Friday evening? You cannot even analyze traffic at the level of the individual car. When you get a bunch of cars and drivers together, with the variables of location, time, weather, and society, all in the mix, then at that level you can predict traffic. A new set of laws emerge that aren’t predicted from the parts alone.”

"Consciousness is an emergent property. From moment to moment, different modules or systems compete for attention and the winner emerges as the neural system underlying that moment’s conscious experience. Our conscious experience is assembled on the fly, as our brains respond to constantly changing inputs, calculate potential courses of action, and execute responses like a streetwise kid."

Dave
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dave »

Hmm, I continue to agree with everything you say, and find it very interesting!

Your point regarding feedback loops and the meditation example is one close to home for me. As a meditator for some time, I would confirm that "your environment includes you" is very consistent with my experience. This begs the question of what are "you" exactly.

Consciousness itself is an evolving stream of activity that is conditioned by the moments leading up to it and the current environment. With respect to meditators changing heart rate and such, this is driven by internal stimuli. It does not fall outside causality chains, it's just more challenging to see this without strong mindfulness. As one gains experience meditating, you become an observer of your mind and its interworkings, and interesting insights about all of this can arise.

I really enjoyed the other parts of your post, thanks for explaining all of that so well.

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

@dragline, I understand your definition of emergence and agree that watching a single ant is not going to tell me everything I need to know to understand a massive anthill. But I am still not seeing that you answered how actual free-will emerges from complex interactions. "We don't know", would be a fair answer, if not for the fact that there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that the feeling of free-will is the thing that emerges, not free-will itself.

That feeling, I believe, is really no different from phantom limb syndrome experienced by amputees. The amputee feels like the limb exists even though it does not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzSS7wOpIwY

BRUTE
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by BRUTE »

@Ego:

it might depend on what is meant by "free will". the experience most humans describe when they talk about free will is that there were several options, and they picked one, for some reasons. this is not incompatible with 100% determinism. it's like a computer running down a decision tree and somehow introspecting the process a bit.

in a way, the "free will" determinists (like brute and Ego) are arguing against is a straw man. if causality is true, everything has a cause. of course nobody can prove that something un-causal (in-causal?) exists. what would that even mean - nothing happened, and as not a result of it, something else happened? something happened, and as not a result, something else happened?

brute hypothesizes: there shall exist a coin-toss machine. connected to it is a video camera. the camera records the machine making a coin toss. if the whole apparatus including coin-toss machine and video camera is considered "the consciousness", didn't that consciousness "decide" and observe itself deciding? sure, the coin toss was deterministic. but the machine "experienced" itself making the toss.

edit:

the type of "free will" that would disprove determinism would be one that allows anti-causality. brute can't even imagine what that would mean. brute thinks this isn't the "free will" proponents are arguing for.

Dragline
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Dragline »

Ego wrote:@dragline, I understand your definition of emergence and agree that watching a single ant is not going to tell me everything I need to know to understand a massive anthill. But I am still not seeing that you answered how actual free-will emerges from complex interactions. "We don't know", would be a fair answer, if not for the fact that there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that the feeling of free-will is the thing that emerges, not free-will itself.

That feeling, I believe, is really no different from phantom limb syndrome experienced by amputees. The amputee feels like the limb exists even though it does not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzSS7wOpIwY
I suppose it depends on what you are defining as "actual free will". I've already agreed with you that the Aristotlian or Descartian notion of this is not biologically correct if that is what you mean. On the opposite side of the coin, one might say that determinism is a also misnomer, since you can't actually use it to determine anything in terms of looking at a brain or brain scans and determining what someone is consciously thinking. Thus, there's no "free" will and no "determining" as this debate is classically framed. Both concepts are wrong in their original conceptions; further, saying one is wrong does not make the other accurate. But both concepts are accurate on a more limited basis if reframed and put into the proper context.

The context for determinism is an individual brain. But all you can usually determine from an individual brain is that inputs have effects. You can't determine what those effects are going to be on consciousness (mind) even if you know the input and everything there is to know about the brain you are looking at. You can guess and you might be right some of the time with some brains, but you cannot know the way you know if you drop a ball on the earth it will fall to the earth, because the brain/mind relationship is not subject to reductionism any more than the other examples of emergence above.

The context for free will is the level of order when you are talking about multiple human beings/brains interacting, virtually all of whom possess "the interpreter" and "theory of mind" as emergent properties of their brains. In that setting the perception of free will in others and the innate acceptance of the concept ends up making it valid for all intents and purposes because of the feedback loops it creates. Your perception becomes your reality. It's quite an ingenious evolutionary development when you think about it, but its a social construction emergent from biology, not a biological construction in and of itself.

A society where people did not believe in each other's agency and act like they had it would not be a society of humans. Maybe they would be animals or computers or aliens or something else, but they would not be humans.

Regarding the amputee example, that again is a single human being/brain so the context is limited. But even that person may take subsequent actions to cure himself of those feelings (if he can) since he can use his other senses to gather inputs and notice the limb is missing. It is also an example of where reductionism is possible because you can easily see the limb is not there and give your brain a contrary input to the one it perceives. By contrast, there is virtually no way you can "not perceive" agency in yourself, unless you become completely fatalistic. Because you're only human.

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

Dragline wrote: A society where people did not believe in each other's agency and act like they had it would not be a society of humans. Maybe they would be animals or computers or aliens or something else, but they would not be humans.
I agree. We have to act as if we have agency to be a human among other humans.

BRUTE
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by BRUTE »

why? what about agency is so human?

ps: alternate name for determinism - causality? also harder to disagree with.

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Ego
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Re: The One where Riggerjack schools brute on Free Will

Post by Ego »

Consequences play an important role in decisions made by the subconscious mind. Remove consequences and some might use that as the excuse to do.... whatever popped into their head.

And then this would technically be true. (NSFW)
https://youtu.be/Qv5fqunQ_4I?t=1m

By collectively pretending that agency exists we give society permission to punish transgressions and deter those with an inclination to transgress.

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