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Neuroscience, Psychology Eroding Idea of Free Will
pragueexpat writes "Do we have free will? Possibly not, according to an article in the new issue of the Economist. Entitled 'Free to choose?', the piece examines new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and psychology that may be forcing us to re-examine the concept of free will. The specifically cite a man with paedophilic tendencies who was cured when his brain tumor was removed. 'Who then was the child abuser?', they ask. The predictable conclusion of this train of thought, of course, leads us to efforts by Britain: 'At the moment, the criminal law--in the West, at least--is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
The whole idea of free will is an artefact of religious thought: If god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why do people do bad things? Answer? Free will!
Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will. This is just another example of physical determinism, which is even more pathetically weak than it's religious counterpart, because it replaces a omnipotent puppet master with the laws of nature. Is nature taking away your ability to choose? Do the laws of physics require that you consume this twinkie instead of that ho-ho? It reduces quickly to absurdity.
Free will is like the Cartesian solipsism brought on by cogito ergo sum, where you prove your own existence, but lose all the rest of existence at the same time. What type of person does it take to sit down and wonder whether or not they exist, and if they do exist, does the rest of the world exist?
Do you have free will? Does it matter? Would you ever know the difference? The pedophile cited in the article couldn't use it as a defense in his trial, because the legal system doesn't give a damn.
I normally am not a proponent of Occam, but this is one of those cases where it's just so apt. What possible explanatory purpose is served by adding or removing free will?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
until quantum physics is either discredited or modified, there's a definite place for "free will" in science.
at the very base of quantum physics is the measurement problem: when a measurement is made, the many quantum possiblities of particles collapse into one actuality. so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality, and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I have Bipolar disorder type 2 and hence there are times when I do stupidly risky things (such as shocking myself with a toaster.. yep that was a great idea). I'am not dangerous to anyone but myself, but as this reads they could lock me up because I have one mood swing where I turn very agressive and refuse to listen to anyone or cooperate (even though it's just words I've never been violent to anyone).
Is it fair that I get locked up because one a month I spent a day telling people to go fuck themselvs and verbally abusing those close to me who try to help? I don't think it is.. but how I read this, I would be in very deep trouble for something I have no control over and effects me less than the average time a guy spends horny a month which effects them in a different way but with about the same direct effect on their beahaviour (wanting sex isn't the same as hating the world, but neither can be controlled).
People need to learn that mood disorders are very difficult to deal with and if you act differently to people like us then you make it worse not better. If you just ignore it and side step/try not to take offence then after an hour or two it tends to fade and everythings back to normal.
I like muppets.
Yeah, because "likely" and "certain" are obviously the same thing in the British government's eyes.
Even if you dispense entirely with the notion of free will, locking up someone before they've committed a crime just because they might is the antithesis of justice.
And it's exactly what I would expect out of a government that seems to be using 1984 as a "how-to" manual.
I swear, the British and the Americans must be in a race to see who reaches totalitarian bliss first...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Must something determine which possibility becomes the actuality? Can't God play dice with the universe?
and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I've often wondered about this view. Conscious observer? OK. Then what constitutes an observer? A scientist with a PhD? That's an observer. A grad student? That's an observer. Undergraduate? Yeah, that's an observer too. Some guy off the street? Also an observer. A retarded person? Yes? Then a chimpanzee? Or how about a cat with a gun aimed at its head with the trigger wired to a radioisotope? Does the cat count as an observer of the isotope? If so, then it damn well is either alive or dead and definitely not both. Is a housebrick an observer? Because it'll sure as hell collapse a superposition. Researchers in quantum computation have the devil of a time preventing decoherence; if the secret was just not to look, surely it would be easy.
If we're proposing that the observer needs to be conscious - as opposed to just being a system far larger than the quantum scale with which the quantum-mechanical system interacts - then just how smart does it need to be?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
This originally appeared here.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Do we have free will?
If so, let's stop talking about it because we can choose to.
If not, then it has already been determined that we're going to stop talking about it right now, so we can't do anything about it, except stop talking about it.
Before the determinists get all worked up I wanted to just say that I'll believe in free will until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback. That is -- Newton's n-body problem where n = 100 billion (roughly the neural capacity for the human brain).
:)
Why do I think this matters? Because we understand precious little about _any_ feedback system; anything self-referential. Our logical analysis breaks on "this sentence is false". The math of our classical physics fails to give precise results with 3 mutually interacting bodies. And we're ready to claim that we understand the human mind well enough to rule out free will?
Maybe we don't have free will... how should I know? But I think it's a little premature to discount the most pervasive observation across the entire human species without even knowing how these things work.
This premise of this article isn't even talking about all that, though -- they're not considering physical determinism, they're wondering if people can rise above their personality profile. Sure, there are extreme anecdotal examples (like the tumor causing misbehavior) that might say otherwise, but even a small study that looks at people's behavior indicators and their resulting behavior will show that people don't always do what you expect. My guess is it never will. But in any case it is way premature.
To summarize my view -- we don't have nearly enough understanding of anything to discount free will. But if in fact it doesn't exist, the completely pervasive perception that it does is more than enough for me to live and let live as though it does.
Of course, my making that very decision brings up the question of free will, I suppose
Cheers.
The idea of physical determinism is not a new one. Philosophers have been debating this exact point for a long time now. This entire pursuit is further complicated by dificulties in actually defining free will. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume) even argued that physical determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive. He went as far to say that free will is incompatible with anything but determinism. This is because if things occurred indeterministically, they would occur randomly. As decisions based on free will are not random, but based on aspects of our character and incentives/disincentives, indeterminism would not really work out. Hume defined free will as meaning that should one have a different value set or incentives when making a decision, the decision could be different. Free Will in Hume's world view was more of a hypothetical ability, but an important one nonetheless.
Using Compatibilism (Free will and determinism), people would still be responsible for their own actions. What is a person beyond a collection of knowledge and algorithms (emotional and rational) in a physical shell? If one's value sets are "warped" and the incentives of obeying the law/doing the right thing are not personally great enough, then it should be said that transgressions are made of ones "free will".
I suggest reading some David Hume. People have already thought of this problem and ways to counteract it.
Also, while tumors aren't subtle, most criminal behaviour is a much more complex mesh of incentives and values that are, as any economist will tell you, hard to determine for certain. Jurisprudence still works!
True, some physicists evoke conscious observers (though no free-will observers) to resolve the measurement problem, and they get all the press because of their new age angle. Of course, if you want to make that precise you have to come up with a mathematical definition of conciousness so that it fits into the rest of the Hilbert space theory, and I haven't seen much progress on that front. Is a child concious? How about a toddler, a baby? A dog, a bacterium, an atom?
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status. A measurement is an interaction which tends to "clump together" the wave function in a bunch of different areas; these areas we call "different worlds"; they all exist in parallel. Every large thing exists either in one clump or in another or in both, but never spread out in between like electrons often do. So slightly different copies of you exist in various different clumps, inaccessible to you because of the valleys between the clumps. Most cosmologists prefer this interpretation, because obviously if you want to apply quantum mechanics to the whole universe, you don't have room for an outside observer performing measurements.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
I recall for a mechanics homework once, having to work out how long it would take for a pencil balanced precisely on its point to fall over, assuming that it is perfectly upright to begin with and that the only deviation is due to quantum uncertainty in its position.
IIRC, the answer was about ten seconds. Even with the most accurate sensing equipment theoretically possible in this universe, you would not have been able to predict in which direction the pencil would be pointing ten seconds later.
Chaos magnifies uncertainty, and quantum mechanics makes sure there's always some uncertainty around. How long does it take for chaos coming from the quantum-mechanical uncertainties to swamp our meteorological predictions - to make the difference between, say, sunshine and rain? I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was less than three months.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Free will is NO problem when it comes to Abrahamic religions. According to most Abrahamic religions, god is Omnicient (Spelling?). Meaning he knows all, everything, and there is no limit to his knowledge. He is also merciful, more than any other living being. The problem is us mere mortals don't know the extent of the evil we commit when we sin, so we don't see the leway god would give us on a daily basis.
/., and get up this morning, I have free-will, and no-one can take that from me, not even god.
Onicience would mean that this god would have no limit to his knowledge, which means that time cannot limit his knowledge. So though we have a choice, and have choices laid before us constantly. He knows which choices we are going to make and why we would make this choice.
Before I am done, I have to make this point. I am a Christian. Can I explain or prove the existance of god? No. Can I make you believe? No. Because Faith and the basic prinicpals of science cannot mix. There is no experiment to prove god exists. Only faith that when you feel that sure feeling that is telling you that what you are hearing is true, is not just you believing something you want to, but an unknown force/being that is telling you through means of communication we have yet to understand, that what you hear is true.
I guess I kinda got off topic, but bottom line, I made this choice to type, and read
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
This article is just suggesting that we go back to eugenics. Of course contrary to 'common knowledge', eugenics does work. All we have to do is look at the family dog to see that eugenics works, and why humans should not be allowed to perform it.
And there you have it: proof that Wikipedia is the Internet!
(On a more serious note, I've found that I tend to surf Wikipedia today in much the same way as I surfed the fledgling web back in 1994-1995: Read a page, keep following links as they look interesting, spend hours just going from one topic to another. Today's web feels more like a star topology than an actual web: start at a search engine or bookmarks, move to a site, do stuff there, go back to the search engine, look for something else. Hypertext has given way to navigation links. Wikipedia actually makes use of hypertext, so I find myself jumping to interesting related topics instead of going back to the hub.)
It's interesting, but I hear a lot of people on slashdot and in tech and gaming publishing refer to themselves as "libertarian" even though, as someone who follows politics in the US pretty closely, I can tell that they usually are not. I once read an article on ign.com about game resellers and copyright protection, where they writer actually said that he was for keeping the current copyright system (status-quo) because he "tended to be libertarian on these issues." I would think a libertarian would want to get rid of copyrights altogether and let the markets decided. But what do I know. I'm not sure there really is a political "side" that slashdotters tend to fit into properly - if anything they tend to be more conservative about trying new things, they don't want to necessarily change things that for them don't seem broken - hence the status-quo comment - but they tend to be progressive on social issues, especially obvious wedge issues, and tend to favor fairness - and these ideas tend to be considered more liberal.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Lyme Disease, neurosyphilis, and other low-grade long-term brain infections can also be extremely evil. Mainly because they're subclinical and don't present with scary symptoms like high fever or unconsciousness, but they can cause a whole range of symptoms. Seizures, paralysis, behaviour changes, etc and so forth. I had chronic Lyme for a few years and it felt like my will to exist was stripped away. Hard to describe, but sort of like a continual case of the flu but moving through yellow shimmering molasses. Really fuckin wierd and unpleasant. Not to mention electrical shock-type sensations in my head, inability to focus my eye on text (but my vision itself was fine), wierd twitches, a propensity to get easily angry, and even prostate cramps with unknown (neurological?) cause. Thank g*d I got cured (more or less cured myself) of that shit - I don't think I'd be here now had I not researched it and recognized the symptoms!
-b.
Actually if you look on PubMed you'll find a number of experiments that do demonstrate quantum aspects to microtubules and the brain; no, it doesn't prove consciousness is causal from them, but there's something to this; I think at the very least it partly explains memory in the brain. And regarding Libet, well, I'm not sure the arising of the urge to mash a button is really indicative of anything on a grander scale.
Introspection is consciousness. And someone who is conscious of thoughts, urges, as they arise will note they arise for a reason, and that something caused them. So what then is will? Will is acting upon a choice. But who chooses the choices we are presented with, the "good/bad" judgments made about them, the evaluation of the course of action? Who chooses the physical limitations upon actually carrying them out? Who chooses the train of thought and experience even leading up to that choice? Can such a thing really be called a choice at all? Who chooses to have a choice? Certainly things beyond our "will", our control.
And what then is freedom? Freedom from what, for who? There was never any "freedom" in this path to begin with, rather, only bondage to things arising from causes. Freedom can't even truly be used to describe a "go/no go" decision, the meeting of the frontal lobe and limbic system. So what then is freedom? Freedom is in being uncaused, beyond causality, which neither thought nor emotion is. Yet, consciousness remains above both, above causes, conscious not only of the body, but of the mind, and of itself. So truly, who are "you" to have free will at all? Wandering thoughts arising from external events and the structure of the brain? Or consciousness of that happening?
If so, then as Ram Dass said, we don't have free will-- we are free will. Why then, do people consider things they have never controlled, and say "this is me, I am this"?
While it was never implemented fully, what was introduced and what we still have today is that the sentencing part includes what to do with insane people. First the case is deliberated in court and a verdict is reached. If the accused person is found guilty a psych exam is performed and a decision is made as to if the person should go to jail or be sent to a mental institution.
Perhaps you are starting to see the problem.
In order to be sentenced to mental care, you have to be guilty. Sweden holds the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that doesn't think you need to be sane to be legally responsible for your actions.
As you can imagine this brings a few problems. If you have to be guilty to receive care then a motivation for why you are guilty needs to be found - motive is essential in judicial rulings. In order to resolve this problem they invented something - I shit you not - called the "possible hypothetical motive". In essence it means that since motive is meaningless for a crazy person, the court invents a motive based on the worst case scenario. If you accidentally run over somebody with your car you will be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If you are insane and run somebody over with your car because the little green men told you so, you will be convicted of premeditated murder.
The severity of sentence is proportional to the severity of crime. In order to get sentenced to a long time of mental care, the crime has to be really hideous. So absurdly, when the court sees that the person standing trial really needs medical help, they have to show that the crime was premeditated. So even petty crimes committed by insane people get labeled as premeditated grave atrocities. This is so that when the sentencing part of the trial comes the court can sentence them to prolonged care.
Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the sanity of the person is first evaluated after the verdict - and hence not at the time of the crime. Temporary insanity doesn't exist. Sane criminals when convinced play insane and get sentenced to care instead of jail. Great examples of the effects of the absurdity are cases where a person commits a crime, is found insane and sentenced to care. On leave from the mental institution (yes, in Sweden both mental patients and criminals get short vacations from their sentences on a regular basis) they commit another crime. This type the psych evaluation finds them to be sane and they are sentenced to jail. So they leave from the mental institution in order to go to jail - and are returned to the mental institution once their jail sentence is up. If you speak Swedish, read Maciej Zaremba's excellent article series on the subject, called "Rättvisan och dårarna" - it won this year's Swedish journalist prize.
The point of being here isn't for him to know, it's for us to know. He already knows in the long run who will go to "Heaven" and "Hell". But we don't. And in order for us to grow spiritually, we have to go through mortal life and learn. Same reason why math teachers give us the problems and teach us how to solve the problems, then let us do it our selves. The teacher knows the answer, and could just as easily tell us the answer, but then we don't learn, or grow.
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
The purpose of law is to CREATE crime, and thus, criminals.
Behavior, coercion, violence, whatever, is one thing. Crime is another.
Crime - like war - is the health of the state.
Again, the essence of the state is: "You do everything we tell you to, and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
The state - ALL versions - is a protection/extortion racket depending on human fear, nothing more or less.
Chimpanzees apparently aren't capable of understanding this, unfortunately.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Hold steadfast to 'old fashioned' conservative values [dogma believers] are mentally dysfunctional adelophobics, their irrational fear of the unknown would leave them standing outside a building in freezing rain.
...) are criminally accountable for any resulting deaths and/or social/cultural damages. These idiots are incapable of having an honest day.
....
Those who play 'lip-service' to those values in an attempt to gain power and control (like Rush 'water boy' Limbaugh, Anne 'happy widow' Coulter, George Bush, Dick Chaney
Watch out for them nuts, they fall out of the trees all the gaul-dang-fycking time killing people and destroying many things like values of honor, honesty, family, community, caring, sharing, integrity
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I'm not sure if you're accusing me of making a one-dimensional analysis, but if you are you'll note I did reference the Nolan chart which is a two-dimensional graph of positions on the political spectrum, and I'm fond of using a variety of higher-dimensional models myself. In general I tend to find wherever there is a long-standing controversy, the two "sides" in the end seems to be talking past each other, propounding issues orthagonal to each other; in other words, they're not arguing opposite sides on a single issue, but they're arguing different issues.
A classic political example of this is that some people who identify themselves as "conservative" because of economics issues, and argue against "liberals" because of those same economics issues, may actually agree with those liberals on social or interpersonal issues; and likewise, some "liberals" who argue against "conservatives" on social issues may agree with some of those same conservatives on economic issues. This breakdown of the left-right axis is what lead to the Nolan chart's two-dimensional spectrum.
Myself, I see each of the axis of the Nolan chart itself as a false dichotomy; there are in fact at least four dimensions that need plotting there. It's not just personal freedom and economic freedom; each of those axes can be broken down into two axes of individual freedom and collective responsibility. People who hold positions "against freedom" on some axis of the Nolan chart are often actually arguing for collective responsibility (that is, responsibility to society as a member thereof), which doesn't have to come at the expense of personal freedom and may in fact be required to ensure it. Consider how much personal freedom (as in "freedom from", negative liberty) anyone would have if there were no police forces to keep the strong from simply plowing over the weak; and then consider that those police forces can only exist if everyone is collectively responsible enough to support them. Anyone who supports the moderate social position that there should be police forces, but only to the extent of limiting some individuals from trampling over the freedoms of other individuals, is actually in favor of both individual social freedom and collective social responsibility.
You could be (and people often are) just one or the other, though the tenability of your position would be questionable; you could argue that everyone should be free to do anything and not have to be responsible for guarding the equal freedoms of others (like an anarchist), or that everyone should be mutually responsible for everyone else's social wellbeing but there should be very little personal freedom (like most collectivist religious types). I guess theoretically you could support neither - believing that no one should be socially free, that people must adhere to some particular strict code of behavior handed down from above, but that no one is responsible for ensuring that anybody else must do so. I guess some Christian Anarchists could hold that position, but it seems pretty rare and rather indefensible IMO.
So yes, the truth is multidimensional. I never said otherwise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."