Do you believe in free will?

[tackattack]

---

1a-Even in the worst cases of brain damage or mental reprogramming, I’ve yet to see someone lose that irreducible sense of self I deem as the agent. I think this is largely due to a large tie between identity and experience. I believe that since we experience things in the now and the movement of our timeline is constant, who we are at any moment is inexplicably tied to each moment. As long as moments continue independent of self, the self experiences passing through that timeline. As long as I am experiencing the temporal self moving through the now, I have an irreducible identity. That to me is as fundamentally real as the passage of time.

Yes, but do you consider that self to remain the same throughout or change according to time? By your answer here, I'd say the latter.

Secondly, what do you mean by irreducible? For example, a person in a coma has no consciousness due to the brain damage. Would you still consider him to have the sense of self?

1b- As no successful attempts have changed this irreducible identity, at least that portion of consciousness remains unknown as to its location. Certainly though it’s not in the material as all brain function can cease and (upon its resuscitation) the majority of the identity is intact. Even in cases of coma where it has been shown that no record of time is kept with consciousness (people waking up thinking it’s 20 years ago) identity still exists.

This part is inconsistent with what you said previously. While claiming the "self" to have irreducible identity, you did not assert that it is independent of the timeline.

Further, your absence of knowledge as to its location is not argument for its immateriality. In fact, the examples you provided work against the assumption. The self could be considered both irreducible and emergent, i.e. it arises from a particular configuration of the brain (emergent) but cannot exist if any part of it is taken away (irreducible). You examples show that as long as that particular configuration exists, the self exists - irrespective of any intermediate time when that configuration did not exist.

2a-at the very least will exist as a useful abstract thought. I believe conscious (read as self-aware consciousness or ego) use of will is a driving force implementing desires and thus is a huge functional part of the causal chain in personal action. While not certain, I find ego driven will reliable and axiomatic that I can force myself to act contrary to the way my id or nature desires me to act.

Mostly ok. Few nitpicks though. Firstly, you cannot consider this position axiomatic if it is based on your view of the "self" as it seems to be. Secondly, your nature is not the same as your id - it includes your id as well as your conscious will. So, while you can act against your will, you cannot act against your nature.

2b- I would say will exist in the consciousness. Sometimes the id uses it and we act (seemingly) involuntarily, sometime the ego uses it (free or coercion). It seems to span both but residing squarely in the conceptual mind. This mind could be the sum of concepts and entirely an illusory fabrication of synapses firing. With the limited number of genomes and vastly expansive amount of synapses I know that the genome isn’t creating a mind with its genetic plans. If the 1000 billion or so synapses is even able to permanently record every bit of experienced information in a lifetime is yet to be seen as well, and I don’t think it’s simply big enough to hold the sum total of consciousness. Even if we could read exact thoughts and implant those thoughts into someone else it doesn’t make the mind strictly visible. It merely concludes that expression of the mind must be done through the window of the physical brain.

This is the point where your justified answers end. You haven't shown any justification for the position of non-physical mind - except for the lack of ignorance about the complete physical explanation. Ergo, your argument here of "simply not big enough" is argument from incredulity.

3a- If run by the id it’s out of direct control and therefore under the influence of instinctual drives and beliefs. If run by the ego it’s directly controlled by the self-aware ego part of the consciousness and free from influence.

Free from influence of the id, but not the ego. An important distinction.

3b-This comes from the feedback loop between the id and ego with relation to identity. “Who I am” is a function of the super-ego and this feedback loop. “Who I am” drives my will and can influence “who I am”, go against the ego or the id and can thus be independent of coercion.

The problem I have here is that you are considering all three - id, ego and super-ego as three different entities. Within the context of the question of "Who I am" - you are answering - my super-ego, not my id or ego. Thus, you can claim coercion in case of id/ego-directed action. I see all three subsumed in the identity and therefore do not consider it coercion in case of id/ego driven behavior. Thus, my question here is, on what basis do you separate the identity of a person from his id or ego?

---

1a- It is the latter, but not because of the passage of time, but the receipt of input. As long as the consciousness receives inputs it changes and thus changes identity. I define irreducible as unable to be lessened. Secondly can you prove that a person has no consciousness in a coma? I believe that, while they can't express, if they can receive input they would still have a consciousness. For instance, after Joe is in a coma for 20 years for brain damage, he wakes up. He's still Joe, He didn't experience the passage of those 20 years and may act differently, but he still perceives himself as Joe.

1b- I would say the self is the sum of a lot of things. It's in part who we perceive ourselves consciously to be, out nature, what we know, memories, Time that we've experienced, etc. Take all those away and I still feel there is a sense of agent that is irreducible. That is typically what I'm trying to identify and talk about when discussing self and duality vs. monism. If you would be so kind as to point out exactly how that is inconsistant with my 1a, I will reassess it. AAlso I'm fairly new to emergent properties and such, please explain it in more detail so I could evaluate it.

2a- I think I see where we're having a divergence. You define nature to include both your id and conscious will. I should be perhaps more specific and refer to it as our naturalistic instinctual nature. Hopefully that helps clear that up. I agree with your point about axioms and subjectivity.

2b- If all brain activity were to cease how would there exist any aspect of consciousness. How would you explain consciousness' dependance on the brain? Is it the electrical activity, the configuration of the synapses? I can fully admit I don't know where the mind would reside, if not in the brain, but I'm working on it.

3a- OK

3b- OK on the grounds that, due to how it functions, it is unobservable to self. I, for instance, know that part of who I am comes from who I am genetically built to be. Part of who I am is who I learned to be. Part of me is what I've experienced, remembereed and not. Part of who I am though, is also who I consciously choose to be. Colloquially when I refer to who I am, it's only the part of me I can perceive, which would not include the parts of my sub-conscious I can not see because I'm consciously expressing it. Objectively all parts of the whole would make the sum of the formal "who am I" agent definition.

[genkaus]

1a- It is the latter, but not because of the passage of time, but the receipt of input. As long as the consciousness receives inputs it changes and thus changes identity. I define irreducible as unable to be lessened. Secondly can you prove that a person has no consciousness in a coma? I believe that, while they can't express, if they can receive input they would still have a consciousness. For instance, after Joe is in a coma for 20 years for brain damage, he wakes up. He's still Joe, He didn't experience the passage of those 20 years and may act differently, but he still perceives himself as Joe.

To a certain extent, yes it can be proven. The two things you accepted here are that a) consciousness requires reception of input, i.e. perception and b) the process of perception alters consciousness.

Now, the process of perception can be recorded. Which part of the brain brain becomes active when an input is sent, indicates perception in process. We can exhaustively test for perception through different senses and map Joe's brain, but if we see nothing happening there, we can reasonably say that there is no consciousness.

Secondly, suppose Joe wakes up after 20 years and he is the same old Joe. His attitude, behavior, thoughts are all consistent with the old Joe. Which would mean that his consciousness is the same as it was before. Which means, there was no perception in between to alter the consciousness. Which means there was no consciousness in between.

1b- I would say the self is the sum of a lot of things. It's in part who we perceive ourselves consciously to be, out nature, what we know, memories, Time that we've experienced, etc. Take all those away and I still feel there is a sense of agent that is irreducible. That is typically what I'm trying to identify and talk about when discussing self and duality vs. monism. If you would be so kind as to point out exactly how that is inconsistant with my 1a, I will reassess it. AAlso I'm fairly new to emergent properties and such, please explain it in more detail so I could evaluate it.

This is what is inconsistent - you state that the self or the identity is the sum of knowledge, memories, experience, nature, perception and X (X being the other irreducible thing). You also state that the self.identity is irreducible, which means you take away any part of the sum and the self no longer exists - it cannot exist as anything less that the sum. Therefore, your X here would not be the same thing as the agent's self or identity - irrespective of whether there is such a thing as X.

2a- I think I see where we're having a divergence. You define nature to include both your id and conscious will. I should be perhaps more specific and refer to it as our naturalistic instinctual nature. Hopefully that helps clear that up. I agree with your point about axioms and subjectivity.

Ok, but I still fail to see any reason for creating this distinction.

2b- If all brain activity were to cease how would there exist any aspect of consciousness. How would you explain consciousness' dependance on the brain? Is it the electrical activity, the configuration of the synapses? I can fully admit I don't know where the mind would reside, if not in the brain, but I'm working on it.

There wouldn't. I can't yet. Yes, but not that simplistic. And so are all the neurologists.

3b- OK on the grounds that, due to how it functions, it is unobservable to self. I, for instance, know that part of who I am comes from who I am genetically built to be. Part of who I am is who I learned to be. Part of me is what I've experienced, remembered and not. Part of who I am though, is also who I consciously choose to be. Colloquially when I refer to who I am, it's only the part of me I can perceive, which would not include the parts of my sub-conscious I can not see because I'm consciously expressing it. Objectively all parts of the whole would make the sum of the formal "who am I" agent definition.

As you say here, the question of "who I am" is being answered on basis of perception - however, as we established - identity is not based upon perception. It is, as you point out as well, determined objectively and as a sum of all parts. Which is why, while it appeared that you were able to coerce yourself - from your limited subjective point of view - objectively - there was no coercion.

[Angrboda]

And here, it would appear, we have an explicit example of someone coercing themselves. [blue]

SECOND DIVISION: LEFT VS. RIGHT

A second division was discovered by accident in the 1960s when a surgeon began cutting people's brains in half. The surgeon, Joe Bogen, had a good reason for doing this: He was trying to help people whose lives were destroyed by frequent and massive epileptic seizures. The human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum. Seizures always begin at one spot in the brain and spread to the surrounding brain tissue. If a seizure crosses over the corpus callosum, it can spread to the entire brain, causing the person to lose consciousness, fall down, and writhe uncontrollably. Just as a military leader might blow up a bridge to prevent an enemy from crossing it, Bogen wanted to sever the corpus callosum to prevent the seizures from spreading.

At first glance this was an insane tactic. The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing some-thing important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. Yet research on animals found that, within a few weeks of surgery, the animals were pretty much back to normal. So Bogen took a chance with human patients, and it worked. The in-tensity of the seizures was greatly reduced.

But was there really no loss of ability? To find out, the surgical team brought in a young psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, whose job was to look for the after-effects of this "split-brain" surgery. Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres-left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left's mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being "right-brained" and scientists being "left-brained").

Gazzaniga used the brain's division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, "What did you see?" Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, "A hat." If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, "What did you see?", the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, "Nothing." But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not re-port verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the lan-guage centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand.

When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that "goes with" what he had seen. The patient's right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called "confabulation." Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on what-ever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self's behavior. For example, if the word "walk" is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, "I'm going get a Coke." The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively Fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.

— by Jonathan Haidt

[oxymoron]

^ That's a good excerpt. I would go as far as saying all of our conscious experience is confabulation. Many many components are working to fill in holes in a data stream that is smaller than you'd think (once you factor in saccadic motion, for example) by interpolation or inference. The fact that much of our internal awareness is in the form of language only further confirms that we are synthesising complex constructs from simpler ones (percept -> concept -> concrete) and using context to add in missing information.

But I don't think that's an example of someone coercing themselves. I don't even think that statement makes much sense. All decisions are the result of systems competing to select an action given a set of inputs. We confabulate the decision as "us" deciding, but Libet showed that this isn't the way it happens, and that's not surprising, because as you'd imagine the complex synthesis is computationally expensive and therefore slower than the instinctual, more "ancient" brain that is actually driving our actions. The internal narrative we experience may complain that some of our higher-level desires were trumped by our lower-level ones, but in the end it is the same systems making the same calculation: we take the action that manages to shout loudest, though there is much plasticity in the way we learn to adjust the weightings of some actions throughout our lives.

[Angrboda]

And here are some examples of the conscious mind making free and uncoerced choices.

Suppose you volunteered to be a subject in the following experiment. First, the experimenter hands you some word problems and tells you to come and get her when you are finished. The word problems are easy: Just unscramble sets of five words and make sentences using four of them. For example, "they her bother see usually" becomes either "they usually see her" or "they usually bother her." A few minutes later, when you have finished the test, you go out to the hallway as instructed. The experimenter is there, but she's engaged in a conversation with someone and isn't making eye contact with you. What do you suppose you'll do? Well, if half the sentences you unscrambled contained words related to rudeness (such as bother, brazen, aggressively), you will probably interrupt the experimenter within a minute or two to say, "Hey, I'm finished. What should I do now? " But if you unscrambled sentences in which the rude words were swapped with words related to politeness ("they her respect see usually"), the odds are you'll just sit there meekly and wait until the experimenter acknowledges you — ten minutes from now.

Likewise, exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game of Trivial Pursuit; and words related to soccer hooligans make people dumber. And these effects don't even depend on your consciously reading the words; the same effects can occur when the words are presented subliminally, that is, flashed on a screen for just a few hundredths of a second, too fast for your conscious mind to register them. But some part of the mind does see the words, and it sets in motion behaviors that psychologists can measure.

(ibid)

[oxymoron]

And here are some examples of the conscious mind making free and uncoerced choices.

I don't see anything "free" in there. In fact quite the reverse - it matters not if we cognize the stimuli or not.

[genkaus]

---

And here, it would appear, we have an explicit example of someone coercing themselves. [blue]

SECOND DIVISION: LEFT VS. RIGHT

A second division was discovered by accident in the 1960s when a surgeon began cutting people's brains in half. The surgeon, Joe Bogen, had a good reason for doing this: He was trying to help people whose lives were destroyed by frequent and massive epileptic seizures. The human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum. Seizures always begin at one spot in the brain and spread to the surrounding brain tissue. If a seizure crosses over the corpus callosum, it can spread to the entire brain, causing the person to lose consciousness, fall down, and writhe uncontrollably. Just as a military leader might blow up a bridge to prevent an enemy from crossing it, Bogen wanted to sever the corpus callosum to prevent the seizures from spreading.

At first glance this was an insane tactic. The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing some-thing important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. Yet research on animals found that, within a few weeks of surgery, the animals were pretty much back to normal. So Bogen took a chance with human patients, and it worked. The in-tensity of the seizures was greatly reduced.

But was there really no loss of ability? To find out, the surgical team brought in a young psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, whose job was to look for the after-effects of this "split-brain" surgery. Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres-left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left's mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being "right-brained" and scientists being "left-brained").

Gazzaniga used the brain's division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, "What did you see?" Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, "A hat." If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, "What did you see?", the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, "Nothing." But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not re-port verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the lan-guage centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand.

When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that "goes with" what he had seen. The patient's right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called "confabulation." Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on what-ever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self's behavior. For example, if the word "walk" is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, "I'm going get a Coke." The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively Fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.

— by Jonathan Haidt

---

Interesting.
But is it really coercing oneself? As I understand, here there seem to be two distinct and separate identities cohabiting the same brain.

[Gooders1002]

I think we have Free will to an point like deciding between waffles and pancakes or should I walk or drive or should I go in holiday now or or later in the year, mostly choices that effect only us when no other factors are at play, but we don't then there are more people to consider or there is some barrier or factor we can not control. I think there are set points in history that must never change events that must happen no matter if there positive or negative but other then that we have free will(well to an extant).

[NoMoreFaith]

I think we have Free will to an point like deciding between waffles and pancakes or should I walk or drive or should I go in holiday now or or later in the year, mostly choices that effect only us when no other factors are at play, but we don't then there are more people to consider or there is some barrier or factor we can not control. I think there are set points in history that must never change events that must happen no matter if there positive or negative but other then that we have free will(well to an extant).

I think you are simply describing when the factors at play are far more elusive.
Even in the big decisions, you are completely unaware of the real factors at play anyway, and most of your decision making process is more a rationalisation making process for those factors.

Let me ask, if when deciding whether to eat waffles or pancakes, the concept of one makes you salivate more than the other.
Was it free will to salivate more at the concept of one than the other?
You probably didn't "choose" to salivate more at the concept at all, any more than a reaction which will guide your rationalisation of the final decision.

Thats my take on things anyway

[Perhaps]

Just because we are effected by our past, doesn't necessarily mean that we don't have control over our future decisions. If the waffles make you salivate more so than the pancakes, it does not follow that you are required to eat the waffles - which is what a world without free will would necessitate. The world may be determinate in nature, yet still provide us with the ability to make decisions based on arbitrary whims (this position is known as compatibilism).