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No, it isn't simply will. It is will that satisfies needs, wants, and goals. If an agent can't do what it wants to do in an unconflicted manner, then choice isn't free. There is a difference between jail and freedom. You are ignoring the essential role of responsibility in resolving goal conflicts over time. Intelligent agents adapt to changing circumstances in a way that resolves those conflicts. They change strategies to improve outcomes over time. Autonomous freedom of choice provides the flexibility to learn and adapt.
Will is an inevitable expression of the deterministic processes that prompt or urge to us act conscious. Will is a part of the process of volition, not its driver.
The motor action, signals to muscle groups, etc, is already underway before we experience thought and deliberation.....you leap out of the path of a car without thought, the feeling come later, and so on.
First of all, I said that "desire" was the driver, not "will".
Desire is a form of will. When you desire something, you want to have have it, you feel the drive to get what you want.
''We can
define the
will as the intensity and duration of investment toward some end goal or state. The will can be described from the bottom up as the animal drive, and from top down as self-conscious desire.''
The term will refers to the general capacity to make decisions deliberately rather than automatically. Desire is a part of will, and so is volition. You said that will was a part of volition, which I think reversed the relationship between will and volition. Deliberation or calculation--the process of making a choice based on priorities--is also part of will. Free will is will that is felt to be fully under the control of the agent--not forced by undue or unforeseen circumstances. When you trip over your own feet, the action may be caused by your voluntary behavior, but it isn't something that you do of your own free will. Free will is both a desired and an intended action carried out successfully.
The capacity to make decisions has absolutely nothing to do with will. Will is an aspect of brains capacity to make decisions, be they deliberate or automatic, but will is not the means of decision making.
We have will, we have intelligence, we have the ability to respond and act. We have a rational brain that generates conscious mind, the ability to imagine, plan and act, but these abilities - for the given reasons - have nothing to do with free will......used in common language, yet 'not very sensible concept'
You keep insisting that free will is freedom from any causal influence, not just those that impede our desires. That is where you go wrong. You see desire itself as an impediment, but that makes absolutely no sense at all. Unimpeded desire is essential to the definition of free will.
Where do I insist that? I don't know why I would do that. The claim here is that free will as defined by compatibilists fails to make a case because the compatibilist acknowledges that force, coercion and undue influence is a constraint on the idea of free will, yet brush aside inner necessity - which poses just as much of constraint on freedom of will as external agents
That was poorly phrased. To me, you appear to dogmatically adhere to the position that free will is freedom from any causal influence, but I think the problem is more subtle than that. In my understanding of your position, you define free will from the perspective of a third party observer with certain knowledge of the future rather than from the perspective of the agent facing an uncertain future. So it appears to you--from that outside observer perspective--that free will is an illusion. The future is known, so there never was a meaningful choice. Correct me if you think I got that wrong.
I am merely pointing out the fatal flaw in the compatibilist definition of free will. I insist on nothing. The flaw is quite obvious.....if external agency eliminates free will, force, coercion, etc, so does internal agency that is fixed by antecedents and non-chosen states and conditions as the system evolves from past to present and future states of the system without deviation. There is our constraint, just as powerful as force or coercion imposed by external agents.
I don't insist on this, it's just how it works given how compatibilists define define determinism
''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!'' - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist.
Like you, she completely misunderstand what people ordinarily mean when they talk about free will. The concept of free will does not require one to reject a mechanistic view of the world. It is essential to an understanding of how autonomous behavior works in biological machines with brains that regulate behavior. Those machines are constantly adjusting and adapting behavior on the basis of experienced outcomes. They depend on causal predictability to achieve the outcomes they desire. Desire can be modified in the course of time, but it doesn't make sense for it to be under control at the time a choice is made. That is putting the cart before the horse. Desire is the horse that pulls the cart.
No she doesn't misunderstand. We know how compatibilists define free will, we know how Libertarians define free will, we know how it is defined in Law and how the term is used in general language.
Assuming that
we know how compatibilists define free will, what makes you think that
she was talking about that concept of free will when she said it wasn't a "very sensible concept"??? I read that quote (not having seen surrounding context) and get the impression that she thinks free will cannot be defined in a way that is compatible with determinism. When she says that you don't need neuroscience to reject "free will", I think she is talking as a neuroscientist rather than a layperson speaking everyday English. Hence, the topic sentence in my paragraph that you are quoting. Free will isn't a very useful concept from the perspective of a neuroscientist studying brain activity.
At this time we are arguing over the validity of the compatibilist definition of free will, where the nature of the brain as a parallel information processor must be considered.
How is parallel processing relevant to the discussion? It strikes me as a red herring.
I was referring to brain agency, the means by which we (the brain) make decisions, think and act.
And as Martha Farah said, when you consider how the brain functions, its networks, regions and lobes, how it makes decisions, etc, the notion of free will is just not very sensible. Not compatibilist, not Libertarian or as the term is used in common language....where it may be fine to say 'he wasn't forced, he acted on his own free will,' but doesn't stack up if you dig deeper....where if it was that simple the debate on free will would not have been ongoing for centuries.
Lot's of sophistry has been going on for centuries, so I don't think that argument carries much weight. Do you honestly believe that people speaking ordinary English take into consideration "how the brain functions, its networks, regions and lobes, how it makes decisions, etc" when they use the expression
free will??? If so, you have reduced your argument to absurdity.
The nature and means of our ability to think and act is obviously not a consideration in common usage of the term free will, where 'he acted of his own free will' is just an expression that basically says ' he wasn't forced' Which is more or less the compatibilist position......which also doesn't account for the means and mechanisms of volition.
''Looking for
free will in the brain not only is interesting for its own sake, but it is also important for understanding a number of neurological and psychiatric conditions.1 We can observe in patients with certain disorders that a relationship between movement genesis and a sense of volition is not mandatory. For example, people with Tourette syndrome often say that they cannot not act out their tics. With psychogenic movement disorders—also called conversion disorders or the old term, hysteria—the movements look voluntary, but patients say they are involuntary. In schizophrenia, movements also may look normal, but patients might say that these movements are controlled by external agents. In early Huntington’s disease, the apparently involuntary chorea (rapid jerky movement) is sometimes interpreted as being voluntary. And in anosognosia (a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain injury seems unaware of an impairment), patients may think that they have made a movement when they have not.
Do We Freely Choose to Move?
In general, scientists need to study what we call “simplified preparations” in which it is possible to control all the variables in a situation. One such experimental situation is making a single movement of the hand or finger. People can be asked to move whenever they want to; the commonsense view is that a person consciously decides to make a movement and then makes it. Free choice has preceded the movement.
Another whole set of issues revolves around the problem of the timing of subjective events. Consciousness can be deceptive, so is it possible that our sense of W, of willing a movement, is incorrect in regard to when it actually happened in the brain? A number of experiments have explored this. The results show that, first, W is not strongly linked to the time of movement onset, so whatever is going on in the brain at time W cannot be responsible for movement genesis.1 Moreover, the brain event of W may even be later than we subjectively report. This should not be a complete surprise since humans “live in the past”—certainly perception of a real-world event has to be subsequent to its actual occurrence, since it takes time (albeit very little time) for the brain to process sensory information about the event. A recent experiment showed that it was possible to manipulate the conscious awareness of willing a movement by delivering a transcranial magnetic stimulus to the area of the brain just in front of the supplementary motor area after the movement had already occurred.3 This suggests that the brain events of W may occur even after the movement.
If free will does not generate movement, what does? Movement generation seems to come largely from the primary motor cortex, and its input comes primarily from premotor cortices, parts of the frontal lobe just in front of the primary motor cortex. The premotor cortices receive input from most of the brain, especially the sensory cortices (which process information from our senses), limbic cortices (the emotional part of the brain), and the prefrontal cortex (which handles many cognitive processes). If the inputs from various neurons “compete,” eventually one input wins, leading to a final behavior. For example, take the case of saccadic eye movements, quick target-directed eye movements. Adding even a small amount of electrical stimulation in different small brain areas can lead to a monkey's making eye movements in a different direction than might have been expected on the basis of simultaneous visual cues.4 In general, the more we know about the various influences on the motor cortex, the better we can predict what a person will do.''
).