Neuroscience and free will

Don't really have a dog in this fight, but I've been giving this thread some thought, since I originally contributed to it. Trying to find some idea that might cut through the problem, but which also generally agrees with my own personal research. Difficult.... but...

If I make some assumptions, most importantly, that I only consider the ability to make a choice from an individuals frame-of-reference, and also that...

1. spacetime is shared.
2. that an individuals spacetime frame-of-reference is the result of an enormous calculation of information that underlies spacetime.
3. that only information which 'matches-up' with an individual can be shared.

If an individuals present frame of reference in spacetime is only the result of a calculation of shared and matching information. Then it seems nonsensical for the individual to believe that their choices could ever be made directly within this calculated result.

If we consider the popularised concept of linear time. Then one could say that choices are perhaps made everywhere but the calculated result. That an individuals choices are made everywhere else, and not where the individual is 'now' (an individuals spacetime frame-of-reference). The 'now' being only the result of a calculation.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. But I don't think anyone is claiming that past events and the current state of affairs do not come under consideration when making free decisions.

631 is my post? ->

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-n...6#pid26636

You link is to post #620.

Here is the post I'm talking about:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-n...4#pid26664

~~ Paul

You are the cause of them.

I'm not the cause of all of my actions. The court still has to make determinations.

I was not talking about understanding free decisions. I just want to know how exactly one will define moral responsibility when there is no way anyone actually makes decisions.

That is a question for legal scholars. They already worry about it. Perhaps it will become more difficult.

No, I am saying if a person accepts Physicalism, but then says, "So this means I am no long responsible for my actions" the response to correct them would be X.

X would be whatever it is that makes someone responsible for their actions when they do not decide those actions. I just haven't seen anything so far that answers the question.

Even if I had an answer, most people would ignore it. No hardened criminal is going to be convinced by a philosophy talk, regardless of the "correct" metaphysic. But it is interesting to wonder whether people actually believe they have free will. One of those papers I posted above is about this question.

So there is no other kind of free will, and no way to rescue human achievement and moral responsibility if Physicalism were true (which, again, thankfully it cannot be).

There is free will in the legal context, which is not necessarily about indeterminism. There are many philosophers who talk about compatibilist free will, but I don't know much about that.

~~ Paul

But isn't that because research is geared towards technological advancement and working with physics as it pertains to those goals? The physics of Newton was clearly adequate for most engineering purposes and I dare say that quantum mechanics came as something of a shock to engineers and others involved in the practical applications of classical mechanics.

But you'd think with all this deep research, some hint of the presence of free will would come up. It is possible that we are somehow just looking in the wrong place.

I have negligible education in maths or physics so by all means dumb it down for me but I think it somewhat condescending to assume that we are all at kindergarten level, to use malf's words.

I try not to talk to anyone as if they do not understand the subjects at hand.

~~ Paul

You link is to post #620.

Here is the post I'm talking about:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-n...4#pid26664

~~ Paul

Thanks, that is weird tho I double checked and had my glasses on...

I can't speak for malf on that particular question.

However, it does seem like people are dumbing down physics for the sake of comparing it to a possible indeterministic world. We agree that the lowest levels of physics involve axiomatic existants and properties based on our observations. And I think we might agree that a specific free decision is axiomatic. At least, it seems to me that has to be the case, since no one can break it down into "steps" or "subdecisions" or "inputs and outputs" or "probabilities" or whatever. There isn't even any explanation for where to draw a line between a trivial decision and a complex, composite decision.

What I find somewhat disingenuous is that people place both of those axiom systems on the same level. We've got copious observations and mathematics and modeling and inter-theoretic descriptive laws and derived technology for the physics axiomatic system. We don't have much for the free will axiomatic system. This is not to say that we won't in the future, but any talk of promissory physics in this context is laughable.

~~ Paul

Complex decisions are a curation of the Possiiblity Space via Rationality (of course Intentionality & Subjectivity are intertwined here, as per Lowe's There are No Easy Problems of Consciousness), as mentioned previously. So really a sequence of decisions.

Re: Axioms of Physics and Metaphysics of Change -> They aren't on the same level, following from Laird's in-depth discussion of necessity & possible worlds. The "axioms" for all events extends to all possible worlds where change exists and the world is intelligible, so by this arrangement of "axioms" it would be at a deeper level where one discusses Final & Efficient causes. Those are just axioms of Change but they show free will is not radically different from the change that exists in presumed non-mental causation. The free part comes in as Final/Inner Cause, which determines the Effect of Efficient/External Causes - so both taking in the causal factors (which determine the Possibility Space) and the need for the selection of a Potential state comes from the Actuality of the Past/Present (so not random, which is potential actualizing for no reason).

As was noted previously there is an incomplete picture of causation in physics as you yourself have noted from your reference to Luck, and physics assumes an unexplained causation at the level of each event, where decisions - which are Unique Events - need to be placed.

Plus it is not the axioms of physics that allow for technology but Intentionality / Subjectivity / Rationality of Consciousness that allow us to apprehend the causal "handles", as Tallis puts it, of the world. See this interview & this interview which has some physicists (England & Mermin) talking about laws of physics as representing our knowledge/thoughts about this universe rather than descriptions of Nature. Another way of looking at this is the question is asking "Why don't the laws of phyiscs change?" or Talbott's question, "Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen?"

All to say the technology built from physics is largely irrelevant to analysis of a single event - looking at an arena where Laws of Nature were extrapolated from unanalyzed/assumed causal events is the wrong explanatory space. While not saying it the same way Tallis gets into this sort of thing in Of Time and Lamentation.

Thanks, that is weird tho I double checked and had my glasses on...

This is post 640 for me...something is happening with the numberings - I don't have anyone on ignore so it doesn't make sense for my numbers to be different...

I reread pages 47–53. Unfortunately, I did not find anything that seems to be an explanation of why I would choose chicken rather than fish.

I think it's quite possible that I am simply reading over something that you think answers my question, more or less. It would really be helpful if you could link to or quote that text.

I did read this:

"There's a need (or so I would argue) for Final Causes, and if Mind can select the Final Cause that's how it makes a free decision.
How I see it is:
Efficient Cause -> What is usually regarded as the Cause of an Event.
Final Cause -> What selects a Possibility from the set of Possible Effects."

That doesn't answer the question, it merely states that I can make a free decision.

Also:

"By Mind's ability to make use of Final Cause through Intentionality / Subjectivity / Rationality."

Again, just a restatement of my ability to make the choice.

And then:

"So for any cause-effect relationship we have the presence of things that are Actual ("Efficient Cause" or "External Cause") and something within the entity undergoing change that selects from available Possible Effects ("Final Cause" or "Internal Cause").

To go back to the free being that incorporates its relevant Past, I'd use Sartre's definition of Free Will -> "Freedom is what you do with what is done to you." So the past leading up to the decision is the Efficient/External Cause (meaning the causal precursors that led to the available possible decisions) and this decision is made by the Final/Inner Cause of the free being.

So the free being is not just making decisions disregarding what has come before, as what has come before is included in the Efficient Causes. And the free being is not just acting randomly -- which would mean the actualizing of a Potential State without something already Actual involved -- because the Past & Present states of the world (meaning all precursors to a decision) are the Actual in this case."

The bolded statement just names the decision-making part of the being.

The final paragraph seems reasonable but does not explain the way in which the Final/Inner Cause selects from the possibility space.

~~ Paul

All the stuff about Final/Inner Cause was discussed in the thread? Which is not to say it was exhaustively discussed, as said before we can dig into it. Imagine a brick going through a window...

A singular free discussion is non-composite, just as the selection of outcomes in any causal event has to be at the base level. Otherwise there has to be something to the possibility selection of any event, mental or not, which then is a process with its own need to select outcomes.

But that is [a] path to an infinite regress of a single moment - like a stack of infinite simulations within simulations with no actually [non-simulated] processor to advance time - and then nothing would ever happen. Since we observe change, that cannot be the case. And [selection of outcomes] cannot be due to a Physical Law, as per Talbott:

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.

All this gives you some indication why so many scientists, when stepping back from the rather messy reality of their daily work and considering the character of their science, show such great reluctance to reckon with the substance of the observable world. They much prefer to conceive the explanatory value of science in terms of abstract laws — equations, rules, algorithms — which naturally remain gratifyingly lawful in an uncomplicated way. The world disappears into a vague notion of "whatever gives material reality to the laws".
But a willingness to consider this reality in its own terms immediately reveals the impossibility of the all-explaining laws with which science supposedly has to do. We come to realize that a physical phenomenon and its lawfulness must be considered as a unity — a syntactic-semantic unity of a sort that receives little recognition within science for the simple reason that physical phenomena (as opposed to their "governing" syntax) receive little recognition.

Now if someone is asking, "Why should human decisions be of this fundamental kind?" that would be a big point - or so I've assumed - of this forum entire.

(That said Tallis gets into this as well, in Of Time and Lamentation. As does Gregg Rosenberg in A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World. As does Feser in Aquinas for Beginners.)

Re: Axioms of Physics and Metaphysics of Change -> They aren't on the same level, following from Laird's in-depth discussion of necessity & possible worlds. The "axioms" for all events extends to all possible worlds where change exists and the world is intelligible, so by this arrangement of "axioms" it would be at a deeper level where one discusses Final & Efficient causes. Those are just axioms of Change but they show free will is not radically different from the change that exists in presumed non-mental causation. The free part comes in as Final/Inner Cause, which determines the Effect of Efficient/External Causes - so both taking in the causal factors (which determine the Possibility Space) and the need for the selection of a Potential state comes from the Actuality of the Past/Present (so not random, which is potential actualizing for no reason).

This is an interesting description of the players but not of the procedure for making a free decision.

You may claim that these axioms are somehow more fundamental because they pertain to all possible worlds, but that does not put them on par with physics axioms in terms of math, details, models, and derived technology. These ideas need to be fleshed out.

As was noted previously there is an incomplete picture of causation in physics as you yourself have noted from your reference to Luck, and physics assumes an unexplained causation at the level of each event, where decisions - which are Unique Events - need to be placed.

You have not explained causation. You have simply named some causes, spaces, and actualizations that supposedly take part. The reason for selection is specified as "the need." There is still nothing said about why the Final Cause selected chicken instead of fish.


~~ Paul