Most people believe their memory to be an accurate account of their experiences and also believe that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish those two beliefs are.
Its just, many will believe they are rational when they aren't, since their lack of rationality makes them unable to see all the ways they are irrational. But people who notice their own irrationality can just stop doing those things and change their views and therefore becomes much more rational than average.
So we have several layers, we have those who don't see their own irrationality and call themselves rational, we have those who see their own irrationality and call themselves irrational since they are, and then we have the ones who see their own irrationality and takes measures to fix it and therefore call themselves rational. The last group would be the most rational ones, but is still often mistaken for the first group.
Go ask your siblings or parents if you're right.
Memory is a fluid thing.
Could you have a mistaken belief about your memory and it's veracity?
Edit:
> Do you ever sometimes have mistaken beliefs?
I remember the sources of my beliefs. Sometimes I have mistaken beliefs since the sources were wrong or fuzzy, like my parents told me something that I then believed, but then I learned that my parents were wrong. This makes it very easy to correct mistaken beliefs, since you just go back to the sources and verify and re evaluate the information against the new disagreeing information.
Remembering the sources of what you know isn't that much extra information, so it isn't particularly hard to do, but it helps a lot keeping yourself more rational.
Find a so-called DRM word list (acronym originating from the researchers' names Deese, Roediger and McDermott) and have someone test you: They present you with the word list for a predetermined amount of time during which you attempt to memorize it. Then they ask you to recall which words were present. Along with recalling (some of the) actual words, you are in addition likely to recall a so-called critical word which was not actually present in the list.
A collection of such word lists can be found at https://www3.nd.edu/~memory/OLD/Materials/DRM.pdf
Just because many people makes that mistake doesn't mean that such mistakes are common in everyone.
But even if I didn't, that's not really the kind of thing I would ever call upon my memory for. Usually it is something like (real, recent examples from my life): "Who said what, when, how, and to whom", "who was here and who left first", "did this scene happen before or after this other scene in the movie", "who threw the first punch", etc.
> But even if I didn't, that's not really the kind of thing I would ever call upon my memory for.
But it's the same type of thing! If a DRM list produces false memories, why should these other situations not? You don't even have to reach for the DRM paradigm; it's well documented that witness reports in courts (i.e. exactly the kind of thing you mention) are unreliable.
We usually feel like there is a person inside that has control and almost extra-physical ability to override, but surely this must be result of physical inputs and processes?
In a weird twist, meditation is one thing that makes this subjectively apparent. There have also been some (contentious) scientific experiments pointing towards this.
I know of no rigorous evidence against the idea that we're purely matter and physics, nor do I know of any rigorous evidence showing that's all there is to humans (or living beings generally).
It's arguably a "mysticism of the gaps", but the "hard problem" form of consciousness still seems like a pretty weird outcome of evolution to me if that is in fact what it is, and not something that's adequately explained by, say, the anthropic principle. I realize opinions will vary, and I'm okay with that - this one happens to be mine at the moment.
It seems to me to require a decent amount of faith in the idea that only matter exists to conclude that consciousness and free will must be illusory.
It's certainly a defensible, reasonable stance, but I don't think it's the only plausible one.
> There have also been some (contentious) scientific experiments pointing towards this.
If you're referring to Libet's analysis of the Bereitschaftspotential experiments, there has been some acceptance in the past few years that this paper shows he misinterpreted the data:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210467109
Popular summary of the debate in The Atlantic:
Why only matter? My default position (of which I'm not entirely convinced of!) is that there are only physical things, not that there is only matter. So if consciousness and free will are physical phenomena of some kind, that makes things logical again.
But if they are physical, then surely they follow physical rules, and need to somehow interact with the rest of physics. This again leaves no gap for there to be a divine kind of free will, one that is extra-physical and capable of overriding cause and effect.
When I say that free will is illusory, I mean it in this sense: I don't see a logically coherent way in which free will could be non-physical and outside of the usual cause-and-effect chain.
**
I did mean Libet, thanks for the references.
And quickly skimming through the linked paper, their suggested mechanism changes the "decision" to simply be a result of stochastic fluctuation in neural activity. So it resolves some of the weirdness introduced by Libet, by not having the moment of decision precede the moment of conscious experience.
But at best, it still leaves free will with a kind of ancillary role, in which it represents the "feeling" of volitional control, with the actual decision still being stochastic at best.
This is certainly possible, but not what people usually mean when discussing free will colloquially (I find).
> They certainly happen on some level
What a strangely useless statement. Why, if they certainly happen, is their appearance in the consciousness and subsequent action when so consciously decided "an illusion"? What illusion is exactly at hand here?
> We usually feel like there is a person inside that has control and almost extra-physical ability to override
I do not see how you can project your qualia on to me, nor how there is a "we" in this statement. I do not feel similarly to this at all. Overall, this is the kind of unenlightened junk I expect to hear from people that claim to understand what our lives are and what they mean. No one understands these things, but it's certainly fun to ponder.
> Why, if they certainly happen, is their appearance in the consciousness and subsequent action when so consciously decided "an illusion"? What illusion is exactly at hand here?
How do you understand the concept of "volition"?
> I do not see how you can project your qualia on to me, nor how there is a "we" in this statement. I do not feel similarly to this at all.
Okay, I apologize for using the word "we". It is certainly my experience that people perceive this in the way I described, from many discussions I've had. The statement above is not meant to be universal in a hard sense, despite my literary use of "we".
I'm not claiming to understand how things ultimately work, but I've certainly had personal experiences pointing towards there not being a homunculus, or an extra-physical volition capable of overriding raw cause-and-effect. In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately cause-and-effect -- and I find people commonly object to this idea when exposed to it.
(Just noticed you're the grandparent poster.) In fact, what do you mean when you say "there is not even conscious level filtering or decisions made prior to action"? What purpose does the conscious level qualifier serve in your sentence, if the filtering and the deciding is ultimately just another effect produced by some cause? How does this differ from any other causal system which is traditionally not considered to possess free will, such as a mechanical contraption?
I understand life and will as follows.
The human experience is built on top of many layers of subconscious awareness. Animals are given the ability to reason about themselves and their physical environment by our shared genes, and so we can conceive of spatial reasoning and execute real-time plans in this way. In addition, all our biological needs - requirements to maintain our existence - are compulsive due to the underlying body driving these requirements. This is why there was a point in this tree where someone invoked the idea that you are compelled sometimes by hunger, sleepiness, or other biological needs to act.
The next level of intellect above most animals is the ability to execute reasoning which is not only focused around cause and effect of one's own actions. All animals, to me, have the ability to understand how they can impact their environment and in doing so hunt, move, climb, or socialize, but they are not well-versed in reasonings of two separate entities beyond themselves. This is what I roughly call abstract reasoning.
In so having abstract reasoning, I am given meaningful will. As I exist, with my needs well-handled by my comfortable first-world existence in a human society, my subconscious freely feeds me ideas. These can be simple; hunger. They can be complex; an echo of a memory. They can be completely abstract; a graph of the program I was working on earlier, a subconscious solution built deep in some internal processing. I agree one certainly does not compel these things, and therefore does not execute will at this stage. But the key is that these things are something which I iterate over, at each moment dabbling in them and their adjacent reason-spaces, deciding if the thought is interesting, or valid, or worth executing, and this is the space where I express my volition. Finding myself in each moment, I ponder what is best for me, what is most desired by me, what I think is morally right in some purely abstract ethical framework developed in my lifetime, and more ideas of this nature. Finally, as Me, I have a decision-space which my conscious explores, the underlying constructs and relationships explained to me by subconscious capabilities granting me some internal knowledge-graph of the world which I get to simply web-walk across, occasionally test new portions of which I do not understand well, and in doing so, I find myself freely able to at each moment to take the great hose of subconscious ponderings and direct them in a way which meshes with my own feelings of interest, progress, pleasure, and other such things. These are the conscious decisions after all, how do I wish to feel? And so the space free will acts in is clearly small, it is not as if I freely wished to exist or to think about some random moment in time which my brain has found itself re-living, but it is very much as if I was the one to decide if the memory is worth pondering deeper, or if the action coming up is one I would like to perform based on these many thoughts executed immediately and without conscious invocation at each moment. In doing so, I decide where to move, why I'd do so, when I should stop, and other such simple decisions which ultimately leave myself able to guide gently into time the vessel I was born into and innately connected with.
So I struggle to understand what illusions I am under, when told this as a simple obvious assertion. Perhaps there is more to say from you at this point.
> In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately cause-and-effect
Maybe it's so, I don't deny this, of course neither you or I know. But the fact is that my consciousness steers and evolves in directions it ordains at one moment and challenges at every other, and in doing so I point my uncontrolled body vaguely, where it passes me back thoughts I did not particularly compel so in the end I can finally compel the entity of myself to do something I so decided.
Even if this is all cause-and-effect, I don't see how it makes consciousness an illusion so much as it just makes it deterministic.
I am not talking about direct control in the sense of “I want to move my hand here and then I make my hand move”, but more in the sense of “there is sometimes a disconnect between the choices I want to make and the choices I actually make”. That difference ebbs and flows, and I am sure some people are better at living exactly how they want to live than others, but I don’t think anyone ALWAYS makes the decisions that are perfectly in line with what they want to choose to do.
Yes, unless those prescribed emotions are causing my body to care more to tend to survival than the normal state of chilling
> Do you ever feel a disconnect about what you wish you would do and what you actually do?
How does the ability to exercise one's will have anything to do with whether or not one has the will?
> Have you ever had trouble kicking a habit, or starting a new one you want to have?
Partial control of my complex meat machine from subconscious levels of my mind do not invalidate the idea that I have complete control over select scenarios. For instance, you have decided to make an argument based on the idea that your meat machine and you share more of a collaborative existence than you would assume a creature with free will would share with its meat-or-otherwise machine, whereas I hold that existence is naturally inextricably tied up with the act of acquiring energy via eating and alleviating whatever burdens sleep is designed to lift and these facts should not be confused as indicating we are slaves to our vessels. Quite a weak argument to me.
> do not invalidate the idea that I have complete control over select scenarios.
I was not trying to say you NEVER have complete control. I am saying we don’t ALWAYS have complete CONSCIOUS control. I am saying we often make decisions for reasons that we are not fully conscious of, or even aware at all. In fact, we will sometimes tell ourselves (and actually believe) we are doing something for one reasons when we are in reality doing it for another reason we aren’t fully aware of. Our subconscious controls a lot more of what we do than we realize, is my point.
I am not saying we can’t choose to, at moments, take more full conscious control for a while. I am also in no way arguing against free will. I am just saying that we are only aware of a part of what goes into our choices of actions.
Okay, perhaps it is useful to be more judicious in your language then. After all, the top-level parent of this comment chain is saying this:
> Most people believe [...] that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish [this belief is].
This comment is not exactly showing the nuance in a statement such as more reasonably arguing "we are only aware of a part of what goes into our choices of actions".
This does not seem like a meaningful definition of free will to me.
This does not seem to me analogous to saying whether a human being would behave the same as itself in the same situation, as the presupposed information differs significantly.
If the reason an oracle can’t exist is fundamental chaos, then that chaos cannot be connected to results of free will without handwavy logic, it would span too many abstraction levels to be useful and/or predictable. The assumption to be made here is that whatever free will is, it must be a similar oracle which predicts chaos instead. Not a direct contradiction but in the same spirit.
One may also view that second oracle as not predicting chaos, but instead acting on top of it, or simply being it. Not sure if you meant this or not.
If an oracle could exist, then yes the chaos is broken (it is no more). The case where an oracle can’t exist for a different reason is still to be explored.
Edit: realized that I’m using “chaos” in place of “uncertainty”, please assume they are the same here.
Really? I can't see how a good faith reading would lead you to think knowing the outcome of a situation having seen that situation and outcome before is in any way congruent with being able to predict an unseen situation given information strictly from before that situation.
I don't really see why I would respond further, that's pretty entry-level logic.