Neuroscience and free will

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.

~~ Paul

You don't know coherent consciousness is an illusion, but imagine it must be because it is the activity of many complex brain structures. You apparently visualize these "dozens of subsystems" coherently coming together as the coordinated or orchestrated activity of very many different structures in the brain. This ignores extensive veridical NDEs and other empirical evidence which indicates that the human mind is not tied to and totally a function of, brain structures. NDEers report (along with veridical data) a strong sense of coherent consciousness even more clear than normal in-the-body consciousness, even though their brains may be mostly shut down. This sense and experience of super-clear coherent consciousness seems to be located in some sort of center of consciousness separated from the physical body.

... but it may be that we are being ‘fooled’ all the time or, to put it another way, constantly constructing our interactions into a coherent narrative. Saying something ‘feels’ a certain way isn’t enough. 

Why? What is wrong with describing how something feels? Why deny such feelings? Your colleague probably felt hurt - why is that not valid? Of course that man could have acted in a different way. He had a choice because he is human. He is not a pre-programmed machine. And I think that is the problem here. You and Paul are both fond of demanding mechanisms. The universe and everything in it is, to you both, mechanistic. That's 19th century thinking from what I can see. It is what Horgan describes as a throwback to old behaviourism when applied to humans.

Why? What is wrong with describing how something feels? Why deny such feelings?

Not denying them, but I’ve tried to show in this (and other) threads that you can’t rely on them for constructing a model of what is ‘real’.

Your colleague probably felt hurt - why is that not valid?

I can’t see such feelings as helpful or in any way beneficial (think of it from a Buddhist perspective if that helps).

Of course that man could have acted in a different way. He had a choice because he is human.

Given exactly the same man, with exactly the same experiences, having exactly the same day, replaying exactly the same scenario... what would make him act differently?

Not denying them, but I’ve tried to show in this (and other) threads that you can’t rely on them for constructing a model of what is ‘real’.



I can’t see such feelings as helpful or in any way beneficial (think of it from a Buddhist perspective if that helps).



Given exactly the same man, with exactly the same experiences, having exactly the same day, replaying exactly the same scenario... what would make him act differently?

Ok, short answers (cause I'm pausing the BBC's "Pointless" on YouTube):

Glad you put 'real' in quotes. I don't think that argument gets us anywhere.

Helpful is a value judgement but whether or not they are helpful is not the point. It is whether or not they are illusory in your terms - again: what is 'real'?

He could make a different choice. You are making it axiomatic that choice doesn't exist but I and others would contend that it obviously does. That was also the thrust of Horgan's argument.

So I'm seeing why this issue was and will remain at an impasse.

... cause I'm pausing the BBC's "Pointless" on YouTube...

Apropos.

[Laird]

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

You seem to be confusing necessary conditions with necessitating causes...

[Edit: Although, to be fair, a necessitating cause could (I think) be described as a sufficient condition which has causal power. [Edit2: In fact, I think I should have written that it's rather the case that sufficient causes are sometimes understood to be "necessitating" - but that supposed equivalence is, in my view, mistaken]. A better and more considered response to your post then is this:

This all comes back to what "determinism" means in the first place. I understand that those who propose an exhaustive "deterministic vs random" dichotomy mean by "deterministic" that the causality is necessitating due to physical laws; that is, that in any given situation, only one outcome is physically possible because a specific set of physical laws necessitates or "forces" it. In that context, I am not even saying that there is a deterministic cause which is "not necessary, and maybe also not sufficient"; I am saying that there is a type of causal event (a free will choice) which is neither "deterministic" (in the sense of "necessitated and forced by physical laws beyond the influence of the agent making the choice") nor "random" (in the sense of "unforced by any physical laws even whilst its utter arbitrariness is also beyond the control of the agent making the choice").

The author (Prof. Norman Swartz) of the page to which you linked uses a broader definition of determinism even whilst recognising the sense in which people understand it to be "necessitating". He maintains that those who use this sense of a "necessitating" physical determinism to deny the possibility of free will are engaging in a modal fallacy, and that "physical determinism is no threat to free will", on which you can read more on his page Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism, which you might remember me linking to in a thread on free will on Skeptiko - perhaps that's even how you arrived at your own link.

The main difference, I think, in the way things are being framed is that Prof. Swartz includes free will choices under the domain of "physical" (and thus deterministic) laws - because the "laws" of those free will choices can be described (even though they are not prescribed) - whereas I'm separating free will choices out into a separate category.]

[Laird]

I thought people might want to improve their descriptions of this third form of decision-making so that even thick-headed folks like me might understand.

Sounds like a win-win... except that I don't think that you're thick-headed and I'm not sure how much my descriptions can be improved (short of divine inspiration!).

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.

~~ Paul

The word "how" implies a cause and cause implies a mechanism. If there is any such thing as free will, that means that the causal chain eventually dead-ends into a prime cause for which there is no answer to "how". Free will is the opposite of mechanism.

If you define the world as existing purely "objectively" then there can be no free will because an "object" is tied to the sensory experience of something solid and basically immutable like a rock (or billiard ball). So everything has some ultimate solidity and laws of nature are unbreakable and timeless and past and future exist at once in the "block universe" (block is another word like "object" which is representative of the sensory experience of solid hard immutable things).

No one can say with certainty that the ultimate nature of things exists as a solid immutable block. One could argue that since novelty is experienced and experience is the ultimate truth (all other lesser truths being abstractions and symbolic representations of experiences extrapolated beyond direct experience), then the ultimate nature of things is not an immutable block but something that changes at varying rates in various dimensions.

If we instead define the world as a pattern, then we have the joining of the subject and the object. Patterns are both discovered "objectively" and arbitrarily imposed "at will". Arbitrary imposition of definitions to form a pattern means there is ambiguity at the boundaries. Ambiguity at the boundaries enables causal chains to exist within the boundaries and then dead end at the boundaries. The boundary IS choice. 

So to give you a "hand-waving description" of how it might work...

The universe exists as a set of patterns. Within these patterns we have complex structures one of which is the body and mind of an individual which imposes patterns. The conscious sense of self is the apex feedback loop on top of a hierarchy of sub processes which can be modeled mechanistically but are rooted in in-deterministic processes. Causal chains dead end at some point. So the individual's main feedback loop of self-conscious will is partly mechanistic but also partly rooted in indeterministic prime boundary conditions. The body behaves mechanistically at the macro scale but as we zoom into the finer structures the trail of mechanism leads into various ambiguous boundary conditions which are subject to quantum uncertainty.

Instead of imagining the world as composed of rocks or billiard balls, The image I envision is a sponge floating on the surface of water. The solid parts of the sponge are structured objective materialistic reality. The water is the "Abyss" of uncertainty and Free Will and prime cause and it interpenetrates the structures of reality at the boundaries. The mind is composed of mechanistic processes which are rooted in ambiguity and so are constantly dipping in and out of the waters of the Abyss to create novelty.

Why does meaning imply free will?

What is different about meaning created by people and meaning created by computers? In both cases, the meaning of a token X is specified by its association with other tokens. 

~~ Paul

Two excellent questions!!!  I will return and try and restate the thought experiment, starting from the structure of a causal model.  I would address each of the two questions with examples in a post or two.

Computers and biological information processing may both use tokens in the same way.  However, biological information can do something that representation cannot.  Biological information can be enforced by living things in a directly manifest way.

A computer can output a signal: act!  A biological organism can manifest both selection output and action/energy release in a physical environment, directly.  Further, these actions are unified and holistic in a way, different than an additive system of components.