Neuroscience and free will

 It looks to me like there is plenty of room in consciousness for free will, no matter how mysterious it may be to the human intellect.

Or, as Laird suggested above, perhaps free will defines consciousness? As in: consciousness is the ability to make choices.

Perhaps what you are asking for isn't possible although I'm not exactly sure what you are asking for. It might be something like Roger Penrose describes when he argues that consciousness contains non-computable aspects. He cites Gödel thus:

I'm asking for a hand-waving description of how we might make indeterministic decisions. If we can't even come up with that, I don't see how we're going to make any progress.

I don't see what Gödel has to do with this.

Perhaps, in the same way, free will is obviously true but unprovable. Here's John Horgan from Scientific American having a little rant about Sam Harris and his defence of determinism. He seems to be illustrating the point I just made about how free will is obviously true.

Horgan is just ranting. Saying "it's just obvious that my previous decision was free" has absolutely no power to convince us. The decision might feel free simply because we did not experience the details of the decision being made.

Heck, we could even have free will and not experience the decision being made. There is nothing about free will that
implies consciousness, unless we define it that way.

~~ Paul

Allow me to save you the trouble, Sci. This (unless there's another one) is, I think, the preexisting thread on free will on PQ in which you and Paul locked horns, begun at the end of August, 2017:

Here is the third possibility you offered:

Now, you ask for a third causal model which leaves room for free will. Fine - here it is, symbolically:

E1 ->(n.n.) E2.

Here, "n.n." stands for "not necessarily". In other words, E2 is caused by E1, but not necessarily, i.e. not deterministically - it is a "freely caused" event, which leaves room for it to be a "freely willed" one.

You invented a nomenclature but not an explanation. How does this differ from a deterministic decision followed by the application of a probability? In other words, once the possibility is determined, how do we decide whether to apply it? How do we decide to actualize the possibility?

~~ Paul

Leading science writer John Horgan certainly has had some good things to say about free will. He has little patience with the deterministic free will-deniers like Sam Harris. For instance, Harris claims “no account of causality leaves room for free will.”, adding, “Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes.”

I can't get anything from Horgan except a just-so claim that we must have libertarian free will because it feels like we are making free decisions. And what does the fact that some people have more choices than others have to do with it?

No one is arguing that it feels like we are making free decisions.

~~ Paul

I'm no expert on this subject, but Conway & Kochen published their strong free will theorem about 10 years ago using particles... https://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3286 and getting rid of all mention of probability, which was mentioned in their earlier theorem.  

Some believe that the alternative to determinism is randomness, and go on to say that “allowing randomness into the world does not really help in understanding free will.” However, this objection does not apply to the free responses of the particles that we have described. It may well be true that classically stochastic processes such as tossing a (true) coin do not help in explaining free will, but, as we show in the Appendix and in §10.1 of [1], adding randomness also does not explain the quantum mechanical effects described in our theorem. It is precisely the “semi-free” nature of twinned particles, and more generally of entanglement, that shows that something very different from classical stochasticism is at play here.

In the present state of knowledge, it is certainly beyond our capabilities to understand the connection between the free decisions of particles and humans, but the free will of neither of these is accounted for by mere randomness.

But worthwhile pointing out, that although they seem to have successfully excluded past events determining the future, they don't deal with any quantum effect from the future, for obvious reasons.



On a slightly different tack, one that's a bit more interesting to me. It might be more accurate to suggest that my sense of free will, may be my sense of pursuing a different trajectory from that of 'the group'.

If reality (my everyday experience of space-time) is indeed a group creation (a shared experience), then that idea might make some sense... if there was no freedom beyond the informational boundary of 'the group', because my experience is formed from sharing with the group, I couldn't have these experiences without being a part of 'the group'. My ability to alter trajectory within those groups boundaries might then be my sense of free will.

Conversely when I cannot pursue a different trajectory from that of the group, when ones degrees of freedom are limited completely... I might feel much more 'as-one' with the group, I'm thinking here of things like Stockholm syndrome that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity... or co-operation with 'the group' when driving in traffic (flow)... and drowning/dying - the sense of peace described as acceptance of lack of degrees of freedom. Perhaps these phenomena suggest more alignment with 'the group' occurring with reduced degrees of freedom.

For me... organisms which split/duplicate, and which to some degree allow each of these split parts to operate as an individual, seem to obtain an evolutionary advantage... I mean, I can see the benefit when a group organism encounters a danger to only a part of it's bulk... the individuals affected by the danger can alter trajectory, compared to 'the group' trajectory to avoid the danger, thus they can oppose 'the groups' trajectory when necessary.

I find this idea of balance between the individual, and the group really interesting. There are some fascinating studies on ant colonies selection of a new home, showing some really very clever balance at work, between the power of the individual scout ant to influence the colony, vs the power of the ant colony (group).

So my sense of freedom, might really be my sense of pursuing a different trajectory to 'the group', and that this occurs within the shared/created group reality. Rather than being a sense of freedom that I've naively grown-up with, which is based within the belief that I am an isolated individual, in a world that exists separately from me.

I'm no expert on this subject, but Conway & Kochen published their strong free will theorem about 10 years ago using particles... https://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3286 and getting rid of all mention of probability, which was mentioned in their earlier theorem. 

I don't understand the Strong Free Will Theorem particularly well, but I think it is a theorem about an attribute that particles might have if experimenters have it. I'm not sure what that does for us. Perhaps their "semi-free" nature of entangled particles can help.

~~ Paul

This interminably long debate about free will appears to mainly be about how there could be free will when all that we know of nature is contained within either causal determinism or randomness, neither of which allow what we believe to be the "free will" of a conscious agent. 

This debate is just another side of the basic debate over materialism. They are closely linked. 

If the world and us are completely deterministic with the exception of truly random quantum mechanical events in the micro atomic world, then materialism rules as the truth of reality and everything in it including us. This is because it is matter and energy and their interactions, behaving as predicted by the laws of physics, that behave in a deterministic manner. If all of reality including us are matter and energy and their interactions, then both materialism and determinism are true. 

So materialism and determinism are really two sides of the same coin. If determinism or randomness are entirely the way the world works then both materialism and determinism are true and all spiritual notions are fantasy and superstition. There is no "human spirit" and there can be nothing like psi and other nonlocal manifestations of consciousness, to say nothing of survival. Regardless of any and all empirical evidence to the contrary. All this evidence has to be false is some way or other. 

The free will debate has high stakes indeed. 

What implications would there be for free will if the empirical evidence of parapsychology is valid and materialism is not true - there really is some form of "spiritual reality"? Since materialism would be false, determinism and randomness would no longer exclusively rule the world. There would also be room for a third alternative that we experience as free will, as an exclusive property of consciousness and probably intellectually impenetrable by it. 

A consciousness that we know enough about already to realize how little we really know of its ultimate essence - that this is still a mystery with no sign of any change to that status. Come to think of it, we do at least have a pile of empirical evidence that human consciousness is nonlocal and not limited to and solely a function of the physical brain. So we already know that human consciousness and its "will" are in essence not physical. So we also know this conscious "will" is not tied to physical determinism and the workings of a hyper-complex mechanism. So we were there already.

[Laird]

Or, as Laird suggested above, perhaps free will defines consciousness? As in: consciousness is the ability to make choices.

Perhaps you're thinking of my suggestion in your Paul Davies + life + information thread that life implies consciousness, will, and intelligence? Though I think that the suggestion you credit to me is worth considering, I'd probably not quite go that far: I can imagine states of consciousness which are purely experiential and non-willing.

[Laird]

You invented a nomenclature but not an explanation. How does this differ from a deterministic decision followed by the application of a probability?

The question could be seen to be misframed, but is it really worth my rejoining this debate and trying to explain why knowing that my explanations have never been satisfactory to you in the past, and that the debate is likely, as nbtruthman describes it, interminable?

In other words, once the possibility is determined, how do we decide whether to apply it? How do we decide to actualize the possibility?

Again, is it worth venturing answers which have almost no possibility of convincing or even slightly swaying you?

Perhaps you're thinking of my suggestion in your Paul Davies + life + information thread that life implies consciousness, will, and intelligence? Though I think that the suggestion you credit to me is worth considering, I'd probably not quite go that far: I can imagine states of consciousness which are purely experiential and non-willing.

Oops - sorry. I shoulda looked first 

I too thought it worthy of consideration though possibly not what I'd conclude after due consideration.