There isn't really a 'freewill problem'.

[ryan]

I meant that each male big horned owl exhibits random behavior when it is not in certain stages of its duties to its family. Or at least scientists have not found any common behaviors during this off time.

You can't will randomness.

1) We have will.

2) Our will is objective randomness (at least partially)

3) Objective randomness is followed by more objective randomness.

It follows, or it is at least possible, that we will objective randomness.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I meant that each male big horned owl exhibits random behavior when it is not in certain stages of its duties to its family. Or at least scientists have not found any common behaviors during this off time.

You can't will randomness.

1) We have will.

2) Our will is objective randomness (at least partially)

3) Objective randomness is followed by more objective randomness.

It follows, or it is at least possible, that we will objective randomness.

Isn't this the mereological fallacy? certainly the brain uses objective randomness as background noise to (and for) neural function, but it's neural function that give rise to anything we might feel tempted (probably unwisely) to call a will (rather than something less loaded like control).

And if we are going to start talking about randomness in this way, can I assume that we are talking about something that cannot be compressed without using more information than the uncompressed version?

 

[Juma]

This may work for all animals; why not? For a few months when work is not needed to be done in any given year, the male big horned owl will "play" and not follow any obvious or common instinct that the other owls do during their "time off".

I think that you miss the point. Quantum substructure and microtubules are common to the brains of all species that have a brain, yet the behavour being generated by each species (within a range) is specific to that species, which is evidence that it is neither quantum or microtubules that determines behaviour of a species or individuals within a species but the macro scale architecture of their brain, human frontal lobes, mid brain, hind brain, the architecture devoted to the sense of smell in canines, echo location in dolphins, etc....

I meant that each male big horned owl exhibits random behavior when it is not in certain stages of its duties to its family. Or at least scientists have not found any common behaviors during this off time.

so what? the brain is complex, even simple systems can behave chaotic. why not a brain? there is no reason to connect that to will.

 

[ryan]

1) We have will.

2) Our will is objective randomness (at least partially)

3) Objective randomness is followed by more objective randomness.

It follows, or it is at least possible, that we will objective randomness.

Isn't this the mereological fallacy? certainly the brain uses objective randomness as background noise to (and for) neural function, but it's neural function that give rise to anything we might feel tempted (probably unwisely) to call a will (rather than something less loaded like control).

Entanglement allows macroscopic distances to be entangled with no know limit to how many entities. And if we don't know the exact physical correlate of the conscious feeling (or illusion) of free will, then how can we know that this feeling is not the entanglement itself?

And if we are going to start talking about randomness in this way, can I assume that we are talking about something that cannot be compressed without using more information than the uncompressed version?

Don't you always have to add at least some information by way of the instruction? Either way, I am interested to know why you ask this question?

 

[Subsymbolic]

Entanglement allows macroscopic distances to be entangled with no know limit to how many entities. And if we don't know the exact physical correlate of the conscious feeling (or illusion) of free will, then how can we know that this feeling is not the entanglement itself?

When we have got a choice between, say, actual information processing that demonstrably promulgates information across the brain and some very speculative physics which is all a bit mysterious really, which is the more tempting option, especially when the quantum option sounds a bit like Teilhard De Chardin on a bad day.

And if we are going to start talking about randomness in this way, can I assume that we are talking about something that cannot be compressed without using more information than the uncompressed version?

Don't you always have to add at least some information by way of the instruction? Either way, I am interested to know why you ask this question?

Of course, that's the point - if the instructions plus the message need to take up more message than the message alone then that's a pretty good test for randomness. And a stochastic system needs good random. I remember writing a Boltzmann machine for my second year AI project - after several weeks of abject failure and increasingly desperate debugging and rewriting it turned out that 'lib newrandom' wasn't random enough and we had to buy some proper random - and that was just simulated annealing.

Thus, I'm just checking that we are using a formal mathematical definition of randomness rather than a folk one.

 

[Treedbear]

Obviously you mean that emergence recapitulates efficient cause, with a relatively homogeneous state evolving to a more complex, heterogeneous, and specialized endpoint. A mere by-product of the principle of increasing differentiation in development.

Nope. Any emergence worth talking about is irreducible. See my earlier explanation.

I fold. Looking back through the discussion you lost me with Banach–Tarski paradox, anomalous monism, and supervenience. I tend to see emergence as the point at which (due to changes in complexity or scale) the ability to understand and predict how a system behaves requires a new set of rules. Such as when going from the quantum to the macro scale of things. Or in this case the complexity of neural connections. It's not a matter of ontology but of epistemology. Free will is simply the inability or apathy towards finding the causes for one's motivations. Consciousness is ... well that's still difficult to even describe in any meaningful way.

 

[fromderinside]

Interesting how you fudged emergence to require a new set of rules rather than to assert that the known rules are not complete which is normal when one resolves combinations. Rather than complete an understanding of combination you go all woozy at the complexity of the problem making things worse by requiring two new conditions. Your fudging is much less obfuscation than where you went on defense though. I agree with you on that.

 

[DBT]

I meant that each male big horned owl exhibits random behavior when it is not in certain stages of its duties to its family. Or at least scientists have not found any common behaviors during this off time.

You can't will randomness.

1) We have will.

Which is not being disputed

2) Our will is objective randomness (at least partially)

Our will is related to the objects and events of the world....randomness does not help rational decision making or the urge, prompt or will that is related to decisions being made.

3) Objective randomness is followed by more objective randomness.

How so? When you see something that you desire and feel the urge to acquire the object of your desire....where does randomness come into the picture? And how is randomness supposed to help?

It follows, or it is at least possible, that we will objective randomness.

No, it doesn't. For the reasons outlined above.....the world and its objects and events are not random and the role of decision making by the brain being to interact with the objects and events of the world/our environment in a rational manner, not randomly, not arbitrarily.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Interesting how you fudged emergence to require a new set of rules rather than to assert that the known rules are not complete which is normal when one resolves combinations. Rather than complete an understanding of combination you go all woozy at the complexity of the problem making things worse by requiring two new conditions. Your fudging is much less obfuscation than where you went on defense though. I agree with you on that.

Me? Or someone else?

 

[Subsymbolic]

Obviously you mean that emergence recapitulates efficient cause, with a relatively homogeneous state evolving to a more complex, heterogeneous, and specialized endpoint. A mere by-product of the principle of increasing differentiation in development.

Nope. Any emergence worth talking about is irreducible. See my earlier explanation.

I fold. Looking back through the discussion you lost me with Banach–Tarski paradox, anomalous monism, and supervenience. I tend to see emergence as the point at which (due to changes in complexity or scale) the ability to understand and predict how a system behaves requires a new set of rules. Such as when going from the quantum to the macro scale of things. Or in this case the complexity of neural connections. It's not a matter of ontology but of epistemology. Free will is simply the inability or apathy towards finding the causes for one's motivations. Consciousness is ... well that's still difficult to even describe in any meaningful way.

The last thing I want is that! I’d rather you understood your point and disagreed than just feel battered into folding. If I can’t convince you clearly, then that’s my failing not yours. I’ll try again with a bit more clarity over the next few days, if that’s worth it for you.

 

[Emily Lake]

You wonder why people care if they think there is no ability to make a free choice, a choice that is not forced in any way?

If they honestly have the faith that nothing they do is a free choice then why try to convince another person of anything?

That we try and try to convince others of our thoughts is because we have freely chosen them and therefore think they are important and true.

These pretenders in not believing in free will can easily been seen through. They don't really believe it for a second. That is why they care what other people think.

Pretty much.

The fact that we're having this 30+ page argument rather implies that free will exists. Unless someone wants to make a compelling argument for how we're all destined to participate in this thread at this time, and are incapable of doing anything else? Because that seems far, far, far more like woo to me than simply acknowledging that choice is real.

It's very,very unlikely that any given person will win the lottery. But that does not allow me to conclude that all people who claim to have won the lottery are liars.

Assuming that there is no choice, then no matter what we are doing, it is exactly as implausible as anything else we could have been doing.

Our participation here was not predictable in advance; But that doesn't mean that it is evidence that we chose to be here, any more than the lottery numbers are evidence that the person supervising the draw was choosing which numbers came out. 5, 15, 3, 21, 6, and 42 had only a one in five hundred million chance of having been the six numbers drawn. Clearly something that unlikely couldn't happen without a conscious choice!

My understanding of statistics and probability seems to differ from yours in a pretty significant way.

- - - Updated - - -

It's very,very unlikely that any given person will win the lottery. But that does not allow me to conclude that all people who claim to have won the lottery are liars.

Assuming that there is no choice, then no matter what we are doing, it is exactly as implausible as anything else we could have been doing.

Our participation here was not predictable in advance; But that doesn't mean that it is evidence that we chose to be here, any more than the lottery numbers are evidence that the person supervising the draw was choosing which numbers came out. 5, 15, 3, 21, 6, and 42 had only a one in five hundred million chance of having been the six numbers drawn. Clearly something that unlikely couldn't happen without a conscious choice!

There is the subjective evidence that being here is a choice.

Unless you are at gunpoint.

If the ideas in your head were not freely chosen you should just stop defending them.

Just stop forever.

That is entirely possible.

I dunno... clearly he is unable to stop doing so. He is compelled by "the Universe" to have this argument.

 

[Treedbear]

I fold. Looking back through the discussion you lost me with Banach–Tarski paradox, anomalous monism, and supervenience. I tend to see emergence as the point at which (due to changes in complexity or scale) the ability to understand and predict how a system behaves requires a new set of rules. Such as when going from the quantum to the macro scale of things. Or in this case the complexity of neural connections. It's not a matter of ontology but of epistemology. Free will is simply the inability or apathy towards finding the causes for one's motivations. Consciousness is ... well that's still difficult to even describe in any meaningful way.

The last thing I want is that! I’d rather you understood your point and disagreed than just feel battered into folding. If I can’t convince you clearly, then that’s my failing not yours. I’ll try again with a bit more clarity over the next few days, if that’s worth it for you.

Yes, fine, as I'm still trying to follow along anyway. But I apologize in advance for not having the time or perhaps ability to understand such abstract concepts. I can't speak for others here but if you can keep it closer to the level of Robert Lawrence Kuhn's "Closer to Truth" series of interviews you might have a better chance of being understood.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm not trying to tell you that it is wrong, in principle, to use technical language, but I thought we were getting pulled away from the central issue here by going into the details of how unsupervised training of statistical clustering algorithms worked. Everyone understands that low-level processing in brains involves neurons that facilitate and inhibit activation. It is fairly easy to come up with methods for simulating that kind of interaction in computer systems, but how does that relate to high level cognitive functions that involve millions of neurons? In particular, how does it relate to the issue of "free will"? Where does it help us understand the difference between the behavior of an automaton and that of a free agent? It seems to me that the reasoning process behind that line of argument is engaging in an implicit genetic fallacy. There is a difference between the behavior of the components of a system and the overall behavior of the system itself. After all, brains are not "neuron soup". They are highly structured machines, whose functions we know a lot about but still can't fully comprehend. Understanding neural networks my tell us something about how the individual components of the brain work, but decision-making seems to be something that happens at a much higher level of brain function.

Well, I was more concerned about your remarks on randomness. Why do you believe that randomness is relevant to this discussion of free will? It seemed to me that you were confusing randomness with unpredictability. Human behavior is not fully predictable, but it is predictable up to a point. Where could randomness play a role in the process of making a choice? Decision-making strikes me as a fully determined process, and that is why we can build robots that make decisions based on situational awareness of their surroundings. That is, in fact, what a simple missile guidance system does.

I hear what you're saying. The description of the learning model was a framework from which to discuss one item: Determinism.

The deterministic approach assumes that only one outcome is possible for any given branch - that the same entity, with the same starting conditions, and same history, would always select the same path, and cannot select a different path. That premise then implies that 1) given sufficiently detailed information, and entity's actions are perfectly predictable and 2) choice is an illusion.

My position is that the universe is NOT deterministic. Setting aside arguments about what is meant by free will, my position is that the same entity, with the same starting conditions, and same history... can end up with a different outcome, because the process is stochastic.

The model that I supplied is an entirely feasible model, that requires only a very minuscule aspect of randomness, but which demonstrates a non-deterministic process for decision making. All that is required for decision-making to be non-deterministic is for 1) the set of comparative elements on which the decision is made to be sampled rather than exhaustive and 2) some element of randomness in the order in which those elements are accessed. The first criteria is met by the process involving a threshold for sufficiency - find a previously experienced set of stimuli that is sufficiently similar to the current set for action. The second criteria is met by allowing for extremely minute quantum interactions within the electrical impulses of the brain.

Taken together, it's an entirely plausible and function model of a decision-making machine that is non-deterministic.

That doesn't necessarily meet the criteria of "free will", depending on how that term is defined (because just deciding to defy gravity is pretty much out, right?). But it does sufficiently negate the claim of determinism so that we can move on to the second aspect of the argument

 

[DBT]

I dunno... clearly he is unable to stop doing so. He is compelled by "the Universe" to have this argument.

Well, not quite....it is the brain that is the agent of response. If we feel compelled to respond it's because 'our' brain has generated this compulsion or prompt to respond, including the form of resonse, for some reason, stimuli, interest, etc

 

[Emily Lake]

@Untermensche, No, it was a rolling forward of present state.

ETA you don't know your arse from your face when it comes to Evolution. Evolution is a result, it isn't a process.

Did you know, your arse formed first?

I've always heard evolution referred to as a process. It's modeled as a process, and it functions as a process. I've never heard evolution referred to as a result.

Unless you happen to subscribe to the hypothesis that evolution is guided and has a definitive end-state? Or that some living things are "more evolved" than others?

 

[Emily Lake]

Where did the "I" emerge from? What caused it (according to you)?

And round and round we go.

You know you two are using different definitions of "emergence", right?

You appear to be using a very straightforward, non-scientific definition... the act or an instance of emerging.
Untermensche is using a technical definition... a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit. He even described it as such.
For reference:  Emergence[/WIKI

 

[Kharakov]

cos(pressure of the continuum *Mass + Ass* pressure of individuality + social pressure*Bass(in the club)) = rudder ratio in the one direction...

 

[Treedbear]

Interesting how you fudged emergence to require a new set of rules rather than to assert that the known rules are not complete which is normal when one resolves combinations. Rather than complete an understanding of combination you go all woozy at the complexity of the problem making things worse by requiring two new conditions. Your fudging is much less obfuscation than where you went on defense though. I agree with you on that.

You're right. I need to read up on emergentism. It was just my knee jerk reaction to the idea of emergence of free will, when I don't recognize free will as having any meaning (other than in the compatibilist sense). In a case like that the word is misappropriated.

A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from the other properties.

Which might perhaps be applicable to consciousness.

 

[untermensche]

I dunno... clearly he is unable to stop doing so. He is compelled by "the Universe" to have this argument.

Well, not quite....it is the brain that is the agent of response. If we feel compelled to respond it's because 'our' brain has generated this compulsion or prompt to respond, including the form of resonse, for some reason, stimuli, interest, etc

What you are saying, if you are able to comprehend, is an asymmetry in the early universe forced him to write that. It has forced all human events, the election of Trump, since there is no opportunity for any choice.

That is what you are peddling.

Why you bother to write it is astonishing though.

Are you not able to tell yourself no, like most people?

 

[Copernicus]

Interesting how you fudged emergence to require a new set of rules rather than to assert that the known rules are not complete which is normal when one resolves combinations. Rather than complete an understanding of combination you go all woozy at the complexity of the problem making things worse by requiring two new conditions. Your fudging is much less obfuscation than where you went on defense though. I agree with you on that.

You're right. I need to read up on emergentism. It was just my knee jerk reaction to the idea of emergence of free will, when I don't recognize free will as having any meaning (other than in the compatibilist sense). In a case like that the word is misappropriated.

A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from the other properties.

Which might perhaps be applicable to consciousness.

It is important to recognize the distinction that Subsymbolic makes between "reducible" and "irreducible" emergence. These are also called "strong and weak emergence". I say that because philosophers treat it as a serious distinction, not because I believe that it is ultimately tenable. Weak emergence is emergence that can be fully predicted purely from observation and simulation. The classic example of this type of emergence is  Conway's Game of Life which can be generated by a  cellular automaton and modeled on a computer. Strong emergence is claimed to have properties that cannot be modeled in this way because the emergent system is said to have an irreducible but downward causal effect on its component parts. An example of this type of causation is the emergence of water from combinations of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The properties of water do not appear to be in any way predictable from its constituents no matter how much they are analyzed. Consciousness, according to Chalmers, is a case of strong emergence, not weak emergence. That is, systemic brain activity exhibits downward causation on the physical behavior of neurons in the system.

I have serious problems with the claim, which strikes me as rather an argument from incredulity rather than necessity. Just because we can't build a cellular automaton that simulates the properties of water, that does not mean that none is possible in principle. Also, downward causation strikes me as essentially an appeal to miracles rather than natural interactions. However, there is an extensive literature on the subject, and I am far from well-read in this area.