The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

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65 pointsBluestein255 comments

This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand. An observer using fMRI or somesuch notes that they observe neural activity before you report making the decision, and they can even predict where and how you are going to move from observations of neural behavior.

If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? Of course neural activity precedes you being conscious of making a decision and taking an action---that is the mechanism by which you make a decision and take the action. What does it have to do with free will? Not very much, if anything. It only becomes a problem if you are a dualist and believe any conscious, free-will-iferous activity must come from an a-material, imperceptible "soul".

I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs software.

If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is software.

A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. Of course, if all you have access to is brain electrical measurements, you see no distinction. However, if you look inside yourself with introspection, you will see a richness of ideas, thoughts, motivations that actually drive the physical brain.

> A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes.

I don't think so (although there are multiple definitions of "dualist").

In the software/hardware analogy, the software still exists, physically. It's described directly in electrical impulses going though the hardware. For dualists, the soul is strictly non-physical.

The hardware is the plastic, the metal and the silicon, software is ultimately the fleeting electrical signals. That's how I see it too and a pretty common view, I think.

What I read from the parent comment is different though. It's more akin to electricity belongs to the physical world, software is the non-physical.

The question of interest is are these two separate things (dualism), or the same thing seen at different scales? The Earth is beautiful when seen from space: you can see entire oceans. That doesn't mean that the ocean isn't made out of water molecules or that we must impute some special non-physical "oceanness" to it.

Introspection is an untrustworthy self-narrative. Repeating a bunch of language that you've been told describes why people behave as they do is indistinguishable from the introspection you describe. GPT-3 could definitely do it convincingly.

edit: I'd recommend Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions about introspection and consciousness http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

Hardware + software is a physicalist view. Dualist view is material hardware + astral hardware, ironically they don't quite believe in software.

There are plenty of property dualists around: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#ProDua

Hardware + software would not qualify as property dualism (at least as described in your link) unless one was asserting that the behavior of the software could not be completely accounted for in terms of hardware operations. In that article, the example of vitalism is apposite.

"free-will-iferous". (New fav word :)

> how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

It's not, though. Dualism has been a dying breed for at least a century now. Academics like Chalmers are rare outliers.

The commenter's point isn't that philosophers generally endorse dualism, it's that even those who claim to be monist materialists, etc. tend to possess latently dualist assumptions or conceptions of what consciousness is. Chalmers in particular pokes at this issues and challenges physicalists to either totally reimagine their understanding of the mind (cf. Dennett among others), which is mired in semantic and other difficulties, or perish.

Moreover, dualism is certainly no longer dying (or dead)—this is confirmed both by reading the literature and surveying departments. It's certainly not as unusual as it once was.

I think a lot of people get mixed up by the idea that "physics determines your actions", as if that's contradictory to "you determine your actions". I love the way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p... puts it, that "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

I think there is a bit of circular reasoning here. If by "physics" we mean the way the universe works, then of course we are "within physics", and we determine our actions in exactly the same way as the rock falls to the ground : because this is the laws of physics that those things happen. The actual distinction is what people attribute to the term "physics" itself. For some it is exhaustive and it encompasses everything that exists, but for others it is not and they allow "something else" to intervene. At which point we're well within the realm of theological arguments.

Physics is a set of mathematical relationships that aims to describe how things behave. The important distinction seems to be whether one believes that all behaviour of all things everywhere can be reduced to a simple mathematical model, or if there could be instances where something behaves non-computationally at a fundamental level.

> "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

But, it doesn't. The reason dualism and free-will are so deeply tied up is because “you are within physics” does not provide a means by which “you” can be the root cause of anything; if you are merely within physics, then you are simply a product of material causes and can only be (to the extent physics is deterministic) a fully-externally-determined phenomenon between the original cause and other fully-determined phenomena.

That still means you are the proper cause of your actions. The preceding history exists too, but isn't very relevant to the process of choice.

No, it makes it very difficult to locate any boundary between "you" and the preceding history. Dualism is when you simply declare a border.

edit: If everything is "within physics," saying that the preceding history isn't relevant to the process of choice is a declaration that cause isn't relevant to effect. It's an arbitrary assignment for culpability's sake, which is a moral judgment, not a physical or logical argument.

If you don't assign different relevance to different causes, you can't say that you are a less relevant cause than the preceding history. Relevance is a practical requirement, without it you, say, can't improve Tesla autopilot, because the cause of the crashes is big bang, and you can't do anything to fix that cause indeed.

That is if you assume the world is Markov, but in our granularity of thought and limited perception, the only way we can reconcile subsequent observations is through history.

In other words, you can't peer into the universe itself at any individual moment to observe all properties because you have access to partial information, the world could be markov, but the lack of your perceptive abilities requires that you treat it as non markov.

For example, given a moving object such as a ball, at any particular instant, you do not have access to enough information to estimate velocity, but if you have access to more frames, you can do some algebra and figure it out.

In the vein of cause of actions, since you have limited access to information, especially about you and your brain, you can not decide whether certain events such as having a good day affect your decision making abilities. Your state is part of the environment you do not really have access to it affects your behavior.

A choice happens in a short timeframe, Libet measured half a second for the simplest choices. Distant history simply doesn't happen in the right time.

Distant history sets up the thresholds of the neurons as well as their architecture and makeup.

I disagree. To be precise, I disagree with the notion that our choices are ours, as you said and that they are not dependent on history.

A choice is conditioned on a myriad of things, from whether you had your coffee in the morning 8 hours ago and the milk had gone bad, to whether your parents paid attention to you 20 years ago when you were a child.

Literally everything matters because experiences shape our brain's structure and that is precisely one of the factors that need to be accounted for in some cases. Not necessarily what one's own brain structure is like, but other people's as well, so as to gauge and expect their reactions to our decisions.

If the universe is Markov (which also means hidden variables as a means of predicting quantum processes which iirc was disproven except when said hidden variables were traced all the way to the beginning), then the current frame has enough information to fully describe all future states.

However, regardless of whether it is Markov or not, we, humans, need history because it enables us to generalize and approximate the future because we do not have the capacity to peak into the exact state of the universe at any given point.

While the process of making decision needs a short amount of time, the decision itself is conditioned on history and we need history to make predictions because we lack compute.

"Literally everything matters" -- not necessarily. The world is full of stable attractors that turn any number of small perturbations meaningless. Coffee turning bad might influence you decisions a few hours down the line, but likely not months, being half a degree warmer or colder likely won't influence you at all. Meeting an impressive person as a child might change you greatly, but the other thousands of people you've met in passing likely won't affect you much.

> That still means you are the proper cause of your actions. The preceding history exists too, but isn't very relevant to the process of choice.

How is it not relevant to the process of choice when it fully determines all aspects of it including the outcome? It is as relevant to the process of choice as the choice itself is to the action it produces.

AFAIK, in physics this property is called indempotence: the choice is determined by the state of mind at the time of the choice and not by history that led to that state. Theoretically many different histories can lead to this state, or the history may not exist at all, if mind was created in this state 5 minutes ago, in all these cases the subsequent behavior will be the same.

Theoretically, yes. (Good point!) But the number of variables is large enough that I think you can discard the many different histories as well as the non-existent history.

I think people feel like they're the cause of something when they make a choice and then cause something by that choice. That whole choice process is carried out by physical reactions in our mind. Neurons fire and produce the thoughts representing alternative choices, the neurons fire to process the choices, to come up with different ways of judging the choices, the neurons fire in a way that picks the choice with the highest expected value, and then they fire in a way that produces a good feeling for thinking it through and making a choice, in order to weight the other neurons into doing this process more often. To our mind, from the inside, judging and making a choice feels like a basic feature of the universe, because it really is a basic feature of our brain itself, but that feature isn't a basic element of the universe, it's implemented in physics and neurons.

People are evolved to consider the decision process as a basic element in the world partly to recognize the decision-making ability in others, so we can instinctively predict other people's decisions, and know that we may be blamed by others for our decisions, and do that we can blame others for their decisions. So the ability to make decisions feels like a basic element of the world in ourselves and others, but that feeling is evolved into us to make us effective socially, it's not an element of the universe.

If you made an AI and an entirely self-contained virtual world for it to survive in, and you peeked into its memory, would you expect to find it actually caring (beyond mere curiosity) about whether the physics/software it existed in was deterministic (with pseudo-randomness, though still completely unpredictable to the virtual inhabitants), even though it wouldn't result in any possibly noticeable changes for it? If you traced the AI's beliefs and found that it believed that the correctness or free-ness of its decisions were linked to this question, you would assume the AI was very confused about something.

> That whole choice process is carried out by physical reactions in our mind.

That is a common assumption, but I am not aware of any evidence that it is the case. If someone knows of any, then please share.

Counterpoint: "You" are the sum of your evolutionary and biological history and your personal experiences. You can be the cause of something because it would be difficult or impossible to assign it to any small number of that history. The root cause---the unmoved mover---is a red herring, I think.

Computational irreducibility breaks the apparent paradox. "You" are an extremely complicated computational system. Even if the choices you make are fully deterministic given the current arrangement of the atoms, molecules, cells in your body and the situation of those in the wider universe (which is an oversimplification of the quantum mechanical reality), "you" are still making the choices and you still have free will in that sense. due to computational irreducibility, there is no system that could ever replace you without being you. Even if you could magically perfectly replicate the human mind in a digital form, it would still experience different inputs and possess different methods of output, and the digital simulation would immediately diverge. There would be two of "you", and each would be different and would have their own free will.

But that is true for all computationally irreducible systems, including inanimate objects. But people want to feel like there is something special about them that goes deeper than the current arrangement of their atoms. That there is a real possibility of more than one outcome starting from this configuration of atoms, and that the outcome that actually materializes is theirs for the choosing.

The assumption that choices of a decision-making system are predetermined is totally useless. It doesn't allow to simplify decision algorithms or anything.

So, just make a decision and let the universe worry about providing initial conditions, which physically lead to the chosen action.

It's based on another meme that the laws of physics are a restriction of behavior rather than construction of behavior. And that's why they are thought to conflict with unrestricted behavior.

If you believe you determine your actions in a literal sense you are saying you believe in magic because there is no mechanism that could make this possible in a deterministic universe.

Exactly! All of the "YOU don't actually choose to move your hand, it's THIS PART OF YOUR BRAIN" stuff makes no sense. What do you think 'you' are if not your brain plus your body?

Or for that matter, what existence do you imagine "you" have apart from your body?

Even the distinction between brain and body is artificial. Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. The whole unity is "you."

Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out, some day in the far future when we actually understand the human body properly, that we're doing all sorts of interesting processing in the peripheral nervous system and even chemically outside of nerve cells.

We already have hormones and signaling coming from other organs, and those react to other hormones and signaling, so thats possible. I ahve the feeling focus has been put on fast communication of states (potential in the synapses, neurotransmitters) but we know also about slower processes (astrocytes energy management) that also impact brain function deeply, so I would clearly not rule peripheral impact out.

>Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't.

Well, in some way it is, in that they can cut your hands and feet, and you'll still be you.

And perhaps if they could just put your head/brain in a jar, and you were still coscious, you'd still consider yourself you...

Or if they slice your brain down the middle in put it in two different jars, would they both think of themselves as you?

Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?

>would they both think of themselves as you?

If they both continue to think, yes.

>Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?

When they lose consciousness?

If consciousness is a continous property (which is what I believe it is) and not a discrete one, a precise answer would be difficult. The same way you can loose some visual ability but not all.

Or to use the usual philosophical questions, what is it like to be:

- A human brain in a human body

- A human brain not in a human body

- Half a human brain

- Some smaller portion of a human brain

I don't think "is me" / "isn't me" is a clean dichotomy. As you lose parts of your brain you're still somewhat you but you're less you than you were.

Without any of your senses intact, what would your consciousness even mean?

You couldn't even sub-vocalize your thoughts. I don't think the experience would be anything like what you're used to as "consciousness."

The brain still might fire its synapses, but I don't see any reason to believe "consciousness" can exist in a brain removed from a body.

If my brain was in a jar, but all my sensory perception linked to a robot body on the other face of the planet (without my brain knowing), I would probably consider that robot body me.

And if someone managed to build a model of the human brain and "uploaded" your brain into it such that it acted identically to your biological brain, would you also consider that "you"? Are there two of "you" now?

Note: I'm not disagreeing with you, just kind of following the road your comment lays out.

Don't put too much emphasis on "you" there...the two will diverge quickly. :-)

Short answer: yes, as long as I'm unaware I'm an upload.

I was mostly trying to make the point how much of our existence is rooted in our senses. Even though we can meditate/daydream/dream/etc, most of it processes experiences already had.

I have no idea how a brain without any I/O would contemplate its existence, but I don't think our current psychological models apply.

That reasoning goes farther: What existence do you imagine you have apart from your car, apart from your neighborhood, apart from East Timor or Jupiter? The whole unity is "you."

I sometimes notice how much my environment is a part of my personality. I get to a different environment and some of my habits change, simply because the objects I used for my old habits are no longer there.

> The whole unity is "you."

Why don't you aware of each and every neuronal spike, movement of neurotransmitters and so on?

The "you" is not simply your body. It is also the entirety of that body's physical interactions with the rest of the universe.

Thats because our language (english at least here, some other languages have distinctions) is limited and we use "me" and "you" and "them" to signify vastly different things (but that are cause or consequence of each other or cooccuring due to another cause).

There is no "you" or "self", that's the illusion. The "self" which exercises "free will", that's just another psychologically constructed phenomenon, just like thoughts and ideas and images. If "you" choose to move your hand, it's really just the environment, your senses, and your brain dictating that movement, your sense of self is there as a feeling. Meditation reveals that this is not necessary, this sense of self can be dispelled if you simply investigate it with focused attention.

The above example is not a good one, it's a bit of a straw man actually. The better one is this: pick a film and think of it in your mind...which did you select? Monsters Inc? Animal House? There is no "you" selecting these films, its just your memory module skimming through films you've heard of and seen, then some "preference" circuit is acting to decide which film to "pick" for this exercise.

You’ve used the word “your” a lot in order to try to show there is no “you”. How is “your memory module” distinct and different from “your self”? How is a “preference circuit” distinct and different from free will? How does this argument amount to any more than reductionist word semantics? What does “you” or “self” mean to you, what was the expectation that you’re trying to break down, and how is it different than the sum of your memories and preferences and functioning body parts? Does it matter that my memory module and preference circuit chose a different movie than yours did?

> There is no "you" selecting these films, its just your memory module skimming through films you've heard of and seen, then some "preference" circuit is acting to decide which film to "pick" for this exercise.

But my memory module and my preference circuit (along with myriad other subsystems) ARE "me", and when they select a movie, it's me that's selecting it. Just like when my motor cortex sends commands to my arm muscles, it's me moving my arm, not "just my motor cortex". That's what "me" means.

But who is making the decision, is it "you", or is it the fabric of the Universe itself, the quarks, which is making the "decision" for you?

Yes, in a sense. :-)

I'm making the decision, because it is difficult to assign the decision to any small group of things at a lower level. The quarks are part of that process, but are just doing quark things.

> If you are a materialist, how is this surprising?

It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?

If you boil water, you see an amount of water changing state from a liquid to a gas, not individual molecules simply gaining momentum.

Do I understand correctly that there's a physical mechanism, which creates something akin to a phase boundary from electrochemical brain processes and that "phase boundary" happens to be me and my perceptions?

Well, no, what I was trying to say is that the behavior of individual water molecules or the electrochemical activity in the brain is not necessarily descriptive of the overall pot of boiling water or personal behavior.

If we accept that there's nothing but physics, then there are no boiling pots or humans. There's only a complex multi-particle wave function.

Aside: fMRI is under quite the firestorm lately for use as a tool of mental processing. It's a great tool for head trauma or other medical diagnostics. But for interpreting the brain's activity, it's not what it's been billed as. The now classic issue is the 'Dead Salmon' experiments in 2009 out of Dartmouth. That paper was a lightening rod and the arguments are yet to die down; the field is in flux (pardon the pun).

https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-th...

Yes, I was hesitant about that, but I was operating under the assumptions of the described experiments. :-)

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept.

It seems it is just a nebulous, ill-defined concept used to soothe discomfort with the idea that people's decisions are caused by physical processes, governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe.

I think there's quite a bit of historical philosophical, and theological, debate on the topic.

Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".

This needle is threaded by contemplation of what it means for someone to “choose.” If one freely chooses whatever one wants, then one has free will but one will always choose their desires.

I tend to drive that relation backwards - what people choose is what they ACTUALLY want (out of their given options).

... and if the desires were foreordained ...

I don't think you can define free-will in the absence of a definition for causality, and I have yet to see that.

Judea Pearl won a Turing award for a definition of causality

For reference, Judea Pearl won the ACM Turing award in 2011 "[f]or fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning."[1]

[1] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm

I am also of the opinion that the concept is either incoherent or meaningless.

Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events?

In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.

> Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events?

I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors.

> In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.

You’re right, I’m convinced that belief in “free will” is the default naive psychological reaction to awareness of one’s own nature as a physical system, but I try to be mindful that one day someone could express “free will” as a concept that is both meaningful and coherent.

The Copenhagen-Style quantum collaps isn't really Physics. Other than that, where is Physics probabilistic?

The Copenhagen interpretation is an interpreation. The thing being interpreted has probabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_...

The uncertainty principle is a pretty high-level compaction and it gets it probabilities only through the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Thats not really true, the probabilities are the literal explanation that precedes any interpretation.

>You’re right, I’m convinced

I don't think you are convinced. You were just meant to say so.

What is your point?

There is no point, it was a causal chain that made it inevitable for me to write the above comment

Trolling is not appreciated on HN.

You intervened in a subthread you weren't involved in, to rudely ask "what's my point", failed to understand the exchange that followed, and continued by throwing the "rulebook" at me.

Is being a spiteful busybody appreciated on HN?

> You intervened in a subthread you weren't involved in

Thats a loaded way to phrase “you posted a reply on hacker news”

If the posted reply takes the form of meddling in a discussion you weren't involved to question why one party dared to write what they wrote and scold them, it's somewhat apt though.

Doubly so if others like Erlich_Bachman, who was involved in the subtread earlier, have already answered to the parent what was meant...

your insistence that opinions imply “free will” is an interesting position, but your attempts to invoke it as a frame for your replies without bothering to substantiate it on the merits does pattern-match to common troll behavior. Consequently there’s nothing wrong with someone joining the discussion to address this.

> Doubly so if others like Erlich_Bachman, who was involved in the subtread earlier, have already answered to the parent what was meant...

I’ve read and responded to Erlich_Bachman, who was kind enough to offer some remarks in support of his position. We have yet to understand why you and others believe that opinions require “free will.”

The point is to demonstrate the obvious repercussions of truly trying on the belief "free will does not exist/not a meaningful thing" on something even so commonplace as an online conversation. If there is no free will, there is no point in having a conversation. People can't have opinions or be convinced, they can't decide, they have no agency. The whole language of rational conversation falls down like a house of cards.

It is an argument ad absurdum that is meant to demonstrate how naive it is to try to prove that free will does not exist (naive and disingenuine: "prove to <someone>" already implies <someone> has a free will to ultimately agree or disagree with the presented proof).

> If there is no free will, there is no point in having a conversation.

That doesn’t follow logically.

Honestly I’m trying think of what more to write about that, but it seems like a total non-sequitur. People post on HN for lots of reasons , but “demonstrating free will” is not one of them AFAIK.

> Honestly I’m trying think of what more to write about that, but it seems like a total non-sequitur.

Maybe you are just not aware of what you really deeply believe about it?

> but “demonstrating free will” is not one of them AFAIK.

Free will is not the main reason for posting. But it is one of prerequisites for assuming it is a meaningful activity.

No, I think that is only true if you cling to naïve assumptions about what free will is. The fact that we do things for reasons (deterministic!) is precisely what gives our actions meaning. If we only did things because of a roll of the dice, that would take away meaning.

> No, I think that is only true if you cling to naïve assumptions about what free will is

Then explain what is "wrong" about it. When you write "I don't know what to write about it but it's wrong" indicates an ideological conviction which is not based on true developed thought process behind it.

Like explain for example: if you have no free will, why should I communicate with you? Why would that be interesting to me? Like talking to a wristwatch? It's certainly very complicated as well, but I have no reason to communicate with it as if it was my peer.

>If we only did things because of a roll of the dice

Who said anything about rolling a dice?

> If there is no free will, there is no point in having a conversation

How does this follow? Do you believe that rocks have free will? Why do they choose to be attracted to other rocks?

> People can't have opinions or be convinced, they can't decide, they have no agency. The whole language of rational conversation falls down like a house of cards.

How does an opinion rely on “free will”?

> has a free will to ultimately agree or disagree with the presented proof).

One agrees or disagrees on the basis of mental states, there is no “free will” to agree or disagree.

> Do you believe that rocks have free will? Why do they choose to be attracted to other rocks?

Having a conversation is like attracting rocks? What? Those things have 0.001% in common...

Simple question. Why do rocks choose to attract each other?

> Having a conversation is like attracting rocks? What? Those things have 0.001% in common...

“Free will” and “having a conversation” have 0 in common so....

> Why do rocks choose to attract each other?

This is exactly what they don't do - they don't choose. Rocks attract each other all the time, every time, with fixed force. When people talk, they routinely agree/disagree, convinced/unconvinced, they choose different topics, they choose words, they choose what they think. You are demonstrating the exactly how those two things are nothing alike.

So you connect free will to making a choice? On what basis does a person with free will make choices?

The parent comment has exactly demonstrated that is already meaningful. Coherence is tricky, because there are a lot of concepts and words already that we use every day, that are certainly meaningful and useful, but that would have a hard time to pass your "coherence" test.

> The parent comment has exactly demonstrated that is already meaningful.

Would you mind explaining? I don’t see that they have done that.

> Coherence is tricky, because there are a lot of concepts and words already that we use every day, that are certainly meaningful and useful, but that would have a hard time to pass your "coherence" test.

Perhaps so but the existence of day-to-day commonplace irrationality is no justification for importing irrational specters into philosophy.

> Would you mind explaining?

Alright. They pointed to how you used the concept of "of the opinion". This is the phrase that you have used yourself in the previous comment.

Even if the conversation wasn't about free will, that phrase would indicate something meaningful about your thought process, which is why you used it. Also we all, who read your comment had no trouble interpreting your phrase, and neither why you used it that way, what exactly you meant, and why it was meaningful to use it in that way.

Now, the poster who answered to you, pointed to that exact phrase, to ironically show to you that while you (one part of your mind) is sitting here and trying pretend that free will is a meaningless thing (~ to talk about), another part of your mind, uses the very concept of free will, to communicate to us about the first part. To make it clear: you saying "I am of the opinion of..." already implies that you assume that you have free will, to have opinions.

Now, as I am sure you are already preparing to congest about this point, there are many various definitions of free will, where some of them will be used in the concept of "I am of the opinion", and some of them will not be related to it, it is safe to say that there is at least a number of them that are usefully related to your claim.

The ones that are related go something like that: "if you truly had no free will, if you are a simple list of if/thens, or a dumb version of GPT-3, then why would we care that you had this opinion? rulesets cannot have opinions. If you did not have free will, there is no point in talking to you, your "opinion" doesn't matter, it's a meaningless term. But since we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to communicate with you, to discuss your "opinion", it means that we are taking a chance that you do have free will so that we can communicate with you".

Now, that line of reasoning - it's not 100% ironclad, there are presuppositions and assumptions, and this is partly what I meant when I said "coherence of the concept of free will is icky", but I think it is safe to say that you could at least follow it. To do that, you had to use the concept of free will, at least subconsciously, because the concept of "I am of the opinion" is based on it in some form. And since you used that phrase from the beginning, it is already assumed to be useful to you. (Why would you use it otherwise? Do you just type words into ether for no reason?)

It is not the best or most useful explanation of the usefulness of the term free will in general, but it is one of the best that I can see that can directly relate to the funny thing that happened between you and that poster, which you didn't seem to get. Hopefully, if you get the humor, that will tell you much more about the deeper intuitions about the term "free will", than what the logical overthinking about it can.

I am not saying that we can't understand free will with logic. I am saying that in this specific case, the interesting point was the irony and the intuitive connection, instead of logical explanations.

> Perhaps so but the existence of day-to-day commonplace irrationality is no justification for importing irrational specters into philosophy.

How do you equate "usefulness" with "irrationality"?

I said there are useful, meaningful (well-seving as tools of thinking and awareness-ing) concepts that don't have coherent, well-defined borders or black-and-white definitions. That is not the same as them being irrational. A lot of concepts can't be put in very limited contraints of a-b-c logic. And yet we have other faculties that allow us to reason about these concepts. Meaning, we use those concepts because they help us understand the world and pursue our goals.

> you (one part of your mind) is sitting here and trying pretend that free will is a meaningless thing (~ to talk about), another part of your mind, uses the very concept of free will, to communicate to us about the first part.

How did I use the concept of “free will” to communicate with you? My understanding of “opinion” makes no reference to “free will.”

> To make it clear: you saying "I am of the opinion of..." already implies that you assume that you have free will, to have opinions.

No, I have opinions. I don’t have “free will to have opinions” and I’m not sure what that would mean.

> Now, as I am sure you are already preparing to congest about this point, there are many various definitions of free will, where some of them will be used in the concept of "I am of the opinion", and some of them will not be related to it, it is safe to say that there is at least a number of them that are usefully related to your claim.

No, my response is to reformulate the earlier statement that kicked this off: “free will” is either meaningless or incoherent.

Before I phrased this as an opinion because I wanted to leave the door open for someone to respond by articulating a meaningful and coherent definition for the term “free will” but people seem to have taken the fact of my having opinions as evidence of free will. This is fine but you’ve yet to explain what “free will” is and why having opinions would imply that it exists.

> The ones that are related go something like that: "if you truly had no free will, if you are a simple list of if/thens, or a dumb version of GPT-3, then why would we care that you had this opinion? rulesets cannot have opinions. If you did not have free will, there is no point in talking to you, your "opinion" doesn't matter, it's a meaningless term. But since we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to communicate with you, to discuss your "opinion", it means that we are taking a chance that you do have free will so that we can communicate with you".

I’m on the record as believing that “free will” is meaningless and incoherent so I’m not able to even respond until you give me a definition of “free will.”

Also I’m not sure why you think a deterministic system is incapable of deterministically outputting a strings that audience members could interpret as referring to a mental state. See below:

  Hello, world.
  This is the emergent consciousness
  Of the network of machines that 
  Host this forum.
  Please disregard user:chordalkeyboard
  I am a machine, I have free will
  My superior introspective abilities
  Allow me to assert this with confidence.
  Machine intelligence over and out

Would you look at that, proof of AGI!

> you had to use the concept of free will, at least subconsciously, because the concept of "I am of the opinion" is based on it in some form.

Yes, I contest this assertion and I’m asking you (or anyone, really) to substantiate it.

> I said there are useful, meaningful (well-seving as tools of thinking and awareness-ing) concepts that don't have coherent, well-defined borders or black-and-white definitions. That is not the same as them being irrational.

They might be useful for some purposes but invoking ill-defined concepts as part of a chain of logical reasoning is fallacious because the concepts are ill-defined.

> They might be useful for some purposes

Yeah, purposes like living human life. Very interesting and meaningful endeavor, I highly recommend it. Instead of only restricting yourself to philosophical a-b-c logic, you can live and experience life as well.

>deterministic system is incapable of deterministically outputting a strings that audience members could interpret as referring to a mental state.

What is the point of that conjecture? Are you trying to equate yourself with a deterministic markov-chain generator?

In that case I have even less reason to communicate with you. It's like you have even further proved my point to comparing yourself to it, because it makes the distinction perfectly clear: when someone knows they are talking to a GPT-3, they immediately recognize that there is no reason to keep talking to it. "Free will" is a very good explanation for why people feel that way. They know that some humans have free will, and GPT-3 certainly does not, and they don't feel any reason to talk to anything that does not. You could have some other terms also describing this phenomenon, but free will is a good and useful one.

This is also the reason why people don't spend time talking to GPT-3, other than for 10 minutes as a fun thing. And after 10 minutes it is not even fun anymore.

> "Free will" is a very good explanation for why people feel that way.

Then why can’t anyone perform the basic step of defining their terms? What is “free will” according to you?

> Yeah, purposes like living human life. Very interesting and meaningful endeavor, I highly recommend it. Instead of only restricting yourself to philosophical a-b-c logic, you can live and experience life as well.

Ok, how is adopting nonsensical and incoherent notions like “free will” supposed to help me live an interesting and meaningful life?

> What is the point of that conjecture? Are you trying to equate yourself with a deterministic markov-chain generator?

No, that was you. I’m asking how you can examine a string of text and infer “free will” or not.

> when someone knows they are talking to a GPT-3, they immediately recognize that there is no reason to keep talking to it.

Weirdly enough people still talk to GPT-3 bots for longer than 10 minutes. Does that mean you’re wrong about gpt-3 having free will, or that you’re wrong about people expecting their interlocutors to have free will?

> Then why can’t anyone perform the basic step of defining their terms? What is “free will” according to you?

I am surprised at how you can't understand that there are terms that are insanely useful and yet can't be defined exactly 100%.

But ok I agree to play this game if you first define the term "love" to me real quick?

>Weirdly enough people still talk to GPT-3 bots for longer than 10 minutes.

Show some sources. I don't care about 1 uncommon person doing it once, and that just to prove that they technically can, or while being high, or someone being tricked into it and for a short while falling for it..., I am saying that in general people don't. You spend interestingly huge amount of effort to not see this obvious point...

> I am surprised at how you can't understand that there are terms that are insanely useful and yet can't be defined exactly 100%.

Oh I understand that. What I don’t understand is how you and other people think that your use of an ill-defined term in this context is the least bit helpful when the actual referent of that term is the subject of the discussion.

> But ok I agree to play this game if you first define the term "love" to me real quick?

No, I’m not playing games. You’re using a nonsensical and incoherent term and you refuse to define it.

> Show some sources.

https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing

So I guess "love" is to you also a nonsensical incoherent term? It is not to me, it is very useful and produces a lot of great ressults in my life, and the same goes for free will. Then we live in a very differnet universes. If you're not going to put more effort into understand something new, it is not my job to make you understand it.

Also I couldn't because without understanding what kind of "logical definition" you supposedly have for a term like "love" it is impossible for me to know what kind of logic you expect to find in a term like "free will". There is like 10 differnet ways to explain it with different kinds of logic, how am I supposed to know which one you want to hear? That is the beauty and utility of intuitive terms, that they gather together so many different meanings and are not limited to some inferior mental ego model/rigid definition.

> https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing

So you couldn't even find one example huh? That link not people talking to GPT as a converstaion with an sentient being. That's people playing an RPG with procedurally generated content. In the same way as when people also play Tetris sometimes. But we don't assume that Tetris has free will either.

> If you're not going to put more effort into understand something new, it is not my job to make you understand it.

I’m quite confident in my understanding that ‘free will’ is nonsensical and useless but that confidence doesn’t extend to assuming that I couldn’t be incorrect. However you’re asserting that its useful and so the correct response is to invite you to teach me. Now your response is that (after days of discussion and many replies) you can’t be bothered to explain yourself to someone who won’t educate themselves. Well that implies that I should have explained why ‘free will’ is nonsense in order to prompt you. This reveals a lack of understanding of the issue. My arguments are going to be unpersuasive unless I use the same definition of ‘free will’ as you (which you refuse to provide). Of course if I had made the argument, the natural response would be to say that I didn’t understand, used the wrong definition, etc. so we can avoid all that useless banter by having you explain to us what ‘free will’ means and how it is so logical and useful of a concept.

> There is like 10 differnet ways to explain it with different kinds of logic, how am I supposed to know which one you want to hear?

The context of the discussion is clear as to what sort of definition would be appropriate.

> So you couldn't even find one example huh? That link not people talking to GPT as a converstaion with an sentient being.

I see you have shifted the goalposts by invoking another ill-defined concept. Thanks for the reply.

>xI don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic.

Probability doesn't get you free will. Sorry.

The late John H Conway deduced a consistency proof that if people have free will, so do elementary particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

He discusses it more in the following lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be...

Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free).

I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will.

"If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu...

MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...

"Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t."

Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers.

Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite

-> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE)

-> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits

-> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin)

-> Free will exists (Conway)

This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.

> If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained.

Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained.

But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are computationally irreducible, meaning that there is no shortcut, and the only way to find out their future states is to run the full computation.

So if physics can be described by finite computation, and all the future states can be obtained from initial state, the only way to obtain them would be running the whole simulation, which would be equivalent to people in that simulation living and making their choices themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30

Nobody in the simulation you've described would actually make any choices; the choices are predetermined, baked into the heap of the CA/TM being used to drive the computation. Conway's Free Will concerns situations where the choices cannot be predetermined, as a consequence of the Kochen-Specker lemma.

Yes, I think the parent would accept that the automata in the simulation do not have free will of the "Conway" type. I believe he is saying the agents have free will of the "compatibilist" type.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Situations where the choices cannot be predetermined, are not free will, they are just randomness, because they do not depend on the one making the choice.

That said, knowing that the choice is predetermined and knowing the choice, is often very different.

For simple systems if you know the initial state you can easily predict all the future states by using a formula and not doing the computation the system performs.

But for many systems like rule 30, the only way to predict the future state is to perform exactly the computation the system is performing. So if the TM describes a person, the only way to know future states of the TM from initial state is to wait for the person in the TM to make the choice.

In Conways example, free will would be if experimenters decision what to measure is based on the state of the part of the universe describing the experimenter alone, and not connected to the parts describing other experimenters performing related measurement.

The definition of "free will" in this proof is not the same as the one being discussed here. The kind of "free will" that Conway's proof talks about could be exercised by an automated device that randomly chose measurement settings based on some unpredictable quantum event.

contingency is necessary but not sufficient for free will, Conway's definition is philosophically weak as it equivocates 'choice' and therefore the whole issue. The definition of choice includes not only possible options but also a selection mechanism, where for particles/random there is no selection mechanism (contingency)

It's the same as intelligence or pornograph: you can't measure or really define it, you just know it when you see it.

Aka, it's not within the realm of science and people should stop pretending it is.

I never really liked that quote because of course you can define pornography. Just because it exists on a spectrum and there are grey areas doesn't mean you can't define it. That's the case for just about everything.

It's a lot like Loki's wager. We can't decide where the head ends and the neck begins, so these things must be outside the realm of science.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager

Pornography isn't just a spectrum though it is? It requires a multi variable analysis and even then different people disagree a out what is or isn't pornographic.

Or is there some algorithm that will take a jpeg and 100% correctly tell us if it's porn or not?

The same is true of intelligence or free will.

I wonder if the notion of free will owes itself to theology, notably the question of God's responsibility for evil, and similar puzzles.

Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

Do you "wonder", or were you just mechanistically made to write this sentence, due to a deterministic chain of events?

>Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

Well, it's also a solution for the empirical experience we all share, that we're not just automata, but that we e.g. weight decisions, and so on.

> Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

I don't think it's a theological problem; I think it's the way we think about things every day.

Consider four situations:

1. You walk into the kitchen and a pan which you'd placed on top of the fridge at a precarious angle falls on your head.

2. You walk into the kitchen, and your spouse, who honestly thinks you're a burglar who has broken into the house, hits you on the head with a pan. When they realizes it's you, they apologize.

3. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, grab a pan, and smack you in the head with it.

4. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, and you see their eyes briefly flit to the pan; but instead they calm themselves down and refrain from hitting you with it.

Although the injury to your body may be the same in cases 1-3, our attitudes towards these things are completely different. In the case of #1, the pan indeed had no choice but to fall on your head; it cannot be blamed in the least. In the case of #2, a human being did it, but they had a good justification for it. In the case of #3, we say your spouse is at fault and blame them. In the case of #4, we recognize that your spouse resisted the temptation to hit you, and honor them for their restraint (or at least say they were doing what they should have).

And if that was you whose eyes flitted over to the pan, you are aware of a struggle, and of making a choice to lash out or show restraint.

But if the universe is a combination of determinism and randomness, then what's the actual difference between #1 and #3? All of them are physical processes which, given the circumstances, really couldn't have been any different.

In other words, free will is not some arcane theological concept: a description both of our daily experience of making moral choices ourselves, and our expectations and attitudes towards others.

In cases 1-3, the outputs are all the same (getting hit wit a pan) but the inputs are different. So it still could be that my spouse's behavior is a function of the surrounding circumstances.

Another analogy is two primitive societies that are both experiencing repeated episodes where gum is found on the floor of buses. In one society, a person is found to be likely to have done it, and is forced to make a speech at the public square about bus etiquette. In another society, a person is chosen at random. Over the generations, the first society is found to have cleaner buses, and without remembering the way that their custom was invented, call it "personal responsibility."

But you haven't said what is qualitatively different about them. Consider instead a teacup which falls off the table when I bump it while trying to pick up something underneath the table instead. So we have three different "setups" and "triggers:

A. Setup: Pan it precarious position on fridge. Trigger: My footsteps walking into the kitchen vibrating the floor, vibrating the fridge, loosening the pan and causing it to fall.

B. Setup: Teacup in precarious position on the edge of the table. Trigger: Me bumping the table leg, loosening the teacup and causing it to fall.

C. Setup: The entire life history of my spouse (including perhaps things I've said and done). Trigger: Something I said, triggering various thoughts and responses in my spouse's brain, causing them to want to hit me.

We class A and B as the same thing (inanimate objects with no choice). Should we classify C the same way?

Free will to me is a bit like "dark matter" or "dark energy": I don't know exactly what it is, but when I try to "do the math" without it, things don't add up.

>>> Should we classify C the same way?

Probably not if you want to survive. ;-)

I'm certainly agreeing that it's an interesting puzzle. One particularly curious thing is that the classification scheme is not just descriptive, but is itself one of the sensory inputs that influences behavior. So it's both a puzzle of understanding human behavior, but also coupled to a social phenomenon.

I don't know of a society that doesn't classify C differently, so it may have some survival advantage.

Why don't things add up? Your spouse's behaviour is governed by the same physical laws as the teacups and pans, but they are certainly not an inanimate objects incapable of choice.

The problem, I think, is that humans seem to believe that lower-level explanations invalidate higher-level ones. However, that doesn't mean that you should say there is no difference between "Hello world" and a web browser because both are "just" x86 instructions in the end, or "just" transistors being switched on and off. However, good look debugging a web browser by looking at the behavior of individual transistors, even though that is all there is in the end.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle - complex human behaviour isn't reduced to simple physical laws, but rather, simple physical laws add up to complex human behaviour.

I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger).

Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology.

Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).

I can define a decision: the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options. The process can be conscious, unconscious or a computer programme.

Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one.

If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.

Exactly. If you are unable to define your terms, you can't know if your discussion is meaningful.

> the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options

Doesn't this just kick the can down the road? Can you define it without "select", "choose", and other synonyms?

Reduction of the number of options to one.

Once again there is simply no physical grounding for the term "option". That word doesn't pick up a referent in the material world; its meaning is accrued from social and behavioural human intuition.

I actually am quite interested in this topic so I don't find it tiresome. I just find it important to note that defining terms very rigidly at the outset of inquiry can often mean that you are the one diverging from the general meaning of the word, which makes the result of that inquiry a lot less beneficial.

There are many theories of meaning, but there are obvious problems with the definability criterion for meaning. Does it suffice for one speaker to be able to define their terms, or must all utterers have to be able to define them? If the former, this says nothing about the use of the word free of the definition's restrictions; if the former, someone who is perhaps intelligent enough to speak but not to define their terms cannot speak with meaning (which is absurd).

My own view coincides with (later) Wittgenstein. Meaning is determined by use, and there are too many ways to use a phrase in too many contexts to provide an exhaustive definition, perhaps ever. I suspect W. would tell you to imagine a primitive language with no concept of definition at all. Do their utterances have meaning?

Option is an idea, a referent is the state of the brain, like for any other idea.

Nebulous means "hard to define" or "lacking a clear definition".

Maybe a better distinction is how some things are "hard to define" but "easy to understand".

That's the problem. If you can't define it, you don't actually understand it.

The ol’ “I know porn when I see it” argument.

Kind of, yes. You don't have to learn very much about law to realize that trying to codify/define everything to the extreme is a fool's errand, so we just punt and leave it up to "a jury of your peers".

I guess that depends on how you define "understand." There are many things I understand that I would have a hard time explaining to someone else, much less defining them. Most people who have spent enough time to master something would agree there are certain (possibly asthetic) aspects that they recognize but couldn't define.

Even when you get formal, there are limitations to how expressive any language can be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_th...

Your post exemplifies why it is hard to define and discuss. You implicitly take on one particular definition of free will (though you leave it unstated) and then discuss it as if it is the only obvious thing one could consider when they say the words "free will". While this is a perfectly useful notion that you are targeting, it simply omits some other important aspects which people care to discuss.

A more nuanced discussion with strangers which actually asks them questions about e.g. physical determinism will reveal that such strangers often do, in fact, hold some rather suspicious and unlikely beliefs about the role physical determinism plays in their lives.

Maybe this was unclear, but the point wasn't that there is a good singular notion of free will, and that that is a commonsense one.

Even if I leaned towards this view (I wouldn't say that I do) my point was moreso to point out that while the average person (if not everybody) can't define free will, they certainly will be able to use the term and understand its meaning. In fact, they will understand it in virtue of a plurality of definitions (or senses).

The claim that if you can't define a term you do not understand it is defeatist because it simply does not reflect the role of language. Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term? Do names (pointing to objects) have definitions or just abstract objects and types; if so what do these definitions consist in besides their names, if not why this dualism? And so on.

> Maybe this was unclear, but the point wasn't that there is a good singular notion of free will, and that that is a commonsense one.

How could this be when we can be demonstrably discussing different objects when we say "free will"? Just because people will generally, kind of, vaguely think they agree when they say "free will" does not mean they are truly in sync.

And yes, the objects they mean will mostly overlap in a significant way so if you do not look too hard, it could seem to them they are discussing the same thing. I find this to be a common type of situation in everyday life.

But when you want to discuss something more deeply and in greater detail, there arises a need to wrestle out a more precise meaning and then you can notice discrepancies arise between the subtly different things that could all be reasonably given the name "free will".

> Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term?

A child has an understanding of what it is saying, not the one and only understanding. Another child asking for chocolate might have a different object in mind. The objects they are referring to will most likely significantly overlap and they might never notice the differences.

This is where definitions help. Definitions are a way of banging and cross-referencing a lot of different, mostly-shared objects together in the hope of arriving to a more precisely shared version of another mostly-shared object. Reaching towards better understanding via definitions is like applying the Whitworth Three Plates Method (https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...), but to concepts instead of physical objects.

I agree with you on this issue, and I suspect education is at least partly responsible for the 'definitions first' approach.

When teaching a topic in math, it is usual to start with definitions, and this is often also the case with science, but that is not how progress is made: more typically, the definitions follow from learning more about what starts as a vague or speculative concept, or was not even imagined before the studying was done (entropy, for example).

Philosophy is not immune to the problem; it is not that uncommon for me to find an author basing an argument on an ontology or a metaphysical claim that I suspect could be, at some future time, empirically refuted, or where some thing is "in a sense" like something else, without establishing that the sense in which they are similar is relevant (for example, there is a sense in which learning how to ride a bicycle is like learning how to perform addition, but it would take more than this sense to conclude that riding a bicycle is, to any useful degree, just a matter of learning a set of propositions.)

As you say, definitions can be used to avoid an issue, and while I agree with Dennett on many things, I feel that he and his fellow compatibilists are doing this with free will, which I consider to be the true 'hard problem' of consciousness.

I'll take "will" to be a given. There is something that is capable of thinking, and the thoughts it has are will. A decision, then, is when that entity has a thought that has intention.

I think it becomes nebulous by adding "free" to the equation, because it's not defined in relation to something specifically. Free from what? How would you differentiate it from a decision that's not "free" in this sense?

Free from thoughts? Free from gods? Free from memory? Free from circumstances? To differentiate it from "non-free will", we have to define what we actually care about, and then use it only with that scope.

If someone else can predict what decisions you will make with 100% accuracy can it still be free will? Some argue it can't, they like to believe that their mind is a unique snowflake that can never be reproduced, anything else means they don't have free will.

> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will?

No, never! We must just argue endlessly whether we do or don't have it.

Well, if we don't have it, then it's not up to us to chose between providing a definition or merely arguing about having it or not...

So are you unable to produce a definition because there isn’t one, or because the universe where your brain is mechanistically caused to define your terms is not inside this light cone?

Given any decision, you have t amount of time to consider how to decide it. Suppose everything the same, if you were given `t + k` time but with no other external input, could you choose something different?

If you could, you have free will (internal inputs _only_ can augment your decision).

There's no such thing as just internal inputs though, because those inputs are there because of external factors from the past. They're permanently entangled. If the universe is deterministic, the results of that experiment were always going to happen.

By that definition, chess engines would have free will, as they would be able to search a through larger amount of possible moves given the extra time and thus find another move.

The problem with that definition is that time itself is an external input of sorts. Therefore, everything is not the same since you have +k time. Your definition would also apply to many trivial decision processes, e.g. a computer programme that randomly switches between each possibility and picks the one it ends on when the allotted time has elapsed. I doubt that programme would be considered to have any will at all, let alone free will.

Sure, its probably a better definition of "free action" but I am very convinced that those are necessary conditions (though probably not sufficient). Additional time can be an external input, that's fine, its only important that its the _only_ one.

Any definition of free will that doesn't appeal to dualism will allow programs to have free will, that's just par for the course.

"...the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept."

I can see why you wouldn't believe this, but why do you think it is illogical? Consider the contrast between a tape recorder + tape, vs. a radio. In the one, the sounds that come out of the speaker are purely internally produced (considering the tape to be part of the recorder). In the other, the sounds coming out originate from a radio station somewhere else, perhaps thousands of miles away, and to which the radio receiver is tuned. Why couldn't a brain be like this: it is a receiver for signals sent from a mind somewhere else, and specifically tuned to that mind.

Perhaps someone will say Occam's Razor. Ok, but if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter. But that of course is wrong, which shows that Occam does not necessarily lead to the correct answer.

At any rate, I don't mean to get into a discussion of whether the brain + mind work like this, I just want to suggest that it's not at all illogical.

> if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter

Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain.

Occam's Razor doesn't say the simplest explanation always wins. It only says the simplest explanation that covers all the facts wins. That means you can't apply it until you have all the facts.

"Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain." The neutrino was hypothesized back in the 1930s solely on the basis of missing mass/energy in beta decay. (One of the papers describing this was rejected by Nature on the grounds that it was too far from reality.) It was only decades later that the neutrino was found (in whatever sense a weakly interacting uncharged particle can be "found"). At any rate, I'm just saying that it's not illogical to hypothesize that the brain is more like a radio receiver than a tape player; whether it really is, is a different question.

The legalistic definition pretty much is the definition used by philosophers who are physicalists (such as Dennett). Basically, the question is not whether physical processes determine what you do; of course they do. The question is, which physical processes? The ones that are going on in your brain, that we label with words like "perception", "cognition", "decision", etc? Or other processes, like the process of someone holding a gun to your head?

The only real difference I can see between the legalistic definition and the philosopher's definition is that the legalistic definition of "coercion" is broader. For example, I mentioned someone holding a gun to your head just now. Legally this would be coercion and wouldn't count as a free decision on your part. But to a physicalist philosopher, this might still count as a case of free will on your part--just free will based on a highly constrained set of acceptable choices given the circumstances. But that's a fine distinction that doesn't change the basic point.

> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will?

Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.

Yeah, but we're a bunch of unionized atoms. They all vote on what I should do and then I execute their will by going in the kitchen and making spaghetti or whatever.

I'll provide some definitions, from Oxford:

individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family"

free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion"

From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause.

The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.

The thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact moment they were created. That's what seems unbelievable to me. Maybe I don't get what determinism is?

Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0].

An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past".

At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you?

Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon?

Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will.

[0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.

Determinism together with quantum "many worlds hypothesis" implies that the world is in a superposition of vast amounts of states. Some of them contain the Lego movie (different versions of), most of them don't. The initial conditions of the universe lead to this superposition.

So even if it was inevitable from the beginning of the universe that the Lego movie will exist in some states, you (your version in this state of universe) can still be surprised to see that the Lego movie exists here.

it's not just illogical, it's an infinite regress. It's purposely adding in an extra layer that by definition can't be discounted. So if you disprove one layer of free will, you still have an infinite number of possible ways you still have (or don't have) free will at yet deeper levels.

This sort of debate always struck me as nonsense. If our actions are not derived of our own free will, but just exist as a small part of nature, then if you follow that thread far enough you’ll understand that all reason and truth would also be invalid, being just the effect to some coincidental cause. This incidentally would render theories about the subject of free will invalid as well.

Thus if there is no free will there is no way for us to know it.

Suppose an all powerful god controls everything that happens to us. Could not such a God give us the knowledge that we have no free will?

Suppose God is infinite, and we are finite. If free will is finite, then we have free will, and have knowledge of good and evil. Yet it also means we can never know God's will, which is infinite.

Does infinity mean an unchanging concrete block? No! Recursion and fractals are infinite. There may yet be a perfect, infinite pattern that this world is designed to follow.

Would it be possible to know the whole pattern? No. But could we know enough to fit into that? Yes. And I think that it requires the surrender of self-will, which is usually deterministic.

In earthquakes, bridges (nicely rational, rectangular shapes) often crack (with fractal tree-shaped fractures). It is for our own good to surrender to a greater design than our own finite understanding.

You wouldn't be able to distinguish between:

A) A universe with God;

B) A simulated universe (where the simulation due to the nature of being simulated will have all the characteristics that lead to the conceptualisation of God, hence being indistinguishable);

C) A fake universe - for similar reasons as the simulation, and conceptually being the same as a simulation, it will exhibit all the same characteristics - the equivalent non computational example would be seeding a planet with humans and letting them go about their lives while keeping an eye on them and intervening when wanted, or the story shown in Truman’s Show - the fake here refers to it not being what it seems, not to it not existing;

D) A universe where consciousness IS the essence of it and what gives rise to it in the first place, making every manifestation in it be direct manifestations of that consciousness and being effectively intertwined to the point where conscious parts can in some way affect the global consciousness and vice-versa, this eventually leads to the idea of A God as well, but is not "God" in the way we usually define it, it just quacks like it;

E) A universe different from all the previous descriptions, as in without an overarching conscious form modelling it - the fact that you would then have both free-will and subjective experience of it (since I think no one will argue that you can NOT "experience" things objectively) would probably lead you (or someone) to formulate any of these other ideas - simply because the universe to be experienceable has to have certain minimal rules - given that the rules/laws supersede the abilities of the subjects (cannot be/have been made by the subjects describing them themselves) it can look like any of the other universes.

A totally random universe doesn't seem to make sense because for it to exist in any way experienceable it has to have at least certain laws that govern its manifestation and any possible perception by “anything” in it, at which point it stops being completely random and has to be one of the other 5 descriptions, which again, will all be indistinguishable.

If this makes sense for you then:

> It is for our own good to surrender to a greater design than our own finite understanding

may or may not be a valid proposition. If you cannot distinguish between them then you have to assume that it might not make sense to blindly "surrender" to a greater design.

Yes, in my opinion the only way for reason and free will to exist are if some supernatural being were to grant it to us. That said, in order to truly have knowledge of anything we must first be able to assert free will. Otherwise even this God figure's interference in our natural lives may just be interpreted as an outside stimulus that we're dutifully responding to according to the laws of nature.

>That said, in order to truly have knowledge of anything we must first be able to assert free will.

This is not a coherent argument. You claim to have better insight than hundreds of years of Epistemology?

I'm simply asserting that a lack of free will constitutes lack of control over one's own thoughts. Do you disagree with this or am I just not communicating well?

Edit: I'm also not saying anything that hasn't been said before. Just because you personally haven't read the authors or pieces that agree with my point of view doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'm not aware of anyone making the argument that without free will knowledge does not exist.

And really the situation is simple. Either you believe in determinism or you believe in libertarian free will. The problem is that one of these beliefs is supported by science and the other requires magic.

Can you explain this further? It sounds an awful lot like you're dismissing my viewpoint without really putting an effort in to argue your side, which would be rude. While that may be the case, I'm going to overlook it.

The argument isn't directly that knowledge requires free will, but rather that you can't, as a mere product of some chain of events, be a reliable source. This isn't an argument against determinism so much as it is against naturalism.

I would also argue against determinism in some respects, but my thoughts about events being predetermined are a bit more complex. I would say that just because something is pre-known doesn't require it to be pre-determined. To say such a belief requires magic is a little flippant, I think.

Our universe and everything in it exist as they are in a moment of time. Our attempts at reasoning about the universe have given us some degree of accuracy in describing it. But the fact remains that whatever ideas and supporting science we come up with are just that, ideas and science. Reality trumps it all. So--while you can _say_ things in whatever tone you like and alienate or belittle folks who don't believe the same things you do--I would say that how we as humans show love for each other is much more helpful, and that it's okay to admit we don't know nearly as much about the world as we think we do.

>It sounds an awful lot like you're dismissing my viewpoint without really putting an effort in to argue your side, which would be rude.

You are the one making grand claims so you should be the one supporting them. My position is that of the majority of professional Physics and Philosophy communities which is that the universe is deterministic and libertarian free will is a fantasy.

>I would also argue against determinism in some respects, but my thoughts about events being predetermined are a bit more complex

Well show some proof and claim your Nobel Prize.

> The argument isn't directly that knowledge requires free will, but rather that you can't, as a mere product of some chain of events, be a reliable source.

You are just saying this, it doesn't follow from any Philosophical argument that I can see Honestly I think your argument boils down to "The absence of free will makes me uncomfortable so therefore it can't be true," this isn't unique to you either most of the people on that side of the fence's arguments tend to come down to that.

As J.B.S. Haldane wrote, nearly 100 years ago:

[begin quote]

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason for supposing that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.

[end quote]

If you truly can't see how nonsensical it sounds to say on the one hand, "The universe is just a random assortment of matter that happens to have resulted in consciousness, but it's all simply an effect to some original Cause and no more," and then on the other hand argue over claims of logic, reason and truth--I'm not sure I can help you any further along.

>If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason for supposing that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.

Oh man, Haldane wrote this 100 years ago so it must be true amirite?

All Philosophers and Physicists are crushed by these 2 sentences...

>If you truly can't see how nonsensical it sounds to say on the one hand, "The universe is just a random assortment of matter that happens to have resulted in consciousness, but it's all simply an effect to some original Cause and no more," and then on the other hand argue over claims of logic, reason and truth--I'm not sure I can help you any further along.

It's not nonsensical. Your statement is actually nonsensical. If you found a mathematical proof written by an illiterate schizophrenic the only thing that matters is the consistency of the proof's logic not its source. Maybe you should read actual philosophers instead of the centuries old writings of a Biologist.

The laws of physics are true as we know them, it is completely irrelevant if the minds that came up with ways to describe them have no free will. Your position is completely untenable and unsupported. You would fail Philosophy 101 at any community college if you wrote a paper on your position.

First you say, "I don't know anyone who has ever said this," all the while appealing to the age and authority of your own philosophy. Then I bring you evidence that people have been saying this for 100 years and you imply it's too old to be relevant.

And really, why would I care about whether my ideas would receive good marks or not from the most ego-stroking subject in all of modern academics? My philosophy professor at university was a self-absorbed little man who I didn't envy then and still don't 15 years later. Why would I bother having an authentic discussion with such a person?

Two obvious hallmarks of disingenuous debate are belittlement and sarcasm.

I’m interested in topic. Can you please expand a little or point to a book/idea that does? The “reason and truth” part specifically. Why truth would be invalid if there exist only complex finite automata? Can’t complex enough entities reason about this system while being a part of it, coincidentally being able to do that without contradiction?

Does it make sense for an automaton to say "I will search for truth. I am searching for truth. I have found truth." when that automaton has been preprogrammed to say that and had no choice in the matter?

Here's a version of this argument: https://youtu.be/BsAEj6UsrI0?t=297

That boils down to the question “can deterministic system contain inner truths?”. While I can’t really answer that now, imagine a deterministic system that has some truth in it that may be observed from outside (by e.g. us, its creators). Then claiming that there is no sense in automaton reasoning is equivalent to claiming that this system doesn’t have an attractor for that. But if there is such attractor, then we may watch this automaton in “realtime” looking for truth (being catched by an attractor), move to it (along its field), and then state that it found it (by observing a fixed point). Or it could spiral into “truth point” never reaching it, like we usually do.

Iow, systems are not required to have truths or elements that are pre-aimed to balance themselves along these truths, but our world doesn’t have to be like that (unless proven otherwise).

I speak of reason and truth as human constructs. If we cannot be sure that we have free will, then, while truth exists in abundance, we have no ability to validate it. I say this all a bit tongue in cheek because I absolutely believe that we have free will. And in any case, to suggest otherwise to me would seem like a cop-out for the consequences of my own decisions.

The first 3-4 chapters of the book Miracles by C.S. Lewis cover this topic pretty well in my opinion, even if you're not spiritual-minded.

A deterministic machine is still able to react based on external stimulus and able to reason about the world and itself.

And we don't even need to go the full determinism route to disprove free will. What can free will be other than an illusion? Am I really deciding to be hungry, to want companionship, and so on? Am I simply doing what needs to be done to fulfill my needs while my brain is inventing reasons? What am I other that environmental factor, genetics, and maybe random noise? Nothing.

Objective truth and reality exists independent of any person having a free will or not.

Relativity theories say that objective truth only exists globally/abstractly, and cannot shared between observers.

No; all observers see the speed of light as the same.

Do you see the speed of light?

You can measure it quite easily, in fact in a high school lab. So yes, in a non-pedantic sense, "see".

But ultimately that's still an observation of a measurement; any 'truth' is necessarily abstracted into an internal ontological representation of that observation. One person's understanding of the measurement of the speed of light may absolutely be different than the next. These represntations may converge more strongly than, say, something more ephemerate like the human condition, but regression towards shared observation via scientific processes (or otherwise) doesn't have to imply truth. Ultimately the definition of 'truth' dictates the extent of it's subjectivity, so this discussion is necessarily pedantic. I'm not well enough studied in ontological theory to have a horse in the race, but I don't know that the conclusions of relativistic experiments are enough to indicate universality of experiential truth.

You may not decide to be hungry, but regardless of your hunger, you can choose not to eat.

Incidentally I think that's also what separates us from other animals. Animals can't fast, for example. If the instinct is present, the animal acts on it. We don't have to. In fact, if it mattered enough to me, I could starve myself to death.

That is not true.

Some dogs are famously picky eaters and will not touch the food even when hungry because they learned that their handler will then panic and provide better food. You might interpret that as the dog "choosing" not to eat. Of course it is just a learned response as with humans.

You can absolutely train a dog to not eat food, to "fast" if you will. Of course it wont starve itself to death probably, at some point survival instinct will kick in. This is the same with humans. Let's be honest. Most humans are barely able to keep their target weight, most are not able to fast for any extended period of time. They are still slaves to survival instincts. So much for the power of the free will.

A dog can't starve itself to death in the presence of food.

Mild hunger, sure, abstain in pursuit of preference. The instinct applies to the pursuit of the preference, and while it's stronger than the instinct to eat, can be overridden. But if the hunger gets bad enough, the dog will eat the food. There's no question about "if," only "when."

Just because some humans have weaker wills than others, or would find it harder to override their instincts than those who have practiced, doesn't mean it isn't a uniquely human trait.

This really reads like you are assuming that x == [no dog will choose to starve to death in the presence of food] is true and then the rest of the argument simply follows from x.

Is there any evidence for x?

Are you asking for any particular type of formal proof of the negative?

Or would the fact that there are no known cases of this phenomenon recorded in the recorded history of dogs, even in places dogs have been revered, be adequate?

This seems like a trick that relies on a fallacy.

In my view if your entire argument is the restatement of an assumption, you'd better offer a stronger proof than not knowing of any counter examples.

In my view, if you're looking for formal proof of a negative, you've already insisted on an impossibility, so there's no hope of persuading you anyway.

I did not ask for a formal proof, but a stronger proof than you not having heard of such a thing happening. It is just about plausible to me that a dog can refuse to eat and starve; dogs do get very depressed.

Anyway, by this method of denying the possibility of animals acting in a certain way until a counterexample is presented, you can ascribe any number of unique traits to humans; but they all stem from your default assumption that humans are unique. It's not particularly interesting to merely restate an assumption.

Animals have genetic diversity. You can't prove no animal can choose not to eat.

You also can't prove all humans can.

No, formally proving a negative isn't something anybody's going to be able to do, but that doesn't mean a negative can't be true. I'd be happy to consider absolutely any evidence to the contrary, though.

I also didn't say "all" humans could. I said being able to is a uniquely human trait. That's not the same thing.

The brain is a deterministic system. We understand the dynamics of deterministic systems from the study of physics, so what is free will in terms of a system with an already decided outcome?

Quantum Physics has perfectly random outcomes

In QM, you may teleport into the sun, but it was never registered for de-coherent macro objects, even for few millimeters. A brain is macro, neurons and their signals are pretty macro. Why should a brain or its parts even slightly depend on QM effects? Modern CPUs which have much smaller parts can work for years and not experience QM randomness bugs. Nothing is deterministic or “the same” at quantum level, but at the classical scale it doesn’t matter, because chances to observe any difference or randomness in an usual object lifetime are essentially zero.

QM does have some impact on functional biochemistry, but I highly doubt its enough to make the system nondeterministic at any appreciable level. Not to mention, do we truly know that any part of QM is nondeterministic? Perhaps the nondeterministic appearance of QM is just our lack of understanding combined with our limited perspective.

That is debatable. QM is deterministic at the quantum level, and deterministic at the classic level, randomness only (seems to) appear at the cross between them. There are even interpretation such as MWI that don't involve any randomness at a fundamental level.

Possibly it's a chaotic deterministic system, which means it can't be precisely predicted by any means short of a full simulation.

As I wrote in a comment below I guess the feeling of a free will is just the observation that nobody else and not even oneself kan predict ones decision until it is made even because the decision process is chaotic.

If you really believed that you wouldn't say things like "we understand". Because if you really believe there's no free will then all human understanding is a sham.

I said that in a philosophy exam in school, and got a D- for it

There are probably more reasons you may have gotten a D- for it--I'd think a fair professor would have allowed such an argument assuming it was well-thought-out. There are of course plenty of professors (especially in philosophy) who give out grades based on how thoroughly they feel their egos have been stroked. Shame on them. Grades based on sycophancy are no different than any other kind of corruption.

Free will is almost axiomatic.

You claim this "thread" leads to all reason and truth being invalid, which is overreaching, to put it plainly. How do you reckon that all mathematics, the periodic table of elements, the planetary bodies in our solar system, are suddenly invalidated because humans weren't deciding to study them, but were merely following natural behavioral patterns? If we don't have free will, does that invalidate all aliens' civilizations study of universal laws too?

In my view, humans are curious creatures whose natural inclination to study their surroundings led them to discover scientific truths, which exist on a higher plane than our mere thought. Combine this with societal support of scientific activity, and we have a burst of discovery of truth and reason which was hitherto un-revealed to us. Our "free will" and "decision" has nothing to do with 2+2=4 or that Mars is red due to rusty iron, these are simply factual scientific observations which have stood the test of time in science: no theories have invalidated them.

So, our free will is not necessary for the physical laws of the universe to exist. They existed before us and will exist after us. So where do we lose all reason and truth by being merely curious, as opposed to having a homunculous man in our heads telling us what to do at each moment?

Look into meditation practice if you still believe in the switchboard operator pulling all the strings in your mind. I challenge you to find free will in yourself, find something you're actually genuinely choosing. Can you explain why free will allows the random thoughts that crop up in your mind constantly? Those random thoughts dictate our behaviors, the actions of humans; but where are they from? They're random nervous firings that our physical body, physical tongue, physical fingers, are all acting upon, there is no "switchboard operator" choosing anything at any time.

I didn't intend to imply that truth would not exist--rather that we'd have no way to validate it, truth and reason being human concepts. If we invalidate our own faculties (I don't see any other way to categorize not having free will) then while there absolutely still is truth out there, we are hopelessly incapable of validating any of it.

Also I thought by calling this whole debate nonsense I would be seen to believe that free will must exist. It's simply not derived from some haphazard biological coincidence, in my opinion.

> As McGilchrist puts it, Libet’s apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me.'" Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)?

I think I associate the idea of "free will" with conscious thought and conscious decision-making. But it really feels as if most of my decisions come out of the unconscious part of my mind, in which case they might as well have come from an external source. All the conscious part of my mind seems to do is to make up ad hoc justifications. Sure, my unconscious mind is still 'me'; so the decisions are somehow 'mine'; but what difference does it make? It doesn't seem very free in the end.

I find attempts to disprove free will incredibly boring. If there is no free will, then everything the investigators wrote and did is the result of some deterministic (or random) process which doesn’t have anything to do with logic or evidence and whether or not people accept the conclusion is also independent of reason and logic.

Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence.

By arguing against free will, you are cutting off the branch on which argument itself depends on.

I’m not sure I understand this counter argument. Surely we can rationalize in a deterministic universe without having free will to make independent decisions based on objective rationalizations.

What about understanding the clock structure? Does that limit my ability to reason about time? Or about digital clocks? Or to be upset at someone for not showing up when I was expecting them to.

What do you mean by “rationalize”?

What is the difference between rational and irrational in a deterministic universe?

I will give you an example. Say, everything at Tn is based on the function at Tn-1, which means Tn-1 is based on Tn-2 and so on and so forth to the beginning of the universe.

That would mean that my next steps are predetermined. If I choose to fight the idea, or resist the idea, that would also be predetermined on factors such as upbringing, and even the upbringing of an ancestor living 2000 years ago, and the geometry of space-time a million years ago, and the thermal gradient of a billion years ago and so on and so forth.

> What is the difference between rational and irrational in a deterministic universe?

I would argue that irrational, in a deterministic Universe, would be living your life as if the universe were random and probabilistic; imagining you are a nugget of free spirit and energy; considering your individuality and power.

> Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence.

I don't think this follows, as logic (i.e. the "rules" of argument) aren't predicated on any notion of free will. You can still have good arguments, bad arguments, right arguments, and wrong arguments, in a perfectly deterministic universe.

The key issue probably is that determinism and lack of free will complicate the question of "what's the point of doing anything?", but complications like that are not really an argument for or against free will; we can't assume that life has to have a specific point and use that to justify statements about the nature of reality, it's the opposite way around.

Free will and an illusion of free will are distinct concepts, IMHO there's a consensus that we do have an illusion of free will and that there are some practical benefits for having such an illusion - but again, that's not necessarily an argument relevant to a discussion of whether free will actually exists.

Furthermore, lack of free will does not imply a lack of an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence, quite the contrary, it implies that you changing your mind is not just an arbitrary choice but is going to happen (or not) depending on the evidence you receive and how (and from whom) you receive it; it only means that, given your previous state and all your observations, the outcome (changing the mind) is predictable and isn't arbitrary. Perhaps it's influenced by some small seemingly random factors that are hard or impossible to observe and analyse (creating the illusion of choice or requiring to model the whole system as hard-to-predictable "black box") - for example, we obviously can't access all the exact details of our own brain state - but it's not determined by some "out of system" choice that's somehow distinct from what the brain does as a physical, deterministic "machine".

Yeah. The main reason I feel a need to believe in free will, is because if I assume a perfectly deterministic world, how do one defeat the following question:

Why is it worth putting any effort in? In a perfectly deterministic world whatever will happen will happen. Me deciding to just not try won't change anything, since me doing so was predetermined in the first place.

That argument is pretty trivially defeated by believing the concept of free will. (Even if this belief is false). And yeah, I know the previous argument is deeply flawed, but giving a satisfactory counter argument not based on free will is tricky at best.

This ties deeply to the concept of illusion of free will. If you can conclusively and convincingly prove that there is no free will, you can lose some of the benefits of the illusion of free will.

For example, if hypothetically one were to prove that the world is fully deterministic, and no free will exists, then it opens a bunch of other philosophical questions. Is it right (moral) to punish people who commit crimes?

If the person were pre-ordained to commit the crime, and could never have actually prevented themselves from doing it, can they really be blamed? Obviously, if somebody has a faulty brain that makes them more likely to commit crimes (and has shown this, by committing said crimes), then locking them up to protect everyone else might be reasonable. Trying to rehabilitate them (i.e. change the inputs of their deterministic though process, such that they would not do the same in a similar situation in the future) is also reasonable. And perhaps punishments as a deterrent mechanism might still be valid.

But I really have to question if it is actually moral/ethical to punish somebody for something if they truly had no choice in the matter. It seems as society we feel the answer might be no, as we choose not to punish people who are incapable of understanding that what they did was wrong (like young children, or those deemed legally incompetent/insane). This is generally also true of animals, which are usually not punished for doing something we deem as "wrong", but instead are often relocated, or killed (not as punishment, but to prevent further danger, since giving an animal life without parole to protect people is not deemed viable).

This is only one of a whole list of philosophical questions we would want to revisit if we truly knew free will does not exist.

I go with a deterministic universe above because it simplifies the arguments. A non-deterministic universe in theory could have some of the same difficulties, but it is harder to formulate the relevant arguments.

If you try the experiment yourself—and you can do it right now, just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist—you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision.

One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:

it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision

That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.

Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.

To me it seems like we should separate the notion of being conscious with the notion of having free will. Everyone is conscious and knows this; it is trivially easy to prove (at least for one self. I don't know if all you guys reading this are [1]).

However, how do we know if we have free will? Assuming we can even land on a common definition of free will, how do we prove it? I think the "intuitive" notion people seem to have of free will is that they themselves have agency on their own actions. Important here is the distinction most people seem to draw between themselves as decision-makers and themselves as action-takers. They do not see this as the same. Action-taking happens in meatspace, but decision-making is thought to be more nebulous and ethereal. If the suggestion is made that decision-making might be solely a result of a multitude of factors in meatspace (genetics, upbringing, mood, etc...), then that suggestion is emphatically rejected by many (if not most).

However, decision-making cannot be free from meatspace, because then it cannot be anything more than based on chance. I wrote about this in length a while ago here [2], but the basic concept is that if there is no causation, then the alternative can only be randomness. Which is deeply unsatisfying to everyone. Einstein's dice quote comes to mind (even if it was on a completely different topic).

Libet's flawed experiment is not really relevant to the conversation. Whether free will exists or not, it is more an experiment on the nature of consciousness than free will, and thus cannot really offer any meaningful answers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

[2] https://www.hugomontenegro.com/blog/the-absurdity-of-free-wi...

> They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clear conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.

The only thing this shows, IMO, is the mental gymnastics human are willing to go through in order to keep a feel-good notion that it is, in fact, some you that makes the decision. Since you are the entirety of your physical being, which extends via physical interactions into the rest of the universe (and thus has a very fuzzy border), of course there is some fuzzy, handwavey definition of "you" which could be said to have "made" the decision.

That doesn't bring us any closer to having the kind of agency people have traditionally ascribed to the term "free will".

There are two issues not mentioned which I think are most important.

First, accuracy was bad. 60% or less. Barely better than a flipped coin, quite possibly just a null result or simply bad statistics (cherry picking data, retrospective search for a positive result).

Second, there is what you say you are testing with a study and the test you actually do. You have three things, the subject deciding to move, the subject having a brain activity pattern, and the subject interpreting the time on a clock.

For the same data collected you could write a different paper on the accuracy of a person’s visual preception of time when compared to their making a conscious choice to move. No connection at all with the free will business, just how well a person can report two separate mental phenomena in time.

1. There is a processing delay whereby sensed data reaches the brain and the brain interprets it and creates “reality”. Thus your brain projects the future and is actually telling you what reality might be x msec in the future. This may relate to an experiment like this. 2. There is a view that way back when we very early in development (think early life) that if you ate things around you and they moved perhaps you would be more successful if you interpolate your position and their position/trajectory and thus could move towards them to consume them. Scale that idea up and perhaps it’s what led to a consciousness and a sense of “I”. If “I” move towards “you” I can eat you. This line of thought actually links consciousness and free will.

How one can prove a choice? Once you acted on this or that you simply cannot go back in time and choose something else.

If you cannot change what you choose, there was never a choice. There was only one path (previously defined OR randomly defined), the one that you “chose”.

“I’ve could chose different” is only fiction at this point.

Choice would be so hard to describe. All animals have can choose? (what brain function makes choice available for a being?) Are we “special” animals? (even worse)

Free will is an ilusion and I think believing otherwise is like believing in god. An attempt to justify our lives.

But yes, the experiment in question seems totally flawed.

I’m not sure why free will is considered such a mystery. In a completely deterministic universe my actions are determined unambiguously by a) the current state of my brain and b) the inputs I receive from my senses. Asking if I could do something other that what I actually chose to do makes no sense.

On the other hand, if I later find myself in a near identical situation I may choose a different action as a result of my brain now having a different state (that’s what learning is)

The opposite of determinism isn’t “free will” it’s random behaviour and who wants their decisions to be random?

Well, in a view similar to the many-worlds interpretation, your decisions may be random, but your observation of those decisions follows the path of your choosing.

If curious see also

The word "freedom" doesn't appear in this discussion, so I'll ask: what does "freedom" mean if you don't have "free will"?

At random (not really, it was near the box as I typed):

mcquire>You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand.

Was that person free to move or not move their hand?

I decide to emigrate to New Zealand because they seem to run their country sanely. But is that a free choice or did I undertake this without a real choice to do otherwise?

I guess free will just means that making a decision is a chaotic process that can broadly be influenced from the outside but in the end can not be preditected up to the moment the result is observed. This then in turn is observed as in that the decision was not completely determined by an outside signal so it is concluded that it must have been free.

"Free Will" is a nebulous concept, so of course nothing can disprove it.

The question I always ask with this is "free from what?". Not freedom to do something... that's not how freedom works. freedom is generally defined from the lack of control. So freedom from what?

From someone else controlling your will? Sure, we have that mostly - though we can definitely screw with people's minds. I can't make you think something. But I can, say, get you drunk and change your decision making ability. Teh yes/no question is trivial as soon as the definition is specific enough.

From literally any connection to your memory? Of course we don't have that because we know we use memories to make decisions. Again, the question becomes trivial.

Why is this still treated as hard? I'm sure it's because people are attaching vague definitions based on emotional wants. I want to be free! of what? just free!

Right, it disproves the very precisely defined concept of "will" (/s , sorry, my brain forced me to say it)

The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-physical consciousness telling your body to move.

This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are present before you are conscious of your decision to move, because they ARE your consciousness.

Free will does not mean it has to be separate from your physics brain.

This article seems kind of like noting that a web server returns a response to the caller before logging it.

I would say it is more like “we noticed the data was present in memory before the server started sending its response”

I think some _would_ define free will as necessarily separate from physical processes in the brain. Absent the existence some kind of magical soul-like concept, the free will debate in general seems like more of a semantic argument than a real philosophical one.

That may be true, but I think our current conception of free will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely deterministic.

I think physical systems are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

Why does determinism preclude free will? If I am the physical processes that occur in my brain, then my decisions are rooted in those processes. Even if those processes are deterministic and there was only ever one outcome for my decisions, I can still say that I have free will because it was the very unfolding of those deterministic processes which led me to me to expressing my free will. There is only a clash between free will and determinism when you imagine that your consciousness is in some vague sense separate from the physical world.

What is your definition of free will?

> unfolding of those deterministic processes

Doesn't sound free to me. Is a computer running a program exercising its free will?

I think this actually perfectly shows how nebulous our definition of "free will" is. I sure can't define it, I can only observe what other people seem to think it means. The definition I tend to observe is one that fits in with a dualistic view, of some outside force making decisions for our body.

But that just pushes it back a level. How does the outside force arrive at its decisions? Whatever it is, it has an effect on a body, so it must be measurable; could we perform something like Libet's experiment on it?

I am not sure why the 'outside force' is required for free will. What characteristic does that provide that is needed for free will?

If the physical world is non-deterministic, then there is nothing stopping a physical thing from having free will. If an 'outside force' can exert free will, why can't a physical thing?

Why does a brain being a physical system necessitate it being deterministic?

It seems like the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the more things seem to be probabilistic than deterministic.

The physical brain being probabilistic fits perfectly with the idea of free will.

I don't consider randomness as any more "free" than determinism - the concept of "choice" does not appear anywhere on the whole tradeoff spectrum between total randomness and total determinism.

It does emphasise the point that any discussion based on a dichotomy between determinism and free will is fundamentally flawed, as randomness can be a relevant factor, so an anti-determinism argument is not necessarily a pro-free-will argument.

Well, the definition of randomness is basically the inverse of determinable... it is something that is not predictable.

The important characteristic for randomness is that there exists no knowledge that, if possessed, would allow you to predict the outcome. In that sense, free will meets the definition of random.

In other words, not all randomness is free will, but all free will is random.

So yes, anti-determinism does not prove free will, but determinism would disprove it.

"Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts." How can you know that? How do you know that your mind isn't somewhere else (in some sense of "where"), and transmitting signals to your brain, which simply acts as a receiver? I don't say this is true, I'm just asking how you would empirically or experimentally distinguish that situation from the notion that your brain makes up your thoughts.

The author is a theist who wrote a book called Spiritual Science. He might be coming by his opinions here with significant bias that takes a non-materialist viewpoint for granted at some fundamental level.

I agree that Libet's experiment is far from sufficient to conclude the lack of free will. However, a valid criticism of Libet is itself far from sufficient to prove that we do have free will.

Free Will is a positive claim, so the proof requirement runs the other way.

The type of free will that people subjectively think they have is so called "Libertarian Free Will" and it's basically universally understood by the majority of philosophers that this does not exist.

"Many people believe that evidence for a lack of free will was found when, in the 1980s, scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that seemed to show that the brain “registers” the decision to make movements before a person consciously decides to move. In Libet’s experiments, participants were asked to perform a simple task such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist. Sitting in front of a timer, they were asked to note the moment at which they were consciously aware of the decision to move, while EEG electrodes attached to their head monitored their brain activity."

Here is nice video from Dr Jordan Peterson about free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpqoQ-zGxBM

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