Neuroscience and free will

No, I guess I don't agree with that. If you simply eject determinism from the picture, you're begging the question, aren't you? But, sure, let's eject it. That still doesn't help me imagine how I'm going to make a decision with whatever is left.


That sort of quasi-religious argument doesn't do the trick for me. I'm asking a much narrower question: If there are free choices, how do I make them? Let's say I've narrowed a choice down to three options deterministically. Now I need to pick one option. I'm not going to do it by flipping coins. What do I do?

~~ Paul

(1) Maybe (especially if you have an engineering background) you methodically list the positives and negatives of each of the three options, define your goal and the relevance of each of these pros and cons to it, and give each of the three options a numerical rating based on that. And then, while considering that, if you are a good engineer you still go with what feels right to you, which may not be quite the best numerical rating. 

(2) Or maybe if you don't have an engineering background you just briefly consider the pros and cons and go with what feels right to you.

(3) Or maybe you change your mind and go with the fall of the dice or toss of the coin. 

In each of these possible actions you have made a conscious choice, even the decision to change your mind about the throw of the dice. 

In this process you really don't understand precisely how you came to the decision. It just feels like a free determination by a conscious self-aware agent. It doesn't feel predetermined by a long complicated antecedent series of mostly hidden causes and effects. But you don't really know.

But there are other even more important things about this that you don't really understand. These things you absolutely know must exist because you experience them. These begin with the "I", the self, the conscious agent with the quality of intentionality that decided to go through this choosing process in the first place, whatever it was that maybe changed its mind and still rolled the dice. Nobody understands consciousness, nobody understands what subjective awareness and intentionality really are, but (practically) nobody doubts that they are conscious, that consciousness, "Iness", intentionality, are real. 

And there is the intuitive feeling that you maybe had - nobody understands what this really is but they still know it exists because they experience it.

Nobody understands how matter and energy and their interactions, that is, deterministic mechanisms, can have subjectivity and agency. The intellect may say that they can't, because these phenomena are in entirely different existential categories. So do you decide, here we go again, that because of this lack of understanding your personal self is just an illusion (of course ignoring the question of what is it that is experiencing this illusion)? Not unless you're one of the extreme neuro-materialists.

I think free will is also one of those things.

And I think it is extreme intellectual hubris to claim something extremely important in life doesn't really exist merely because the intellect doesn't understand how it could exist. The very most you can reasonably say is that you just don't really know with absolute certainty.

(1) Maybe (especially if you have an engineering background) you methodically list the positives and negatives of each of the three options, define your goal and the relevance of each of these pros and cons to it, and give each of the three options a numerical rating based on that. And then, while considering that, if you are a good engineer you still go with what feels right to you, which may not be quite the best numerical rating.

So that's deterministic.

(2) Or maybe if you don't have an engineering background you just briefly consider the pros and cons and go with what feels right to you.

Also deterministic.

(3) Or maybe you change your mind and go with the fall of the dice or toss of the coin.

Also deterministic.

In each of these possible actions you have made a conscious choice, even the decision to change your mind about the throw of the dice. 

In this process you really don't understand precisely how you came to the decision. It just feels like a free determination by a conscious self-aware agent. It doesn't feel predetermined by a long complicated antecedent series of mostly hidden causes and effects. But you don't really know.

Agreed.

But there are other even more important things about this that you don't really understand. These things you absolutely know must exist because you experience them. These begin with the "I", the self, the conscious agent with the quality of intentionality that decided to go through this choosing process in the first place, whatever it was that maybe changed its mind and still rolled the dice. Nobody understands consciousness, nobody understands what subjective awareness and intentionality really are, but (practically) nobody doubts that they are conscious, that consciousness, "Iness", intentionality, are real. 

And there is the intuitive feeling that you maybe had - nobody understands what this really is but they still know it exists because they experience it.

Nobody understands how matter and energy and their interactions, that is, deterministic mechanisms, can have subjectivity and agency. So do you decide, here we go again, that because of this lack of understanding your personal self is just an illusion (of course ignoring the question of what is it that is experiencing this illusion)? Not unless you're one of the extreme neuro-materialists.

My personal self is not an illusion altogether. What is an illusion is the feeling that my consciousness is all-of-a-piece, that it is a coherent singular thing. It may very well be made up of dozens of subsystems that "come together" to feel coherent.

I think free will is also one of those things.

I think free will is a separate question. I could have an immaterial soul still bound by determinism and randomness. I could have one not so bound, but then, as we discuss in this thread, I have no concept of how it might make a decision.

And I think it is extreme intellectual hubris to claim something extremely important in life doesn't really exist merely because the intellect doesn't understand how it could exist. The very most you can reasonably say is that you just don't really know with absolute certainty.

And on the other side of the coin, I think it's rather vapid to claim that something does exist when we have absolutely no description of it. A feeling is not necessarily backed by an actual existent.

But I agree that we cannot be absolutely certain one way or the other.

~~ Paul

Sure, please proceed.

~~ Paul

Ignoring all religious, metaphysical, political and classical versions of causality; I see 4 areas of measurable activity.

Physical events outside of the scientist.
Physical events inside the scientist.
Information structures evolving outside the scientist. 
Information structures evolving inside the scientist.

The physical events are governed by natural laws.  The physical events inside the body will be targeted as to their biological functions.  The DOE will resolve aspects in the outside (exo) and look to match data patterns with math patterns that describe isomorphic informational structures between theory and data.

If there is enough matching (isomorphic) information structure between theory and observed data in the experiment, the resulting information object (simulation) will predict future results in reality.

The math patterns will have evolved to an arrangement of the information structures outside of the scientist will now match information structures first modeled inside the scientist (endo).

With me?  Any caveats?

So that's deterministic.

Also deterministic.

Also deterministic.


~~ Paul

My possible paths (1), (2) and (3) can't be claimed to be actually known to be deterministic, because the intuitive feelings and the decisions to follow one of these paths are themselves mysterious properties of a subjective agent. Once the path was (mysteriously) chosen, then the outcome appeared to be a deterministic chain but was still subject to mysterious intervention by the conscious agent, who could still change his mind.

But I agree that we cannot be absolutely certain one way or the other.

~~ Paul

Uncertainty is measure of information content.

I’m just going to put ‘colour’ back on the table as a reminder that the nervous system is expert at fooling us into thinking that something exists, that doesn’t.

I’m just going to put ‘colour’ back on the table as a reminder that the nervous system is expert at fooling us into thinking that something exists, that doesn’t.

Isn't this simply the laziest of retorts?  Consciousness doesn't exist.  Love doesn't exist.  Beauty doesn't exist.  Color doesn't exist.

I'd like to return, for a moment, to that quote from John Horgan that I posted earlier in this thread. Here it is again:

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.

So the point I would like clarified is this: what exactly do determinists believe when it comes to causality? That causes are all to do with physical interactions? No, really, I am very confused about this and it would help me understand where determinists are coming from. Horgan seems to be saying that Harris is stuck on a physicalist model while ignoring the subjective. Horgan's position seems to be that choices are made, not because of some objective physical neuronal activity but because of the subjective assessment (meaning) of the information at hand. Are determinists, as malf seems to be saying in his latest post, claiming that the subjective doesn't exist as Horgan maintains they are?

Ignoring all religious, metaphysical, political and classical versions of causality; I see 4 areas of measurable activity.

Physical events outside of the scientist.
Physical events inside the scientist.
Information structures evolving outside the scientist. 
Information structures evolving inside the scientist.

The physical events are governed by natural laws.  The physical events inside the body will be targeted as to their biological functions.  The DOE will resolve aspects in the outside (exo) and look to match data patterns with math patterns that describe isomorphic informational structures between theory and data.

If there is enough matching (isomorphic) information structure between theory and observed data in the experiment, the resulting information object (simulation) will predict future results in reality.

The math patterns will have evolved to an arrangement of the information structures outside of the scientist will now match information structures first modeled inside the scientist (endo).

With me?  Any caveats?

Sorry, I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

~~ Paul