Neuroscience and free will

[Laird]

Are you claiming that there is no possible world in which some events occur out of necessity?

Guys, I'm open to the possibility of a necessary decision - anybody? Just a simple example. Convince me. I'm the judge here.

Guys, I'm open to the possibility of a necessary decision - anybody? Just a simple example. Convince me. I'm the judge here.

Who is making the decisions when a computer program runs?

~~ Paul

[Laird]

Who is making the decisions when a computer program runs?

Golly gosh, I just don't understand it. I've been so accommodating. I've even allowed for the possibility that there could be a necessitated decision. I've given the hard determinists all the free rein they could want, and yet still nobody can give me an example of a necessitated decision. It's really most, most peculiar. Honestly, I just don't know how to explain this. Can anybody else?

Are you claiming that there is no possible world in which some events happen out of necessity?

~~ Paul

I thought that it was pretty much established that this was the case, given that an ice cube may or may not melt in a lava bed.

If there is a world where events don't happen out of necessity, then there are no worlds where it does (necessity must be universal).

Damned if I can explain why my CD player works, but folk intuitions are always right, right?

Linda

Who is making the decisions when a computer program runs?

~~ Paul

The highly intelligent groups of hardware designers, and then a vast number of software programmers who build on top of their creations.

Software and hardware don't make decisions, as they're not conscious nor sentient in any sense. They're designed with many, various layers of abstractions so that a programmer can create some input, which is fed into the CPU black box, which then processes, and spits out a result. At first, they used crude methods, like punch cards, then used those to eventually create assembly languages that could do that for them, and then used to those assembly languages to create far more production abstractions, so then something like C can be written, and fed into a compiler binary that does all of the hard work of outputting a end-user program. Layers, built upon more layers.

It took some extremely intelligent human beings to design a modern computer. The sheer amount of effort and decision-making that goes into designing such a complex and complicated machine is basically unrivaled by almost anything else. The history of computer design, and how it has progressed from nothing to what it is today ~ that takes free will to accomplish.

A computer cannot be designed through deterministic decision-making ~ it takes extremely intricate creativeness to even begin to do so. It takes a wild imagination to piece everything together so it works to the neat degree that it does today.

So, don't underestimate the fact that free will is necessary to create something like a computer. It doesn't just... happen, like you seem to believe. It requires conscious individuals with free will, and the imaginative abilities that come as a result of being able to make choices and decisions.

The highly intelligent groups of hardware designers, and then a vast number of software programmers who build on top of their creations.

Right, but who is making the decisions when it actually runs? After all, we are assuming that there are no necessitated events, aren't we?

~~ Paul

Right, but my question is whether physics is just admitting something that cannot be done at all, even with some sort of "free will theory."

~~ Paul

If that were the case I don't think we'd get pondering about the question from physicists like these:

Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter...
  -James Jean

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From The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley

GM: In a sense, do we create that particle?

BH: That’s a very interesting question. Do we create what we see? Maybe we do. I know people say, “Oh, it’s all subjective.” But there are only certain things you can do with it. You can’t magic things up. You can reorder things. You can rearrange things when you are making your reality. We’re rearranging the processes. We are part of the process.

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How observers create reality

Brian Josephson

Wheeler proposed that repeated acts of observation give rise to the reality that we observe, but offered no detailed mechanism for this. Here this creative process is accounted for on the basis of the idea that nature has a deep technological aspect that evolves as a result of selection processes that act upon observers making use of the technologies. This leads to the conclusion that our universe is the product of agencies that use these evolved technologies to suit particular purposes.

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On Participatory Realism

Chris Fuchs

In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “ ‘I’ is not the name of a person, nor ‘here’ of a place, . . . . But they are connected with names. . . . [And] it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.” This statement expresses the dominant way of thinking in physics: Physics is about the impersonal laws of nature; the “I” never makes an appearance in it.

Since the advent of quantum theory, however, there has always been a nagging pressure to insert a first-person perspective into the heart of physics. In incarnations of lesser or greater strength, one may consider the “Copenhagen” views of Bohr Heisenberg, and Pauli, the observer-participator view of John Wheeler, the informational interpretation of Anton Zeilinger and Caslav Brukner, the relational interpretation of Carlo Rovelli, and, most radically, the QBism of N. David Mermin, R ̈udiger Schack, and the present author, as acceding to the pressure.

These views have lately been termed “participatory realism” to emphasize that rather than relinquishing the idea of reality (as they are often accused of), they are saying that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. Thus, far from instances of instrumentalism or antirealism, these views of quantum theory should be regarded as attempts to make a deep statement about the nature of reality. This paper explicates the idea for the case of QBism. As well, it highlights the influence of John Wheeler’s “law without law” on QBism’s formulation.

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Temporal Platonic Metaphysics

Aleksandar Mikovic

We have presented a Platonic metaphysics where time plays the essential role: it serves to distinguish between real and abstract universes. This role of time together with our proposed mind-brain connection resolves the epistemological problem in platonism [1]. Namely, if the abstract ideas are outside of spacetime, then how can we do mathematics? According to our approach, the answer is that our mind, which is a temporal sequence of ideas contained in our brain, will contain the copies of these abstract ideas.

An important consequence of the assumption that passage of time is a non-mathematical idea, is that mind is not a mathematical structure. This is because we can imagine processes in time, so that the idea of passage of time is contained in our mind. Hence our mind is not a mathematical structure. This then implies that a mind cannot be simulated on a computer.

Note that our approach represents a generalization of von Neumann’s idea to formulate QM as a theory of evolving objective universe interacting with human consciousness, see [9]. In theories with global time, the conflict with relativity can be a voided if one postulates that the label is not the same as a clock reading and that a clock reading depends on the clock trajectory. On the other hand, it is clear that is related to the age of the universe. Since always increases, then the time travel will be impossible within our framework.

From the platonic perspective, existence of multiple universes is natural, since all possible universes exist as objects in the World of Ideas. Further more, by assuming that the passage of time is a fundamental and a non-emergent concept, one can divide all possible universes into the temporal ones and the timeless ones. The temporal universes can be then considered as real, i.e. like the universe we live in, while the timeless universes can be considered as abstract.

To continue from the last post:

Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

As we probed the deeper implications of Penrose’s theory about consciousness, it wasn’t always clear where to draw the line between the scientific and philosophical dimensions of his thinking. Consider, for example, superposition in quantum theory. How could Schrödinger’s cat be both dead and alive before we open the box? “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.”

I wondered if Penrose’s theory has any bearing on the long-running philosophical argument between free will and determinism. Many neuroscientists believe decisions are caused by neural processes that aren’t ruled by conscious thought, rendering the whole idea of free will obsolete. But the indeterminacy that’s intrinsic to quantum theory would suggest that causal connections break down in the conscious brain. Is Penrose making the case for free will?

“Not quite, though at this stage, it looks like it,” he said. “It does look like these choices would be random. But free will, is that random?” Like much of his thinking, there’s a “yes, but” here. His claims are provocative, but they’re often provisional. And so it is with his ideas about free will. “I’ve certainly grown up thinking the universe is deterministic. Then I evolved into saying, ‘Well, maybe it’s deterministic but it’s not computable.’ But is it something more subtle than that? Is it several layers deeper? If it’s something we use for our conscious understanding, it’s going to be a lot deeper than even straightforward, non-computable deterministic physics. It’s a kind of delicate borderline between completely deterministic behavior and something which is completely free.”

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Is The Universe A Vast, Consciousness-created Virtual Reality Simulation?

Bernard Haisch

Two luminaries of 20th century astrophysics were Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington. Both took seriously the view that there is more to reality than the physical universe and more to consciousness than simply brain activity. In his Science and the Unseen World(1929) Eddington speculated about a spiritual world and that "consciousnessis not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense impressions." Jeans also speculated on the existence of a universal mind and a non-mechanical reality, writing in his The Mysterious Universe(1932) "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."...

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Torah and the Thermodynamics of Life: An Interview with Jeremy England

It has to be acknowledged that Tanakh is not trying to keep you comfortable with the idea of natural law, it is trying to make you uncomfortable with the idea of fixed, natural laws. That’s at least one current within it. (There are other ones that are countercurrents. There is also the Psalmist’s idea of mah rabu ma’asecha Adonai kulam be-chochma asita [how many are the things you have made, O Lord; you have made them all with wisdom]—the idea that Hashem made everything in wisdom and it has all this natural order and regularity to it. So, there are these currents in tension with one another.) But papering over that tension and saying, “It’s easy, we don’t have to worry about it”—that can come at a cost.

Someone might say, “The rules of the universe are fundamentally mathematical and probabilistic. Furthermore, there is a very parsimonious mathematical theory that is the explanation of everything, and we are just trying to refine our understanding of that model. But the universe is mathematical.” That is, in a sense, a mystical claim. It is beautiful and nourishes the souls of people who devote themselves to it. And it’s a very common devotion in my line of work.
 
But I staunchly reject that way of talking, because I think the laws of physics are human contrivances. And that might sound like a radical statement, but what I mean is that the world has things about it which are predictable, and we can propose to model it, but those models are our constructions.

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Physicist N. David Mermin on what the study of physics is about:

In my youth I had little sympathy for Niels Bohr’s philosophical pronouncements. In a review of Bohr’s philosophical writings I said that “one wants to shake the author vigorously and demand that he explain himself further or at least try harder to paraphrase some of his earlier formulations.” But in my declining years, I’ve come to realize that buried in those ponderous documents are some real gems: “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience,” and “Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods for ordering and surveying human experience.”

I’m suggesting that this characterization of physics by Bohr is as true of classical physics as it is of quantum physics. It’s just that in classical physics we were able to persuade ourselves that the abstractions we developed to order and survey our experience were themselves a part of that experience. Quantum mechanics has brought home to us the necessity of separating that irreducibly real experience from the remarkable, beautiful, and highly abstract superstructure we have found to tie it all together.

If that were the case I don't think we'd get pondering about the question from physicists like these:

I didn't mean physicists, but physics itself. Anyway, I'll drop this issue.

I'm just trying to find out whether, in fact, there can be no worlds in which there are any necessitated events. If that is the case, then I wonder which agent is running computers?

Also, I can't help but wonder what stops the underlying agent from establishing automatic events. But perhaps that is a silly question.

~~ Paul

I don't understand why other worlds matter, though I agree there could be worlds with no physical axioms.

It just means if you can imagine it being different, it isn't axiomatic in the same way that something fundamental about change is axiomatic.

Why did I choose chicken rather than fish? That is, the question you asked a few pages ago.

Via free will to alter Final Cause.

That would be a statement of the fact that the force is axiomatic. It would not explain how the force operates. We can do that with the four physical forces.

Do forces explain causation? It seems to me they follow from causation already assumed - you take measurements then posit the force is the source of those measurements.

So there is nothing to explain between the force and a particular result of the force?

Well my point was this "force" explanation wouldn't be satisfying, I would rather say the thing to explain is the causation that has allowed us to assume there are forces.

Some randomness has a uniform probability distribution. Some does not. I do not know why this is the case.

So physicalism rests on Luck...seems like an odd belief system to adhere to...