Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[pocaracas]

If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.
The brain wouldn't have the mechanism in place to prevent this bad behavior. This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

I'd say the concept of "free will" is a difficult one.
With all rigor, all our mental operations should lead to a predictable result. If we knew all the original conditions of a given grain (all the neurons, all the synapses, all the initial conditions), we would be able to predict the outcome. But, at the moment, we don't know them, and it seems to be impossible to know them without killing said brain.
Our will is a desire that we or our brains have. It does seem to be free from external sources... but bound to it's inner wiring which is itself, in part, dependent on all the experience gathered in one's lifetime and, in part, dependent on the individual's genetics, and also womb conditions during pregnancy; not to mention other physical on chemical trauma (i.e. head banging into some wall; consumption of drugs, etc.).

[Tino]

If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.

This statement suggests that people change their behavior based on awareness of external rules. How is that different than free will?

This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

Ok you're off on a tangent but I've never had to hit my kids to get them to follow rules. But let's not turn this into a child rearing discussion.

With all rigor, all our mental operations should lead to a predictable result. If we knew all the original conditions of a given grain (all the neurons, all the synapses, all the initial conditions), we would be able to predict the outcome.

I've seen this asserted before but not by anyone who seemed to have the qualifications to back it up. It is also self-contradictory to believe that a machine could be built to model every "thing" in the world, since that machine too would need to be modelled, leading to an infinite spiral of bigger and bigger machines.

[pocaracas]

If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.

This statement suggests that people change their behavior based on awareness of external rules. How is that different than free will?

The difference is in the mechanism.
The simple awareness of external rules is embedded in the brain, as synapses and stuff like that.
My guess is that any decision, at any given moment, depends on the neurons and synapses you have at that particular time. An they will follow through regardless.
What I'm saying is your thought process is really just a physical/chemical process in your brain.
From this point of view, our will is not entirely free... it's bound by the brain's mechanics.

But, if we abstract from this layer of physical stuff, of course our thoughts are free... they roam free inside our neural-network.

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This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

Ok you're off on a tangent but I've never had to hit my kids to get them to follow rules. But let's not turn this into a child rearing discussion.

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Aye.. there are exceptional kids out there.... it just happens that mine need that extra incentive.... just like most do.

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With all rigor, all our mental operations should lead to a predictable result. If we knew all the original conditions of a given grain (all the neurons, all the synapses, all the initial conditions), we would be able to predict the outcome.

I've seen this asserted before but not by anyone who seemed to have the qualifications to back it up. It is also self-contradictory to believe that a machine could be built to model every "thing" in the world, since that machine too would need to be modelled, leading to an infinite spiral of bigger and bigger machines.

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indeed, hence what I said after:

But, at the moment, we don't know them, and it seems to be impossible to know them [...].

[The Grand Nudger]

I will attempt to suggest a test if you can tell me what your proposed "no-free-will" is. What controls the will if it is not free? If it is deterministic, then determined by who or what?

And if you think there is no practical value to either side of the issue, what is the point of the non-free-willers bringing it up? Is it just navel gazing?

Do your own work. The point is challenging assumptions, I suppose. In your responses and questions it becomes very obvious that you begin with the assumption of free will, but lacking any explanation as to why this is so it seems a strange assumption, to me. Especially considering our inability to find anything free of determinism anywhere we care (or dont care) to look. The billions made annually on exploiting just how easily coerced our "wills" -whatever they are- can be in a pleasant little industry called "advertising" is another very obvious example of this. Something as minor as buying a tube of toothpaste is, in all likelihood, very much an issue of determinism. So, love, hate, buying toothpaste......I'm just looking for a single case of free will so we can attempt to explain whats going down when it's leveraged.

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If there were no rules punishing bad behavior, it would run rampart.

It does, because there aren't. No one gets punished for doing anything, you get punished for getting caught.

The brain wouldn't have the mechanism in place to prevent this bad behavior.

It doesn't, if it did we wouldn't have mountains of "incentives" and external sources of conditioning...there would be no need.

This is visible in kids born in the "I never lay a hand on my child" societies. Kids never learn the rules, hence they think they are free to do whatever their brains conjure up.

I'm assuming you're referencing crime, which has gotten lower and lower in those "i never lay a hand on my child" societies, reliably. It's almost as though a large group of social animals is slowly being conditioning to be more conducive to social interaction by some mysterious force that we have no name for..........

You know, it occurs to me, if we weren't so goddamned pleasant about "bad behavior" we'd probably be even more pleasant than we are...eventually...lol. Sure, greater levels of cooperation lead to greater amounts of success, but what if the price for uncooperative behavior was the ultimate penalty, -no success- biologically speaking. How many assholes would be left in the world? Is the asshole an expression of genetics or an emergent property of consciousness, a ghost in the machine..hehehe

[Tino]

Aye.. there are exceptional kids out there.... it just happens that mine need that extra incentive.... just like most do.

I wasn't suggesting that my kids are exceptional or unusual, just that they are well behaved children who don't get hit by their parents. There are so many other methods available for incentives, punishments etc. Perhaps it's inevitable that this becomes a child rearing discussion but I don't believe that any child needs to be hit.

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you think that they make the decision to be "well behaved" through a means of free will? Is that something that free will is at work in? Say, they could be murderous tots slitting your throat in your sleep or well behaved...but they make the decision to be well behaved? Mine aren't murderous or well-behaved. They fall in the middle...and I don't think that they think about it much, but that's me and mine.

My daughters explanation for anything that she does, as an amusing aside..is that "Lahni-do's".

[Tino]

Do you think that they make the decision to be "well behaved" through a means of free will? Is that something that free will is at work in?

Yes that's how I see it. They're aware of the consequences of their behavior. Most of the time they follow the rules or do the right thing. Sometimes they don't and suffer the consequences or a guilty conscience. It looks like free will to me.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, I would reference biology and conditioning in that regard..and the plus side is that I can demonstrate the existence of biology and conditioning....you see why the two explanations may not be equal? Why I might have suspicions that the idea of "free will" is actually code for something else? I don't think that my kids "decide" to be good or bad, for example..and maybe thats because they're too little to make decisions like that (that has to be mentioned). If we were referencing consequences and avoidance I wouldn't call that "free will" either..we're definitively hardwired for avoidance.

[Darkstar]

Until we can create and program a machine with the complexity of the human brain that acts in a way indistiguishable from a real human, we won't know for sure. We have at the very least the illusion of free will; the brain combined with nature vs. nurture would create complexity so great that it might be indistiguishable from free will. I understand how our likes and dislikes are not entirely voluntary, but the envirinment is way too complex to know for sure if it is inborn, or perhaps an indirect result of other likes or dislikes, because of a similarity between them (but then, maybe the 'lkes and dislikes' would have to be distilled into a list of very basic traits that are ascribed to thing that are liked or disliked, and those traits cause the like or dislike). Some people are 'prone to violence' but they can resist the urge. Does this prove free will? Maybe, but not necessarily. I don't think we can know for sure at this point.

[Angrboda]

I reduce the constraints on human behavior down to two strategies.
1. Antagonizing behaviors that agonize discomfort and anxiety (reduce behaviors which increase pain or displeasure; e.g. distracting yourself from worrying about that promotion)
2. Agonizing behaviors that antagonize discomfort or anxiety (increase behaviors that reduce [subjective] discomfort; e.g. eating when we feel hungry)

I hope you won't mind if I comment that this seems vastly oversimplistic, and while you're entitled to your view, asking me to buy it without any scientific basis is a bridge too far.

I don't mind, particularly, but you've introduced an explanation of human behavior which is equally simple and expect us to accept it on the basis of a philosophical argument. However, when I introduce an alternative explanation of human behavior, you require scientific rigor. Requiring a lesser standard for your own explanation than you do for mine is a form of special pleading, and makes your argument fallacious. If you're not willing to consider my explanation on the same terms as your own, then I am fully justified in dismissing your argument on that basis.

I would argue that the human organism always seeks what it considers to be the ideal compromise amongst all factors. If this is true, then its choices aren't free, as it will always choose what it thinks is best, and what it thinks is best wasn't itself chosen the moment before, but rather determined by its past history.

You appear to be saying that a will isn't free unless it is able to make decisions without developing the best compromise amongst all factors. I don't agree, since the freedom is embedded in the decision of what factors to include and how to weigh them. If you want an example of decisions made without weighing of factors you could just use a random number generator. Does a random number generator have free will? My view is that consciousness is required for will.

No, that's not what I'm saying. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was introducing a model of decision making which in my opinion is sufficiently powerful and capable to explain human behavior at this level, a model which doesn't require free will to produce the same results (the choices and decisions). This model combines the two strategies with this criterion to yield a deterministic algorithm which I believe well captures how humans work. (The one notion I excluded which is common is the notion that we seek pleasure. That may or may not be a valid objection. See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis.)

You say above that "...it ( a human organism) will always choose what it thinks is best...". Based on that rule, you should be able to devise a practical test, demonstration or scenario where I or someone else are unable to do anything other than what I/he/she think(s) is best. Can you come up with one? If there isn't one, does your view of will have any practical use or meaning?

Well, the difficulty is in detecting what that is inside a working brain. However there's a more fundamental problem here. You've repeatedly asked for an example of what a world where we don't have free will looks like. Yet I've just introduced two examples, the robot drivers, and my algorithm for human choice. You dismissed one with a wave of the hand and special pleading, and you don't even respond to the other (it's like there's an 18 minute gap of silence in your reply). We know what a world with determinism in it looks like. We have plenty of scientific evidence of determinism. The very science of psychology depends on human mental behaviors being robustly predictable. (Can you imagine a world where scientists study human behavior when doing so has no predictive value?) We don't have any scientific evidence of any processes which are free in the sense that you seem to think free will is. And while we still need to connect the dots and demonstrate that all human behaviors can be explained deterministically, the possibility that they can is much more probable than that an unknown entity named free will which nobody has ever seen or described does.

Note critically at this juncture the common alternatives that crop up in free will arguments. The assertion that people believe in free will, therefore it must be based on something. This is a mix of argumentum ad populum and argument from tradition, and both make it fallacious. And the claim that determinists can't show how fully determined mechanisms explain human behavior, therefore, "free will." (It's arguable that you've just done this in your reply to me.) This is an argument from ignorance, and is again fallacious. And I see you've raised another, referring to our need to hold people morally accountable for their actions. (May have been pocaracas.) This is essentially an argument from consequences, that the results of our not having or coming to believe we don't have free will would be so undesirable that they simply could not be tolerated. This again is a flawed argument. Even if scientists discovered that there was no free will, and people immediately began raping, killing, and eating babies, this would not prove the scientist was wrong. Your task is to demonstrate free will. Demonstrating the undesirability of a lack of free will gets you nothing. (And I do have provisional answers to the consequences argument, but I'm not going to go into them.)

In one of your replies, you assert that human choice is free because we are able to choose what values and weights and criteria we place upon our choice. (Sorry if it's a bad paraphrase.) Are these factors freely chosen? If not, then the choice itself is not free. I'll accept that these factors are freely chosen. By freely chosen, of course, I mean the values and criterion for choosing the values and criterion were themselves freely chosen, and the choice of those was determined by choosing the values and criterion for that — if any free choice requires a choice of values and weights, that values and weights choice also requires a choice, and you end up with a vicious regress. Generally speaking, philosophers consider a vicious infinite regress to be very bad news. You could argue that it's turtles all the way down, and preserve your argument, or accept the inevitable, that this chain of choices must bottom out with a choice that is not free, thereby robbing the entire chain of decisions of their freedom.

I just got up, so I'm not fully coherent. I missed a point or two. I've got book clubs to read for, so I likely will not return to this discussion for a while (or perhaps at all). Consider my arguments for what it's worth.