Do you believe in free will?

[Whateverist]

@Whateverist

I had an interesting conjecture last year which I offer without even pretense that there is any evidence for it; it's simply food for thought. There is a theory, Simulation Theory, that suggests that we reason about other people's mental states by running the scenario on our own hardware and seeing how we would respond.

That seems to be the way of it. When I first began doing this, I remember having a naive confidence in my predictive model. At some point I think we begin creating characters for our simulations with motives and predilections different than our own. Perhaps we all also have the ability to imagine our way into these characters much as actors and writers are able to do. The key in all these cases is to find baser common motives beneath which drive the motives of the characters.

[quote="SEP"]The simulation (or, “mental simulation”) theory (ST) is a theory of everyday human psychological competence: that is, of the skills and resources people routinely call on in the anticipation, explanation, and social coordination of behavior. ST holds that we represent the mental states and processes of others by mentally simulating them, or generating similar states and processes in ourselves: thus, for example, anticipating another's solution to a theoretical or practical problem by solving the problem ourselves (with adjustments for evident disparities, e.g., in skill level). The basic idea is that if the resources our own brain uses to guide our own behavior can be modified to work as representations of other people, then we have no need to store general information about what makes people tick: We just do the ticking for them. Simulation is thus said to be process-driven rather than theory-driven (Goldman 1989).

Seems right to me.

(Are the thoughts in our heads thought in language, or is linguistic thought just a value added extra. I frequently bring up the question of whether people without language — deaf, dumb, blind, whatever — are likely to experience their consciousness as fundamentally different than our own. Anyway, still not my goal; moving on.)

But before you move on I must add that I have no doubt that linguistic thought are value additive. It is possible to listen and understand without producing any language of ones own. I think of this value added as a kind of inner narrative, no more needed for understanding than it is in a novel .. though that is one way to tell a story. My preference is not to narrate my experience to myself. For me, language is just for other minds. If there is no audience or nothing to say then I don't want to 'hear' any linguistic thoughts.

This is the conjecture. It occurred to me that perhaps we have the telescope the wrong way round. How important is it for an animal to have a theory of itself? My thought was that perhaps the cognitive framework in which intentionality and will arose was first applicable, not to the self, but to the other. Take the evolution of say, fish. If we're a fish looking for a smaller fish to eat, we don't require predictive abilities about our own behavior. But if we want to eat, we need to be able to make predictive guesses about what an unpredictable system — the other fish — might do. For that, we need a cognitive framework where our lack of information is a part of the framework — suggesting the fish may do anything, because our information about it isn't sufficiently rich to do otherwise. Wayne Gretzky said, "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." A great predator plays where the fish will be, just as a good fighter pilot shoots where his target will be.

Is it possible that the Intentional Stance (of the other) preceded applying that idea to the self? Anyway. No evidence whatsoever, just an interesting thought.

This seems entirely likely. Possibly the notion of ones own intentional stance may have arisen given the strategic advantage of anticipating how the other side is evaluating us. We could have used that information for the sake of projecting deceptive stance or merely to better anticipate their planning. I read recently that most of our brain's bulk and complexity arose not for the sake of getting enough to eat but rather for the sake of negotiating our own complex cultures. That seems likely to me.

I'll leave you with a couple examples from the animal world which should give us pause about our special place at the top of the cognitive tree (joking).

We're certainly animals and the best place to understand our nature is there. When you look closely at what they can do without our sort of language, you will be less inclined to assign much instrumental significance to language in considering questions such free will.


v

ETA: There are studies that seem to indicate that neurological events which signal, say, the movement of a finger precede our conscious intent and awareness of intending to move the finger. (Approx. 150-300 millliseconds, IIRC.) Some aspects are controversial, but it dovetails with another contemporary theory, that of the adaptive unconscious (see Wikipedia). This idea is that our decisions occur below the level of consciousness, and that consciousness simply acts as a reporter, confabulating an explanation for the event it didn't originate. (I suggest looking into the term the adaptive unconscious, confabulation, and Sperry and Gazzaniga's work on split-brain subjects. No time to trace down references, but Jon Haidt's work is of relevance as well. And to a lesser extent, that of Daniel Kahneman; not speaking of Prospect Theory, aka Error Theory, which is unrelated.)

More support for thinking language is less key to the expression of our will than seems commonly assumed. Thanks for the references. They sound interesting.