Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

''An action’s production by a deterministic process, even when the agent satisfies the conditions on moral responsibility specified by compatibilists, presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agents. '' - Oxford Scholarship.

I'm beginning to think you are posting that quote without reading it yourself. It is saying that there is no distinction between our deliberate action versus an action forced upon by other agents. The basis for abolishing that distinction is that all actions, whether our own or those imposed upon us at gunpoint, are produce by a deterministic process. Do you actually agree that we should remove that distinction between what we decide to do versus what we are forced to do at gunpoint?

Necessitated actions - being determined - are by definition are neither chosen, negotiable or alterable, events that proceed or unfold deterministically according to antecedent events and the laws of nature.

Operational free will does not require freedom antecedent events or freedom from the laws of nature. It only requires freedom from coercion and undue influence.

Necessitated actions are not freely willed actions.

All actions are equally causally necessary, including those actions we deliberately choose of our own free will (free of coercion and undue influence, NOT freedom from causation).

To label necessitated actions, not being willed, as an example of free will is case of mislabeling determinism, which is the error of compatibilism

We simply call as we see it.

(A) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. She was not coerced nor unduly influenced to do so, therefore she was free to choose the salad for herself. It was a freely chosen "I will have the salad, please".

(B) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. Her choice is reliably caused by her dietary goals and her genetic food preferences. These goals and reasons have antecedent causes found in her prior life experiences. Her life itself has antecedent causes, going back through the evolution of the human species, the appearance of life on the planet, the formation of the planet, all the way back to the Big Bang (and whatever preceded that, ad infinitum). So, this was also a causally necessary event, the fundamental notion of determinism.

Both A and B happen to be true. Thus the notions of operational free will and determinism appear to be compatible.

... That which is necessitated is not free.

One need not be free of causal necessity in order to be free from coercion and undue influence. Causal necessity is a universal constant of our deterministic universe, and every freedom we have requires reliable cause and effect, so, your assumption is incorrect.

It is you doing it, therefore free will is not an adequate argument because it ignores the means and mechanisms of decision making,

We assume that the means and mechanisms of decision making are fully deterministic processes occuring within our physical brains. But, again, operational free will does not require freedom from our brains, but only freedom from coercion and undue influence. So, our conclusion is incorrect.

Necessitated actions - being determined - are by definition not chosen.

If it is necessary that we make a choice, such as when we are in the restaurant and the waiter is waiting for our order, then, obviously, a necessitated action is, in fact, chosen. You have a lot of faulty assumptions in your argument.

These are events that proceed or unfold deterministically according to antecedent events and the laws of nature.

Correct!

Necessitated actions are not freely willed actions.

Except when they are necessarily freely chosen actions. Another faulty assumption.

''Each state of the universe and its events are the necessary result of its prior state and prior events. ("Events" change the state of things.) Determinism means that events will proceed naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation").'' - Marvin Edwards

Absolutely! Always has been. Always will be. This includes those events in which we decide for ourselves what we will do while free of coercion and undue influence. (You know, choices of our own free will).

Both 'higher' and 'lower' functions work on the principle of information processing that is determined by the 'wiring' and connectivity of the network, brain region or structure, not will, not free will.

The wiring in one area will organize sensory data into a model of reality that supports the functions of imagination, evaluation, and choosing. This is where we will decide for ourselves what we will do. If that process is free of coercion and undue influence, then we call that "a freely chosen will", or simply "free will".

The point being: that it is the state and condition of the system, not will, that determines the decision made in any given instance in time.

Yes. We call that system the Central Nervous System. It does our thinking and our deciding, and whatever it deliberately chooses to do, we, as a whole person, have chosen to do.

Saying ''you made the decision'' is just a general reference to the person as a whole.

Yes. Most of us refer to ourselves and others as whole persons. We all know that we have brains that make decisions and perform lots of other functions. But, decisions as to what we as a whole person will do, such as skydiving, really involves all of our parts.

We are a collaborative collection of reliable causal mechanisms that work together for the benefit of the person as a whole.

Which doesn't explain the nature of the process.

Everything that is needed to understand the nature of free will is already common knowledge. If anyone wants to know the details of what the different parts of the brain are doing, there are many good books out there on neuroscience, by people like David Eagleman ("The Brain"), Michael Gazzaniga ("Who's in Charge?"), Michael Graziano ("Consciousness and the Social Brain").

It is specifically the brain that 'decides.' The brain acquires and processes information and makes decisions based on sets of criteria,

Exactly.

the only possible option (being determined) can be realized in any given circumstance.

There is no such thing as choosing between a "single possibility". Every choosing process requires at least two real possibilities. Every time it is determined that you must make a choice, it will also be determined that there will be at least two options to choose from.

Only one thing will be chosen, but all of the other things can be chosen.

Neuroscience is the means by which we gain an understanding of how the brain works, how decisions are made and actions are taken. Which is without a doubt relevant to the question of free will....whether such a thing exists or not.

Neuroscience may explain how our decision making works, but it cannot "explain it away" as if decision making wasn't actually happening. What neuroscience will always continue to assert is that our brains are in fact making choices that control our behavior. Neuroscience can also inform us of the various ways that mental illness and brain injury may alter our normal decision making process.

But neuroscience will never assert that it is anything other than our own brains that are controlling our behavior.

Abstract
''Belief in free will has been a mainstay in philosophy throughout history, grounded in large part in our intuitive sense that we consciously control our actions and could have done otherwise. However, psychology and psychiatry have long sought to uncover mechanistic explanations for human behavior that challenge the notion of free will. In recent years, neuroscientific discoveries have produced a model of volitional behavior that is at odds with the notion of contra-causal free will and our sense of conscious agency. Volitional behavior instead appears to have antecedents in unconscious brain activity that is localizable to specific neuroanatomical structures. Updating notions of free will in favor of a continuous model of volitional self-control provides a useful paradigm to conceptualize and study some forms of psychopathology such as addiction and impulse control disorders. Similarly, thinking of specific symptoms of schizophrenia as disorders of agency may help to elucidate mechanisms of psychosis. Beyond clinical understanding and etiological research, a neuroscientific model of volitional behavior has the potential to modernize forensic notions of responsibility and criminal punishment in order to inform public policy. Ultimately, moving away from the language of free will towards the language of volitional control may result in an enhanced understanding of the very nature of ourselves.''

Please note that the free will they object to is "contra-causal free will", that is, "freedom from reliable cause and effect", an irrational and thus impossible freedom. That is not operational free will. Operationally, free will is simply a choice we make for ourselves while free of coercion and undue influence.

Note also that the authors are affirming a model of volitional self-control (human agency) and disorders of agency (which presumes human agency and control).

The way in which neuroscience can modernize forensic notions of responsibility and criminal punishment is not by abolishing responsibility, but by assuring that offenders whose behavior is controlled by mental illness are treated psychiatrically and not just punitively.

In short, they are not buying the hard determinist's incompatibilism. They recognize that people normally exercise self-control by their own volition (their freely chosen will). And the fact that the brain provides the mechanism for that self-control does not impair their understanding of volition (operational free will).

 

[fromderinside]

Again not my problem you can't understand a thing I say. I've been trying to get my head for weeks now through the full perspective shift so as to understand "physics", not as a specific "our physics" but as in as "a class of different things each a physics", where a physics is a model of field interaction of which ours is a member of.

Now, humans are fun because we can do all these different kinds of functions and more. We are capable of looking at our current goal and seeing a failure long before we even start to go to the place to do the things and figure out ways to get past the failure cases.

We have choice functions where we can reselect our goals. We have choice functions where we can create new values, or refine responses to those values in future encounters.

We even have choice functions where we can modify the feelings associated with historic events.

 Physics

Physics is the natural science that studies matter,[a] its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force.[2] Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics#cite_note-4[3][4][5]

Try the model above. It seems to work pretty well. The physics that the is base of all our advances in understanding the world in which we live. The one that we can manipulate through the definitions derived without use subjective variables.

 

[DBT]

What you don't seem to get is that the compatibilist argument is directly related to determinism, not stochastic, not probabilistic, not random

You really can't move your understanding between global and local reference frames can you?

You don't seem to understand that local and global are related. Quite simply, that if the world is determined, local reference frames are determined by both conditions in the world as a whole and local events or references.

'Local references' do not allow freedom from determinism if we live in a deterministic world.

If you don't understand that much, there is no hope.

You don't even understand what stochastic means in this context, and why it is important.

How many times does it need to be explained to you that compatibilism is directly related to determinism?

Not stochastic, not random, not random, not probabilistic, but determinism.

One more time; the argument is whether or not free will is compatible with determinism.

If you want to discuss free will in relation to stochastic, probabilistic or random events, start a new thread.

 

[DBT]

If it was that simple, the debate would have been settled centuries ago.

What is difficult for some may be easy for others. I was able to see through the problem as a teenager in the public library. Inevitability was not some entity exercising control over me. Inevitability was actually me, doing what I do, and choosing what I choose. Free will is just another causally necessary event. But causal necessity itself is neither a meaningful nor a relevant cause of anything.

It's basically the same notion as in Schopenhauer's and Kane's quotes, except that I'm using the other side of the conceptual coin. When it comes to inevitability and me, I am clear as to who is doing what, while many people are still trapped in the self-induced hoax that causal necessity is an agent who is responsible for everything that happens.

Wishful thinking. There are two sides to the debate. There are compatibilists and there are incompatibilists.

Both sides are convinced that their argument is sound.

Which side is correct depends on the soundness of their terms and propositions and supporting evidence.

Neuroscience provides evidence for brain function, how decisions are made and actions taken, for instance.

Dictionaries don't delve into the means and mechanisms of decision making, the nature of determinism or freedom in relation to determinism.

The job of dictionaries is to explain the meaning of words as they are commonly used in practice. William James in his lectures on Pragmatism, described it as the "cash value" of the word, what it means by how it works in actual use.

Dictionaries do not explore or take into account the nature of cognition, decision making and motor action when they provide definitions of free will. They simply describe how the term is used.

Freedom of will demands the possibility of alternate actions.

With the evolution of intelligent species we get imagination, evaluation, and choosing. With them come the possibilities of alternate actions.

Imagination, evaluation and choosing are all attributes enabled by neural networks and information processing.

We have information processing, decision making and motor action, we can carry out actions based on decisions made. None of this is the work of free will, nor can it be labelled free will because will has nothing to do with it.

Failure within the network, cognitive processes fail, evaluation fails, decision making fails, consciousness becomes incoherent.

 

[DBT]

unconscious information processing activity that leads, in microseconds, to the experience of thought, deliberation, decision making and the will to act.

Just this part though...

You call it "unconscious", I call it pre-narrative.

Call it whatever takes your fancy. You are wrong

Information input is not conscious, transmission of information via the nerves, axons, dendrites, synapsis and processing by neurons, etc, is not a conscious process prior to conscious activity and representation of information in conscious form.

The former feeds information into the latter. That's physics at work. Information processing is neither willed or open for conscious regulation.

Information input, not will, alters the system.

Information is input into the system also from the system.

Makes no difference. You don't get choose what goes on within the system. Functional Memory is composed of information from the external world, your life experiences, identity, family, friends, interests, profession, language, culture, etc, etc.....the very basis of who you are and what you do.

Without which, you no longer recognize, think or act....

You don't understand the basics of the issue.

 

[DBT]

Here are some specific questions for DBT that I am not sure he has ever concretely addressed, only indirectly addressed at best (I could have missed some of his answers).

Do you believe that the state and condition of your brain just IS you?

Of course I have addressed it. Everything has been addressed and repeated numerous times

I have pointed out that the organism, body, brain, mind, is you.

That’s fine. You have said several times that the state of condition of my brain determines what I will do. So I wanted to clarify. Now, by your own definition and reasoning, since the state and condition of my brain is me, then when you say that the state and condition of my brain detrermines what I will do, you must mean that I dertermine what I will do. That’s compatibilism.

Wording it as 'I determine what I do' means nothing when you have no awareness of what is happening within the system that you call 'you'

On the contrary, it is the non-chosen condition of the system being acted upon by external events that determines you.

Whatever is happening within 'your' brain, your system is not subject to your will or your regulation.

Freedom of will demands the ability to regulate and choose according to your will.

That is not how it works.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Wishful thinking. There are two sides to the debate. There are compatibilists and there are incompatibilists.

And there are two sides among the incompatibilists, libertarians who say free will is true but determinism is false, and, the hard determinists who say that determinism is true and free will is false. This is where the debate becomes interminable.

Compatibilists say that free will is true and determinism is true. With compatibilism the debate ends.

Neuroscience provides evidence for brain function, how decisions are made and actions taken, for instance.
Imagination, evaluation and choosing are all attributes enabled by neural networks and information processing. We have information processing, decision making and motor action, we can carry out actions based on decisions made.

Exactly. Neuroscience confirms that it is our own brains that decide what we will do next. Not the Big Bang.

None of this is the work of free will, nor can it be labelled free will because will has nothing to do with it.

That depends entirely upon how we define free will. When defined operationally, free will is the brain deciding for itself what it will do while free of coercion and undue influence. And this takes into account all of the brain's mechanisms for imagining alternatives, evaluating them, and making choices.

But if you define free will irrationally, as freedom from causation, or freedom from ourselves, or freedom from reality, or freedom from our own brains, then of course free will would not be a correct label for anything.

Failure within the network, cognitive processes fail, evaluation fails, decision making fails, consciousness becomes incoherent.

Yes. The reliability of rational causation can be severely affected by physical causes (brain injuries) and biological causes (tumors and other diseases) that interfere with the normal operation of the brain. So, when reformulating determinism, we would say that every event is the reliable result of some specific combination of physical, biological, and rational causation.

 

[DBT]

''An action’s production by a deterministic process, even when the agent satisfies the conditions on moral responsibility specified by compatibilists, presents no less of a challenge to basic-desert responsibility than does deterministic manipulation by other agents. '' - Oxford Scholarship.

I'm beginning to think you are posting that quote without reading it yourself. It is saying that there is no distinction between our deliberate action versus an action forced upon by other agents. The basis for abolishing that distinction is that all actions, whether our own or those imposed upon us at gunpoint, are produce by a deterministic process. Do you actually agree that we should remove that distinction between what we decide to do versus what we are forced to do at gunpoint?

It means what it says; basically, that an actions production by deterministic processes presents a challenge for compatibilism regardless of conditions that meet the compatibilist definition of free will, ie, acting without external coersion or force.

That deterministic processes are a challenge to the notion of free will

Necessitated actions - being determined - are by definition are neither chosen, negotiable or alterable, events that proceed or unfold deterministically according to antecedent events and the laws of nature.

Operational free will does not require freedom antecedent events or freedom from the laws of nature. It only requires freedom from coercion and undue influence.

That's according to the compatibilist definition of free will. Incompatibilists obviously disagree, and give the reasons why the compatibilist definition fails to prove the proposition.

Necessitated actions are not freely willed actions.

All actions are equally causally necessary, including those actions we deliberately choose of our own free will (free of coercion and undue influence, NOT freedom from causation).

Deliberately choose is a bit misleading in relation to determinism and the nature of information processing.

It is information processing that 'chooses.' What is chosen is determined by the system, not freely chosen.

Careful wording alone doesn't establish a case for free will.

To label necessitated actions, not being willed, as an example of free will is case of mislabeling determinism, which is the error of compatibilism

We simply call as we see it.

(A) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. She was not coerced nor unduly influenced to do so, therefore she was free to choose the salad for herself. It was a freely chosen "I will have the salad, please".

(B) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. Her choice is reliably caused by her dietary goals and her genetic food preferences. These goals and reasons have antecedent causes found in her prior life experiences. Her life itself has antecedent causes, going back through the evolution of the human species, the appearance of life on the planet, the formation of the planet, all the way back to the Big Bang (and whatever preceded that, ad infinitum). So, this was also a causally necessary event, the fundamental notion of determinism.

Both A and B happen to be true. Thus the notions of operational free will and determinism appear to be compatible.

What the woman does or does not do is not freely chosen by an act of her free will. It is determined before she is even aware of her decision;

Decision making:
"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

''Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.''

Please note that the free will they object to is "contra-causal free will", that is, "freedom from reliable cause and effect", an irrational and thus impossible freedom. That is not operational free will. Operationally, free will is simply a choice we make for ourselves while free of coercion and undue influence.

There are several forms of objection to the idea of free will. That is but one.

Note also that the authors are affirming a model of volitional self-control (human agency) and disorders of agency (which presumes human agency and control).

The way in which neuroscience can modernize forensic notions of responsibility and criminal punishment is not by abolishing responsibility, but by assuring that offenders whose behavior is controlled by mental illness are treated psychiatrically and not just punitively.

In short, they are not buying the hard determinist's incompatibilism. They recognize that people normally exercise self-control by their own volition (their freely chosen will). And the fact that the brain provides the mechanism for that self-control does not impair their understanding of volition (operational free will).

Volitional self control does not mean agency through will or an ability to change outcomes according to our will or wish.

The brain being a modular system, self-control is largely a function of the PFC, which may moderate inputs from the amygdala, fear, emotional impulses, etc.

Will is not involved. Consciousness has no access to the process. What happens is represented on conscious form milliseconds after the event.

This issue just comes down to agency. If it is the state and condition that determines behavioural output, behaviour is not regulated by consciousness or will, and it cannot be defined as a matter of free will.

Cognition is not free will. Information processing is not free will. Motor action is not free will.

 

[Jarhyn]

You don't seem to understand that local and global are related

No, you just don't seem to understand HOW they are related.

The way they are related, it creates a demand that a principle of operation be in effect in the local reference frame: those things that operate with local reference frame have stochastic behavior and free will.

I describe it in This post using a fully deterministic universe, and still objectively, as an outside observer, identifying the free will of a specific actor.

By the definitions used, any other person could identify which actions of the dwarf was "will", "free will" and "imposed change".

All terms are well defined right down to "wererabbit".

 

[Jarhyn]

unconscious information processing activity that leads, in microseconds, to the experience of thought, deliberation, decision making and the will to act.

Just this part though...

You call it "unconscious", I call it pre-narrative.

Call it whatever takes your fancy. You are wrong

Information input is not conscious, transmission of information via the nerves, axons, dendrites, synapsis and processing by neurons, etc, is not a conscious process prior to conscious activity and representation of information in conscious form.

The former feeds information into the latter. That's physics at work. Information processing is neither willed or open for conscious regulation.

Information input, not will, alters the system.

Information is input into the system also from the system.

Makes no difference. You don't get choose what goes on within the system. Functional Memory is composed of information from the external world, your life experiences, identity, family, friends, interests, profession, language, culture, etc, etc.....the very basis of who you are and what you do.

Without which, you no longer recognize, think or act....

You don't understand the basics of the issue.

No, It makes a huge difference. It is the difference between recurrent neural networks and non-recurrent neural networks: one holds and modifies internal state and the other does not. Thus a non-recurrent neural network cannot self-review, but a recurrent network can. It can then become capable of deciding, as a function of neural organization, as a function of a previous frame or held state, which functions to execute.

This feedback allows any RNN to "decide, for itself, what it will do". What it decides for itself is still determined and calculable but it's self-ness is an observed fact of the system insofar as that state is driven by the locality, not by external data.

 

[Jarhyn]

Again not my problem you can't understand a thing I say. I've been trying to get my head for weeks now through the full perspective shift so as to understand "physics", not as a specific "our physics" but as in as "a class of different things each a physics", where a physics is a model of field interaction of which ours is a member of.

Now, humans are fun because we can do all these different kinds of functions and more. We are capable of looking at our current goal and seeing a failure long before we even start to go to the place to do the things and figure out ways to get past the failure cases.

We have choice functions where we can reselect our goals. We have choice functions where we can create new values, or refine responses to those values in future encounters.

We even have choice functions where we can modify the feelings associated with historic events.

 Physics

Physics is the natural science that studies matter,[a] its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force.[2] Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics#cite_note-4[3][4][5]

Try the model above. It seems to work pretty well. The physics that the is base of all our advances in understanding the world in which we live. The one that we can manipulate through the definitions derived without use subjective variables.

The problem here is your self-reference.

People have assumed for too long that "there is only one physics, only one set of physical laws".

There are lots of different sets of physical laws.

The only issue is that there is only one set of physical laws that describe any given universe as a universe.

Our universe is described well by a set of physical laws describable by math, and contains various systems also described by different (but compatible) physical laws described by math.

Ultimately it comes down to a fixed set of interactions that occur against a set of fields, to be "A physics".

Ultimately something must be a contained set of fields upon which some physics interacts, to be "a universe".

Being able to look at a universe in a jar means that I get the GUT of the thing without having to figure it out from the inside. It saves me a lot of work. But it is nonetheless a universe with a physics.

now, none of what I have described is subjective, either. "Door" is well defined. "Locked" is well defined. "Dwarf" is well defined. "Rabbit" is well defined.

everything there is well defined as an object.

Certain things about it are ABSURD, most certainly! And the way those absurdities came to contain this absurdness was exactly arbitrariness! But their absurdity makes them no less objective, even if the objects are made of charge potentials on a binary field inside an x86 architecture instead of charge potentials on nuclear and electrical and magnetic and other such fields inside a (our universe's unifying principle) architecture.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

It means what it says; basically, that an actions production by deterministic processes presents a challenge for compatibilism regardless of conditions that meet the compatibilist definition of free will, ie, acting without external coersion or force. That deterministic processes are a challenge to the notion of free will

Not that challenging considering that I was able to resolve the problem as a teenager in the public library. A Rubik's cube? No. I still haven't figured that out yet. But the compatibility of determinism and free will was easy.

Operational free will, the one that is actually used, does not require freedom from antecedent events or freedom from the laws of nature. It only requires freedom from coercion and undue influence.

That's according to the compatibilist definition of free will. Incompatibilists obviously disagree, and give the reasons why the compatibilist definition fails to prove the proposition.

Compatibilists have a much simpler proposition to prove. We simply prove that free will is commonly understood as a choice we make that is free of coercion and undue influence. This is proven by common usage of the notion in private and public life and in the courtroom. It is the specific free will that is used to assess a person's responsibility for their actions.

Compatibilists do not have to prove that free will is uncaused, because we assume it is reliably caused, just like every other deterministic event. We do not have to prove that we have a soul that operates independently from the brain, because we assume that the brain is the center of our decision making. We do not have to prove that free will operates outside of the laws of nature, because we recognize that everything we do is consistent with those laws.

So, the compatibilist proposition is simple and uncontroversial. All of the debate is between the two incompatibilists: the libertarians and the hard determinists.

Deliberately choose is a bit misleading in relation to determinism and the nature of information processing.

Not misleading at all. A deliberate choice is a choice whose antecedent cause was a process of deliberation. Deliberation is a form of information processing, performed within our own brains.

We simply call as we see it.

(A) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. She was not coerced nor unduly influenced to do so, therefore she was free to choose the salad for herself. It was a freely chosen "I will have the salad, please".

(B) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. Her choice is reliably caused by her dietary goals and her genetic food preferences. These goals and reasons have antecedent causes found in her prior life experiences. Her life itself has antecedent causes, going back through the evolution of the human species, the appearance of life on the planet, the formation of the planet, all the way back to the Big Bang (and whatever preceded that, ad infinitum). So, this was also a causally necessary event, the fundamental notion of determinism.

Both A and B happen to be true. Thus the notions of operational free will and determinism appear to be compatible.

Decision making:
"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

We're minimally conscious during habitual behavior or learned skills, such as driving a car or playing the piano. But an unexpected event will invoke conscious awareness.

''Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.''

And detecting the direction of motion would naturally be firmware if not hardware. But note that in the experiment when most of the dots were moving randomly, it took a while to reach a point of certainty as to the general direction of the set of dots.

All of this is interesting, of course, but none of this changes the basic facts of compatibilist free will. The brain, when confronted with an issue to decide will attempt to deduce the answer based upon the information available. The process is likely to vary according to the context of the issue. For example, different steps will be involved when choosing what to order for dinner than when choosing which direction the dots on the screen are moving.

There are several forms of objection to the idea of free will.

The actual case appears to be that there are several different ideas of free will that people object to. But no one can reasonably object to operational free will.

Volitional self control does not mean agency through will or an ability to change outcomes according to our will or wish.

Hate to break the news to you, but volition is just another name for will. Here's the scoop from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary:

Definition of volition
1: the power of choosing or determining : WILL
2: an act of making a choice or decision
also : a choice or decision made

Did you know?
Volition ultimately derives from the Latin verb velle, meaning "to will" or "to wish." (The adjective voluntary descends from the same source.) English speakers borrowed the term from French in the 17th century, using it at first to mean "an act of choosing," a meaning Herman Melville employed in Moby Dick (1851): "Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea." Melville's use comes about a century after the word had developed an additional meaning: "the power to choose." This meaning, now the word's dominant use, is found in such sentences as "Members must join of their own volition."

So, "volition" contains both the notions of will and choosing.

 

[fromderinside]

Again not my problem you can't understand a thing I say. I've been trying to get my head for weeks now through the full perspective shift so as to understand "physics", not as a specific "our physics" but as in as "a class of different things each a physics", where a physics is a model of field interaction of which ours is a member of.

Now, humans are fun because we can do all these different kinds of functions and more. We are capable of looking at our current goal and seeing a failure long before we even start to go to the place to do the things and figure out ways to get past the failure cases.

We have choice functions where we can reselect our goals. We have choice functions where we can create new values, or refine responses to those values in future encounters.

We even have choice functions where we can modify the feelings associated with historic events.

 Physics

Physics is the natural science that studies matter,[a] its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force.[2] Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics#cite_note-4[3][4][5]

Try the model above. It seems to work pretty well. The physics that the is base of all our advances in understanding the world in which we live. The one that we can manipulate through the definitions derived without use subjective variables.

The problem here is your self-reference.

People have assumed for too long that "there is only one physics, only one set of physical laws".

There are lots of different sets of physical laws.

The only issue is that there is only one set of physical laws that describe any given universe as a universe.

Our universe is described well by a set of physical laws describable by math, and contains various systems also described by different (but compatible) physical laws described by math.

Ultimately it comes down to a fixed set of interactions that occur against a set of fields, to be "A physics".

Ultimately something must be a contained set of fields upon which some physics interacts, to be "a universe".

Being able to look at a universe in a jar means that I get the GUT of the thing without having to figure it out from the inside. It saves me a lot of work. But it is nonetheless a universe with a physics.

now, none of what I have described is subjective, either. "Door" is well defined. "Locked" is well defined. "Dwarf" is well defined. "Rabbit" is well defined.

everything there is well defined as an object.

Certain things about it are ABSURD, most certainly! And the way those absurdities came to contain this absurdness was exactly arbitrariness! But their absurdity makes them no less objective, even if the objects are made of charge potentials on a binary field inside an x86 architecture instead of charge potentials on nuclear and electrical and magnetic and other such fields inside a (our universe's unifying principle) architecture.

If only your subjective declarations made sense. They don't. I've tired of wading around in your hypothetical subjective declarations.

Maybe you should take the effort to point out, to put material to your declaration of what is my self-reference. I supplied a cogent description of Physics to you. All you have to do is use it as it is mathematically described complete with material operational definitions.

Otherwise your wandering around has no substance at all. All you have are concepts in your mind which you are having a devil of a time making clear. They certainly aren't objective anything.

 

[DBT]

You don't seem to understand that local and global are related

No, you just don't seem to understand HOW they are related.

The way they are related, it creates a demand that a principle of operation be in effect in the local reference frame: those things that operate with local reference frame have stochastic behavior and free will.

I describe it in This post using a fully deterministic universe, and still objectively, as an outside observer, identifying the free will of a specific actor.

By the definitions used, any other person could identify which actions of the dwarf was "will", "free will" and "imposed change".

All terms are well defined right down to "wererabbit".

It's irrelevant. The argument is related to compatibilism, which in turn is related to determinism. Why do you keep introducing extraneous elements into the debate (if that's what it could be called)?

Again, if you want to argue for the existence of free will in relation to stochastic/probabilistic/random, start a new thread.

 

[DBT]

That depends entirely upon how we define free will. When defined operationally, free will is the brain deciding for itself what it will do while free of coercion and undue influence. And this takes into account all of the brain's mechanisms for imagining alternatives, evaluating them, and making choices.

But if you define free will irrationally, as freedom from causation, or freedom from ourselves, or freedom from reality, or freedom from our own brains, then of course free will would not be a correct label for anything.

Definitions don't necessarily prove the proposition. The premises may be flawed. Many elements may not be included, which makes the conclusion irrelevant.

Semantic arguments are not sufficient.


1)God is love.
2)Love can be experienced.
3)Love exists.
4)God exists.

Common perception or definitions of free will are equally meaningless:


1)Free will is the ability to make conscious decisions.
2)Conscious decision making is experienced.
3)Free will exists.



1) Free will is the ability to act in accordance with our will.

2) We are able to act in accordance with our will

3) We have free will.


This is just selective wording that ignores the means by which decisions are made and actions taken, a matter of internal necessitation, not freedom of will. Necessitation is not freedom.

 

[DBT]

unconscious information processing activity that leads, in microseconds, to the experience of thought, deliberation, decision making and the will to act.

Just this part though...

You call it "unconscious", I call it pre-narrative.

Call it whatever takes your fancy. You are wrong

Information input is not conscious, transmission of information via the nerves, axons, dendrites, synapsis and processing by neurons, etc, is not a conscious process prior to conscious activity and representation of information in conscious form.

The former feeds information into the latter. That's physics at work. Information processing is neither willed or open for conscious regulation.

Information input, not will, alters the system.

Information is input into the system also from the system.

Makes no difference. You don't get choose what goes on within the system. Functional Memory is composed of information from the external world, your life experiences, identity, family, friends, interests, profession, language, culture, etc, etc.....the very basis of who you are and what you do.

Without which, you no longer recognize, think or act....

You don't understand the basics of the issue.

No, It makes a huge difference. It is the difference between recurrent neural networks and non-recurrent neural networks: one holds and modifies internal state and the other does not. Thus a non-recurrent neural network cannot self-review, but a recurrent network can. It can then become capable of deciding, as a function of neural organization, as a function of a previous frame or held state, which functions to execute.

This feedback allows any RNN to "decide, for itself, what it will do". What it decides for itself is still determined and calculable but it's self-ness is an observed fact of the system insofar as that state is driven by the locality, not by external data.

It is the state of the system that determines capability, not will. Will, be it conscious or unconscious, has no say in what neural networks do or do not do. Architecture, state and condition from moment to moment is the sole agency of thought and action;

For example:
Quote;
''People suffering from Alzheimer's disease are not only losing their memory, but they are also losing their personality. In order to understand the relationship between personality and memory, it is important to define personality and memory. Personality, as defined by some neurobiologists and psychologists, is a collection of behaviors, emotions, and thoughts that are not controlled by the I-function. Memory, on the other hand, is controlled and regulated by the I-function of the neocortex. It is a collection of short stories that the I-function makes-up in order to account for the events and people. Memory is also defined as the ability to retain information, and it is influenced by three important stages. The first stage is encoding and processing the information, the second stage is the storing of the memory, and the third stage is memory retrieval. There are also the different types of memories like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. The sensory memory relates to the initial moment when an event or an object is first detected. Short-term memories are characterized by slow, transient alterations in communication between neurons and long-term memories (1). Long-term memories are marked by permanent changes to the neural structure''


The terminal Stages of the disease, and the consequences of such a profound memory loss being; Symptoms:

''Can't recognize family or image of self in mirror.
Little capacity for self-care.
Can't communicate with words.
Can't control bowels, bladder.
May have seizures, experience difficulty swallowing, skin infections.

Examples:
Looks in mirror and talks to own image.
Needs help with bathing, dressing, eating and toileting.
May groan, scream or make grunting sounds.
May try to suck on everything.
Sleeps more.''

 

[DBT]

It means what it says; basically, that an actions production by deterministic processes presents a challenge for compatibilism regardless of conditions that meet the compatibilist definition of free will, ie, acting without external coersion or force. That deterministic processes are a challenge to the notion of free will

Not that challenging considering that I was able to resolve the problem as a teenager in the public library. A Rubik's cube? No. I still haven't figured that out yet. But the compatibility of determinism and free will was easy.

Operational free will, the one that is actually used, does not require freedom from antecedent events or freedom from the laws of nature. It only requires freedom from coercion and undue influence.

You are not taking the 'action production by deterministic processes' nature of the mechanisms that form and generate your conscious experience into account. That what you think, believe and do is being produced by an interaction of information unconsciously within the system....milliseconds prior to conscious initiation.

Thereby ''an actions production by deterministic processes presents a challenge for compatibilism''

It presents a challenge for compatibilism because action production is not open to regulation, modification, negotiation or change.

You think and do as a result of 'action production by deterministic processes' - not will.

Just saying 'it is me' is not sufficient to establish freedom of will

That's according to the compatibilist definition of free will. Incompatibilists obviously disagree, and give the reasons why the compatibilist definition fails to prove the proposition.

Compatibilists have a much simpler proposition to prove. We simply prove that free will is commonly understood as a choice we make that is free of coercion and undue influence. This is proven by common usage of the notion in private and public life and in the courtroom. It is the specific free will that is used to assess a person's responsibility for their actions.

It is too simple. It doesn't take a host of elements into account, the means and mechanisms of experience.

Compatibilists do not have to prove that free will is uncaused, because we assume it is reliably caused, just like every other deterministic event. We do not have to prove that we have a soul that operates independently from the brain, because we assume that the brain is the center of our decision making. We do not have to prove that free will operates outside of the laws of nature, because we recognize that everything we do is consistent with those laws.

So, the compatibilist proposition is simple and uncontroversial. All of the debate is between the two incompatibilists: the libertarians and the hard determinists.

It doesn't have to be uncaused. If will is to be branded as free will, it really has to be free. It has to be able to do something meaningful. It has to be able to make a difference.

But, for the given reasons, necessitation, an actions production by deterministic processes, etc, does not allow will to make a difference to outcomes, will cannot act freely, cannot make a difference....which makes freedom of will an empty claim, an idea, an ideology.

.

Deliberately choose is a bit misleading in relation to determinism and the nature of information processing.

Not misleading at all. A deliberate choice is a choice whose antecedent cause was a process of deliberation. Deliberation is a form of information processing, performed within our own brains.

We simply call as we see it.

(A) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. She was not coerced nor unduly influenced to do so, therefore she was free to choose the salad for herself. It was a freely chosen "I will have the salad, please".

(B) A woman decides to order a salad for herself. Her choice is reliably caused by her dietary goals and her genetic food preferences. These goals and reasons have antecedent causes found in her prior life experiences. Her life itself has antecedent causes, going back through the evolution of the human species, the appearance of life on the planet, the formation of the planet, all the way back to the Big Bang (and whatever preceded that, ad infinitum). So, this was also a causally necessary event, the fundamental notion of determinism.

Both A and B happen to be true. Thus the notions of operational free will and determinism appear to be compatible.

Her choice, in each and every moment of action, is determined, not freely willed. Saying 'she chose' - which is true but misleading - doesn't tell us how this is accomplished.

It's the how of it, rather than appearance that counts.

Decision making:
"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

We're minimally conscious during habitual behavior or learned skills, such as driving a car or playing the piano. But an unexpected event will invoke conscious awareness.

Consciousness follows information processing by milliseconds. Information processing, not will, is the agency.

''Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.''

And detecting the direction of motion would naturally be firmware if not hardware. But note that in the experiment when most of the dots were moving randomly, it took a while to reach a point of certainty as to the general direction of the set of dots.

All of this is interesting, of course, but none of this changes the basic facts of compatibilist free will. The brain, when confronted with an issue to decide will attempt to deduce the answer based upon the information available. The process is likely to vary according to the context of the issue. For example, different steps will be involved when choosing what to order for dinner than when choosing which direction the dots on the screen are moving.

Compatibilist free will is a carefully worded definition; acting according to our will without external force or coercion, but ignores inner necessitation.

If external necessitation is a problem for compatibilism, so is internal necessitation because neither are subject to regulative control.

You can neither stop external force from acting upon you through an act of will, nor access or alter your own internal necessitation though will.

There are several forms of objection to the idea of free will.

The actual case appears to be that there are several different ideas of free will that people object to. But no one can reasonably object to operational free will.

It's just a term. A term that involves different beliefs, Libertarian free will, compatibilism in several versions, Hobbs, Dennett, etc....

Volitional self control does not mean agency through will or an ability to change outcomes according to our will or wish.

Hate to break the news to you, but volition is just another name for will. Here's the scoop from the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary:

Volition - the cognitive process by which an organism decides on and commits to a particular course of action.


M . Hallett
Abstract
This review deals with the physiology of the initiation of a voluntary movement and the appreciation of whether it is voluntary or not. I argue that free will is not a driving force for movement, but a conscious awareness concerning the nature of the movement. Movement initiation and the perception of willing the movement can be separately manipulated. Movement is generated subconsciously, and the conscious sense of volition comes later, but the exact time of this event is difficult to assess because of the potentially illusory nature of introspection. Neurological disorders of volition are also reviewed. The evidence suggests that movement is initiated in the frontal lobe, particularly the mesial areas, and the sense of volition arises as the result of a corollary discharge likely involving multiple areas with reciprocal connections including those in the parietal lobe and insular cortex. - Clinical Neurophysiology , Volume 118 , Issue 6 , Pages 1179 - 1192

Definition of volition
1: the power of choosing or determining : WILL
2: an act of making a choice or decision
also : a choice or decision made

Did you know?
Volition ultimately derives from the Latin verb velle, meaning "to will" or "to wish." (The adjective voluntary descends from the same source.) English speakers borrowed the term from French in the 17th century, using it at first to mean "an act of choosing," a meaning Herman Melville employed in Moby Dick (1851): "Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea." Melville's use comes about a century after the word had developed an additional meaning: "the power to choose." This meaning, now the word's dominant use, is found in such sentences as "Members must join of their own volition."

So, "volition" contains both the notions of will and choosing.

Which does not necessarily equate to Free Will.

 

[Jarhyn]

If only your subjective declarations made sense. They don't. I've tired of wading around in your hypothetical subjective declarations.

I'm tired of your inability to generalize and inability to observe objective properties objectively in well defined systems.

You wish to declare "subjectivity" around actual material objects so you don't have to face the reality that free will objectively exists for human beings stuck as individual stochastic actors within a deterministic system.

As I pointed out, I'm describing an object, well defined as a deterministic universe all the way to it's binary field interactions.

You can cry and moan all you want that it is subjective and all you will do is objectively embarrass yourself.

I have pointed out free will, demonstrated unequivocally an entity demonstrating free will. And of the objective existence of an "entity".

You dislike this so you handwave it away.

I suspect that it is unclear to you largely because you wish it to be, that you fail to understand it in the same way Metaphor fails to understand simple sentences of seventh grade level english: your religion demands that you look away from it lest your absolution be put at risk.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Definitions don't necessarily prove the proposition.

Definitions make it clear what we are talking about. There is a big difference between free will as a choice we make for ourselves that is "free of coercion and undue influence", versus a choice we make for ourselves that is "free of causal necessity". One definition can be demonstrated in real life. The other definition is a logical impossibility.

But, returning to the topic of this thread, the fact is that causal necessity is neither a meaningful nor a relevant constraint, it is not something that anyone needs to be free of.

Necessitation is not freedom.

Ironically, causal necessity is required for every freedom we have to do anything at all. Freedom is the ability to do what we want. Doing things requires us to cause effects. Walking to the kitchen to fix breakfast requires us to stand up and walk. Without reliable cause and effect standing and walking would be impossible. And this is why "freedom from causal necessity" is a paradoxical notion, because it suggests that we must be free from that which freedom itself requires.

It is necessary for us to stop at a red traffic light. We are not free to just drive through it without risking arrest. It is necessary for us to study for exams. We are not free to party-hardy without risking failure in school.

But it is never necessary for us to be free of causation itself. That which is causally necessary is what we are already doing of our own free will. (Schopenhauer and Kane).

 

[Jarhyn]

It's irrelevant. The argument is related to compatibilism, which in turn is related to determinism. Why do you keep introducing extraneous elements into the debate (if that's what it could be called)?

Again, if you want to argue for the existence of free will in relation to stochastic/probabilistic/random, start a new thread.

No. There are already three threads that you wish to metastasize this bullshit of yours across, and all three are Entirely about compatibilism, determinism, and how these concepts relate to "indeterministic action": stochastic systems.

The fact that you do not grok this is sad, but I the kind of way that usually invokes pity.

Now you can keep throwing tantrums over that or you could start paying attention.

Stochastic models are entirely present in deterministic systems at scale.

I gave you an example of the imperfect stochastic modelling of an objectively observable actor in a deterministic system giving rise to observable and objectively identifiable free will (and constrained will), as well as imposed state changes.

This whole thread is about the interplay between free will, stochastic modelling, and deterministic system. Though the fact you wish to avoid the topic seems to me a really good reason to press it further...