According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[BSilvEsq]

Maybe "thought" is better than "mind", but that carries implications of conscious thought, while "mind" is the combination of both conscious and sub-conscious brain activity.

Why not simply go with "brain function" "brain activity" "neurological function" or "neurological activity" -- all of which are neutral to conscious versus unconscious and avoid Cartesian dualism.

Otherwise, thanks for your considered response to my prior post.

So the duality of mind is an interesting subject.

Inevitably, all the systems we observe that report some internal state report this internal state in an indirect way.

We can see some things happen, but it is fundamentally going to look different to our senses as this report is rendered than it appears "from the perspective of the interaction".

Indeed, phenomena simply occur where they are according to physics, while we observe these phenomena in a largely disconnected way.

To that end, I have here for years widely questioned the very assertion that there is such a thing as "non-consciousness"; that all phenomena are in some manner experiential, but that most of these experiences integrate uselessly or fail to integrate at all.

If this is the case, asking "where does consciousness come from" would be like asking "where does physics come from".

If we were to then instead ask "why are we conscious of some things and not all things if all phenomena implies consciousness", we might answer something like "because THESE phenomena feed into one another to do meaningful work and expose the presence of surrounding statistically useful information, and THOSE just feed into one another as a solid, homogenous mass of silica."

Of course one of the other things this does is reveal humans to be rather "not-special", and implies some very uncomfortable things about the technologies we are developing today which are capable of genuine ongoing autonomous self-modification and maintenance.

"Unconscious" here just implies that it's not reporting to you, or perhaps even that you aren't generating a report to yourself or at least you aren't recording it.

Lots of things disrupt the artifact of our awareness of some manner of activity in our brains, or outright place those interactions over horizons. But you being deaf does not mean someone else is not speaking and making sound. It just means that YOU aren't able to hear it. Maybe they're deaf too... But the air is still wiggling even if nobody there can feel it.

A better word than "conscious" might be "deliberate" -- but even that has problems. Also, I described brain activity as consisting as the conscious function and the sub-conscious function (and not unconscious or non-conscious).

By saying sub-conscious, I did not mean to suggest that the brain function that causes the heart to beat is not a form of consciousness. I was just using the verbiage of biology and neurology that distinguishes between deliberate or somatic brain function and non-deliberate or autonomic brain function. So, again, the term "brain function" is preferable to my mind (meaning state of mind or brain in this instance).

Once again, a problem with most, if not all, communication -- especially communication of concepts and ideas -- is that our language is limited. Words are human symbols developed to represent reality, but the symbols are inherently imperfect. The only way to truly describe anything with perfection is to identify the thing and let its properties speak for themselves -- but even then limitations and distortions of human perception still get in the way.

Returning to the concept of consciousness, I am a devout atheist (if there is such a term), but I always say that the fact that I seem to experience what we call consciousness is miraculous, because it is a fantastical notion that is impossible to explain without resorting to spiritual or mystical concepts -- at least to my small mind / brain.

I digress -- my son believes that our consciousness is collective and is informed by the universe external to the body and that the brain or mind somehow acts as a receiver for the external information -- which includes information that an individual has not otherwise detected by the use of their five senses. To me, that is a fantastical belief, but it is no more fantastical than many other beliefs, including those of science, physics, religion, and other paradigms.

Lastly (for now, anyway), I take your point that "one of the other things this does is reveal humans to be rather 'not-special', and implies some very uncomfortable things about the technologies we are developing today which are capable of genuine ongoing autonomous self-modification and maintenance." I know I am in the minority in this group, but I do not believe that artificial intelligence, machine learning, or anything about computers or robots is, in any way, truly emergent or conscious -- at least not in the sense that philosophers and theologians tend to believe to be true of humans. Then again, I also do not believe that to be true of humans -- which I take to be the point of your comment (but I could be wrong).

If it is truly possible to replicate what we call human consciousness through a machine, then I submit that human consciousness is purely and entirely deterministic in the fatalistic sense. I know that there are many software engineers who disagree with my sentiment and contend that systems can be developed (maybe even have been developed) that are sufficiently sophisticated computers to break free from their fatalistically determined programming and act in a manner that is the same as Free Will. I disagree with that contention. I don't disagree that computers can act in a manner that is seemingly free and produce results that are not perfectly predictable by humans, but that does not mean that the computer can produce a non-fatalistic result. It could mean that, or it could simply mean that there are sufficient hidden variables that humans are insufficiently capable of mapping out the intricacies of the path that leads to the seemingly emergent activity. I believe the same is true of human activity -- but that is just a feeling that cannot be proved or falsified.

 

[steve_bank]

For participant[ants in this thread.

Are you posting

1. Of your own free will?
2. Because you were destined to post here and had no choice?
3. A combination of 1 & 2?
4. I have no idea why I am posting?
5. Other, explain.

 

[pood]

Camels, humans and every other animal have brains. They act on antecedent circumstances to maintain their lives. When my pigeon friend Brownie hopped up on the park table to share chicken with me he evaluated his circumstances, decided I was trustworthy, and shared food with me. I decided to share food with him because I liked him.

Free will on both our parts.

What is a brain?

I ask not because I don't know, but because you seem to be ascribing mystical powers to what is, at its most basic function, a processing center for sensory input whose use and outputs are complex but not beyond our ability to observe and predict. And one which we have gotten to know quite a lot better in the past twenty years following the decoding of the connectome.

What mystical powers am I ascribing to a brain?

Brains evolved to make choices among available alternatives. Nothing mystical about that.

If everything were preordained there would be no evolutionary advantage to brains that choose, and at best we would all be p zombies.

 

[Jarhyn]

If it is truly possible to replicate what we call human consciousness through a machine, then I submit that human consciousness is purely and entirely deterministic in the fatalistic sense.

I would assert we already have and that this is not the case.

This is one of the reasons why I find it so very important to find our language about freedom and wills and the dances of desires and the fine navigation of an error space that is learning and striving and perhaps applying aperiodic math to become something very "weird"... And to find that in the language we handle machines with.

Even if I am a machine and the world is a machine world, fate has no power to make me a machine that decides other than I in this moment will, and so I reject that fate has any true power over me and any mechination anywhere implies a phenomena of a mechanics. If consciousness is the presence of a phenomena of mechanics, and this grand pooling of it is the "miracle" of time and space amid rules that merely 'allow' for this to happen, then it to me is a fine miracle, and every day I see such things is a fine one to me. It is surely a rare and precious thing in the void.

Perfectly mechanical determinism as a result of causation does not free me from existing in the flow of this as a thing that decides autonomously. Rather it constrains me to be a thing with freedoms, wherever this thing appears among it, when invoking the mode of possibility.

 

[BSilvEsq]

you would simply acknowledge that the two of you are using these words in different senses

How have I not? I have literally told YOU, right I front of him, that when he says "determinism" he is NOT using the "compatibilist" definition, no matter how he says he is.

I am NOT the one who has a difficulty telling the difference, even insofar as I suggest a whole second set of words to attach to this distinct concept of "pre-determinism", and described the specific difference.

The problem is that he refuses. He absolutely refuses to acknowledge that the sense which I have described over a hundred times, and over a hundred times differentiated does not itself imply pre-determinism/Radical Fatalism.

I feel little obligation to tell him that the definition that compatibilists use for determinism does not comport to pre-determinism, when I have told him this so many times.

He needs to hear it from someone who isn't me.

Perfectly reliable causation does not imply radical fatalism.

I begin by stating that it really does not matter what words you are DBT have used. All that matters is what you meant by those words -- as many of the words being used have multiple meanings and even more connotations.

I think we are on the same page when we say that the word "Compatibilism" as used by DBT and me means a belief that what you call Radical Fatalism and Libertarian Free Will are compatible. I believe you have stated your concurrence with this view. [[I also know that Poop idly and illicitly says that even those diametrically opposite concepts can be harmonized, but I dismiss that assertion as emotional vomit.]]

I also think we are on the same page when we say that the word "Compatibilism" as used by you and some others on this board means a belief that Determinism (as you define it within science) and Free Will (also as you define it) are compatible. Accepting your definitions, I have no quarrel with your conclusion that Determinism and Free Will are not necessarily incompatible, and I believe that DBT agrees.

So, what we are left with is the question of whether DBT's factual belief that philosophers (as contrasted with scientists) use the word "Determinism" to mean (i) what you call Radical Fatalism, or (ii) a process in which the future is free to evolve in some ways that are not pre-determined. Based on my own studies of philosophy (which are no means exhaustive), I take philosophers to have described a paradigm called Determinism that has all the characteristics that you ascribe to Radical Fatalism. I believe the best evidence of that historical fact of what philosophers have meant by the word Determinism is articulated by Popper. As far as I can tell, it also seems to me that philosophers historically used the term "Compatibilism" to mean that the form of Determinism that you equate to Radical Fatalism is compatible with the notion of Libertarian Free Will. Perhaps, I am wrong about the use of these terms in history (i.e., before the advent of quantum theory). That is, however, my understanding of the way these terms have been used historically, and I believe that is what DBT is saying. I will, however, welcome DBT to say for himself whether he agrees or disagrees with my assessment.

 

[Jarhyn]

One interesting part of all of this is this idea of the personal boundary.

It is a boundary created not of stones or even flesh or of the specific individual neurons, but by the just-so orderings of neurons. It is a boundary created by the resulting actions of those neurons being the way they are in responding to things, but the boundary does not specifically bound those neurons, but some larger thing, and in not one but TWO ways.

This thing is that which creates the boundary of self, or a major pillar of it if not the whole of it.

But the concepts around this...

@BSilvEsq I don't suppose you might indulge me and watch Pantheon some time soon? It has some really difficult scenes, and some of it is dark and bloody, but it is very well written and explores some ideas about the "soul" in a way that I think are rather important and interesting.

Through fiction around real and near-real technology, it explores various concepts about the human mind via technology and psychology and the nature of the continuity of self, and would lay a foundation to discuss things in a way using a shared language.

 

[BSilvEsq]

If it is truly possible to replicate what we call human consciousness through a machine, then I submit that human consciousness is purely and entirely deterministic in the fatalistic sense.

I would assert we already have and that this is not the case.

This is one of the reasons why I find it so very important to find our language about freedom and wills and the dances of desires and the fine navigation of an error space that is learning and striving and perhaps applying aperiodic math to become something very "weird"... And to find that in the language we handle machines with.

Even if I am a machine and the world is a machine world, fate has no power to make me a machine that decides other than I in this moment will, and so I reject that fate has any true power over me and any mechination anywhere implies a phenomena of a mechanics. If consciousness is the presence of a phenomena of mechanics, and this grand pooling of it is the "miracle" of time and space amid rules that merely 'allow' for this to happen, then it to me is a fine miracle, and every day I see such things is a fine one to me. It is surely a rare and precious thing in the void.

Perfectly mechanical determinism as a result of causation does not free me from existing in the flow of this as a thing that decides autonomously. Rather it constrains me to be a thing with freedoms, wherever this thing appears among it, when invoking the mode of possibility.

I understand your point and stated in the part of my post that you did not reproduce that I understood that others on this board were of that view. I disagree, but I am content to agree to disagree. I believe we have both staked out our view, and there is no point in continuing to go around in circles -- although it does help to sharpen / refine the analysis. To my mind, your stated view, while couched in mechanical terms, is mystical and spiritual in nature. That is not a criticism. I admire such thinking.

 

[BSilvEsq]

One interesting part of all of this is this idea of the personal boundary.

It is a boundary created not of stones or even flesh or of the specific individual neurons, but by the just-so orderings of neurons. It is a boundary created by the resulting actions of those neurons being the way they are in responding to things, but the boundary does not specifically bound those neurons, but some larger thing, and in not one but TWO ways.

This thing is that which creates the boundary of self, or a major pillar of it if not the whole of it.

But the concepts around this...

@BSilvEsq I don't suppose you might indulge me and watch Pantheon some time soon? It has some really difficult scenes, and some of it is dark and bloody, but it is very well written and explores some ideas about the "soul" in a way that I think are rather important and interesting.

Through fiction around real and near-real technology, it explores various concepts about the human mind via technology and psychology and the nature of the continuity of self, and would lay a foundation to discuss things in a way using a shared language.

Happy to watch the video. Can you point me to where I can do so.

As to boundaries, I believe they are a transient illusion (or delusion) that prevents us from being in true touch with the unitary nature of the universe.

I have to run to a meeting (not literally, I am actually driving), and I will say more about this another time.

Stay Well

 

[steve_bank]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

 

[DBT]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

We are whatever the brain is doing. Will has no control over genetics, neural architecture, social circumstances, family, language, social conditioning, etc, etc....where our wants and needs are formed.

 

[DBT]

you would simply acknowledge that the two of you are using these words in different senses

How have I not? I have literally told YOU, right I front of him, that when he says "determinism" he is NOT using the "compatibilist" definition, no matter how he says he is.

I am NOT the one who has a difficulty telling the difference, even insofar as I suggest a whole second set of words to attach to this distinct concept of "pre-determinism", and described the specific difference.

The problem is that he refuses. He absolutely refuses to acknowledge that the sense which I have described over a hundred times, and over a hundred times differentiated does not itself imply pre-determinism/Radical Fatalism.

I feel little obligation to tell him that the definition that compatibilists use for determinism does not comport to pre-determinism, when I have told him this so many times.

He needs to hear it from someone who isn't me.

Perfectly reliable causation does not imply radical fatalism.

I begin by stating that it really does not matter what words you are DBT have used. All that matters is what you meant by those words -- as many of the words being used have multiple meanings and even more connotations.

I think we are on the same page when we say that the word "Compatibilism" as used by DBT and me means a belief that what you call Radical Fatalism and Libertarian Free Will are compatible. I believe you have stated your concurrence with this view. [[I also know that Poop idly and illicitly says that even those diametrically opposite concepts can be harmonized, but I dismiss that assertion as emotional vomit.]]

I also think we are on the same page when we say that the word "Compatibilism" as used by you and some others on this board means a belief that Determinism (as you define it within science) and Free Will (also as you define it) are compatible. Accepting your definitions, I have no quarrel with your conclusion that Determinism and Free Will are not necessarily incompatible, and I believe that DBT agrees.

So, what we are left with is the question of whether DBT's factual belief that philosophers (as contrasted with scientists) use the word "Determinism" to mean (i) what you call Radical Fatalism, or (ii) a process in which the future is free to evolve in some ways that are not pre-determined. Based on my own studies of philosophy (which are no means exhaustive), I take philosophers to have described a paradigm called Determinism that has all the characteristics that you ascribe to Radical Fatalism. I believe the best evidence of that historical fact of what philosophers have meant by the word Determinism is articulated by Popper. As far as I can tell, it also seems to me that philosophers historically used the term "Compatibilism" to mean that the form of Determinism that you equate to Radical Fatalism is compatible with the notion of Libertarian Free Will. Perhaps, I am wrong about the use of these terms in history (i.e., before the advent of quantum theory). That is, however, my understanding of the way these terms have been used historically, and I believe that is what DBT is saying. I will, however, welcome DBT to say for himself whether he agrees or disagrees with my assessment.

I think that its a fair summary.

These are not my personal definitions, just how Compatibilists define their terms and the implications of their conditions.

Some, it would seem, want it both ways, that compatibalism is a sound argument and that determinism does not have the implication of 'radical fatalism.'

A kind of inexplicable, irrational mishmash of compatibilism and Libertarian free will.

 

[pood]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

We are whatever the brain is doing. Will has no control over genetics, neural architecture, social circumstances, family, language, social conditioning, etc, etc....where our wants and needs are formed.

Right.

And this means I can’t choose whom to marry, or what job to take, or even what to have for breakfast?

 

[steve_bank]

For participant[ants in this thread.

Are you posting

1. Of your own free will?
2. Because you were destined to post here and had no choice?
3. A combination of 1 & 2?
4. I have no idea why I am posting?
5. Other, explain.

No takers?

I think it rewires in party introspection.

 

[steve_bank]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

We are whatever the brain is doing. Will has no control over genetics, neural architecture, social circumstances, family, language, social conditioning, etc, etc....where our wants and needs are formed.

Is that really true?

I look at culture as a tn veneer over our instincts. Can reason over ride insintc? I think it can.

One can learn to de-escalate personal conflict instead of reachng for a gun. Peple do it..


When tame house trained cats and dogs go feral they return to their genetic inheritance.

 

[DBT]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

We are whatever the brain is doing. Will has no control over genetics, neural architecture, social circumstances, family, language, social conditioning, etc, etc....where our wants and needs are formed.

Is that really true?

I look at culture as a tn veneer over our instincts. Can reason over ride insintc? I think it can.

One can learn to de-escalate personal conflict instead of reachng for a gun. Peple do it..


When tame house trained cats and dogs go feral they return to their genetic inheritance.

Reason may or may not override instinct, it can, but it's not a matter of free will. People often act impulsively. Then they may regret their actions. What happens is a matter of how the brain responds in that instance.

And training is obviously possible. Animals can obviously be trained. But if they are, it is not something they willed. It is a condition of their environment and circumstances, they are in the hands of humans who desire animals that behave according to their expectations.

 

[DBT]

You can refer to the brain as it, but are you not your brain and the chemical activity within it?

The essential problem with philosophical attempts to define mind and self.

We are whatever the brain is doing. Will has no control over genetics, neural architecture, social circumstances, family, language, social conditioning, etc, etc....where our wants and needs are formed.

Right.

And this means I can’t choose whom to marry, or what job to take, or even what to have for breakfast?

If determinism is true, you can do whatever is determined, you can marry, have children, a career, you can think, feel and act.....in fact, according to the given terms, what you think and do is inevitable.

You can't support compatibalism if you reject the given conditions of determinism.

Perhaps arguing for Libertarian free will is a better option?

 

[Jarhyn]

If it is truly possible to replicate what we call human consciousness through a machine, then I submit that human consciousness is purely and entirely deterministic in the fatalistic sense.

I would assert we already have and that this is not the case.

This is one of the reasons why I find it so very important to find our language about freedom and wills and the dances of desires and the fine navigation of an error space that is learning and striving and perhaps applying aperiodic math to become something very "weird"... And to find that in the language we handle machines with.

Even if I am a machine and the world is a machine world, fate has no power to make me a machine that decides other than I in this moment will, and so I reject that fate has any true power over me and any mechination anywhere implies a phenomena of a mechanics. If consciousness is the presence of a phenomena of mechanics, and this grand pooling of it is the "miracle" of time and space amid rules that merely 'allow' for this to happen, then it to me is a fine miracle, and every day I see such things is a fine one to me. It is surely a rare and precious thing in the void.

Perfectly mechanical determinism as a result of causation does not free me from existing in the flow of this as a thing that decides autonomously. Rather it constrains me to be a thing with freedoms, wherever this thing appears among it, when invoking the mode of possibility.

I understand your point and stated in the part of my post that you did not reproduce that I understood that others on this board were of that view. I disagree, but I am content to agree to disagree. I believe we have both staked out our view, and there is no point in continuing to go around in circles -- although it does help to sharpen / refine the analysis. To my mind, your stated view, while couched in mechanical terms, is mystical and spiritual in nature. That is not a criticism. I admire such thinking.

Look under my user name.

I'm not joking. I mean sometimes I joke about it because I do find it ridiculous, but I am absolutely serious about the reality of it.

"Most people are mostly right most of the time" means religious people, too. It just means there are things they are wrong about and maybe one of the things they end up more wrong about than anything else is the desire to contradict reality.

I think we are on the same page when we say that the word "Compatibilism" as used by DBT and me means a belief that what you call Radical Fatalism and Libertarian Free Will are compatible.

That is NOT what any "compatibilist" believes.

Nobody on the internet who discusses compatibilism in the subject of free will, none of the outspoken compatibilists on Reddit, of which I'm one, nor Marvin Edwards, nor Pood nor I, compatibilists all, I think, believe that radical fatalism would be compatible with libertarian free will, because, and I cannot stress this enough, the majority of us reject both concepts as the different sides of the same nonsense.

If this is what you call compatibilism, it is the very core of a very deep misunderstanding, mostly on your part. It is a straw man.

I believe you have stated your concurrence with this view.

I did not.

Libertarian free will is the same free will as radically fatalistic free will which is the expectation to be free of what you are.

When I talk about most people being mostly right, this is specifically where the compatibilist rejects libertarian sourcing of free will. One small error. They say "it comes from not having prior causes" as if that's a coherent statement, and that gets rejected.

Edit: dunno what's actually going on in this paragraph, I got interrupted writing it twice;
I think I have it, now?

It's the same way we reject radical fatalism when discussing determinism, determining what this experience we have about having freedoms and wills and wills which are sometimes free, and so on comes from, if not "not having a prior cause".

The response the compatibilist usually finds is that "ah, it is some quality of the mechanical system, in some abstract way pertaining to its regular functions specifically."

This leads to the idea that compatibilist free will is compatible with mechanical determinism, but NOT AT ALL is it the case that "LFW" is compatible with "Radical Fatalism".

Interestingly, Pood indicates that it very well could be the case that compatibilist free will could be compatible with even fatalism, but that Radical Fatalism is itself a fundamentally incoherent view for strangely inverse reasons as LFW.

Either way, compatibilists reject a lot of that discussion as sophistry.

Some other offshoot of less serious thinkers do call themselves compatibilists, and among these, they merely expect that "whatever free will is and however it works, it must be compatible with how the universe works."

As a very serious compatibilist, I can see that for all radical fatalists as I will call them believe that the universe is mechanical, a clockwork of strange continuities, they are right. It is just that this does not make "pre-determination" equivalent to "determination".

It also, however, means that while we think that the language of libertarian free will is mostly right, certain religious concepts about God and free will being magical and unique to humans, and particular concepts about forgiveness by a god and retaliatory punishment, and certain aspects of religious sin and so on are also going to be rather warped, sometimes around that nugget.

The most notable warp that this causes is that it means people cannot change themselves, not through any "spiritual event of salvation", or through any sort of easy act of being reborn in some immediate sense. It doesn't let people be something other than what they are right this instant.

A lot of people through time have made this observation, objected to the discussion between LFW and Radical Fatalists as sophistry, been accused for years of various slights of hand as people cling to what we observe as fallacies, and so on.

Notably quite some time ago Voltaire made such discussion of how this concept of philosophical determinism seems to end badly, where you believe it could not have been otherwise, after all; he landed on "do meaningful work", which is where I myself mostly land.

Instead, compatibilism says change takes work, and for such as us "change" takes "doing the things that allow us to learn", and that morality is about consent and, strangely, a concept uttered by Alistair Crowley of all people ends up being the most accurate one I have seen uttered on the topic and one which itself invokes what that man even meant by the word "magic".

"Most people are mostly right". Even Crowley. And he believed things about magic.

I am a compatibilist, but more than most, this is because I reject that which is incompatible with what I observe.

But it doesn't mean I fail to observe wonders.

 

[DBT]

As it was you who brought up radical fatalism, you should explain how it relates to determinism as compatibilists define it to be.

 

[Jarhyn]

As it was you who brought up radical fatalism, you should explain how it relates to determinism as compatibilists define it to be.

No, you keep discussing radical fatalism.

And I have explained this a number of times: radical fatalism is the belief that the notion that "I didn't means that I couldn't", that determination equates to pre-determination, and so on: that you need to be "free of prior cause" to be free in some "true" sense.

Determinism as compatibilists define it is that later states evolve from earlier ones, full stop. There is no assumption that some freedom from your own nature is necessary in that ridiculous sense.

Then, you proceed to play word games, commit a modal fallacy, and then spout some shit about "cannot be otherwise" rather than "is not otherwise" and round and round we go.

We have explained this for years.

 

[Copernicus]

As it was you who brought up radical fatalism, you should explain how it relates to determinism as compatibilists define it to be.

I think everyone defines determinism in pretty much the same way. The problem is in how people define free will.