Free will and determinism

It's nice to see back, Paul (although I disagree with nearly everything you've ever posted)  but why were you not free to stay away from the forum?

Hey, Tim.

I was free to stay away for awhile, but then inexorably drawn back. It's not my fault!

~~ Paul

Hi Paul, it is good to see you here again. It reminds me of the best days of Skeptiko, when we all had some very interesting discussions - even though we didn't come to any conclusive answers!
What does taking responsibility mean in the absence of free will - perhaps a politician would understand that best.

I think that is because you imagine your brain running along totally materialistic lines - which makes free will hard to understand. However, my feeling is that free will is just one of a whole list of aspects of consciousness that reinforce one another:

1)        Consciousness extending after death - think of Julie Beischel's multiple blind tests of mediums.

2)        Links between consciousness as in ESP - think of all the Ganzfelt experiments that have been done, or Rupert Sheldrake's experiments with dogs that know when their owners are coming home.

3)        Reincarnation - think of Ian Stevenson's work together with other researchers.

4)        The separation of consciousness from the body - think of all the NDE/OBE studies.

5)        The existence of free will (which practically everyone claims to have).

Materialism requires that none of these phenomena are real - including free will - whereas if you accept a non-material reality, all these phenomena are conceivable and tend to reinforce each other.

Hey there, David.

Taking responsibility simply means that you were the vehicle for the action. You did, after all, make the decisions. They just weren't free, but rather deterministic and random.

All those things are well and good, but they don't answer my question. I don't see how suddenly becoming a believer in those things is going to enlighten me about the method by which I can make a decision that is more than deterministic and random. Sure, I can come up with possible sources for the decisions (e.g., indeterminism somehow being more than randomness), but not the method. And if I simply decide that there can't be a method/mechanism/procedure/algorithm because those things are all inherently deterministic, then I've gotten nowhere.

We must agree that there is some method of making a free decision. If not, then in what sense am I making a free decision?

~~ Paul

The illusion of making libertarian free will decisions could be a product of evolution. Or, it could simply be that since we do not experience the complete process of making a decision, it feels like there must be a free step. Which, to me, is an argument that there is no free decision, or we would experience how that free decision is made and my interminable question would have been answered long ago.

~~ Paul

We do have experience of making decisions though?

There's that pesky word "how" again..though I think the reason your question is interminable is this post:

When the other person says "Aha, I understand what you are saying."

This was the response to when I asked what the criteria of satisfactory explanation is. No one can meet this criteria in a debate, those non-stated goal posts can always recede?

"The man who wants to beat a dog always finds his stick."
  -Serbian Proverb

Before we devolve this into an attempt show Paul an elephant going through the eye of a needle, can we agree to move the "let me convince Paul of free will" posts to the other thread?

For those of us who endured it the first time, just trust me. You'll be happy to have it consolidated elsewhere.

Before we devolve this into an attempt show Paul an elephant going through the eye of a needle, can we agree to move the "let me convince Paul of free will" posts to the other thread?

For those of us who endured it the first time, just trust me. You'll be happy to have it consolidated elsewhere.

Oh I keep linking back to the old thread for that reason.

At this point it's obviously an erroneous if not trick question, and the best possible responses have likely been given.

They did interview a interview with Tononi however:
https://youtu.be/0hex5katLGk

Btw you might find this of interest:

Only what exists can cause: An intrinsic view of free will

Giulio Tononi, Larissa Albantakis, Melanie Boly, Chiara Cirelli, Christof Koch

This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum of cause-effect power in the brain. Moreover, the way specific experiences feel is accounted for by how that cause-effect power is structured. If IIT is right, we do have free will in the fundamental sense: we have true alternatives, we make true decisions, and we - not our neurons or atoms - are the true cause of our willed actions and bear true responsibility for them. IIT's argument for true free will hinges on the proper understanding of consciousness as true existence, as captured by its intrinsic powers ontology: what truly exists, in physical terms, are intrinsic entities, and only what truly exists can cause.

All those things are well and good, but they don't answer my question. I don't see how suddenly becoming a believer in those things is going to enlighten me about the method by which I can make a decision that is more than deterministic and random. Sure, I can come up with possible sources for the decisions (e.g., indeterminism somehow being more than randomness), but not the method. And if I simply decide that there can't be a method/mechanism/procedure/algorithm because those things are all inherently deterministic, then I've gotten nowhere.

In one sense I think you are right - a human being seems to be a strange and intimate blend of physical matter and spirit (for want of a better word). I am sure that animals are the same.

In all sorts of ways, you can't explain how living things behave without addressing both components of that blend - so you are right if you ignore the spirit part of the blend. When people such as you try to ignore the spirit part of the blend, the result is a string of absurd ideas:

We have no free will.

Consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon.

Consciousness is a hallucination.

NDE's are best not talked about!

etc.

You are right in that if you ignore the spirit part of the blend, any and all of these conclusions seem to follow.

I think spirits are real, basically because people like you have to endorse such implausible ideas to deny their existence. A spirit clearly has free will (presumably within some constraints), and asking for the mechanism by which spirits operate is either meaningless in principle, or is akin to stone age man asking what makes certain plants poisonous. I.e. it is a question that would require a lengthy scientific exploration of the properties of spirits.

Honestly, I used to think much as you do, but I found there was a growing list of evidence that I had to ignore or explain away.

You are right in that if you ignore the spirit part of the blend, any and all of these conclusions seem to follow.

Actually more and more people on the terrestrial if not materialist side of things are coming around to ideas regarding free will.

See mentions of Tononi in this thread [and also] Raymond Tallis, Mumford & Anjum, and Helen Steward.

These people don't, AFAIK, accept PK or NDEs.

I was free to stay away for awhile, but then inexorably drawn back. It's not my fault!

Okay. I presume it's the fault of your brain cells, then. But if it's your brain cells, then who or what are you ?

Okay. I presume it's the fault of your brain cells, then. But if it's your brain cells, then who or what are you ?

Trust me, this line of reasoning won't get you anywhere. It doesn't make any sense how you can choose to take responsibility if you don't make decisions, but materialist faithful have managed to mangle philosophy to the point they have a pile of pseudo-profound statements.

What materialism evangelism has to believe is that there can be no possibility of genuine free will because it's obvious their belief system can't have it. Just look at the difference in how free will is treated versus how consciousness is treated.

We have an a priori reason to believe that materialism is false, there is no "how" that explains how we get consciousness from that which is non-conscious. Even New Atheist Horseman & neuroscience PhD Sam Harris agrees materialism seems nonsensical because it demands Something from Nothing.

Yet materialists don't stop this from claiming that someday such an explanation will be found.

OTOH there's no a priori reason to deny free will - the usual excuse is there's some kind of dichotomy where every causal act is deterministic or random but there's no definitive logical argument I've seen provided (usually the statement is given as something faith-based AFAICTell). Physics, which as per atheist Why I am Not A Christian author Bertrand Russell, just measures causation and doesn't give us an account of what is actually the intrinsic nature of causation:

"All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent."

Even then what it shows us are quantum phenomena that are neither deterministic (not 100% predictable) nor random (can be measured/modeled stochastically). So even before we bring in consciousness there's phenomena that parallel what we think of as humans that possess a certain character but whose every decision cannot be perfectly predicted.

AFAICTell it's all really just religious indoctrination into the materialist evangelical faith of the pseudoskeptics. They'll claim they are acting rationally, but their starting position is we can't trust our experiences nor our decision making so they should be more open to examining their faith-based beliefs...