Neuroscience and free will

Can you elaborate on what is meant by "scientific manner"? Thanks!

I'm struggling to articulate my perspective well.

Both concepts, random and free will, seem intractable (to me).  We can't explain or demonstrate either in the traditional scientific sense.  Both seem purely conceptual and open to each individual's willingness, ability, etc to accept as manifest.

It may be that folks predisposed to a scientific, materialist-based worldview would be more open to accepting the concept of random as opposed to free will.  As Paul puts it they can simply state: Random means no prior cause.  There's a logic to it and even some hints of it being manifest such as in the decay science Paul referenced previously.  Still, it isn't a proven scientific concept it seems and may even be incoherent as you seemed to offer.  (Interesting thing for me to think about!)

As to free will the materialist struggles because there is not quick, clean definition and the rather more challenging issue of consciousness being so poorly (i.e., not?) understood in scientific terms.  Also, this is the area where the deist/etc likes to conjure soul, higher forms of consciousness and other "woo".

For those coming from a more mystic, spiritual, whatever-term-you-wish-to-use perspective the struggle may be reversed or perhaps both concepts are on level terms?

Personally I don't have anything more than my own bias or perspective on both concepts:  Both are difficult for me to square.

I'm struggling to articulate my perspective well.

Both concepts, random and free will, seem intractable (to me).  We can't explain or demonstrate either in the traditional scientific sense.  Both seem purely conceptual and open to each individual's willingness, ability, etc to accept as manifest.

It may be that folks predisposed to a scientific, materialist-based worldview would be more open to accepting the concept of random as opposed to free will.  As Paul puts it they can simply state: Random means no prior cause.  There's a logic to it and even some hints of it being manifest such as in the decay science Paul referenced previously.  Still, it isn't a proven scientific concept it seems and may even be incoherent as you seemed to offer.  (Interesting thing for me to think about!)

As to free will the materialist struggles because there is not quick, clean definition and the rather more challenging issue of consciousness being so poorly (i.e., not?) understood in scientific terms.  Also, this is the area where the deist/etc likes to conjure soul, higher forms of consciousness and other "woo".

For those coming from a more mystic, spiritual, whatever-term-you-wish-to-use perspective the struggle may be reversed or perhaps both concepts are on level terms?

Personally I don't have anything more than my own bias or perspective on both concepts:  Both are difficult for me to square.

Is there something - by which I mean anything at all in the world - where you feel a satisfying explanation has been given in a scientific manner?

This is one reason why I don't dwell inordinately long on philosophical debate. Mountains of ideas are constructed and elaborated upon, but there is always a dependence on some initial assumptions.

Unless and until there is agreement on the initial assumptions - and a recognition and acknowledgement that they are indeed assumptions, personally I find no satisfaction in these areas.

One example from my younger days, someone once raised a question as to whether it was better to view the world through the eyes of an optimist or those of a pessimist. One could argue a case for both. I simply chose one and moved on.  Other examples either solidified from an undetermined view, or even shifted, on the basis of evidence. The ability to shift one's position is in itself something to ponder on. How often do any of us truly change our position on things? That's both a serious and a rhetorical question, it is intended seriously but it doesn't require an answer.

This does remind me of something Freya Matthews noted in "Why has the West Failed to Embrace Panpsychism?".


It gets into how people seek answers to Big Questions, and the difference between "theoria" - holding the world as a picture in the mind vs the experiential immersion with the world ->

"Consider, for instance, Newton’s laws of motion. If we are given Newton’s second law then we can indeed predict that a billiard ball will accelerate in proportion to the strength of the force applied to it, but if we have no idea why force and mass and acceleration are related in the way the law describes, we will not really understand why the ball behaves as it does. In other words, since this model of explanation leaves universals themselves unexplained, it ultimately begs the explanatory question. The illusion of explanatory power that attaches to this structure of inference from universal to particular emanates not from ontology but from logic, and reflects the fact that ‘the world,’ as it is re-presented in theoria, is organized not by innate ontological necessity but by the rules that govern propositions. These are rules of predication, consistency and inference, first and foremost inference from universal to particular. So the structure of theoria subtly follows the structure of mental doubling or re-presentation via the mirror of picture-propositions; in conformity with this, theoria orders these picture-propositions in accordance with the laws apposite to them, namely, the laws of logic, rather than discerning in reality itself the contours of any innate ontological necessity. In this way the world takes on the aspect of a rational order: in characterizing it as rational however we are in fact identifying the logical structure of the mental mirror rather than the structure of the world itself."

"I would like to spell out in a little more detail how the conundrum of causation at the heart of science is a consequence, at a subtler level, of the mirroring maneuver at the base of theory. In this mirroring maneuver the mind, as we have seen, projects ‘the world’ as an idealized totality onto a kind of mental screen and in the process differentiates itself, in just the kind of way Kant detailed in his analysis of the transcendental unity of apperception, into a knowing subject, on the one hand, and the world as object or known, on the other. Since this object is, despite its world-content, mentally a passive construct of the subject, it will be understood by the subject to be, in an ultimate sense, inert. In the explanatory scenario of theoria, self-activity, and hence motive power, will always be intuited to lie outside the object. The object by definition, qua object, lacks the power of self-creation or self-animation. It will for this reason seem intuitively natural, from the perspective of the subject, to posit an external source of motive power for the world, a Prime Mover or, as secular substitute for such a Mover in science, a principle of causation, which is, as we have seen, a principle of coercion or force. The laws of nature are held in place by the arbitrary but coercive force of causation."

This is held in contrast to:

"It was in this respect that the Greek philosopher stood in marked contrast to the Chinese sage, who, Jullien observed, set out not to explain the world but to adapt himself to it. The sage sought to identify the tendencies or dispositions at work in particular situations in order to harness those tendencies or dispositions to his own best advantage. To this end he remained open to all points of view instead of insisting on a single viewpoint (‘truth’) exclusive of others. In describing the sage as seeking ‘congruence’ with reality, Jullien seems to be implying that the thinking of the sage remained inextricable from agency rather than becoming, like the thinking of the Greeks, an end in itself."

"Our focus has shifted from the world as an inner but nevertheless external-to-the-subject object of observation to the immediate field of active influences in which we are agentically immersed. We do not need a theory about the nature of reality in order to respond strategically to this field: we can feel the environmental pressure increasing and decreasing as we respond now this way, now that. There is no sense of this world as a completed totality; it extends just as far as the range of our own sensitivity, and as we move around in it this range is constantly changing. To train the strategic faculty, one does not teach reason, which is to say, the rules of logic and abstraction, but rather one sets exercises or practices which cultivate sensitivity and responsiveness. This is why Chinese sages typically received their training in martial and other Daoist arts rather than in discursive inquiry."

Might be of interest, as you seem to have cultivated the second path?

The question for billiard ball explanations is why something else doesn't happen.

That's precisely the question for free will, especially since one of the primary points of free will is that I could have chosen otherwise.

Well then we should be good, since Final Causes determine the Effect of Efficient Causes. ("I can still hear you saying, never break the chain")

Except that there remains something to be explained: How does free will break the deterministic causal chain? What other sort of causality is there?

If it follows from the Efficient Causes we do know why. At some point though possibility selection must occur and there must be a Possibility Space otherwise there'd be no decisions.

So does the freedom come in (a) when the possibility space is enumerated; or (b) when one of the items in the possibility space is chosen? And the answer to this question does not explain how the possibility space was enumerated nor how that final selection is made.

No, there's actually less of a "how" in the examples you offered AFAICTell, but perhaps if this is the real "how" you wanted, and not a "how" like how circuits work, please tell us more about Pauli exclusion.

Then we have a different notion of "how." This is how Pauli exclusion operates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%8...statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_interaction

Again, as I said, we do not know why two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state. That is axiomatic. There have to be axioms.

How do the laws of physics operate? How does randomness operate?

Randomness operates by virtue of the fact that there is an event without any causal precursors. Now you just need to know how causal precursors work.

I cannot tell you why physics works in such a way that we can describe laws about it. But I can tell you how lots of things in nature operate and how we can then use those things to create technology. I can give you gory details about microelectronics and even quantum computers. Except for the ground-level causal properties, I can explain almost all of the simple things we see in nature.

So I think something is missing from the story of free will. Something between the ground-level existants and a particular final decision. If all the explanation that is missing is packed into the ground-level concepts, if all the missing explanation is within unknowable axioms, then so be it. But that seems so unsatisfying.

~~ Paul

I get that the bold above (mine) seems logical.  I also get that there isn't a satisfactorily similar logical description for free decision-making.

What I don't follow is how the bold, while seemingly logical, is satisfactory.  It isn't for me since I (still) don't know what random means.  I don't think of things in daily life as being random under the definition you provide.  For me random seems much more akin to "not understood" (credit back to Max for introducing that concept in this thread).

I agree that it's possible that there are supposedly random events that we just don't understand. Otherwise, though, I'm happy with the idea that an event can have no causal precursors. Zero precursors is just as good as 42 precursors. I know that it's sort of unsatisfying, but perhaps not so much for me.

A coin flip, for example, isn't a random event.  It is the inability of the human flipping the coin to be perfectly consistent in the action that introduces the illusion of random.

Right, we should refer to apparently true random events, such as alpha decay.

We have already covered science's inability as yet to prove the concept of random as an actual phenomena.

Yeah, I think that is impossible.

It seems to me that you may be impacted, like all of us, by your own biased worldview on this topic.  The (again seemingly logical) notion of an event with no precursors must not challenge your worldview while the concepts Laird/Sci and others have offered on the free-decision question does.  Regardless, neither "definition" seems satisfactory or even "understandable" in any sort of scientific manner.  You should have angst about both it seems to me.

I'm happy to have my worldview challenged. I think that all the machinations about trying to figure out the source of the free decision seems premature. If I can neither see evidence for them nor understand an explanation for how they can be made, then I can't get too excited about the source.

~~ Paul

What I believe is that only you have a clue about what you are questioning. I don't. I tried, earlier in the thread, to get you to explain what you are looking for but you just repeat yourself as though it is self-evident. Clearly Laird thinks he's answered you at length. Or at least as best he can answer. I also suggested that perhaps you are asking the impossible - that there is no answer to your question. Perhaps you know that already and your tactic is mere deflection.

It seems to me that your question is asking to prove a negative, as in: prove that the outcome of every choice is not determined. In that way, you are not required to provide a step-wise sequence of deterministic events leading to that outcome, all you need to say is "determined - if not, prove me wrong".

I have two choices: chicken or fish. I could flip a coin. Or I could select fish precisely due to the fact that I have eaten chicken for the past two days.

So there is a simplistic description of how I'd make a random or deterministic choice between chicken or fish. Surely we can imagine the deterministic path to be based on 2, 3, or 100 precursors, not just 1, completely algorithmically.

All I want is that sort of thing for a free choice. And I'm sure you'll agree that it cannot be something like:

I freely choose between the chicken and fish.

It seems obvious to most taking part in this discussion that we, as agents, have free will. We cite examples of creativity, novelty, spontaneity, etc., as well as adding some lengthy philosophical discourse (particularly Laird and Sciborg) in support of that conclusion. It also seems obvious that you feel you can just reject all of that by repeating your question as though we should be able to supply you with an answer that you can accept, and only one that you can accept. You get to decide what criteria the answer must meet but all you can offer by way of description of those criteria is repetition of the question. 

Here's a little example of the kind of response from you that I'm talking about. Nbtruthman stated:

"So you can't get around it, human creativity requires that there exist the same true freedom of thought (generating possibilities) and action that is needed for true free will."

Your response:

"I await a proof of this claim."

If all you are going to offer is a repeated variation on "prove it", then you should understand why Laird called time on his participation.

You don't agree that Nb's response is a just-so claim that needs a proof if we are to accept it? What are the non-question-begging premises? And even if I accept it, it does not often an explanation.

~~ Paul

I have two choices: chicken or fish. I could flip a coin. Or I could select fish precisely due to the fact that I have eaten chicken for the past two days.

So there is a simplistic description of how I'd make a random or deterministic choice between chicken or fish. Surely we can imagine the deterministic path to be based on 2, 3, or 100 precursors, not just 1, completely algorithmically.

All I want is that sort of thing for a free choice. And I'm sure you'll agree that it cannot be something like:

I freely choose between the chicken and fish.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that at all. You have demanded a description of a choice while stipulating "random or deterministic". Are you saying that free choice must be either random or deterministic? Why can't we include subjective preference? Does subjectivity inevitably reduce to physical precursors (movement of particles, neuronal activity, etc.)? Or, to ask it another way: how do you define precursors? Is subjective preference the so-called "third option" that you dismiss in earlier posts?

Yes, I believe this is always the impasse. Physicists can describe, theorize, and harness deterministic cause/effect and randomness. If we could just make one step toward describing the third thing, then I might be willing to believe there is something there. The third thing might be completely separate, or it might carve a chunk out of randomness. That's fine. But I haven't heard even a hand waving description of it.

~~ Paul

Again, I'm trying to imagine where you are coming from with your algorithmic approach. I might choose chicken on one occasion and fish on another. If you have an algorithm which determines that I would inevitably choose fish, why then on another occasion would I choose chicken? It might be that I caught a whiff of roast chicken in the air and found that appealing. You might call that particles in the air but I would call that subjective appreciation. In other words, the choice might come down to whether I prefer, on that occasion, the smell of chicken to fish but on another occasion that preference might be reversed.

That's precisely the question for free will, especially since one of the primary points of free will is that I could have chosen otherwise.

That is answered by Final Cause. Now we can get into the question of whether Final Causes are extant I suppose.

Except that there remains something to be explained: How does free will break the deterministic causal chain? What other sort of causality is there?

The "deterministic" causal chain that is happening by Luck? What's to be broken there? Final Cause fills in the explanatory gap, at least in some Possible World which is what I thought the discussion was about -> How could Free Will be Possible?

So does the freedom come in (a) when the possibility space is enumerated; or (b) when one of the items in the possibility space is chosen? And the answer to this question does not explain how the possibility space was enumerated nor how that final selection is made.

At (b). The How of the Possibility Space follows from Tallis' discussions regarding Intentionality, and I still don't understand what kind of "how" you are looking for regarding the final selection.

Then we have a different notion of "how." This is how Pauli exclusion operates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%8...statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_interaction

Do these explain why something else doesn't happen, or just descriptions where causation is taken for granted? If the latter those aren't "how" explanations that would be of value at the level of decisions.

A quick glance suggest it's the latter...

Again, as I said, we do not know why two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state. That is axiomatic. There have to be axioms.

So it's a "just so" offering? Better to have an axiom as it relates to any event, rather the brute facts where bottom level physics is taken for granted. After all a metaphysics of change is something true in all possible worlds, whether this world is a simulation or a god's ephemeral dream..

Randomness operates by virtue of the fact that there is an event without any causal precursors. Now you just need to know how causal precursors work.

I don't think the first sentence makes any sense unless it's in relation to an inner cause. Why does anything else obey the assumption that things need causal precursors if something within the universe does not...isn't this an appeal to Luck? Beyond that there are limitations to the randomness otherwise they wouldn't be modeled by stochastic variables - so this isn't really pure randomness, for example position clouds of electrons can be translated across a 3-D coordinate system by moving the macro-objects they constitute.

Of course if no one can say how causal precursors work it hardly seems worthwhile to worry about mental causation, and as per Tallis' talk physics has no account for causation:

I cannot tell you why physics works in such a way that we can describe laws about it. But I can tell you how lots of things in nature operate and how we can then use those things to create technology. I can give you gory details about microelectronics and even quantum computers. Except for the ground-level causal properties, I can explain almost all of the simple things we see in nature.

All of that would assume causation then as something taken for granted? How could that ever be equivalent to understanding a singular event like a decision? The "how"s you speak of are in the wrong explanatory space and seem quite orthogonal to the "how" of a decision. To me this seems akin to a cook demanding explanations for quantum gravity while noting all the recipes he can explain that take such physics for granted?

Another way of perhaps seeing this --> We can start with change and get into Aquinas' Five Ways, and then we have a God who gives us an explanation for the causal picture. Then we would could just paste whatever "how" explanation you have for your examples at the end of those explanations...that seems more satisfying then papering over the explanatory hole which just takes causation for granted within the context of the physicalist faith in "just so" magic?

Additonally, we create technology because we have causal power - we find interest relative causes by our Intentionality + Subjectivity, then use Rationality to bring artifacts into being - subsuming the natural ends of materials to serve our ends. And since there are no good materialist/physicalist causal explanations for Consciousness (as per prior posts in this thread re: Intentionality) machines are a sign of our causal power having efficacy within the network of causes.

So I think something is missing from the story of free will. Something between the ground-level existants and a particular final decision. If all the explanation that is missing is packed into the ground-level concepts, if all the missing explanation is within unknowable axioms, then so be it. But that seems so unsatisfying.

I still don't see the problem...I mean I can  see what is missing when physicalists take things like "Laws of Nature" as tenets of their faith, brute facts that paper over causation questions, but the idea of Final Cause as determining the Effect of an Efficient Cause seems perfectly fine as that brings the history of the agent into account within the translation to particular Possibility Spaces. That Consciousness evades and at least in the case of Intentionality runs against the external 3rd person causal flow only highlights the space in the world picture where Final Cause can act.

OTOH physicalism stripped of the untenable curtain of Laws is obviously Hyperchaos, where no explanation is given for why things happen one way instead of another...that seems like intellectual Abyss in defiance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to me. As noted in the Freya Matthews paper I mentioned above (linked for convenience):

‘Why does the world cohere?’...The question arises for physics because when the world is conceptualized in physicalist terms, as a manifold of logically discrete physical elements only externally and contingently stuck together by causal laws, then it is a mystery why these elements remain stuck together—why the ‘laws’ continue to hold. For, as we have seen, nothing can be shown to anchor those laws, ontologically speaking. Causality has been unmasked as illusory, at least insofar as it is supposed to confer natural necessity. There is therefore no reason why the universe should not simply fall apart at any moment."

And I can see how physicalism makes human life worthless, because all seeming decisions are controlled by external causal precursors...but I don't see why this should bother those who've seen the deep flaws in the belief system of physicalists/materialists? Especially those of us who are either Idealists or place the Mind as equivalent or over the Material, like Sri Aurobindo seeing "Godhead" as a Unity between Will & Force or Thomist-Aristolieans who see God granting us a limited version of the powers inherent to the Ground of Being as determiner of efficient & final causes.

But then it seems, IMO, that it is pretty close to certain that all causation is mental causation in some way, more so now that the thread has detailed physicalism's numerous explanatory failures...maybe I'm too far in the other corner to see what I assume is a real problem across the chasm.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that at all. You have demanded a description of a choice while stipulating "random or deterministic". Are you saying that free choice must be either random or deterministic? Why can't we include subjective preference? Does subjectivity inevitably reduce to physical precursors (movement of particles, neuronal activity, etc.)? Or, to ask it another way: how do you define precursors? Is subjective preference the so-called "third option" that you dismiss in earlier posts

I'd say even starting down this line of thinking has taken on intellectual errors. Randomness and Determinism are, from physics, a projection on to reality. It's a measure of our ignorance/confidence with nothing to say about causation itself.

For example Penrose as a physicist is familiar with "randomness" as represented in the math of physics but still says things like this:

“An element of proto-consciousness takes place whenever a decision is made in the universe,” he said. “I’m not talking about the brain. I’m talking about an object which is put into a superposition of two places. Say it’s a speck of dust that you put into two locations at once. Now, in a small fraction of a second, it will become one or the other. Which does it become? Well, that’s a choice. Is it a choice made by the universe? Does the speck of dust make this choice? Maybe it’s a free choice. I have no idea.”

Rather than "subjective preference" I would use "subjective aim" -> If I understand you correctly the obvious distinction between randomness and freedom is that freedom is acting towards an end?

I'm not sure that I would agree with that at all. You have demanded a description of a choice while stipulating "random or deterministic". Are you saying that free choice must be either random or deterministic? Why can't we include subjective preference? Does subjectivity inevitably reduce to physical precursors (movement of particles, neuronal activity, etc.)? Or, to ask it another way: how do you define precursors? Is subjective preference the so-called "third option" that you dismiss in earlier posts?

Stipulating? No, no, I was just giving examples of random and deterministic choosing methods. I expect the free method to be different, not wholly random and deterministic. Or not even at all random and deterministic.

Again, I'm trying to imagine where you are coming from with your algorithmic approach. I might choose chicken on one occasion and fish on another. If you have an algorithm which determines that I would inevitably choose fish, why then on another occasion would I choose chicken? It might be that I caught a whiff of roast chicken in the air and found that appealing. You might call that particles in the air but I would call that subjective appreciation. In other words, the choice might come down to whether I prefer, on that occasion, the smell of chicken to fish but on another occasion that preference might be reversed.

We're talking about the deterministic method now, not the free method. It could be different next Tuesday because there are actually dozens of factors that determine my choice, and also because things happen between now and next Tuesday. And I agree that the choice can come down to preferences, wants, desires, inclinations, and fancies. But that doesn't necessarily mean that any of those emotions are not purely deterministic and random.

So I just want a little script of how a free decision is made. I'm making no assumptions about determinism, randomness, physics, or otherwise.

~~ Paul