Neuroscience and free will

Personally, I don't think we need to argue on the basis of differing definitions. Let's just drop the reference to laws, and refer to underlying reasons, instead. After all, it is the underlying reason which shows us whether the event is necessary (deterministic), not whether or not we have happened to formulate a "law" (complete or otherwise) to describe the underlying reason.

Linda

This is a good suggestion. We can begin by deciding whether there are any physical events that must happen the way they do, due to the preceding state of affairs. If Laird insists that there are not, then we will understand what he wants us to agree with. I won't be able to agree, because how the hell should I know? I think there are events that happen out of necessity, but I can't be sure.

But I will agree that not all events must happen they way they do. Is that a sufficient crack in the wall?

~~ Paul

I plan to answer your post in detail, but first I am doing some research on prescriptive versus descriptive laws. I think we have different definitions of them in mind.

~~ Paul

From the open lines of the article by N. Swartz:

 What does it mean to have free will? To have free will at least two conditions must obtain.

1. We must have two or more possibilities 'genuinely open' to us when we face a choice; and
   
   
2. our choice must not be 'forced'. 

First physics tells us that objects (particles) manifest in just this way!  Multiple superpositions resolve to one actuality.  Random choices, as being logically independent, comes from a lack of information, not available at an agent's local information processing, to form a decision.  Agents that perceive important affordances can adapt their behavior with greater success in their informational and physical environments.

If two or more outcomes can be predicted by an agent - then there can be a decision based on Bayesian principles.

Determined states are when there is only one outcome - something that is rare in physics; and exists mostly in the realm of logical systems.

You didn't read the paper about the origin of the DNA/RNA/Ribosome system; suggesting how the code evolved, written by M. Barbieri.  Did you?

You cannot imagine a life form that simple replicates by copying and has no equivalent of DNA? Interesting.

Anyway, I'm not sure what your point it. If you want to say that DNA encodes proteins (and other things), fine.

~~ Paul

There is tremendous advances in using DNA as a computational device.  I can imagine another polymer that when synthesized creates an amorphous crystal that can be long enough to store a high number of bits.  Having it unzip into two symmetrical halves, enabling a fairly noiseless channel, is the "how" of starting a copy!

Without going into how translation and transcription and then ribosomes work as an integrated system (with error correction software built in) the actual model of how the organic coding works is tightly functional - and is where the probabilities for a simple unicorn-like fantasy drops to near zero.  Time and again you are numb to the fact that complex systems are controlled and regulated, far beyond the simple "copy" instruction.

Do you doubt there is no living organism tested that doesn't have DNA/RNA systems?  

I am an pragmatic kinda guy.

From the open lines of the article by N. Swartz:

First physics tells us that objects (particles) manifest in just this way!  Multiple superpositions resolve to one actuality.  Random choices, as being logically independent, comes from a lack of information, not available at an agent's local information processing, to form a decision.  Agents that perceive important affordances can adapt their behavior with greater success in their informational and physical environments.

So you're simply asserting that randomness is actually nonrandom decision making?

You didn't read the paper about the origin of the DNA/RNA/Ribosome system; suggesting how the code evolved, written by M. Barbieri.  Did you?

No.

~~ Paul

Without going into how translation and transcription and then ribosomes work as an integrated system (with error correction software built in) the actual model of how the organic coding works is tightly functional - and is where the probabilities for a simple unicorn-like fantasy drops to near zero.  Time and again you are numb to the fact that complex systems are controlled and regulated, far beyond the simple "copy" instruction.

Do you think you could write in a way that is (a) not so condescending, and (b) not so murky?

What is the point of all this? Do you think that I'm refusing to acknowledge that protein synthesis involves a code?

~~ Paul

Perhaps we should first clarify the exact purpose of the page. Here's my suggested title, which (I hope) accurately reflects the purpose I'd suggest for it:

"Free Will and Causality: Discussion Resources, Glossary, and Conceptual Summary and Synthesis".

Yes? No? Additions? Deletions? Other amendments?

I'd maybe just have a page on causality, rather than mentioning free will there? The two topics are interrelated but I think it might be best to first treat with causation to show the explanatory gaps of the physicalist picture.

Nice. An anticipatory thought/question comes out of that. Previously, you seem to have linked rationality with final causation; in the above you link it with eternal logical universals: a committed hard determinist might then insist that the eternal logical universals are "necessary", and thus that final causation is "necessitated", and thus that all decisions are "necessitated" rather than free. How would you respond to that?

I don't think rationality necessarily involves final causes? And having access to rationality doesn't mean we will always be rational, rather our Possibility Space has efficacy because of our bed-rock rational inferences. To take an example from Tallis's On Time & Lamentation (mentioned in this post):

"In conventional understanding, seeing a cup has as its proximate cause the light reaching me from the cup, entering my eyes and ultimately triggering off nerve impulses in my visual cortex. Again in accordance with conventional understanding, the light that has been reflected from the surface of the cup – in virtue of which I see it, it appears to me – is causally upstream from the events in my brain. My seeing sees beyond myself and any bodily processes that are involved in seeing.


This is very awkward indeed for the materialist world picture. Just how awkward becomes apparent if we attempt to describe object perception as we have just done in the standard materialistic language of cause and effect. We have to envisage the effect (neural activity in my visual cortex) somehow being in contact with its own causal ancestry (the light from the cup), in order to “reach out to”, “to be about” the cup and to relocate the light arising from the cup back on to it. To put this another way: the causal chain in virtue of which the light “gets in” (to the eye and the brain) fits comfortably inside the world picture of physicalism; while the gaze that “looks out” most certainly does not. This is underlined by the fact that what the gaze looks at is not the ever-changing pattern of light on the object but something that we see revealed by that light: an object with a back, and an underneath, and an inside, and a future, and a past, none of which are presently exposed by the light."

The last part I bolded to me is part of our rationality. We infer this from our experiences, just as we have some in-born or early developed understanding of interest-relative causation and manage to make "proto" rational decisions during infancy.

[There is something about Rationality that I think is connected to Nagel's View From Nowhere though:

‘how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole.’]

Nice!

The idea of evolving towards a mere ripple of a physical world must be some kind a trip for the physicalist...

(By the way, I get the impression that you typed that out on a phone/pad from hard copy - am I guessing right?)

Yeah, had to type it out, apologies for any mistakes!

From the open lines of the article by N. Swartz:

First physics tells us that objects (particles) manifest in just this way!  Multiple superpositions resolve to one actuality.  Random choices, as being logically independent, comes from a lack of information, not available at an agent's local information processing, to form a decision.  Agents that perceive important affordances can adapt their behavior with greater success in their informational and physical environments.

If two or more outcomes can be predicted by an agent - then there can be a decision based on Bayesian principles.

Determined states are when there is only one outcome - something that is rare in physics; and exists mostly in the realm of logical systems.

You didn't read the paper about the origin of the DNA/RNA/Ribosome system; suggesting how the code evolved, written by M. Barbieri.  Did you?

I have to confess I'm also not sure where this is going. We will go from Barbieri's paper on DNA/RNA/etc to a connection to superposition that will show us mental causation?

Or is the first part noting randomness is just an external expression of probability - is this where Baeyesian principles comes in? A relation to QBism and the idea of a Participatory Universe? [reposting link for convenience]

And then showing how mentality is involved with the basic aspects of causation that make up the universe & then Life? [Like Josephson's Biological Observer-Participation and Wheeler's 'Law without Law?]

It might be helpful to cash out anything that suggests a special mathematical/scientific knowledge into terms that are as close to layperson as possible.

[Laird]

So, I read sections 6.4--6.7 of the lecture notes:

http://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/freewill1.htm#versus

Interestingly, it says that prescriptive laws are violable, though I think that may pertain only to human laws.

It also says that (emboldening mine):

"Early scientists in this modern period (beginning in the 16th Century) regarded these principles as prescriptive laws, but with one exception: the laws of nature differ from God's moral laws in that laws of nature are non-violable"

and that (emboldening again mine):

"I want to suggest that the claim in that argument – the claim that the Laws of Nature are not of our choosing – is a relic of the earlier view that Laws of Nature are God's inviolable prescriptions to the Universe."

I have assumed this (the inviolability of prescriptive laws) to be implicit in our discussion.

However, I see nothing that insists that when we adopt descriptive laws, this entails that the universe never does anything out of necessity.

Then I can only encourage you to (re)read the notes in full. This is pretty much their entire point, Paul. It's fine if you want to present a counter-argument, but it's not fine for you to fail to recognise the argument in the first place.

Another interesting thing in that article is that section 6.8 seems to violate the statement in section 6.4 that descriptive laws contains no proper names.

I think you're mistaken here. I assume you're referring to "D₄₇₂₉" and "D₅₃₂₂", but there are no proper names in those descriptions, simply because the descriptions are only alluded to. You seem to be assuming that the actual descriptions which are alluded to would require proper names, but I have shown you via examples of my own devising that this is not the case (see the example "Descriptive law"s I offered under 2.1 and 2.2 in this post).

Then I read the page "Laws of Nature" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Strangely, it never uses the word "prescriptive."

True, but it does use variants of the word/phrase "governed [by]", which amounts to the same thing. If laws are "prescriptive" then they don't merely "describe" the world: they "govern" it.

I focused on section 8, "Necessity." It discusses the debate between necessitarians and non-necessitarians, but does not reach any conclusion about whether some physical events happen out of necessity.

It ends with this:

The primary worry for necessitarians concerns their ability to sustain their dismissals of the traditional reasons for thinking that some laws are contingent. The problem (cf., Sidelle 2002, 311) is that they too make distinctions between necessary truths and contingent ones, and even seem to rely on considerations of conceivability to do so. Prima facie, there is nothing especially suspicious about the judgment that it is possible that an object travel faster than light. How is it any worse than the judgment that it is possible that it is raining in Paris?

My view is that this is not merely a "primary worry" but a fatality (especially re the bit I've emboldened). Is your view different? If so, then why? How do you justify that different view?

I kept searching for relevant essays and papers. There are papers apparently arguing that there are natural laws that are metaphysically necessary:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/063a/cf...fe87ce.pdf

So, naturally, because you

(1) are keen to, so far as possible, work out for yourself what is true, and
(2) recognise as fallacious the argument that "some philosopher once published a paper arguing that X is true, therefore it is possible that X is true"

you enthusiastically devoured the paper, analysed its arguments, and came to a conclusion as to whether or not they were sound (and even cogent).

Please, then, go ahead and share with us that conclusion and how/why you reached it.

There is much discussion about whether our talk of laws pertains only to our world or to all possible worlds. One argument is that we should assume that laws describing events don't happen out of necessity because there could be a logical world in which the law does not hold. If that is the view we are taking in this discussion, then I would tend to agree that descriptivism means that nothing happens out of necessity. I say "tend" because I think it's possible that we could have a law that describes events that must happen a certain way in all possible worlds.

Justify the statement I've emboldened. Explain or describe how this is (or could be) possible.

So after about two hours of searching and reading, I don't find anything that convinces me that descriptivism entails that no events happen out of necessity. It simply means that we aren't embedding the laws in nature itself and thus endowing the laws with prescriptive causal power.

My contention is that if laws don't have prescriptive causal power, then events are not (cannot be, in virtue of what laws mean) necessitated. Reading can only affect that contention to the extent that it supplies new definitions or meanings for "descriptive", "prescriptive", "law", and "necessitated" - but then we'd be talking about something different than we have been...

However, I stand by for additional reading suggestions.

And I stand by for cogent arguments based on the meanings we've been using/assuming for these words all along.

[Laird]

At issue is whether or not laws are the same thing as the underlying reason why specific events are produced. They are treated as different, by those who work with them.

Who cares how (you contend) they are "treated"? Regardless, the "underlying reason" for a physical event is semantically equivalent to the "law" describing/prescribing that physical event (ETA: unless we want to get into the reason why a supposedly prescriptive law was prescribed, in other words into the intent of the prescribing agent).

If we think of "laws" and "underlying reason" as synonymous, then we are talking about complete laws.

Presumably, by "complete" laws you mean the laws that actually describe reality, as opposed to those (presumably "mere approximations") that we hope to arrive at via the scientific method, in which case, we're already assuming "complete" laws.

And in this case the laws will be both descriptive and prescriptive.

Oh, great. Now the laws themselves are in a state of quantum superposition.

So the contention then becomes:

The events described by complete laws happen necessarily, or the events described by prescriptive laws happen necessarily.

No, the first part of that contention begs the question. It simply assumes that "complete laws" are prescriptive aka necessitating, without providing a justification for why. So, whilst you could contend as much, it would require a supporting argument which currently is lacking.

And the second part of the contention simply reiterates the definition of "prescriptive laws", which is not especially useful.

After all, it is the underlying reason which shows us whether the event is necessary (deterministic)

No, it is whether or not an event occurs in every possible world that shows us whether or not it is necessary, or, on a more forgiving account of necessity, an event is "necessary" if the law (aka underlying reason) which prescribes it is "enforced" by some prescribing agent, whether that agent be conscious or insentient.

[Laird]

This is a good suggestion.

No, it is a bad suggestion based on a false distinction. "Laws" and "underlying reasons" amount to the same thing. There is no good reason to swap one phrase for the other.

We can begin by deciding whether there are any physical events that must happen the way they do, due to the preceding state of affairs.

This amounts to there being a prescriptive law that is enforced such that under those conditions which constitute "the preceding state of affairs", the "physical events" must happen. But if that is the case, then who or what is enforcing that law?

But I will agree that not all events must happen they way they do. Is that a sufficient crack in the wall?

It depends on why you say that. What distinguishes the conditions under which an event "must" happen the way it does from those conditions under which an event "need not" happen the way it does?