Free will re-redux

Of course it may not be and the ever present promissory note from science will ultimately bear fruit.  Perhaps free will be shown to not exist and to be deterministic and/or "random".  But the underlying request remains incoherent to me:  If we have free will and it is NOT reducible to determinism and/or randomness how would it ever be shown in process form; in a flow chart?  The request itself seems to require a causal chain of some type which, again, seems to make the request incoherent/inconsistent.

Perhaps I'm missing something.

If you are using a flow chart or recipe or list of steps, what stops you from deciding part way through to "just wing it" and make the decision "at random"?

If you decide to make the decision "randomly", what decides whether you use a coin or a six sided die? What ensures you don't decide to shift to the other before you roll/flip? What makes you accept the decision of the random outcome of the coin/die?

The "how" of non-free decisions you've been given is at a different level of causality than the "how" of free will. Or rather, the former already assumes causality works a certain way, whereas free will has to be explained at the level of whatever reasoning one posits for why there's causation. 

That's why, IMO, you feel like something is missing. None of this is an argument for free will, mind you, it's just an argument for where the proper level of explanation lies.

As for feeling like my decisions are free: I don't have that feeling. I have no feeling one way or the other, because I do not experience the entire decision-making event.

~~ Paul

I think the post about penrose and the posts by Silence probably make the strongest points, alongside what Sci said up there. If free will is a stage removed and you're looking for the recipe for how an action occurs I dunno if we're going to get anywhere. I don't know how you're going to change your mind if you think free will is illogical.

But then, if you don't feel your decisions are free anyway, I suppose you don't have a choice in the matter when it comes to changing your mind.

you're looking for the recipe for how an action occurs

The talk will examine an embarrassment shared by both theological and scientific approaches to the intelligibility of the world and highlighted for theologians by Special Divine Action (SDA).

I will suggest that a serious, perhaps the central, problem presented by SDA is that of understanding a local event being brought about by an agency or force that is, by definition, absolutely general. The commonly expressed worry that SDA requires of God that he should violate His own laws reflects only the most obvious manifestation of what is a deeper difficulty; namely, finding an adequate explanation of the local, and actual, in the general.

The scientific endeavour to make the universe entirely intelligible - culminating in a putative Theory of Everything – encounters similar problems. I shall examine the Principle of Precedence in its various guises (inertia, laws of nature, probability) and different approaches to causation. They all prove profoundly unsatisfactory for different reasons. The difficulty common to various naturalistic responses to ‘Why’ is that of establishing an adequate connection between the explanandum and the explanation given that the former inevitably sets out general possibilities and the latter is composed of singular actualities.

The goal, or regulative idea, of science – namely finding a sufficient reason for singular events in the general properties of the universe to which they belong - is analogous to the theological aim of making sense of SDA by connecting and reconciling such action with fundamental characteristics of God. I shall argue that theists and atheists both need to look critically at the very idea that things happen because they are made to happen, typically by what has preceded it characterised in most general terms; at the notion of ‘becausation’.

In the final, and most speculative and least-developed, part of the paper, I shall ask whether the search for an explanation of events in something that makes them happen is prompted by a felt need to reconnect items of an intrinsically seamless universe pulled apart into distinct elements by the irruption of self-consciousness into Being. This last idea is offered up tentatively for dissection.

An interesting vid from the YT Channel PBS Spacetime. Does Physics Negate Free Will?

An interesting vid from the YT Channel PBS Spacetime. Does Physics Negate Free Will?

That was pretty interesting. The bit at the end about consciousness and free will was not what I expected from a physics channel.

Apologies for butting into the middle without reading the pages of debate.

Matt does a pretty good job giving a fair and balanced look at physics and free will:


So as I understand it the question is: if a choice is made that is neither deterministic nor random how does that happen?

Determinism and randomness are two spaces. The boundary of which is a space in its own right and that is where consciousness and free will are found.

Future states are somewhat dependent on past states but this dependency is not merely existing from one Planck length to the next but our existence is smeared out across a larger patch of time. 

I think of my existence like a torus - a magnetic dynamo. North Pole to the future. South Pole to the past. The sum of my past states and choices generates a field ahead of me that shapes the probability of otherwise random events.

When I encounter a synchronicity that is my free will extending itself quite a ways out there. But micro-synchronicities occur in my gray matter constantly which in turn manifest as a decision/perception (same thing).

If this sounds recursive it is.

Determinism and randomness are two spaces. The boundary of which is a space in its own right and that is where consciousness and free will are found.

Are these really two spaces? Determinism that has no explanation is just a special kind of randomness. It seems to [me] this is just a confusion of mathematics for reality, since in math things are either modeled with a deterministic function where input/output are fixed or via random variables where an input can lead to a distribution of outcomes.

If you put me in the Matrix and for a lark add the following rules:

1. If Sci sees a squirrel [today] and eats pizza, the moon will be orange for that night.

2. If Sci sees a sparrow [today] and eats a cookie, there's a 50% chance two moons will be seen.

I would conclude the "1" is deterministic and "2" is random, but I wouldn't know the actual source of causality for either. [I'm assuming you gave me a new identity ignorant of the Matrix.]

Our own assignment of the [two] terms is equally ignorant of actual causal explanation.

Some mind-bending thoughts on this:        ( Paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9412004.pdf )


From Roger Penrose (same paper):


If the determinism/randomness dichotomy rules the Universe (as Paul seems to believe), mind and consciousness and therefore the process whatever it is by which apparently subjectively free choices are made are probably noncomputable, meaning non-algorithmic and incapable of being generated by strong AI computers. This means whatever the process is it can't be visualized and described by a logical series of computational steps as in a computer program.  It seems to me that means our rational logical intellect fundamentally can't comprehend whatever this process is. This comprehension is what Paul demands, and it would probably be impossible.

If the determinism/randomness dichotomy does not rule the Universe including Man then consciousness, agency, subjectivity and intentionality themselves are allowed to be ultimately not deterministic and therefore to not be subject to any sort of limitation to the deterministic/random dichotomy. This allows room for true free will choices.

As with the Universe is deterministic case, Nature does not have any obligation to provide a design of this (either apparently free or truly free will choices) that allows human comprehension.

First of all, I'm not sure why mind wouldn't be computable, as long as the machine has a true RNG available. It wouldn't be predictable, but that is different. Also, as it stands, we don't know how random events affect the brain, so we couldn't write the computer program now. We could write something that does use random effects, as we are already doing in AI applications.

Second, I'm not asking for a description at quite such a detailed level. I'm really just trying to get any sort of feeling for what people are picturing as the free decision "process."

~~ Paul

Are these really two spaces? Determinism that has no explanation is just a special kind of randomness. It seems to [me] this is just a confusion of mathematics for reality, since in math things are either modeled with a deterministic function where input/output are fixed or via random variables where an input can lead to a distribution of outcomes.

If you put me in the Matrix and for a lark add the following rules:

1. If Sci sees a squirrel [today] and eats pizza, the moon will be orange for that night.

2. If Sci sees a sparrow [today] and eats a cookie, there's a 50% chance two moons will be seen.

I would conclude the "1" is deterministic and "2" is random, but I wouldn't know the actual source of causality for either. [I'm assuming you gave me a new identity ignorant of the Matrix.]

Our own assignment of the [two] terms is equally ignorant of actual causal explanation.

I'm happy to agree that we don't know the ultimate source for what we call a predetermined event. However, we understand cause and effect well enough to be able to build microcomputers that behave almost completely as if predetermined. We even understand the essentially random nature of QM enough to build many devices based on QM principles, including small quantum computers.

Can I get a description of the free will "process" at a level even vaguely approaching the level of description I can give you for the internals of a computer? One explanation, I suppose, would be that every event is the result of something's will and that something is unusually cooperative with our technology.

~~ Paul

This is where the bi-level mode of analysis is valuable.  Free willful output and actual selections from agency, as decisions, are informational events.  They can occur and there can be a nearly identical physical states before an after.  The transformations that are physical are objective, assuming an actual event.  The environment and the agent are measurable in the moment, as to physical aspects.  How do you not experience the physical event?

I stand ready to defend the transforms that occur in decision making, in terms of changing probabilities, informational objects and programs that construct and deconstruct information objects.


good to see you back

Thanks!

I certainly experience any effects of the decision. But I simply do not experience the decision at any level of detail. I can make decisions in situations ranging from sleep to deep concentration on a problem. But in the latter case I experience only the gross steps of the decision. I talk to myself a lot while thinking about problems. I feel confident in saying that I am not directly experiencing whatever insights occur between one mumbling and the next. It's just a series of hops.

~~ Paul