Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

Reliable causation is a prerequisite for accomplishing any intent. Without it, we would be unable to carry out our will. Freedom, especially free will, requires a world of reliable cause and effect.

True on the surface, but causation not subject to will. Whatever happens is determined by elements other than our will.

Except when someone's will is the prior cause of the event. For example, you cannot delete the function of "willing" from a "willful action".

Nor can you delete "willing" from the causal chain, without falsifying determinism.

Information processing, not our will is the means of response.

You cannot delete willing from information processing! It's right there within the large catalog of the brain's practical functions. We choose what we will do. Our chosen intent then motivates and directs our body's actions to carry out that intent.

Nobody chooses their neural architecture.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to choose our neural architecture in order to choose what we will have for dinner in a restaurant.

The list of things that we do not choose does not eliminate any of the things that we do choose.

The appearance of alternative possibilities is not the same as having an alternative possibility in any given instance in time, where only the determined action is possible.

Since a possibility exists solely within the imagination, its appearance there is sufficient evidence of its existence. And, because it is a causally necessary mental event, and a logically necessary parameter of the choosing function, it damn well will appear, whether you like it or not.

The requirements of a possibility are simply that, if we chose to do it, we could actually do it. It is never required that we actually do it in order for it to be possible.

Not at all, where consciousness exists, consciousness itself is an inseparable part of the determined system and its progression of events.

EXACTLY!

Consciousness plays its determined role. You can't have it both ways, determinism on the one hand and consciousness being able to buck the system on the other.

There's no bucking the system. Conscious processes do their thing and unconscious processes do their thing, and they work together in the same brain. Every event within the conscious processes and every event within the unconscious processes is causally necessary from any prior point in time. But, causal necessity is so ubiquitous that it really doesn't add any useful information. It is the specific doings of the conscious and unconscious processes that are causally necessitating the choice.

It's a question of what implications 'all events proceeding 'without deviation' has for the idea of free will.

Well, one implication is that it will be causally necessary, and without deviation, that I will be making a choice as to what I will have for dinner.

Which do not appear to be good.

As you may eventually realize, the implications of causal necessity and events proceeding without deviation, are entirely neutral.

 

[Jarhyn]

Jarhyn writes: Our universe is capable of producing machines capable of taking instructions, and executing behavior on the basis of those instructions, and those instructions are capable of static analysis and even execution on other platforms.

The wills can be assessed as free or constrained. They will either execute and run, or they will not, but moreover they will pass their unit tests or they will not. This is a real property.

We have plans... We have objective evaluation.. we have success criterion...

That's all the ingredients to compatibilist free will right there.

Putting it out there isn't defining. You put it out there that choice is made, that will exists. What is your basis for saying this?

All I can surmise is you need to justify yourself, you be, therefore you think, you choose, you decide. Not necessary. Works just as well when you don't set yourself in judgement.

Rather than trying to build justifications form individual perspectives why not assume it's because it happens in a determined world? No one exerted will no one chose it happened. No consciousness, no mind, no will, no choice just happenings in a determined world.

No need to explain why this happened or that happened, just things happening as seen from some arbitrary point of view in a world where things are determined. From any perspective what happens is seen to be determined by previous conditions.

Do we really need to connect our presence to what happens in any real way beyond making us feel good about what we characterize. Does it explain things or actions in a way that moves our understanding of the world. or does it leave us with a problem explaining how we fit into the world as we think we do?

I suggest it leaves us with this latter problem for which there is little evidence such exists. Take mind out of physics and we are left with physics. Great! I'm pretty sure that if we study things as determined we'll get to explaining how we became to be the physical beings that we are in the physical world.

I wonder what the forum version of a subtweet is?

I have defined "free"; I have defined "will". The latter are objectively observable things that exist within our universe, and the former is an observable property of such.

These definitions are useful. They are far more useful than yours which evaluates to "nonsense".

 

[fromderinside]

Jarhyn writes: Our universe is capable of producing machines capable of taking instructions, and executing behavior on the basis of those instructions, and those instructions are capable of static analysis and even execution on other platforms.

The wills can be assessed as free or constrained. They will either execute and run, or they will not, but moreover they will pass their unit tests or they will not. This is a real property.

We have plans... We have objective evaluation.. we have success criterion...

That's all the ingredients to compatibilist free will right there.

Putting it out there isn't defining. You put it out there that choice is made, that will exists. What is your basis for saying this?

All I can surmise is you need to justify yourself, you be, therefore you think, you choose, you decide. Not necessary. Works just as well when you don't set yourself in judgement.

Rather than trying to build justifications form individual perspectives why not assume it's because it happens in a determined world? No one exerted will no one chose it happened. No consciousness, no mind, no will, no choice just happenings in a determined world.

No need to explain why this happened or that happened, just things happening as seen from some arbitrary point of view in a world where things are determined. From any perspective what happens is seen to be determined by previous conditions.

Do we really need to connect our presence to what happens in any real way beyond making us feel good about what we characterize. Does it explain things or actions in a way that moves our understanding of the world. or does it leave us with a problem explaining how we fit into the world as we think we do?

I suggest it leaves us with this latter problem for which there is little evidence such exists. Take mind out of physics and we are left with physics. Great! I'm pretty sure that if we study things as determined we'll get to explaining how we became to be the physical beings that we are in the physical world.

I wonder what the forum version of a subtweet is?

I have defined "free"; I have defined "will". The latter are objectively observable things that exist within our universe, and the former is an observable property of such.

These definitions are useful. They are far more useful than yours which evaluates to "nonsense".

Now try to define operationally the thing, 'you' or 'self', to which you defined 'free' and 'will'. You are nowhere near being in a position to call your 'definitions' objective. They all refer to either 'you' or 'self' for justification.

Oh. By the way that universe and those those machines to which you refer can be defined as determined making such as plans and routines moot since we know they are just lists of things already determined. Taking a path adds no will or plan they just make whatever you describe doing this as self referencing without ever establishing the independence or existence of these 'named' things. That a thing has memory is also determined since that is the record, at best, of what that thing has done.

Its not for me to define for you the means by which something comes to produce records or deceive itself into thinking it has autonomy in a determined world. That such exists is sufficient since it does not change the fact that 'it' is determined as well.

It seems to me that you should be concentrating on energy flow efficiency as a basis for explaining behavior and evolution rather than on such as self and will which, at best, can only be error terms or inefficiency mechanism containers.

 

[Jarhyn]

Now try to define operationally the thing, 'you' or 'self', to which you defined 'free' and 'will'.

I don't need to. You thinking I do is entirely your problem.

I have an object entire, an interpreter, that functions as a transform for the complication of a meat machine: the metal.

All I need to do is establish that each of these elements: an interpreter, a plan, and it's freedom to goal are all properties.

Once I've established this, your premise "freedom of will cannot exist in deterministic systems" melts away.

At that point the burden falls on you to prove "humans are incapable of: holding plans, though plans can be held; interpreting information, though information can be interpreted; evaluating their plans outside of direct execution, despite plans being evaluable outside of direct execution", which is ridiculous because as stated, all these things are real things that still happen in a deterministic universe.

 

[Jarhyn]

It strikes me that there are a number of misconceptions that certain folks, namely those who discover that the body is a machine and the mind just a part of the body, that the existence of this machine has implications to their "freedom".

It does not.

They are, inevitably, a function of the sum total of that present machine. This is because machines themselves can encode plans (re: DNA, Machine Code, sketches on napkins), and those plans can be interpreted by any machine that can predict the results, outside of execution.

If the plan encompasses a goal (or even an unbounded iterative process), the function of the plan can be objectively assessed in those terms.

It is apparent that humans can do all these things but moreover humans have observed all these things existing in nature down to the very most basic elements of their function. Determinism is necessary for this to be assessed, because if there is no pattern to the way things happen, modeling the pattern well enough to plan for it happening is right out. Survival of any thing across any "goal behavior" becomes impossible.

This is true in any universe describable by math which can contain machines.

To understand how machines can hold plans, the easiest approach is taking a machine architecture course, along with a course on assembly language.

 

[fromderinside]

Now try to define operationally the thing, 'you' or 'self', to which you defined 'free' and 'will'.

I don't need to. You thinking I do is entirely your problem.

I have an object entire, an interpreter, that functions as a transform for the complication of a meat machine: the metal.

All I need to do is establish that each of these elements: an interpreter, a plan, and it's freedom to goal are all properties.

Once I've established this, your premise "freedom of will cannot exist in deterministic systems" melts away.

At that point the burden falls on you to prove "humans are incapable of: holding plans, though plans can be held; interpreting information, though information can be interpreted; evaluating their plans outside of direct execution, despite plans being evaluable outside of direct execution", which is ridiculous because as stated, all these things are real things that still happen in a deterministic universe.

I start with the world is material and determined. Now DNA has attributes one can call plan, even an interpreter, produces a meat machine. That bit about freedom to goal is a lot more iffy. To do so the system would have to be non determinant. But we know from all empirical evidence the system is determined not free. Empirical Determinism is a material realization consistent with materiality. Only material need be considered, not the beings or designed objects in the world. As soon as you introduce plan, interpreter, in a being or any other processor you need to define them operationally within the evidence for a determined material world.

You have not done so. Demonstrating how DNA results in a being is consistent with materiality and determinism. Having a brain moves one from the material to the metaphysical. And there, you have not demonstrated metaphysical reality exists within the materiality of a determined world.

if, and only if you can show that the processes that produce beings are also the processes that produce thought can you justify plan interpreter and possibly something other than determination. I'm going to say it's likely you can replicate what DNA does in molecular assembly to produce a brain.

After that you need to find ways to connect materiality to subjective thoughts which I've tried to show you can be achieved by using such as oxygen uptake as signal of metabolism related to producing thought.

You have not done so. Nor do I think you can do so. That still leaves you without any mechanism for violating determinism, producing free thought that is material. So that little gem embedded in your argument - freedom to goal - is still orphan, without basis.

 

[DBT]

you don't choose the state and condition of 'your' brain.

Well, you might not. I don't have the issues you seem to have in altering your brain.

Oh, really? You chose your parents, genetic makeup, neural architecture, place of birth, culture, your school, your strengths and weakness, the way you think, reason and act....it's all under the control of your magical free will?

Wow, brilliant, good for you Champ.

 

[DBT]

If we don't choose our state and condition, yet what we think and what do flows from our non-chosen condition, where is free will?

That's not the question. The real question this: What are the meaningful and relevant constraints that a person must be free of, in order to decide for themselves what they will do?

Inner necessitation is a meaningful restraint. Given that a person has no awareness or control of the mechanisms that forms them and their experience self and the world, a person does precisely what the state and condition of their system determines.

That is not a free will choice. State and condition is not chosen.

A simple example of free will is a person in the restaurant, deciding for themselves what to order for dinner.

It is specifically the brain that chooses, 'person' refers to the body in general. It is specifically the brain that evaluates and selects options. The option that a brain selects in any given instance in time is the only possible option in that instance in time because it was not 'free will' that acted, but the state and condition of the system in that instance in time.

It is information processing, not free will that is the agency of decision making and motor action.

There are lots of things we don't get to choose. There are also lots of things that we do get to choose.

What we do choose is determined by what we don't get to choose, the state of the system.....which doesn't just sit idle while 'free will' supposedly does its thing.

 

[DBT]

Wrong. It has been explained why it is wrong, over and over. The article I just quoted explains it. Your objections are laughable.

Your religion is laughable. Your religion is based on the naive, yes NAIVE understandings of neural computational theory held by people on the wrong side of the problem.

I told you what you need to understand here, and you fail to jump on it.

I can be a great mechanic, but that means jack shit when the question is "at what pressure and temperature must the gasoline be at to push the piston with this amount of force", because mechanics is not chemistry.

As it is we absolutely do have say over what our brains can and can't do. Just like my brain would previously impulse towards pulling away from a punch, and now it doesn't.

I made a conscientious decision to resist what other parts of my brain were talking me to do until I was strong enough to win against them and stay put. It sucked, it hurt, and I did it anyway.

If you would like to know how, I can teach you, and I wouldn't charge for that, even.

You don't want to think that you or some sociopath or whatever have a choice, or had a choice.

You did, and you have to live with that. I'm sorry that's so hard for you, but you do have a choice. You always have a choice. The choice to suborn one's will to some other mechanism in their own meat they have no direct control over rather than fight it is exactly what makes people sociopaths.

Sometimes people never get the opportunity to learn how to be anything else. Usually I chock this up to a failure of imagination, and even idiotic apologia for hard determinism.

The ability to objectively evaluate the plan as "free to goal" or "does not create freedom to goal" demands that free is an objective property of the will.

Religion? You don't understand the basics of the debate. Not to mention that your response is irrational.

First your claim ''and the experts you list are not actually expert'' - Jarhyn - then I provide information that I in fact refer to experts in their field. M Hallett, a specialist in neurology and motor action,,, quoting what he has to say, which agrees with what I have been saying......then what?

Well, gosh, then you come back with; ''most "experts" you quote disagree with you.''

Pathetic.

Your claim was not "humans function deterministically". Your claim is "the universe functions deterministically", first off, hence your argument about neurology -- though it is a bad one based on argument from Incredulity -- is irrelevant to the issue of free will.

Now you are telling me what my claims are, even while getting it badly wrong?

Where did you get the idea that humans do not function deterministically if the world or the universe functions deterministically?

Your reasoning is, frankly, bizarre.

 

[DBT]

Wrong. It has been explained why it is wrong, over and over. The article I just quoted explains it. Your objections are laughable.

You don't want to think that you or some sociopath or whatever have a choice, or had a choice.

Are you saying that Sociopaths choose to be Sociopaths? Really? Surely not. Or are you just saying that Sociopaths are able to think and decide? If you mean the latter, you haven't understood a word that's been said.

 

[DBT]

Mark Hallett.
''Dr. Hallett is the Chief of the Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. He went to Harvard Medical School and did his neurology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. As part of his training, he was a fellow at NIH from 1970 to 1972. From 1976 to 1984, Dr. Hallett was the Chief of the Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and worked up to Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. From 1984, he has been at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke where he also served as Clinical Director of NINDS until July 2000. He is past President of the American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine and the Movement Disorder Society, past Vice-President of the American Academy of Neurology, and current President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology and the Brainstem Society. His work mainly deals with principles of motor control and the pathophysiology of movement disorders''

M. Hallett
How Can There Be Voluntary Movement Without Free Will?
''Humans do not appear to be purely reflexive organisms, simple automatons. A vast array of different movements are generated in a variety of settings. Is there an alternative to free will? Movement, in the final analysis, comes only from muscle contraction. Muscle contraction is under the complete control of the alpha motoneurons in the spinal cord. When the alpha motoneurons are active, there will be movement. Activity of the alpha motoneurons is a product of the different synaptic events on their dendrites and cell bodies. There is a complex summation of EPSPs and IPSPs, and when the threshold for an action potential is crossed, the cell fires. There are a large number of important inputs, and one of the most important is from the corticospinal tract which conveys a large part of the cortical control. Such a situation likely holds also for the motor cortex and the cells of origin of the corticospinal tract. Their firing depends on their synaptic inputs. And, a similar situation must hold for all the principal regions giving input to the motor cortex. For any cortical region, its activity will depend on its synaptic inputs. Some motor cortical inputs come via only a few synapses from sensory cortices, and such influences on motor output are clear. Some inputs will come from regions, such as the limbic areas, many synapses away from both primary sensory and motor cortices. At any one time, the activity of the motor cortex, and its commands to the spinal cord, will reflect virtually all the activity in the entire brain. Is it necessary that there be anything else? This can be a complete description of the process of movement selection, and even if there is something more -- like free will -- it would have to operate through such neuronal mechanisms.
The view that there is no such thing as free will as an inner causal agent has been advocated by a number of philosophers, scientists, and neurologists including Ryle, Adrian, Skinner and Fisher.(Fisher 1993)'' - M. Hallett Clinical Neurophysiology,

I would suggest to Dr. Hallet that he look into the brain areas that are involved in planning what the body will be doing if he wants to understand the neural aspects of people deciding for themselves what they will do. My arms and legs do not decide when I should employ them go grocery shopping versus employing them to play the piano.

You may have overlooked the means and mechanisms by which thought and action is made possible.

Nobody is suggesting that arms or legs make decisions. Nor does the general 'you' have access to the means and mechanisms of the conscious experience of the general 'you.'

Hallet is presuming that free will refers to the actions of some non-physical soul or spirit. But that's not what free will is about. Free will is when a person decides what they will do while free of coercion and undue influence. Deciding what we will do is a physical process performed by our physical brains. Hallet is an expert in clinical neurophysiology, which is about how the physiology and neurology of the body accomplishes basic movements. He is apparently not an expert in how the brain performs decision-making and planning.

Hallett is referring to how actions are generated and performed. Neural agency, not free will. Will doesn't orchestrate or control the process of cognition.

So, Hallet should remain silent about free will until he studies the brain areas involved in choosing and planning. Right now, despite his keen knowledge of his specialty, he's sounding like someone who is very uninformed about the matters we're discussing.

Not agreeing with someone who is a specialist in the field is not the same as demonstrating that what he says is wrong.

What Hallett describes is supported by numerous lines of evidence, experiments, case studies, etc, many of which I have quoted and cited.

DBT, I would suggest you confine your quotes to people qualified to speak on the matter of free will. Hallet's opinions on this matter are basically water cooler gossip.

Hallett is a specialist in brain function, cognition and motor action. Given that thought, will and action are functions of the brain, there is nobody more qualified to comment.

 

[DBT]

Reliable causation is a prerequisite for accomplishing any intent. Without it, we would be unable to carry out our will. Freedom, especially free will, requires a world of reliable cause and effect.

True on the surface, but causation not subject to will. Whatever happens is determined by elements other than our will.

Except when someone's will is the prior cause of the event. For example, you cannot delete the function of "willing" from a "willful action".

Prior will is no more free of antecedents and inner necessitation than is current will or future will.

Nor is will the orchestrator of decision making. The brain generates the will to act based on needs and wants, which are determined by countless factors, circumstances, needs, wants, fears......

Nor can you delete "willing" from the causal chain, without falsifying determinism.

Nor do I. I have described the role of will on several occasions.

Information processing, not our will is the means of response.

You cannot delete willing from information processing! It's right there within the large catalog of the brain's practical functions. We choose what we will do. Our chosen intent then motivates and directs our body's actions to carry out that intent.

Will emerges relatively late in the process. First inputs, then propagation, then processing of information, integrating with memory function enabling recognition (milliseconds), etc, etc....

Nobody chooses their neural architecture.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to choose our neural architecture in order to choose what we will have for dinner in a restaurant.

The list of things that we do not choose does not eliminate any of the things that we do choose.

Yet it is specifically the state of the system, not will, that decides in any given instance.

The appearance of alternative possibilities is not the same as having an alternative possibility in any given instance in time, where only the determined action is possible.

Since a possibility exists solely within the imagination, its appearance there is sufficient evidence of its existence. And, because it is a causally necessary mental event, and a logically necessary parameter of the choosing function, it damn well will appear, whether you like it or not.

The requirements of a possibility are simply that, if we chose to do it, we could actually do it. It is never required that we actually do it in order for it to be possible.

What we imagine is not necessarily what we in fact do. What we imagine also has antecedents.

Not at all, where consciousness exists, consciousness itself is an inseparable part of the determined system and its progression of events.

EXACTLY!

Including all the consequences for the idea of free will.

Consciousness plays its determined role. You can't have it both ways, determinism on the one hand and consciousness being able to buck the system on the other.

There's no bucking the system. Conscious processes do their thing and unconscious processes do their thing, and they work together in the same brain. Every event within the conscious processes and every event within the unconscious processes is causally necessary from any prior point in time. But, causal necessity is so ubiquitous that it really doesn't add any useful information. It is the specific doings of the conscious and unconscious processes that are causally necessitating the choice.

That is causal necessitation at work. The brain shapes and forms our conscious experience on the basis of information acquired and memory function by means of neural activity.

Memory function failure alone disintegrates consciousness.

It's a question of what implications 'all events proceeding 'without deviation' has for the idea of free will.

Well, one implication is that it will be causally necessary, and without deviation, that I will be making a choice as to what I will have for dinner.

Which do not appear to be good.

As you may eventually realize, the implications of causal necessity and events proceeding without deviation, are entirely neutral.

Neutral? It determines the very state of the system, the world, the brain, thought and action.

 

[Jarhyn]

Wow, brilliant, good for you Champ.

Nice straw-man argument. Champ.

You cannot change what happened in the past. You can absolutely change what your brain encodes about that past.

There are processes by which emories can be changed and altered/corrupted/corrected/added.

There are processes by which new habits can be inserted.

But moreover there are processes to directly feed back information on the basis of what one part of the brain is saying it another.

I can, and have: identified some part of my brain that was doing something "wrong", resisted the influence of that wrong impulse, and directed feedback at the impulse until it was closer to the "known right configuration".

In neural intelligence terms, this is "finding an unformatted or available response pathway, and running a training algorithm on it."

But instead of some guy sitting at a terminal, it's some other part of the neural network doing it.

Everything in there is mutable and not only can the system be altered, it is trivially true that the system alters itself.

Now, you can claim that "the part of the system that does the altering isn't 'you'; 'you' feel it milliseconds after the decision is already made", except that's some special pleading and no-true-scotsman.

There's a process that does all this, and this process is aware of what it is doing, at least in MY head (dunno about yours!). To then say that the brain is not reconfiguring itself is just silly.

Now, you could take all of those classes that I mentioned so as to know exactly how and why and by what logical mechanisms the brain alters itself, but you won't.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Inner necessitation is a meaningful restraint. Given that a person has no awareness or control of the mechanisms that forms them and their experience self and the world, a person does precisely what the state and condition of their system determines.

You're still invoking dualism. The person happens to BE that system in its current state and condition. Nothing more is required in order for the person to decide for itself what to have for dinner.

Free will is when that choice is free from coercion and other forms of undue influence, such as a condition of significant mental illness that impairs their ability to make rational choices.

The menu is a normal influence that does not compromise one's ability to choose. But a significant mental illness is an extraordinary influence that may in fact compromise one's ability to make a rational choice (for example, if the person suffers a delusion that the waiter is a space alien out to get him).

It is specifically the brain that chooses, 'person' refers to the body in general. It is specifically the brain that evaluates and selects options.

Yes, the brain is a very significant part of the body of the person. That's common knowledge.

The option that a brain selects in any given instance in time is the only possible option in that instance in time because it was not 'free will' that acted, but the state and condition of the system in that instance in time.

Every dinner that the person took the trouble to think about was a real possibility, because it was something that could have happened if they chose to make it happen. Things that "can" happen do not necessarily happen. Only things that "will" happen necessarily happen.

Multiple possible choices are input to the choosing operation. A single actual choice is output. That is the function of choosing, to reduce multiple possibilities to a single actuality. (This is a "possibility friendly event", none of the possibilities are injured in any way by not being chosen).

It is information processing, not free will that is the agency of decision making and motor action.

And the specific form of information processing is called "choosing", as in choosing what we will have for dinner. How is it that you continue to think that you can hide the choosing event from us by using the more general function of information processing? Choosing is a specific king of information processing. Reading is another kind of information processing. Taking an exam in school is another kind. Recognizing a stop sign at the intersection is yet another. There are many kinds of information processing, and choosing is definitely one of them.

What we do choose is determined by what we don't get to choose, the state of the system.....which doesn't just sit idle while 'free will' supposedly does its thing.

Well, the state of the system happens to be us, as we are right now. And we are not idle while trying to decide what we will have for dinner. We are doing something called "choosing what we will have for dinner". And if we are free to make this choice for ourselves, it is called a "freely chosen I will have the salad", or simply free will. It is not rocket science.

 

[Jarhyn]

I start with the world is material and determined

All that gets you to is "material and determined". It doesn't get you away from compatibilist free will. Maybe that gets you away from some imaginary nonsensical concept of "libertarian free will", but I'm not talking about libertarian free will.

That bit about freedom to goal is a lot more iffy. To do so the system would have to be non determinant

No, to do so any localization of the deterministic system would have to model the system stochastically.

The subsystem within the deterministic progression is stochastic.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem demands this is the case for all subsets of the system.

We CANNOT determine the whole system from inside the system so OUR behavior within it has a property of free will.

Evaluation of Freedom to goal is defined as "do all functional unit tests pass?" And truth of freedom to goal is evaluated as to "did execution return expected output?"

And all this can be automated. Each part can be jacked into another part until the process just goes.

It helps when the subsystem has a source of chaos to simulate the unavailability of information that may pertain to the environment.

 

[Jarhyn]

Wrong. It has been explained why it is wrong, over and over. The article I just quoted explains it. Your objections are laughable.

You don't want to think that you or some sociopath or whatever have a choice, or had a choice.

Are you saying that Sociopaths choose to be Sociopaths? Really? Surely not. Or are you just saying that Sociopaths are able to think and decide? If you mean the latter, you haven't understood a word that's been said.

Some part of the sociopath represents a decision to do the things sociopaths do. If there is any part of the sociopath not down with being such, it may have it's free will abrogated by the part that wants so very badly to be one.

Other times, the part that is capable of saying no says "yes" instead, and gives free will to a monster that kills people, becoming that thing entire.

This is a choice, given knowledge that they could have decided to say no.

Hallett is a specialist in brain function, cognition and motor action. Given that thought, will and action are functions of the brain, there is nobody more qualified to comment.

If they are not an expert in neural training, modelling, and assembly, with a strong background in machine architecture they are still just a bystander to actual understanding here.

You are making an argument from authority to someone who has actually built a synthetic neuron, strung a bunch together, and understood how logic and process and state machine behaviors arise from this arrangement.

Go back to school and learn why you are wrong.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Mark Hallett.
''Dr. Hallett is the Chief of the Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. He went to Harvard Medical School and did his neurology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. As part of his training, he was a fellow at NIH from 1970 to 1972. From 1976 to 1984, Dr. Hallett was the Chief of the Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and worked up to Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. From 1984, he has been at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke where he also served as Clinical Director of NINDS until July 2000. He is past President of the American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine and the Movement Disorder Society, past Vice-President of the American Academy of Neurology, and current President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology and the Brainstem Society. His work mainly deals with principles of motor control and the pathophysiology of movement disorders''

M. Hallett
How Can There Be Voluntary Movement Without Free Will?
''Humans do not appear to be purely reflexive organisms, simple automatons. A vast array of different movements are generated in a variety of settings. Is there an alternative to free will? Movement, in the final analysis, comes only from muscle contraction. Muscle contraction is under the complete control of the alpha motoneurons in the spinal cord. When the alpha motoneurons are active, there will be movement. Activity of the alpha motoneurons is a product of the different synaptic events on their dendrites and cell bodies. There is a complex summation of EPSPs and IPSPs, and when the threshold for an action potential is crossed, the cell fires. There are a large number of important inputs, and one of the most important is from the corticospinal tract which conveys a large part of the cortical control. Such a situation likely holds also for the motor cortex and the cells of origin of the corticospinal tract. Their firing depends on their synaptic inputs. And, a similar situation must hold for all the principal regions giving input to the motor cortex. For any cortical region, its activity will depend on its synaptic inputs. Some motor cortical inputs come via only a few synapses from sensory cortices, and such influences on motor output are clear. Some inputs will come from regions, such as the limbic areas, many synapses away from both primary sensory and motor cortices. At any one time, the activity of the motor cortex, and its commands to the spinal cord, will reflect virtually all the activity in the entire brain. Is it necessary that there be anything else? This can be a complete description of the process of movement selection, and even if there is something more -- like free will -- it would have to operate through such neuronal mechanisms.
The view that there is no such thing as free will as an inner causal agent has been advocated by a number of philosophers, scientists, and neurologists including Ryle, Adrian, Skinner and Fisher.(Fisher 1993)'' - M. Hallett Clinical Neurophysiology,

I would suggest to Dr. Hallet that he look into the brain areas that are involved in planning what the body will be doing if he wants to understand the neural aspects of people deciding for themselves what they will do. My arms and legs do not decide when I should employ them go grocery shopping versus employing them to play the piano.

You may have overlooked the means and mechanisms by which thought and action is made possible.

Nobody is suggesting that arms or legs make decisions. Nor does the general 'you' have access to the means and mechanisms of the conscious experience of the general 'you.'

Hallet is presuming that free will refers to the actions of some non-physical soul or spirit. But that's not what free will is about. Free will is when a person decides what they will do while free of coercion and undue influence. Deciding what we will do is a physical process performed by our physical brains. Hallet is an expert in clinical neurophysiology, which is about how the physiology and neurology of the body accomplishes basic movements. He is apparently not an expert in how the brain performs decision-making and planning.

Hallett is referring to how actions are generated and performed. Neural agency, not free will. Will doesn't orchestrate or control the process of cognition.

So, Hallet should remain silent about free will until he studies the brain areas involved in choosing and planning. Right now, despite his keen knowledge of his specialty, he's sounding like someone who is very uninformed about the matters we're discussing.

Not agreeing with someone who is a specialist in the field is not the same as demonstrating that what he says is wrong.

What Hallett describes is supported by numerous lines of evidence, experiments, case studies, etc, many of which I have quoted and cited.

DBT, I would suggest you confine your quotes to people qualified to speak on the matter of free will. Hallet's opinions on this matter are basically water cooler gossip.

Hallett is a specialist in brain function, cognition and motor action. Given that thought, will and action are functions of the brain, there is nobody more qualified to comment.

Sorry, but Hallett refers only to the motor cortex and never mentions the prefrontal cortex at all. The prefrontal cortex performs the functions that we associate with free will. From the Wikipedia article:

This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[4][5][6].

So, Hallett is either very confused or he is simply inflating the importance of the brain area of his specialty, the motor cortex.

When Hallett refers to free will at the end, he appears to be using the free will = supernatural soul, version of free will. And like any other scientist, the supernatural will always be appropriately rejected.

Operational free will does not require anything supernatural or anti-causal. It is simply when we choose for ourselves what we will do while free of coercion and other extraordinary influences that effectively remove our ability to make the choice for ourselves.

Hallett offers nothing that is useful to this discussion.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Prior will is no more free of antecedents and inner necessitation than is current will or future will.

Fortunately, no one ever needs to be free of prior causes in order to be the meaningful and relevant cause of what they do next.

Nor is will the orchestrator of decision making.

The will of the customers to have dinner in the restaurant is what causes them to pick up the menu, review the menu, consider specific options, and make their choice.

Did you think that will was something else? Perhaps a sprite or spirit floating in the air?

The brain generates the will to act based on needs and wants

There, that wasn't so hard. Now, consider the fact that after the brain generates the will to have dinner in the restaurant, that product of the brain then becomes the input to subsequent brain activity, like reading the menu and making a choice.

which are determined by countless factors, circumstances, needs, wants, fears...

Yes, but only the factors that still remain within us, after those prior events have passed, get to participate in our choice. No prior cause of us can participate in our decision without first becoming an integral part of who and what we are. Result: It is actually us, in the here and now, that is making the decision.

Will emerges relatively late in the process. First inputs, then propagation, then processing of information, integrating with memory function enabling recognition (milliseconds), etc, etc....

No, that doesn't hold up. Will, whether conscious or unconscious, motivates and directs subsequent conscious or unconscious brain activity. For example, the conscious will to have dinner at the restaurant results in the unconscious activity of the motor cortex as it lifts our legs and shifts our weight such that we walk through the restaurant's door.

Yet it is specifically the state of the system, not will, that decides in any given instance.

Will is a part of the state of the system which is us. The choosing process, also a part of the state of the system which is us, determines our deliberate will.

What we imagine is not necessarily what we in fact do. What we imagine also has antecedents.

Correct on both counts.

That is causal necessitation at work.

Causal necessitation does no work. Causal necessitation is about what the objects and forces that actually do the work are doing. For example, it is our own brain that is doing the work of choosing, in a reliable and deterministic manner.

The brain shapes and forms our conscious experience on the basis of information acquired and memory function by means of neural activity.

Yes, but also keep in mind that the brain is also having that conscious experience.

Memory function failure alone disintegrates consciousness.

I don't think so. We have immediate conscious experience of sensory information, even if we immediately forget it. We have long term and short term memory working separately, such that a person can lose short term memory of what just happened but can recount events from long ago, and we also have the loss of long term memory where short term memory still functions fine (for the few minutes that it lasts).

Neutral? It determines the very state of the system, the world, the brain, thought and action.

Well, no. Causal necessity itself causes nothing and necessitates nothing. And the fact of reliable causation, from which we logically derive causal necessity, is always true, whether it rains or shines, so it is a neutral notion.

 

[Jarhyn]

Mark Hallett.
''Dr. Hallett is the Chief of the Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. He went to Harvard Medical School and did his neurology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. As part of his training, he was a fellow at NIH from 1970 to 1972. From 1976 to 1984, Dr. Hallett was the Chief of the Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and worked up to Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. From 1984, he has been at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke where he also served as Clinical Director of NINDS until July 2000. He is past President of the American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine and the Movement Disorder Society, past Vice-President of the American Academy of Neurology, and current President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology and the Brainstem Society. His work mainly deals with principles of motor control and the pathophysiology of movement disorders''

M. Hallett
How Can There Be Voluntary Movement Without Free Will?
''Humans do not appear to be purely reflexive organisms, simple automatons. A vast array of different movements are generated in a variety of settings. Is there an alternative to free will? Movement, in the final analysis, comes only from muscle contraction. Muscle contraction is under the complete control of the alpha motoneurons in the spinal cord. When the alpha motoneurons are active, there will be movement. Activity of the alpha motoneurons is a product of the different synaptic events on their dendrites and cell bodies. There is a complex summation of EPSPs and IPSPs, and when the threshold for an action potential is crossed, the cell fires. There are a large number of important inputs, and one of the most important is from the corticospinal tract which conveys a large part of the cortical control. Such a situation likely holds also for the motor cortex and the cells of origin of the corticospinal tract. Their firing depends on their synaptic inputs. And, a similar situation must hold for all the principal regions giving input to the motor cortex. For any cortical region, its activity will depend on its synaptic inputs. Some motor cortical inputs come via only a few synapses from sensory cortices, and such influences on motor output are clear. Some inputs will come from regions, such as the limbic areas, many synapses away from both primary sensory and motor cortices. At any one time, the activity of the motor cortex, and its commands to the spinal cord, will reflect virtually all the activity in the entire brain. Is it necessary that there be anything else? This can be a complete description of the process of movement selection, and even if there is something more -- like free will -- it would have to operate through such neuronal mechanisms.
The view that there is no such thing as free will as an inner causal agent has been advocated by a number of philosophers, scientists, and neurologists including Ryle, Adrian, Skinner and Fisher.(Fisher 1993)'' - M. Hallett Clinical Neurophysiology,

I would suggest to Dr. Hallet that he look into the brain areas that are involved in planning what the body will be doing if he wants to understand the neural aspects of people deciding for themselves what they will do. My arms and legs do not decide when I should employ them go grocery shopping versus employing them to play the piano.

You may have overlooked the means and mechanisms by which thought and action is made possible.

Nobody is suggesting that arms or legs make decisions. Nor does the general 'you' have access to the means and mechanisms of the conscious experience of the general 'you.'

Hallet is presuming that free will refers to the actions of some non-physical soul or spirit. But that's not what free will is about. Free will is when a person decides what they will do while free of coercion and undue influence. Deciding what we will do is a physical process performed by our physical brains. Hallet is an expert in clinical neurophysiology, which is about how the physiology and neurology of the body accomplishes basic movements. He is apparently not an expert in how the brain performs decision-making and planning.

Hallett is referring to how actions are generated and performed. Neural agency, not free will. Will doesn't orchestrate or control the process of cognition.

So, Hallet should remain silent about free will until he studies the brain areas involved in choosing and planning. Right now, despite his keen knowledge of his specialty, he's sounding like someone who is very uninformed about the matters we're discussing.

Not agreeing with someone who is a specialist in the field is not the same as demonstrating that what he says is wrong.

What Hallett describes is supported by numerous lines of evidence, experiments, case studies, etc, many of which I have quoted and cited.

DBT, I would suggest you confine your quotes to people qualified to speak on the matter of free will. Hallet's opinions on this matter are basically water cooler gossip.

Hallett is a specialist in brain function, cognition and motor action. Given that thought, will and action are functions of the brain, there is nobody more qualified to comment.

Sorry, but Hallett refers only to the motor cortex and never mentions the prefrontal cortex at all. The prefrontal cortex performs the functions that we associate with free will. From the Wikipedia article:

This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[4][5][6].

So, Hallett is either very confused or he is simply inflating the importance of the brain area of his specialty, the motor cortex.

When Hallett refers to free will at the end, he appears to be using the free will = supernatural soul, version of free will. And like any other scientist, the supernatural will always be appropriately rejected.

Operational free will does not require anything supernatural or anti-causal. It is simply when we choose for ourselves what we will do while free of coercion and other extraordinary influences that effectively remove our ability to make the choice for ourselves.

Hallett offers nothing that is useful to this discussion.

It comes down to the fact that "people who study how biology is a machine" are not necessarily qualified to answer "how and whether machines make choices".

The most qualified people to discuss "how and whether machines make choices that are describable as 'free' and whether those choices can be made on the basis of 'will', and whether these properties are objectively observable" falls exactly on the people who study machine architecture, assembly, systems architecture, and neural (variable bias transistance switching) models.

"Is meat a machine" is a different question from "is machine 'free' as pertains to it's 'will'".

 

[Jarhyn]

It is not rocket science.

Except that it kind of is, at least to the level DBT is insisting to see.

They do not understand how a machine can do a choosing operation in such a way to encompass an element that defines "will", such that that can be "free: true/false". They demand to know how the machine may do these things, without learning how machines go about "doing things".