Neuroscience and free will

Similarly, we don't really know what free will and creativity are, but like qualia and agency we experience them as attributes of this probably unknowable consciousness, so free will and creativity are also real and existent but probably unknowable.

I agree with qualia and agency, but I have no experience of free will. Thoughts appear in my mind as if by magic. I can control them to some degree. But I don't think I experience any sort of spectrum of free will versus determinism. I cannot tell whether my thoughts are free or determined.

~~ Paul

I agree with qualia and agency, but I have no experience of free will. Thoughts appear in my mind as if by magic. I can control them to some degree. But I don't think I experience any sort of spectrum of free will versus determinism. I cannot tell whether my thoughts are free or determined.

~~ Paul

Surely that degree of control you recognise can be thought of as your free will?

Its as if Paul is asking to understand what lies behind the door of "free will" in a reductive sort of way.  I (sort of) understand what he's asking ("Thoughts pop into my head").  Its not like I feel as if I am conjuring my thoughts, but trying to wrap my head around what goes into my "free will" seems to be asking who's the puppet master behind my thoughts.

Maybe there is one, but that can of worms seems to lead into an infinite regress.  (Who's the puppet master's puppet master?)

Perhaps its not knowable per se.  I just struggle to believe the solution is some uber complex calculus governed by the laws of nature that themselves are supposedly immune to regress (e.g., the materialist perspective: there is no agent behind anything).

I agree with qualia and agency, but I have no experience of free will. Thoughts appear in my mind as if by magic. I can control them to some degree. But I don't think I experience any sort of spectrum of free will versus determinism. I cannot tell whether my thoughts are free or determined.

~~ Paul

The "I" with the mysterious power of agency, that can control to some extent what "bubbles up" and especially whether it is responded to or not. This reminds me of Michael Egnor's thoughts about Benjamin Libet's research from his article that I quoted in the beginning post of this thread:

....The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will....Libet noted the correspondence between his experiments and the traditional religious understanding of human beings. We are, he said, beset by a sea of inclinations, corresponding to material activity in our brains, which we have the free choice to reject or accept.

Its as if Paul is asking to understand what lies behind the door of "free will" in a reductive sort of way.  I (sort of) understand what he's asking ("Thoughts pop into my head").  Its not like I feel as if I am conjuring my thoughts, but trying to wrap my head around what goes into my "free will" seems to be asking who's the puppet master behind my thoughts.

I don't particularly engage with the term "puppet master", it seems ambiguous and possibly seems to trivialise our existence - though I don't know whether that was the intention, or just my (mis-)interpretation.

At any rate, recently I was faced with a question of, "how do we know the unknowable?", not in some abstract philosophical sense, but in a practical, down-to-earth case. Some damage had occurred to my property, which I thought had been vandalism, but there had been no witnesses, or none that would step forward. So how could I discover what had really happened?

The answer I knew, that is I knew how. The how, is to ask the question as I lay down to sleep, and I'd have the answer by the morning. I didn't have to wait that long, as I settled down to sleep, it became clear, it was the wind, a strong gust of wind had exerted the forces which brought about the damage. It was remarkable, suddenly it all made sense, the pattern of damage, the time, place, location, everything was suddenly fitting together and I understood it.

Where did this come from? I don't think it was external, it wasn't someone else pulling my strings, it was me accessing my own resources. When thoughts come into our heads suddenly, they come from something which is part of who we are. There are times though when we may be pooling our resources and sharing thoughts with others too, some questions require a broader input in order to have a wider perspective. This too can be approached in the same way, by asking a question before going to sleep.

I dare say this is tangential to the topic of this thread, my apologies for that.

Surely that degree of control you recognise can be thought of as your free will?

I don't think so. It might just be deterministic and random. It doesn't feel one way or the other.

~~ Paul

Its as if Paul is asking to understand what lies behind the door of "free will" in a reductive sort of way.  I (sort of) understand what he's asking ("Thoughts pop into my head").  Its not like I feel as if I am conjuring my thoughts, but trying to wrap my head around what goes into my "free will" seems to be asking who's the puppet master behind my thoughts.

True free will doesn't have to be mechanistic or reductive. But if that means that it is impossible to describe, then I hesitate to believe it. Why should I not then believe in a myriad of interesting ideas?

~~ Paul

The "I" with the mysterious power of agency, that can control to some extent what "bubbles up" and especially whether it is responded to or not. This reminds me of Michael Egnor's thoughts about Benjamin Libet's research from his article that I quoted in the beginning post of this thread:

I'm not sure why the control mechanism has to be indeterministic. It might be highly attuned to the current state of affairs ("Would this be a good thing to utter right now?"), but that does not imply indeterminism.

~~ Paul

I'm not sure why the control mechanism has to be indeterministic. It might be highly attuned to the current state of affairs ("Would this be a good thing to utter right now?"), but that does not imply indeterminism.

~~ Paul

This certainly and not unexpectedly shows your mindset - you automatically assume that your own self, your innermost being as a sentient agent, is probably a mechanism. With the corollary that mechanisms are implemented by physical machines - so the mechanism in this case most probably is the physical brain. Despite the various problems with that materialist position, starting with the well-known "hard problem" of consciousness. Of course, a mechanism is automatically deterministic isn't it. Oh well, back to square one.

Thoughts appear in my mind as if by magic.
~~ Paul

This is where science comes in.  They are not magical -- but natural events.  

Free will is not an experience!!!!  It can be defined as a program, where selection is based on agency and Bayesian Reasoning! Not based on forces or materials.

Defining thoughts as structured information resulting in available affordances; and defining activities as executable algorithms, makes an understandable model.

 Third, it is suggested that an ontology of structural objects for OSR can reasonably be developed in terms of informational objects, and that Object Oriented Programming provides a flexible and powerful methodology with which to clarify and make precise the concept of “informational object”. The outcome is informational realism, the view that the world is the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. - Luciano Floridi, Oxford Scholar

Bayesian reasoning is an application of probability theory to inductive reasoning (and abductive reasoning). It relies on an interpretation of probabilities as expressions of an agent's uncertainty about the world, rather than as concerning some notion of objective chance in the world

Someday, you will be curious. I hope I get to explain my thought-experiment in a way you could understand.