Free will re-redux

First of all, who says that random processes in the brain could not have contributed to Shakespeare's writing? It's a just-so claim that they did not, possibly based on some strange idea that someone is suggesting the entire project was random.

The second paragraph is a strawman. No one is suggesting that the universe has played out entirely deterministically. There most certainly are random processes involved, unless you're going to claim that everything we think is stochastic is in fact deterministic. So even if Shakespeare's brain involved no random processes, the state of the universe up to his first writing certainly did.

So that leaves us with the claim that intelligent writing requires free will. I'm not convinced.

~~ Paul

Of course, you're free to believe that all the works of Shakespeare (and of course of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rodgers and Hammerstein, etc. etc.) are the ultimate result of deterministic causal chains plus random perturbations. Just a joke.

Why do you keep on about this being my claim? I've said a dozen times that I'm suspending the claim that there are only these two possibilities. The claim is suspended. The fact that I then say there are the only two I can imagine is a comment about my possible failure of imagination. Then I ask someone to give me a description of another possibility.

You spend a lot of time avoiding the question by insisting that I'm not really asking a question. Do I just have to have faith in it?

~~ Paul

No one has avoided your "how" question.

You said you wanted a "how" like "how does a computer work?" It was pointed out this is the wrong level of explanation, because a computer is made of cause-effect relations where the possibility selection is already mapped out.

You said you could make a decision in a non-free way by following a recipe or flipping a coin. It was pointed out that this isn't a "how" like "how do I make a free decision" because if you had to make a meaningful decision these processes - of which there an infinite variation of - would have to be decided on. So whether you play a game of chance, follow some preset list of steps, or some combination this would just be the follow through of a decision.

Then it was pointed out that the "how" explanation of free will would be akin to a "how" of randomness, determinism, or pedesis.

Then you said you just can't conceive of something other than determinism or randomness....and at that point it's not clear what you want the rest of us to do. I mean the board skeptics don't seem bothered by the fact I can't conceive of how Physicalism could be true.

The laws are merely descriptive, so what keeps the behavior of the universe from changing? Nothing. Is that possibility helpful to a description of how indeterministic effects occur?

~~ Paul

You're asking how things like alpha decay and the electron's position in an atomic orbital work?

Or are you saying there are no reasons for why the universe works as it does, including those indeterministic effects?

The thread is a complete waste of time if anyone thinks it's going to lead to anything fruitful, but that's not a criticism.

I do wonder about this myself, especially since looking around over the years at pseudo-skeptic sites it seems to me this exclusive randomness/determinism dichotomy is a major catechism of the materialist evangelist faith.

That makes sense. After all to admit that free will is possible in some realities would have to mean those realities where consciousness is more than just the reducible material components of the brain.

And since free will is the foundation of human civilization and individual human life that would mean it's in humanity's best interest to advocate for aspects of parapsychology like NDEs, Psi, Reincarnation research, etc.

But if they can convince people there's no way to get that real free will, and we have to settle for weird philosophical arguments reconciling the lack of free will with determinism/randomness, then it becomes acceptable to evangelize their faith that all that ultimately exists are the supposedly non-mental components of physics.

So maybe there's no way to bridge the conceivability gap, but it seems at least Smaw has a foot in both worlds so to speak. Why I'm curious as to his next reply, as he seems to get what the skeptic side is but also gets where the proponent side is coming from.

That's an interesting statement about your personal incredulity.

I'm not sure what you mean. Why does "intelligent writing" require free will?

~~ Paul

I feel like there have been arguments put forward that science requires free will. Otherwise we are REALLY lucky that we are at where we are today. 

Certainly a bit of a laugh to say that whenever we don't find a good cancer treatment or the like there was never any chance it would be different. Or if Einstein didn't pick his nose one day he wouldn't have discovered particle physics.

I feel like there have been arguments put forward that science requires free will. Otherwise we are REALLY lucky that we are at where we are today. 

Certainly a bit of a laugh to say that whenever we don't find a good cancer treatment or the like there was never any chance it would be different. Or if Einstein didn't pick his nose one day he wouldn't have discovered particle physics.

It's as if you have some model of determinism + randomness that is no richer than a billiard table in its possibilities. Things are stunningly complicated. Discoveries lead to further discoveries along all kinds of paths. Perhaps paths get knocked into different trajectories by random events.

We haven't found a treatment for a particular kind of cancer yet. Does that mean that all the possible deterministic + random paths forward lead away from it? Of course not. In fact, wouldn't it seem more and more likely that we would find a treatment? The paths of hundreds of doctors and scientists all point at that kind of cancer.

I'm not sure what Einstein's picking his nose has to do with his discoveries, but that is a separate question.

~~ Paul

It's as if you have some model of determinism + randomness that is no richer than a billiard table in its possibilities. Things are stunningly complicated. Discoveries lead to further discoveries along all kinds of paths. Perhaps paths get knocked into different trajectories by random events.

We haven't found a treatment for a particular kind of cancer yet. Does that mean that all the possible deterministic + random paths forward lead away from it? Of course not. In fact, wouldn't it seem more and more likely that we would find a treatment? The paths of hundreds of doctors and scientists all point at that kind of cancer.

I'm not sure what Einstein's picking his nose has to do with his discoveries, but that is a separate question.

~~ Paul

It's not so much that under determinism we wouldn't have found treatment, it's that there was never any other option to find treatment. It was always going to be the one way. Or it's up in the air all the time, who knows if we'll find treatment its exciting every time.

I wonder if someone's put forward that randomness in brains leads to options, with conscious decisions letting us choose between the two. Didn't Penrose do that? 

Also, for Einstein. People are shaped by their actions and environment, one giant line of cause and effect. Einstein could've spent a few extra seconds picking his nose, that might have made him want to make a sandwich, that stopped him sitting down at a table and bam no particle physics for another 50 years.

It's not so much that under determinism we wouldn't have found treatment, it's that there was never any other option to find treatment. It was always going to be the one way. Or it's up in the air all the time, who knows if we'll find treatment its exciting every time.

I wonder if someone's put forward that randomness in brains leads to options, with conscious decisions letting us choose between the two. Didn't Penrose do that? 

Also, for Einstein. People are shaped by their actions and environment, one giant line of cause and effect. Einstein could've spent a few extra seconds picking his nose, that might have made him want to make a sandwich, that stopped him sitting down at a table and bam no particle physics for another 50 years.

Well, there might have been another option if randomness is involved. But I'm not sure why it being inevitable bothers you.

Yes, randomness may lead to options. And conscious decisions might often be the way we choose. I just don't understand how that choice can be freely made.

I think Einstein was pretty focused and could make a sandwich without losing track of what he was doing. Hell, I can do that and I'm no Einstein. Or even a grilled cheese.

~~ Paul

I wanted to dig a little deeper into this issue of causal explanation.

There's a level of causal explanation that asks "What events Y, if they occur, result in outcome X's occurrence?" for "deterministic" cause-effect relations and "What events W, if they occur, result in a chance for outcome Z's occurrence?" for "random" cause-effect relations.

But "random" seems to cover a range of behaviors. There's the idea of true chaos, what Meillassoux calls "hyper chaos" where things are truly unpredictable. An electron can grow to the size of a golf ball and change into a tree frog.

That's obviously not what is meant when describing electron position in-determinism. So we know it's not true randomness in that sense. But even with regards to the electron's position while no singular measurement can be predicted perfectly from the prior state of the universe a series of measurements shows the position of electrons resolves stochastically to a distrubition - the atomic orbital whose shape varies depending on the elements/compositions in question.

That doesn't look like "randomness", rather it seems like something neither "random" nor "deterministic".

And when someone says, "deterministic" they mean those cause-effect relations which so far at least are unchanging. But just as a fair pair of dice can possibly come up snake eyes for a million rolls, however implausible that is, there's no way just from outside observation to know which "deterministic" cause-effect relations are just "lucky streaks" precisely because we don't have an explanation for what makes some cause-effect relations better modeled by singular output functions and other cause-effect relations better modeled by random variable functions.

So these attributions of "deterministic" and "random" seem iffy to me. After all if I've followed a routine for decades - say visiting a coffee shop and always getting the same thing (black coffee & bear claw) you could say that's a "deterministic" cause-effect relation. And if I change it up despite all relevant causal factors observable from the outside of my inner life staying the same you'd say it was "random".

Similarly, if the universe is Finely Tuned then the observed physical "deterministic" and "random" cause-effect relations are actually the result of mental causation. One variation of this argument is that the oddities in physics are better explained if our universe is a "simulation" running in the consciousness of some Ur-Mind (God?) ->

"In other words one out of every 25 photons will be reflected on average, and this holds true even for a "one at a time" flux. The four percent cannot be explained by statistical differences of the photons (they are identical) nor by random variations in the glass. Something is "telling" every 25th photon on average that it should be reflected back instead of being transmitted. Other quantum experiments lead to similar paradoxes."

=-=-=

"In both the glass reflection and the two-slit experiments, what is there that tells photons what to do? Brian Whitworth, a professor of information processing and technology, puts it this way:

One of the mysteries of our world is how every photon of light, every electron and quark, and indeed every point of space itself, seems to just “know” what to do at each moment. The mystery is that these tiniest parts ofthe universe have no mechanisms or structures by which to make such decisions. Yet if the world is a virtual reality, this problem disappears.

We can think of no way to hardwire the behavior of photons in the glass reflection or the two-slit experiments into a physical law, or explain things in terms of particles coming in touch with each other. In the case of the two-slit experiment, we need to assume, following Feynman, that a photon instantaneously traverses every possible path through the entire universe in order to "explain" the behavior of one little laboratory photon. What kind of bizarre information is being shared between particles in the glass reflection experiment and how would that conceivably be possible?

On the other hand, writing a bit of software –an algorithm –that would yield the desired result is really simple."

=-=-=

"some transcendent consciousness has created not a physical reality,but a virtual reality based on its abilities to act like a vast mental computer. At first glance this might appear to be a trivialization of consciousness as a mere computer. But that is too literal. Think instead of an unbounded intelligence capable of unlimited concentration, able to dream up and keep in mind every detail of an entire universe governed by the laws and logic of that intelligence."

-Bernard Haisch, Is the Universe a Self-Computing Consciousness? From Digital Physics to Roycean Idealism

If the quantum level was more like the classical level, more "deterministic", would there still be a problem? The theist would say yes:

Magic versus metaphysics

...what is objectionable about magic can only be that it is supposed to be inherently unintelligible, unintelligible even in principle and not merely in practice.  Appeals to magic in this sense can, of necessity, explain nothing.  They are rightly dismissed as pseudo-explanations or worse -- Putnam suggests that they are actually incoherent.

But to operate in a way that is ultimately unintelligible in principle -- as the atheist arguably has to say the fundamental laws of nature do, insofar as he has to say that they are “just there” as a brute fact, something that could have been otherwise but happens to exist anyway, with no explanation -- just is to be “magical” in the objectionable sense.  In fact it is only on a theistic view of the world that the laws of nature are not “magical”; and the Mackie/Russell position is (as I argue in the post linked to above) ultimately incoherent for the same sorts of reason that magical thinking in general is incoherent.  As is so often the case, the loudmouth New Atheist turns out to be exactly what he claims to despise -- in this case, a believer in “magical powers.”

And even if one isn't an Idealist, or even a Theist, there's still the question of whether our observed cause-effect relations are the work of aliens:

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? - Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.

Caleb Sharf

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.

Going further and looking at Ufology, where the deeper reality altering oddities lie, it seems aliens could set up our physics and even how Psi works to their liking.

All to say there's are varied reasons for thinking that mental causation is responsible for observed physics, so what's labeled "random" and "deterministic" are really grounded in the (pre-)selection of possibilities by a conscious agent.

This all gets us to the 'lower' level of causal explanation, "For any X-Y causal relation, what makes that relation hold?"

I feel like there have been arguments put forward that science requires free will. Otherwise we are REALLY lucky that we are at where we are today.

 
Maybe you're thinking of Bohr and then Henry Stapp, arguing that Science depends the experimenter to make choices about the experiment.

Stapp notes that probabilities in classical physics were considered to be epistemic, the result of human ignorance. The infinite mind of a Laplace demon could comprehend the exact positions and velocities of all the particles of matter, plus the forces acting on them, and thus know the entire past and future of the world, including the thoughts of man. Stapp says quantum mechanics has changed that. Probabilities are now real (ontological), opening the door to mental processes that cannot be understood in terms of material particles. 

Can Free Choice and the Quantum Zeno Effect Give Us Free Will?

Free Choice of the Experimenter
Niels Bohr introduced the free choice of the experimenter - who can decide for example to measure the x-component of spin sx, in which case the results will be a + or - value for sx and the other components sy and sz remain undetermined . Paul Dirac commented that it is Nature that decides between + and -.

Quantum Zeno Effect
The Quantum Zeno is a direct consequence of the fact, pointed out by Henry Margenau, that a measurement is also a state preparation. When you measure a system and find sx = +, you have also prepared the system in state +. Dirac pointed out that if you measure a system in a known state +, it will be certain to be found in state +.

This is called a non-demolition measurement. Quantum Zeno is a rapid series of measurements that keeps preparing the system in the same state. Exactly how consciousness in the the relatively large brain can make such quantum measurements is, however, completely unclear.

Stapp's unique quantum mechanical contribution to the free will problem is the claim that the observer's free choice of which experiment to perform, combined with the Quantum Zeno Effect, allows the observer, by his own free choices, to hold stably in place a chosen brain activity that would normally fade away.