The Free Will Thread

Lithose

Lithose

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Jive Turkey_sl said:
The argument was never for any sort of dualism (Harris of all people would never come close to that side of the fence). The argument is whether or not you have conscious free will; are you consciously making these decisions for yourself or are they coming from the darkness of your mind and you have no real conscious authorship of them.
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He wouldn't say it openly (I agree he'd be very against accepting that as his position), but he's building it in order to deconstruct it and assigning the 'free will' label to his construct. But that's the thing, his 'construct' is just playing on people's false perception of themselves, the 'soul' perception, that we are somehow separate from the system, that there is 'us' and 'our body'. What is the 'darkness of your mind'? You're a biological organism, that 'darkness' is part of you. "You" are notjust your consciousness. It's obviously a lot more complex than that.

Take just justice argument for example. Lets say there is no 'free will', and biologically one organism among us is killing others for reasons which go against a social abstraction which reasonably harms the entirety of our social system. We eliminate this threat. Hasany of the causality behind our actions changed? Is there adistinctionhere? Even if your consciousness is justifying the action after the fact, the information which you acted on is the same. You still made a choice.

Once you go deep enough, the distinction is one without difference. Your brain is part of you, they are not fundamentally separable (As far as we know). Even if your conscious acts more like a monitor for a computer (IE displaying your actions in a way other parts of your mind can cycle into their information networks to continue to make new choices based on that relay of knowledge) then those new choices, even if your conscious is an after-the-fact display of them? Are still 'your' choice. You and the 'you' which Harris needs to create for the argument? Is a distinction without difference.

In short, your consciousness yes may just be a construct so you can break down actions and offer another source of information to the 'darkness' in you that actually makes choices...but that darkness is not separate, your consciousness is PART of a system. It's more a reflection of the whole system--the example that a brain tumor can fundamentally change consciousness shows they are interconnected. Both are part of 'you', so 'you' do make the choices. (Even in cases like, say, Charles Whiteman where he said he was having 'dark thoughts' and couldn't control himself--his consciousness had clearly been altered because the whole system was, his consciousness is part of it.)
 
Lithose

Lithose

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Mist_sl said:
Exactly. If 'we' are just an abstract observer of our own purely physically/biologically deterministic course of events, what evolutionary advantage does that observer represent if it cannot affect some change in return?

Hence my argument. I don't really believe in 'free will' in the kind of moment-to-moment idea that we are freely in control of every one of our actions and decisions. But I do believe that in developing metacognition, humans are able in some way to observe and then, consciously decide to engage in steps over time to alter the chain of causality created by our thoughts and behaviors, and therefore alter the course of our otherwise biologically deterministic lives.
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Yeah, exactly. I view cognition as a kind of summary report for the actions the organism has taken. It's a way to feed data back into the system so the neural network has more data to make choices on later. In the end, yes your choices is a summation of a bunch of chemicals and electrons shifting around. It may come before your consciousness in a moment to moment matter, this does not mean the consciousness was not integral to helping this array or neurons formulate a decision. It also does not mean those neurochemical reactions were not 'you'. They were.

What we are is a sum of many parts, break those parts down enough and we cease to be. Distinguishing 'consciousness' is like distinguishing any smaller system in your body, alone it is nothing. So of course 'alone' it has no free will. "Alone" it is not 'you'. It does not exist without the mind, so how useful is labeling it as 'you' as if it is a separate entity?
 
Jive Turkey

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Lithose_sl said:
He wouldn't say it openly (I agree he'd be very against accepting that as his position), but he's building it in order to deconstruct it and assigning the 'free will' label to his construct. But that's the thing, his 'construct' is just playing on people's false perception of themselves, the 'soul' perception, that we are somehow separate from the system, that there is 'us' and 'our body'. What is the 'darkness of your mind'? You're a biological organism, that 'darkness' is part of you. "You" are notjust your consciousness. It's obviously a lot more complex than that.

Take just justice argument for example. Lets say there is no 'free will', and biologically one organism among us is killing others for reasons which go against a social abstraction which reasonably harms the entirety of our social system. We eliminate this threat. Hasany of the causality behind our actions changed? Is there adistinctionhere? Even if your consciousness is justifying the action after the fact, the information which you acted on is the same. You still made a choice.

Once you go deep enough, the distinction is one without difference. Your brain is part of you, they are not fundamentally separable (As far as we know). Even if your conscious acts more like a monitor for a computer (IE displaying your actions in a way other parts of your mind can cycle into their information networks to continue to make new choices based on that relay of knowledge) then those new choices, even if your conscious is an after-the-fact display of them? Are still 'your' choice. You and the 'you' which Harris needs to create for the argument? Is a distinction without difference.

In short, your consciousness yes may just be a construct so you can break down actions and offer another source of information to the 'darkness' in you that actually makes choices...but that darkness is not separate, your consciousness is PART of a system. It's more a reflection of the whole system--the example that a brain tumor can fundamentally change consciousness shows they are interconnected. Both are part of 'you', so 'you' do make the choices. (Even in cases like, say, Charles Whiteman where he said he was having 'dark thoughts' and couldn't control himself--his consciousness had clearly been altered because the whole system was, his consciousness is part of it.)
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Harris isn't making a distinction between the brain and the mind. He's a materialist through and through. But there is a fundamental difference between believing you're making a conscious decision and actually making a conscious decision. He's saying you can no more take credit for the thoughts and actions that enter your brain than you can for your liver filtering your blood. The difference being that we don't feel like we're responsible for the action of our livers. He's not arguing a sort of soul, but is saying we have a biological sense of "me". And we all feel like the "me" is driving, but when we look closer, it seems it is not.
And in the case of blame and justice, he brings up brain tumours all the time. The man who develops a tumour and ends up with a criminal fetish is no more or less at fault for his brain physiology than the man who is born with a brain that results in the same desires. Only we give the man with the tumour a break (that's not to say the tumor-free man shouldn't be thrown in jail. I'm with Chaos in that lack of free will shouldn't have any bearing on our current justice system)
 
AngryGerbil

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Where does your free will reside? What is its location? Is it behind your eyes? Does it weigh 21 grams? Does it come back and reside behind other eyes later on? Is there a place that 'behind your eyes' can go other than behind your eyes? Where did behind your eyes come from?

The Eye of Sauron is fiction because it is a disembodied consciousness. We know that such a thing has not been and likely can not be.
 
Lendarios

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We have the capability of making decisions based on XYZ. That is free will in itself. What ever label you want to call it, but its there. Also animals do have free will as well, as they don't blindly respond to stimuli.
 
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Simas_sl

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I may be misreading the last handful of posts but people seem to be arguing consciousness exists so free will must exist, or that ones actions are at least partially guided by internal forces so free will exists.

I don't think that really gets at what is meant by free will. In other words, you can have consciousness and still not have free will. Your actions can be determined in part by your internal states and not have free will. What I'm thinking when I say I do not believe in free will is that everything is predetermined. All of existence since the Big Bang is essentially a line of falling dominoes. With a sufficient understanding of physics and enough computational power we could plot out the entirety of all existence for all time. We'll never get that far. But Consciousness existing doesn't change that. I think therefore I am is irrelevant. Denying free will exists does not mean you exist, it just means you have no agency.
 
Jive Turkey

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Simas_sl said:
I may be misreading the last handful of posts but people seem to be arguing consciousness exists so free will must exist, or that ones actions are at least partially guided by internal forces so free will exists.

I don't think that really gets at what is meant by free will. In other words, you can have consciousness and still not have free will. Your actions can be determined in part by your internal states and not have free will. What I'm thinking when I say I do not believe in free will is that everything is predetermined. All of existence since the Big Bang is essentially a line of falling dominoes. With a sufficient understanding of physics and enough computational power we could plot out the entirety of all existence for all time. We'll never get that far. But Consciousness existing doesn't change that. I think therefore I am is irrelevant. Denying free will exists does not mean you exist, it just means you have no agency.
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This feels alarmingly close to fatalism. Purely random events seem to happen at the quantum level all the time. I'm not sure the dominos would fall the same way if you were to go back and start again
 
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Simas_sl

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Maybe not, but once they start falling they only fall one way, is how I think of it.

I prefer determinism to fatalism but it may be six and one half dozen of the other.
 
Jive Turkey

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But given infinite knowledge of the universe, because of the random nature of quantum events, you still couldn't accurately predict future events.
Fatalism says you're destined to act a certain way in the future, determinism just says you can only act one way at the current moment based on the current state of your brain
 
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Northerner

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Ha! I don't know if I've seen Harris' video a while back and forgot about it or what but I did pick his example city and it kinda creeped me out for a moment.
 
Phazael

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I agree with the pure physics argument that Simas is advancing, but realistically it is irrelevant as Lithose stated. Nothing is truly random and everything is a direct consequence of something that proceeded it (or at the same time but has no direct discernable connection if you are a fan of synchronicity or chaos theory) and the deck has been stacked. It is irrelevant because any system capable of building accurate predictive models on the distribution of all physical matter in the entire universe (if even such could be measured) would be larger/more complex than the contents of the universe it is predicting. Its a huge exercise in mental masturbation.

On a psychological level, humans are animals and driven by a combination of instinct and experience like any other animal. What separates us (and possibly other higher forms) from the proverbial pack is a degree of self awareness that lets us do abstract thought constructs (like having this esoteric discussion) and occasionally rise above our base drives. Its what makes one guy fall on a grenade and take one for the team and other major acts of self sacrifice and change. Its rare, but its there.

But yeah, from a particle physics point of view, everything has been predetermined, but its impossible to benefit from that fact, so there is no point contemplating it.
 
Jive Turkey

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Phazael_sl said:
Nothing is truly random and everything is a direct consequence of something that proceeded it
...
But yeah, from a particle physics point of view, everything has been predetermined
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This is simply untrue. Photon emission is random and unpredictable
 
Cad

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This whole thing seems like a definitional argument where we want to define free will and consciousness in such a way that we can proclaim that for a certain set of accepted definitions, we have no free will. No free will sounds edgy! Proclaim it! Now buy my interesting book on philosophy.
 
Phazael

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Photon transmission through an uneven medium is unpredictable to a point, but not random, because we don't have a complex enough predictive model. Just because we lack the tools or knowledge to understand a pattern does not make it random. Or are you seriously arguing that two identical particles in identical closed systems will behave completely differently under identical circumstances? Because that pretty much flies in the face of the basics of scientific physical laws.
 
Kaines

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Cad_sl said:
This whole thing seems like a definitional argument where we want to define free will and consciousness in such a way that we can proclaim that for a certain set of accepted definitions, we have no free will. No free will sounds edgy! Proclaim it! Now buy my interesting book on philosophy.
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It's all God's will anyway....
 
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