Free Will: Fact or Fiction

[Tempus]

He's talking about the writing of history specifically, but it can be taken more generally.

• "The nightmare quality of Kafka's novels lies in the fact that nothing that happens has any apparent cause, or any cause that can be ascertained: this leads to the total disintegration of the human personality, which is based on the assumption that events have causes, and that enough of these causes are ascertainable to build up in the human mind a pattern of past and present sufficiently coherent to serve as a guide to action. Everyday life would be impossible unless one assumed that human behaviour was determined by causes which are in principle ascertainable. Once upon a time some people thought it blasphemous to inquire into the causes of natural phenomena, since these were obviously governed by the divine will. Sir Isaiah Berlin's objection to our explaining why human beings acted as they did, on the ground that these actions are governed by the human will, belongs to the same order of ideas, and perhaps indicates that the social sciences are in the same stage of development today as were the natural sciences when this kind of argument was directed against them." - E. H. Carr (What is History? p94)

I think freewill is nonsense, myself. For me, the answer to the question "what would a world look like with freewill?" would be "frightening". Actually, I find both options frightening, particularly in the early hours. Compatiblism, as far as I can tell, is optimistic determinism. It's really a Morton's fork from my perspective, sans the choice.

[Omni314]

Determinism all the way. a ball can't decide whether or not to roll down a hill, a electrical impulse doesn't control where it goes in a brain, people down decide where they go or what the think.

[Whateverist]

Determinism all the way. a ball can't decide whether or not to roll down a hill, a electrical impulse doesn't control where it goes in a brain, people down decide where they go or what the think.

But are you really convinced by the logic of this or are your neurons just firing as they will and must? Why would you waste your time trying to convince us all of determinism if you truly realized the necessity of our brains making the sense that they do? Oh yeah .. what choice do you have? Go right ahead .. but know that your arguments have all the significance of the wind blowing. I don't blame either of you.

[pocaracas]

Determinism all the way. a ball can't decide whether or not to roll down a hill, a electrical impulse doesn't control where it goes in a brain, people down decide where they go or what the think.

But are you really convinced by the logic of this or are your neurons just firing as they will and must? Why would you waste your time trying to convince us all of determinism if you truly realized the necessity of our brains making the sense that they do? Oh yeah .. what choice do you have? Go right ahead .. but know that your arguments have all the significance of the wind blowing. I don't blame either of you.

Actually, what gets posted is influenced by previous posts (if you read them). The brain is just too complex for us to understand how it works, but I just can't accept that our thought is anything more than neurons firing in a specific pattern... .alas, not repeatable, because you can't replicate the initial condition of any thought, due to it's great complexity, of course! and because previous actions/thoughts create new neural pathways which will influence any future thought.

[Angrboda]

The Strange Case of Phineas Gage

The strange story of Phineas Gage is one of the classic cases of neurology, and one of the first that led scientists to suspect that there might be regions of the brain specifically devoted to personality and reasoning. The terrible accident this man suffered, while tragic, also served to cast a gleam of light on the inner workings of the mind and reveal how fragile the neurological construct called the self is in all of us.

It was the summer of 1848, in New England, and the Rutland and Burlington Railroad Company was building new tracks for its trains. The proposed path ran over uneven ground, and outcrops of stone had to be blasted to clear a way for the rails to be laid.

The construction crew supervising the blasting was led by one Phineas Gage, a 25-year-old man whose employers described him as "the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ" (Macmillan 2000, p. 65). He was further said to have "temperate habits" and "considerable energy of character", and "was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of action" (ibid.) In short, a better person to lead the construction crew could not have been found.

In order to blast, the crew would drill a narrow shaft in the rock, fill it halfway with explosive powder, insert the fuse, and then fill the hole the rest of the way with sand, which would direct the explosion inward, toward the rock it was intended to destroy. Once the sand was added, it had to be tamped down with an iron bar, then the fuse was lit and the blast went off. Gage and his crew were performing just such a procedure when the fatal mistake occurred.

For one particular shaft, the blasting powder had been poured and the fuse set, but the sand had not yet been poured. However, before it could be added, Gage became distracted and unthinkingly tamped down the explosive powder itself. His iron tamping rod struck sparks, the powder ignited, and the blast - channeled and directed by the narrow walls of the drill shaft - went off in Phineas Gage's face. The tamping iron, which had been in the hole at the time, was propelled upward like a bullet straight at his head.

The iron tamping rod, over three feet in length and tapering from an inch-and-a-quarter diameter at one end to a quarter-inch at the other, pierced Gage's left cheek point first, penetrated the base of his skull, passed through the front of his brain, and flew out through the top of his head, leaving a ghastly exit wound. Covered with blood and brain material, the iron landed over a hundred feet away. Gage was knocked over by the force of the blow, but astonishingly, then sat up and spoke. He was conscious and seemed in command of his faculties, despite the terrible injury he had suffered. His men helped him get to town to see a doctor.

The physician who examined him, Dr. John Harlow, confirmed that initial impression. Phineas Gage was fully coherent; he was not paralyzed and had no difficulty walking, speaking or using his hands. He had lost sight in his left eye as the result of his accident, but otherwise his senses and faculties were intact. He even spoke with Harlow perfectly calmly and rationally despite the gaping wound in his skull. In disbelief, the doctor helped treat him, and with his help Gage eventually survived the injury and a subsequent infection and fever - a major achievement by itself, in an age before antibiotics.

However, it soon became apparent that Gage had not survived his ordeal unchanged. Almost immediately after his fever had passed and his wounds had healed, major and surprising changes in his personality began to surface. In essence, he was no longer the man he had been before the accident. As Dr. Antonio Damasio writes:

"Yet this astonishing outcome [Gage's survival] pales in comparison with the extraordinary turn that Gage's personality is about to undergo. Gage's disposition, his likes and dislikes, his dreams and aspirations are all to change. Gage's body may be alive and well, but there is a new spirit animating it." (Damasio 1994, p. 7)

The man Phineas Gage had been before his accident was gone. As a perplexed Dr. John Harlow wrote, he had become "fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned... A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man." (quoted in Damasio 1994, p. 8)

A sharper contrast with the man he had been before would be impossible to imagine - "the alterations in Gage's personality were not subtle" (p. 11). Where once he had been polite, modest and likable, he had become crude, profane and tactless. Where once he had been responsible and goal-driven, he now became lazy and irresponsible, and would conceive all kinds of wild plans and fail to follow up on any of them. Where once he had made shrewd and wise decisions, it now seemed he was actively attempting to drive himself to ruin through repeated instances of bad judgment. So dramatic and obvious was the change that his former friends sadly said that he was "no longer Gage" (quoted in Damasio 1994, p. 8). His employers refused to give him his old job back, not because he lacked the skill, but because he no longer had the discipline or the character.

For the next several years, Gage held menial jobs working in a stable or as a stagecoach driver. However, in 1860, he began unexpectedly suffering from seizures. After this, his decline began to accelerate; he worked as a farmhand and did other odd jobs, but always moved on before long, as he "[found] something that did not suit him in every place he tried" (Macmillan 2000, p. 66). Finally, on May 21, 1861, he suffered a series of major seizures, slipped into a coma, and died without regaining consciousness.

Gage's skull was exhumed after his death and became a museum exhibit, and a hundred and twenty years later, Dr. Damasio and his colleagues decided to analyze it to determine exactly where his brain had been injured. Building up a three-dimensional computer model of his skull, they ran simulations to determine the most likely path of the iron bar through it based on the never-fully-healed entrance and exit wounds.

What they found was not surprising. The region of Gage's brain that was damaged was a part of the frontal lobes called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - precisely the part now believed to be critical for normal decision-making (p. 32). With this part of his brain destroyed, he was unable to plan for the future, behave himself according to social rules and customs, or decide on the most advantageous course of action. That he behaved as he subsequently did was to be expected, and was not his fault or the result of any conscious decision. Dr. Damasio writes, "It is appropriate to say... that Gage's free will had been compromised" (p. 38).

The most important lesson that we can draw from the strange and tragic case of Phineas Gage is that the frontal regions of the brain play a major role in determining personality. Likewise, they play a crucial role in controlling behavior, allowing us to inhibit our reckless impulses and conduct ourselves as society expects. These functions can be disabled when the frontal lobes are damaged or destroyed. Nor is Phineas Gage's case the only one like it on record. As the remainder of this section will show, there are many more examples of people with frontal lobe damage who exhibit similar symptoms: an inability to make wise decisions, to behave as law or custom expect, and to fit into society as an ordinary human being. How can a dualist hypothesis explain this? Did the blast of the iron on that morning in 1848 knock Gage's soul out of his head? A materialist theory of mind can easily explain how a person's character traits can be altered by physical harm. For dualist models that hold that character traits ultimately arise from an immaterial "ghost" invulnerable to harm, these cases are not similarly explicable.

— Ebon Musings, The Atheism Pages:

[Tino]

a ball can't decide whether or not to roll down a hill

Right. A ball doesn't have free will.

a electrical impulse doesn't control where it goes in a brain

Right. Electrical current doesn't have free will.

people down decide where they go

Repeated observations of human beings shows that they do decide where they go. For example, every day billions of people go to their place of work or school, and then later in the day return to their own home .

[jonb]

Repeated observations of human beings shows that they do decide where they go. For example, every day billions of people go to their place of work or school, and then later in the day return to their own home .

Sorry to show this video again, but I am an absurdist, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFx_QEi-vww and as such I have no free will not to endlessly go on about it. Anyway I've made my choice and I'm sticking with it until I change my mind, I think, or think I think, I don't know what. . . .

[Angrboda]

people down decide where they go

Repeated observations of human beings shows that they do decide where they go. For example, every day billions of people go to their place of work or school, and then later in the day return to their own home .

The question is not "do we make decisions," but rather, are the decisions we make freely made? And what would that mean?

The computer you're using is making thousands of decisions a second. Not one of them is a freely made decision. They are all determined by its programming, its history, and its hardware. There is a robot race that is run in the southwest United States each year (or was) where robotic computers would pilot cars along a desert race course to see whose robotic pilot was the best. The first few years, the results were abysmal, as the problems of computer processing of perception were far greater than anticipated. I believe that the first year it was run, not a single robot finished the race. Over the years, however, the programs and hardware got better to the point that a robot pilot could successfully navigate the course. These robot pilots make millions of decisions about where to go. None of those decisions is an example of free will. Simply saying we make choices isn't an argument. A sunflower chooses to face the sun. The mere existence of decisions and choices is insufficient to demonstrate the existence of free will.

Anymore, 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)

Figuring out what actions best satisfy these overriding goals at any moment may require balancing any number of competing desires and anticipated outcomes, e.g. satisfying that seven year itch with an extra-marital affair, or taking your honey on a cruise to "reignite the passion." However, 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. (e.g. If you have neither slept, eaten or urinated in 72 hours, there is a much higher than normal chance that you will choose eating, pissing or sleeping as the ideal option. You didn't freely choose that probability; it was a precondition of your choice, and in this instance, clearly determinative of the outcome.)

The existence of choosing or deciding doesn't demonstrate free will.

[Tino]

The question is not "do we make decisions," but rather, are the decisions we make freely made?

Agreed, good start.

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 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.

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?
[/quote]

[The Grand Nudger]

Precisely, if -you- the claimant of this "free will" business cannot devise a test that could at least distinguish between the two (free will involved vs no free will involved)....-your- view...as the claimant, has what practical value or meaning?

How could we determine what "decisions" even involve this free will? Do you decide those whom you love or dislike, for example? Are some things within the remit of this will's abilities while others remain outside the walls of the camp? If so, which things, if not....why not? How does this "will" work? Where does it come from? Consciousness? Thats a non-answer, just shifts the question back from one term to another. Personally, I like to think that I make decisions too, that I'm "my own man", but I don't see any reason to be sure that this is so....it's just a pleasant thought.