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Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will (extremetech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision -- how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act. The team devised a novel way to track a participant's focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger's-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times. In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. Participants' frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
Can we use it on people who do First Post?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
doh!
Somebody didn't get the memo about fMRI studies; fMRI right now is only about half a step away from being pseudo-science. What with sofware bugs rendering thousands of studies meaningless, and widespread methodological errors leading to voodoo correlations, any claim of a discovery based on fMRI right now should be taken with a bucket-sized pinch of salt.
The reason why free will is the province of philosophers (and theologians) is because it has nothing to do with neuroscience. What they're talking about in the summary is conscious thought, not free will. Free will is the ability to influence your environment by your own volition, independent from the inexorable march of time or destiny or god's plan. Consciousness is your ability to think about how you're influencing your environment as you do it.
Nah, they've just found the part of the brain that the aliens use to control our every waking decision!
Governments everywhere are salivating over this news, as they will now pour billions of dollars in taxpayer money into research to find a chemical that suppresses this part of the brain that can be added to the water like fluoride.
inb4 correlation doesn't equal causation, as all fMRI studies are: correlated brain areas excited in specific tasks and extrapolated over time. Might sound like all of science, but understanding how little we know of specific regions of the brain combined with its elasticity... this kind of report just makes me groan.
Besides, we've known it's the pineal gland since the 16th century...
Free will means the will to choose between God and damnation. This is the only meaningful choice you can make and that's why you have free will, so that what you choose has a meaning and consequences. Everything else boils down to this choice. Thoughts and choices are not reducible to brain patterns and this is an example of primitive, naive approach to human psychology. I'm tempted to call it pseudoscience but one of axioms of science is that that which does not exist materially does not exist at all, so it's consistent with this (unverified) premise.
Next up scientists find ways to predict what your free will will will.
A report from Fast Company details how technology is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
To Slashdot editors: can we please stop with the unrelated crap?
Awesome... now we know the exact areas of the brain to manipulate so that our corporate overlords can control us better.
I'm betting the next gen VR headsets will have electrodes to stimulate those areas properly for future mind control -- especially during election seasons. lol.
I'm kidding.... at least... I think I'm kidding. Oh, dear god, they might actually go there with this tech.
Now, if we could only prove that free will actually exists, we would have something.
They really didn't show anything particularly new in the article. No important new information on brain function was gleaned. The interesting part was the involvement of the basal ganglia, which often get ignored when talking about higher brain functions. And you're right, it does not seem to have much of anything to do with free will. Just deciding to look at the left or right screen isn't free will, it is small-d decision making. Deciding to cut class and go fishing... that's free will.
Personally, given my studies of medicine, neurology, philosophy, and theology, I see no evidence for what many people would call free will. One cannot simply choose an arbitrary previously unknown option and act upon it, this is the so called libertine free will. The meaningful questions then become: how do we define free will, can we show it obtains, is it consistent with observation, and how then does it effect change.
"Controls Free Will".
Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.
Free-will is predicated on consciousness, so yes, it does have something to do with neuroscience.
Have they checked it on control group of dead salmons?
http://www.wired.com/2009/09/f...
Apparently the study was performed on a dead salmon to confirm the results. fMRI is pseudoscience.
You are talking about Incompatibilism and the notion of Free Will as constrained by Hard Determinism (aka Physics/Destiny/God's Plan). They are using the term more on the Compatiblism side, where the key part of Free Will has more to do with the Choices made by an individual based on their own internal motivations (absent external hindrances from individuals and/or institutions). It's one of the more sticky aspects of the philosophic debate of Free Will, because folks often arent operating on the same definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
now how to turn it off. Trump's gonna be president soon, he wants full control not long after he's sworn in.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Just because there is activity in my pants when I see pictures of naked women does not mean my pants control my sex drive.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It was the biting of an apple that gave man free will, and it is all the fault of a woman and a talking snake. It was all planned by the lizard people who run the illuminati and put Obama in office.
Also, the earth is flat, and even if global warming is real, jeebus is gonna come riding in on a winged unicorn to save us from a sky dragon!
Trump 2016!!!
(I'm kidding. Obviously. As evidenced by the "Trump 2016" - no sane person would vote Trump)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Just over a year ago I made a decision to stop consuming alcohol. I had been consuming some alcohol daily for over 25 years. I wonder if the same parts of the brain that these researchers looked at are the same as the ones I used to make that decision to stop drinking.
I also wonder if those parts of the brain these researchers are calling the "free will" center of the brain are what I use when I consider the decision I made and, so far, keep making the decision to not drink.
I would consider what I did an exercise of free will. I am skeptical that what they are testing for in this study is actually free will.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
The reason why free will is the province of philosophers (and theologians) is because it has nothing to do with neuroscience.
Of course it has to do with neuroscience. Free will (if such a thing indeed exists, and is not merely an illusion, as more evidence is pointing towards) is an emergent property of (mostly) your brain and (somewhat) the rest of your body. This makes it fall within the domain of neuroscience.
Neuroscience is not yet advanced enough to comprehend it, but that's a different problem. It comes from your brain, therefore, it can be studied.
I feel like I read stupid article titles like this every week (mostly on futurist tech type sites! "EXTREME TECH", yarrrr) about how team of neuroscientists has found the center for "free will" or have developed a new algorithm can "predict human thoughts" or some bullshit. An fMRI study in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that shows that spontaneously switching attention between two screens with stuff on them activates the frontal lobe (planning), the basal ganglia (action selection), then the parietal lobe (just a total guess here, but maybe the part of the parietal lobe involved in spatial orientation?) is not appropriate to use for the claim that we've "found the free will center". Just because your attention switches to something, doesn't mean it's free will, either! When you gaze at different parts of a piece of art, are you using "free will" every time you move your eyes, or letting aspects of the picture attract your gaze?
Since everything we do is driven by our brain...
Is it? Or is the brain just the engine that something less tangible uses?
The science isn't in yet.
So what, do you think it comes primarily from the pancreas? Or the spleen perhaps?
It comes from the brain and is influence by the state of the body, and may actually be somewhat illusionary - basically a post-hoc rationalization of our brains. It's a whole system, but complex higher order processing is largely done within the brain. The best I think you can do is argue it's an entire system, with hormonal and biochemical effects from the body influencing how the brain behaves.
Just because there is activity in my pants when I see pictures of naked women does not mean my pants control my sex drive.
Well, at least now I know what I've been doing wrong all these years.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Hence the contradictory title:
Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will
Interestingly much of this kind of study has been developed in the field of addiction. In the addict brain there seems to be a defect in the ability to use free will to make a healthy choice to not drink or use drugs. George Koob has been studying this for decades https://www.scripps.edu/resear... It seems there are many structural and chemical abnormalities in the addict brain that impact free will.
All hail the Hypno-Toad! [Slow, rhythmic applause.]
biological drones or robots, soon the CIA or other spooky government agency will have an entire army of disposible manchurian candidates ready to do their dirty work
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...is the acknowledgement and acceptance of predestination.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I have free will without neuroscience. So no, it doesn't.
North korea very interested.
Now remove or suppress it: in order to have a peaceful, ordered and non-violent society, people must follow orders. All the time. Without question. The dream of a liberal, gentler society is finally about to become reality. Hillary 2016!
WTF does this have to do with the story?
Is Slashdot using some script that counts the number of matching keywords, or some other nonsense to incorrectly infer relatedness?
If hard determinism were true for all of the cosmos, then it is must be at least theoretically possible to infallibly predict a future state from a current state. If, however, knowledge of any alleged future state is ever used as factors in how to manipulate the current state, then the so-called foreknowledge of the future state is actually meaningless. For example, one can trivially create a hard-deterministic mechanism that responds as output with the opposite of its input (an inverter logic gate, for instance). If the input to the mechanism can somehow be made to be whatever the current state of being suggests the final output of the machine will be via hard-determinism, we can see that either the assumption about hard determinism being real must be false (because if it were not, the future state would be possible to determine from the current state, and so provide that information as input to the device), or else it must simply be impossible to incorporate any information about a future state into the present state. So either hard determinism doesn't actually exist, or else it is completely inconsequential (and may as well as not be assumed to not exist). At the very least, no benefit can ever be gained by assuming that hard determinism is true at a universal level.
One implication of this is that even if we did not actually have what we think free will is, we would not ever have the ability to know it, and so the apparent illusion of free will that we seem to have have is indistinguishable from anything we might want to otherwise call genuine free will. If they are indistinguishable, we might as well call the illusion of free will to simply be "free will", or else the expression of real free will is meaningless, since we cannot otherwise even know what that concept entails.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Appeal to ignorance. Turtles all the way down. You keep looking for puppet strings behind the position of electrons. I'll put my faith in the law of large numbers. I'll race you to heaven.
You made a conscious decision, as opposed to an unconscious one, to stop drinking. Whether that was an exercise in free will comes down to whether or not you ever had the option to choose otherwise. If the future is predetermined and actions just march us toward inevitability, then free will does not exist and you chose to stop drinking because you were destined to do so. If the future is not predetermined then we have some influence over how the future takes shape, that's called free will.
At least by one definition. As I said, this is the domain of philosophers and they have tons of jargon for everything. A poster above mentioned that this is only the definition of free will in the domain of determinist thought, and that isn't the only way to look at it.
With practically no bearing on the notion of free will and numerous alternate things which may be involved. Moreover to suggest a limitation to a specific portion of the brain is absurd as the entire thing is effectively an emergent phenomena.
Yes, the information "uses" the brain, just like software uses hardware in computers.
Consciousness is basically classification, or representation of inputs. Free will is the policy of the agent. There's no metaphisical "something" behind consciousness and self, just an agent embedded in an environment, trying to maximize its rewards.
Isolating the part of the brain that has to do with planning actions has NOTHING to do with doctors feeling they're becoming data entry clerks. It's not relevant in the least. It's completely unrelated. And yet this happens on a large portion of BeauHD articles, despite rampant complaining from users. I don't think anyone with any knowledge of science and technology would think that the stories are related. It makes the editors look ridiculous and certainly doesn't make them look like nerds. A related story would be the software glitches with fMRI scans, which may or may not be relevant to the validity of this study, but you chose something completely different. Please stop with the unrelated news. You're not being asked to do extra work; in fact, it takes less work because you don't have to go look up unrelated news and write a couple of sentences about it.
What you did was more than exercising a free choice. It was changing the reward system you are operating under, and all the future choices that follow from that. So it was more like reprogramming your reward system.
Agreed. "Indicates" might be more accurate. There's no good OQE of control provided in their study.
We know the world is not deterministic. That is good, because only in a non-deterministic world free will would be able to arise. Any discussion of free will that does not involve QM is doomed to inconclusiveness.
Hence the contradictory title:
Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will
That is only a [bad] headline. It has no bearing on the issue at hand. You should read it as Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That enables Free Will
... or philosophy again.
That just shows the mechanics of the process, not what initiated the process. The initiator is free will, not the hardware that carries out the instruction. Fail. Until we scknowledge that consciousness is not 'stored in the brain', we will never understand it. In effect, with technology, *we* are its consciousness, we are the ones coding parameters within which even algorithmically initiated actions take place (those algorithms are still based on instructions that have been coded in).
What kind of philosophy is that? If you have free will then all your decisions are made through that. If not, then you don't actually make any decisions but instead just view how your brain reaches those decides and think you made them. There's no middle ground.
And since science demonstrates that you can change how people feel and think by messing with their brains, free will is less likely to exist every year. Assuming it does exist, then it matches no current laws of reality that we have.
I know this is Slashdot, where actually reading background articles can get you disqualified.
However, it so happens that even a cursory glance at the articles you linked to show that, although there is reason for concern, your claim is heavy on hyperbole and light on justification.
If researchers use patched versions of their statistical packages, and don't fall prey to the error described in the Scientific American article you linked to, their results should be Ok.
Researcher can usually improve the validity of their results by consulting with a proper statistician before they rush off to publish, but that holds in many more areas of science.
The reason why free will is the province of philosophers (and theologians) is because it has nothing to do with neuroscience. What they're talking about in the summary is conscious thought, not free will. Free will is the ability to influence your environment by your own volition, independent from the inexorable march of time or destiny or god's plan. Consciousness is your ability to think about how you're influencing your environment as you do it.
Actually not really. Do we actually make our decisions based on conscious thought? No, neuroscience is showing that our decision making is mostly unconscious if we make quick "gut" decisions and therefore; it's manipulated by outside factors. Now if we take our time and reason things out, then we may be expressing free will. (Source: Thinking Fast Thinking Slow, Daniel Kahneman)
From a completely philosophical standpoint? Well, get 10 philosophers in a room and you'll get 11 definitions of free will.
Sorry, but the answer that got you that 'A' in that philosophy course you took too boost your GPA is only correct to that particular professor.
It's only in the last decade or so that experiments have shown our thoughts can and do have a strong influence on of the dna that builds and maintains the brain and nervous system. In other words our thoughts can turn our genes on and off, when it gets the switches stuck in a self-destructive combination it drives us towards extreme behaviours which we call "mental illness". Philosophically I think Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop" and "Godel, Escher, Bach" present the most convincing model of consciousness as an emergent property of the mind boggling complexity of the feedback mechanisms in a living organism. He also makes a very strong case for the impossibility of a mind that's even theoretically capable of fully understanding itself.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...we now know precisely where to put implants in order to properly enslave the masses.
We know the world is not deterministic. That is good, because only in a non-deterministic world free will would be able to arise. Any discussion of free will that does not involve QM is doomed to inconclusiveness.
Or, you know, Religion...
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Neuroscientists have used fMRI to pinpoint the part of the brain that is making doctors feel like glorified data-entry clerks.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb when you think about it.
Agreed. I'm convinced that many people who discuss "free will" -- and particularly those who strongly object to the idea of determinism on the microscopic level (ignoring random quantum mechanical fluctuations) as destroying "free will" -- haven't always thought about what they really mean by terms.
From my perspective (and some philosophers would agree with this, particularly so-called "compatibilists"), trying to apply a concept like "free will" to microscopic behavior is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to define macroscopic "beauty" or a concept like "truth" or even a concept like a "chair" only in terms of atoms. You couldn't do it. Our human macroscopic concepts simply don't exist with that sort of granularity -- even if you tried to define what constitutes a "chair" compared with "not a chair" on the level of arrangements of individual molecules, you'd never get two humans to agree to that sort of level of precision.
It's a similar problem when we come to an idea of a "free choice." What do we really mean when we say, "I freely chose X instead of Y"? Usually in discussions of free will, we're talking about deliberate choices, not just random choices made with no reason. And that means we have reasons for choosing X over Y. We might enumerate them -- I had 5 reasons in favor of X but 3 in favor of Y, so I chose X. When we say, "But I could have freely chosen Y instead," we generally mean something about our reasoning would change -- maybe some of those reasons in favor of X would be undermined by something we read recently or something a friend said discounting those reasons. Or it could be something more subtle, like changes in our body chemistry -- maybe we had an extra cup of coffee which changed the mood and made Y seem more desirable, or maybe we had a headache and that shifted our priorities... or whatever.
But when we say "I could have freely chosen Y over X" in the context of a discussion about "free will," we generally do NOT mean, "If EVERYTHING in the universe had been exactly the same, including all of my subjective ratings and beliefs of the reasons for and against X and Y, along with all of my body chemistry and feelings... and every single atom EXACTLY in the same position, I COULD HAVE made a different choice."
We don't generally mean that, because that would be making a different choice for no reason, and "free will" is not about random choices, it's about having an ability to make a deliberate choice based on reasons. If all the reasons are the exact same (and every atom in the same place), why would it support "free will" to believe that a different choice would make sense? That's not conscious "free will" -- that's randomness or anarchy.
"Free will" is a macroscopic human concept -- an emergent phenomenon -- which has little to do with how deterministic (or not) the microscopic universe is. And whenever this topic comes up on Slashdot, there are always these fervent believers that "free will" has to exist in some way that the universe is not deterministic -- but where exactly does that "free will" happen? Quantum mechanics effects "bubbling up" to microscopic consequences can't be a reason, because that's based on randomness -- and proponents of "free will" usually insist that the alterations in decisions must be deliberative not based on random chance.
So, if everything in the universe down to the atom is precisely the same, and you still want to be able to make a "free choice" that's different, how precisely is that supposed to happen? Does some atom suddenly take a different turn for no apparent reason? It makes little sense in a scientific context, unless you're willing to postulate the existence of a separate "soul" or "consciousness" or whatever that doesn't obey the laws of science as we currently understand th
For instance some people now theorize the entire universe could be a giant computer simulation. In such an environment some decisions could be left to free will while others are hard coded (not that I actually believe we are all sims). We can theorize the purpose of such a system would be to ensure some specific conditions in the sim are met.
Even in a far more likely base organic reality it's feasible that some processes may be genetically hard coded into our actions while others are not.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
Of course it involves consciousness, otherwise dice rolls would have "free-will".
That may seem well and good, but it's not really useful information. Worse, you've used a poor analogy. It might be a reasonable first hypothesis to suspect it's your other head that's doing the thinking, but we can measure brain activity that leads to the physical response of arousal and establish a cause and effect relationship between the two. Outside of neurological damage or some other form of externally produced stimulation, you won't see physical activity without first having that activity in the brain.
First of all, we don't even know if free will actually exists. Whether it actually does or not isn't too important as humanity will continue to operate as though it does as the alternative doesn't really fit with the way society works such as how could we justify (not that you would have any choice in the matter) punishing someone if their actions weren't a result of their own volition.
If we assume that free will does exist, then it has to originate somewhere. Given that the brain controls most other operation it seems like the most likely candidate. Unless you're proposing that there is activity elsewhere that causes further activity in the brain which leads to eventual free will, you don't really have a testable hypothesis.
I tell my brain not to think about specific things. I don't just reach for whatever triggers the dopamine.
So William of Ockham, if he exists, must be agreeing with me right now.
no it's not about that,
free will, the question they are trying to answer without knowing the question, what they are recording is deliberation or consideration. considering the results of your actions is not free will - that you could make an arbitrary choice between equal choices is kind of free will, but again your past experiences will be driving that and you were not in control of those circumstances. however there has never really been any dispute even philosophically that something was happening in your head that made you make that choice or another.
the philosophical question goes around that you don't really have free will about choosing the circumstances. but even then human beings make choices that don't make sense logically thinking, for bering proud and other "feeling" reasons. they have probably gone with the scientific look at that, and are trying to then see that process work in the brain, which sure, yeah they can do - but you didn't choose those things to happen that made you, you - so how free is your free will? the religional side of it goes all the way to that if there is an all knowing god how there can be free will and if he is all knowing and knew what would happen anyway - and has choice over to make it happen or not - then is it your fault or his. the "god gave us free will" cop out is a necessary addition to make it be kind of your choice if you believe or not, so that it can be your fault if you go to hell or heaven after you die. without free will it would be cruel and unnecessary, just random, if you got to heaven or not. judaism doesn't have this problem because the god just helps the jewish people against other people and thus isn't really all powerful everywhere at the same time being - and much from more of a "our god vs. their god", fit for a tribe.
christianism needs that free will cruft to provide some kind of reason why it's not just gods fault if someone does something that god doesn't want. back when this stuff was taken seriously it was a really serious question, because all church imposed penalties, scaring people with going to hell and all that dependent on it. and with christianitys _all_powerful_ god and well, not really thought of rules for what happens with the soul, it provided thinkers a great deal of thinking to think if their thoughts were pre-thought into being by some universal power or not - and this is important if you want to have moral high ground on deciding if someone is evil just because he has not heard about the god or was born into a different culture - if you're a heaven/hell kind of christian then it really should be an important question for you to ponder if all indian people will go to hell just because they were born in india(and as a sidenote, if you think that then fuck you).
soo.. scientist try to decide a philosophical teology question with observable science and fail to make an impression, news at 11. whats even more boring is that trying to observe your brain making decisions is the most researched subject in the oh so prestigious field of attaching wires to your head.
They've zoomed in on the mechanism for decision making. That says nothing about free will.
If they find a mechanism for decision making in bullfrogs, will they conclude that they have free will?
If the relevant structures in a human are damaged, will they conclude that the person does *not* have free will? Not hold them accountable for crimes?
And of course it's well known that alcohol, other chemicals, even magnetic fields affect our decision making. Are those also part of the mechanism of free will?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...you still have made a choice.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't get it: is Free Will defined as ' Free as in beer' or 'Free as in speech' ?
(desperately hoping no dopey whoosh responses)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
And WHY exactly are they so interested in that part of the brain?
Since everything we do is driven by our brain, free will, if it exists, must have something to do with neuroscience.
The Conway/Kochen Free Will Theorem says that if free will exists, it derives from the free will possessed by elementary particles. It needn't arise from neuroscience if it's a more fundamental characteristic of the universe.
Note that I'm not claiming that either humans or quarks do or do not have free will, just pointing out that if we do have it, neuroscience isn't the only possible origin. Perhaps what we perceive as our free will is actually the collective free will of the subatomic particles that make up important parts of our brains... though that raises obvious and deep questions about what "free will" even is, since we tend to think of it as being goal-oriented and causal in nature, and it's not clear what kinds of "goals" subatomic particles could even have or how combinations of them could produce what we perceive as free will.
On the other hand, our pattern-matching brains tend to interpret everything in a causal/goal-focused way, to the degree that classical Aristotelian philosophy posited that *all* physical processes were a result of goals (final causes, "teloi", to use Aristotle's word). That is clearly wrong in lots of other cases, maybe this is just another example of our biases misleading us and that the truth is that free will is just how we perceive the macro-level emergent properties that result from quantum randomness. That is the most logical conclusion of the Free Will Theorem, anyway, that free will is nothing more and nothing less than quantum noise, scaled up.
Or not :P
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
They have some activity-pattern. That is all. Only by using flawed and unproven theories (that are about on the sophistication-level of medieval medical theory) can they conclude they know what they claim to know. In a few years or decades, these idiots will finally admit that they basically understand nothing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Your argument uses a type of logic without a time component.
You are intermixing this logic with concepts like current and future state. The result is that your argument and thus your conclusions are void of meaning.
The idea that a part of the brain "controls free will" just because there is activity there when certain decisions are made is pretty dumb
Like how a steering wheel controls the driver?
New science, just in: right before a vehicle changes lanes scientists were able to detect steering wheel movement. I guess we found the "brains" of vehicular operation.
This is incredibly interesting to me. Thank you for the link and details. I have self-defined free will as the ability to control your own brain. Or, another way to put it is, not the ability to affect and change the outside world, but the ability to choose your internal worldview, moods, thoughts, and to change the landscape of your experience, and thereby control the habits, actions, and how existence occurs to self (the experience of experience.) The application of recursion to experience: the self experiencing the self experiencing the self.
There is an amazing amount of automation, habits if you will, that your brain is great at performing without conscious thought (Check this article out for a primer on habits and how they relate to conscious thought: NY Times.) There are also many thoughts that are circulated in the mind that are simply reflexive, a product of a though generating meat-machine (see cognitive behavioral therapy for details.) Gaining control over these reflexive habitual actions and thoughts is what I see as a demonstration of free will. You will continue to have reflexes and habits for life. That's just how your mind/body works. It is the control of these things, the self-administered reconditioning as a result of examination and resolve, that shows the exercise of free will.
Another way to consider this is: What mechanism is responsible for an addict that stops using? In light of the structural and neuro-chemical deficit I and other addicts are operating from, where does that ability to simply stop come from? Definitely not the part of the brain that is already compromised and abnormal. It is responsible for perpetuating addiction. I posit that free will is as inherent to the human mind as recursion is to linguistics, and they are both part and parcel of the same complexity payload that generates both sentience and consciousness in our brains. Through structured self-experience of the self we can gain access to generate wholly new actions and patterns in our own operating medium, specifically the structural and neuro-chemical pathways in our own brains.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Well, the "Free Will" is about how compelled Slashdot readers are answering to junk science. I mean, right there in the title is the oxymoronic "that controls Free Will", making it very clear that this is clickbait or its attention-grabbing equivalent in science circles, nothing else.
Is it? Or is the brain just the engine that something less tangible uses?
The electro-chemical signals flowing through the complex network of my brain are quite intangible.
If you're trying to imply something spiritual, which I suspect you are, then let me ask you this: What reason do you have to even suspect such a thing?
What makes you think that a neural network as complicated as the brain can't pass the Turing Test? Particularly to people running on roughly equivalent machines?
Your question is interesting, but ultimately I think right up there with infinite universes theories.
The science isn't in yet.
You understand it's so very frustrating when you say this, right? No, the science is not in on your by-all-definitions implausible hypothesis. Nor will it ever be, because it cannot be, nor is there any evidence to even suggest that it should be.
But what you cannot do is establish a cause and effect relationship between brain activity and anything that is provably like, "free will". Or God. Or "consciousness".
This story is pop science crapola. The same people who would consider themselves "skeptics" when it comes to the basic physics of global warming will swallow neuroscience in one greedy gulp.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This isn't studying free will per se, this is just studying the neurology of will simpliciter; of decision-making in general. From the summary at least, this doesn't at all address the question of whether the decision the person made was the decision that the person wanted to make, or just the one that they happened to feel like making with no further deliberation or possibly even contrary to their wishes.
You'd need to study something like a recovering alcoholic deciding not to drink, even though he wants to drink, because he doesn't want to want to drink, and compare it with a struggling alcoholic deciding to drink because he wants to even though he doesn't want to want to, to see where that kind of free will neurology is happening.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I think the illusion of free will is simply a misunderstanding of how complex the feedback loops and source information really are.
We like to simplify a choice that involves billions of neuronal inputs over the spatial and time domains as "I chose X over Y, freely."
It's simple-mindedness, and an insult to the complexity of the neural network running our consciousness.
But there are many events that happened beforehand that go into the formation of a particular brain, none of which (obviously) the brain had any say in. So is free will a simple quantifiable quality you can isolate within the brain?
Sciences like neuroscience are great at answering many mysteries we come up with. The question of free will is not one of these.
Happy people make bad consumers.
That is only the incompatibilist conception of free will you're talking about, which has been an enormous philosophical waste of time. An electron doesn't magically have free will about its location just because its exact position isn't causally determined.
There are many other different conceptions of what free will is, and pretty much all of the others don't give a flying fuck whether or not God or Nature has predetermined all events.
Look up people like Harry Frankfurt or Susan Wolf for much better ideas about what free will means. Here's a hint: free will is the difference between someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and so doesn't; and someone who (whether determined or not) wants to drink, thinks they shouldn't, tries not to, and does anyway. Both of them deliberated on their actions, both were equally determined (or not), both came to the same decision on what to do, but only in one of them was that decision effective on their behavior, and that person had free will while the other didn't, because that's what free will is.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That's only an incompatibilist conception of free will, which is completely trivial. If you'd say an electron "has free will" because it's position and momentum are not causally determined, then something is defective with your conception of free will. That's like saying an electron "is conscious" because it it able to "observe" things in the quantum mechanical sense that means nothing more than "interact with".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Even if the universe were deterministic, it still wouldn't be possible in practice to completely computer a future state, because of mathematical chaos and limits on the theoretical speed of computation: by the time you finished computing, that future will have already passed, so the best you can do to "predict" the future is wait to see what happens.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How do you code "free will" into a simulation? Decisions can either be made through some deterministic algorithm, or randomly. What would free will be?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The government will use this technology to assure it that you are a supporter of the administration. If they can see that your support is not of your own free will, they will not allow you to breed, thus eugenically creating a human slave species.
the output of a chaotic iterative system that is deterministic, but cannot be predicted or modeled.
The free will theorem is much more interesting than that. I won't attempt to explain it, though, because I'd undoubtedly screw it up. If you're interested in such things, I highly recommend you read the original paper.
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If you where to create a simulation advanced enough to create sentient inhabitants (likely as a byproduct of it's full purpose) it stands to reason that it would be based off tech far in advanced to our own current levels. Even now we are working on developing systems that move beyond simple binary decision making. I would imagine the system having a rule keeping AI with the universal physic programed into it and allowing all other AI's in the environment to grow organically (so to speak).
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
What mechanism is responsible for an addict that stops using? In light of the structural and neuro-chemical deficit I and other addicts are operating from, where does that ability to simply stop come from? Definitely not the part of the brain that is already compromised and abnormal. It is responsible for perpetuating addiction.
No, it is optimised for perpetuating addiction in order to free conscious capacities for other tasks. It's like changing from organ to piano after 25 years; annoyingly similar but yet different and you have to unlearn a lot consciously. Some of it you may never get rid entirely.
The human brain is to a good degree a machinery for optimizing conscious procedures and mechanisms into automatic ones. Addiction is right in his ballpark. That's not "compromised and abnormal" but its main operating mechanism. If you stopped playing the violin at 20 and take it up at 60, it is still all there. Not in pristine state, sure enough, but it will come back to a good degree much faster than with a new learner.
The same with addiction, patterns of organizing the tedious parts of your waking life into actions passing time. You can always pick them up again and get back to close to where you were faster than you'd like. The only thing able to keep you from that is yourself. And yourself is what you are doing with your brain.
it may be optimised for addiction, but that does not mean it needs to be used for it.
Since everything we do is driven by our brain...
Is it? Or is the brain just the engine that something less tangible uses?
The science isn't in yet.
Bingo! The link between the brain and consciousness is the same between an automobile and the driver.
Damaging (or improving) some part of the automobile will affect the drivers ability to use the vehicle, but the fuel injector ain't the driver.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
You code the agent to be able to make normative evaluation about the behaviors of other agents; to form opinions about what agents should do.
You code the agent to respond to at least some kinds of input from other agents by changing its own behavior patterns; to be conditionable, at the very least (or at best) by rational argument.
You code the agent to be able to consider itself "in the third person", without bias, the way it would consider another agent; and to be able to act upon itself in the way it would act upon another agents, too.
Voila, the agent makes normative evaluations about its own behavior, acts upon itself in ways to cause it to change its behavior, and its behavior actually changes to conform to its normative evaluations of what it should be.
Free will is just what happens when social animals start parenting/governing/conditioning themselves individually, reflexively, rather than merely imposing their judgement upon others free from conditioning themselves, or accepting the conditioning of others without making any judgements themselves. It is being neither unruled nor other-ruled, but self-ruled.
It's just a kind of reflexive functionality, nothing magical about it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yeah it's interesting and all and it's a valid theorem, in that its conclusion follows from its premises, but it starts from a faulty premise, namely that (as that wiki article phrases it), free will is "in the sense that our choices are not a function of the past". Sure, if we have that kind of "free will", then so do electrons and whatnot, but that just shows that that's not a sense that captures what we really mean by "free will".
Indeterminism is neither sufficient nor necessary for free will, but it (indeterminism) applies to electrons just as much as to people, sure, no duh.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The electro-chemical signals flowing through the complex network of your brain are quite tangible. You can track them with physical probes, you can track them with radiation scanners, you can track them with passive external monitors.
"Spiritual" could be one theory, but why be so limited in your philosophy, Horatio? We have perfectly respectable scientists arguing for rolled-up micro-dimensions. We have quantum mechanics doing spooky things - and just maybe doing them at a macro scale in biological systems if a recent article I read is on the right track.
One thing I've learned about science is that it's never "done". We get finer and finer approximations until it all seems to boil into fuzz. Then we try something different and maybe learn something new.
If my world-view was all metal and lubricants, would I see the human in the seat of the bulldozer? Or be able to tell it from a ghost? A computer? An orang-utan?
"Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI."
Since when is free will a "problem"? I know what the writer meant, but it certainly sounds nefarious.
I disagree that indeterminism isn't necessary for free will. In a purely deterministic universe free will must be an illusion.
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Only if by "free will" you mean "non-determination", which you shouldn't.
If by "free will" you mean, as you should, a certain kind of functionality, an ability to cause your behavior to conform to the patterns you judge that it should conform to, then indeterminism is at most a hindrance and mostly completely inconsequential. Contrast, for example, to a struggling alcoholic who wants to drink, but doesn't want to want to drink and certainly doesn't want that want to drink to cause him to actually drink, but who nevertheless does drink, because their decisions about what they should want and how they should behave are not effective on their actual wants or behavior. That's what lacking free will is. Having free will is the opposite of that: the ability for your wants about [what to want and the efficacy of those wants on your behavior] to be effective. That doesn't require indeterminism, it just requires a decision-making mechanism built to function that way.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Obviously a joke, but yes free as in speech, at least approximately, inasmuch as it's "free as in unrestrained" rather than "free as in without cost", and both speech and will are free in (variations of) the former way.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That all sounds deterministic though, and so not free will. Of course there's nothing magical about what is usually called free will, but that's why I think free will is just an illusion.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
If it's deterministic then it's not free will according to the people who believe in such a thing.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Actually, if the activity repeatedly occurred in those pants and conversely did not occur in other pants, you could say with some measure of conviction that your pants *do* control your sex drive. Or at least facilitate/inhibit it.
The bigger problem here is the old correlation does not equal causation maxim. What if the subjects caught a flash of the color red on one screen out of the corner of their eye. Our brains are hard wired to look at all sorts of things from colors to motion to (for most males) the female form. Free will has nothing to do with that initial impulse to look. (Just the indulgence to stare long enough for activity to happen in our pants.)
Sure... and that's compatible with one of my conclusions: " ... or else it must simply be impossible to incorporate any information about a future state into the present state".
My point being that assuming the universe is actually deterministic accomplishes nothing at best, and is wrong at worst.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
OK
Are you willing to put your money on it?, you can have my soul for $200
Deal?
Otherwise stop talking nonsense
...this was going to happen.
If the multi-verse start from a single particle and condition rising to complexity while general entropy increases, you can have both determinism and free will and its not a contradiction
The end result being dependant on the choices made but ultimately doesn't matter because no matter what choices are made the end result is the same
In other words reality is not about the destination but about the journey there
An electron doesn't magically have free will about its location just because its exact position isn't causally determined.
You've lost me on this analogy. Determinism doesn't require causality, it requires inevitability. The fact that an electron's position is random at any given point in time would only be significant if you had a time machine and could observe an electron being at different places at the same point in time. (Assuming the same observational conditions, I've not talking about wave-particle duality here.) This would represent a break in inevitability.
That seems like a convoluted way of explaining things though, let's go with a roulette wheel instead: you spin the wheel and get a random number, and we're going to assume that this is a special wheel which always produces a random number independent of all other observable factors in the universe (gravity, cosmic rays, everything). The wheel is not independent of time, however. We don't know how time influences the wheel. Then you get in your time machine, go back, and do it again. If you get a different number then you have proven that time is not immutable.
Causality can create inevitability, but it isn't a requirement.
Less tangible like the collective will of all your cells working for survival? That I can get behind.
You exist because your cells want you to exist and consciousness is just a byproduct of that collective, the collective of cells.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
If by "free will" you mean, as you should, a certain kind of functionality, an ability to cause your behavior to conform to the patterns you judge that it should conform to, then indeterminism is at most a hindrance and mostly completely inconsequential.
This is the really difficult thing about defining free will. Your definition implicitly assumes that it exists... and that the notion you're trying to define even makes sense. In a perfectly-deterministic universe, it doesn't.
Having free will is the opposite of that: the ability for your wants about [what to want and the efficacy of those wants on your behavior] to be effective.
You're assuming that you're actually making the decisions you think you're making. There's growing evidence that a huge amount of the internal narrative we build is constructed after the fact, to explain what we "chose", rather than as the actual mechanism. That's not to say that all of it works that way, or that we don't ever actually make true choices... but we don't really have any evidence that we do, either.
That doesn't require indeterminism, it just requires a decision-making mechanism built to function that way.
If the mechanism is entirely deterministic, is there any actual choice? To take your example, an alcoholic's bad choices arise from a pretty low-level miswiring of the reward circuits. The difference between an alcoholic's decisions and an occasional drinker's decisions is not one of willpower -- this is pretty well-understood neuroscience -- the alcoholic brains have been "wired" through a combination of genetics and experience to function differently. The difference is actually structural and mechanistic. It's entirely believable that in the future we may learn how to rewire the brain to correct those pathological defects. Will that mean that the former alcoholic acquired free will? Or will it simply mean that the new mechanism operations differently, just as water flows down a new channel when you cut one.
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Determinism doesn't make it not free will, just like indeterminism doesn't give an electron free will. It's a terrible (and terribly widespread) misconception to think that free will means anything to do with causal determinism rather than something to do with the kind of process that goes on in one's mind, which can be entirely deterministic (and must be at least adequately deterministic; pure random noise is not freedom).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Okay, but your first sentence, "If hard determinism were true for all of the cosmos, then it is must be at least theoretically possible to infallibly predict a future state from a current state", is still strictly incorrect, even if your final conclusion comes around to the right general area. Hard determinism could be completely true, and yet the future still impossible in principle to predict perfectly.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How about a chaotic mostly deterministic system? In other words a system where decisions are mostly due to the personality (neutron weighting) but partially due to chaotic behavior of the brain signaling system etc. which makes the result not fully predictable _but_ not random.
But that's really a philosophical question...
Throwing time travel into this unnecessary complicates things. Think in terms of models and computation.
If determinism is true, then given a complete, perfect and accurate description of the universe at one time, and enough memory and time to compute upon it, you could model any future state of the universe from that. You would, of course, have to be outside of the universe you're computing about, or in other words, doing this on a simulated, model universe, but that model universe is deterministic if you can do that. If you can't, then it's not deterministic.
It being not deterministic doesn't magically make anything inside of it free of will though. If your model universe contains just a buzzing cloud of electrons, adding true randomness to the function by which their position evolves in the model doesn't make them "free willed". And no combination of randomization to the particles making up a model human makes that human free willed either. It's something else about the way that human's thoughts and behavior function that makes him free willed or not. And that something else doesn't need randomness in its constituent elements, and is at worse hindered by them; adding random noise to your decision-making process doesn't make you more free, if anything it makes you less.
There's room to debate exactly what that "something else" is that actually counts as free will or not, but indeterminism isn't it. If indeterminism is what makes human thought and behavior "free" then it makes electrons equally "free", and that shows that to be a useless sense of the word "free".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Will that mean that the former alcoholic acquired free will?
Yes. That purely mechanical, neurological ability is what free will is. People with miswired brains lack it. If we could fix their brains, they would gain it.
This isn't a moral condemnation of people for failing to exercise "enough willpower", any more than it's a moral condemnation to say that someone locked in a cage lacks freedom of movement. Being mentally caged by the wiring of your brain makes your will unfree. Uncaging it would make it free. It's not determinism that's doing the relevant caging, it's the wiring of your brain. You don't need to be able to break the laws of causality to be free of will, you just need to be able to break your own bad habits. Some people can, and they are free willed. Others sometimes can't, and in that respect, they aren't.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
To be taken with a grain of salt as the underlying technology/software is proven to show false positives 72% of the time back in June this year:
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-bug-in-fmri-software-could-invalidate-decades-of-brain-research-scientists-discover
Plus this guy missing 90% of his brain:
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-bug-in-fmri-software-could-invalidate-decades-of-brain-research-scientists-discover
He has free will. Looks like the brain re-learns conciousness over and over again.
If determinism is true, then given a complete, perfect and accurate description of the universe at one time, and enough memory and time to compute upon it, you could model any future state of the universe from that.
That's causality. If you have perfect causality, and perfect knowledge of the present, then you can predict the future. That's not determinism. Causality is one way of getting to determinism, but it isn't a requirement.
Determinism is basically what I described before as inevitability, although I didn't want to use the jargon because it has connotations which I'm not wholly comfortable discussing.
You are confusing fatalism with determinism.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Well said!
We just need to do away with the whole idea of free will. If it's deterministic than there's no free in free will.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That's like doing away with the concept of political liberty, or freedom in the sense of not being chained up in a box, because "meh it's all deterministic anyway". There is still an important psychological function that the term "free will" picks out that is a useful concept whether or not it's all deterministic anyway, just like those other kinds of freedom are important whether or not it's all deterministic. It's freedom from determinism that's the useless concept, and that just goes to show that that's not the proper referent of the term "free will".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ah, you fell into my trap :-)
The alcoholic doesn't have any less "free will" than the non-alcoholic. If you put a gun to an alcoholic's head and a glass in his hand and say "If you drink that, I'll blow your brains out", the alcoholic will not drink. If you put the non-alcoholic in an appropriate situation (say, bachelor party), he may drink himself into a stupor. In both, there are a wide range of actions that may be taken by each, and miswiring of the alcoholic's brain simply amounts to a bias (a strong one) in those choices... but depending on the circumstances he will choose differently, and in many of them he'll choose the same as the non-alcoholic.
In the previous paragraph I used the word "choice", not because I think this illustration in any way proves that choices exist, but because it's a convenient label. In all cases the combination of circumstances + wiring determines an outcome. Is there any choice? Do you have a choice in how you're wired? It appears that we do... by consistently exercising "free will" to make one sort of choice we can form habits and create pathways making that sort of choice "easier". Or by choosing what information we consume we affect our brain's wiring.
But there I go, using "choice" and "free will" as though they exist. But who's to say that the initial "choices" to adjust our wiring aren't themselves just a deterministic result of circumstances and wiring? And who's to say the rationale we think underlies those choices isn't just post-hoc explanation of non-rational, pre-determined action? if you assume absolute determinism, then absolutely everything, at every stage, comes about because of the conditions that prevail, including all of the machinery that you believe you use to make decisions.
(I should perhaps mention that I don't actually hold the position I'm arguing here. I believe free will exists, that it doesn't derive from sub-atomic indeterminacy but instead comes ultimately from a soul which science will almost certainly never be able to detect. But I find fascinating the notion that it doesn't actually exist, that it's illusory post-hoc justification of fundamental randomness and emergent properties. It gets even more interesting when you throw in the multiple-world model for QC... the argument then is that you actually make all possible decisions at each decision point, then in each of the branching universes you apply post-hoc justification to explain why you made your "choice". Oh, and then there's the whole "we're actually living in the Matrix" theory :P)
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Looking for a more authoritative source, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a lengthy article (which I haven't read) but puts in a conveniently quotable bit near the top:
Determinism: The world is governed by (or is under the sway of) determinism if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.
That's annoying. It implies causality but doesn't actually require it, even though the article is specifically on Causal Determinism, which is distinct from just plain determinism. I'm sure it's explained somewhere in there, but you know what? I don't care. You can have at it if you want.
That sounds far more like mindfulness / self-awareness than free will.
In all cases the combination of circumstances + wiring determines an outcome.
Yes, and there's a specific functional difference dependent on that wiring that imparts or inhibits the freedom of the will. You don't need to be able to choose how you're wired for you to be wired to be able to choose in the relevantly free manner, just like you don't need to be able to control how strong your muscles are in order for confines of spider-silk to be not binding on you; you just happen to be built in a way that something so little can't restrain your freedom of motion, but other organisms are not so lucky.
I guess I mistakenly implied that freedom is a boolean condition, but it's not; you can be more free, or less free, just like to one person, certain physical restraints may be no impediment to their physical freedom, while to others those may be absolutely binding.
it doesn't derive from sub-atomic indeterminacy but instead comes ultimately from a soul which science will almost certainly never be able to detect
If the functioning of that soul deterministic or not and does it matter and why or why not? You've just pushed the question back to the next turtle down.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I was a major editor on the free will and determinism articles on Wikipedia a while back, and there was a problem editor who trashed a lot of those things and drove away a lot of other editors (including myself) and left things in a really craptastic state, so in this case I wouldn't rely too much on Wikipedia.
The SEP articles are good though, curated by professional academics.
Fatalism is the concept that a certain thing is absolutely inevitable one way or another; that no matter what anyone does, no matter what happens, this thing will end up happening anyway. It's actually rather counter to causal determinism, because it implies that changes in prior events can be no detriment to the inevitable, fated event; the effect happens independent of the causes, with or without them.
There are a wide variety of determinisms, most of which are about one class of phenomena (usually human thought or behavior) being determined exclusively (i.e. regardless of any other kinds of phenomena) by another class of phenomena (e.g. genetics, upbringing, etc). The three exceptions to that, that are almost equivalent as far as free will goes and are often used interchangeably in discussions regarding it are logical, nomological, and theological determinism. Logical determinism is just the position that there is some truth of the matter, already, about future events. That may or may not be because events naturally follow from other events in an orderly, law-like fashion; if that's the case, it's nomological determinism. If it's not the case, then something else besides natural laws, i.e. something supernatural, must have fixed the truths of those future events, which leaves you with theological determinism.
As an atheist, I generally disregard theological determinism, and am only concerned with nomological determinism which is thus equivalent with logical determinism. Even accepting the possibility of theism, I'd argue that theological determinism just pushes the question back further: does God's behavior, including the fixing of future events, proceed in an orderly, law-like fashion (in which case theological determinism is still just a subset of nomological determinism with a specific intermediary class of phenomena, acts of God), or not (in which case future events, fixed at the dawn of time though they may be, still proceed from the random whims of God, and so you've really still got indeterminism).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It's a closely related phenomenon, but it's not self-awareness, it's self-control, which is the same thing as free will: you determine what you are going to do.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Only if by "such a thing" you mean incompatibilism, not just free will.
There are lots and lots of people who believe free will exists and can be (or even has to be) deterministic. They're called compatibilists and for centuries until very recently they were the dominant school of philosophy (and are still fighting a strong fight against a recent insurgence of incompatibilism).
Look up Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf for some notable contemporary examples.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If the universe is deterministic, it is predictable. That the usefulness of this predictability may be nil because the information cannot be communicated to the present, either at all, or simply in time to still qualify as a prediction from that reference point is immaterial.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I guess I mistakenly implied that freedom is a boolean condition, but it's not; you can be more free, or less free
Ah, so the possession of free will is a fuzzy value. I don't think that change to the definition makes anything clearer... and it also doesn't refute the notion that free will is just an emergent property of quantum randomness, since from the macro level quantum randomness looks fuzzy-valued, defining probability "clouds" of potential outcomes.
If the functioning of that soul deterministic or not and does it matter and why or why not? You've just pushed the question back to the next turtle down.
Indeed, I have. Plus I've introduced a whole new set of questions about the meaning of free will, particularly if we introduce an omniscient God into the discussion. I didn't claim that adding a soul answered anything, though it does allow free will to exist in a deterministic observable universe by providing another degree of freedom where it can live, non-deterministically.
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"Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."
If a physical system is chaotic, as most natural ones tend to be, it's future behaviour is not predictable with 100% certainty unless you have an exact analytical solution to the equations governing its behaviour - and those simply don't exist in the general case. So no, determinism doesn't imply predictability.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There are a number of faults with the argument that this test necessarily measures the act of exercising free will rather than simply measuring brain patterns. Instead of trying to list them out here though I would recommend anyone interested in the topic to take a look at this book which I found to be excellent reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262525798/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1469073660&sr=8-3&keywords=free+will
There is a whole series of these books by MIT press on other topics. Good stuff.
They are blind, groping at flesh, searching for the meaning of dicks and brains. dick-brain specialists.
Thank you; and, even with an exact solution governing it's behavior (and the exact details of the initial condition), computing the evolution of increasingly more chaotic systems is increasingly more time consuming, to an eventual limit that some systems' evolution cannot even in theory be computed faster than the systems actually evolve.
Taking a step back, it should be pretty obvious that it would be impossible in principle to compute the evolution of the universe faster than the state of the universe evolves, because the mechanism doing the computation is a part of the universe, and the act of computation is a part of the universe's evolution. The physical limits of the universe therefore impose physical limits on the speed of computation, and at some point you reach a maximum theoretically-possible computation efficiency, and a maximally-efficient computer of a given size can only compute some maximum complexity of system faster than that system itself evolves; to predict a larger system you need a larger computer, and to predict the entire universe you would need to turn the entire universe into a computer... that then emulates its old self. And still more slowly than its old self would have just evolved on its own.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Determinism does imply predictability, but it does not necessarily imply the knowability of enough information to make that prediction... only that the information exists.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The cubicle across from you is empty, go now. Stays a while, does something else. After a few days. Checks the cubicle. Then makes another decision. About why he made the decision to check the cubicle. You don't seem to follow, it seems like you are waiting for something, an answer perhaps? We have been watching you, we don't know who got to you first. Us or them...
Ed Vul would have deferred to Steve Yantis. Steve was a solid researcher. Shame he passed so young.
I've read about Heisenberg's interpretation of his uncertainty principle (or principle of indeterminacy, as he preferred to call it) as being due to the observer necessarily disturbing the experiment, but this has been refuted (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1208.0034) and has nothing to do with Schrödinger at all.
Free will is the ability to influence your environment by your own volition, independent from the inexorable march of time or destiny or god's plan.
Just realized that this definition of free will is really close to the definition of randomness.
Interesting, but the debate of free will has existed long before microscopic particles were even known to exist. From early debates on free will it seems to me that the point of contention was whether a person could have actually chosen differently at a given point in time. Modern philosophers have moved the goalposts (the compatibilists you mention) so that can still say "yes, we have all the free will that matters". But they have changed the definition, turning an interesting debate into a semantics debate.
Control is a bad word. Induces, initiates or raises are better. Natural language is at times surprisingly precise instrument and in others completely misleading and dulling.
Free will would be disobeying the instructions and paying attention to only one side the entire time.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
what a primitive definition of 'free will'. One day we might come up with a realistic model of what it is and be able to create experiments that really test it. In the meantime it might be worth taking a look at http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf - there is a growing body of evidence that fMRI correlates to brain activity are often questionable.
The electro-chemical signals flowing through the complex network of your brain are quite tangible. You can track them with physical probes, you can track them with radiation scanners, you can track them with passive external monitors.
Then everything in this universe that man has any knowledge of that isn't fantasy is tangible. I'm glad we cleared that up.
"Spiritual" could be one theory, but why be so limited in your philosophy, Horatio? We have perfectly respectable scientists arguing for rolled-up micro-dimensions. We have quantum mechanics doing spooky things - and just maybe doing them at a macro scale in biological systems if a recent article I read is on the right track.
QM is a lot of nifty things. A claim that QM effects are somehow sentient, or possess will... well, that's not argued by anyone anywhere that I've ever seen. QE effects "bubbling" up at a macro scale simply provides more random input to the state machine. It's still a tangible effect, by your very own definition.
One thing I've learned about science is that it's never "done". We get finer and finer approximations until it all seems to boil into fuzz. Then we try something different and maybe learn something new.
No, science is never done, but there are mountains of evidence on all the hills that are arguments around yours, but not a single shred of evidence on yours. Could that change some day? Yes. I concede that. But I'm no more inclined to look for a spiritual cause for consciousness than I am to look for marks of a sky fairy having created this planet.
If my world-view was all metal and lubricants, would I see the human in the seat of the bulldozer? Or be able to tell it from a ghost? A computer? An orang-utan?
Why couldn't you?
A computer certainly can. Using very simplified versions of our very own wetware- neural networks.
Willpower is a limited resource, at least for most humans. In my case, I can only resist so much temptation of certain types. Put me through stressful situations with dark chocolate available, and I will eventually eat some. Assuming free will exists, this makes the issue more complicated.
Determinism and free will are not necessarily incompatible, depending on how you define free will. If I'm hungry, suppose you offer me two pizzas, one of which is sausage and mushroom and one of which is veggie that includes green pepper. I will, of my own free will as I experience it, eat slices of the sausage and mushroom one. Is that free will, determinism, both, or neither?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I see it as the parts of the brain involved in free will instead of controlling it.
('controlled' is more emotive in a title I guess)
Also while the testing methodology is clever, it'd be informative to see a version with up / down choices
instead of left / right to eliminate possible bilateral brain issues.
In / out choices might show differences in brain activity also.
You exist because your cells want you to exist and consciousness is just a byproduct of that collective, the collective of cells.
Or, consciousness finds it convenient to control a vehicle that has self-preservative characteristics.
The cells of even primitive life-forms "want to exist", but that doesn't mean that they have consciousness.
Integral Calculus isn't "tangible", but the human brain can store information about it in tangible constructs. Likewise, my bank balance. But the storage isn't the actuality, and the bank account information in my brain is no more the actual account than the bank account information on my hard drive is, even though that is likewise represented in tangible and measurable form.
I don't posit self-aware Quantum mechanics and I have no idea how you drew such a wild conclusion, You seem to take a delight with confusing the levers with the driver.
And how, pray tell can a neural network "see" what's at the controls of a bulldozer if the driver no more visible to man or computer than cosmic rays were to the Babylonians? On top of which you seem to be assuming that we have neural networks that can accurately conduct a Turing Test. As I recall, the original test specifically required a human as the test instrument/reference.
Who is the heretic who down modded this fine post?
Integral Calculus isn't "tangible", but the human brain can store information about it in tangible constructs. Likewise, my bank balance. But the storage isn't the actuality, and the bank account information in my brain is no more the actual account than the bank account information on my hard drive is, even though that is likewise represented in tangible and measurable form.
But your bank account has *0* effect on anything outside that which we give it. So this entire line of reasoning is entirely non-sequitur. Your bank account is the tool, not the actor.
Your bank account is not an intangible effect, as you've attempted to define it.
I don't posit self-aware Quantum mechanics and I have no idea how you drew such a wild conclusion, You seem to take a delight with confusing the levers with the driver.
Perhaps I mistook you. You posited that the brain could be the engine that something less tangible *uses*, and then gave QM as an example of an intangible effect. To which I replied, at best, QM provides a source of random input- which is *not* "Free Will". I made the apparently incorrect assumption that if it's not random input that it offers, then you must be claiming it imparts its will upon the engine that is our brain. I'd love to hear your alternative explanation, for the sake of correcting my understanding of your position.
And how, pray tell can a neural network "see" what's at the controls of a bulldozer if the driver no more visible to man or computer than cosmic rays were to the Babylonians?
The same way the babylonians (or more specifically, their progeny) eventually did. By expanding their knowledge through observation. Our neural network allows for this. So do artificial ones.
On top of which you seem to be assuming that we have neural networks that can accurately conduct a Turing Test. As I recall, the original test specifically required a human as the test instrument/reference.
We do have neural networks that can accurately conduct a Turing Test. There's one driving your fingers right this minute. I make no assumption that artifical networks that to date have only just now come within 3 orders of magnitude of the complexity of the Neural Network the Turing Test uses as a benchmark. That assumption was all you. I don't think anybody said "there we are, we've got it!"