Neuroscience and free will

I don't think you're going to get the explanation you're looking for. All we can do is observe what does happen and then compose laws that describe what we see. We can then use those laws to rule out things that can't happen under the same conditions, such as the two billiard balls occupying the same space, or the struck ball moving backward toward the striking ball.

But for the third way of making decisions, we don't even have observations, let alone descriptive laws, let alone derived technology. If we could observe the third way of making decisions, we wouldn't be having this conversation. True, we don't observe the decision being made purely by deterministic + random methods, either, but we know those processes exist outside our minds, so we can:

Suggest that mental decisions are made using the same two methods (at least in part).

Then ask if anyone can even imagine a third method.


~~ Paul

It works according to the descriptive laws of physics. I must not understand what you're looking for.

Even if you are looking for some kind of quasi-philosophical description of what is happening below the quantum mechanical level, why do we need that? We can describe how it works well enough to build stunningly complex modern chips that operate according to strict specifications, even to the point of repairing random errors. All I'm asking for regarding the third way of making decisions is a high-level handwaving description; nothing even close to the level of detail we can specify for computers. I'm really just asking for an informal logical description of a process/procedure/method/scheme/way of making decisions that isn't entirely deterministic and random.

I don't think saying "well, we don't know why billiard balls do what they do" is a reasonable excuse for not offering some sort of description. Nor do I think that asking "are there really random events?" is an excuse; if you don't think there are, then they simply won't be part of the description.

~~ Paul

This all seems to be jumping the gun - you said you want a "how" of free will, but how can someone supply this without a presentation of a "how" you believe to be satisfactory of some other process?

For example I am not convinced determinism/randomness are existing anywhere but inside our minds, as probability expectations. So I would not consider a need for a "third way" as it remains unclear there are some preceding other two ways. I also don't think we have a level of detail regarding causation in computers that satisfies the necessary explanatory level free will would have to be explained at.

I think our ignorance of billiard balls and the existence of randomness have much to do with what would count as a satisfactory explanation.


Best to discuss our understanding of causality prior to discussing human-level free will, otherwise all discussion is doomed to impasse yet again. So...what is the "how" of circuits that, as you say, account for randomness?

Without a God exercising mastery over the fate of things isn't this picture of causal chains itself an example of insanity/magic?

Isn't determinism that happens without explanation, attributed to mere brute facts like "Natural Laws", just randomness of a special kind -- and doesn't randomness violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason?

I see a good deal of argument for determinism being that things happen for a reason, but I find this odd as this only paints a partial picture. It's not enough to note consistency, there must be an explanation for why something happens which would explain why something else doesn't happen.

I agree entirely and have said similar things in my previous posts in this thread.

"Determinsim" or "mechanism" or "causal chains" or "material" are words that refer to the patterned regular aspect of reality, but since all patterns are created by arbitrarily assigning boundaries by choice then the natural laws exist only by the Will of the Prime Cause which interpenetrates all of regular reality like water in a sponge.

All explanations are only partial explanations because all ontologies must be circular and literally insufficient, but can be metaphorically sufficient to orbit around the indefinable ineffable One thing at the center. So all things that are "solid" float upon nothing but the Will of the Prime Cause. The conflict in reality between solid regularity and insanity/novelty/creativity is ongoing in the mind of God as well as in the mind of the individual because the inside becomes the outside becomes the inside in a mobius loop.

Since you brought God into it again, I'll restate what I said earlier about the Genesis creation myth and pattern: you have everything right there in one story. You have classification or boundary setting ("God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them" and "you may eat of any tree but the tree of knowledge or else you will die"). Then you have ambiguity of boundaries from the trickster serpent: "Did God really say...?" Then when a Free Will is exercised to cross a boundary (eat the forbidden fruit) the beings become the Prime Cause (you shall be like God) and gain knowledge (because knowledge is as much pattern creation as it is pattern recognition) and since knowledge/pattern creation involves separation into parts, the separation is a death of one kind of structure while it is the creation of a new structure.

So all structures are a manifestation of Free Will. We can look at reality as being the product of the intention of the mind of God and the stable aspect of reality represents the sanity of the mind of God.

Boundaries are where choice occurs and where knowledge is discovered and where reality is created and where termination occurs (things die).

And this is exactly what we've been saying to you regarding free will choices, for what I imagine is a very, very similar if not identical reason.

Precisely. Now say the same of free will choices (albeit that the "laws" of free will choices are more varied, less generalisable, and are instantiated by consciousnesses in the act of making choices rather than by who-knows-what in the case of the laws of physics) and we can all agree and go home!

But I am not quite ready to go home!

Where these Laws you mention, and how are they enforced?

It seems to me we have observations that are then set into equations, and these relations are then enshrined as "Laws"...but there is nothing here but probability expectations, or so it seems to me. 

AFAICTell there is the observation of Pattern without an account for the "why" of the patterns holding. If science in involved with the discovery of patterns through observation of change, it seems that Pattern, Observation, and Change are [ultimately] unaccounted for because they concern the "things in themselves", the relata for which the relations set into equations hold.

And is it not curious that mysteries of Causation and Consciousness, the ingredients of Free Will, are aspects of these relata while Determinism and Randomness are merely projections of probability expectations concerning the relations?

I can't say it, because I cannot observe any sort of events pertaining to libertarian free will. There is no data from which to derive laws. But for events we can observe, we have plenty of data suggesting that there are deterministic events and random events. And so we have laws of that sort.

In other words: All we can do for libertarian free will is make the logical attempt at describing how it might work. Heck, you could even decide what you want for dinner, assume it was a true free choice, and then derive some laws about how you did it. I challenge you to be able to come up with any laws.

~~ Paul

This is an odd request, as free will concerns what is happening at each individual choice from the inside whereas the projection of probability expectations (whether something is "random" or "deterministic") is based on repeated observation of similar events observed from the outside.

As per my just prior reply to you and my last reply to Laird this "Law of Dinner Choice" seems to be asking for an explanation [of] free will in precisely the wrong terminology?

This all seems to be jumping the gun - you said you want a "how" of free will, but how can someone supply this without a presentation of a "how" you believe to be satisfactory of some other process?

I'm not asking for "how" in any detailed way. I'm just asking for a high-level description of what happens when I make a free choice. Even just a hint of the sequence of events.

I can give a pretty detailed "how" for a computer CPU, right down to the quantum mechanical level. Here, for example, is the Wiki article on quantum tunneling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling

For example I am not convinced determinism/randomness are existing anywhere but inside our minds, as probability expectations. So I would not consider a need for a "third way" as it remains unclear there are some preceding other two ways. I also don't think we have a level of detail regarding causation in computers that satisfies the necessary explanatory level free will would have to be explained at.

Wow. Then this free will thing is stunningly complicated and bizarre. For computers, we don't have to talk much about causation. But isn't it clear that the processes implemented in a chip are deterministic? Except for problems like random RAM errors, many of which we can fix deterministically. We really do understand how to harness the deterministic aspects of the universe to build complex devices. Witness the Large Hadron Collider.

Best to discuss our understanding of causality prior to discussing human-level free will, otherwise all discussion is doomed to impasse yet again. So...what is the "how" of circuits that, as you say, account for randomness?

In the case of RAM, you add some bits to each memory unit that encode some aspect of the primary bits, such as the number of 1 bits. Hsiao or Hamming codes are used. From this you can correct a random single-bit flip and detect random 2-bit flips. The code and detection are entirely deterministic, allowing the scheme to work in the face of some amount of randomness. We are lucky that the inherent randomness at the quantum level averages out to a significant amount of determinism at the macro level.

I cannot give a low-level description of causality. We have various logical descriptions of it, and calculi that help us analyze complex events. The physics gets more complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Physics


~~ Paul

This is an odd request, as free will concerns what is happening at each individual choice from the inside whereas the projection of probability expectations (whether something is "random" or "deterministic") is based on repeated observation of similar events observed from the outside.

As per my just prior reply to you and my last reply to Laird this "Law of Dinner Choice" seems to be asking for an explanation [of] free will in precisely the wrong terminology?

Then select a more appropriate terminology.

It seems that one excuse for avoiding a description of free will is that it is "fundamentally different" from deterministic and random processes. Fair enough. But if that means that there is nothing left to employ to produce a description, then we all should admit there is no description.

~~ Paul

[Laird]

I can't say [of free will choices that "[a]ll we can do is observe what does happen and then compose laws that describe what we see"], because I cannot observe any sort of events pertaining to libertarian free will.

But that's as much an assumption (notwithstanding any further supporting argument) as it would be an assumption (likewise) for me to say that I cannot observe any sort of events not pertaining to libertarian free will. I might say that if, for example, I were an idealist of the type who believes that God's (libertarian) free will, creative agency, and choices are what "determines" every event other than those which He delegates to us to "determine" with our own (libertarian) free will, creative agency, and choices. On that view, the "laws of physics" would be entirely attributable to libertarian choices made by God, and thus those events which we observe to "conform" to the "laws" of physics would solely "pertain to [God's] libertarian free will".

Let's though set aside both dichotomous assumptions for the moment and see what a middle ground might look like where all we assume is that some events pertain to "the laws of physics" instantiated by physical events (and do not pertain to the "laws" of libertarian free will choices), whereas other events pertain to those "laws" instantiated by libertarian free will choices (and do not pertain to the "laws" of physics). Of course, some of the necessary conditions for each specific event might come from the other category, but let's ignore those for simplicity.

First, for context: by "laws" here I'm simply referring to generalised, universal propositions which can be (are) applicable in one or more specific instances. Prof. Swartz, mentioned in one of my previous posts, goes into some detail^[1] in his book The Concept of a Physical Law as to the conditions which a proposition might need to satisfy to legitimately qualify as a "physical law", but we need not concern ourselves with that level of detail here. Suffice it to say that a "law" as I am using it here (again, inspired by Prof. Swartz) is descriptive and not prescriptive, which is not to deny (contra Swartz) the possibility that some "laws" (e.g., of physics) are prescriptive - but if that possibility is to be realised then there needs to be an identification of and accounting for the prescribing agent, whether that agent be sentient or not, and, as far as I can tell and recall, we haven't had one yet in this thread, nor in any other thread on free will in which I've been involved.

In any case, here, then, we might provide these congruent examples:

1. Examples of specific (hypothetical) events to which the (at a minimum descriptive but potentially prescriptive) "laws" of physics are applicable, and those "laws" of physics which describe them, include:
   
   
   1. Event: The dropping to the ground of your HB pencil at 7:48am on the 23rd of February, 2019 (Australian Eastern Standard Time, AEST), when, after it was nudged, it rolled off your desk.
      
      Descriptive law: (Amongst others) When one object with mass is in the presence of another, it is drawn to the other (and vice versa) with a force which is directly proportional to the product of both masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers [adapted from Wikipedia].
      
      
   2. Event: Your flying into the air at 8:02am on the 23rd of February, 2019 (AEST) when, having sought some physical exertion, you landed heavily on a trampoline.
      
      Descriptive law: (Amongst others): When one object with mass exerts a force upon a second object with mass, the second object simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first object [adapted from Wikipedia].
      
   
   
2. Examples of specific (hypothetical) events to which the descriptive "laws" of free will choices are applicable, and those "laws" which describe them, include:
   
   
   1. Event: Your screwing up your face in bemusement at 12:49pm on the 23rd of February, 2019 (AEST) after reading this post (having returned to your desk from your brief, but pleasing, excursion to your trampoline).
      
      Descriptive law: When a mild-mannered man reads a post related to free will forty minutes after its having been posted, he screws up his face in bemusement.
      
      If, in fact, there were (had been) a separate, preceding instance in the universe in which a mild-mannered man read a post related to free will forty minutes after its having been posted and did not screw up his face in bemusement, then the (descriptive) law would instead (have) be(en): "When the second mild-mannered man to read a post related to free will forty minutes after its having been posted reads that post, he screws up his face in bemusement". You get the idea.
      
      
   2. Event: Your getting up again from your desk at 12:55pm on the 23rd of February, 2019 (AEST) to catch some more fresh (and bouncy) air.
      
      Descriptive law: When a man reads a post on free will forty minutes after its having been posted and 301 minutes after a pencil rolls off his desk, he gets up from his desk after another six minutes.
      
      Again, the "law" could be adjusted as necessary given any similar events.
      

Now, the "laws" describing events due to free will choices are generally less general than the "laws" of physics which describe physical events, but that need not be problematic - we are, after all, dealing with (by assumption) two different categories of law-described events.

Moving on to your challenge to me: "I challenge you to be able to come up with any laws [about how you (Laird) decided what you want for dinner]". From the above, I think it is clear that whatever decision-making process I go through can easily be described by a set of laws. Let's say, for example, that my decision-making process is a truncated version of something like you suggest in your earlier post to Sci:

1. At 4pm, while out cycling, I identify my options, based on what I have in the pantry, and on my imagination, as laksa, chick pea curry, and pasta with a tomato-based sauce.
   
2. At 4:10pm, having returned home, I discard the chick pea curry and pasta options because at that point I'm more in the mood for a laksa.
   

The first law might be something like this: When a man is out cycling in a cold climate on an island state 231 minutes after having posted to a forum about free will, he identifies his options for dinner as laksa, chick pea curry, and pasta with a tomato-based sauce.

The second might be something like this: When a man returns home from cycling in a cold climate on an island state 241 minutes after having posted to a forum about free will and ten minutes after deciding on his options for dinner, he discards two of the options and fixes on the laksa for which he is more in the mood.

Paul, to generalise (!) from all of this, my suggestion is that you are (generally!) not recognising a symmetry, and thus that the epistemic demands you are making of libertarian free will as a causal model apply as much to the purely physical causality which you seem to be suggesting as exhaustive in causal scope (albeit modified by "randomness"). In fact, I would suggest that the epistemic demands on that physical causality are even greater than those on the causality of libertarian free will. Here are two of the symmetries as I see them, and why I think the epistemic demands on physical causality are greater:

1. Both can be formulated in terms of descriptive "laws" (albeit that, as noted above, the "laws" describing events due to free will are "generally less general").
   
   
2. Both are ultimately inexplicable so far as we know. Why, ultimately, is the behaviour exhibited by masses in the presence of one another described by the "law" of gravity that we have and not by some other "law"? We don't know (and you admit as much), we simply observe that it is (seems to be). Why, ultimately, is the behaviour of one conscious being after reading a forum post described by one given "law" and not by another? We don't know, we simply observe that it is... but, and here's why I think that the epistemic demands on physical causality are greater, in this case we can at least observe from introspection that something about conscious beings seems to involve us having the capacity to freely instantiate given actions (and thus the more general "laws" which describe them) out of a range of possibilities, intentionally and of our own volition.
   

So, my challenge to you in turn is: what similar observation can we make about the reasons why one (set of) "law(s) of physics" describes any given physical event and not (an)other(s)?

[1] In brief, though, Prof. Swartz's suggestion/assertion is that "A proposition is a physical law only if it is a contingently true conditional, of universal or statistical form, all of whose nonlogical and nonmathematical terms are purely descriptive predicates."

[Laird]

But I am not quite ready to go home!

Silly us. We're forgetting that we're already home, or at least at a "home away from home".

Where these Laws you mention, and how are they enforced?

Ah, apologies for not being clear enough. For convenience, I'm using the framing of Prof. Swartz, one of whose books I referenced in my immediately previous post, to Paul, and whose lecture notes on free will and determinism I've referenced a couple of times, once in the old Skeptiko thread and once earlier in this thread in my (edited) response to Linda.

Prof. Swartz distinguishes between prescriptive and descriptive laws. As an example of a prescriptive law he gives: "Keep off the grass". As an example of a descriptive law he gives "F = ma".

In other words, Prof. Swartz maintains that all physical laws, amongst which he includes those laws describing free will choices (on which more, including examples of, see my immediately previous post to Paul), are descriptive and not prescriptive, and thus there is no "enforcement" as there might need to be for prescriptive laws.

You also ask "where" these laws are - I would say that they are in the same place that all descriptive statements are, wherever that is - perhaps we ought to ask Plato!

I liberally quoted "law" in my response to Paul because I am not entirely comfortable with the term as applied descriptively and not prescriptively, but because it seems to be the most recognised and convenient one, I've stuck with it.

It seems to me we have observations that are then set into equations, and these relations are then enshrined as "Laws"

Right - that's roughly Prof. Swartz's view too.

AFAICTell there is the observation of Pattern without an account for the "why" of the patterns holding.

And that's part of the basis of the point I've just made to Paul regarding the more onerous (epistemic) demands on the type of causality ("physical necessitation") that he seems to - at least provisionally - think holds exhaustively (albeit modified by true randomness). At least we can basically state a "why" for the patterns of free will choices holding: that conscious agents have the volitional capacity to instantiate them out of their own beings. What can we say similarly for a "why" of the - putatively non-conscious - patterns "out there" in physical reality?

If science in involved with the discovery of patterns through observation of change, it seems that Pattern, Observation, and Change are unaccounted for because they concern the "things in themselves", the relata for which the relations set into equations hold.

Right, so, the explanation of "scientific laws" is beyond the scope of science itself... at least when science is conceived of as a strictly empirical discipline divorced from the rest of rational inquiry, which I don't necessarily think is the best conception in all contexts, but I understand it in this context.

And is it not curious that mysteries of Causation and Consciousness, the ingredients of Free Will, are aspects of these relata while Determinism and Randomness are merely projections of probability expectations concerning the relations?

That's an interesting framing. And I'm reminded here of the value of responding to posts rather than simply reading them: one is forced to read more carefully, for understanding, and otherwise-hidden gems like this become more discoverable.

So (what I think you're saying is that), whilst causation has an ontological reality, determinism does not; it is merely an epistemic construct? If "physical laws" are merely descriptive then that seems to follow: all we can do is try to best approximate the true descriptions, and our approximations could reasonably be described as "probability expectations".

I am interested though in exploring the other possibility: that "physical laws" are prescriptive, not descriptive (the view which Paul seems to be espousing, whether explicitly or implicitly). How might this be possible? What (if not "who") would be supplying the "enforcement" necessary for the prescription? Perhaps Paul has something to say about this.

I'm not asking for "how" in any detailed way. I'm just asking for a high-level description of what happens when I make a free choice. Even just a hint of the sequence of events.

I can give a pretty detailed "how" for a computer CPU, right down to the quantum mechanical level. Here, for example, is the Wiki article on quantum tunneling

Again, I don't think this is the "how" at the level of free will, as you are talking about how we can take observed causal patterns (including stochastic patterns) that exist and exploit them to our advantage. But this assumes the patterns exist, rather offers explanations for the patterns.

The question of why the computer doesn't sometimes turn to dust when a certain program is run isn't to be found in this "how" explanation.

At this level assumed patterns, the level of relations, there is no way to explain free will anymore than we could explain consciousness as these are properties of relata.And relata are the things-in-themselves physics fails to offer account for. A good explanation on the limits of relations is presented at the end of Smolin's Time Reborn:

"We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains."

Wow. Then this free will thing is stunningly complicated and bizarre.

Not at all, rather free will must be simple in that it is an inherent property of the agent rather than something composite.

For computers, we don't have to talk much about causation. But isn't it clear that the processes implemented in a chip are deterministic? Except for problems like random RAM errors, many of which we can fix deterministically. We really do understand how to harness the deterministic aspects of the universe to build complex devices. Witness the Large Hadron Collider.

Sure, we are confident enough that the patterns will hold. That isn't the same thing as understanding the why of they hold for us to build large Colliders.

We are lucky that the inherent randomness at the quantum level averages out to a significant amount of determinism at the macro level.

So you accept there is no actual determinism, it's just a special kind of randomness that holds by luck? This seems a bizarre picture of reality?

I cannot give a low-level description of causality. We have various logical descriptions of it, and calculi that help us analyze complex events. The physics gets more complex.

Could you at least explain how randomness works? Because it seems to me that what you ascribe to a fundamental randomness I would more likely ascribe to a fundamental mental causation.

Then select a more appropriate terminology.

It seems that one excuse for avoiding a description of free will is that it is "fundamentally different" from deterministic and random processes. Fair enough. But if that means that there is nothing left to employ to produce a description, then we all should admit there is no description.

~~ Paul

The terminology is at the level of relata - what does it mean for one event to cause another. At the least this involves discussing Change as Actualization of Potentials and/or Aristotle's Four Causes - Material, Efficient, Formal, and Final. Why I think our focus should be on a brick going through window as its an easy enough picture involving an identifiable cause A and effect B.

I still don't think there are random or deterministic processes in actuality (as opposed to indications of our confidence in probabilities), so I'm not sure why there's a need to show something "fundamentally different". Is there some proof that every event must be deterministic or random?

But it seems before we can ask how free will is "fundamentally different" we'd need to explain the "how" of randomness, that AFAICTell violates the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Since as you say it's all randomness that becomes pseudo-deterministic by Luck that suggests you are saying causation occurs for no discernible reason, with no actual boundaries. That seems to me a forgoing of explanation?

Why would you accept that there can be randomness and not free will, as the former suggests causation without explanation and the other suggests an inner causal power possessed by the agent?

All that said, I never claimed there is no "how" to free will - one can describe a space for the free agent's operation within the sequence of causal processes, but these need to be set into particular metaphysical pictures that offer "hows" for causation itself.