Neuroscience and free will

I see parallels in this with Hurm's speculations/insights. Perhaps "hyper-chaos" is the default, and consciousness is the radical explorer-balancer projecting and asserting just enough order onto that chaos for meaning to be possible, but allowing enough lee-way for unexpected "chaotic" revelations/breakthroughs/insights to be both possible and taken advantage of. As in evolution: perhaps consciousness "deliberately" allows for chaotic/random "mutations" within the ordered process of "biological life" which it has projected upon the even more extreme default hyper-chaos, and which it then exploits via attending consciously to those "chaotic mutations" which actually provide a benefit: order out of chaos.

But this randomness would violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which is why as much as the idea of True Chaos appeals at an aesthetic level I don't know if it can be logically justified.

Of course, as noted previously the "just so" determinism implied by recourse to "Laws of Nature" also violates the PSR...which again is why I look to some fundamental mental voliition to help explain why anything happens b/c that is a causality I can at least claim [possesses the] experience of seeming fundamental...

[Laird]

But this randomness would violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)

Ah. Interesting. I still haven't decided whether I have sufficient reason to accept the PSR...

I ought to look into the arguments and positions for and against more carefully.

as much as the idea of True Chaos appeals at an aesthetic level I don't know if it can be logically justified.

OK... so, just exploring this objection a little: what if a sentient agent willed it into being? Would that be a "sufficient" and logically justifiable reason for its existence?

Paul, to generalise (!) from all of this, my suggestion is that you are (generally!) not recognising a symmetry, and thus that the epistemic demands you are making of libertarian free will as a causal model apply as much to the purely physical causality which you seem to be suggesting as exhaustive in causal scope (albeit modified by "randomness"). In fact, I would suggest that the epistemic demands on that physical causality are even greater than those on the causality of libertarian free will. Here are two of the symmetries as I see them, and why I think the epistemic demands on physical causality are greater:

        Both can be formulated in terms of descriptive "laws" (albeit that, as noted above, the "laws" describing events due to free will are "generally less general").

        Both are ultimately inexplicable so far as we know. Why, ultimately, is the behaviour exhibited by masses in the presence of one another described by the "law" of gravity that we have and not by some other "law"? We don't know (and you admit as much), we simply observe that it is (seems to be). Why, ultimately, is the behaviour of one conscious being after reading a forum post described by one given "law" and not by another? We don't know, we simply observe that it is... but, and here's why I think that the epistemic demands on physical causality are greater, in this case we can at least observe from introspection that something about conscious beings seems to involve us having the capacity to freely instantiate given actions (and thus the more general "laws" which describe them) out of a range of possibilities, intentionally and of our own volition.


    So, my challenge to you in turn is: what similar observation can we make about the reasons why one (set of) "law(s) of physics" describes any given physical event and not (an)other(s)?

I'm afraid your post has only increased my feeling of asymmetry between our physical laws and your free will laws. Your laws were simply repetitions of the events. They were not laws is any sort of logical or scientific sense.

Furthermore, there was no hint of a free decision method in your laws. All those decisions could just as well have been made determinstically or randomly. In particular, a free will law ought to state multiple possible outcomes; if there is only one, it's really a deterministic law.

Why do I keep insisting that we do have some understanding of deterministic and random decision making? Because we have a world of physical laws, experiments, and derived technology that strongly suggests the existence of determinism and randomness, at least at the levels above the quantum. Why is it one set of laws and not another? Because we devise the laws based on our observations.

Now, if there are really no general laws of free will, but just a series of disjoint free choices, so be it. I remain frustrated, but that is my problem.

~~ Paul

Again, I don't think this is the "how" at the level of free will, as you are talking about how we can take observed causal patterns (including stochastic patterns) that exist and exploit them to our advantage. But this assumes the patterns exist, rather offers explanations for the patterns.

It offers explanations for many patterns. But I agree that it can't offer an explanation of the lowest-level patterns. There probably is no explanation for "the way things just are."

At this level assumed patterns, the level of relations, there is no way to explain free will anymore than we could explain consciousness as these are properties of relata.And relata are the things-in-themselves physics fails to offer account for. A good explanation on the limits of relations is presented at the end of Smolin's Time Reborn:

But I'm only asking for a high-level explanation. We have plenty of explanation for high-level physical phenomenon.

Not at all, rather free will must be simple in that it is an inherent property of the agent rather than something composite.

I'm fine with free will being an inherent property of the agent. But I'm not sure why that's an excuse for the inability to explain how it works, at least to some degree.

So you accept there is no actual determinism, it's just a special kind of randomness that holds by luck? This seems a bizarre picture of reality?

There is actual determinism at a high level. I accept that there is no determinism at the lowest levels. Yes, that is bizarre.

Could you at least explain how randomness works? Because it seems to me that what you ascribe to a fundamental randomness I would more likely ascribe to a fundamental mental causation.

You think that every particle decay has a mental causation? Who is doing that causing and why do they care? Anyway, here is my explanation of randomness:

random = not deterministic

I still don't think there are random or deterministic processes in actuality (as opposed to indications of our confidence in probabilities), so I'm not sure why there's a need to show something "fundamentally different". Is there some proof that every event must be deterministic or random?

I think the dichotomy is true by definition. But I'm happy to suspend that belief if someone can make a case for how a third thing might work. If we just say that it isn't a dichotomy and the third thing is free will, then all we have is a really wimpy definition of free will.

But it seems before we can ask how free will is "fundamentally different" we'd need to explain the "how" of randomness, that AFAICTell violates the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Since as you say it's all randomness that becomes pseudo-deterministic by Luck that suggests you are saying causation occurs for no discernible reason, with no actual boundaries. That seems to me a forgoing of explanation?

Physicists have various explanations for how the determinism emerges from the randomness. I agree that it is an open problem.

Why would you accept that there can be randomness and not free will, as the former suggests causation without explanation and the other suggests an inner causal power possessed by the agent?

Because an event without a cause is reasonably well defined. And there is lots of evidence that such events occur. On the other hand, the idea of free will has deep underlying aspects that are ignored if we cannot come up with some description of them. There must be some way that I make a free decision that results in a decision that is not arbitrary. My free decisions are not coin flips.


~~ Paul

On the rarity of functional versus impaired or nonfunctional protein versions in response to random mutations of a protein amino acid sequence: 

From this article:   

Yes, if you focus on mutations to a specific protein, I suspect that more than a couple will screw it up. It depends on the size of the protein, I suspect. But those deleterious mutations are removed by selection, so the accumulating mutations are primarily neutral.

The first paragraph provides an overview of Neutral Theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_th..._evolution

Ah, but this doesn't answer your question about searching sequence space. My guess here is that useful proteins are not so very far apart in sequence space. So a short search can produce new useful proteins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_s...ence_space

~~ Paul

Yes, if you focus on mutations to a specific protein, I suspect that more than a couple will screw it up. It depends on the size of the protein, I suspect. But those deleterious mutations are removed by selection, so the accumulating mutations are primarily neutral.

The first paragraph provides an overview of Neutral Theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_th..._evolution

Ah, but this doesn't answer your question about searching sequence space. My guess here is that useful proteins are not so very far apart in sequence space. So a short search can produce new useful proteins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_s...ence_space

~~ Paul

More about the Tokuriki and Tawfik paper:

"The authors demonstrate that their results apply generally to globular proteins (e.g., enzymes and components of molecular machines). The reason is that the stability of a protein’s structure decreases on average with each added mutation. As a result, increasingly small percentages of sequences in the local region of sequence space are functional. The drop in stability can be slow at first, but after a certain threshold is reached, the structure rapidly destabilizes. The corresponding region of sequence space then becomes almost entirely devoid of functional sequences. Axe came to the same conclusions previously, but the authors neglected to give him due credit.

This trend in destabilization is remarkably consistent across different types of proteins, as confirmed by both experiment and the FoldX computational algorithm."
.....................
....the related rarity of proteins has been further confirmed by a residue-residue co-evolutionary statistical model. As a result, a few dozen random mutations would completely disable (unfold) most proteins. 
.....................
This definitive evidence refutes one of the most common criticisms of Axe’s protein research. Namely, critics often complain that he did not consider the possibility that the protein he studied might have performed some other function than the one for which he tested. In reality, since the functional loss is due to the loss of structural stability, all other functions dependent on a stable structure must also cease.

From this article (on the probability of assembling flagellar machine proteins from random mutations through "co-option"):     

"Conclusions from a  key paper on relevant research related to evolutionary timescales conducted through Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and IST Austria:

The expected time required for a random search to find one member of a set of target sequences (e.g., nucleotide sequences corresponding to a functional gene) of length L increases exponentially with L. 
The expected time required to find a target from a starting sequence that is only a “few steps away from the target set” is the same as from a starting sequence that is randomly chosen. 
The second conclusion can be understood from the fact that nearly all random changes to an initial trial sequence close to a target would move early trials away from the target. The search would then need to explore the entire sequence space just as with an initial random sequence. In the context of the cooption process, the time required for a copy of a preexisting protein with some sequence similarity to a flagellar protein to evolve into the latter is just as long as for the flagellar protein to evolve from a random sequence. Therefore, calculating the minimum expected waiting time for the arrival of a new protein through cooption equates with the time for an initial random sequence to find a protein target as modeled in the Harvard study.
.......................
....(Consequently,) ....the chances of any organism evolving a new protein of comparable length (to one of the flagellar machine proteins) (500 amino acids) in all of Earth’s history is much less than 1 chance in a trillion trillion. In addition, the numerical data on the exponential growth of the timescales can be interpolated to demonstrate that the chance of any novel protein much longer than 250 amino acids appearing would be miniscule."

Concerning the issue of what really is causality and determinism, has anyone considered how this relates to the possibility that our world, our reality, is a virtual reality simulation? If that is the case, causality and the example of the breaking of a window by a brick is merely how the simulation is programmed. The brick>>thrown>>contact window>>broken window microdynamic sequence is then merely the result of extremely complex deterministic algorithms being executed, algorithms that implement what we call the "laws of nature". These rules or laws would have been intelligently designed by entities in that hyper-reality. We ourselves as conscious beings would be the unwitting users or participators actually existing in that meta-reality outside of the simulation.

This might be a proximal solution, but it occurs to me that it would probably just lead to an infinite regress, since the meta or hyper-reality of the simulation and human consciousness itself would then be subject to the same deep questions.

It offers explanations for many patterns. But I agree that it can't offer an explanation of the lowest-level patterns. There probably is no explanation for "the way things just are."

But I'm only asking for a high-level explanation. We have plenty of explanation for high-level physical phenomenon.

But the explanation space you are talking about is regarding parts of a system that isn't at the level of causality. And we don't have causal explanations regarding the "why" of events, just the relations - this is the wrong kind of explanatory space for free will which has to concern causation at the fundamental level.

The explanatory level of physical phenomenon can't be correct for explaining freedom as physics begins with the patterns of change/stability already observed. Any explanation at the level of relations, already assuming that events are determined/random at the level of relata, is not going to be an adequate explanation.
But I don't even think it's about high-level vs low-level, because for there to be free will you would have to a non-reducible aspect of an agent that themselves has to be non-reducible. Thus the lowest level of reduction would have to be "macro-scopic".

I'm fine with free will being an inherent property of the agent. But I'm not sure why that's an excuse for the inability to explain how it works, at least to some degree.

But "how it works" is how it fits into a metaphysical picture at the level of causation. The "how it works" level you are talking about isn't even really explaining the "how" of anything because it comes after causation after the questions of electricity flowing, stability of matter, and so on are presumed. If we take a single electron involved with a circuit, what is the "how" that explains its path?

The causal picture we give to that single electron can include a space for free will, say by reference to Final Cause or arguing that all causation needs Consciousness as its Carrier, but the freedom itself has to be one of the axiomatic parts of reality. Why I mentioned one has to look at Aristotle's conception of Four Causes, Potentiality/Actuality, etc. That's the level of reality where free will would have to enter the picture, before we talk about physics we have to talk about change in itself.

If we start with a brick going through a window we can then suss out potential causal pictures for all reality where freedom of the will doesn't seem to be a special problem. For example if there is a God who grants final causes to all things, and we prove its necessity as the Ground of Being, it seems simple enough for such a deity to gift humans the ability to determine their own final cause in a more limited fashion.

That said, I do agree that modern Libertarian takes that try to have free will just magically exist apart from the rest of the causal picture seem hopelessly flawed, but part of my reason for that is naturalist notions of "emergence" seems like a Something-from-Nothing delusion. A potential caveat would be Tallis' essays How Can I Possibly Be Free? and What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves, which are the only takes I've seen from a naturalist (albeit an "immaterialist") that cogently makes a space for freedom. Perhaps this is something along the lines of the "how" you are looking for?

There is actual determinism at a high level. I accept that there is no determinism at the lowest levels. Yes, that is bizarre.

But this determinism is just happening by luck? Then there is only randomness of a special kind where the same thing happens given the same initial conditions. But nothing seems to be binding it, so "determinism" is our confidence in the face of an inability to actually assign a probability distribution.

You think that every particle decay has a mental causation? Who is doing that causing and why do they care?

I strongly suspect that all events might be mentally caused, as it seems to be best way to preserve the Principle of Sufficient Reason in causal explanations. But as I've said before it's probably better to start with a brick hitting a window to see what everyone thinks about causation because I think the argument for this ubiquitous mentality has to be established by examining causation as a whole.

As for the who, I am not sure whether it is top-down (Prime Mover) or consciousness within the particle itself (Panexperientialism) or some level in between. But all causation does seem to require mentality of some kind, if only the experiential receptivity aspect of consciousness.

Anyway, here is my explanation of randomness:

random = not deterministic

What then is "deterministic"?

But if that's your best explanation for randomness, then free will is explained by being not random, nor deterministic? Why would that be unsatisfying since determinism and randomness don't actually describe reality at all (see below)?

I think the dichotomy is true by definition. But I'm happy to suspend that belief if someone can make a case for how a third thing might work. If we just say that it isn't a dichotomy and the third thing is free will, then all we have is a really wimpy definition of free will.

It's not that there is a "third thing", it's that there are events that happen but are not in themselves determined nor random, those terms are just mental projections of our probability knowledge. 'Determined" events are the ones we have so much confidence in we assign P(event) = 1, the others we assign a Random Variable to with some probability distribution.

If we say 4 out 100 photons reflect back off the front surface of a window, but we don't know which 4, we are merely talking about our expectation but not how or why the photons decided to reflect back.

For Theists, Idealists, Panpsychics of certain stripes there would just be free willed events that from the outside can be assigned a confidence of probability if the same accepted conditions are provided once more.

In any case it's odd to me that you would insist on this dichotomy as absolute after acknowledging you don't have an explanation for causatiion?

Physicists have various explanations for how the determinism emerges from the randomness. I agree that it is an open problem.

Can you provide one or two of these explanations?

Because an event without a cause is reasonably well defined. And there is lots of evidence that such events occur.

I don't really see a good definition, other than "it just happens"? Same with the stability of nature according to mere brute facts like "Laws of Nature"?

How would one prove the Laws of Nature are immutable/universal? How would one distinguish between events that are random vs. events that are free by outside observation?

And it still seems illogical to me to have things happen without sufficient reason, which seems to be the case for everything in your outlook?

The Chatterjee paper is interesting and I have printed it to read.

Here is a critique of it, which I also printed to read:

https://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/9/24/...-biol-2014

I don't understand this:

"The expected time required to find a target from a starting sequence that is only a “few steps away from the target set” is the same as from a starting sequence that is randomly chosen. 

The second conclusion can be understood from the fact that nearly all random changes to an initial trial sequence close to a target would move early trials away from the target. The search would then need to explore the entire sequence space just as with an initial random sequence."


Yes, nearly all random changes would move the sequence one step away. But there are random changes that would move it one step closer. And if the changes are truly random, there would be a random walk around the original sequence. And then there's this:

https://www.livescience.com/48103-evolut...andom.html

~~ Paul

Concerning the issue of what really is causality and determinism, has anyone considered how this relates to the possibility that our world, our reality, is a virtual reality simulation? If that is the case, causality and the example of the breaking of a window by a brick is merely how the simulation is programmed. The brick>>thrown>>contact window>>broken window microdynamic sequence is then merely the result of extremely complex deterministic algorithms being executed, algorithms that implement what we call the "laws of nature". These rules or laws would have been intelligently designed by entities in that hyper-reality. We ourselves as conscious beings would be the unwitting users or participators actually existing in that meta-reality outside of the simulation.

This might be a proximal solution, but it occurs to me that it would probably just lead to an infinite regress, since the meta or hyper-reality of the simulation and human consciousness itself would then be subject to the same deep questions.

Well I think we could then ask what explains the causation for one cycle of the VR world's "game loop" in the reality running the simulation, but this idea of the world as VR is sort of the case Arvan makes in New Theory of Free Will.

This paper shows that the conjunction of several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses –including the holographic principle and multiverse theory in quantum physics, and eternalism and mind-body dualism in philosophy –jointly imply an audacious new theory of free will. This new theory, "Libertarian Compatibilism", holds that the physical world is an eternally existing array of two-dimensional information –a vast number of possible pasts, presents, and futures –and the mind a nonphysical entity or set of properties that "read" that physical information off to subjective conscious awareness (in much the same way that a song written on an ordinary compact-disc is only playedwhen read by an outside medium, i.e. a CD-player). According to this theory, every possible physical “timeline” in the multiverse may be fully physically deterministic or physically-causally closedbut each person’s consciousness still entirely free to choose, ex nihilo, outside of the physical order, which physically-closed timeline is experienced by conscious observers.

He's gone through challenging some philosophical arguments against free will, but sadly AFAIK this is on some blog and possibly just in a comment section. I'll try to dig it up.

There's also Brian Whitworth's idea of an Universe as Virtual Reality.

To clarify the difference, suppose information processing in one world creates a second virtual world. To an observer in the first world, events within the virtual world are “unreal”, but to an observer within the virtual world, virtual events are as real as it gets. If a virtual gun wounds a virtual man, to that virtual man the pain is “real”. That a world is calculated does not mean it has no “reality”, merely that its reality is local to itself. Even in a virtual reality, stubbed toes will still hurt and falling trees will still make sounds when no-one is around. Reality is relative to the observer, so by analogy, a table is “solid” because our hands are made of the same atoms as the table. To a neutrino, the table is just a ghostly insubstantiality through which it flies, as is the entire earth. Things constituted the same way are substantial to each other, so likewise what is “real” depends upon the world it is measured from. To say a world is a virtual doesn’t imply it is unreal to its inhabitants, only that its reality is “local” to that world, i.e. not an objective reality.

Bernard Haisch makes a similar argument, though its more explicitly Idealist which I have to admit seems confusing to me - if all is Mind why does Mind need to conceive of reality in terms of a program? Or perhaps its more that the conception of the construct is best understood in a computational framework?

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. For example, in the case of the four percent reflection, every time a photon is emitted from the laser, let a random number generator select a number between one and 100. Then specify that if the number turns out to be 25, 50, 75 or 100 the photon that triggered the random number will become one of the "reflected four."

That does the trick that no hardwiring – that we can imagine – can do. And likely many other incomprehensible aspects of quantum physics could be understood if we replace the notion that the laws of nature are hardwired with the possibility that they are software algorithms.

I think all of these takes, insofar as they would support freedom of the will, grant it a place at the axiomatic level of reality. That seems to follow from the Idealism and Dualism suggested in Arvan's and Haisch's takes.