Neuroscience and free will

You said...

       "They did have correlated values before they were measured"

That's flat out wrong, and is a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum mechanics...

Yes, sorry, bad wording. I should have said they were correlated and that would be clear once the values are measured.

Then you repeated your misunderstanding by saying...

       "They are correlated before measurement: that's what entanglement is"

Which is also wrong... as what is accepted in Quantum Mechanics is that entanglement produces correlation between the measurements... not before the measurement.

I think it's entirely fair to say that the entangled particles are correlated. It's a way of saying that the quantum states are not independent. If you want to reserve the term correlated to apply only after measurement, fine. But I think you'll find that such a restriction is not followed by physicists.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02099178

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01071-9

And here you are back saying the same rubbish...

         "But entangled particles are correlated. That's what entanglement is. That's why I know the value of particle B after I measure particle A."

Yes, you can know the value of particle B after you measure particle A... but only because you have measured them, at which point they are not entangled. So repeating the nutty claim in the first sentence just shows you don't understand/don't accept some fundamental principles of Quantum Mechanics.

No, I think it mostly shows that you are being pedantic.

Entangled particles have no values, their information is undetermined, we can say nothing about them. It's the measurements of carefully prepared entangled pair particles which is correlated, and that occurs when they are no longer entangled.

Agreed, though I think you're being too restrictive with the term correlated.

~~ Paul

So the almost perfect determinism of a computer is just a mental abstraction?

I mean..."almost perfect" indicates that you're giving a probability very close, but not actually, 100%? There's an expression of confidence without actual knowledge of what is going on at the causal level - why isn't randomness asserting itself and making it all fly apart?

In any case, machines are a testament to human causal power - something that would arguably favor free will as per Dupre's old essay:

Having got that far, however, most of the details of the internal combustion engine concern the more or less ingenious auxiliary devices that make sure it really does do what it is intended to do rather than one of the may other things it has an initial capacity to do. So, for instance, the cylinder must be strong enough to avoid simply disintegrating when the gasoline explodes; the crankshaft must be extremely strong and rigid if it is to reliably convert the linear momentum of the cylinders to rotational motion; piston-rings prevent the energy of the explosion from being dissipated between the piston and the cylinder; oil must be provided to prevent the cylinders getting so hot as to seize in the cylinder, or for that matter melt; some way must be found to dissipate excess heat from the running engine; and so on. Even a Trabant has the capacity to run, and sometimes does so. The difference between this and a well designed car is that the behavior of the parts of the latter is so tightly constrained that it can do nothing but what it is designed to do--though eventually, of course, even the best designed machine will break free of its constraints. My point so far is just that this kind of constraint is not something characteristic of nature generally, but something that engineers devote enormous efforts to attempting, never with total success, to achieve.

Of course, this account of the reliability of machines does assume the reliability of various causal relations. Gasoline and air mixtures invariably explode when sparked; heat will flow from a hot engine to cooling water circulating over it; and many others. It is interesting that many such regularities can be seen as reflecting the overall upshot of very large numbers of similar though indeterministic processes at the microlevel, which suggests the hypothesis that it is just those macrolevel processes that can be roughly reduced in this way that reveal this near determinism. But I do not want to insist on this here. While machines could presumably not work without exploiting extremely reliable regularities such as those just mentioned, the regularities that characterize the machines themselves, as with many other macroscopic causal regularities are only more or less reliable. Reflection on how good machines are engineered, far from making us think of mechanism as generally characteristic of the world, should make us realize how difficult it is to turn even little bits of the world into bits of mechanism.

I'd perhaps go further, and suggest we are imparting new final causes with our intentions with our creation of artifacts...Even the brick and the window are examples of our power to reformulate purpose beyond the boundaries of the self. Of course the necessity of final causes as part of a causal explanation need to be argued for - I'd say this inner "intention"/"purpose" is why billiard balls don't turn to butterflies, why computers don't explode into glitter when running a certain program, etc.

For me, free will has no description whatsoever, let alone an unsatisfying one. I simply cannot imagine how I might make a libertarian free decision. And so we have this conversation.

Well that question was specific to Silence. 

I am still unsure what you're looking for if those Tallis essays aren't the kind of answer you want...

Why does free will have to have a description at all Paul?

So that we have some confidence that it's not merely a just-so claim?

You seem comfortable  with the concept of random which is arguably at least as ambiguous.  I haven't seen a description in this thread for random that is at all cogent beyond Max's rather elegant "not understood".  So, for free will just use "not understood", have faith in your first person experience NOT being based on third party determinism (because it sure doesn't feel that way), and move on.

My first person experience tells me nothing about whether my decisions are free. I do not observe the steps that I go through while making a decision. I try not to fall into the trap that this nonobservation implies free will.

~~ Paul

You consider the notion of random as coherent?  If so, please explain.

I find the idea that an event can have 0 causes to be just as reasonable as it having > 0 causes.

I do agree that we may think that an event is random and then come to learn that it is not. But that doesn't suddenly open the door to free decisions.

~~ Paul

Why does free will have to have a description at all Paul?

You seem comfortable  with the concept of random which is arguably at least as ambiguous.  I haven't seen a description in this thread for random that is at all cogent beyond Max's rather elegant "not understood".  So, for free will just use "not understood", have faith in your first person experience NOT being based on third party determinism (because it sure doesn't feel that way), and move on.

Well I would disagree that free will is not understood, at least within the right metaphysical picture? It certainly is more understandable than "random" which defies our logical sense, and more understandable than "Law of Nature" which - unless God is involved - seems like an attempt to paper over the fact determinism is just randomness of a special kind.

So we're left with a missing component of every event, namely the question of why something else doesn't happen. (Superposition perhaps being the most obvious example of such indeterminacy of state.) The only possibility selector I know of is my direct experience of decision making, which is why I suspect Feynman and Penrose were both pulled into using the word "decide" when discussing indeterminism on the level of particles.

But then since I strongly suspect all causation has to be, in some way, mental causation, I may just be too far removed from the concern of this supposed randomness/determinism dichotomy - which just seem like mere projections of probability assignments to me.

After all no unique event can be designated random or determined, and given subjective first person POVs are (presumably) unique to each agent it is (hopefully!) clear that every decision is unique since making a decision a second time involves the memory of making it the first time + whatever consequence followed. Beyond that attempting to catalogue mental states into discrete things that can be assigned "force" vectors that sum up to a decision forgets the nature of qualia as qualitative and our mental state as a blending of qualitative states. (And as noted above it wouldn't even be a resolution since the question of why something else doesn't happen remains.)

That, of course, is not a positive account but rather an indicator for why starting from the assumption that things are random/determined is already heading in the wrong direction. And admittedly even [if] we agreed all causation plausibly involves mentality we would still need to ask whether the "mental" part of causation in seemingly non-conscious things is due to the influence of a God acting as Ground of Being, some panpsychic/panexperientialist distribution, the Idealist's claim that everything is conscious or in consciousness, etc...

IMO from here we'd probably be it would probably best [to examine] Aristotle's conception of cause, namely the Four Causes - Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final. For those who agree the Four Causes are necessary to explain events, might be easier to think of Free Will as, in some sense, a special kind of Final Cause...

[Maybe an example, like a brick going through a window, is the best place to start...]

My perspective on this debate is to humbly submit a summary outline (perhaps simplistic) of some of the disparate but still converging reasons I feel we can relax and realize that we very probably have free will, in no particular order (other arcane philosophical arguments not included). None of the arguments are absolutely conclusive, however. Just a use of abductive reasoning, the preponderance of evidence.

1. If the mind is the brain, thinking, feeling, and perceiving are physical processes — in particular, input/output processes — going on in the brain. If this is the case these are deterministic causal chains that even if supplemented by random fluctuations, guarantee that there absolutely is no true (libertarian) free will. However, there is a large array of empirical paranormal evidence in the various fields of parapsychology and other areas of psychic investigation that conclusively demonstrate that the mind is not the physical brain. 

2. The mind is not the brain for other reasons, for instance the now-famous "Hard Problem" of consciousness. This has no solution up to the present or in the foreseeable future. This problem is the fact that the properties of consciousness like thinking, feeling, perceiving (qualia), willing and intentionality (agency), etc. are in an entirely different (higher) existential realm than the properties of matter and energy and space. They have no length, width, depth, mass, charge, velocity, etc. etc., and therefore are not physical, not either the physical brain or its neurological processes. This other higher realm obstinately eludes any scientific analysis. The ultimate nature of it and its subsidiary properties of deciding, willing, "agentness", etc. are probably scientifically and intellectually unknowable. 

3. Libertarian free will does seem to require something other than deterministic causal chains plus random fluctuations, but is seemingly impossible to intellectually, analytically and scientifically be conceived of and understood. But insistence that some sort of an analytical understanding of (libertarian) free will is required to even consider it as possible, is an invalid debating tactic, since it makes the unfounded assumption that that something can't exist merely because we can't intellectually understand it.

4. Further, there is no real in-depth understanding of what precisely are causality and randomness. Their real nature may ultimately be traced to consciousness. 

Ergo, per 1, 2, 3 and 4 the materialist assumption that determinism and randomness absolutely must rule consciousness is not true, and is not any reason to confidently deny free will. This evidence still leaves the possibility of no-free-will, but then this bare possibility is subject to other objections.

5. "...an objective review of the (empirical) neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will. The first neuroscientist to map the brains of conscious subjects, Wilder Penfield, noted that there is an immaterial power of volition in the human mind that he could not stimulate with electrodes. The pioneer in the neuroscience of free will was Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated clearly that, while there is an unconscious material predisposition to acts as shown by electrical brain activity, we retain an immaterial “free won’t,” which is the ability to veto an unconscious urge to act." (https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/is-free-w...rous-myth/)

6. The existence of human creativity, especially the extreme creativity exhibited by some geniuses also has strong implications toward the existence of free will.      

7. Another reason is predicated on the clear implications of a spiritual world view. Of course this argument is rejected out of hand by materialists for ideological reasons. If, despite the present social dominance of materialism, the spiritual world view (the so-called "perennial wisdom") is correct (and there is a load of empirical evidence bearing on this), then soul (and human) free will must exist. If determinism/randomness rule all of reality and there is no free will, then there is also no sense or point to a spiritual existence, and therefore it probably doesn't exist. Even if it were possible in a totally deterministic/random reality to conceive of souls with no free will, they make no sense in this metaphysical system. But this totally materialist deterministic/randomistic metaphysic is probably invalid, considering the mass of empirical paranormal evidence alluded to above.

Libertarian free will does seem to require something other than deterministic causal chains plus random fluctuations, but is seemingly impossible to analytically be conceived of and intellectually understood. But insistence that some sort of an analytical understanding of (libertarian) free will is required to even consider it as possible, is an invalid debating tactic, since it makes the unfounded assumption that that something can't exist merely because we can't intellectually understand it.

Further, there is no real in-depth understanding of what precisely are causality and randomness. Their real nature may ultimately be traced to consciousness. 

Is there a proof that everyone else is looking at that clearly shows events must be deterministic or random? Because I get events *can* be deterministic or random, but why *must* events fall into this dichotomy? The terms seem like mere projections of probability to me. 

Regarding analytical understanding, how could this be avoided? We need to have an explanation for causation itself before getting to mental causation. I'd question whether there's an in-depth understanding of determinism, which looks just like a special kind of randomness to me...at least in the Physicalist picture that can only speak of relations, not relata.

All that said, I agree that mixing and matching determinism/randomness seems unlikely to yield satisfactory answers. Why I believe Two-Stage Models, unless they are adding something new, are sadly a step in the wrong direction.

Is there a proof that everyone else is looking at that clearly shows events must be deterministic or random? Because I get events *can* be deterministic or random, but why *must* events fall into this dichotomy? The terms seem like mere projections of probability to me. 

The basic idea seems to be that no alternative is possible because no one can conceive of exactly, analytically, what it could be. That is hardly proof.

Regarding analytical understanding, how could this be avoided? We need to have an explanation for causation itself before getting to mental causation.

An analytical understanding of mental causation itself will probably always be obscure, because of the Hard Problem.  But we know absolutely that mental causation exists, because we experience it.

The basic idea seems to be that no alternative is possible because no one can conceive of exactly, analytically, what it could be. That is hardly proof.


An analytical understanding of mental causation itself will probably always be obscure, because of the Hard Problem.  But we know absolutely that mental causation exists, because we experience it.

As to the first point - how can anyone conceive of randomness? Determinism is easily defined, but I question whether anyone can conceive of it without recourse to God if they are to give answer to why something *else* doesn't happen at any point in the causal sequence. Even the observed randomness at the particle level is not true randomness, at least nobody expects a sub-atomic particle to become a dragon. There's obviously a constraint on possible options, one of which is decided/"decided" upon. That we can model particle behavior with Random Variable functions suggests a bridge between Chaos and Order.

As to the second - I don't think it's enough to invoke the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Even simultaneously noting the Hard Problem of Consciousnes, and the Hard Problem of Matter, and the Hard Problem of Causation, and how all 3 problems concern relata while Physicalism can only speak of relations...is not a positive account. We can also note that the designations of determined/random fail for unique events like the decisions of conscious agents...but this is also not a positive account. It does, however, open the door to the correct explanatory space to consider, which is not the language of relations that physics is concerned with...

I'd agree we probably can't decide between Neutral Monism, Idealism, Scholastic Theism, and so on with the varied immaterialist pictures of reality. But we should be able to give particular pictures of causation within these options, and from there at least the relationship of a free agent to the rest of reality.