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Study Suggests Free Will Is An Illusion (iflscience.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IFLScience: A new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has attempted to define and investigate the subject of free will. By asking participants to anticipate when they thought a specific color of circle would appear before them, something determined completely by chance, the researchers found that their predictions were more accurate when they had only a fraction of a second to guess than when they had more time. The participants subconsciously perceived the color change as it happened prior to making their mental choice, even though they always thought they made their prediction before the change occurred. They were getting the answers right because they already knew the answer. "Our minds may be rewriting history," Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The implication here is that when it comes to very short time scales, even before we think we've made a conscious choice, our mind has already subconsciously decided for us, and free will is more of an illusion than we think.
on a subscription model.
The conclusion is bullshit. Free will isn't an illusion and life isn't a game that plays us. (Anyone catch the reference there?)
On short time scales, reaction time is probably faster if the brain does some processing in advance. The decision is already made so the mental processing need not be done instantly and, instead, can just be acted upon almost right away.
At longer time scales, though, there probably is free will. There's no clear advantage to intelligence if free will doesn't exist to make use of it.
Maybe at short time scales, free will doesn't really exist. Instincts and reflexes take over, though these can be conditioned. At longer time scales, though, free will surely does exist. The brain has more than one way of processing information and deciding on a course of action.
I suggest reading "Sleight of Mind." Magicians have known for millennia how to force certain outcomes.
(I have no connection to book or the authors, other than having read the book. It's a bit pretentious at times, but otherwise rather insightful.)
I swear I already read about this study years ago.
But right now I can't find the source.
(This is not a meta-post joke. I really remember the "few milliseconds before illusion of prediction" topic being studied.)
Because picking colors and circles in a few fractions of a second is the same as deciding to rob a bank.
...because every decision we make is determined by our genetics and our environment. All of our decisions are pre-determined by these two factors and free will is just an illusion.
If you run a computer program a thousand times with the same inputs you'll get the same outputs every time. Likewise, if you made a thousand copies of the universe and ran the same situation a thousand times our actions in every universe would be the same. This means we have the same level of free will as a simple computer program. We're just running the program defined in our genetics and environment and all of our decisions are pre-determined by these factors. We only think we're making decisions and choosing our own path.
Or people feel less guilty about lying if they hadn't fully decided on their prediction yet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The paper (or at least its abstract) doesn't seem to mention "free will". This seems to be a term introduced by reports of the paper. The paper itself seems to refer to choices that are made consciously as opposed to those that aren't (and are therefore made subconsciously). I think the term "free will" confuses the issue, because it's used in different ways.
In practical usage it more or less refers to choices that are made without being controlled by an outside agent (e.g. not choices made under duress), and in philosophical usage it more or less refers to "choices" that are made without any cause (although I don't think this idea makes sense).
Free will is not predicting the future! What does it mater if the choice is conscious or not? This test might at best show that decisions can be _influenced_ by external factors.
The journal article is paywalled, so I'm relying on the linked articles for my information.
Why not have the participants enter their choice BEFORE the circle is displayed and then and automatically record whether or not their response was correct? It would keep participants honest. I think a more reasonable interpretation than "we are seeing the future because we have no free will" is that the participants simply did not have time to solidify a guess in their minds and were simply lying (even if they were doing it subconsciously) about their guess.
Of course free will is an illusion
If it is an illusion, then who is being fooled?
Before one can declare "X is obviously Y", I think it's helpful to define what X actually is. And this is the problem I have with the declarations of "Free wil is X": I've never actually seen anything amounting to a reasonable definition of "free will".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Our primitive mind designed for a world where we are constantly under attack or will need to attack others, is the product of 500 millions years of evolution. Our higher brain functionally only 2 or 3 million years. So yes in term of making quick decision our primitive brain kicks in. We use it while driving, and every day living. That is why magicians are able to pull off their tricks on us. They get the primitive brain distracted on something else while they do something else. The higher human brain is much slower however it will try to process more information. Such as the question to the volunteers of this study if they want to do it or not. There is no immediate danger there is no pressure of instant response they can stand back and think about it. Factor in what rewards would they get, what are the risks, what trade offs from the action will occur. That is free will. However if someone tried to get volunteers and is a natural sales man would apply pressure on them to make a decision far more quickly. Because they will avoid them trying to think about it, they will keep their minds occupied with idle chit-chat, and implying the positive images of what will happen.
The study shows our primitive mind makes a lot of decisions for us. But nothing about free will.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I feel ashamed to think of all the years when I went on believing there was some distinction between predestination and free will. In fact, I'm now sure it's just a matter - once again - of us being fooled by our own language.
Imagine the universe from a God's eye point of view. Think of it as a four-dimensional space, with one dimension being time. (Physics suggests there are probably a lot more dimensions, but this simple model is sufficient). Now when (apologies for the meaningless use of "when", as time is a dimension within the universe) God creates the universe, it is complete: it contains, in His mind, everything that will ever happen. (Please note that this mental experiment does not depend at all on the existance of God). What does this do to free will? Well, it obviously destroys it completely. Imagine the Mississippi River, which notoriously meanders and turns back on itself for hundreds of miles. It creates curves, which become oxbow lakes, and then disappear again. Do you think the river has free will? Or could all of its elaborate changes be predicted, with enough knowledge of the physics and the initial conditions? Yet maybe if you were the river, you might like to think you had free will.
There is no contradiction here. We feel as if we have free will, yet our actions are mostly quite predictable. Ask yourself, "who is it that has free will?" Isn't it a rather old-fashioned picture that comes to mind, of a little person or imp sitting inside your head, choosing and making decisions for you? But even introspection shows (as David Hume testified) that there is no such little imp of identity. Our actions arise from the state of the whole organism from moment to moment. And if there seems to be an element of freedom, of indeterminacy, to them that may be because so very much of our thinking is unconscious.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
This strikes me not so much about studying "free will" than our inability to operate on extremely small timescales.
Second of all, I would be very reticent to accept into general principle the idea that there is no free will.)
If free will exists but we assert it does not, we surrender it of our own volition: if there is hope, but we do not keep hope, then from our own decision, there is no longer hope.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
I find it puzzling that Christians in particular seem to be irritated by the idea of a lack of free will.
Isn't it conflictive to believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful deity while at the same believing in freedom of choice?
More than once I've seen a religious person irritated when the notion of determinism came up in a discussion.
What is the connection there?
The study shows that our brain decides before this is reflected in the conscious mind. However, the subconscious process are part of the thought process. This does not mean that this process cannot be influenced and manipulated. Of course it can, but that is not an argument against free will. The biggest problem with the concluding sentence of the abstract is that they use the term free will, which has many different definition that are not compatible. If you think free will is the objective and self-motivated choice of a human than there is no free will, as we are not able to make objective decisions on a general basis. Some decisions we perform are based on habits, even bad habits (where we know they are bad, but still do them). Therefore, there is no free will.
Alternatively, you could say that will is by definition subjective and does not need to be logical and thought through. In that case habits are not a problem and you freely decide between presented options based on your likes. Furthermore, there is no objective way to determine whether eating too much chocolate is an objective choice, as it depends on how important health is for you compared to good taste.
On a side note: Free will was invented to be able to define a rules which prohibit the suppression of the personal will by a third party. In that context free will does not need to be unaffected by previous events and unbiased.
Finally, you may say that the will of a person can be manipulated against the interests of that person. Is that the case such manipulation must be prohibited. However, that would require most advertisements to be changed or suppressed. Same applies to political statements and TV presents of politicians etc.
People have free will in the senses that a train has got free will but still has to go where the tracks are laid down.
You can even have indeterminacy with completely deterministic components. The weather is fundamentally unpredictable, even if you leave quantum mechanics out of the picture. A nonlinear equation with three components can go on creating apparently 'new' information forever, with no repetition.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Free will is just an illusion? That is what they WANT you to think.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Subject is wrong: If you make a definition of something everybody knows what is, and based on that definition comes to the conclusion it doesn't exist. It means your definition is wrong. Free will means choice, it doesn't mean random or unpredictable.
But on an another topic: The actual story. Yes we are often make up explaination after the fact, and by often I mean most of the time. The human brain is a parallel machine, most of it is just guessing what the rest is doing and usually after it has done it.
Okay, free will is an illusion. Now decide, would you like to pee now or wait 5 minutes and finish what you are doing?
I am sure similar incidents happens to everyone. Packing all the kids into the station wagon and driving half way across the country to a great secret backwoods camping nook that you last visited when you 8 years old, and then to be thoroughly disappointed by the actual campsite ...
I read that we never remember the actual details at all, but we only the feelings triggered by the sights and sounds.
git push -f origin HEAD:master seems to be on by default in our brain. History is constantly being rewritten.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Free will is a prerequisite for knowledge. If we don't have free will, then we can't choose our beliefs based on what's true, but are predestined to believe whatever we believe. Therefore any argument against free will is invalid because it means: "I'm not saying free will doesn't exist because it's true, I'm saying it because I have to."
Free will is axiomatic in that it is a prerequisite for knowledge. There can be no claim to valid knowledge unless free will exists.
There can be suggestions made to you before you choose that animal that will, unknowing to you, push you to choose a certain one. You certainly made that choice of your own free will, IMO, but you just don't realize certain influences of the extent of how much they impacted your decision. In that sense, we fool ourselves, which could be called an illusion.
At most it suggests that the visual processing center filters information presented to the conscious mind, which we already knew. This is a study of phenomenology, not free will.
Actually...
Back in the late 1970s, I figured out a trick. I was enlisted in the Marines back then and we drank - a lot. Man, did we drink. Anyhow, we'd all be getting shitty and I'd ask one of my drinking buddies, "When was the last time you went pee?"
They'd look at you funny but they were off to the bathroom within five minutes. Done quietly, while moving from small group to small group, I could create a run on the bathroom. Drunken Marines, all having to piss and now angry, resulted in some of the funniest things I've ever seen.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Or, 3) Processing raw sensory information introduces a delay the conscious mind "fills in" the same way it fills in the eye's blind spot.
don't tell Rush.
Of course there is no free will. Your brain is made out of chemicals those chemicals follow specific laws. This means that it is would be possible to simulate your brain if you had a big enough computer. So if you can simulate your brain and can predict what your decision would be then you don't have any free will.
Automatons can have illusions!
But my information regarding his work is very limited, so I can't safely state that with certainty.
From the abstract... Here, we explore the possibility that choices can seem to occur before they are actually made...The experience of choice is susceptible to “postdictive” influence and that people may systematically overestimate the role that consciousness plays in their chosen behavior.
Free will is too heavy a term for what's at play here. These methods of study simply show that our freedom of choice does not mean that we choose at random. And that's been studied and experimented with, debated by philosophers throughout human history, and has popped up even on Slashdot. As my first source clearly says, "One of the worst ways to generate 'random' numbers is to ask somebody to write down some numbers 'at random'. It won't work...The human mind is built for patterns; it doesn't like boring repititions." Just because we have the freedom to choose, a.k.a. "free will," does not guarantee our choices is random.
This experiment just shows that, when we aren't given enough time for the "consciousness circuitry" within our minds to make its choice, other circuitry in our minds take over and make for some interesting results. Maybe, instead of debating whether or not free will exists, we should instead attempt to analyze what cranial pathways are taking over. I'd be very interested to know what portions of the mind take over when it's forced to make split-second decisions, then measure whether or not these decisions are more accurate, or in what ways, compared to the "I've had time to think about it, and I've concluded..." choices.
some scientists will say / "conclude" anything, anything at all under the sun, to avoid concluding that things like clairvoyance and telepathy exist.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It is fairly well accepted belief that the Universe is deterministic, but only from the Universe's standpoint. No observer inside the Universe can perfectly predict anything because that would require knowing all information within the Universe, which is impossible from inside the Universe.
It seems that the conclusion is related to the Libet experiments.
In this experiments, participants are asked to mark the time they decide to take an simple action (like pushing a button) then perform said action. Using ECG, he discovered that the motor cortex "prepared" the movement about 300ms before the recorded time of the decision.
It implied that the decision wasn't conscious, suggesting that free will is an illusion.
Needless to say, this conclusion is controversial.
Nothing to see here folks.
The mind naturally has many systems and sub-components. This makes the mind is a complex multidimensional system, and it is easy to detect automatic decision making mechanisms.
The fact of automated response systems does not disprove freewill, no more than the fact of automated computer mechanisms (and bots, etc) disproves the existence of users on the internet (and elsewhere)
Of course, some day, the internet will be filled with AI Bots spamming each other for the fun and profit, and it will be bots and turtles all the way down. An actual user will become a rare thing indeed.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you are so sure it exists, just prove it
It's hard to prove that free will exists but easy to show that the conclusions of this study are not proven. All they have shown is that the brain can subconsciously process information and provide it to the conscious mind. The very fact that when given longer the people got more answers wrong proves that the conscious mind can choose to ignore that information and hence free will can still exist in that choice.
The high speed reaction results suggest that we can program our low level, high speed firmware to return the result we are looking for which makes sense from a survival perspective because you don't need to have higher level reasoning and choice take place when a predator jumps out of a bush at you. So, if free will does exist, all they have shown is that we can use it to pre-program our brains to react to certain situations in a predetermined way. However the choice to do that was still potentially a free one and although some of these reactions may have been pre-programmed at birth there is nothing to say that they cannot be changed later.
is if a machine that can predict my actions is invented, I could always incorporate that machine into my decision making process, restoring my "free will" ("oh, I was about to decide that? On second thought, maybe not").
Consequently, free will seems to be more of an emergent property of being able to continuously and flexibly augment and use tools for our thought processes than some kind of "magic stuff" that makes our decisions appear truly mystical and random.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
A split second before you did
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
And no references to The Matrix: Reloaded.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
It has been known for some time now that the conscious and sub-conscious mind interact in ways often imperceptible to the conscious mind. However that doesn't make good click bait so the conclusion "no free will" was used instead. All done.
At least these "studies" are now using words appropriate to the level of science being done: "Suggests".
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Ever been in an accident? Of course our brains re-write history and try and make sense of the sense impressions given to them. Of course on a second by second basis the process is messy and we are not necessarily the best reporters of what is going on in our heads. On the shortest time scales, there is little to no free will, as there is literally no time to think.
By the way, free will is about the ability to make choices. Conscious versus subconscious is about how the choices are made.
nothing new, move along
... but if somebody did a scientific study, which has a conclusion, then I'm convinced I don't exist ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
We don't know why a neural network make the choices it makes either
Sure we do, it's a summation of weighted inputs passing a threshold. Look at any iteration close and hard enough and you know why. And with a faster computer running the same neural net, you'll be able to predict the outcome before it happens. It's a deterministic process.
Then there is no such a thing as free will, but rather an electrochemical process weighing the choice and the largest or smallest weight being preponderant.
The physical implementation of an abstract concept does not negate the abstract concept. Otherwise, there's no such thing as computation, just voltages and currents pulsing through printed circuit boards, signifying nothing.
Frankly free will does not exists and such study confirm it : our choice are dictated by our memory, education, past, and perception.
If our choices were not dictated by such things, they would be random. What else could we base our choices on?
In any case, the experiment in the TFA does not address free will, but an implementation detail of a mind. It's interesting, but not philosophically significant.
Just try holding your breath for ten minutes, and you'll realize that your supposed free will doesn't even have full control over your voluntary muscles.
Well, really not at all because none if the participants going all the way back to the people who wrote the laws or who cooked the juror's breakfast had any choice either. It's lack of free will all the way down.
After years of trying to read various papers, articles, take a class in philosophy, I still don't grasp what free will is. The best I have come up with is a term that people use to assert individual responsibility and accomplishments, such that they can justify taking pride in what they do and demonize actions of people they hate.
The only thing about the study that suggests that freewill is an illusion, is that despite the data suporting the opposite the published conclusion is that one has no free will, as if the author were fated to come to such a conclusion.
The data appears to show that when given time for the conscious mind to interfere, the choices made were indeed different than the automatic responses.
If the universe is non-deterministic, then upon what basis can we ultimately have confidence that we have no free will?
I would argue that "free will" is actually just a phrase to describe the appearance of free will anyways, but only when there is no provable evidence that anyone, either the person making the choice or anyone or anything else, has the ability to be able to tell the difference between the outcome of their so-called free-willed choice and an otherwise predetermined outcome.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
of the article.
They were not testing free will, they were testing our ability to cheat faster than our mind was capable of realizing we were cheating.
Free will itself is a complex, philosophical-religious concept that is not easily subject to testing, any more than god is subject to testing.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The fact that our brains can sometimes hide or disguise influences on our choices has nothing to do with free will.
Indeed, we've long known that factors we don't think are influencing our choices can indeed do so. For example, subconscious racism or classic experiments showing that people asked to choose between identical items will select the one on the right (and they make up reasons it's better). This experiment no more implicates free will than these well known facts.
The issue of free will has been explored at length in philosophy and doing a neat experiment doesn't give you special warrant to ignore these points. If one was familiar with the old doctrine of compatibilism (yes you can have free will and determinism because what determines your actions is your brain state which is you) it would be immediate that so long as you view the brain process which responds to the visual image as a part of the individual making the choice free will isn't called into question at all.
Yes, it's interesting that our choices can be realized in such a counter-intuitive way but don't try and over sell the result by claiming philosophical implications you haven't seriously thought through (or bothered to read the existing literature about)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
If you have free will you don't need to worry about it, and if you don't there's nothing you can do about it.
If you dont/cant recognize the influences then you cannot have free will. If my influences made you chose an option, without know knowing it, then how can you say you made that decision freely?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Book: The Illusion Of Conscious Will by D. Wegner In this book they place people in FMRI scanners and ask them to touch their fingers together at some random time. The results suggest that the decision area of the brain (neo-cortex) gets involved quite late in the process. Worse than that, there research to suggest that there is a region of the brain whose job is to construct some narrative so that it seems like we actually made the decision. (Some patients have lost this area due to stroke, and they can produce strange results in testing).
There are different ways to look at it. Aren't all decisions are based (largely) on past influences? Maybe when things matter less, we spend less time thinking about it, and then certain influences become stronger. If we allow that to happen willingly, isn't that still free will? If I willingly allow myself to be guided down a path, its still free will. If I don't care and let others take over so I don't have to think, that's free will as well.
A pulitzer prize winning non-fiction book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid gave a pretty convincing defense of exactly this. At best, this might be some experimental support of a long standing theory. "Free will" is merely a narrative that you create after the fact, since it's mathematically impossible to for any logical system to examine itself accurately. It's not that we don't know why we decide things... it's that we can't know why we decide things because that would violate Godel's incompleteness theorem.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
we spend less time thinking about it
But your past (and biology) determines what you spend your time thinking about. At each moment, what you allow is a culmination of all of your past history.
This book already documented the effect.
Ah, except one comment this surely disqualifies Slashdot as a serious forum. As does "rewarding" my remark with a 0! Of course only "funny" remarks make any chance at all. And yes this is a sour post!
Dis boy 'ere is wrong. On the quantum level we have a random stuff happening.
god of the gaps
Preprint please not being subscribed this free will wants to see what up.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
It doesn't exist because you can't prove it.
X doesn't need to be "reasonable" to be an illusion. In fact, unreasonable things are pretty good candidates for things being just an illusion.
There is really no such thing as random events. There is only interactions with outcomes that we aren't able to comprehend and predict yet. Just because we likely can't ever reach a point that we can know every single bit of information in a system and so predict the output doesn't mean it isn't strictly deterministic. It is simply more comfortable for us to believe we are special and have free will than to accept the alternative.
Predictability and determinism are not the same thing. Predictability implies determinism, but determinism does not imply predictability.
... in the sense that the idea of your persona can decide things. A personality is an idea of who you think you are, and ideas can not decide things. YOU can decide things, but an idea is a product of the mind and can not decide for itself. The mind is not all of reality.
It is a well accepted belief that the Universe is random. I don't think there is any evidence either way. In fact the "well accepted belief" you presented seems to imply that it will be "impossible" to gather evidence "from inside the universe" to test it. Scientific claims must be falsifiable. This claim is philosophical at best, and simply wishful thinking at worst.
So, this experiment shows that there are special cases when the human mind can be tricked into making choices that are not "free". How to you jump to the generalization that there is not "free will" at all from that? If you see a horse swimming, do you write an article that horses are in fact fish?
If we didn't have free will when our neurons were deterministically following the laws of physics, I don't see how giving the neurons random quantum dice to base their behavior on helps the case for free will.
Slashdot is an illusion as well.
"Do not try and bend free will, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth..."
"What truth?"
"There is no free will."
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't particularly... but I was always under the impression that the strongest case for lack of free will rests on the notion that the universe is deterministic. While the universe may not actually be deterministic, any lack of determinism cannot possibly help the case for trying to disprove the existence of free will.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This study is the latest in a long line of studies which show that we have poor insight into the causes of our choices. We think we know why we have decided the way we have, but experiment after experiment has shown that this is often not entirely true. This study is showing that even events which occur _after_ the moment when we think we have decided can influence our decisions without our being aware of this fact.
Our explanations of why we have decided the way we have are stories that we construct. Whether these stories are constructed before or after the decision is made, they are still stories that do not fully account for the actual causes of the choices.
Our sense of free will is grounded in the idea that we know why we make the choices we do. This experiment contributes to a large body of literature which demonstrates that this is simply not true.
It's free will all the way down. They chose to participate, they chose to cooperate rather than making random animal noises or always picking the same circle. They chose to accept the answer from their subconscious processing rather than ignore it. The subconscious chose not to say fish.
The study just showed that we are not fully aware of subconscious processes (but that's a tautology). If anything, the study supports free will by showing that we can choose not to listen to the subconscious.
There are other weirder interpretations as well but Occam suggests we not go there.
Neither determinism nor randomness helps free will. It is just more obvious that determinism doesn't help. Not only that, but nothing helps free will, because it's an incoherent concept to begin with.
It like if I want to buy a bike that costs $200, and I only have a $100 bill, I cannot afford the bike. It is obvious that a $100 bill is less than $200. But with a giant pile of pennies, it's not so obvious whether it is more or less than $200. So I exchange my $100 bill at the bank for 10,000 pennies, now I have a giant pile of pennies, so maybe I can afford the bike now.
I feel like the revelation of quantum mechanics basically took all the $100 bills and turned them into pennies, and some people are unreasonably optimistic that this somehow changes the free will equation.
It's an interesting experiment, with interesting results, that has no connection whatsoever with the subject of "free will" as most normal people understand that term. Pointing at this and then questioning free will is utterly bogus flamebait.
Lack of determinism helps the case for free will only to the extent that it permits free will to be something that is at least physically possible, where a fully deterministic universe would not permit actual free will to exist at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There's some good points from Sam Harris on this topic, a bit more elaborate than the study.
Step one: discover the visual blind spot
Step two: loudly proclaim the integrated visual field doesn't exist
Step three: reload, lather, rinse, repeat
Whether the lack of determinism helps depends on what you replace it with. IF what happens is not deterministic, what are the rules for governing what happens? The only other thing I I know of is randomness, which doesn't help.
You could also say the opposite. Lack of randomness helps the case for free will because free will can't be random, but what do you replace randomness with? It doesn't help if you replace randomness with determinism.
If you know of or can think of a 3rd option other than determinism and randomness, please let me know. I certainly don't have a good enough imagination for that.
As I said, it helps only in the sense that it permits free will to at least be something that *MIGHT* be physically possible, as opposed to determinism, which tosses the entire concept of free will out as something that cannot even exist in this universe. That any alternatives to determinism which might exist may not provide any direct support for free will specifically is immaterial to the point that they simply do not completely preclude it, like determinism does.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Free will is doing whatever your brain decides, regardless of whether the conscious part of your brain was aware of it as the unconscious part was making the decision. Researchers and philosophers regularly bring this up because it creates controversy, and thus attention to their work. But their premises is always based on redefining "free will" to mean "what you are consciously aware of thinking, and had complete control of the entire thought process." Hell, that definition never applies, and they know it.
I wrote a blog post about this fallacy-based conclusion way back in 2011: http://www.ideationizing.com/2...
I didn't say "reasonable" I said "reasonable definition".
I have never actually seen a definition of free will I consider to be a reasonable definition.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
ok fine.
X doesn't need to have a "reasonable definition" to be an illusion. In fact, things without reasonable definitions are pretty good candidates for things being just an illusion.
Well if one is willing to stretch their imagination to include the possibility of the folk concept of free will in the absence of determinism, maybe it is also possible for one to stretch their imagination to include the possibility of free will within the framework of determinism.
My favorite intellectual on the subject Dan Dennett actually makes the case that any kind of free will worth wanting is not precluded by determinism.
As I said in my example. I don't think the lack of determinism leaves open a possibility for free will to exist, any more than changing your $100 bill to pennies leaves open a possibility that you have $200. It just creates the illusion of that possibility. Despite the illusion that we have an unknown amount of money, we still know it's $100. By the same token, the removal of determinism creates the illusion of the possibility of free will, until you realize that nothing you replace it with (pennies, quarters, nickels, dimes) gives you anything more than determinism ($100 bill) did.
Dan just goes the extra step and says, ok fine so you don't have the kind of free will you thought you did. You don't really want that anyway. Here's a thing with all the good features of free will that is logically coherent, that is not only possible, it is also possible in a deterministic universe.
I personally find this part very interesting, and I do think it is true, but I rarely bother trying to convince other people of it. I think you have to be in a particular mindset to be receptive to that sort of thing.
If it's _my_ mind deciding unconsciously, then it's still me, and I'm still deciding.
Free will doesn't necessarily mean conscious free will.
We already know we have that: We can choose to prefer logic or not. Following a logical chain isn't free, but choosing to follow it certainly is, and that's conscious.
The problem it sounds like is what exactly are we defining as free will and what are we measuring to determine it as such? First of all the science of predicting choice and action of an autonomous individual is Behavioral Science, which is not the determination of whether free will exists. It might make systematic guesses at what choices an individual is likely to make given a set of circumstances in order to predict the individual's choice. Free will is obviously predictable because free will is the antithesis of pure random thought and action. To use a line from a popular role playing gaming system, "a free thinking individual is not as likely to jump off a bridge as they are to cross it" meaning free will is not random thought/action. Saying as much then, what is free will? A choice made by an individual possessing free will can likely be predicted often by analysis. Where individuals make a choice whose consequences put them at risk to their health or well being then would be a good place to look for it. When a choice overrides our sense of self preservation it is then that we are acting based upon other criteria that might actually be counter productive to our existence. How then can our survival instinct and a "biological software program" be determining our choices in such instances? Would that make our emotional feelings like virii? How about some ideologies that beckon us to give up our lives in the name of such ideas? Making a choice that results in detriment to our survival and knowing the likely outcome of such a choice in advance would then equate to either being the results of virii (an idea that damages the biological software of our mind) or free will (making a choice based upon some other criteria that is beyond systematic measure, like emotions). If we assume that emotions are the result of the production of hormones and our body's response to them manifested through behavior and good (or bad) feelings, then really why do people make choices related to our emotions that result in a detriment to our comfort and sometimes our health? Some emotions (like anger and anxiety) result in reactionary behavior (very predictable and lacking free choice) while emotions like happiness result in the most clear thinking and often choices that knowingly may result in detriment to comfort or health. In this experiment it sounds like the measurement was examining our cognitive awareness with regard to the order of the occurrence of events when it comes to evaluating a visual change in a given system by asking for the prediction at different time intervals before the actual change of the system occurred. Then the measurement is one of determining whether we are cognitively aware of the order of events. Do we see the event first by the backward propagation through time of the occurrence resulting from the outcome of the collapse of the wave function or do we make the guess and then see the change? Obviously, our minds and consciousness and free will are intrinsically linked to the quantum nature of the universe as are our senses and cognition. Perhaps for this reason the only artificial intelligence with free will that human beings ever make will be based upon complex quantum computers with a nervous system to match. Our choices as living creatures seems to be connected to the nature of the universe in that way. Certainly Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose have explored this possibility. So if our minds and sense do actually evaluate events backwards in time, does that still mean we lack consciousness or free will. Without letting my living ego interfere too much I'd say that proves that we do have free will. It's that our nervous system, cognition and sensory input is able to act on the backwards propagating outcome of the collapse of the wave function. The event occurs only when we attempt to make measure and its outcome and is rewritten backwards in time when the observation is made. Therefore our mind is able to traverse that nature of the observer dependent phenomenon relating to the collapse of the wave function and remember it ahead of time. Like remembering the future.
... right after the article about Clinton and Trump being the presumptive nominees? Just to rub it in?
I have no idea what's you're talking about. I'm saying it's pointless to claim X is an illusion when you can't even tell me what X is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If this is the case, Milgram showed us there's no free will.
Free will consists of two goal posts, constantly moving.
(In the mean time, I'm wondering who is pushing whom around in my careenium.)
In other news:
Studies show that "Social Science" is a contradiction in terms.
I'm saying that if you are trying to provide evidence for the illusory nature of some phenomenon, they fact that the phenomenon in question, despite appearing real, can't even be objectively described, is potential evidence of that.