Compatibilism: What's that About?

[fromderinside]

You can use the same logics but you can't execute the same controls.

Oh, you absolutely CAN.

This is entirely what the modern discussion of "mindfulness" recognizes: that the controls ARE there and it is just a matter of figuring out how to use them. It's like a physical therapy but to the muscle of "personal review and management"

All of academic discussions on justice, and much of modern psychology is actually based around this fact.

Even esoteric traditions orbit this capability.

You act as if there would not be ready selection pressure in favor of allowing the process to internally execute.

And even then, it can still be executed through a "hop outside" through various mechanisms.

Talking about yada yada yada mindfulness wins the the prize. I looked up a study on mindfulness.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13063-018-2547-1

Not only was it yada yada yada, it was a collection off loosely defined terms mashed together into an almost mystical (Buddhist origins) breezy narrative.

Of note from the study?.

Trial status
At the time of manuscript submission, recruitment for this study was ongoing.

That's it.

They published a study in 2018 in which laid out a design and procedure from which they generated no results.

About par for the course.

Ommmmmm

See, this is an interesting aspect about some folks: they don't understand that it has nothing to do with "mysticism" and everything to do with self-management.

It seems readily apparent that anyone with a vested interest in resisting the acceptance of responsibility might reject the mechanisms that would allow someone to modify their own behavior.

This has been discussed, discovered, lost, rediscovered, hidden, guarded, revealed again so many times mostly on account of a few unfortunate facts:

It's really hard to write anything absolutely concretely true about what is happening when you don't even know what a neuron is or that humans have them or how they get trained effectively (ignorance in antiquity), various religions have often taken to reversing these mechanisms against the exercise of free will (re: scientology), and from the perspective of something embedded in a larger mass that you don't have absolute and universal connectivity to it can look a lot like you are talking "outside" when you are really just talking locally (illusion of spirits).

What? You thought a process that took several thousand people over the course of almost 100 years armed with electron microscopes and scalpels and diamond edged brain slicing machines disassembling whole brains to figure out how to formally describe a neuron and how to train them in groups from the outside would be easy to figure out and describe intuitively from the inside without any of that?

Instead, we got layers and heaps of metaphor and bad assumptions and piles of religions accreting around the idea, and of course some idiots throwing the baby out with the bathwater when they reject those religious treatments.

You are a neural network, embedded in a larger neural network. You have access to various levers of that neural network as neural networks have, whether directly or indirectly. Some of those levers are "move this, this way" some of the levers are "No, not THAT way!"

You don't even really have an excuse. You KNOW networks have those levers. What did you think they were attached to, exactly?

The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get on with picking up your abdicated responsibilities.

Paraphrasing  Shelly Berman circa the fifties: "Yes Lord. Lord what is one?"

 

[Jarhyn]

You can use the same logics but you can't execute the same controls.

Oh, you absolutely CAN.

This is entirely what the modern discussion of "mindfulness" recognizes: that the controls ARE there and it is just a matter of figuring out how to use them. It's like a physical therapy but to the muscle of "personal review and management"

All of academic discussions on justice, and much of modern psychology is actually based around this fact.

Even esoteric traditions orbit this capability.

You act as if there would not be ready selection pressure in favor of allowing the process to internally execute.

And even then, it can still be executed through a "hop outside" through various mechanisms.

Talking about yada yada yada mindfulness wins the the prize. I looked up a study on mindfulness.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13063-018-2547-1

Not only was it yada yada yada, it was a collection off loosely defined terms mashed together into an almost mystical (Buddhist origins) breezy narrative.

Of note from the study?.

Trial status
At the time of manuscript submission, recruitment for this study was ongoing.

That's it.

They published a study in 2018 in which laid out a design and procedure from which they generated no results.

About par for the course.

Ommmmmm

See, this is an interesting aspect about some folks: they don't understand that it has nothing to do with "mysticism" and everything to do with self-management.

It seems readily apparent that anyone with a vested interest in resisting the acceptance of responsibility might reject the mechanisms that would allow someone to modify their own behavior.

This has been discussed, discovered, lost, rediscovered, hidden, guarded, revealed again so many times mostly on account of a few unfortunate facts:

It's really hard to write anything absolutely concretely true about what is happening when you don't even know what a neuron is or that humans have them or how they get trained effectively (ignorance in antiquity), various religions have often taken to reversing these mechanisms against the exercise of free will (re: scientology), and from the perspective of something embedded in a larger mass that you don't have absolute and universal connectivity to it can look a lot like you are talking "outside" when you are really just talking locally (illusion of spirits).

What? You thought a process that took several thousand people over the course of almost 100 years armed with electron microscopes and scalpels and diamond edged brain slicing machines disassembling whole brains to figure out how to formally describe a neuron and how to train them in groups from the outside would be easy to figure out and describe intuitively from the inside without any of that?

Instead, we got layers and heaps of metaphor and bad assumptions and piles of religions accreting around the idea, and of course some idiots throwing the baby out with the bathwater when they reject those religious treatments.

You are a neural network, embedded in a larger neural network. You have access to various levers of that neural network as neural networks have, whether directly or indirectly. Some of those levers are "move this, this way" some of the levers are "No, not THAT way!"

You don't even really have an excuse. You KNOW networks have those levers. What did you think they were attached to, exactly?

The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get on with picking up your abdicated responsibilities.

Paraphrasing  Shelly Berman circa the fifties: "Yes Lord. Lord what is one?"

Well, to understand that, generally you have to do two things: one being "realize this entire act of description of neural systems that you did for some 42 years describes aspects and things you will encounter 'inside'" and the second being "if I'm in here, and not all that's in here, other shit is, too."

Then it starts to make a lot more sense.

Find a quiet room, do some meditation, and see if texture or form exists in your mind, and if you can emote different ways at what you find there.

You should ping @Elixir some time about how he's fucked with scientologists on an e-meter before. It's on my bucket list, but I would also have to like, not be anonymous.

The point is, it's kind of sad to see someone live half-a-life in some little cage of ignorance because they are trapped in the assumption that they cannot access the levers despite the fact that the thing typing at me at least has enough agency to string words together and throw them at their fingers long enough to hit "post".

Do you really not know how to emote at yourself? Do you lack the power to observe "I just did something I've been trying to do for a while but I'm not feeling encouraged or happy... (Find something that makes me feel encouraged and happy)... (Now hold that feeling while thinking about what I just accomplished)..."

It's behavior mod 101, in fact using that classical conditioning you keep talking about.

But on yourself.

How have you been ignorant of this? Like one of the projects in any college behavior mod course is to use classic conditioning to modify your own behavior. You think you can't do that freemind?

 

[pood]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

I suppose I would be the compatibilist who is not at all bothered by the modal fallacy (probably because I never heard of it or understood it before). When I use the term "causal necessity" I am permitting the notion of "must". And, unlike Dennett, I have no trouble with the term "inevitable". The stronger forms do not penetrate my solution.

If it is inevitable that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then inevitability is not a meaningful constraint.
If it is causally necessary that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then causal necessity is not a meaningful constraint.
If I must do precisely what I myself choose to do, then must is not a meaningful constraint.

The notion of inevitability usually implies that "there is nothing we can do about it". But universal causal necessity/inevitability is different, because it also incorporates our own choices and our own control within the overall scheme of causation, without replacing them with anything else. In other words, everything proceeds exactly as it always has, and our choices are the meaningful-and-relevant control of our own actions. And our own actions are the meaningful-and-relevant causes of subsequent events in the real world.

 

[pood]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

I suppose I would be the compatibilist who is not at all bothered by the modal fallacy (probably because I never heard of it or understood it before). When I use the term "causal necessity" I am permitting the notion of "must". And, unlike Dennett, I have no trouble with the term "inevitable". The stronger forms do not penetrate my solution.

If it is inevitable that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then inevitability is not a meaningful constraint.
If it is causally necessary that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then causal necessity is not a meaningful constraint.
If I must do precisely what I myself choose to do, then must is not a meaningful constraint.

The notion of inevitability usually implies that "there is nothing we can do about it". But universal causal necessity/inevitability is different, because it also incorporates our own choices and our own control within the overall scheme of causation, without replacing them with anything else. In other words, everything proceeds exactly as it always has, and our choices are the meaningful-and-relevant control of our own actions. And our own actions are the meaningful-and-relevant causes of subsequent events in the real world.

I don’t think that our positions differ in any truly substantive way, except terminologically. I don’t recognize any sort of necessity beyond logical necessity. All that which not logically necessary (true at all possible worlds) is contingent (true at some possible worlds, false at others).

Your point about “there is nothing we can do about it” is quite relevant in this context. Another form of determinism oft cited is sometimes called relativistic determinism. This is a form of determinism derived from special relativity, in which it is held that SR implies that the future exists along with the past and present. It derives from the relativity of simultaneity, which shows that different inertial frames can disagree on the temporal order of events. This is also called the block universe.

But if the future exists, it’s really no different from saying that the past determines the future. The supposed relativistic threat to free will is that if the future is set in stone as much as the past, then “there is nothing we can do about it” — our choices are already pre-determined, ergo no free will, supposedly.

But this worry ignores the fact that our choices, with or without a block universe, are made by us. When people say that “there is nothing we can do about it,” what they are really implicitly (and illicitly) arguing for is that, for us to have free will, we ought to be able to change things that already are, or will be, true.

But that’s absurd. Even if the block universe is real and all our future choices are set in stone, this is no different from saying that all our past choices are set in stone. Yet no one thinks that because it is a fixed fact of the past that I had eggs for breakfast yesterday, I had to have eggs. In just the same way, no one should think that just because it’s true today that tomorrow I will have eggs for breakfast, then I have to have eggs.

The “there is nothing we can do about it” worry disguises an appeal to a fallacy of classical logic — that I ought to be able to change what I did, am doing, and will do in the future. But to be able to do so would violate the Law of Non-contradiction — it would require the ability to both do, and not do, x at the same time. No account of free will requires as a premise that I be able to commit a logical absurdity.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist whose writings I admire (her blog is called Back Reaction) believes we probably live in a block universe and also believes we have no free will. In one of her blog posts she wrote challengingly, “see if you can change the future.” Her point was that to have free will, we must be able to change a pre-set future.

But this is not so. To have free will does not require that I have the ability to change anything, past, present, or future. It only requires that I be able to do, within my limited power, those acts which, in part, make the past be what it was, the present be what it is, and the future be, what it will be. I can rephrase her statement to say, “see if you can change the present.” You cannot. If right now I raise my hand, I have not changed the present. I have made the present moment be, in part, what it is. The present moment will now quantify over a great many acts and events that are contingent. One of them will be that I contingently raised my hand. Had I done otherwise, which I had full power to do, than the present moment would be different. The same goes for the past and future.

There will only be one realized history, but there are vastly greater numbers of realizable histories — possible non-actual worlds, in modal terminology. Those worlds were, are, and always will be, possible, contra the hard determinist stance that only one history can be realized.

 

[fromderinside]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

F=MA

 

[Jarhyn]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

I suppose I would be the compatibilist who is not at all bothered by the modal fallacy (probably because I never heard of it or understood it before). When I use the term "causal necessity" I am permitting the notion of "must". And, unlike Dennett, I have no trouble with the term "inevitable". The stronger forms do not penetrate my solution.

If it is inevitable that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then inevitability is not a meaningful constraint.
If it is causally necessary that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then causal necessity is not a meaningful constraint.
If I must do precisely what I myself choose to do, then must is not a meaningful constraint.

The notion of inevitability usually implies that "there is nothing we can do about it". But universal causal necessity/inevitability is different, because it also incorporates our own choices and our own control within the overall scheme of causation, without replacing them with anything else. In other words, everything proceeds exactly as it always has, and our choices are the meaningful-and-relevant control of our own actions. And our own actions are the meaningful-and-relevant causes of subsequent events in the real world.

I don’t think that our positions differ in any truly substantive way, except terminologically. I don’t recognize any sort of necessity beyond logical necessity. All that which not logically necessary (true at all possible worlds) is contingent (true at some possible worlds, false at others).

Your point about “there is nothing we can do about it” is quite relevant in this context. Another form of determinism oft cited is sometimes called relativistic determinism. This is a form of determinism derived from special relativity, in which it is held that SR implies that the future exists along with the past and present. It derives from the relativity of simultaneity, which shows that different inertial frames can disagree on the temporal order of events. This is also called the block universe.

But if the future exists, it’s really no different from saying that the past determines the future. The supposed relativistic threat to free will is that if the future is set in stone as much as the past, then “there is nothing we can do about it” — our choices are already pre-determined, ergo no free will, supposedly.

But this worry ignores the fact that our choices, with or without a block universe, are made by us. When people say that “there is nothing we can do about it,” what they are really implicitly (and illicitly) arguing for is that, for us to have free will, we ought to be able to change things that already are, or will be, true.

But that’s absurd. Even if the block universe is real and all our future choices are set in stone, this is no different from saying that all our past choices are set in stone. Yet no one thinks that because it is a fixed fact of the past that I had eggs for breakfast yesterday, I had to have eggs. In just the same way, no one should think that just because it’s true today that tomorrow I will have eggs for breakfast, then I have to have eggs.

The “there is nothing we can do about it” worry disguises an appeal to a fallacy of classical logic — that I ought to be able to change what I did, am doing, and will do in the future. But to be able to do so would violate the Law of Non-contradiction — it would require the ability to both do, and not do, x at the same time. No account of free will requires as a premise that I be able to commit a logical absurdity.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist whose writings I admire (her blog is called Back Reaction) believes we probably live in a block universe and also believes we have no free will. In one of her blog posts she wrote challengingly, “see if you can change the future.” Her point was that to have free will, we must be able to change a pre-set future.

But this is not so. To have free will does not require that I have the ability to change anything, past, present, or future. It only requires that I be able to do, within my limited power, those acts which, in part, make the past be what it was, the present be what it is, and the future be, what it will be. I can rephrase her statement to say, “see if you can change the present.” You cannot. If right now I raise my hand, I have not changed the present. I have made the present moment be, in part, what it is. The present moment will now quantify over a great many acts and events that are contingent. One of them will be that I contingently raised my hand. Had I done otherwise, which I had full power to do, than the present moment would be different. The same goes for the past and future.

There will only be one realized history, but there are vastly greater numbers of realizable histories — possible non-actual worlds, in modal terminology. Those worlds were, are, and always will be, possible, contra the hard determinist stance that only one history can be realized.

I don't think "possible" need enter into it. Except perhaps in the realm of "given the gaps in my knowledge it is possible that I am wrong that this provisional will is not free at the outset."

Or "given the gaps in his knowledge it is true that his held will is not free at the outset".

I do think there is a distinction between "will" and "must" which approaches the same value of certainty at infinity: when you go global, know all things, and know the mechanism of the physics the distinction vanishes:

The dwarf must try the door. The dwarf must always try the door.

The door must be locked. The door must always be locked.

Elsewise it is not the same equation of definition for the same universe.

Even so, the dwarf will try to open the door and the dwarf will try to validate "door is open?"

But that is where the dwarf MAY fail on the basis of the fact that failure of "open door" is possible in general: it is happening in this very moment. The dwarf cannot know until it gets the return code "NOPE!"1. It is not "subjective" so much as a limit of "locality".

The °°° here is "dwarf try door, is door open?"

The first half being the task, and the second half being the requirement.

The task will be parsed to completion, every step which needs validation either getting it or failing or occasionally recalculating the task around obstacles. This one is fairly simple on account of only being a linear atomic task/check. They can get far less linear and atomic.

Of course this requires one to accept that things can be "instruction execution engines".

As FDI succinctly mentions :

F=MA

This means that one can look at a mass, look at the momentary acceleration, and determine the force it exerts.

One can look at a mass, a situational moment, look at the momentary action contributed in a single decision, and determine how this impacts the outcome causally.

That we can look at individual contributions to what causes what will happen to happen, make a plan for that kind of thing to happen again in the future, initiate a cause as per the plan, and watch as that thing will happen from the event we freely initiated.

 

[fromderinside]

I’ve written all this before, but let me try to summarize the argument more succinctly.

The Consequence Argument reduces succinctly to:

The laws of nature, in conjunction with antecedent events, necessitate all future events, including all human acts.

The crux of the dispute, as I see it, lies in two words from above: “laws” and “necessitate.”

The Humean compatibilist, of which I, roughly, am one, denies that the “laws” of nature are laws at all. The so-called laws are descriptions of what happens in the world. They are not, and cannot be, prescriptions. Those who think otherwise have the burden or proof to show that laws are actually prescriptive.

If laws are merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, then the first prop of the Consequence Argument is knocked out from under it. If laws are descriptions, as I hold, then at least some “laws” of nature are up to us.

Now move on to the word “necessitate.” As I have repeatedly pointed out, the use of the word “necessitate” in this context commits the modal fallacy.

As I have also pointed out, there are other forms of determinism besides causal determinism. All these forms of determinism, when they argue against free will, commit the modal fallacy.

Logical determinism is the thesis that if there are true propositions about future contingents events, then these propositions are not actually contingent (could be otherwise). So, if today it’s true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I must do x. No free will.

The fallacy here, as I’ve pointed out, lies in the misallocation of the modal necessity operator. In the above, it must be applied jointly to both the antecedent and its consequent, and not just to the consequent. Hence the corrected argument is:

Necessarily (if today it is true that tomorrow I will do x, then tomorrow I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Epistemic determinism is the thesis that if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I must do x. No free will.

Again, this is an example of the modal fallacy, and the repaired argument goes:

Necessarily (if an omniscient observer knows in advance that I will do x, then I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

Causal determinism is the thesis that given antecedents a, b, and c, then later I must do x.

Modally repaired:

Necessarily (if antecedents a, b, and c, then later I will (not must) do x. Free will restored.

As an example, suppose this morning I had a big breakfast because last night I skipped dinner. It does not follow that I had to have a big breakfast, I just did because antecedently I had refrained from eating.

The standard compatibilist agrees with the hard determinist that given antecedents a, b, and c, x follows. They part company on this point: the hard determinist maintains that x must follow, whereas the standard compatibilist holds nothing more than that x will follow.

The Humean compatiblist, as also previously noted, thinks that, because “laws” are descriptive and not prescriptive, x does not follow from a, b, and c. Rerunning the tape of history with antecedents exactly the same will yield different results (though this is not an experiment we can run, of course.) For a full treatment of this issue see chapters 10 and 11 of the book The Concept of Physical Law by Norman Swartz. The whole book can be downloaded for free here.

For a different take on the subject, I recommend David K. Lewis’s classic paper, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” It is a rebuttal of van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument but taking a different line.

I suppose I would be the compatibilist who is not at all bothered by the modal fallacy (probably because I never heard of it or understood it before). When I use the term "causal necessity" I am permitting the notion of "must". And, unlike Dennett, I have no trouble with the term "inevitable". The stronger forms do not penetrate my solution.

If it is inevitable that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then inevitability is not a meaningful constraint.
If it is causally necessary that I will do precisely what I myself choose to do, then causal necessity is not a meaningful constraint.
If I must do precisely what I myself choose to do, then must is not a meaningful constraint.

The notion of inevitability usually implies that "there is nothing we can do about it". But universal causal necessity/inevitability is different, because it also incorporates our own choices and our own control within the overall scheme of causation, without replacing them with anything else. In other words, everything proceeds exactly as it always has, and our choices are the meaningful-and-relevant control of our own actions. And our own actions are the meaningful-and-relevant causes of subsequent events in the real world.

I don’t think that our positions differ in any truly substantive way, except terminologically. I don’t recognize any sort of necessity beyond logical necessity. All that which not logically necessary (true at all possible worlds) is contingent (true at some possible worlds, false at others).

Your point about “there is nothing we can do about it” is quite relevant in this context. Another form of determinism oft cited is sometimes called relativistic determinism. This is a form of determinism derived from special relativity, in which it is held that SR implies that the future exists along with the past and present. It derives from the relativity of simultaneity, which shows that different inertial frames can disagree on the temporal order of events. This is also called the block universe.

But if the future exists, it’s really no different from saying that the past determines the future. The supposed relativistic threat to free will is that if the future is set in stone as much as the past, then “there is nothing we can do about it” — our choices are already pre-determined, ergo no free will, supposedly.

But this worry ignores the fact that our choices, with or without a block universe, are made by us. When people say that “there is nothing we can do about it,” what they are really implicitly (and illicitly) arguing for is that, for us to have free will, we ought to be able to change things that already are, or will be, true.

But that’s absurd. Even if the block universe is real and all our future choices are set in stone, this is no different from saying that all our past choices are set in stone. Yet no one thinks that because it is a fixed fact of the past that I had eggs for breakfast yesterday, I had to have eggs. In just the same way, no one should think that just because it’s true today that tomorrow I will have eggs for breakfast, then I have to have eggs.

The “there is nothing we can do about it” worry disguises an appeal to a fallacy of classical logic — that I ought to be able to change what I did, am doing, and will do in the future. But to be able to do so would violate the Law of Non-contradiction — it would require the ability to both do, and not do, x at the same time. No account of free will requires as a premise that I be able to commit a logical absurdity.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist whose writings I admire (her blog is called Back Reaction) believes we probably live in a block universe and also believes we have no free will. In one of her blog posts she wrote challengingly, “see if you can change the future.” Her point was that to have free will, we must be able to change a pre-set future.

But this is not so. To have free will does not require that I have the ability to change anything, past, present, or future. It only requires that I be able to do, within my limited power, those acts which, in part, make the past be what it was, the present be what it is, and the future be, what it will be. I can rephrase her statement to say, “see if you can change the present.” You cannot. If right now I raise my hand, I have not changed the present. I have made the present moment be, in part, what it is. The present moment will now quantify over a great many acts and events that are contingent. One of them will be that I contingently raised my hand. Had I done otherwise, which I had full power to do, than the present moment would be different. The same goes for the past and future.

There will only be one realized history, but there are vastly greater numbers of realizable histories — possible non-actual worlds, in modal terminology. Those worlds were, are, and always will be, possible, contra the hard determinist stance that only one history can be realized.

I don't think "possible" need enter into it. Except perhaps in the realm of "given the gaps in my knowledge it is possible that I am wrong that this provisional will is not free at the outset."

Or "given the gaps in his knowledge it is true that his held will is not free at the outset".

I do think there is a distinction between "will" and "must" which approaches the same value of certainty at infinity: when you go global, know all things, and know the mechanism of the physics the distinction vanishes:

The dwarf must try the door. The dwarf must always try the door.

The door must be locked. The door must always be locked.

Elsewise it is not the same equation of definition for the same universe.

Even so, the dwarf will try to open the door and the dwarf will try to validate "door is open?"

But that is where the dwarf MAY fail on the basis of the fact that failure of "open door" is possible in general: it is happening in this very moment. The dwarf cannot know until it gets the return code "NOPE!"1. It is not "subjective" so much as a limit of "locality".

The °°° here is "dwarf try door, is door open?"

The first half being the task, and the second half being the requirement.

The task will be parsed to completion, every step which needs validation either getting it or failing or occasionally recalculating the task around obstacles. This one is fairly simple on account of only being a linear atomic task/check. They can get far less linear and atomic.

Of course this requires one to accept that things can be "instruction execution engines".

As FDI succinctly mentions :

F=MA

This means that one can look at a mass, look at the momentary acceleration, and determine the force it exerts.

One can look at a mass, a situational moment, look at the momentary action contributed in a single decision, and determine how this impacts the outcome causally.

That we can look at individual contributions to what causes what will happen to happen, make a plan for that kind of thing to happen again in the future, initiate a cause as per the plan, and watch as that thing will happen from the event we freely initiated.

Why are you talking about plans in subjective space? This is a Determinism thread. You are citing an example that requires one to make use of capabilities developed because one cannot directly process reality. One must take what has been proved by empirical experiment. To do so one uses tools which evolved meeting necessary requirements to survive as a social being to find facts in the real world. That method to execute empirical experiments is the scientific method.

The Scientific method removes one from making personal judgements by forcing one to use objective methods to measure objective reality directly. After finding objective data one uses tools to interpret what one has achieved by inventing methodologies that permit one to carry out objective procedures. Now you are asking to take observations of a determined world and subject them to subjective analysis? Why?

We have just found objective data of the real world and you think that by putting that data through subjective rational analysis something useful will come of it? Isn't the whole idea of producing tools which work with objective data to avoid use of mental processes to decide outcomes? Maths, as computers prove, work better independent of minds. All maths are operationally defined testable objects best used for manipulating real data without judgement by mental processes.

Unless the plan is actually a an operationally defined formula it is useless. Just like mindfulness in the example I provided is meaningless unless objective data underwrites it so too are mental masturbations'.

Yes minds came up with all these tools. But what the minds proposed were methods removing minds from interpreting data as is was being collected or judging the meaning while the data was being processed.

 

[DBT]

Choosing is choosing

And the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club...

So, not surprisingly, you miss the point. Which was that 'choosing' does not equate to 'free will.'

Selection does not necessarily equate to free will

Nowhere did anyone say it did. Selection equates to the implantation, the writing of will.

If that means what I think, that's true. Selection does determine will....but it appears that you haven't considered the implications of determined will or the nature of selection within a determined system.

That process itself is a will.

No, it's not. selection is an information processing function of neural or silicon chip networks. Architecture determines capability, features, attributes, capacity, etc.

Nothing in the function and wiring of a computer is being willed. Your use of 'will' is absurd.

Human will emerges in consciousness milliseconds after actions are determined, in your own words 'Selection equates to the implantation, the writing of will''

Will is 'written' before it is made conscious.

Playing no part in the prior information processing, will and action proceeds as determined, freedom of will is incompatible with determinism.

 

[DBT]

You say you understand, then proceed to demonstrate that you don't. The point in regard to the notion of free will being that you don't get to choose your physical makeup, how inputs act upon it or how it responds.

Asserting 'I am the system, therefore free will' is begging the question.

What you claim is a fine example of begging the question, where the premises assume the truth of the conclusion.

1. As Jarhyn points out, I can certainly modify my physical makeup by deliberation and choice. It is true that I didn’t get to choose my genetic

What you overlook is that what you experience as agency has already been determined and fixed milliseconds prior to your experience of deliberation and choice, and it is from this flawed assumption of agenct that you try to build a case for free will.

Things just don't work like that. Inputs must precede transmission, propagation and processing of information, integrated and represented in conscious form, you experience thought and deliberation that was determined milliseconds ago.

This illusion of conscious agency, that your deliberations make a difference to outcomes is exposed when things go wrong with the mechanisms.

This has all been explained numerous times;

Cognition.
''When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.

Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you twitched a single muscle.''

Michael Gazzaniga, narrator function;
''Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”

Even more fantastic examples of the left hemisphere at work come from the study of neurological disorders. In a complication of stroke called anosognosia with hemiplegia, patients cannot recognize that their left arm is theirs because the stroke damaged the right parietal cortex, which manages our body’s integrity, position, and movement. The left-hemisphere interpreter has to reconcile the information it receives from the visual cortex—that the limb is attached to its body but is not moving—with the fact that it is not receiving any input about the damage to that limb. The left-hemisphere interpreter would recognize that damage to nerves of the limb meant trouble for the brain and that the limb was paralyzed; however, in this case the damage occurred directly to the brain area responsible for signaling a problem in the perception of the limb, and it cannot send any information to the left-hemisphere interpreter. The interpreter must, then, create a belief to mediate the two known facts “I can see the limb isn’t moving” and “I can’t tell that it is damaged.” When patients with this disorder are asked about their arm and why they can’t move it, they will say “It’s not mine” or “I just don’t feel like moving it”—reasonable conclusions, given the input that the left-hemisphere interpreter is receiving.

The left-hemisphere interpreter is not only a master of belief creation, but it will stick to its belief system no matter what. Patients with “reduplicative paramnesia,” because of damage to the brain, believe that there are copies of people or places. In short, they will remember another time and mix it with the present. As a result, they will create seemingly ridiculous, but masterful, stories to uphold what they know to be true due to the erroneous messages their damaged brain is sending their intact interpreter. One such patient believed the New York hospital where she was being treated was actually her home in Maine. When her doctor asked how this could be her home if there were elevators in the hallway, she said, “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?” The interpreter will go to great lengths to make sure the inputs it receives are woven together to make sense—even when it must make great leaps to do so. Of course, these do not appear as“great leaps” to the patient, but rather as clear evidence from the world around him or her.''

 

[Jarhyn]

Why are you talking about plans in subjective space

I am not. I am talking about the fact that plans held by things are objective parts of mechanical systems that objectively determine their behaviors.

The list of instructions to be acted upon by a processor is no less an object than the dwarf itself, which is then an object composed itself of a series of bits on a field.

Just like our plans are objects composed in reality of a series of chemical potentials across a field of neurons.


Your inability to step back from "subjectivity" and look at it as the complete mechanical OBJECT that it is and see that it OBJECTIVELY had an OBJECT that is nonetheless "arbitrary, but real, instructions" is your problem here.

It doesn't matter whether we process reality directly. It does not matter if the thing that measures the reality and checks the requirement checks a very abstracted piece of reality. It doesn't matter that the real requirements are more "this much chemical was dumped here in the brain (as a result of hand moving)" or "the door was open".

They are essentially the same thing as far as "the universe" is concerned. You hand-waving "SuBjEcTiViTy!!!111" at it doesn't make the fact that it's really an object acting like a fucking robot that happens to be able to program itself.

Unless the plan is actually a an operationally defined formula it is useless

LOLWUT?

No, the plan is only useless if it fails, the plan is only useless if it is not °°°. And often it is even useful then in after-action-review.

You must really hate yourself if you don't want to be involved with decisions over who you yourself will be and what you will do.

The only thing that can manage and provide tight oversight on yourself is yourself. It's the only thing wired for providing immediate feedback and analysis.

The only way to achieve certain behavioral goals is then to do analysis, find out what you did wrong, test it...

Are you seriously hung up on some bad belief that the scientific method includes automatic science, and experimentation on and within the self?

'choosing' does not equate to 'free will.

Nobody said it does. Sometimes the choice is "life! There is a gun in my face (physical systemic requirement of undeniable lizard-brain drive)" and we recognize that means that the adjoining will came from external to the drive system of the person speaking. It came from the drive system of (maybe the guy with the gun?).

In this situation, choosing is not free will.

So no choice does not of its own imply "free will" of the person choosing, in all situations.

The ability of systems to execute arbitrary instruction sets implies •••.

The ability of systems to fail to execute instructions to the satisfaction of a requirement implies °°°.

Choosing requires a ••• that contains multiple options (direct or by reference), which will result in a single selection of new secondary •••. Whether the ••• that ended up choosing on a secondary ••• was °°° depends on whether or not the secondary ••• is itself °°°:

it chose that "my ••• shall be *** unto ***'s completion" which, suggests *** may not constitute a °°° •••.

So in short, you have made an unargued assertion and thus an assertion fallacy.

Selection does determine will

Ok, so, here you are admitting that (at least some) determined systems have WILL.

Now, ask yourself: Q: can a will fail unto it's requirement?

If so, it has a truth value associated with it, a property derived by it's intersection through reality. This truth value is °°°.

Congratulations, in finding ••• you found °°°.

A: yes, it may

Will is 'written' before it is made conscious

It is written by the brain. You have some failed understanding about the meaning of what is "conscious" versus not.

You make all kinds of claims that this is meaningful but it really isn't.

has already been determined and fixed

It has been determined and fixed, by me, milliseconds before it is narrated back to me. I'm still the one who determined and fixed it. Of course it takes a little bit of time for that data to come back in a loop around to me, and I still have the ability in those milliseconds to send a NO, if I don't like what I see, or what any of the other processes in my brain say of what they see.

Generally it is a causal requirement, in fact, for something to be done BEFORE it may be evaluated by "the peanut gallery".

You keep claiming that the time delay of the narration means it was not consciously decided upon. That doesn't imply anything of the sort, and it's fundamentally bad science to say it does.

You (the you that makes decisions and gets an awareness of what happened narrated back) exist in a capacity where you get all the data you need to review what is happening in your head.

Let me reiterate: serial killers have a responsibility to kill themselves before they kill anyone else.

 

[DBT]

Wow, the size of the post, you have been working. I've got no hope of getting through all that in the time that I have.

I figured that if you were going to throw Gazzaniga at me, I had better go over the notes I had taken while reading his book.

Well, the narrator function is a long way from being an example of free will.

Choosing is choosing. Selection does not necessarily equate to free will. 'Free will' is not necessary as an explanation for what is essentially a matter of information processing.

Right. The notion of free will is not intended to explain how the brain works.

'Free will' is usually applied to describe whether the person was free to decide for themselves or not. Based upon their control of their choice of action, the person is either held responsible for their actions, OR, someone or something else is held responsible.

In matters of free will and responsibility, we don't really need the details of how the brain works, except when the brain is not working normally. But the person, specifically their normally functioning brain, chooses what they will do. We empirically observe people making choices, so we know that this is not an illusion. Any illusions the person may have as to how their choices came about, that their brain constructs for them while modeling the self, is irrelevant to the notion of free will. All that society cares about is whether their normal adult brain decided to perform the act or not. When that is the case, society holds them responsible for those actions.

Whether the decision was calculated unconsciously and then passed to consciousness as reportable experience, or whether consciousness was informed by the more unconscious processes more frequently during the process of deliberation, is not a significant problem. As long as conscious intent was present at the time of the action, the person is held responsible. How the brain managed to form that conscious intent is a matter for neuroscience, not jurisprudence. Jurisprudence only cares about whether the brain was functioning abnormally, in a way that could reasonably be said to remove the person's normal control of their actions.

The same is true for the notion of free will outside of the legal system. The person is held responsible for what they deliberately chose to do. This may be a good thing, something worthy of praise to encourage others to copy that behavior. Or, if it is a bad thing, it may be worthy of blame, to discourage others from copying it.

If we are to determine whether there is something that we can call free will operating within the brain, we should consider the nature and function of a brain and what role 'will' plays within the system.

Simply saying it doesn't matter, ''oh it's us that's doing it, therefore free will'' is not good enough, it's not a valid argument. It's just slapping a label onto a set of selected conditions and declaring ''this is free will.''

A system that has the capacity to process information and categorize has the ability to select an option based on a set of criteria.

And that is what we call "choosing".

We do. But it is the nature of choosing that determines whether it can be labelled 'free will.'

If choosing is determined by antecedents, fixed without the input of will, or ability of will to modify, choosing is not an example of free will.

It is the state of the processor and the given criteria that determines the option that is taken.

Of course. Choosing is a deterministic function. At the macro description level, we speak of the person's goals and reasons, their thoughts and feelings, as the reliable causes of their selecting the option. And thus we retain the notion of reliable causation at the macro level.

Reliable is not the word. Determinism fixes outcomes. Things go as determined, not chosen because we can depend on things being as we wish them to be.

Our will and wishes are fixed by prior events, what we want is determined, not freely chosen.

Everything the brain does is motivated by biological needs.

Motivated is the wrong word; everything the brain does is determined by an interaction of biology and environment. We are talking about a determined system;


What Does Deterministic System Mean?
''A deterministic system is a system in which a given initial state or condition will always produce the same results. There is no randomness or variation in the ways that inputs get delivered as outputs.''

Without those drives to do what is necessary to survive, thrive, and reproduce, we would sit motionless, just like a rock, and we would have become extinct. Quite possibly there were many variations in species that lacked these drives and did immediately die off. So, we may generalize these drives, figuratively, as a "will to live", and suggest that such a will is the driving force within the brain and all of the other systems in the body. As Mark Solms suggests, it is the affects produced by mechanisms in the brain stem that originate conscious awareness. He suggests that the key characteristic of feelings is that they are felt, that they are the earliest things of which we are aware.

So, I'm going to suggest that will is the driving force for the whole mechanism.

The will to live is inherent. A survival trait. We don't choose to have it, it's wired into the system. Practically all animals have it, The will to live doesn't determine how a brain functions or its abilities, which is a matter of architecture, state and condition.



Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

''The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. What does this mean? It means that all of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and feelings are produced by chemical reactions going on in your head (a sobering thought). The brain's function is to process information. In other words, it is a computer that is made of organic (carbon-based) compounds rather than silicon chips. The brain is comprised of cells: primarily neurons and their supporting structures. Neurons are cells that are specialized for the transmission of information. Electrochemical reactions cause neurons to fire.

Neurons are connected to one another in a highly organized way. One can think of these connections as circuits -- just like a computer has circuits. These circuits determine how the brain processes information, just as the circuits in your computer determine how it processes information. Neural circuits in your brain are connected to sets of neurons that run throughout your body. Some of these neurons are connected to sensory receptors, such as the retina of your eye. Others are connected to your muscles. Sensory receptors are cells that are specialized for gathering information from the outer world and from other parts of the body. (You can feel your stomach churn because there are sensory receptors on it, but you cannot feel your spleen, which lacks them.) Sensory receptors are connected to neurons that transmit this information to your brain. Other neurons send information from your brain to motor neurons. Motor neurons are connected to your muscles; they cause your muscles to move. This movement is what we call behavior.

In other words, the reason we have one set of circuits rather than another is that the circuits that we have were better at solving problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history than alternative circuits were. The brain is a naturally constructed computational system whose function is to solve adaptive information-processing problems (such as face recognition, threat interpretation, language acquisition, or navigation). Over evolutionary time, its circuits were cumulatively added because they "reasoned" or "processed information" in a way that enhanced the adaptive regulation of behavior and physiology.''

 

[Jarhyn]

can call free will operating within the brain

••• operates in the brain. °°° operates in reality.

Perhaps this is why you are having such a hard time.

Sometimes the brain tries to predict reality: the brain is attempting to model whether something will be free (which it may because our particular determinism allows this kind of operation).

°°° is an assessment of truth value on a sentence of the •••, and is not a functional feature in and of itself. It is a "derived" value, an "assessed" value.

The assessed value inside the brain is not the real value of the °°° evaluation.

The real value of the °°° evaluation is whether in reality that sentence gets resolved.

Instead, we operate with provisional °°° assessments. They are LIKE °°° but are in truth imaginary.

It just happens that certain provisional evaluations of °°° value pursuant to a ••• allow us to operate much more efficiently: "I'm not strong enough to huck a basketball that far so as to get it through the net".

Interestingly even in moments of provisionally failed °°°, sometimes we hit YOLO and execute a ••• that we know will fail in some spectacular way. Sometimes you hold a ••• to both (apparent) forks and the outcome that must happen will always satisfy a ••• unto an assessment of "°°°".

Sometimes even a ••• is open-ended. Oftentimes for some less goal-oriented thinkers: Do a thing, See what happens! No requirement!

This will obviously always be a °°° ••• because there is no way the ••• can fail.

 

[pood]

Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

''The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics.

Same old yada yada.

The brain functions as a computer. Really? You say this, or quote someone else saying this, as if it were an established fact. It’s not. I’ve already given you at least one link to a paper by a neuroscientist who argues forcefully that the brain is not a computer, nor does it function similarly to one. But even if it does function as a computer, or like a computer, it changes nothing with respect to this discussion.

”Governed soley by the laws,” etc. etc. Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I don’t think you ever have given a straight answer to a question I have asked many times: Are the “laws” of nature DEscriptive (as I hold) or PREscriptive (as the quote above holds)? If you think the laws are prescriptive, present your evidence. If the laws are not prescriptive, then in no sense is the brain governed by these alleged laws.

 

[pood]

F=MA

Your point?

F=MA is simply a description of an exceptionless regularity in nature, not an edict that nature must behave this way. It is also a contingent and not a necessary truth. So your reply connects with nothing that I wrote.

 

[pood]

Your brain does not process information. Your brain is not a computer.

 

[Jarhyn]

Your brain does not process information. Your brain is not a computer.

My brain does process information. My brain in addition to whatever else it does, is a computer.

Much of the information or processes arises from its own function.

When the process of that internal function generates an arbitrary list of instructions for which to execute, it is functioning much MORE like a computer (because that's what computers do, they run algorithms).

The arbitrary list of instructions, no matter how it is reified by my own neurology's concrete function, is a •••.

The •••, regardless of what I may imagine of it's °°°, has a real °°° value reified by the relationship between all that reality out there and the reified requirement.

 

[pood]

The brain as a computer is a metaphor. As the above linked article notes, we’ve been using metaphors for thousands of years for the brain, with the latest technology of each era being adopted as a metaphor for how the brain works.

I take no stand on whether a computer is, or could be, conscious. But the point of the above-linked article is that the brain does not really work like a computer at all. That said, I’m not sure how the issue of how the brain actually works really has bearing on free will. I‘m prepared to accept that a computer has a kind of free will and possibly even consciousness, that consciousness could be substrate independent, without endorsing the idea that the brain is a computer or resembles one in any relevant sense.

 

[Jarhyn]

The brain as a computer is a metaphor. As the above linked article notes, we’ve been using metaphors for thousands of years for the brain, with the latest technology of each era being adopted as a metaphor for how the brain works.

I take no stand on whether a computer is, or could be, conscious. But the point of the above-linked article is that the brain does not really work like a computer at all. That said, I’m not sure how the issue of how the brain actually works really has bearing on free will. I‘m prepared to accept that a computer has a kind of free will and possibly even consciousness, that consciousness could be substrate independent, without endorsing the idea that the brain is a computer or resembles one in any relevant sense.

My point is that "how the brain works" has no bearing on "what the brain clearly is capable of doing".

I don't give so much of a shit about the particulars of fulfillment right up to the moment I'm trying to make a computational system that can host the neural graph network of a brain.

The relevant sense is that "the brain MAY hold an arbitrary list of instructions, each validated on a requirement". That's all I need, really.

That the Algorithms, instructions etc are generated by a set of neurons with mutable connections in relation to their immediate signal pattern rather than transistors with fixed connections and a field memory matters not-at-all.

The fundamental proof that I can write a list of instructions on a piece of paper, followed by a requirement, and the fact that I can point to a reified mechanism that validates the requirement, and see it executed by someone else, is all I need to commit the full transform from "free will in a deterministic simulated universe" to "free will in a deterministic immediate universe".

Edit: in many ways it doesn't matter HOW, it merely matters WHETHER.

If I wish to infer B whether B is less than A, and I know that A-C = B and C = |D|*(0-1) where D != 0, I do not need to know the exact values of A, B, C, or D to know that. It is true in all universes that B is less than A, if those contingents are met. I'm pretty sure that is in fact definitional of what it means to be "less than".

Knowing how is like knowing how much less in the above. It's unimportant. What's important is that I have maintained "at least this much has been demonstrated: an arbitrary list, something that executes, something that checks execution"

Sitting down to think of the exact form in "set"...

Arbitrary list execution is within the set of "what Turing machines do"

Arbitrary list execution is within the set of "what neural graphs can do"

°°° and ••• are demonstrably, via Turing machine observation down to deterministic mechanics, not illusory: they are reified.

The transform is just useful for blasting away the red herring of "NeUrOnS!!!111" and then wrapping that modal logic around calculus of responsibility as a principle of mathematical application.

It's more the hammering the concepts of "ethics" entirely to mathematical principle that I'm about.

Freedom and Will factor heavily into that branch of game theory, and form the foundation of certain derivations of principle: that wills, if derived from fundamentally equal drives, are fundamentally equal.

I'm not going to get into doing the rest of the calculus that gets you to mutual compatible self actualization, but this is a big part of it.

That's what my stake here is: axiomizing ethics properly.

I have other stakes in neurology namely developing strong AI.

 

[fromderinside]

Your brain does not process information. Your brain is not a computer.

My brain does process information. My brain in addition to whatever else it does, is a computer.

Much of the information or processes arises from its own function.

When the process of that internal function generates an arbitrary list of instructions for which to execute, it is functioning much MORE like a computer (because that's what computers do, they run algorithms).

The arbitrary list of instructions, no matter how it is reified by my own neurology's concrete function, is a •••.

The •••, regardless of what I may imagine of it's °°°, has a real °°° value reified by the relationship between all that reality out there and the reified requirement.

Good. Thanks for taking the effort to inform a participant on the meaning of information. Just incase....  Information theory