In Random Will, I presented a mechanism by which some form of free will might be
possible.
In
that article I wrote:
If the universe is entirely
deterministic, there is no free will because our actions are merely the
consequence of our interactions with our environment. Presented again with precisely the same
environment, our brains would go through exactly the same processes and we
would make the same decisions, take the same actions and think the same
thoughts.
If the universe is entirely
random (and therefore entirely indeterminate), then there is no free will
either. There would be little, if any,
causal relationship between action and reaction in a random universe. Presented again with precisely the same
environment, our brains would likely react in a vastly different way. However, integral to the concept of free will
is the idea that there is some degree of constancy in our thoughts and
behaviour.
I’ve
collected some of my contributions to the discussion below, with some minor
editing, as a form of intellectual recycling.
----------------
The
initiator of the discussion used the definition from a creation science
web-site (creationwiki), claiming it to be the "common definition":
Free will, is the capability
of agents to make one of alternative futures the present. The logic of free
will has two main parts, a categorical distinction is made between all
"what chooses", and all "what is chosen", referred to as
the spiritual domain and the material domain respectively. This understanding
in terms of two categories is named dualism.
Together with these two
domains come two ways of reaching a conclusion, subjectivity and objectivity.
You have to choose to identify what is in the spiritual domain, resulting in
opinions (subjectivity). You have to measure to find out what is in the
material domain, resulting in facts (objectivity).
This
definition seems to have some major issues. First and foremost, a computer has
the capability which is described as "free will" in this strange definition. A simple example
being the one that controls the traffic lights at an intersection. Say the
lights are flashing amber and there are two alternative futures for one set of
lights, they can be red, or they can be green. The computer can make a
particular future become the present (assuming the passage of time) by making
the light green. The thing that falls into the category of "what chooses" is the computer and "what is
chosen" is the future state of the set of lights (which can be objectively measured,
either by checking that a light in a particular position is lit, or by checking
the nature of the lens over the light that is lit).
I
think we can safely abandon this definition, can't we?
There
seems to have been an effort to define "spirit" and "freedom of
opinion" but not "free will". It's bizarre that long discussions
about free will (such as the one in question) are about something that is
effectively undefined, either because no-one makes the effort to produce a
definition, or because the operating definition is as weak as this one.
I
asked that the main protagonists make clear what they mean by free will. As a
start, by trying to answer the following:
By "free will", do
you mean that decisions can be made without taking any cognisance of prior
states? Do you mean that a person who is brought up on the wrong side of town
and is taught to be a criminal makes a free decision every day to
continue on with criminal behaviour? Or are you saying that free will somehow allows us to
make decisions totally divorced from our experience and that it is only some
weakness on the part of criminals that makes them freely choose to do what
other people in their social group (i.e. other criminals) do and it would be
easy for them to bring their free will to bear and choose to stop being a criminal at any time?
Or, by "free will"
are we saying that in the traffic light example, we are more like the computer,
making choices between more complex alternatives, rather than deciding which lights should be on at certain times?
In which case, our decisions are totally determined (or pretty much determined)
by antecedent causes, and our "free will" is just the ability to affect other things that are not able to interact in the same way
with antecedent causes?
Sadly
no-one really put forward a usable definition.
Never
mind, I presented one for consideration.
--------------------
To
my mind there is "strong" free will and "weak" free will.
If
you have "strong" free will, then you are not influenced by what came
before, and you have some sort of immutable element that can make decisions
unconstrained by current circumstances (i.e. an immortal soul). This presumes
some sort of absolute morality, since the "right" thing to do won't
be situational.
If
you have "weak" free will, you can mould your decisions, you can
change your mind and you don't have to follow a set rule book - but you are
going to be heavily influenced by who you have become and what is going on at
the time and your options will be limited by a number of factors (including
what you know and what you can imagine). This presumes a more fuzzy logic
approach to decision making, with multiple overlays that contribute to a sort
of grid from which options can be selected. It's "sort-of-free will".
This
latter form of free will is what the materialists tend to be happy with
(including me). The former is the domain of magical thinkers including
theists.
--------------------------
Later
on, I returned to the idea of what free will is not:
I
prefer to use a definition based on Laplace's demon. Laplace's demon knows everything
there is know - all the characteristics of the most fundamental particles (or
waves or probability functions or whatever is most fundamental to the
universe). If the demon can tell what is going to happen in the future based on
that knowledge, then there is no free will. If there is something else,
something fundamentally unknowable, then that makes it impossible for the demon
to predict the future and free will is a possibility.
(Note that I am
assuming here that probabilistic phenomena are based on laws and forces that we
humans might not be able to know about and that it is this lack of access that makes it impossible for us to
identify the antecedent cause that results in the radioactive decay of particles at some precise instant and
not before or later. However, the reliability of probabilistic predictions of such decay does indicate that
some regular mechanism may be at play "behind the curtain" as it were. If so, Laplace's demon would be able to see behind that curtain so long as what goes on there
is natural, rather than supernatural.)
This conception makes free will something magical, rather than emergent from physical phenomena and therefore it's the sort of free will that theists tend to believe in. I refer to this form of
free will as "strong free will" and I think it's what Belinda calls
"ontic free will". (I suspect though that "ontic" just means it's real,
sort of like when the Greek Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus where creating
humans and all the other creatures respectively, they are described as slotting
in abilities to their creations - they'd have had a free will module on the
shelf and Prometheus would have inserted that into his human. Alternatively free
will might have been in a vat, with Prometheus decanting a large portion and
putting it in to the human, and Epimetheus taking smaller portions for all the other creatures.)
With
the notion "strong" free will comes the notion "weak" free
will. For me, weak free will is a consequence of the imperfection of biological machines. We are sort of
programmed, by our genetics, our upbringing and other experiences and by our
culture (and also our language of course). This programming sits inside our
wetware processor and reacts to stimuli - but our sensors are not perfect, nor
is our brain. The huge complexity of what is going on when we respond to our
environment makes how we act appear like it's driven (at times) by strong free
will, but it's not - we're just reacting according to programming that we
ourselves did not choose, using a processor that we did not choose on the basis
of input that we did not choose via sensors that we did not choose.
To a
certain extent it is true that we cannot help ourselves, but only to an extent.
For example, we could choose what factors play a greater role in each decision
(although that choice itself is limited), we can eat Italian if annoying our
friends who don’t like Italian is the most important factor, or Greek if
gastronomic pleasure on our part is primary (and we are big fans of Greek food).
But not only that, we can mould our wetware processors, and our programming, by
changing our behaviour to improve our outcomes in the future. We're not always
successful at this (because we don't always know what we will want in the
future), but it does allow for a very strong feeling that we are, at least in
part, self-created beings exercising free will.
---------------------------
What I have noticed, both in this debate and more generally, is that the
whole discussion regarding free will tends to miss a key element - what is the actual
mechanism for free will? At least theists have their "souls" to point
at, although they can't prove the existence of a soul (the closest they have
got is via that extremely dodgy 21g experiment and
surely no-one takes that seriously). So I ask, if a free will defender is not positing a
soul, but is positing free will, what is their proposed mechanism?
Note
that pointing to quantum uncertainty isn't going to help because fundamentally
not being able to know what is going to happen in the future isn't any more
helpful with respect to free will than knowing the future perfectly. Unless of course the
free will defender posits a mechanism that somehow bends quantum uncertainty to
their will, in which case they head into quantum mysticism and, again, they would have to explain how this mechanism works.
Note also that I am not saying that if a mechanism isn't immediately available, that the idea has to be shelved forever. I'm just saying that if you don't have a mechanism by which free will would be possible (and you have no other evidence that free will actually exists), then you're not in much of a position to champion the existence of free will.
-------------------
Unfortunately,
no-one was able to present a mechanism by which free will would work – not even
“weak” free will, let alone “strong” free will.
-------------------
Later,
I got a little hot under the collar:
Can
we agree that if the universe is strongly, and ontologically, deterministic,
then there is no free will - irrespective of whether the universe is
epistemologically predictable?
I
think we can, so I'll press on.
I
struggle to see how people justify making the leap from the notion that the
universe is *not* strongly (and ontologically) deterministic, that this leads
inexorably to free will. As Belinda
indicated, we can't truly perceive causal connections. We can only intuit them,
or deduce them, or backwards engineer them - and when we do so we can only do so
incompletely.
At
certain levels (i.e. macroscopic levels) and within certain timeframes (i.e.
shorter timeframes), we seem to be able to predict the future based on our understandings
of causal connections, but only to a certain extent. If we want to be totally
accurate, we can't. If we want to predict well into the future, we can't. And
if we want to make discrete predictions at the subatomic level, we can't (we
can only make probabilistic predictions).
Any
will we might have, therefore, is somewhat frail - we can't really will a thing
to happen with total certainty and what we can will to happen is predicated on
pre-existing circumstances and a host of physical "laws" over which
we have no influence whatsoever. Thus we cannot will ourselves to fly by
flapping our arms, but we can will ourselves to drink a cup of coffee, so long
as a cup of coffee can be procured.
How
could such a will be justifiably described as "free" when it's so very
much constrained?
But
even going this far is making an unwarranted assertion. I suspect that when a
free will defender implies that if the future is (ontologically)
"open", then free will follows. The problem here is that the
inscrutability of the future doesn't necessarily give us (humans, or any other
living creature) an ability to shape it. There's no reason to think that we
have any more influence over an indeterminate (and thus unpredictable) future
than we have over a strongly deterministic future. From what I can tell, in a
practical sense, the claims about free will centre on an ability to influence the future - not just
about whether the future is fixed or not.
I
suggest that the best position is to be sceptical about the existence of
"strong" (or "ontic") free will until such time as evidence
for its existence appears (or a mechanism by which free will would work).
--------------------
It
was about this time that the initiator of the discussion revealed himself to be
crazier than had previously been apparent – singing the praises of the Tea
Party, claiming that people who deny his definition free will were spiralling
into depravity, accusing me of a being a filthy cursed liar (when I’m so obviously clean)
and using a website like www.scienceoflife.nl
as a reference.
Syamsu had been claiming that a Professor Walter Schempp had used a freedom based theory
to produce the functional MRI and I responded that there was no indication that
Schempp had any involvement in the development of the fMRI. It was at this time he called me a filthy cursed liar and provided the following link and quote as counterevidence:
"You have studied and come to understand the complement of this concept.
You created mathematical models which are used for constructing functional MRI
devices, by which now even separate nerve strands can now be made visible in
the body, thanks to your work."
I
put a bit of effort into my response (tinged with an element of anti-quantum
mystic grumpiness) so I’ll share it with you:
-------------------
Syamsu,
Where
to start?
Ok,
firstly this is a useless reference because it does not support your claim, i.e. that Schempp developed the fMRI (expressed when you asked in a previous post "How
can anybody accept the machine Schempp produced, but reject the basic theory
Schempp used to produce the machine, as pseudoscience?") The quote only claims
that Schempp has created mathematical models that "are used for
constructing functional MRI devices". At best he may have contributed to
the improvement of fMRIs.
Secondly,
the nature of the quote makes it useless. It's taken from an open letter to
Professor Schempp, inviting him to contribute to a book "Science of
Life". There is no indication that Schempp has responded.
The
only person from the list of people Otto von Oddball has invited to contribute
whose name I recognise is Matti Pikanen and that's only because I've had a
similar discussion to this about his TGD theory. It's interesting to note the
comment on the page that lists Matti's work: "These materials are made
available online because TGD publications are not yet accepted in so-called ‘respected’
physics journals."
A search of Matti's eye-strainingwebsite indicated that he is
actually linked to Science of Life. For
example Matti makes reference to a document on Crop Circles ... yes, that's right,
he's talking about crop circles being "messages providing biological
information (including genetic codes) about some unknown life forms". As a
keen watcher of the television show QI, I've seen some of the guys who have created a number of these crop
circles as a bit of a lark, including one with a QI logo.
No
wonder, if Walter Schempp is a half-way reputable scientist, that he wants
nothing to do with Science of Life.
Finally,
as I've already presaged, the website from which you've taken a quote that
doesn't support your claim (and would be useless even if it seemed to do so) is
hardly reputable. It's a treasure trove of dead ends, there's no indication
that "Science of Life" is linked to any reputable academic body, he
talks about a Science of Life Symposium in 2011 that never happened and when
you look at Otto von Oddball's writings, one quickly sees that there's
something seriously wrong. For example, look at this article on something close
to your heart "Freedom of Choice" - I'll post a bit here
so people can see without having to soil themselves by visiting the site:
Freedom of choice is a
change in dimensional organisation.
This can be represented by
Dimensional Operators.
The Vortex is a well known
Dimensional Operator.
A vortex unifies Point,
Line, Plane and Volume.
Although we can define this,
we cannot describe this.
The reason is that
Dimensional Operations involve involvement.
In changing our involvement,
we also change the Dimensions.
This requires a notation
addressing multiple logic.
Presently, scientific
notation offers this option.
Classical, Relativistic,
Probabilistic and Unified theories complement each other.
Each pertains to a different
mode, degree, in participation in creation.
The shift from one theory to
another is executed by a scientist, using choice.
In changing our involvement,
we change our participation in creation.
At the same time, we change
our realisation in/of/for creation.
But we also create a
realisation of change.
We need to realise that WE
create that change.
The realisation of creation
of change is known as awareness.
The realisation of change of
creation is known as consciousness.
The realisation of
consciousness of change in creation is called life.
The realisation of awareness
of change in creation is response-ability.
The
rant just keeps going. Pretty much the whole thing (and
the text on other pages) is written in four line blank verse.
In
sooth I do know why it makes me sad, Syamsu, but a quote from this website
unwisely ripped does not me a liar make. (Thanks and apologies to Shakespeare.)
Your
challenge now, Mr Syamsu, is to produce authoritative evidence that Schempp
supports a theory that even remotely supports your creationwiki definition of
free will and that he applied that theory in the development of the fMRI.
Please
note that I am not ridiculing Professor Schempp, I'm ridiculing your misuse of
Professor Schempp's work (and the misuse by other mystics). Unless of course,
Professor Schempp is a willing participant in this nonsense, in which case I'll
ridicule him too, but so far there's no real evidence that he is, other than
his name appearing at the quantrek.com site (a site dedicated to what appears
to be quantum nonsense).
-----------------------
My
expectations with regard to a response were not high and Syamsu managed to live down to them.
----------------------
I
just realised that I left out one of my longer attempts to get a cogent response
from Syamsu (slightly edited):
Ok, if the only definition
of free will you will accept is that which is closely linked to a peculiar
fantasy regarding the origins of the universe, then of course you're going to
find that atheists don't think much of "free will". I don't think
that atheists are attacking the "common concept of free will", nor do I think that your definition is anywhere close to the common conception of
"free will" (except in the sense that it is "base" or
"simple", as in "simple-minded"). I think you'll find that
most atheists will just ignore it, because it's silly. I will do you the
honour, however, of trying to take you seriously.
You seem to think that
atheists, and others who disagree with your "common concept of free will"
are ignorant of or don't understand how choosing works. This is a curious
claim.
Let me try to give a real
example of what goes on inside the mind of real live atheist.
Earlier today I was playing
a computer game, Need for Speed. One could say that I chose to play it. I
certainly did choose to purchase the game, from a range of many other options
(so I made "neopolitan owns a copy of Need for Speed" the present, in accordance with your creationist
definition of free will).
However, I'm a bit of an achievement junkie, so I
have become conditioned to play this game (and games like it) for the thrill I
get from, for example, learning how a particular car handles and using it to
beat one of the harder races. A win, particularly if it required some effort,
releases a rush of endorphins and it is often the case that I "choose" to immediately
start a new race after a sweet victory. But do I really choose?
Sometimes it
doesn't feel like it. Sometimes I know that I should be doing something else,
and I might have previously thought "This has to be the last race, then I really
must go and see what else Syamsu has written", but I nevertheless find
myself clicking on the right combination of buttons to start a new race anyway.
Even within the race
scenario, my "choices" are not entirely my own. While there's some
fiddling going on with the computer program with regards to the steering (I
suspect that the game cheats and makes me drive into walls at the most
inconvenient times... until it takes pity on me after a few soul destroying failed attempts), but there is also some autonomous control on my part.
For
example, taking a hint from something that the cricketer Don Bradman used to
say, I adopted the principle of not looking at cars and structures that I
needed to drive past but rather I looked at the gaps that I needed to drive through. As a consequence I found that I crashed into such obstructions far less frequently. I
didn't previously "choose" to crash into civilian traffic, or into annoyingly
placed buildings, but the simple act of not focussing on them seemed to result in me hitting
them less often.
With regard to that element of my experience, I didn't feel
like I had much free will at all - I was responding at an unconscious level and
when I tried to exert a free will of a kind by controlling my driving in order
to avoid obstructions, it actually brought about what I didn't want (ie
crashing into those obstructions at high speed).
Anyway, I eventually did
stop playing the game to take my dogs for a walk.
Now, was that my choice? Was
it a free choice? It certainly felt like it, more so than my compulsion to keep
playing, but really, I was just responding to a more subtle mix of stimuli and
motivations.
One section of my brain wanted more endorphins in the quick rush
from winning a race, while another wanted the slower release of endorphins and
health benefit of a walk, plus there was an avoidance of the guilt that would have
ensued if I had failed to walk my poor dogs. But walking the dogs is something
that has been foisted on me by my earlier self (the one who bought the dogs in
the first place), and really I only get a little window of choice in respect to
exactly when I walk. I further get a bit of a choice as to where I walk, limited
by the distance we walk and the weather, and where we walked the day before,
and so on. In reality, I just follow a pattern, if I remember to do so.
Now, Syamsu thinks that I don't know
about making choices, but with regard to the walk, I made a whole host of
choices ... when to walk, where to walk, what to wear when I walked, what music
to listen to while I walked, who to stop and talk to while out walking, who to
ignore and hurry past, when to stop to let traffic past, when to walk across the road, when to
check my phone for messages, when to scratch my nose and so on. I managed to do
all of this, despite being an atheist (or more specifically a non-theist)!
Each one of these choices
(choosings?) presented me with alternative options, and I acted to make one of
those options become the present (they became "the present" at the time, sadly they are now all
in the past, except for my ongoing health resulting from the walk and the
relative happiness of my dogs). So, in in the Syamsu world, was I exercising
"free will" as he defines it, or was I somehow getting it wrong? If
so, could Syamsu explain how I was getting it wrong.
Please note that it is
possible to scientifically explain all of my behaviour as described above (even my suicidal crashes during the game),
none of it is particularly mystical. I'm not seeking therapy with respect to
it, I just want Syamsu to explain how this "choosing" thing is
differently to the choosing that I've been doing pretty much every day of my
life.
Syamsu's response? Well, he
only responded to the first paragraph, with this:
That's great but taking the
common concept seriously means to disregard all other concepts. Go ahead, apply
the common concept.
