Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Jarhyn]

proclivities that are determined by genetics, environment and life experiences

... That drive them to make the choices they do.

Choices have reasons too.

You're not invalidating the choice just to say that the context has priors.

In the moment, the context is all. Universe is not a machine that spits out a whole block at once from the beginning but rather process happens and each next moment is a function of the current, not the previous, moment.

Determinism doesn't allow alternate actions. There is not freedom to do otherwise within a determined system.

No, the context in which the individual objects in a deterministic system do it allow alternate actions in the moment. Just because one thing happened now does not mean the same thing happens tomorrow on the same setup.

Just because the processor jumps from line 225 today does not mean the processor ju.ps from line 225 tomorrow, because tomorrow, register 2 receives 4 instead of 0.

The individual objects in a deterministic system allow alternate actions at disparate times when those same objects encounter different contexts against the same internal state.

Even monoliths make have localities.

Because choices and the discussion of them are not about now, specifically.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

...

A really good book on the subject of consciousness is Michael Graziano's "Consciousness and the Social Brain". One of the things he points out is that an early survival requirement was reading clues from predators faces as to what they were thinking. Were they about to attack? etc. But the key info was that awareness is a data schema that tracks the attention mechanism.

Subvocalization was a topic in early psychic research, when having the subject guess what card symbol the experimenter was looking at. It was feared that the subject was picking up on the experimenter's subvocalization, so they had to change the set up in some way. I don't recall any more than that.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The compatibilist proposition is simply that free will is a meaningful concept within a deterministic world.

The proof is this:
P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

Agency just comes down to state and condition of a brain in any moment in time. The internal condition of the brain and external elements that act upon it in each moment in time producing a necessarily fixed response in each and every moment in time.

Right. My brain, faced with the multiple possibilities on the menu, must choose what I will have for dinner. And, since I am free of coercion and undue influence, the choice is my own freely chosen "I will have the lobster, please".

And, because it was I, myself, that made the choice and placed the order, the waiter will bring me the lobster dinner, and will also hold me responsible for my deliberate act by bringing me the bill.

Free will is pretty straightforward that way. So is compatibilism:

The choice is deterministic, because it is reliably caused by my own goals and my own reasons (which have their own prior causes).

The choice is free will, because it is reliably caused by my own goals and my own reasons (which have their own prior causes).

You cannot do something one moment, but the next you can do what you could not a moment ago....

You're a little confused there. If "I can choose the steak" was true a moment ago, then "I could have chosen the steak" will be true later, even after I have chosen the lobster. The "I could have" is simply the past tense of "I can".

The fact that I did not choose the steak does not imply that I could not have chosen the steak. When we speak of something that we "could have done", we are always implying that we "did not do it". So, "did not do" never rules out "could have done", as it is always implied and fully expected by the "could have".

For example, remember the traffic light that "could have" remained red, even though it "did not" remain red. We may safely say that the light "would not have remained red", but we cannot say that it "could not have remained red".

That's just how these words work. Because "I can choose the steak" was true at the beginning of the choosing operation, "I could have chosen the steak" will be true at the end, even though "I did not choose the steak", and even though, given determinism, "I never would have chosen the steak". I still could have chosen the steak.

not because you have free will and you decided to do otherwise, but because the brain was altered by information acting upon it: inner necessitation.

The causal mechanism of the inner necessitation was the choosing operation. You cannot continue to pretend that choosing doesn't happen. It is an actual event that takes place within our brains.

Your dinner companions urge you to try this or that, information that the brain acquires, processes, integrates with memory function, proclivities, etc, then brings the only possible action - in that moment in time - to consciousness: you decide to order Lobster.

Yes. I decide to order the lobster. There may be many influences upon my decision. But none of them are coercive or undue. It is still my own choice.

Now, if my impulsive dinner companion pulled out his gun and said, "You're going to order the steak, right now, or I'll blow your head off!", then I would be forced to order the steak, and my will would be subject to his will, and thus, not free.

And it is to make such distinctions between actions caused by our own goals and reasons, versus coerced actions, versus insane actions, that free will remains a meaningful concept, even in a fully deterministic world.

Which - rather than 'free will' - is a case of information processing within a determined system.

There's no "rather" here. Free will IS a case of information processing within a deterministic system.

Necessitated actions - being determined - are by definition not willed, chosen or negotiable.

Causally necessitated actions may be freely chosen, coerced, insane, or accidental. There is nothing in the definition of determinism (P2) that excludes any of these causes.

If you think there is something in the P2 definition of determinism that excludes the P1 definition of free will, then please prove your claim.

 

[Copernicus]

Really. You need to understand what noise and sound are, not what you consider polite discussion between chatty drinkers at the club.

If you don't want to address what I posted about the difference, posting random materials that you find on the internet is not going to help advance the discussion. I was interested in how you might address the problem of building a mental model of reality, but I suspect that you have nothing of interest to say on the subject. Let's just let it rest.

Its pretty evident from my responses that we can't build a mental model of reality.

What we are left with is an explanation of how what we do is achieved by our nervous system. You don't seem interested in that since it, at best, we can only be model a relative reality in accordance with our privative equipment. Again this is something you don't seem interested in doing.

It is not at all evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality. You might as well deny the existence of air and then go on to discuss how it is our bodies manage to inflate our lungs. You can refuse to use the term "air", but you still need to explain breathing. So you play a linguistic game by adopting different terms to describe the same concept that was perfectly well described by the term "air".

So let's talk about the fact that perception in human beings is known to be active and not passive. That is easy to prove with scientific methods, and any introduction to psychology will explain how to prove it. So let's start with a definition of  Active Perception. The one in Wikipedia will suffice:

"...a study of Modeling and Control strategies for perception. By modeling we mean models of sensors, processing modules and their interaction. We distinguish local models from global models by their extent of application in space and time. The local models represent procedures and parameters such as optical distortions of the lens, focal lens, spatial resolution, band-pass filter, etc. The global models on the other hand characterize the overall performance and make predictions on how the individual modules interact. The control strategies are formulated as a search of such sequence of steps that would minimize a loss function while one is seeking the most information. Examples are shown as the existence proof of the proposed theory on obtaining range from focus and sterolvergence on 2-0 segmentation of an image and 3-0 shape parametrization".

I have put the words with "model" in boldface so that they will be easy for you to see. So go ahead. Explain how we do this modeling with the nervous system. And please don't bring Neanderthals into the discussion. Let's try to stay focused.

 

[Jarhyn]

Not every event in our universe in the moment contributes meaningfully to every other event. Some events have not contributed anything to other events. I can observe in this very moment two events, on either side of our universe, which are necessarily not contributing anything at all to each other in this moment and never, ever, will.

Even in the initial expansion of our universe, there is no such requirement.

Thus I can state quite readily looking at the "moment of first cause" that this here arrangement of numbers is not interacting not affecting this other bit.

They aren't even interacting gravitationally at that point, as not even the graviton has come to be formed yet.

They exist independently, completely.

Then later, gravitons come to form, and things start affecting each other at the speed of light but the effects they have on one another are still limited in extent.

As the universe flies apart at an accelerating rate, bits within it start falling towards each other, but still as exactly themselves, in that moment.

Later on these interactions can only take the extent that they create in their locality, and exchange information only locally, through particle exchange.

The first causes of these things are at different proportion in extent and impact and meaningfulness.

They have together become a new thing, whose own history is uniquely its own, and from which decision of force is derived.

Whether that thing is a rock and the decision of force on it derives to changes in orientation as translated through it's physical shape through impact physics, or whether that thing is a person and the decision of force derives to changes in orientation as translated through neurons going (ouch, ow, stop, ohgodwhy, who dropped me down this hill?!?) being the thing translating force to changes to it's conformity and motion, limited in freedom of this will may it be due to the awesome power of many massive things producing an effect of gravity to also being dominated primarily by impact physics.

 

[fromderinside]

...

A really good book on the subject of consciousness is Michael Graziano's "Consciousness and the Social Brain". One of the things he points out is that an early survival requirement was reading clues from predators faces as to what they were thinking. Were they about to attack? etc. But the key info was that awareness is a data schema that tracks the attention mechanism.

Subvocalization was a topic in early psychic research, when having the subject guess what card symbol the experimenter was looking at. It was feared that the subject was picking up on the experimenter's subvocalization, so they had to change the set up in some way. I don't recall any more than that.

Your notions of consciousness require too much of growth in capabilities in a single species, and are supported by too little evidence.

... and how do we express their awareness? We consciously recite it. We can't avoid expressing our conscious thoughts in our native language. How's that happen unless something goes through our language processing apparatus? Try to express your consciousness of what you see in visual form, or our smells and tastes. Sure you can be conscious of what you are seeing but when it comes to expressing what you are seeing? Oops. Gotta use that language processor again. So why not take advantage of the vocalization apparatus outputs to make it seem like it is you speaking.

Eyup, Homo Erectus and Neanderthals made pretty complex tools too and they were in the hominid line. So if being a hominid was, with complex tools, the point at where speech became important why not they also be able to keep thoughts and stories alive via speech and perhaps the beginning of consciousness.

Actually, I still give Crick some credit for identifying the minimum neural structures necessary for consciousness. So it's possible that birds and mammals all potentially have some form of consciousness. That would be especially true for those species that have advanced social communication capabilities.

 

[fromderinside]

Really. You need to understand what noise and sound are, not what you consider polite discussion between chatty drinkers at the club.

If you don't want to address what I posted about the difference, posting random materials that you find on the internet is not going to help advance the discussion. I was interested in how you might address the problem of building a mental model of reality, but I suspect that you have nothing of interest to say on the subject. Let's just let it rest.

Its pretty evident from my responses that we can't build a mental model of reality.

What we are left with is an explanation of how what we do is achieved by our nervous system. You don't seem interested in that since it, at best, we can only be model a relative reality in accordance with our privative equipment. Again this is something you don't seem interested in doing.

It is not at all evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality. You might as well deny the existence of air and then go on to discuss how it is our bodies manage to inflate our lungs. You can refuse to use the term "air", but you still need to explain breathing. So you play a linguistic game by adopting different terms to describe the same concept that was perfectly well described by the term "air".

So let's talk about the fact that perception in human beings is known to be active and not passive. That is easy to prove with scientific methods, and any introduction to psychology will explain how to prove it. So let's start with a definition of  Active Perception. The one in Wikipedia will suffice:

"...a study of Modeling and Control strategies for perception. By modeling we mean models of sensors, processing modules and their interaction. We distinguish local models from global models by their extent of application in space and time. The local models represent procedures and parameters such as optical distortions of the lens, focal lens, spatial resolution, band-pass filter, etc. The global models on the other hand characterize the overall performance and make predictions on how the individual modules interact. The control strategies are formulated as a search of such sequence of steps that would minimize a loss function while one is seeking the most information. Examples are shown as the existence proof of the proposed theory on obtaining range from focus and sterolvergence on 2-0 segmentation of an image and 3-0 shape parametrization".

I have put the words with "model" in boldface so that they will be easy for you to see. So go ahead. Explain how we do this modeling with the nervous system. And please don't bring Neanderthals into the discussion. Let's try to stay focused.

There's a world of difference between computer models and neural models. So here's one article about computer modeling of neural activity that agrees with visual system neural design. There are hundreds of these in the literature.

Oh, wait. This is science and not philosophy. Sorry.

Even a novice to perception would know this. Read on only if you want to learn.

Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of the Visual System: Past, Present, and Future: https://iidb.org/threads/compatibilism-whats-that-about.24773/page-12#post-973020

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were inspired by early findings in the study of biological vision. They have since become successful tools in computer vision and state-of-the-art models of both neural activity and behavior on visual tasks. This review highlights what, in the context of CNNs, it means to be a good model in computational neuroscience and the various ways models can provide insight. Specifically, it covers the origins of CNNs and the methods by which we validate them as models of biological vision. It then goes on to elaborate on what we can learn about biological vision by understanding and experimenting on CNNs and discusses emerging opportunities for the use of CNNS in vision research beyond basic object recognition.

 

[Copernicus]

Really. You need to understand what noise and sound are, not what you consider polite discussion between chatty drinkers at the club.

If you don't want to address what I posted about the difference, posting random materials that you find on the internet is not going to help advance the discussion. I was interested in how you might address the problem of building a mental model of reality, but I suspect that you have nothing of interest to say on the subject. Let's just let it rest.

Its pretty evident from my responses that we can't build a mental model of reality.

What we are left with is an explanation of how what we do is achieved by our nervous system. You don't seem interested in that since it, at best, we can only be model a relative reality in accordance with our privative equipment. Again this is something you don't seem interested in doing.

It is not at all evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality. You might as well deny the existence of air and then go on to discuss how it is our bodies manage to inflate our lungs. You can refuse to use the term "air", but you still need to explain breathing. So you play a linguistic game by adopting different terms to describe the same concept that was perfectly well described by the term "air".

So let's talk about the fact that perception in human beings is known to be active and not passive. That is easy to prove with scientific methods, and any introduction to psychology will explain how to prove it. So let's start with a definition of  Active Perception. The one in Wikipedia will suffice:

"...a study of Modeling and Control strategies for perception. By modeling we mean models of sensors, processing modules and their interaction. We distinguish local models from global models by their extent of application in space and time. The local models represent procedures and parameters such as optical distortions of the lens, focal lens, spatial resolution, band-pass filter, etc. The global models on the other hand characterize the overall performance and make predictions on how the individual modules interact. The control strategies are formulated as a search of such sequence of steps that would minimize a loss function while one is seeking the most information. Examples are shown as the existence proof of the proposed theory on obtaining range from focus and sterolvergence on 2-0 segmentation of an image and 3-0 shape parametrization".

I have put the words with "model" in boldface so that they will be easy for you to see. So go ahead. Explain how we do this modeling with the nervous system. And please don't bring Neanderthals into the discussion. Let's try to stay focused.

There's a world of difference between computer models and neural models. So here's one article about computer modeling of neural activity that agrees with visual system neural design. There are hundreds of these in the literature.

Oh, wait. This is science and not philosophy. Sorry.

Even a novice to perception would know this. Read on only if you want to learn.

Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of the Visual System: Past, Present, and Future: https://iidb.org/threads/compatibilism-whats-that-about.24773/page-12#post-973020

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were inspired by early findings in the study of biological vision. They have since become successful tools in computer vision and state-of-the-art models of both neural activity and behavior on visual tasks. This review highlights what, in the context of CNNs, it means to be a good model in computational neuroscience and the various ways models can provide insight. Specifically, it covers the origins of CNNs and the methods by which we validate them as models of biological vision. It then goes on to elaborate on what we can learn about biological vision by understanding and experimenting on CNNs and discusses emerging opportunities for the use of CNNS in vision research beyond basic object recognition.

What? Where did that come from? I start talking about  Active Perception--basically, Psychology 101--and you branch off into an unrelated topic--CNNs--which represent a computational approach to perception (usually, visual perception, which is just one sensor modality). You start out by mentioning a "world of difference between computer models and neural models" before actually ignoring that difference. IOW, you are incapable of saying how the brain actually recognizes patterns, so you change the subject to a computational model that only tries to mimic in a very limited way what a brain does. Deep Learning is a fascinating new approach to object recognition in AI modeling, but there are still lots of problems with them. They are useful for what is called "Big Data" problems, but they don't do much for "Small Data" granularity. That is, they don't begin to explain how active perception works in human beings, who are able to infer patterns from relatively impoverished perceptual data. AI systems, to the extent that they can be said to build models of reality grounded in sensor signals, don't begin to build abstract models of reality in the way that biological brains do, especially human brains.

 

[fromderinside]

Really. You need to understand what noise and sound are, not what you consider polite discussion between chatty drinkers at the club.

If you don't want to address what I posted about the difference, posting random materials that you find on the internet is not going to help advance the discussion. I was interested in how you might address the problem of building a mental model of reality, but I suspect that you have nothing of interest to say on the subject. Let's just let it rest.

It's pretty evident from my responses that we can't build a mental model of reality.

What we are left with is an explanation of how what we do is achieved by our nervous system. You don't seem interested in that since it, at best, we can only be model a relative reality by our private equipment. Again this is something you don't seem interested in doing.

It is not at all evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality. You might as well deny the existence of air and then go on to discuss how it is our bodies manage to inflate our lungs. You can refuse to use the term "air", but you still need to explain breathing. So you play a linguistic game by adopting different terms to describe the same concept that was perfectly well described by the term "air".

So let's talk about the fact that perception in human beings is known to be active and not passive. That is easy to prove with scientific methods, and an introduction to psychology will explain how to prove it. So let's start with a definition of  Active Perception. The one in Wikipedia will suffice:

"...a study of Modeling and Control strategies for perception. By modeling, we mean models of sensors, processing modules, and their interaction. We distinguish local models from global models by their extent of application in space and time. The local models represent procedures and parameters such as optical distortions of the lens, focal lens, spatial resolution, band-pass filter, etc. The global models on the other hand characterize the overall performance and make predictions on how the individual modules interact. The control strategies are formulated as a search of such a sequence of steps that would minimize a loss function while one is seeking the most information. Examples are shown as the existence proof of the proposed theory on obtaining range from focus and stereo vergence on 2-0 segmentation of an image and 3-0 shape parametrization".

I have put the words with "model" in boldface so that they will be easy for you to see. So go ahead. Explain how we do this modeling with the nervous system. And please don't bring Neanderthals into the discussion. Let's try to stay focused.

There's a world of difference between computer models and neural models. So here's one article about computer modeling of neural activity that agrees with visual system neural design. There are hundreds of these in the literature.

Oh, wait. This is science and not philosophy. Sorry.

Even a novice to perception would know this. Read on only if you want to learn.

Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of the Visual System: Past, Present, and Future: https://iidb.org/threads/compatibilism-whats-that-about.24773/page-12#post-973020

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were inspired by early findings in the study of biological vision. They have since become successful tools in computer vision and state-of-the-art models of both neural activity and behavior on visual tasks. This review highlights what, in the context of CNNs, it means to be a good model in computational neuroscience and the various ways models can provide insight. Specifically, it covers the origins of CNNs and the methods by which we validate them as models of biological vision. It then goes on to elaborate on what we can learn about biological vision by understanding and experimenting with CNNs and discusses emerging opportunities for the use of CNNS in vision research beyond basic object recognition.

What? Where did that come from? I start talking about  Active Perception--basically, Psychology 101--and you branch off into an unrelated topic--CNNs--which represent a computational approach to perception (usually, visual perception, which is just one sensor modality). You start by mentioning a "world of difference between computer models and neural models" before actually ignoring that difference. IOW, you are incapable of saying how the brain recognizes patterns, so you change the subject to a computational model that only tries to mimic in a very limited way what a brain does. Deep Learning is a fascinating new approach to object recognition in AI modeling, but there are still lots of problems with them. They are useful for what is called "Big Data" problems, but they don't do much for "Small Data" granularity. That is, they don't begin to explain how active perception works in human beings, who can infer patterns from relatively impoverished perceptual data. AI systems, to the extent that they can be said to build models of reality grounded in sensor signals, don't begin to build abstract models of reality in the way that biological brains do, especially human brains.

From your defining article comes the next paragraph.

A related but narrower definition of active perception represents perception and action within the brain as the same thing. It states that when a person sees an action, it internally translates into, and is understood within the context of, a possible action. This supports the capability in people and animals of learning what to do based on what they see others doing.

So I took the narrower definition, found where scientists applied nervous system attributes in their computer models, and successfully modeled observed behavior. In fact, the primary references to your definition come out of J. J. Gibson's work out of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. That ensemble of behavior are cognitively processed together has never really been an issue. That's predicted in the actual design of the central nervous system.

One can take attributes of the NS and model them as computer modules or one can take psychological complexes and model them by computer. What one needs to ask is whether the presumption of the psychological ensemble is verifiable. It's easier to verify if one model found nervous designs as computer routines then verify the module act as it appears the nervous system acts.

 

[DBT]

proclivities that are determined by genetics, environment and life experiences

... That drive them to make the choices they do.

Choices have reasons too.

You're not invalidating the choice just to say that the context has priors.

In the moment, the context is all. Universe is not a machine that spits out a whole block at once from the beginning but rather process happens and each next moment is a function of the current, not the previous, moment.

Determinism doesn't allow alternate actions. There is not freedom to do otherwise within a determined system.

No, the context in which the individual objects in a deterministic system do it allow alternate actions in the moment. Just because one thing happened now does not mean the same thing happens tomorrow on the same setup.

The possibility of more than one possibility being realized in any given instance in time is not determinism. You are describing an indeterministic system.

Determinism means that precisely the same setup produces precisely the same results. Entropy, change, additional information doesn't allow precisely the same setup in highly complex systems....there may be temperature variations and other elements acting upon the system from moment to moment.

Just because the processor jumps from line 225 today does not mean the processor ju.ps from line 225 tomorrow, because tomorrow, register 2 receives 4 instead of 0.

The individual objects in a deterministic system allow alternate actions at disparate times when those same objects encounter different contexts against the same internal state.

Even monoliths make have localities.

Because choices and the discussion of them are not about now, specifically.

Different actions in disparate times entails different information states during each and every instance of a determined action. only one outcome is possible in each and every action. In no given instance in time can there be an alternate action, or its not determinism

 

[DBT]

The compatibilist proposition is simply that free will is a meaningful concept within a deterministic world.

The proof is this:
P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

Agency just comes down to state and condition of a brain in any moment in time. The internal condition of the brain and external elements that act upon it in each moment in time producing a necessarily fixed response in each and every moment in time.

Right. My brain, faced with the multiple possibilities on the menu, must choose what I will have for dinner. And, since I am free of coercion and undue influence, the choice is my own freely chosen "I will have the lobster, please".

Information acts upon the brain upon which the brain produces an action which is brought to mind.

''The compatibilist might say because those are influences that are “outside” of the person, but this misses the entire point brought up by the free will skeptic, which is that ALL environmental conditions that help lead to a person’s brain state at any given moment are “outside of the person”, and the genes a person has was provided rather than decided.

The “hard incompatibilist” such as myself says that a person’s brain state at any given moment outputs a person’s wants and desires, and that very brain state is dictated entirely by the person’s biology (no one controls their genes) and environment (and that environment is filled with other people and things that influence those brain states all the time).''

And, because it was I, myself, that made the choice and placed the order, the waiter will bring me the lobster dinner, and will also hold me responsible for my deliberate act by bringing me the bill.

Free will is pretty straightforward that way. So is compatibilism:

The choice is deterministic, because it is reliably caused by my own goals and my own reasons (which have their own prior causes).

The choice is free will, because it is reliably caused by my own goals and my own reasons (which have their own prior causes).

The action was not willed, but necessitated by inputs acting upon neural networks and acquired proclivities.

It is trivially true that 'you' made a decision (common language), but it is specifically true that it was a part of you, your brain, that responded to its inputs without 'you' being aware of the process until thoughts were brought to conscious attention.

You did not freely will your decision. You were not aware of it until after the fact.

You cannot do something one moment, but the next you can do what you could not a moment ago....

You're a little confused there. If "I can choose the steak" was true a moment ago, then "I could have chosen the steak" will be true later, even after I have chosen the lobster. The "I could have" is simply the past tense of "I can".

Nope, time and new information alters the system. You change your mind because information has altered the state of the brain.

The fact that I did not choose the steak does not imply that I could not have chosen the steak. When we speak of something that we "could have done", we are always implying that we "did not do it". So, "did not do" never rules out "could have done", as it is always implied and fully expected by the "could have".

''To make a long story short, the brain state you have at any given moment is dictated by causal processes that are ultimately out of your control. To dismiss this because we “want”, “desire”, “make decisions”, and so on, but then use qualifiers to disqualify other causal mechanisms that would play into those wants, desires, or decision making processes because they seem “less free” – is to make arbitrary distinctions between what causal processes grant “free will” and what one’s prevent “free will”. These arbitrary qualifiers miss the greater point, which is that we don’t have this free will: FREE WILL and no process is “more free”.

For example, remember the traffic light that "could have" remained red, even though it "did not" remain red. We may safely say that the light "would not have remained red", but we cannot say that it "could not have remained red".

We may say the light could have remained red, or could have cycled normally, could have failed entirely....or any of the possibilities that are associated with traffic lights due to their mechanisms and faults, but whatever we say is spoken from our ignorance of the state of the system, but whatever the light does in any given instance in time is determined by its information state in each and every instance in time....with no possible alternate action in any given instance.

The actions that the traffic lights perform proceed as determined. We in our ignorance can only guess based on statistics and our past experience with traffic lights.

That's just how these words work. Because "I can choose the steak" was true at the beginning of the choosing operation, "I could have chosen the steak" will be true at the end, even though "I did not choose the steak", and even though, given determinism, "I never would have chosen the steak". I still could have chosen the steak.

Words are used to communicate our thoughts and perceptions of the world. As such, words do not necessarily represent the means by which decisions are made and actions are taken. Which, for the large part, are unconscious processes.


''The increments of a normal brain state is not as obvious as direct coercion, a microchip, or a tumor, but the “obviousness” is irrelevant here. Brain states incrementally get to the state they are in one moment at a time. In each moment of that process the brain is in one state, and the specific environment and biological conditions leads to the very next state. Depending on that state, this will cause you to behave in a specific way within an environment (decide in a specific way), in which all of those things that are outside of a person constantly bombard your senses changing your very brain state. The internal dialogue in your mind you have no real control over.'' -

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Your notions of consciousness require too much of growth in capabilities in a single species, and are supported by too little evidence.

... and how do we express their awareness? We consciously recite it. We can't avoid expressing our conscious thoughts in our native language. How's that happen unless something goes through our language processing apparatus? Try to express your consciousness of what you see in visual form, or our smells and tastes. Sure you can be conscious of what you are seeing but when it comes to expressing what you are seeing? Oops. Gotta use that language processor again. So why not take advantage of the vocalization apparatus outputs to make it seem like it is you speaking.

Eyup, Homo Erectus and Neanderthals made pretty complex tools too and they were in the hominid line. So if being a hominid was, with complex tools, the point at where speech became important why not they also be able to keep thoughts and stories alive via speech and perhaps the beginning of consciousness.

Actually, I still give Crick some credit for identifying the minimum neural structures necessary for consciousness. So it's possible that birds and mammals all potentially have some form of consciousness. That would be especially true for those species that have advanced social communication capabilities.

So, Francis Crick is the DNA guy. I haven't read anything by Crick. But I've read books by Michael Graziano, Michael Gazzaniga, and David Eagleman who are all neuroscientists.

My impression is that we can be aware of things without describing them, but we cannot describe them without being aware of them. The semi-spatial neglect syndrome that Graziano describes is an unawareness of objects on one side of the room. Not only is the patient unaware of that side of the room, but he is also unaware that anything is missing. Toss a beach ball at the patient's head from the missing side, and he will reflexively swat it away, but he cannot explain his actions. This demonstrates that the problem is not in the visual mechanism, but actually in the mechanism of awareness.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, let's take a look at something else then, if this pathway of pointing the hard determinist at a real choice is not going to work.

I sit down at a table with my friends. This night we are playing D&D. We are not making choices based on lights, not making choices based on menus. We are looking at a group of nerds spewing varying sounds at each other and drawing absurd marks on paper.

Nothing here has anything to do with survival.

It's barely doing anything at all.

Yet more choice lives around this table than in most restaurants.

Lets look at it...

The rulebook described all the various things one may do. It describes the entire Freedom of Action, in a general way, and even that isn't necessarily "hard and fast".

Most notably, the rulebook offers MANY things.

Despite the fact that the player MAY play one of many classes, they MUST choose at least one*.

Similarly for "race".

At the end of this process over the course, of many offered classes, one is chosen.

It is not chosen by the DM. It is not chosen by the particles on the barest edge of the universe reflecting still older particles back.

There is no cosmic wave from Sirrus B of origin:first cause that may penetrate the walls of this bedroom such that the nerd will choose differently either.

You could, in fact, mostly excise the house these nerds are living in, put in an oxygen feed, and teleport the whole house to the surface of a roughly earth shaped mass with the nerds none the wiser, and they will make all the same decisions they would have had you left them on earth, for the most part.

You might get some divergence just from quantum foam dependent probabilistic outcome differences.

But in the moment, the moment force of THIS stuff no other stuff anywhere, is the stuff that causes the interactions we are concerned about, the flapping around of the meat that causes such patterns as "I slay the dwarf with my crossbow" and "no you didn't unless that's a 20 on your die" and "oh you know it!" And "HUZAAH!"

Nobody asks, in our world of compatibilist determinism, whether we can decide to be both a Wizard and a Rogue at level 1. Unless, of course, the DM reveals in the next moment "oh, forgot to mention Gestalt rules" and then the player says "oh, then I'll be a rogue as well, that was my second choice".

And then the DM may ask "why didn't you choose it" and then the player says "because last week you chose Rogue and I didn't want to seem as though I was following on."

Note that they didn't say "because at the big bang there was a quark at this here position instead of a gluon".

What is missing, even in discussion of "could it have been", which is itself imaginary, is the discussion of momentary state.

In the moment, it is not "all particles everywhere" determining whether a collection of particles on average in some place is in 'high' or 'low' energy state. It is exactly the particles in the neighboring neurons. 'This' collection is agent to 'that' decision, and when a collection of stuff is agent to the decision of events in the moment, this is what the compatibilist calls "choice".

This is not something you cannot claim is non-existent. Localities, collections of stuff, in the moment, act as the decider of events within moments.

If you are not speaking to the reality or lack thereof of collections of stuff acting as agent to the decision of events, then you are not speaking or even debating with the compatibilist but rather just spouting religious preaching.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The compatibilist proposition is simply that free will is a meaningful concept within a deterministic world.

The proof is this:
P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

Information acts upon the brain upon which the brain produces an action which is brought to mind.

The brain acts upon the information. To say that the "information acts upon the brain" creates another imaginary causal agent. The restaurant menu lists the meals that the chef is able to prepare for us. But the menu does not force us to choose any of the listed items.

Each person is free to choose for themselves what they will have for dinner.

''The compatibilist might say ...

The compatibilist has actually said P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. So, let's not go wandering all over the place with Trick Slattery.

Coercion is when someone imposes their choices upon us by force or the threat of force.

Undue influences include any other influences that can prevent us from making reasonable choices for ourselves. A significant mental illness or brain injury that imposes hallucinations or delusions upon us, or that impairs our ability to reason, or that subjects us to an irresistible impulse would be one example. Another example would be manipulation by hypnosis or through deception. Another example would the influences of unequal power such as between parent and child, commander and soldier, doctor and patient, etc.

The action was not willed, but necessitated by inputs acting upon neural networks and acquired proclivities.

The definition of free will (P1) does not require freedom from information.
The definition of free will (P1) does not require freedom from our neural networks.
The definition of free will (P1) does not require freedom from our acquired proclivities.

The action of ordering each dinner was deliberately chosen by each customer. And what did they deliberately choose? They deliberately chose an "I will have this for dinner" or an "I will have that for dinner".

The choosing causally necessitated the will. The will causally necessitated the dinner order given to the waiter. It's quite simple

It is trivially true that 'you' made a decision (common language), but it is specifically true that it was a part of you, your brain, that responded to its inputs without 'you' being aware of the process until thoughts were brought to conscious attention.

Nope. You've over played your Libet. I was consciously aware that I was in a restaurant. I was consciously aware while browsing the menu. I was consciously aware that everyone else at the table had already given the waiter their order and they were all waiting on me to make up my mind. Your notion that I was unconscious through all these events is absurd.

There is an interaction of conscious and unconscious brain activity throughout this experience of deliberately choosing what I will do.

As to the timing of my conscious awareness of the choice itself, it was only required that it be in time to tell the waiter, "I will have the lobster dinner, please".

Oh, one more thing, it was not "trivial" that it was "I" that made the decision. After all, the waiter had to know who ordered which dinner and who should receive each bill.

...You change your mind because information has altered the state of the brain.

Right. For example, I may get home and find that the lobster disagreed with my tummy. That's new information. I may find that I regret my choice, and I will think about what I could have done instead. For example, I could have had the steak, or, I could have had the fried chicken, etc.

Another key function of "could have" is examining our past choices. If the choice turned out badly, we want to learn from them. What could I have done differently? How would things have been different if I had chosen that other option instead?

You break these functions when you destroy the meaning of "could have". And worse, when you make us the victims of a slew of imaginary causal agents (determinism, causation, laws of nature, the past, information, etc.) that plot together to control our future, you make the future hopeless.

''To make a long story short, the brain state you have at any given moment is dictated by causal processes that are ultimately out of your control. "

What you and Trick Slattery fail to realize is that those brain states that deliberately choose what I will have for dinner happen to be "me" deliberately choosing what I will have for dinner.

You're creating an imaginary problem, just like Zeno does in his paradoxes. The false, but believable, suggestion that creates the paradox is that my brain states do not include me. Thus you claim that I must somehow exist in a form that is separate from my brain and that I must control what my brain does. It sounds like we must exist as "souls", separate from our brains! So, is that what you're preaching?

The definition of free will (P1) does not require freedom from our brain processes.

We may say the light could have remained red, or could have cycled normally, could have failed entirely....or any of the possibilities that are associated with traffic lights due to their mechanisms and faults, but whatever we say is spoken from our ignorance of the state of the system, but whatever the light does in any given instance in time is determined by its information state in each and every instance in time....with no possible alternate action in any given instance.

The actions that the traffic lights perform proceed as determined. We in our ignorance can only guess based on statistics and our past experience with traffic lights.

The notion of "can happen" is exactly that, a matter of our uncertainty, our "ignorance" of what will actually happen. When we don't know what will happen, we imagine what can happen, to prepare for what does happen.

We slowed down, because the light could have remained red. And we say that with certainty even though we know for a fact that it did not remain red.

When deciding between the steak and the lobster, we begin in ignorance of what our choice will be. But we know with certainty that it can be the steak. And, we know with certainty that it can be the lobster. We are only uncertain about what it actually will be.

At the end of deciding, we know with certainty that it will be the lobster, and we know with certainty that it could have been the steak.

 

[Copernicus]

From your defining article comes the next paragraph.

A related but narrower definition of active perception represents perception and action within the brain as the same thing. It states that when a person sees an action, it internally translates into, and is understood within the context of, a possible action. This supports the capability in people and animals of learning what to do based on what they see others doing.

So I took the narrower definition, found where scientists applied nervous system attributes in their computer models, and successfully modeled observed behavior. In fact, the primary references to your definition come out of J. J. Gibson's work out of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. That ensemble of behavior are cognitively processed together has never really been an issue. That's predicted in the actual design of the central nervous system.

One can take attributes of the NS and model them as computer modules or one can take psychological complexes and model them by computer. What one needs to ask is whether the presumption of the psychological ensemble is verifiable. It's easier to verify if one model found nervous designs as computer routines then verify the module act as it appears the nervous system acts.

Fair enough. That Wikipedia article is a bit confusing anyway, since it doesn't really address the history of the concept of  Active perception, which originated in  Gestalt psychology. The reason I brought it up is that people tend to think of perception as passive in nature. That is, it is just a raw report of incoming data. What Gestalt psychologists discovered in the early 20th century--well before digital computers--was that humans tended to perceive patterns in nature. That is, the mind supplies information to fill in elements of patterns, even when the raw report from the peripheral nervous system is missing those elements of the pattern. It is easy to prove this phenomenon experimentally, which is why it normally figures into introductory courses on psychology. The narrower sensorimotor concept of "active perception" is not germane to my point. To reiterate, my point is that the mind does not just perceive what the peripheral senses tell us. It matches that against pattern templates, and it can be shown to interpolate elements of a pattern that don't actually exist in the sense data. That is the point I was trying to make to you earlier about the difference between a sound and a noise. A sound is an interpreted noise.

You had said earlier that it should have been evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality, but pattern templates matched against incoming data from the peripheral nervous system are hard to interpret as anything but building blocks for mental models. And all of this is well-established through observation and experimentation on human behavior. You can't even talk about illusions, let alone optical illusions, without in some way acknowledging that minds, which are created by physical brain activity, build, maintain, and modify models of reality.

 

[fromderinside]

Your notions of consciousness require too much of growth in capabilities in a single species, and are supported by too little evidence.

... and how do we express their awareness? We consciously recite it. We can't avoid expressing our conscious thoughts in our native language. How's that happen unless something goes through our language processing apparatus? Try to express your consciousness of what you see in visual form, or our smells and tastes. Sure you can be conscious of what you are seeing but when it comes to expressing what you are seeing? Oops. Gotta use that language processor again. So why not take advantage of the vocalization apparatus outputs to make it seem like it is you speaking.

Eyup, Homo Erectus and Neanderthals made pretty complex tools too and they were in the hominid line. So if being a hominid was, with complex tools, the point at where speech became important why not they also be able to keep thoughts and stories alive via speech and perhaps the beginning of consciousness.

Actually, I still give Crick some credit for identifying the minimum neural structures necessary for consciousness. So it's possible that birds and mammals all potentially have some form of consciousness. That would be especially true for those species that have advanced social communication capabilities.

So, Francis Crick is the DNA guy. I haven't read anything by Crick. But I've read books by Michael Graziano, Michael Gazzaniga, and David Eagleman who are all neuroscientists.

My impression is that we can be aware of things without describing them, but we cannot describe them without being aware of them. The semi-spatial neglect syndrome that Graziano describes is an unawareness of objects on one side of the room. Not only is the patient unaware of that side of the room, but he is also unaware that anything is missing. Toss a beach ball at the patient's head from the missing side, and he will reflexively swat it away, but he cannot explain his actions. This demonstrates that the problem is not in the visual mechanism, but actually in the mechanism of awareness.

 Francis Crick

• Temporal Resolution of Tonal Pulses

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51, 644 (1972); https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1912888
Kendrick N. Williams and David R. Perrott

Temporal Resolution of Tonal Pulses

Temporal resolution, as defined by the minimum detectable gap between successive tonal pulses, was observed to decrease as a direct function of both the frequency disparity between successive pulse...

asa.scitation.org

ABSTRACT
Temporal resolution, as defined by the minimum detectable gap between successive tonal pulses, was observed to decrease as a direct function of both the frequency disparity between successive pulses and the duration of the pulses. An interaction between frequency disparity and pulse duration was also observed.

Says awareness of actual input is dependent on duration and intensity of signal input.


Nuff sed.

 

[fromderinside]

From your defining article comes the next paragraph.

A related but narrower definition of active perception represents perception and action within the brain as the same thing. It states that when a person sees an action, it internally translates into, and is understood within the context of, a possible action. This supports the capability in people and animals of learning what to do based on what they see others doing.

So I took the narrower definition, found where scientists applied nervous system attributes in their computer models, and successfully modeled observed behavior. In fact, the primary references to your definition come out of J. J. Gibson's work out of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. That ensemble of behavior are cognitively processed together has never really been an issue. That's predicted in the actual design of the central nervous system.

One can take attributes of the NS and model them as computer modules or one can take psychological complexes and model them by computer. What one needs to ask is whether the presumption of the psychological ensemble is verifiable. It's easier to verify if one model found nervous designs as computer routines then verify the module act as it appears the nervous system acts.

Fair enough. That Wikipedia article is a bit confusing anyway, since it doesn't really address the history of the concept of  Active perception, which originated in  Gestalt psychology. The reason I brought it up is that people tend to think of perception as passive in nature. That is, it is just a raw report of incoming data. What Gestalt psychologists discovered in the early 20th century--well before digital computers--was that humans tended to perceive patterns in nature. That is, the mind supplies information to fill in elements of patterns, even when the raw report from the peripheral nervous system is missing those elements of the pattern. It is easy to prove this phenomenon experimentally, which is why it normally figures into introductory courses on psychology. The narrower sensorimotor concept of "active perception" is not germane to my point. To reiterate, my point is that the mind does not just perceive what the peripheral senses tell us. It matches that against pattern templates, and it can be shown to interpolate elements of a pattern that don't actually exist in the sense data. That is the point I was trying to make to you earlier about the difference between a sound and a noise. A sound is an interpreted noise.

You had said earlier that it should have been evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality, but pattern templates matched against incoming data from the peripheral nervous system are hard to interpret as anything but building blocks for mental models. And all of this is well-established through observation and experimentation on human behavior. You can't even talk about illusions, let alone optical illusions, without in some way acknowledging that minds, which are created by physical brain activity, build, maintain, and modify models of reality.

Why? It is obvious that no sensing system in humans captures the extent of stimuli available in the local sense world if our limited sensors are within range. We can't model or claim to model reality if we can't imagine or sense reality.

My analogy is we exist on a tiny far from the hotbed of reality and with the tools we have, we can only gather indirect information about what we can sense with senses. The world is the entire universe over its entire life. And we begin by sampling with inefficient and incomplete sensors. No way we can get from that microscopic sample to reality with whatever capabilities we have for combining what we know into knowledge of everything. Here I'm gonna ripoff Jarhyn and say local solutions cannot become system solutions. We are still discovering stuff that changes how we view what we know. We've not even begun to tap the range of what is there. nor are we ever going to do so.

 

[Copernicus]

...
You had said earlier that it should have been evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality, but pattern templates matched against incoming data from the peripheral nervous system are hard to interpret as anything but building blocks for mental models. And all of this is well-established through observation and experimentation on human behavior. You can't even talk about illusions, let alone optical illusions, without in some way acknowledging that minds, which are created by physical brain activity, build, maintain, and modify models of reality.

Why? It is obvious that no sensing system in humans captures the extent of stimuli available in the local sense world if our limited sensors are within range. We can't model or claim to model reality if we can't imagine or sense reality.

But that's the point. We can imagine the reality that we can't sense. That is exactly what the Gestalt school discovered and proved beyond reasonable doubt with experimentation. You say that you are a retired psychophysicist, but you seem to be completely unaware of the fact that human perception is active, not passive. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but I'm not confident at this point that you really understand the evidence. You can use a  tachistoscope to prove it experimentally.

My analogy is we exist on a tiny far from the hotbed of reality and with the tools we have, we can only gather indirect information about what we can sense with senses. The world is the entire universe over its entire life. And we begin by sampling with inefficient and incomplete sensors. No way we can get from that microscopic sample to reality with whatever capabilities we have for combining what we know into knowledge of everything. Here I'm gonna ripoff Jarhyn and say local solutions cannot become system solutions. We are still discovering stuff that changes how we view what we know. We've not even begun to tap the range of what is there. nor are we ever going to do so.

Then explain why it is so easy to prove that perception in humans (and other animals) is active, not passive. That is, we recognize patterns in what we sense, even if the sensory information does not fully support every element of the pattern.

 

[fromderinside]

...
You had said earlier that it should have been evident from your posts that we cannot build models of reality, but pattern templates matched against incoming data from the peripheral nervous system are hard to interpret as anything but building blocks for mental models. And all of this is well-established through observation and experimentation on human behavior. You can't even talk about illusions, let alone optical illusions, without in some way acknowledging that minds, which are created by physical brain activity, build, maintain, and modify models of reality.

Why? It is obvious that no sensing system in humans captures the extent of stimuli available in the local sense world if our limited sensors are within range. We can't model or claim to model reality if we can't imagine or sense reality.

But that's the point. We can imagine the reality that we can't sense. That is exactly what the Gestalt school discovered and proved beyond reasonable doubt with experimentation. You say that you are a retired psychophysicist, but you seem to be completely unaware of the fact that human perception is active, not passive. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but I'm not confident at this point that you really understand the evidence. You can use a  tachistoscope to prove it experimentally.

My analogy is we exist on a tiny far from the hotbed of reality and with the tools we have, we can only gather indirect information about what we can sense with senses. The world is the entire universe over its entire life. And we begin by sampling with inefficient and incomplete sensors. No way we can get from that microscopic sample to reality with whatever capabilities we have for combining what we know into knowledge of everything. Here I'm gonna ripoff Jarhyn and say local solutions cannot become system solutions. We are still discovering stuff that changes how we view what we know. We've not even begun to tap the range of what is there. nor are we ever going to do so.

Then explain why it is so easy to prove that perception in humans (and other animals) is active, not passive. That is, we recognize patterns in what we sense, even if the sensory information does not fully support every element of the pattern.

Active perception is clear observing innervation that descending/ascending nervous activity modulates input nervous activity in most human sensory and effector systems. That is irrelevant to my argument.

If one has no access to information one has no means for verifying other than existing information. One cannot model something which one can't experience. If you don't have a palette all you can do is fill in the blanks with the tools you have. That's not going to get you to reality.

It does not matter whether one has the ability to create a map as known by inserting data to complete existing models. Existing models always change as understanding increases.

An example today is dark energy and matter. They are proposed fillers to complete the current theory. But we already see there are elements outside our theoretical model. So completing the model without including the new data goes nowhere because the model has changed in unknown ways.

My problem is we have glimpsed knowledge of the amount of energy out there from our existing models but we will never have the capacity to exploit that knowledge/energy because harnessing such energy is beyond our reach forever. And darn it we don't even know whether energy is the tool we really need to exploit. We may be at the stage mankind was 60,000 years ago and we may not have another 60000 ears to find out.

Finally, imagine what we know versus what is the reality now is like what we knew 60000 years ago was to what we know now. Time problem.

 

[DBT]

The compatibilist proposition is simply that free will is a meaningful concept within a deterministic world.

The proof is this:
P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence.
P2: A world is deterministic if every event is reliably caused by prior events.
P3: A freely chosen will is reliably caused by the person's own goals, reasons, or interests (with their prior causes).
P4: An unfree choice is reliably caused by coercion or undue influence (with their prior causes).
C: Therefore, the notion of a freely chosen will (and its opposite) is still meaningful within a fully deterministic world.

Sure, that is the compatibilist argument, the conclusion does follow from the premises....but...as the premises are questionable - the argument from Incompatibilism, etc - the argument is not sound, the conclusion does not prove the proposition of ''free will.''

''A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true.''

The problem for the notion of free will is, basically, unconscious agency, the non chosen state of neural networks being acted upon by external information: inner necessitation. Lacking the necessary regulative ability to qualify as being free will.

Necessitation and freedom are not compatible.

Information acts upon the brain upon which the brain produces an action which is brought to mind.

The brain acts upon the information. To say that the "information acts upon the brain" creates another imaginary causal agent. The restaurant menu lists the meals that the chef is able to prepare for us. But the menu does not force us to choose any of the listed items.

Each person is free to choose for themselves what they will have for dinner.

Sensory information is not imaginary. Acquiring and processing sensory information is the very thing the brain has evolved to do. Its role and purpose is to respond to information acquired from the external world.

The restaurant menu is information acquired by your senses, processed, integrated with memory and proclivities, the determined response activated; thoughts and actions proceeding without impediment or restriction.

A highly evolved intelligent system, but not a free will system.

You can do what you want, but what you want is fixed by the state and condition of the information processor. Not the generic 'person,' but specifically the brain.

''The compatibilist might say ...

The compatibilist has actually said P1: A freely chosen will is when someone chooses for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. So, let's not go wandering all over the place with Trick Slattery.

Its never a freely chosen decision. Determinism means necessitated actions. Each step of the cognitive process is determined from input to action.

We may say ''he is free to chose '' on the basis of outer appearances. After all, we can think and act. That is what we see.

What we don't see is the means and mechanisms by which all of this is possible or how it works.

Our casual comments do not take the underlying means of thought and action into account.

Coercion is when someone imposes their choices upon us by force or the threat of force.

Sure, and necessitation is when information acquired by the senses alters brain activity, with thoughts and feeling brought to mind in response, with no free will involved, just the form and function of the system at work.

Each person according to their own makeup. Each animal according to the architecture of their own brain.

The actions that the traffic lights perform proceed as determined. We in our ignorance can only guess based on statistics and our past experience with traffic lights.

The notion of "can happen" is exactly that, a matter of our uncertainty, our "ignorance" of what will actually happen. When we don't know what will happen, we imagine what can happen, to prepare for what does happen.

Our uncertainty is not the uncertainty of the system, which, if determined has no inherent uncertainy, with events proceeding according to initial conditions and each and every action fixed thereafter.

We slowed down, because the light could have remained red. And we say that with certainty even though we know for a fact that it did not remain red.

When deciding between the steak and the lobster, we begin in ignorance of what our choice will be. But we know with certainty that it can be the steak. And, we know with certainty that it can be the lobster. We are only uncertain about what it actually will be.

At the end of deciding, we know with certainty that it will be the lobster, and we know with certainty that it could have been the steak.

We as conscious being do not have access to the mechanical/ electrical state of the traffic lights, or systems and workings of our own brains.

The brain itself is a modular system with different regions competing for attention. The results are not willed.

How we perceive the world, the traffic lights, our own estimations, uncertainties, thoughts and actions are a reflection of our limited understanding


The compatibilist conclusion may follow from its premises, but as its premises are flawed, the argument is not sound.


''A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true.''