Neuroscience and free will

[Laird]

This is interesting to me because it gets into the question of how one even comes to regard a pattern of behavior as a law. It requires a lack of uniqueness, such that interest-relative causal conditions yield an effect so often we assign a probability of 100% to the outcome.

This helps me see Bergson's issue with the spatialization of time and mechanization of consciousness. Each decision is a Unique Event, given memory of past decisions informs the agent's new decision making. There's no way to have points representing decisions on a graph for curve fitting, because points imply identity save for positions.

Additionally trying to tease apart the qualia of influencing reasons (which include qualia) and assign them "force" vectors is just impossible. Bergson's arguments go deep into these issues and this seems to me an account for why there are no laws of mind.

Right. This is what motivated my answer to Paul's question, "What are the laws of free choices?" - the answer is there aren't any, there are simply psychological reasons why some people tend to make some choices more often than, and make some more often in the same way as, others.

[Laird]

It stuck in my mind that Paul's debating tactic back then was simply to keep repeating the question as though he was being ignored yet LS (and Michael Larkin and others) wrote pages of extended responses to his questions just as Laird and Sciborg have done here. Yet still the constant repetition of the same question. Here's a few samples of LoneShaman indicating his frustration.

Yep... it's good form to assume good faith in a discussion, but at some point you do have to wonder (sorry, Paul, but honestly...).

[Laird]

that afore-mentioned long debate on the Sekptiko (Mind-Energy) forum.

Oh, this must be the debate that David Bailey also refers to in which LS changed his (David's) view from evolutionary/NS to ID? Quite a famous one - I should probably dig into it.

A lot of material has been posted, mostly by Sci, to this forum in various threads that you could read yourself to find out why "proponents prone", so to speak, on free will, consciousness, and mind. It's probably more fruitful for you to read some of that stuff and get to the bottom of it that way than for us to go around in circles here.

I think everything that could be asked is available here in this thread as, at least, a cursory starting point?

If the question is "How is a free decision made?" it's the Inner/Final Cause that determines the effects of the External/Efficient Cause, as per Sartre's "Freedom is what You Do with what is Done to You". If one asks why that that's not just randomness I'd say randomness/determinism is a statement about our probabilistic confidence and doesn't cancel the need for causal explanations. As shown by quoting Feynman in QED, you can model reflection of photons with a Random Variable without knowing how the photons "decide" (his quotes) among themselves which will bounce back.

I'd go further in pointing out Randomness & Determinism are external probability projections, and how they cannot be applied to Unique Events - and b/c of an agent's memory (what Eric Weiss calls "the experience of past experiences") + emotional/physical state every decision is a Unique Event. You cannot "spatialize" the agent's decisions into points for a curve fitting b/c "points" here imply identity of relevant conditions, and beyond that you cannot represent the inner state of a being with "force" vectors representing different levels of influence for different mental/emotional concerns.

Thus from the outside a free willed being would look random, but that's the mistake of discounting its inner state. Even then as an external attribution it is mistaken identification of the determinist/random poles that confuse us here. The far end of the determinist pole is the event that is demanded by Inexorable Fate, such that there no genuine alternatives that could have happened. The far end of the random pole is Meillassoux's Hyperchaos, randomness that allows for no probability distribution. These are obviously to be regarded as abstractions, so any seemingly necessitated external cause in real life is obviously a disposition in the sense it can be blocked from happening & any seemingly random cause that can be modeled with an Random Variable is actually neither entirely contingent nor entirely random.

Another example of something occupying the middle country of that spectrum would be an electron with a positional cloud that helps constitute a [thrown] ball. When I throw the ball the positional cloud - which represents places the electron might end up at - shifts with the arc of my toss. So I've influenced the randomness of the position cloud without completely necessitating the outcome. Again, not only is this neither deterministic nor random, but I am a causal precursor that translates the Possibility Space of the electron's positions.

So much for the determinist/random dichotomy being a problem (thank you Henri Bergson), but there is still the question of a positive metaphysical account, which concerns the question of dividing causes into Inner/Final and External/Efficient.

If one asks why there needs to be a Final Cause I'd point out that randomness as a term used in reference to particles is used to denote our expectations. We have an expectation for something to happen but instead we find we don't know why there is a selection of possibilities instead of just one. But then, if that's the problem with randomness then even when there is only one outcome ("deterministic") we don't have an explanation for why something else doesn't happen. To appeal to Natural Laws leads to new problems:

1. How would a non-physical entity like a Natural Law interact with physical entities?


2. Even if such a thing were possible something within the seemingly bound entities would have allow the interaction and this would be outside the binding Law.

3. What stops these Laws from changing in their constancy and/or their universality?

Thus just as randomness is a probability expression that leaves us ignorant of possibility selection, so to determinism is a special kind of randomness where the same outcome happens without real explanation. So neither the brute fact of "Natural Law" nor the brute fact of "Randomness" cancel the need for something at the event level to select among the possible effects. This possibility selection is what I refer to as Inner Cause or Final Cause.

Looking at how Feynman discussing photon reflection - and Penrose discussing superposition - both end up using the word "decide" it seems clear that given the varied good arguments for Idealism/Theism/Panpsychism that mental causation is a candidate for Inner Causation. As noted by William James, "chance" is just a negative connotation for something having causal power within itself, which makes more sense that "randomness" which suggests a violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason...and like feces in a wine barrel you cannot have a little bit of randomness (whether it's one drop of wine in a barrel of feces or vice versa what you've got is a barrel of feces)...

I suppose one doesn't have to think of the Inner Cause of the particle as having anything to do with consciousness, at least not within the confines of what has been said so far in this post. But the comparison to Free Will is apt - Inner Causes have to be, within the event where they decide among possibilities, fundamentally simple by which I mean non-composite. Not to mention at the level of any event - given change is observed - there has to be a Ground wherein something is fundamental/axiomatic that determines why something rather than something-else happens...and the only thing that even seems to fit the bill is Consciousness making decisions.

Of course for Free Will to simply break away from the causal chain of the past is to have an entity that we'd regard as insane. So this Freedom has to be within the causal sequence, which is why Sartre's quote is relevant. Free Will is properly located as the possibility selection ("what you do") of some prior set of events ("with what is done to you"). So Free Will is the selection of the Effect of what has come before, not a cause unto itself or leaping outside of the causal chain. 

The way Free Will gets influenced by the past is analogous to how my toss of a ball shifts the position cloud of that electron helping to make up the ball - the prior events (Efficient/External Causes) translate the Possibility Space that I can select from via use of Inner/Final Cause. This is also how past decisions go from Inner/Final to External/Efficient causes, because the decisions you made in the prior Now contributed to your translation to a new Possibility Space corresponding to the present Now. (thank you Whitehead!)

As to how the World comes to be presented as a Possibility Space, that is all the stuff about Intentionality/Subjectivity/Rationality being immaterial that was mentioned in prior posts in this thread (specifically how Intentionality goes from Mind --> World and thus runs against the World impinging on the senses +  how you can't get a causal account of Intentionality w/out recourse to Intentionality).

Also Gregg Rosenberg's work on how all causation is carried by consciousness, though this really didn't play a huge role so far it does relate to Whitehead's ideas of how causation works and came to inform the agent who possesses Inner/Final Causal Power.

Anyway, the point of all this was originally to answer the question of how free will could work. Whether there are Final/Inner Causes in Nature seems to be the big question on which this all hinges. I believe that without Final/Inner Cause you run into the issues with "Randomness" and "Natural Laws" I mentioned above. 

Lots more could be said, but this - as a restating of Whitehead with some help from other authors - seems like an answer to the "how" question. You could apply the "how" to different pieces of my dissection of events, but that strikes me as rather cheeky given Physicalism sustains itself on Luck alone given there's no Ground-floor reason why any event happens.

I'd also be curious if there's another example of something that selects among possibilities (necessary for change to occur) that isn't a Mind.

So we have the negative account, why arguments trying to describe Mind from the World fail + why the determinism/randomness dichotomy is a non-concern. And we have a positive account that involves Intentionality & Final/Inner Cause.

There's also an indirect argument for all causation as mental causation which is that when you look at Rationality/Subjectivity/Intentionality you find they are immaterial yet somehow obviously involved with the brain. The best explanation is the brain is either made of Mind or a substance where Mind is not subordinate to Matter, like Sri Aurobindo conceiving the Godhead as the unity of Will & Force that makes up the world in panentheistic fashion (see also Plotinus' One, Chinese top-down Panpsychism, Aztec Neutral Monism, etc...).

Also most classical theist type arguments regarding a Prime Mover or Assigner of Final Causes could be regarded as indirect arguments for all causation being mental causation.

Oh, this must be the debate that David Bailey also refers to in which LS changed his (David's) view from evolutionary/NS to ID? Quite a famous one - I should probably dig into it.

I didn't want to infer that Paul contributed little to that debate, merely that it seemed to be a tactic to keep repeating the same question when his opponents went to extraordinary lengths to answer. Nevertheless, I have always maintained that I learned a great deal about evolutionary theory from following that thread and indeed from Paul's contributions. I have to say that I found LoneShaman's knowledge and explanations the more convincing, however.

[Laird]

Ah I mean I have a better idea of my personal opinion but I don't want to run over your own. That said I can take a stab at a first draft if it helps center things.

Yep, give it a go, I reckon. If/where there's an opportunity for me to add to it I can make whatever contribution seems best (maybe tying in GCDEs as you suggest).

Where this most certainly doesn't work is in explaining the way we come to have thoughts about the world, because we need to explain how we hold disparate aspects of the world not only as discrete entities but also how we come to have thoughts about them in our minds.To try and find the causal account of intentionality is to use intentionality...but that suggests that, in some sense, Intentionality precedes our mental apprehension of causation. Why I mentioned machinery is to show that this is more than just some quirk, as our apprehension of interest-relative causes is what has given us so much dominion over our environment.

Thanks, that gives me a much better sense of what you're saying, though I suspect I to fully grasp it needs further reading and pondering. It seems you're basically outlining an argument against causality-as-explanation-for-intentionality, which, along with other arguments, leads us to:

So either by going down to [the] level of a single event, or up to the level of events entire, you run up against what I consider reasonable arguments for the necessity of mentality.

And it's good and useful to have those arguments on the table.

Yep, give it a go, I reckon. If/where there's an opportunity for me to add to it I can make whatever contribution seems best (maybe tying in GCDEs as you suggest).


Thanks, that gives me a much better sense of what you're saying, though I suspect I to fully grasp it needs further reading and pondering. It seems you're basically outlining an argument against causality-as-explanation-for-intentionality, which, along with other arguments, leads us to:


And it's good and useful to have those arguments on the table.

Yeah there are issues for causal accounts for Consciousness because so much of what we think of as causes are interest-relative rather than the tide of every external 3rd person presumably non-conscious event. Thus there doesn't seem to be explanatory room for Consciousness within that tide. There's more that can be said about this problem for physicalism...

But I feel like the big question has been answered in showing the folly of the randomness/determinism dichotomy, and showing how causal precursors translate the Possibility Space the agent-as-possibility-selector can pick a decision from....which then leads to a new Possibility Space. This preserving freedom without disconnecting the agent from its place in the World timeline seems like an answer to the concern of how a free agent can make meaningful decisions.

At this point AFAICTell a person who is not undecided either believes there is some secret determinist sauce, that there is free will, or there's a dash of Hyperchaos - the idea something can happen for no reason at all without an explanation - in the Real. We could make theistic arguments that have God as Ground of Being allowing for agents who can determine their own Final Causes, but I suspect this would require an intermission anyway for people like myself to read up on possible arguments/proofs re: God's existence/nature...

As for the undecided, my suggestion is to read up on the aforementioned authors. I am unsure what I at least could say at this point in time that would convince a straggler...

[Laird]

I think everything that could be asked is available here in this thread as, at least, a cursory starting point?

Yes, I think you're right. And it's great to see you lay out the case in such detail (though for brevity I haven't quoted the full post). It's not so often that you write so extensively, but when you do you do it well.

[Laird]

Some thoughts on the different types of necessity, and to answer a question that Paul put: free will is ultimately a metaphysical concept, and so metaphysical necessity is obviously a relevant type of necessity. "Nomological necessity" is relevant only to the extent that "physical laws" which are beyond the determining power of the free agent, apply to (and thus restrict[*]) that agent. We've defined the acronym "GCDE" as a "generalised conditional description of an event". We've stipulated that some GCDEs are "laws" in that their conditions pick out many events in the world. Some of those "laws" in turn might be "nomologically necessary", whereas others are merely "accidentally true generalisations" that just happen to apply to multiple events. So, even given a set of "nomological necessary laws", it remains plausible that they have only limited applicability to free agents, whose (the agents') metaphysical freedom gives them ultimate determining power over at least some of the remaining "GCDEs".

[*] ETA: Though it should be pointed out that there is an argument that as much as "restricting" agents, physical laws are necessary for the agent to exercise freedom, in that they provide the structure within which decisions are meaningful and which decisions manipulate.

Also, if we allow for "nomologically necessary laws" then two tricky and closely-related questions present themselves:

1. In virtue of what are nomologically necessary laws "necessary"? That is, in virtue of what do they describe events that "have to" happen or properties / states of affairs that "have to" be the case? For that which is metaphysically or logically necessary, there is an intuitive answer: in virtue of its being the case in every possible world. If, no matter which world we imagine, something is the case (true/exists) in that world, then it is intuitively obvious that that thing "has to" be true/exist. What, similarly, can we say for nomological necessity?
   
2. What distinguishes "nomologically necessary laws" from "accidentally true generalisations"?
   

Feel free to share your answers...

Yes, I think you're right. And it's great to see you lay out the case in such detail (though for brevity I haven't quoted the full post). It's not so often that you write so extensively, but when you do you do it well.

Thanks, I think it's a nice summary of the conclusions we've come to here so credit goes to the discussion's interlocutors as this all lead to the correct Possibility Space.  

And it is at the very least a "how" explanation on par, but IMO far better, than any of the examples of "how" explanations of comparable processes given so I find it quite adequate. Naturally one can criticize the arguments but as presented it remains a metaphysical picture that could be imagined as a reasonable one for at least some reality out there among the Possible Worlds...