According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[AdamWho]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

 

[pood]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

 

[AdamWho]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

 

[DBT]

I was asking for something coherent

No, I gave you something coherent. Your inability to follow it was your own issue.

What you have said about determinism and free will to date is as coherent as your claim for consciousness and will in computers, which is neither supportable or coherent.

There is no evidence for consciousness or will in computers, and your software design, debug, etc, rationale has no merit because, as pointed out, you seek to circumvent the very terms and conditions of determinism that you, yourself gave.

You are not separate from the world as a deterministic system. What you think and do, design, program or debug is subject to the very same conditions as the system you design and program. The system you design and create doesn't function according to its non-existent will, and you were brought to that point through a countless series of events that made you who you are, what you think and do.

Your claim that I lack, as I am, the ability to interact with myself such that I am different after than I was before, and that i lack the power to do this intentionally, is spurious.

That's incoherent. Nobody claims that we can't think and act.

I have regulatory control over at least some of my cognitive states, therefore you are wrong that this control is absolutely absent.

You are whatever the brain is doing in response to the information it acquires via the senses integrating with memory function.

If memory function fails, for instance, you cease function rationally. You lose your sense of control, you no longer recognize the world around you.

This has been explained over and over.

Brain function is not free will. The non-chosen state of the brain is the state of you.

It would have to be absolutely untrue that someone could do something that changes themselves through some state transition.

So there it is, you have yet to grasp what is being explained.


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


The anatomy of movement

''Almost all of behavior involves motor function, from talking to gesturing to walking. But even a simple movement like reaching out to pick up a glass of water can be a complex motor task to study. Not only does your brain have to figure out which muscles to contract and in which order to steer your hand to the glass, it also has to estimate the force needed to pick up the glass. Other factors, like how much water is in the glass and what material the glass is made from, also influence the brains calculations. Not surprisingly, there are many anatomical regions which are involved in motor function.''

If, due to my cognitive state, I pick up a drill and put it through my brain, my cognitive state will lead to a change in my cognitive state. Therefore regulatory control exists. The very power of a cognitive entity, due to their cognition, to change that cognition, is exactly the thing you deny existence of, despite clear evidence that it is not only possible but ubiquitous that people do so.

People decide, gnostically, to study so as to change their cognitive state, too.

Your attempt to treat responsibility as "zero sum" so as to say "something is responsible for making the agent what they are so the agent cannot also be responsible for making changes to itself" is misplaced. Both are true, the maker of the agent was responsible at time t for creating the agent that would modify itself at t+1 and the agent itself was also responsible at t+1 for modifying itself.

The brain decides and brings the decision to consciousness, initiating motor actions in the process.

Once again, it's not that we (the brain) can't think, decide or act, but given the terms of determinism, what you think and do in any given instance, you think and do necessarily, which is not a matter of free will.

Again;


''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.''

Think about the implications.

 

[pood]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

 

[Jarhyn]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

Yeah, I just don't get his reticence to actually accept useful, compatibilist definitions instead of the useless definitions bandied about.

For the record, I think IIT is an important thing to look at from the perspective of discussing consciousness. I don't accept it "off the shelf", granted since it's kinda nutty around trying to measure Phi, as if that's a sensible concept; systems of consciousness are generally non-fungible, and have to be examined on a case-by-case basis, handled mathematically. Only when two conscious systems share a systemic identity are they "interchangable". As such, the real measure of a conscious system is exactly its state diagram and mathematical functional identity.

My proposition has always been that consciousness starts small and is "constructive": that any system that measures some phenomena and integrated that information without destroying it is "conscious of" that information, and that the only reason most people cannot seem to acknowledge this is that they have never actually seen such "primitive consciousness" ever construct into something they can recognize.

As a result few people ever drill down into the semantic deconstruction of what it is they are conscious of.

I can use some construction of switches to, for instance, represent "consciousness of blue" using some blue capture elements, a battery and an LED. When the LED goes on, it communicates awareness of blue.

Of course you could argue that it is not conscious that other colors exist, or what colors are, or even conscious of it's consciousness of blue; it doesn't even need a memory.

But the transience of this awareness, and the absence of its ability to learn does not change that the words do apply to the situation, and successfully describe it.

No amount of hand-waving can dispel the fact that I can use those words in that way to construct a will to implement consciousness of any phenomena you could name and deconstruct what kind of switches have to go together in what way to get that result.

Further, no amount of hand waving can dispel the fact that this will is some real concrete thing, as is the engine that processes it to discover whether this will is free to its completion or constrained. We can observe this freedom in actuality.

Finally, no amount of hand waving can dispel the fact that this will is my own, and that it came specifically through the path of my own will authoring process rather than some will authoring process local to, for instance, Pood's skull. Again, we can observe the freedom of this will in actuality, and in this state observe that I have "free will" in actuality.

And all of this functions just fine in a deterministic universe.

 

[pood]

Indeed, all this requires a broadly deterministic universe to function at all.

Earlier I talked about how Jerry Coyne believes an improv jazz musician did not compose his piece. Rather, determinism did. I invite anyone who agrees with Coyne, or Coyne himself should he happen this way, to explain how a mindless process, determinism, which describes but does not prescribe how things go, composed an improv jazz piece, BEFORE (as Coyne explicitly stated) the jazz musician ever sat down to compose. Explain that, please!

 

[Jarhyn]

For the record, I think IIT is an important thing to look at from the perspective of discussing consciousness. I don't accept it "off the shelf", granted since it's kinda nutty around trying to measure Phi, as if that's a sensible concept; systems of consciousness are generally non-fungible, and have to be examined on a case-by-case basis, handled mathematically. Only when two conscious systems share a systemic identity are they "interchangable". As such, the real measure of a conscious system is exactly its state diagram and mathematical functional identity.

I will note that in IIT, this would imply that we can actually observe when things are conscious and the very idea of a P-Zombie is spurious. It would imply even for non-switches that there is some kind of consciousness and that consciousness is ubiquitous across the universe, visible anywhere where phenomena happen... though these are more alien to us since they involve much more chaotic interactions than the kinds directed through and insulated in the switching network of a mind.

It also means that there is a conflation happening in the minds of the critic to IIT when they ask "do you really think a rock is conscious". They are leaving off something important in such a criticism, namely the "of all the things a human is", never mind their also leaving out the discussion of which human, since consciousness is not really fungible like that.

They are obviously loading the question, switching out the fundamental discussion that everything is conscious of something with the suggestion that the compatibilist ought defend that it is conscious of things like "blue lines" and "horses"... Despite the fact that the compatibilist made no such claim. As such, it is a dishonest criticism to level. Rather, the compatibilist only made the claim that it is conscious of an entropic state and little more, as it is incapable of sensibly separating and integrating the information.

As such, this gives us a means for understanding and describing what something is conscious of, whether it is conscious of itself, whether it's consciousness is x86 or x64 compatible/complete, whether it is conscious of "horseness" of some thing or contains the contingent mechanisms to be conscious of a blue line were it presented one somehow, and when in fact it would become conscious of a "blue line". It can even be analyzed for what situations exist where it would hallucinate consciousness of things. The language is useful, and allows the accurate and precise description of phenomena in a non-contradictory and non-circular way.

What was once a massive mystery, much like free will prior to compatibilist language, becomes something that can be discussed formally with respect to algorithms, math, and systemic structure within this slightly modified IIT approach... But it also invalidates much of the prior attempts to discuss the concept as not-even-wrong.

 

[DBT]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

Pressed the point? There is no point to press.

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

 

[AdamWho]

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

You wording is difficult to parse. Are you supporting the idea

1. The fact that we are consciousness is obvious and doesn't need to be debated

2. The lack of (libertarian) free will poses a problem for the existence of consciousness.

 

[Jarhyn]

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

You wording is difficult to parse. Are you supporting the idea

1. The fact that we are consciousness is obvious and doesn't need to be debated

2. The lack of (libertarian) free will poses a problem for the existence of consciousness.

The thing is, I really don't think DBT is equipped to even participate in this discussion.

The understanding there is as shallow as the sweat on a street preacher's brow.

They want to proclaim that they understand what "consciousness" is, and where it is, and where it isn't, despite the fact that the part he calls "consciousness" is only "consciousness of what I was just thinking about earlier", and that the thing that happened milliseconds before that was still still my mind making decisions as me being the person I am in the way I make decisions.

The awareness that brings the plot arc of my previous decisions back into the phrase about my current decisions is simply there to help me review and double-check the process: knowing about the decisions I just made and the process and reasons why I made them helps me make better decisions, and gives me an opportunity to correct clearly faulty phrases on my decisions before they are acted upon.

They want to say that the thought that happened milliseconds before those thoughts were recursively reported is somehow not experienced as thought, and that only the report of what happened is experience without any good reason to believe that.

DBT is simply not equipped to think about it in a general way.

They are so lost in the weeds of their beliefs about consciousness and freedom and wills, in their beliefs about what is important, that they refuse to actually pick up the tools that information scientists use to understand systems.

They could have done this, but they refuse to accept that responsibility is not zero sum, and that "deviation" is not necessary for momentary responsibility, and the only thing necessary for him to be the one choosing is for him to be the one containing the contingent mechanism that renders choice on preconditions.

 

[pood]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

Pressed the point? There is no point to press.

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

How did the jazz improv piece get composed?

Also, your bit above about unconcsious brain activity is meaningless. Yes, some of our brain processing is pre-conscious, but so what? That brain activity is still us. However, when you say that EVERY feeling, thought, etc., is shaped by UNCONSCIOUS brain activity, that is empirically false. You may be thinking of the Libet experiments, but that is not what those experiments showed. They showed some of that activity, but they also showed that the conscious mind had a veto power over those unconscious predelictions. Libet himself disagrees with those who say his experiments disproved free will.

So, please tell me how that jazz improv piece got composed before the composer composed it? And, for that matter, tell me about how the architect built the building (from the other thread) even though according to you he had no choice in the matter at all? How did that big, beautiful, complex building get built by hard determinism? Does hard determinism have a mind? A will? Planning? Foresight? No, of course not. The architect has those.

 

[AdamWho]

I do not understand why people are bringing up "hard determinism". Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

Libertarian free will doesn't exist because we don't have access to (or control of), the precursors to our mental states. No magical explanations need to apply

A jazz musician doesn't have any more control of these "precursor mental states" than anybody else. The composer of a jazz solo is the memories, experiences, knowledge, and muscle memory of the performer. Musicians generally don't think too much when they play, it is mostly automatic.

 

[The AntiChris]

Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

In philosophy, Wiki describes hard determinism as:

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

DBT is a 'hard determinist'.

 

[Jarhyn]

Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

In philosophy, Wiki describes hard determinism as:

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

DBT is a 'hard determinist'.

Also a believer in super-determinism, a well known exception to the bell inequality.

Regardless, compatibilists, the only people who have been able to present a sensible understanding of free will determinism or not, present the idea of consciousness and free will in terms of determinism; determinism is broadly required in the framework of free will that actually has useful properties and it allows modeling decision making processes in those terms.

The major disagreement here happens around DBT's inability to recognize they are arguing past us and trying overmuch to claim that we have no part in the continuing authorship of self. It recurses upon itself.

 

[DBT]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

Pressed the point? There is no point to press.

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

How did the jazz improv piece get composed?

By a brain that has the ability to compose and write. An ability that's enabled by neural networks, not free will. An ability that AI becoming more sophisticated at without consciousness or will, just information processing power.

Also, your bit above about unconcsious brain activity is meaningless.

It's not only meaningful, but essential. Without the underlying substrata of unconscious information processing, consciousness is not possible.

Yes, some of our brain processing is pre-conscious, but so what? That brain activity is still us. However, when you say that EVERY feeling, thought, etc., is shaped by UNCONSCIOUS brain activity, that is empirically false. You may be thinking of the Libet experiments, but that is not what those experiments showed. They showed some of that activity, but they also showed that the conscious mind had a veto power over those unconscious predelictions. Libet himself disagrees with those who say his experiments disproved free will.

So what? It is the unconscious/pre-conscious activity that shapes, forms and feeds consciousness.

So, please tell me how that jazz improv piece got composed before the composer composed it? And, for that matter, tell me about how the architect built the building (from the other thread) even though according to you he had no choice in the matter at all? How did that big, beautiful, complex building get built by hard determinism? Does hard determinism have a mind? A will? Planning? Foresight? No, of course not. The architect has those.

The composer didn't just pop fully formed out of a vacuum. The composer is no more exempt from deterministic antecedents than the music he composes, a mind suited for composing (not everyone can) drawing from the past, tradition and development of music, instruments, culture, style.

The world as a deterministic system doesn't exclude complexity or creative thought. Nobody is arguing that we can't think, compose, build or act, just the nature of what we do in terms of determinism and the claim of free will.

Free will doesn't create a brain capable of composing music or sending rockets into space.

Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

In philosophy, Wiki describes hard determinism as:

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

DBT is a 'hard determinist'.

Another word for an incompatibilist, The definition of determinism is the same.

 

[DBT]

Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Debating that is as boring as gods, bigfoot and anti-vax.

The real issue for me is, what does a lack of free will mean for consciousness? Are we actually conscious? Or is that just a story we tell ourselves like the free will story?

I don't completely the relationship between P-zombies and free will

Yes, we’re actually consciousness, and one driving impetus behind concsiousness no doubt is that it gave organisms the ability to choose, rather than just react blindly to stimuli. Choice entials free will. To deny this, is to claim, as Jerry Coyne poreposterously does, that an improv jazz musician had nothing to do with his work — it was determined before he ever began. Unfortunatley Coyne doesn’t tell us how this great piece was created by a blind process. Perhaps he thinks it evolved somehow, the way life forms do?

You don't actually know if people are conscious or just appear to be conscious.

Just like the appearance of "freewill" doesn't mean that (libertarian) free will exists.

Maybe you’re referring the problem of other minds. It’s true I can’t prove other people are conscious, but why should I care? They act conscious and that’s enough for me.

As for myself, I certainly experience consciousness. If that is some kind of illusion, it’s a pretty good one, and indistinguishable from the real thing.

Consciousness allows us to evaluate options and make choices. its very existence refutes hard determinism completely. I have pressed this point on DBT in this and other threads and never received anything but a hand-waving “you don’t understand determinism” response which is nothing more than, “you don’t agree with me, therefore you don’t understand,” a useless form of argumentation and useless to address. His schtick has long since worn thin. He’s even taken to quoting Marvin Edwards, who is, erk, a compatibilist. When you constantly quote or cherry pick people who disagree with you, it’s a good sign your argument is in the last ditch.

Pressed the point? There is no point to press.

There is no point to press because, as explained, consciousness is not exempt from the progression of events as they evolve without alternatives or deviation at any point within a deterministic system. Where every feeling, thought and action is shaped and formed by antecedents, unconscous brain activity, processing memory integration, etc, milliseconds before conscious representation and the experience of thought, decision making and action.

How did the jazz improv piece get composed?

By a brain that has the ability to compose and write. An ability that's enabled by neural networks, not free will. An ability that AI becoming more sophisticated at without consciousness or will, just information processing power.

Also, your bit above about unconcsious brain activity is meaningless.

It's not only meaningful, but essential. Without the underlying substrata of unconscious information processing, consciousness is not possible.

Yes, some of our brain processing is pre-conscious, but so what? That brain activity is still us. However, when you say that EVERY feeling, thought, etc., is shaped by UNCONSCIOUS brain activity, that is empirically false. You may be thinking of the Libet experiments, but that is not what those experiments showed. They showed some of that activity, but they also showed that the conscious mind had a veto power over those unconscious predelictions. Libet himself disagrees with those who say his experiments disproved free will.

So what? It is the unconscious/pre-conscious activity that shapes, forms and feeds consciousness.

So, please tell me how that jazz improv piece got composed before the composer composed it? And, for that matter, tell me about how the architect built the building (from the other thread) even though according to you he had no choice in the matter at all? How did that big, beautiful, complex building get built by hard determinism? Does hard determinism have a mind? A will? Planning? Foresight? No, of course not. The architect has those.

The composer didn't just pop fully formed out of a vacuum. The composer is no more exempt from deterministic antecedents than the music he composes, a mind suited for composing (not everyone can) drawing from the past, tradition and development of music, instruments, culture, style.

The world as a deterministic system doesn't exclude complexity or creative thought. Nobody is arguing that we can't think, compose, build or act, just the nature of what we do in terms of determinism and the claim of free will.

Free will doesn't create a brain capable of composing music or sending rockets into space.

 

[DBT]

Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

In philosophy, Wiki describes hard determinism as:

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

DBT is a 'hard determinist'.

Also a believer in super-determinism, a well known exception to the bell inequality.

Regardless, compatibilists, the only people who have been able to present a sensible understanding of free will determinism or not, present the idea of consciousness and free will in terms of determinism; determinism is broadly required in the framework of free will that actually has useful properties and it allows modeling decision making processes in those terms.

The major disagreement here happens around DBT's inability to recognize they are arguing past us and trying overmuch to claim that we have no part in the continuing authorship of self. It recurses upon itself.

You appear to be living in La La land, where you make up your own stories regardless of what is said or explained. It's childish.

Once again, the definition of determinism is the same as quoted by compatibilists, the same as quoted from multiple sources, Stanford, etc, the same as you gave....the difference lies purely in the refutation of the compatibilist definition of free will, which fails because it ignores the implications of determinism in relation to the means and mechanisms of response.

To repeat;

'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. '



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

 

[Jarhyn]

Hard determinism cannot exist for well-understood physics reasons.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

In philosophy, Wiki describes hard determinism as:

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist.

DBT is a 'hard determinist'.

Also a believer in super-determinism, a well known exception to the bell inequality.

Regardless, compatibilists, the only people who have been able to present a sensible understanding of free will determinism or not, present the idea of consciousness and free will in terms of determinism; determinism is broadly required in the framework of free will that actually has useful properties and it allows modeling decision making processes in those terms.

The major disagreement here happens around DBT's inability to recognize they are arguing past us and trying overmuch to claim that we have no part in the continuing authorship of self. It recurses upon itself.

You appear to be living in La La land, where you make up your own stories regardless of what is said or explained. It's childish.

Once again, the definition of determinism is the same as quoted by compatibilists, the same as quoted from multiple sources, Stanford, etc, the same as you gave....the difference lies purely in the refutation of the compatibilist definition of free will, which fails because it ignores the implications of determinism in relation to the means and mechanisms of response.

To repeat;

'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. '



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

Your quoting of Scripture does not become you.

It is no more true now than it was the last time you professed your faith.

Even in your quote of your preferred scripture of irrational belief, there is a very weak qualifier added to "conditions": "environmental". Not all conditions are "environmental", as there are brain state conditions that also lead to brain state conditions.

Some of those brain state conditions that lead to brain state conditions are choices by the person which they are responsible for choosing.

You are pointedly ignoring and in the straight up La-La land of faith and religion to say there is no outside when we can clearly observe the momentary distinction of current outside-ness or inside-ness of an influence.

 

[pood]

The composer didn't just pop fully formed out of a vacuum.

Correct.

The composer is no more exempt from deterministic antecedents than the music he composes, a mind suited for composing (not everyone can) drawing from the past, tradition and development of music, instruments, culture, style.

Correct.

The world as a deterministic system doesn't exclude complexity or creative thought.

Correct.

Nobody is arguing that we can't think, compose, build or act …

Good.

Free will doesn't create a brain capable of composing music or sending rockets into space.

Correct. Free will doesn’t create brains.

So, here is where we are at. You agree that the composer composed the music, not the big bang. We agree that it processed deterministic inputs to do this.

I would assume you would agree that the composer *is* his brain.

Threfore: The composer composed the music.

I’m glad we agree.