What is free will?

[OLDMAN]

It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers. It's just a shallow term, a casual reference in every language, rarely used at that.

So you freely claim.

There is nothing the claim is bound to, no knowledge, no experience, no evidence.

The endless and repeated evidence is I can move my arm when and how I desire. Over and over and over.

So it must be a claim made completely free of any influence beyond the desire of one mind.

Why a mind would desire it is another matter. Human desires that are freely acted on can be very strange.

There is no evidence an evolved brain would desire such uselessness.

The endless claim that no distinction exists between a reflexive brain and an active mind is an error in thinking.

A bad choice made freely using an active mind.

You leaned to move your arm, before you even knew you were an I.
So tell us just how you moved your arm? Which signals did you send to which neurons triggering which muscles and to what extent? Don't know, maybe the "you" persona isn't in charge as much as you'd like to think.
Bugs can move too, think they are self-aware, or are they just giving off the illusion of free will?

We aren't people with brains we use to figure things out...
we're brains that have developed personas to help them figure things out.

 

[untermensche]

It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers. It's just a shallow term, a casual reference in every language, rarely used at that.

So you freely claim.

There is nothing the claim is bound to, no knowledge, no experience, no evidence.

The endless and repeated evidence is I can move my arm when and how I desire. Over and over and over.

So it must be a claim made completely free of any influence beyond the desire of one mind.

Why a mind would desire it is another matter. Human desires that are freely acted on can be very strange.

There is no evidence an evolved brain would desire such uselessness.

The endless claim that no distinction exists between a reflexive brain and an active mind is an error in thinking.

A bad choice made freely using an active mind.

You leaned to move your arm, before you even knew you were an I.

Sure. But in the end I learned how to do something in my mind to cause the arm to move.

So tell us just how you moved your arm?

That's like saying: Tell me how you create the image of a cow in your mind.

Who knows how we do these things at will?

Who knows how we move the arm at will or reject a bad idea with the will?

 

[bilby]

It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers. It's just a shallow term, a casual reference in every language, rarely used at that.

So you freely claim.

There is nothing the claim is bound to, no knowledge, no experience, no evidence.

The endless and repeated evidence is I can move my arm when and how I desire. Over and over and over.

So it must be a claim made completely free of any influence beyond the desire of one mind.

Why a mind would desire it is another matter. Human desires that are freely acted on can be very strange.

There is no evidence an evolved brain would desire such uselessness.

The endless claim that no distinction exists between a reflexive brain and an active mind is an error in thinking.

A bad choice made freely using an active mind.

You leaned to move your arm, before you even knew you were an I.
So tell us just how you moved your arm? Which signals did you send to which neurons triggering which muscles and to what extent? Don't know, maybe the "you" persona isn't in charge as much as you'd like to think.
Bugs can move too, think they are self-aware, or are they just giving off the illusion of free will?

We aren't people with brains we use to figure things out...
we're brains that have developed personas to help them figure things out.

Indeed. And the idea that the brain is in charge even of conscious thought, is crazy to anyone who has studied either psychology or endocrinology.

The same person, with the same brain and the same access to the same data will make a different choice dependent largely on the state of their endocrine system (known to laymen as 'mood' or 'emotions').

 

[OLDMAN]

You leaned to move your arm, before you even knew you were an I.
So tell us just how you moved your arm? Which signals did you send to which neurons triggering which muscles and to what extent? Don't know, maybe the "you" persona isn't in charge as much as you'd like to think.
Bugs can move too, think they are self-aware, or are they just giving off the illusion of free will?

We aren't people with brains we use to figure things out...
we're brains that have developed personas to help them figure things out.

Indeed. And the idea that the brain is in charge even of conscious thought, is crazy to anyone who has studied either psychology or endocrinology.

The same person, with the same brain and the same access to the same data will make a different choice dependent largely on the state of their endocrine system (known to laymen as 'mood' or 'emotions').

Sure and the time of day and temperature or bullets flying...but the grey matter is still in charge. It deals with all imput from experience or falls back on logic or perception of any particular situation. It can choose different reactions.

 

[Copernicus]

...

As to word usage, I strongly object to allowing others to tinker with meaning. Think they are all they may, but incorrect usage and misusage (and not merely different usage) is abound. I find no more difficulty in defining the word God as I do the word unicorn. Existence is not a requirement to a word's meaning, and as far as defining words go, I have been forever hesitant to do so--except with "free will" and such few other terms. I believe the meaning of a word is a function of its collective usage, and as adamant I am as staying focused on lexical usage not being stipulative, I reject a failure to distinguish between reference and meaning to sway my perspective on meaning. As they ask, if you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have," it's never any more or less because of what someone calls it ... and a rose by any other name smells just as sweet.

I think that you are ignoring how word meaning actually works. All words are more or less ambiguous, and all have fuzzy boundaries. There is really no such thing as "correct usage", because word meanings are purely conventional. That is, people push and shove each other verbally over just what sense of a word they want to settle on from a conversational perspective. A philosophically loaded term like "free will" is going to involve more than the usual amount of pushing and shoving (if for no other reason than philosophers are involved ). When people start talking about "correct usage", they are usually just seeking conversational dominance in a usage battle.

Frankly, I believe that our sense of "free will"--the freedom to have done otherwise than we chose to do--is almost always about hindsight, never the moment in which we make the choice. We operate on full autopilot--fully predetermined autonomy--just as robots do. The difference is that we can reflect on outcomes and tinker with the autopilot so that we can have different outcomes when similar choices come to us in the future. It all depends on how well our choices met the test of past expectations. Hence, we imagine an irrealis past in which we made a different choice, when, in reality, the choice was fully determined. This is why I consider myself a "compatibilist". What we normally mean by "free will" is nothing more than a sense that one could have behaved differently, not a point where the choice was truly "undetermined" in the strict philosophical sense of determinism. That is, free will is fully compatible with determinism, at least in the sense of "free will" that I have described.

 

[bilby]

You leaned to move your arm, before you even knew you were an I.
So tell us just how you moved your arm? Which signals did you send to which neurons triggering which muscles and to what extent? Don't know, maybe the "you" persona isn't in charge as much as you'd like to think.
Bugs can move too, think they are self-aware, or are they just giving off the illusion of free will?

We aren't people with brains we use to figure things out...
we're brains that have developed personas to help them figure things out.

Indeed. And the idea that the brain is in charge even of conscious thought, is crazy to anyone who has studied either psychology or endocrinology.

The same person, with the same brain and the same access to the same data will make a different choice dependent largely on the state of their endocrine system (known to laymen as 'mood' or 'emotions').

Sure and the time of day and temperature or bullets flying...but the grey matter is still in charge. It deals with all imput from experience or falls back on logic or perception of any particular situation. It can choose different reactions.

It's really not in charge at all. You may think it is - That the grey matter is the most important player in all of this - But just ask yourself 'who is telling you that'?

People are observably irrational; And observably rationalize their irrational behaviours. The brain is rarely in charge, and never of the really important stuff, without decades of training, and hours of genuinely hard concentration.

Reason is a very powerful tool, and its value cannot be overstated; But the frequency with which it is applied is almost always HUGELY exaggerated. That's human nature. And we do it because it feels good. Which is the same reason we do most things.

Indeed, when a person consistently applies reason, and disregards emotion, for everyday activities, we call this Autism Spectrum Disorder; And it is often characterized by emotional outbursts, because rationality doesn't work as well as we think it should, and that is infuriating.

 

[untermensche]

Sure and the time of day and temperature or bullets flying...but the grey matter is still in charge. It deals with all imput from experience or falls back on logic or perception of any particular situation. It can choose different reactions.

Reflexes can take over when there is perceived danger.

But there is also what we call voluntary control.

The ability to move the arm at the moment of your choosing.

You can't erase the long periods of voluntary control because there are reflexes that can arise in what for most are rare circumstances.

 

[DBT]

.... rarely used at that.

Aha, so our disagreement surfaces already....

I would say that it is regularly and commonly used (or at least strongly implied) in arguably one of the key scenarios for human interaction, law courts (and in morality generally, including in interpersonal relationships). It underlies the concepts of guilt and personal responsibility.

I meant in everyday language, daily discussions, casual references.....I can't say that I have heard the term 'free will' mentioned in quite a while.

I know that it is a regular topic of debate on the Internet, considered in Law, neuroscience, philosophy, arguments for and against, etc, etc, but that is not what I was referring to when I said - ''It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers'' - which was not about neuroscience or philosophy or the law but 'people' in general.

I should have been more specific on that point.

 

[DBT]

It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers. It's just a shallow term, a casual reference in every language, rarely used at that.

So you freely claim.

There is nothing the claim is bound to, no knowledge, no experience, no evidence.

I have provided numerous quotes and links to studies and experiments, only to have you ignore or brush them aside. You don't accept evidence when it goes contrary to your own beliefs......beliefs that are not accepted by Neuroscience.

 

[ruby sparks]

Frankly, I believe that our sense of "free will"--the freedom to have done otherwise than we chose to do--is almost always about hindsight, never the moment in which we make the choice. We operate on full autopilot--fully predetermined autonomy--just as robots do. The difference is that we can reflect on outcomes and tinker with the autopilot so that we can have different outcomes when similar choices come to us in the future. It all depends on how well our choices met the test of past expectations. Hence, we imagine an irrealis past in which we made a different choice, when, in reality, the choice was fully determined. This is why I consider myself a "compatibilist".

So if I hear you right, you're saying that free will, to you, is the ability (for instance) to reflect on (mentally regurgitate) deeds done and imagine that they could have been done differently even when they couldn't have been, because this has a modifying effect on the next deed. If so, I agree, but I would not call it free will. Why not? Well, because even the reflection and imagining is unfree and unfolding automatically and as fully determined as the original deed. In other words (and this is no small matter) any second deed will be as fully determined (barring random effects) as the first one was.

What we normally mean by "free will" is nothing more than a sense that one could have behaved differently, not a point where the choice was truly "undetermined" in the strict philosophical sense of determinism. That is, free will is fully compatible with determinism, at least in the sense of "free will" that I have described.

In a nutshell, I think you're saying (may even have explicitly said, in the bolded bit) that free will is essentially an illusion or a belief that there is free will. And if so what you would effectively be saying is that an illusion is compatible with reality. Thank you for highlighting one of my fundamental issues with compatibilism and why I don't think it grasps the nettle.

- - - Updated - - -

Next up, compatibilism about god. The sense or belief that there is one is compatible with it being the case that there (probably) isn't.

 

[ruby sparks]

.... rarely used at that.

Aha, so our disagreement surfaces already....

I would say that it is regularly and commonly used (or at least strongly implied) in arguably one of the key scenarios for human interaction, law courts (and in morality generally, including in interpersonal relationships). It underlies the concepts of guilt and personal responsibility.

I meant in everyday language, daily discussions, casual references.....I can't say that I have heard the term 'free will' mentioned in quite a while.

I know that it is a regular topic of debate on the Internet, considered in Law, neuroscience, philosophy, arguments for and against, etc, etc, but that is not what I was referring to when I said - ''It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers'' - which was not about neuroscience or philosophy or the law but 'people' in general.

I should have been more specific on that point.

Ok gotcha.

But if I may carry on disagreeing............politely (and knowing that we pretty much agree on most things)...

I don't think the fact that people in everyday situations neither use the word or think deeply about it would make it pointless to inform them that they may be living in what is essentially an illusion, even if the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process. We could tell people who don't use the term that they (it seems) don't have this ability that they assume they have.

 

[DBT]

I meant in everyday language, daily discussions, casual references.....I can't say that I have heard the term 'free will' mentioned in quite a while.

I know that it is a regular topic of debate on the Internet, considered in Law, neuroscience, philosophy, arguments for and against, etc, etc, but that is not what I was referring to when I said - ''It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers'' - which was not about neuroscience or philosophy or the law but 'people' in general.

I should have been more specific on that point.

Ok gotcha.

But if I may carry on disagreeing............politely (and knowing that we pretty much agree on most things)...

I don't think the fact that people in everyday situations neither use the word or think deeply about it would make it pointless to inform them that they may be living in what is essentially an illusion, even if the term itself being of no use for our understanding the decision making process. We could tell people who don't use the term that they (it seems) don't have this ability that they assume they have.

I don't disagree with what you say here. At least not enough to worry about.

 

[ruby sparks]

I don't disagree with what you say here. At least not enough to worry about.

Fair. I sort of knew that.

 

[untermensche]

It seems pointless to tell people they don't have ''free will'' when the term itself is of no use for our understanding the decision making process, human behaviour or its drivers. It's just a shallow term, a casual reference in every language, rarely used at that.

So you freely claim.

There is nothing the claim is bound to, no knowledge, no experience, no evidence.

I have provided numerous quotes and links to studies and experiments, only to have you ignore or brush them aside. You don't accept evidence when it goes contrary to your own beliefs......beliefs that are not accepted by Neuroscience.

You are mistaken.

It is as simple as that.

With all that research you have no objective understanding of the mind.

You have no idea what it is or what it can do.

Your claims to the contrary are lies.

It very is hard to make any progress against bold face lies.

It is fighting against the religious mentality of certainty in the face of no understanding or evidence.

We have our clear experiences.

We can move the arm when and how we chose.

That is a phenomena that needs to be explained.

This nonsense that the brain does it but somehow tricks the mind into thinking the mind is actively doing it is pathetic last resort grasping of straws.

Especially when there is zero objective understanding of what the mind is and how it works and what it can do.

 

[Copernicus]

Frankly, I believe that our sense of "free will"--the freedom to have done otherwise than we chose to do--is almost always about hindsight, never the moment in which we make the choice. We operate on full autopilot--fully predetermined autonomy--just as robots do. The difference is that we can reflect on outcomes and tinker with the autopilot so that we can have different outcomes when similar choices come to us in the future. It all depends on how well our choices met the test of past expectations. Hence, we imagine an irrealis past in which we made a different choice, when, in reality, the choice was fully determined. This is why I consider myself a "compatibilist".

So if I hear you right, you're saying that free will, to you, is the ability (for instance) to reflect on (mentally regurgitate) deeds done and imagine that they could have been done differently even when they couldn't have been, because this has a modifying effect on the next deed. If so, I agree, but I would not call it free will. Why not? Well, because even the reflection and imagining is unfree and unfolding automatically and as fully determined as the original deed. In other words (and this is no small matter) any second deed will be as fully determined (barring random effects) as the first one was.

Not quite. You still have trouble wrapping your head around compatibilism, apparently because you equate "free" with "uncaused" rather than "unobstructed". However, every aspect of making a choice is determined, and that is why we can program machines to make choices. What makes the choice "free" is the realization that there was no external obstruction to achieving a different outcome, just an internal volitional one. The point is that one can change the behavior of the autopilot. Free will is fundamental to learning. Hence, one can be held accountable for one's behavior, because holding people accountable is the way society (or God, if one is religious) controls and modifies choices freely made. You can keep telling me that this isn't actually "free", and I'll keep telling you that we are operating with a different concept of what makes a complex volitional activity "free". We can't change the past, except in our imagination. The future is where the real freedom lies.

Think about how we use the word "automaton". An automoton is a robot that always predictably performs the same actions under the same circumstances. It cannot change its behavior. It has no "free will". We are essentially automatons that can change our behavior to effect different future outcomes under the same circumstances. We do so to avoid punishment, pain, and grief. Or to achieve reward, pleasure, and happiness.

What we normally mean by "free will" is nothing more than a sense that one could have behaved differently, not a point where the choice was truly "undetermined" in the strict philosophical sense of determinism. That is, free will is fully compatible with determinism, at least in the sense of "free will" that I have described.

In a nutshell, I think you're saying (may even have explicitly said, in the bolded bit) that free will is essentially an illusion or a belief that there is free will. And if so what you would effectively be saying is that an illusion is compatible with reality. Thank you for highlighting one of my fundamental issues with compatibilism and why I don't think it grasps the nettle.

I'm not really a big fan of eliminative materialism, because I think that everything we perceive and think about reality is, to some extent, an illusion. That does not mean that nothing exists. It's just a matter of the perspective or stance you take when you describe it. There are different levels of abstraction to reality. You can't describe wetness from the perspective of a water molecule, but wetness is a very real property of water. Radical eliminitavists are constantly declaring real phenomena to be illusions and therefore nonexistent, because they arbitrarily choose to blind themselves to some emergent layer of reality.

Next up, compatibilism about god. The sense or belief that there is one is compatible with it being the case that there (probably) isn't.

IMO, God is a delusion, not an illusion. There is no freedom to modify reality in the same way that there is freedom to modify behavior.

 

[DBT]

I have provided numerous quotes and links to studies and experiments, only to have you ignore or brush them aside. You don't accept evidence when it goes contrary to your own beliefs......beliefs that are not accepted by Neuroscience.

You are mistaken.

It is as simple as that.

I clearly remember posting numerous quotes and links to studies.....which you either ignored or rejected out of hand. So, no, I am not mistaken about that.

With all that research you have no objective understanding of the mind.

You have no idea what it is or what it can do.

Your claims to the contrary are lies.

Your objections are a Strawman of own making. You are wrong because of the simple fact that even though we do not understand how a brain creates conscious experience/mind, this does not mean that nothing is understood or that there is no evidence for a brain, mind relationship, ie, the the source of conscious experience/mind is indeed brain activity.

Furthermore, that it is the state and condition of the brain at any given moment in time that governs its expression of conscious experience/mind....drugs altering consciousness, brain trauma, brain lesions, etc, etc.

That is what you ignore or brush aside in favour of your own unfounded belief in autonomy of mind.

 

[untermensche]

I clearly remember posting numerous quotes and links to studies.....which you either ignored or rejected out of hand. So, no, I am not mistaken about that.

I read it all.

No objective understanding of the mind in any of it.

No understanding of what the mind is or how it works or what it is capable of doing.

And from this nothingness you arrive at certainty about what the mind is and what it can do.

That is the very definition of religious delusion.

 

[DBT]

You are still doing it, still repeating your fallacy...still making out that because something is not understood - how a brain forms conscious mind - that nothing is understood.

Something is understood. It is understood that chemical and physical changes to the brain alter consciousness, alter cognition, alter perception, alter mood, alter emotions...and that these can even be stimulated by applying current to specific parts of the brain, generating fear on demand, generating anger, etc, etc, which means that mind/consciousness is a physical activity, that it is the physical activity of a brain that generates this phenomena, even if we don't know how.

That is what you conveniently brush aside, ignoring all evidence, dismissing all research because you don't like it, because it doesn't suit your needs.

 

[bilby]

There's no such thing as free wifi.

 

[DBT]

No such thing as free wifi? Damn, yet another cherished belief turns into ashes.