Neuroscience and free will

I too feel a certain deja vu with this debate and I am under no illusions that I can follow the philosophical reasoning but - and perhaps this was also part of the previous debate - wouldn't determinism deny novelty and creativity?

I'm also unclear about how determinism fits with darwinism. Darwinism, as we have discussed elsewhere, describes evolution in terms of natural selection following random mutation. Random means chance and chance is incompatible with determinism, isn't it? Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, Paul, but don't you argue for both determinism and darwinism?

I'm not really arguing for determinism as much as asking for a coherent description of an indeterministic method of making decisions. Meanwhile, I also think there are stochastic (random) processes in nature.

But imagine we had only determinism. So somewhere off in space a gamma ray was deterministically ejected from a particle, traveled to Earth, and zapped a base pair in some DNA. Wouldn't we be comfortable in calling that a pseudorandom event? It is effectively random with respect to the base pair.

~~ Paul

Well sticking for the moment with the dualist assumption of the supernatural agent, why can't the decision simply be a kind of mental causation that is neither random nor determined?

It seems to me the question that has to be answered is why are events only determined and/or random?

I think that question can certainly come into play, but only after someone can describe this third method of making decisions. Otherwise it's basically: I think determinism/randomness is a false dichotomy and so why can't I have my special kind of decision? We can ask that question but it doesn't get us anywhere.

I think this is all why it matters what the model for causation is. We aren't really saying much when we say a change of force is a cause, especially since as Feynman notes "force" as a term runs into a circular definition problem.

And our technology relies on "good enough" predictability, as I sadly am looking at a laptop on the fritz at the moment...But I don't think it matters much given technology is an extension of human causal power placed on the environment. We don't will the substance of technology into being, but we do will the structural patterns of tech. So that is a predictability we impose upon the world with great effort, rather than causation as found outside the bounds of our will.

I agree it requires effort, but we are still doing amazing things by creating causes and harnessing the effects. And we are doing nothing at all by harnessing some third sort of indeterministic causality.

IIRC this is always our impasse. I'll dig up the old thread because I'm curious where the debate turned last time...

Yes, I believe this is always the impasse. Physicists can describe, theorize, and harness deterministic cause/effect and randomness. If we could just make one step toward describing the third thing, then I might be willing to believe there is something there. The third thing might be completely separate, or it might carve a chunk out of randomness. That's fine. But I haven't heard even a hand waving description of it.

~~ Paul

I'm not really arguing for determinism as much as asking for a coherent description of an indeterministic method of making decisions.

~~ Paul

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:

Why do I believe that consciousness involves noncomputable ingredients? The reason is Gödel's theorem. I sat in on a course when I was a research student at Cambridge, given by a logician who made the point about Gödel's theorem that the very way in which you show the formal unprovability of a certain proposition also exhibits the fact that it's true.

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.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It's the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris's talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it's possible that Harris's words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I'd realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.

We are physical creatures, but we are not just physical. We have free will because we are creatures of mind, meaning, ideas, not just matter. Harris perversely--willfully!--refuses to acknowledge this crushingly obvious and fundamental fact about us. He insists that because science cannot figure out the complex causality underpinning free will, it must be illusory. He is a throwback to the old behaviorists, who pretended that subjective, mental phenomena—because they are more difficult to observe and measure than planets and protons—don't exist.

But imagine we had only determinism. So somewhere off in space a gamma ray was deterministically ejected from a particle, traveled to Earth, and zapped a base pair in some DNA. Wouldn't we be comfortable in calling that a pseudorandom event? It is effectively random with respect to the base pair.

~~ Paul

By the way, speaking of Sam Harris (see previous post), you and he seem to hold similar views down to citing almost identical analogies. This is Sam Harris:

"Quantum effects do drive evolution, as high-energy particles like cosmic rays cause point mutations in DNA and the behavior of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle."

(The Moral Landscape, footnote 101, p. 216.)

[Laird]

I'll dig up the old thread because I'm curious where the debate turned last time...

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:

The Solution to the Problem of the Freedom of the Will

And this post (of Paul's) marks the end of the exchange between you and him.

Don't forget also that all Skeptiko threads involving discussions on free will (to the best of my ability to identify them) are listed in the Index:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/in...eterminism

The ones in there that stand out to me, because I participated in them, are:

The (in)coherence of hard determinism as an alternative to free will, an older thread, which I started, and in which Paul and I had a lengthy exchange, and,

Half a second to consciousness, the most recent thread, in which I offered Paul an answer to his challenge to identify a "third possibility" beyond the random/deterministic dichotomy he seems to feel cannot be escaped. Predictably (and deterministically or at least determinedly) - he willed against accepting my answer, even though he could have arbitrarily, randomly, and indeterministically accepted it. Sigh.

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:

The Solution to the Problem of the Freedom of the Will

And this post (of Pauls') marks the end of the exchange between you and him.

Don't forget also that all Skeptiko threads involving discussions on free will (to the best of my ability to identify them) are listed in the Index:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/in...eterminism

The ones in there that stand out to me, because I participated in them, are:

The (in)coherence of hard determinism as an alternative to free will, an older thread, which I started, and in which Paul and I had a lengthy exchange, and,

Half a second to consciousness, the most recent thread, in which I offered Paul an answer to his challenge to identify a "third possibility" beyond the random/deterministic dichotomy he seems to feel cannot be escaped. Predictably (and deterministically or at least determinedly) - he willed against accepting my answer, even though he could have arbitrarily, randomly, and indeterministically accepted it. Sigh.

Oh boy, you are on a roll today Laird. This deserves a Gold Star ... a like is just inadequate.

Ah great find Laird - thanks!

I'll go through those threads, especially the "Solution..." one. To keep it simple for now I do feel there's an asymmetry in what we accept as deterministic/random and what we demand of an account of free will.

The former dichotomy is, AFAICTell, based on mathematical modeling being held as binding - we see processes from the outside and if the same thing happens often enough it's determined, if the process defies expectation it's random. I've never seen a proof that the mathematical description binds causation itself, and to me mathematics - and to a degree physics itself - is an expression of our knowledge and not the nature of the world.

So yes we can describe a lot of the world via mathematics, but none of that says much (anything?) about causal powers -- As noted by Feynman "force" is a concept that suffers from circularity in definition & saying 4 out of 100 photons randomly reflect doesn't tell you which photons "decide" (his quote marks) to bounce off the reflective surface. Really even determined processes are just random, because the "decision" of consistency is happening for no reason at all.

In this external observation of events one cannot then give an internal account for event descriptiors of any causal process, let alone presumably free agents. Rather the discussion would center around relations, not relata.

All that said there are models of causality in certain metaphysics that can account for the internal aspect of causal powers, but I don't believe any of these could be modeled by mathematics save for the external measure of probability assignments...but to me this type of probabilistic description is an expression of our ignorance as to inner cause. I'd say there is indeterminism but not randomness, as the latter IMO violates the Principle of Sufficient Reason. 

The above AFAICTell is the crux of the question, and I think it brings us back to the last part of the discussion within the "Solution..." thread, wherein I need to reply to Paul's last post. But the impasse above, I think, shows why one side doesn't see a problem and the other side won't be satisfied with Whitehead's or Aquinas's accounts of how free will works. (Bergson AFAIK only gave the negative argument, that no argument for determinism holds water.)

I think that question can certainly come into play, but only after someone can describe this third method of making decisions. Otherwise it's basically: I think determinism/randomness is a false dichotomy and so why can't I have my special kind of decision? We can ask that question but it doesn't get us anywhere.

I agree it requires effort, but we are still doing amazing things by creating causes and harnessing the effects. And we are doing nothing at all by harnessing some third sort of indeterministic causality.

Yes, I believe this is always the impasse. Physicists can describe, theorize, and harness deterministic cause/effect and randomness. If we could just make one step toward describing the third thing, then I might be willing to believe there is something there. The third thing might be completely separate, or it might carve a chunk out of randomness. That's fine. But I haven't heard even a hand waving description of it.

~~ Paul

From what I can tell, others seem to be referring to any deterministic cause which is not necessary, and maybe also not sufficient. The examples given certainly seem to be of that type (the not necessary type, anyways). Maybe others aren't aware that causes which are neither necessary nor sufficient are still deterministic causes?

https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/conditions1.htm#section8

Linda

Not jumping in, just following with interest but I just thought this (from Horgan) was simple and right to the point.

But just because my choices are limited doesn't mean they don't exist. Just because I don't have absolute freedom doesn't mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn't exist because it isn't absolutely free is like saying truth doesn't exist because we can't achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.

Not jumping in, just following with interest but I just thought this (from Horgan) was simple and right to the point.

But just because my choices are limited doesn't mean they don't exist. Just because I don't have absolute freedom doesn't mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn't exist because it isn't absolutely free is like saying truth doesn't exist because we can't achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.

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.”

From a short article by Horgan:  

"Science has discovered nothing that contradicts free will. To deny free will’s existence is to deny that our conscious, psychological deliberations—Should I ask my girlfriend to marry me? Should I major in engineering or art?—influence our actions. Such a conclusion flies in the face of common sense. Of course, sometimes we deliberate insincerely, toward a foregone conclusion, or we fail to act upon our resolution. But not always. Sometimes we consciously choose to do something and we do it. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it often does.

Moreover, free will must exist, if some creatures have more of it than others. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from—than they did when they were infants. They also have more than our dog Merlin does. I have (on my good days) more free will than adults my age suffering from schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Try telling prisoners or paraplegics that there is no free will, and that choices are illusory. “Let’s change places,” they might respond, “since you have nothing to lose.”

We also need the concept of free will, much more than we need the concept of God. Our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consign our fate to our genes or God. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. Choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful."
.....................
"Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who dwells within those shadowy realms into which science has not fully penetrated, such as the imaginary time before the Big Bang banged. In the same way, maybe we can have a free will of the gaps. No science is more riddled with gaps, after all, than the science of human consciousness."

Free will is experienced as an irreducible property of consciousness. Needless to say, science is no closer to understanding consciousness now than it was at the dawn of the twentieth century, despite incredible progress in understanding the brain as a data processor with its structures of neurons and synaptic neural nets. In fact, a new paradigmal insight has emerged - the "Hard Problem" of qualia (Chalmers). 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.