Free will is an illusion, biologist says
physorg.com
physorg.com
"Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.
It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
In fact if you use your imagination, you can come up with scenarios in which you don't know what your future choice will be, but it clearly doesn't feel like a free choice. E.g. if you say "I will choose to get a coffee if I roll the die and the number is 3 or above, or a tea otherwise."
The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence, "it feels like my choices are not determined in advance".
"If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be."
You expect to know what your choice will be only when you choose it. That equals the feeling of "freedom of choice".
>The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence
It doesn't explain it, it just asserts it. There is no reason why a lack of foreknowledge about your future decisions should make you feel as if you have free choice. It could just as well make you feel like you're bobbing around at random in the causal flux.
>but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff
Actually, I'm not sure that I know any of those things (it might help if one of those terms actually meant something).
Can you tell me why you think it doesn't? You think I was playing word games. I think I was cleanly picking a concept apart into fundamentals and relating my definition to each piece.
I assert that free choice means
1. you make purposeful choices
2. your choices don't feel like they are definite until you choose them
and that I have sufficiently shown why each of these relates to the definition I gave.
"it might help if one of those terms actually meant something"
They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
You were picking a particular stipulated definition apart, but the definition in question doesn't correspond to the concept of "free will" or "free choice" that people actually have. Playing around with definitions like this doesn't address any important issue.
Tthere is no sense in which (1) and (2) explain our sense of freedom of choice. You can perfectly well imagine that even if both (1) and (2) were true, you might nonetheless have no sense of free will. Even if you don't know what you future decisions will be, you can still feel like a "cog in the machine" with no power to act of your own volition. In fact, I sometimes really do feel like this. For example, if you've ever been extremely angry, you've probably had the feeling of not knowing exactly what you're going to do next, but nonetheless feeling that you have very little control over your actions.
>They are all very clear AI terminology except value fulfilment, which should be self evident.
Really? If I google for "value fulfillment payoff", the only result is a link to these posts. I'm know what the individual words mean, but I find the phrase a little baffling.
So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.
But those differences would have nothing to do with human will. They would be random, or, more precisely, non-deterministic (per definition, as you can't measure them). So, having a non-deterministic free will is like having no free will at all.
Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)
The alternative interpretation is that all particles in the universe have free will. ;)
But maybe if we could follow one particle in its everyday life, we see how it exercises its free will?
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Math_...
So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.
You are right about the definition but wrong about your conclusion. It is impossible to measure 2 brains and be sure they are physically identical.
But this does not mean 2 brains cannot be physically identical.
Free will would be non-deterministic, by definition.
Revised conclusion: We have as much free will as our particles.
Still no fate, though ;)
If you don't have free will, you still respond to stimuli. So instead of punishing someone for willful action, you subject them to stimuli.
I just can't view other people as black boxes who "respond to stimuli", because that's incompatible with any kind of moral or human outlook on the world. After all, I don't think of myself as a black box who responds to stimuli. And how can I be a truly moral person if I think others are fundamentally different from me?
I have a couple responses regarding complex machines and responsibility. Firstly, as to whether or not we are complex machines, the fact that you don't want to think of yourself as a black box or a very complex machine is somewhat tangential to the issue. If we both agree that there is some sort of objective reality outside of ourselves than either we are complex machines (materialism) or not (dualism? please forgive me if I am putting words in your mouth) and the way we feel about it does not change that fact (whatever it actually is). My point here is just to be cautious about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis just because of the way it feels.
But as for responsibility, even if we were to suppose that we were "merely" complex machines, I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions. Contemplating root causes beyond that level is problematic no matter how you view the universe--is there a devil that causes one to sin or does it depend on the initial state of the universe?
In my personal opinion, the only domains that materialism remains poor at explaining are free will and qualia. For free will I can hand-wave and assert that free will is an illusion which our brain provides us with because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps in helping us decipher when actions arise from within the individual or from within the environment. For qualia I yet have no explanation. :)
We can do that, but it's arguably treating people as means rather than ends. As I said, I don't view myself as merely a bundle of state, and it therefore seems somewhat immoral to treat others as if they were just bundles of state. It's kind of fundamental to a moral view of the world to believe that you are no more or less a person than any other person. So unless I can really persuade myself that I myself am just an automaton of some sort, I'm not sure I can deny free will and nonetheless maintain a satisfactory moral outlook.
It would definitely be weird for one to have free will and everyone else not to, and I am certainly not making that claim. However, if you believe that one can behave morally with respect to dolphins, cockroaches or the environment--and most people would agree that some or all of the members of that set are mere bundles of state and/or lack free will--then it seems that one should be able to act morally with respect to a bundle of state person, too.
What's more, your beliefs about free will get integrated into the algorithm as well; someone who believes that they are not responsible for their actions will behave quite differently than someone who believes they are capable of choosing. Like many human ideas, free will is a necessary (or at least, useful) illusion.
What the article essentially says is that our brain is nothing but a CPU, programmed over millions of years by natural evolution in a way that it gained all kinds of responses to multitude of various inputs (our 5 senses) in all kinds of combinations, self-improving learning algorithm, and that illusion of consciousness emerged as a by-product of this complex system. Pretty interesting what exact data-structure/algorithm/etc caused this peculiar side effect.
It could have something todo with the observation that our brain doesn't need to be whole in order to have consciousness. In different types of physical brain damage, even major ones, a human was able to remain conscious. Same could happen with the other part of brain damaged, which was healthy in another example. So I'm thinking - maybe our the sense of conscoiousness is like a potential difference which makes electrical current flow through the wire - you need to have multiple parts of brain with potential difference to create an illusion of consciousness. This is pretty vague but I like this concept - may be onto something. Consciousness does feel a lot like different parts of brain interacting, or one part /observing/ another and reacting to it just like it'd be reacting to the outside world.
Meh.
If you hold a prior belief that the physical world is all there is (or that physical explanations are the only valid explanations, which the physical sciences take as their starting point), you can come up with endless circular rationalizations of materialism.
This, at least, is the attitude that many people have to ghosts, gods, and werewolves.
This is why scientists make bad philosophers. They do not acknowledge the boundaries of their philosophy.
Science is an extremely powerful and well-proven set of tools for learning about the natural world. Scientism is a crock of baloney.
You would think the belief in free will, or its absence, becomes a feedback mechanism in human behavior. How many different ways can that seed be planted? Why does the belief/disbelief amplitude vary among individuals? Is the belief/disbelief meme just another meme that's been around a long time, and affects us far less than we believe? I once knew a successful Indian woman who completely believed in fate, which surprised me because with all her energy and drive I thought she was living her life as a free willer.
When I see a person who grew up in a wonderful environment with presumably good genetics, judge and condemn someone who did not, I wonder how they justify their superiority. It's as if they believe that, if they were that person, they would make better choices and do better things with their life. My question is, if you were that person, with exactly the same genetics and environment, then wouldn't you, by definition, BE that person and live your life in exactly the same way?
I suspect their answer would eventually come down to something about a "soul" which, even if it exists, would still be something that you were born with and thus completely out of your control. So, again, I would ask how they deserve their superiority, especially if they don't go for the soul argument.
I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?
I'd say it's just luck, but I can see some people using that as an excuse to never do the right thing. "I was born this way so that's how I'm going to be." I could probably argue with myself for hours about this kind of stuff.
I'd personally go with "I deserve it because I was so awesome in this life."
http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech
My favorite line in the paper, cogito ergo sum should be cogito ergo eram :)
It's all Chu spaces -- enjoy!
Would anyone take seriously an article like "Phagocytosis is a myth, philosopher says"?
There are no new ideas, just new implementations.
The you that lifts your arm and the you which feels like it decided to lift your arm are on different schedules.
I have never seen evidence of such a machine, so I don't think you can prove it either way. I like to believe whichever theory seems to benefit me most at the time.
I'm curious about your "I like to believe" stance. Are you saying you'll ignore any evidence for any theory if you don't think the theory benefits you more than another theory, even if your theory has been shown to be wrong?
Now whether or not I was programmed by the universe to make that decision that way or not, from the outside there is no way a universal observer could determine what eventual choice I would make. It easily passes the duck test as being free will.