Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

But below the threshold of your awareness lies the means and mechanisms of what you are experiencing.

Yeah, we know that. But that doesn't make any significant difference. In nearly all cases we are sufficiently aware of the key facts that are needed for us to plan our actions and make our decisions.

You are not aware that what you feel you are doing is decided before it's brought to awareness.

And it is decided by ... wait for it ... our own brain! And that's us! Perhaps an unconscious part of us, but still us. And the waiter will bring us the bill for the dinner we ordered, whether the origin of the choice was unconscious or conscious! Oh, and I'm pretty sure we were conscious when we told the waiter, "I will have the Chef Salad, please", because we will remember our order when it arrives.

Recall Gazzaniga's narrator function;

Of course. When the "interpreter" function has the facts, then it gives us the facts. But when the facts are missing, it will try to fill in the missing pieces as best it can.

Michael Gazzaniga
''... Yet even though our brain carries out all these functions in a modular system, we do not feel like a million little robots carrying out their disjointed activities. We feel like one, coherent self with intentions and reasons for what we feel are our unified actions.''

Yes. You see, we're still walking around as whole persons, interacting with other whole persons. Our brain constructs a coherent identity and makes decisions for the whole person, and explains our actions in ways that make sense to us and to others.

Michael Gazzaniga
''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. ...

And that's what we get when the brain is damaged. But that is not what we normally get when the brain is functioning in a healthy way. So, we should keep this important distinction in mind as we explore neuroscience.

 

[fromderinside]

But below the threshold of your awareness lies the means and mechanisms of what you are experiencing.

Yeah, we know that. But that doesn't make any significant difference. In nearly all cases we are sufficiently aware of the key facts that are needed for us to plan our actions and make our decisions.

Well we'd better be aware of information key that are are needed used by us to plan our actions and make our decisions act.

Fixed it.

 

[Jarhyn]

But below the threshold of your awareness lies the means and mechanisms of what you are experiencing.

Yeah, we know that. But that doesn't make any significant difference. In nearly all cases we are sufficiently aware of the key facts that are needed for us to plan our actions and make our decisions.

Well we'd better be aware of information key that are are needed used by us to plan our actions and make our decisions act.

Fixed it.

No, you just hid a bunch of expanded definitions because you don't like their implications.

Acting incorporates planning actions and making decisions, at least for some humans. If it does not for you, that is not my problem or Marvin's but rather yours.

 

[fromderinside]

zzzzzzz

Oh, you answered.

Pretty much repeated your previous overstatement I see.

Yawn.

 

[Jarhyn]

zzzzzzz

Oh, you answered.

Pretty much repeated your previous overstatement I see.

Yawn.

You can pretend all you like, but you can't escape reality by trying to hide the will at play.

Some are like a little kids trying to hide their "irresponsibility" in a closet hoping nobody will find it.

 

[DBT]

You could have politely asked ''what does the article mean by the brain is a 'computer'' and it would have been explained...but not accepted, I suspect. Not accepted because it goes against the idea of free will.

Why would I ask you explain something you evidently know nothing about?

Perhaps you should rethink your beliefs. You ignore anything and everything that is explained and provided. You seize on a word and run with it regardless of what was meant or what was subsequently explained and supported.

It is you who plays a game of bluff and bluster to cover your own inaduate understanding of the subject matter.

Now you dismiss the articles as playig semantic games. They are not playing semantic games. They are telling you that the brain as a computer is a metaphor, and a failed one at that. They are telling you why the brain is not a computer and does not parallel process. It’s all spelled out.

Finally, you once again inaccurately contend that I dismiss the brain as being a computer because if it were a computer, free will would be disconfirmed. This is nonsense. I have already said, at least twice, that whether the brain is a computer or not makes no difference to compatibilist free will. I have already told you that the reason I bring up the computer issue at all is because of your well-known tendency to state as settled fact ideas that are not settled at all, but in dispute. I have said all this and you ignore or distort it. How is this nothing more than disingenuousness, to put it politely, on your part?

Not quite. To be brief and to the point: as the brain is a physical system that functions according to its architecture and inputs, where will plays no role in determining actions or outcomes, what is deliberated, thought or done (will acting as a prompt or drive to act), is fixed by antecedents in relation to the state of the system, there is no claim to be made for free will, compatibilism merely slaps a label on a carefully selected set of conditions and declares it done.

A label that proves nothing.


''I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems! - Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuro-ethicist.

 

[Jarhyn]

You ignore anything and everything that is explained and providedbaldly asserted, and fallacious at that

FTFY

will plays no role in determining actions or outcomes

See, more bald assertions.

To be brief and to the point: as the brain is a physical system that functions according to its architecture and inputs, where will plays no role in determining actions or outcomes,

More assertion fallacies. Will he back it up with more than mere assertion?

fixed by antecedents in relation to the state of the system, there is no claim to be made for free will

Well, there's a reassertion of the false dichotomy, but thats both an assertion fallacy and a false dichotomy, particularly "assertion OF false dichotomy".

It is you who plays a game of bluff and bluster to cover your own inaduate understanding of the subject matter

Hey @Keith&Co. I'm in need of a FSTDT list member. I have a really shiny mirror that needs nominating.

I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept

An argument from emotion...

[Inside an argument from authority] computers are rational physical systems

HA! Computers are far from rational systems.

I speak this as someone who has built an entire computer.

Classical Computers irrationally do whatever you tell them, process math in whatever way they were designed, will attempt any illegal execution, will run whatever you throw at it.

Classical Computers are, in fact, the inverse of a rational system, a system bound so tightly bound to their own binary thresholds of transistive activation that they are incapable of any kind of logic on their own.

At best they are good at performing modal logics, when asked very precisely to do it in a very particular way.

In this way you could call a computer "infinitely impulsive", but most certainly not "rational".

 

[DBT]

The left-hemisphere interpreter is not only a master of belief creation, but it will stick to its belief system no matter what.

This explains many things about you, then. My belief system incorporates doubt, and yours clearly does not. My whole process here has been one of refinement of my understandings of this "responsibility math", mostly by reading and doubting the sufficiency of certain definitions and discussions to fully grasp the underlying framework of arbitrary sequence executions.

This goes back to an issue I notice insofar as humans seem to have two ways of operating in the world and it's really hard to teach someone to use a method that they don't seem well practiced in:

The first is goal-orientation.

In goal orientation someone explicitly looks at what their needs are, and then pass those needs off to a secondary system: what need does it "feel like" I must most focus on right now?additionally, one can add "why?" And "does that actually make sense"?

From there, one gets to ask "how?" And then more "does that make sense?"

Eventually this results in a list of actions and requirements. The proof of that is that I can express this via a piece of paper. Someone else can pick it up and execute on it all the same, once they are done parsing it, compiling it into signals that can be handled mathematically, and executing on those patterns of signals.

Essentially, humans are capable of JIT execution on internally generated scripts derived from goals.

But that's only one of the models.

There's another model of behavior in play in the human condition: The Chinese Room model.

The idea of The Chinese Room is that someone is standing in a room. There are no windows, just a door through which food and water and other comforts are passed, and waste removed, and a camera. And a book, in a closet with a back door that only opens when the front door is locked through which the book is regularly exchanged.

The operation of the room is thus: the distress of the person in the room is noticed. A piece of paper is fed in through the slot in the door. The person finds the page where the markings on the piece of paper are seen, then they utter the PinYin printed next to the markings, which does not correspond to the markings given.

Then something happens and the person gets what they want.

This operation amounts to treating every operation in the universe as a lookup table of past observations of "that worked", and "that didn't".

It completely overlooks the power of "I've never done that nor seen it nor thought about it but (observed structure) Implies (principle of operation) so (this will work)".

Then, one of the beliefs that was planted early in my belief structure was the belief that I ought to doubt my belief structure.

This is a rather rare ability, and rarely leveraged against a belief even so. It might be rather hard to study the dislodging of beliefs, in that regard so I don't think much can be said of the study of it. It is examining something that a vanishing small number of minds have only a handful of opportunities to every operate meaningfully on.

There is even a name for such moments: "Existential Crisis".

Most people fight it, and double down. Some people let their tightly held beliefs open up in that moment and reorient and even shove certain patterns out entirely.

You still fail to take the nature of determinism into account, how the brain selects options/makes decisions.....which is not through the means of free will.

Brain Agency:
''A new study expands on that work and says that the brain rewrites history when it makes its choices, changing our memories so that we believe we wanted to do something before it happened.

In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, of Yale University, the test subjects were shown five white circles on a computer screen. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.

The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.

Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.

The scientists suggest that the findings show that the test subjects’ minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle — even if they hadn’t actually had time to do so.

The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing.

But that same feeling can go awry, the scientists wrote in the Scientific American magazine. It may be important for people to feel they are control of their lives, for instance, but distortions in that same process might make people feel that they have control over external processes like the weather.''

 

[Jarhyn]

You still fail to take the nature of determinism into account, how the brain selects options/makes decisions.....which is not through the means of free will.

Your understanding is so badly assembled around this concept, and perhaps you have a vested interest in not seeing it.

The brain has a ••• at time *. We will call this •••(*). This •••(*) is:
Of •••(A), •••(B), •••(C), evaluate on (parameters); return a list of ••• such that all ••• are provisionally, contingently °°°. Repeat until this returns the same list twice. On this list, rank them by provisional °°° score. Eliminate any ••• containing unacceptable collateral costs. Pop the top off that list. Store the secondary ••• for whenever. Return the popped •••.

Of course, the •••(*) is not exactly the thing executing on •••(*). But this •••(*) is clearly °°°, on account of nobody interrupting it or superceding it in some way. Thus when •••(A) is selected, and replaces •••(*), •••(A) is The product of a °°° •••(*).

This is a deterministic list of operations. None of them can execute in any other way or return any other value than •••(A). Yet •••(A) is what Marvin would call "a free will", and what I call "a freely held will".

If •••(A) is to fight some folks in the grand hall with a battle axe, then we say "the dwarf's ••• to murder folks in the chow hall must not be allowed to be °°°" and then we put together a new •••: stop the dwarf from murdering folks.

 

[DBT]

But below the threshold of your awareness lies the means and mechanisms of what you are experiencing.

Yeah, we know that. But that doesn't make any significant difference. In nearly all cases we are sufficiently aware of the key facts that are needed for us to plan our actions and make our decisions.

Of course it makes a difference. If action is determined before awareness, you are merely playing out what was fixed/decided prior to awareness.

You are not aware that what you feel you are doing is decided before it's brought to awareness.

And it is decided by ... wait for it ... our own brain! And that's us! Perhaps an unconscious part of us, but still us. And the waiter will bring us the bill for the dinner we ordered, whether the origin of the choice was unconscious or conscious! Oh, and I'm pretty sure we were conscious when we told the waiter, "I will have the Chef Salad, please", because we will remember our order when it arrives.

Our brain is doing it, therefore free will? Nope, doesn't work.

Recall Gazzaniga's narrator function;

Of course. When the "interpreter" function has the facts, then it gives us the facts. But when the facts are missing, it will try to fill in the missing pieces as best it can.

There is no 'we' to whom the interpreter gives the facts. The way you put it suggests the presence of a separate or autonomous entity, a we, a self, to whom the brain or the interpreter reports to.

Michael Gazzaniga
''... Yet even though our brain carries out all these functions in a modular system, we do not feel like a million little robots carrying out their disjointed activities. We feel like one, coherent self with intentions and reasons for what we feel are our unified actions.''

Yes. You see, we're still walking around as whole persons, interacting with other whole persons. Our brain constructs a coherent identity and makes decisions for the whole person, and explains our actions in ways that make sense to us and to others.

The brain is a modular system, regions cooperating and competing: eat the chocolate, it tastes good/don't eat the chocolate, it's fattening, it spikes blood sugar, etc, etc.

Different elements producing inputs where only one outcome is realized, but not willed.

''We are doing it, therefore free will'' does not represent the means and nature of cognition.

Michael Gazzaniga
''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. ...

And that's what we get when the brain is damaged. But that is not what we normally get when the brain is functioning in a healthy way. So, we should keep this important distinction in mind as we explore neuroscience.

It is the state and condition of a brain that determines behavioral output regardless of the presence or absence of damage.

Brain damage just exposes the illusion of control, be it conscious or unconscious....where free will has no role or presence.
Quote;
''People suffering from Alzheimer's disease are not only losing their memory, but they are also losing their personality. In order to understand the relationship between personality and memory, it is important to define personality and memory. Personality, as defined by some neurobiologists and psychologists, is a collection of behaviors, emotions, and thoughts that are not controlled by the I-function. Memory, on the other hand, is controlled and regulated by the I-function of the neocortex. It is a collection of short stories that the I-function makes-up in order to account for the events and people. Memory is also defined as the ability to retain information, and it is influenced by three important stages. The first stage is encoding and processing the information, the second stage is the storing of the memory, and the third stage is memory retrieval. There are also the different types of memories like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. The sensory memory relates to the initial moment when an event or an object is first detected. Short-term memories are characterized by slow, transient alterations in communication between neurons and long-term memories (1). Long-term memories are marked by permanent changes to the neural structure''

 

[pood]

Perhaps you should rethink your beliefs. You ignore anything and everything that is explained and provided. You seize on a word and run with it regardless of what was meant or what was subsequently explained and supported.

It is you who plays a game of bluff and bluster to cover your own inaduate understanding of the subject matter.

Oh, you big tease! You say the same thing to all the guys and gals!

Perhaps you should hold up a mirror and say the same thing.

 

[pood]

Not quite. To be brief and to the point: <snip>

More later about the Farah quote. For now, I just note that, in responding to my latest post, you ignored my point — noted yet again! — that I never claimed that in order for free will to hold, it must be the case that the brain is not a computer. You have not retracted the charge, even though I have specifically repudiated it at least twice. I SAID that IF the brain is a computer, it STILL does not defeat compatiblism. Your failure to gracefully reteract your stawman caricature of my position is noted.

 

[pood]

Here is the whole e-mail conversation between the the author and Martha Farah, whom DBT quoted above:

Me:__ The big question is how much people should feel comfortable extrapolating these results to other, more seemingly complex decisions about which we feel a deep personal connection -- do I rent an apartment, get involved in a relationship, leave my job in search of another, and so on.
__
Martha Farah:__ The authors have taken an important first step toward understanding how we make decisions, and toward revealing the apparently prolonged cascade of unconscious processes that precede the conscious decisions we make with what seems like "free will." But of course there is always a trade-off in science between making a process scientifically tractable and making it realistic. Remember, Galileo rolled balls down inclines and theorized about infinite frictionless planes; he didn't set about trying to understand the fluttering, zig-zagging motion of a falling leaf! The authors started with a very simple decision-making task, and their results now form the basis for some good working hypotheses to be tested with more complex decisions.

__
Me:__ How do these results square with our notion of free will?
Do they obviate free will, which in that light is an illusion; or might there still be a balance between free will and unconscious decisions;
or is free will still paramount, but operating at some other level?

__
MF:__ Let me start with a very general observation. Neuroscience is changing the way we think about ourselves. One of the hardest changes for people to assimilate is the idea that our intentional, voluntary behavior is the product of a physical system, the brain. If physical processes in the brain cause our actions, then how can there be free will? How can we be held responsible for our behavior? Can't we just all plead "my brain made me do it"?

The Soon et al paper jumps right into the middle of these issues. It shows us how limited, even misleading, our introspections are. According to the authors, many seconds before we are aware that we have made a decision, we have -- or at least, our brain has! All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality, which is so intuitive, with the idea that mental processes are brain processes. But these results on the neural processes underlying free decisions rub our noses in it! One can assimilate findings about color vision or motor control being brain functions a lot more easily than findings about consciously experienced
"free will" being a brain function, and hence physically determined and not free at all!

I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!
__
Me:__ As I'm sure you often hear, this makes my head spin a bit. One follow-up: re: the replacement of free will with the concept of rationality, selecting actions based on practical reasoning -- I can see how rationality and the mind as physical system don't conflict, but doesn't the very concept of selection (and, arguably, reasoning) imply an agency that is rendered illusory by findings like these?
__
MF:__ Depends what you mean by agency... If you think of a computer selecting certain actions based on a combination of inputs and stored information about goals etc, then there is a (not too head-spinny)
sense in which the computer is the agent selecting the actions. (Of course, what makes the computer that kind of agent that it is, making the selections that it does, is its whole history -- how it was designed, what kind of goals and knowledge have been programmed in, etc. -- But it is the computer, in its current state, that is selecting and so it seems reasonable to say it is the locus of the rational decision.)

Going back to the Nature Neuroscience findings, the parts of the brain whose activity are correlated with the decision and precede the person's conscious awareness of having decided -- as well as potentially other parts -- are the analogs of the computer described above... And this happens well before the conscious experience of "free will" making the decision.

One advantage of focusing on rationality rather than free will is that it enables us to retain the concept of moral and legal responsibility.
If someone is rational and is not under coercion (eg someone holds a gun to your head and says you'll be shot if you don't do X) then it is reasonable to hold him or her responsible...

Me: Still struggling a bit. But not because of any deficiencies or illogic in your own excellent explanation -- I suspect my response to all this is skewed by some instinctive (subconscious -- ha) need to cling to the idea of free will. Perhaps because my sense of free will is tied in some inexplicable way to my sense of self and ...
authenticity? That's not the right word. Maybe I should come right out and say (non-religious) soul, of which free will is a manifestation.

Somehow the computer doesn't seem satisfactory, in the sense that a rational program would make the same decision again and again again.
Somehow that doesn't seem alive. I'm always unsettled by computational analogies to the soul, in the sense that the appearance of self-awareness is not the same thing as self-awareness.

That the Turing test was devised by someone for whom disguising or transcending the body was so (sadly) necessary, and Norbert Wiener himself such a person of mind rather than body, adds to my unsettlement. But that's my own superstition, rather than a real critique.

Fascinating! Let’s upack this! Because it seems to me that Farah is a compatibilist but doesn’t know it, maybe because she sucks at philosophy no matter what her scientific credentials are? It wouldn’t be the first time that a scientist sucked at philosophy. Hell, a lot of scientists, like Steven Hawking (“philosophy is dead,” he wrote in the first page of a book that was devotred entirely to philosophy, O irony) think that philosophy is a waste of time. They’re wrong. But more later.

 

[Jarhyn]

Of course it makes a difference. If action is determined before awareness, you are merely playing out what was fixed/decided prior to awareness.

You're placing undue burden on "awareness". You don't even need to be aware of your decisions for others to clearly see that "you: the sum total of process happening amid and of your flesh" are the originator of them in the moment.

"Awareness" is feedback and review, and that's not germane to who actually made the decision. The dwarf didn't need to have a narrator telling him what his will was for him to have it and for that will to be free.

Our brain is doing it, therefore free will? Nope, doesn't work

Argument from incredulity/assertion.

Different elements producing inputs where only one outcome is realized, but not willed

Argument from assertion.

Not quite. To be brief and to the point: <snip>

More later about the Farah quote. For now, I just note that, in responding to my latest post, you ignored my point — noted yet again! — that I never claimed that in order for free will to hold, it must be the case that the brain is not a computer. You have not retracted the charge, even though I have specifically repudiated it at least twice. I SAID that IF the brain is a computer, it STILL does not defeat compatiblism. Your failure to gracefully reteract your stawman caricature of my position is noted.

Exactly. Even if the brain IS like a computer -- particularly if is like a computer, in fact -- then my use of a computational engine demonstrably capable of •••'s that are themselves demonstrably capable of being °°° blasts the argument right out of the water.

Of course, I also defend my position that AS the brain is capable of executing an arbitrary series of parsed instructions, and because a computer is a system which executed arbitrary series of parsed instructions by definition, then by definition of what a computer is, the brain is "like" it, insofar as the brain is it, and also something else much more interesting.

 

[pood]

Let’s unpack the interview with Farah:

Me:__ The big question is how much people should feel comfortable extrapolating these results to other, more seemingly complex decisions about which we feel a deep personal connection -- do I rent an apartment, get involved in a relationship, leave my job in search of another, and so on.

Martha Farah:__ The authors have taken an important first step toward understanding how we make decisions, and toward revealing the apparently prolonged cascade of unconscious processes that precede the conscious decisions we make with what seems like "free will."

OK. Seems like “free will”? In scare quotes, no less. But let that pass for now.

But of course there is always a trade-off in science between making a process scientifically tractable and making it realistic. Remember, Galileo rolled balls down inclines and theorized about infinite frictionless planes; he didn't set about trying to understand the fluttering, zig-zagging motion of a falling leaf!

Good point!

The authors started with a very simple decision-making task, and their results now form the basis for some good working hypotheses to be tested with more complex decisions.

Okie-doke.

Me:__ How do these results square with our notion of free will?


Do they obviate free will, which in that light is an illusion; or might there still be a balance between free will and unconscious decisions; or is free will still paramount, but operating at some other level?

MF:__ Let me start with a very general observation. Neuroscience is changing the way we think about ourselves. One of the hardest changes for people to assimilate is the idea that our intentional, voluntary behavior is the product of a physical system, the brain.

This is hard for people to assimilate? It’s not hard for me or Marvin or Jarhyn to assimilate. What else ya got, Farah?

If physical processes in the brain cause our actions, then how can there be free will?

By physical processes in our brain causing our decisions? How about that? Because, after all, since we ARE our brains, the above question logically reduces to, “If we cause our actions, than how can there be free will?” I guess Farah failed to notice this reductio, because had she done so, the answer to her question would be self-evident.

How can we be held responsible for our behavior? Can't we just all plead "my brain made me do it"?

Can’t we just all plead, “I made me do it?” Why, yes, yes we can!

The Soon et al paper jumps right into the middle of these issues. It shows us how limited, even misleading, our introspections are. According to the authors, many seconds before we are aware that we have made a decision, we have -- or at least, our brain has!

“Many seconds before we are aware that we have made a decision, we have — or at least, we have!” Very good. We have made a decision!

All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality, which is so intuitive, …

Full stop! Farah makes the same mistake that DBT does, and it seems hard determinists in general do. They seem to believe that in order for TRUE free will to obtain, whatever that is, then it must be the case that there is a little homunculus in our brains that is directing all our activities down to the neuronal or atomic level. Nonsense! NO compatibilist says this.

… with the idea that mental processes are brain processes.

Why, yes they are!

But these results on the neural processes underlying free decisions rub our noses in it!

Rub our noses in what? No conpatibilist thinks that dualism is a necessary condition of free will. So there is nothing to rub our noses in.

One can assimilate findings about color vision or motor control being brain functions a lot more easily than findings about consciously experienced "free will" being a brain function, and hence physically determined and not free at all!

Free will IS a brain function and does nothing to undercut compatibilism. It AGREES with compatibilism!

It seems to me that Farah is attacking, not compatibilism, but libertarianism or dualism. But not compatibilism. I wonder how she cannot know this?

I don't think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will!

Exactly! The opposite of determinism is INdeterminism and not free will! Welcome to compatiblism, Farah!

Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems!

And there is no conflict between the concepts of rationality or practical reasoning and compatibilism. Farah is not attacking compatibilism, whether she understands this or not.

Me:__ As I'm sure you often hear, this makes my head spin a bit. One follow-up: re: the replacement of free will with the concept of rationality, selecting actions based on practical reasoning -- I can see how rationality and the mind as physical system don't conflict, but doesn't the very concept of selection (and, arguably, reasoning) imply an agency that is rendered illusory by findings like these?

Yes, if you are arguing “agency” as a homunculus, then that’s an illusion. But the compatibilist agrees that it is an illusion!

__

MF:__ Depends what you mean by agency... If you think of a computer selecting certain actions based on a combination of inputs and stored information about goals etc, then there is a (not too head-spinny) sense in which the computer is the agent selecting the actions.

Wonderful! We agree! Which is why, of course, I stated that whether the brain is a computer or not has no bearing on compatibilist free will, despite DBT’s repeated strawmanning of my position.

Of course, what makes the computer that kind of agent that it is, making the selections that it does, is its whole history -- how it was designed, what kind of goals and knowledge have been programmed in, etc. -- But it is the computer, in its current state, that is selecting and so it seems reasonable to say it is the locus of the rational decision.)

Wonderful! I agree!

Going back to the Nature Neuroscience findings, the parts of the brain whose activity are correlated with the decision and precede the person's conscious awareness of having decided -- as well as potentially other parts -- are the analogs of the computer described above...

Yes! Analogs! The brain is not literally a computer? Reading this, DBT?

And this happens well before the conscious experience of "free will" making the decision.

And?

One advantage of focusing on rationality rather than free will is that it enables us to retain the concept of moral and legal responsibility.

If someone is rational and is not under coercion (eg someone holds a gun to your head and says you'll be shot if you don't do X) then it is reasonable to hold him or her responsible...

HA HA HA HA, ya don’t say? Welcome to compatiblist free will, and to positions of me, Marvin, Jarhyn, etc. …

Notice, though, that “rationality” and “free will” are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are one and the same. If I weren’t rational I would have a hard time, um, rationally choosing!

Me: Still struggling a bit. But not because of any deficiencies or illogic in your own excellent explanation -- I suspect my response to all this is skewed by some instinctive (subconscious -- ha) need to cling to the idea of free will.

Cling right away. Farah has endorsed compatiblism without even knowing it. Libertarianism or dualism, not so much. But since compatibists are neither libertarians nor dualists, Farah’s scare quotes around “free will” don’t scare us at all.

 

[pood]

I want to emphasize that here …

One advantage of focusing on rationality rather than free will is that it enables us to retain the concept of moral and legal responsibility.

If someone is rational and is not under coercion (eg someone holds a gun to your head and says you'll be shot if you don't do X) then it is reasonable to hold him or her responsible...

… Farah has fully endorsed the operational definition of free will that Marvin has elucidated lo these many times! If she wants to call it “rationality” rather than “free will,” fine. They are the same thing, of course, but now we are just down to a terminological dispute. Farah is clearing arguing for compatibliism whether she understands this or not.

 

[Jarhyn]

Free will IS a brain function and does nothing to undercut compatibilism

Well, execution of will is a brain function, calculation of provisional will freedom is a brain function, assembly of will segments based on provisional freedom scoring is a brain function, and cessation of provisionally unfree wills is a brain function, and the will itself is a function executed by the brain...

But I don't think that the will itself properly classifies as a "brain function". Its a function executed by, not executed of. One implies structure.

This might be where he tries to "get you" but I think I might just choose to interpret as if this is what you meant?

Also, Nowhere does the actual freedom of the will come from the brain.

Rather It comes from reality letting it be so, a very useful set of circumstances indeed, but circumstantial nonetheless. It seems it's just the brain's duty, perhaps to itself, to not make bad decisions in the first place.

To restate the whole thing: will is a function executed by the brain, as is calculation of freedom, and wills executed by the brain may be executed freely, and visibly so. These being functions done by, and of brains does nothing to undercut Compatibilism.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

In nearly all cases we are sufficiently aware of the key facts that are needed for us to plan our actions and make our decisions.

If action is determined before awareness, you are merely playing out what was fixed/decided prior to awareness.

And, if it was fixed/decided by my own brain prior to awareness, then it is still fixed/decided by that which is me.

Our brain is doing it, therefore free will? Nope, doesn't work.

That's odd. It works for me. Free will is when a person decides for themselves what they will do, while free of coercion and undue influence. Nothing more. Nothing less. There is no requirement that free will be free from the workings of our own brain, whether that work is performed consciously or unconsciously.

There is no 'we' to whom the interpreter gives the facts. The way you put it suggests the presence of a separate or autonomous entity, a we, a self, to whom the brain or the interpreter reports to.

The 'we' is the brain itself. Keep in mind that it is a collection of specialized functional modules working together for the benefit of the whole person. One of those functions may be calculating the decision. Another of those functions is the interpreter that creates a description of the events that emerged into conscious awareness along the way.

The brain is a modular system, regions cooperating and competing: eat the chocolate, it tastes good/don't eat the chocolate, it's fattening, it spikes blood sugar, etc, etc.

Yes! Exactly.

Different elements producing inputs where only one outcome is realized, but not willed.

Will/volition/intention is the output of deciding what we will do. That output then becomes the input that motivates and directs our thoughts and actions as we carry out that intention.

''We are doing it, therefore free will'' does not represent the means and nature of cognition.

No no. "We are doing it, therefore it is us doing it." Whether we are doing it of our own free will is a separate question. Are we doing it while free of coercion and undue influence? If so, then free will, if not, then not free will.

It is the state and condition of a brain that determines behavioral output regardless of the presence or absence of damage.

Yes, but it makes a difference whether the brain is functioning normally, or functioning abnormally because of significantly brain damage. You get this right? If the damage prevents the person from forming a rational choice, then it unduly influences the person's decision making.

Brain damage just exposes the illusion of control, be it conscious or unconscious....where free will has no role or presence.
Quote;
''People suffering from Alzheimer's disease are not only losing their memory, but they are also losing their personality. In order to understand the relationship between personality and memory, it is important to define personality and memory. Personality, as defined by some neurobiologists and psychologists, is a collection of behaviors, emotions, and thoughts that are not controlled by the I-function. Memory, on the other hand, is controlled and regulated by the I-function of the neocortex. It is a collection of short stories that the I-function makes-up in order to account for the events and people. Memory is also defined as the ability to retain information, and it is influenced by three important stages. The first stage is encoding and processing the information, the second stage is the storing of the memory, and the third stage is memory retrieval. There are also the different types of memories like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. The sensory memory relates to the initial moment when an event or an object is first detected. Short-term memories are characterized by slow, transient alterations in communication between neurons and long-term memories (1). Long-term memories are marked by permanent changes to the neural structure''

Ah! Another name for the interpreter, the "I-function" of the neocortex. But I have to object to these neuroscientists portraying the story constructed by the brain as being "made up" or "confabulated". If the brain has sufficient information to accurately describe (even if only symbolically and at the macro-level) the sequences of conscious events, then the "story" will be a "true" story. If not, then, like they say, "Garbage In, Garbage Out". And if that were the normal case, then our species would not have survived this long. So, it is reasonable to assume that it is not the normal case. Rather, the information given us by the interpreter/I-function is accurate enough to enable us to deal with the real world in a real way. (Well, at least until the brain is damaged by injury, disease, or simply age).

 

[The AntiChris]

They are the same thing, of course, but now we are just down to a terminological dispute.

I think it always has been (what DBT dismisses as 'semantics').

 

[fromderinside]

zzzzzzz

Oh, you answered.

Pretty much repeated your previous overstatement I see.

Yawn.

You can pretend all you like, but you can't escape reality by trying to hide the will at play.

Some are like a little kids trying to hide their "irresponsibility" in a closet hoping nobody will find it.

People do as they believe they should according to what they perceive, remember and are designed to do.

Free will at play? Naw.

Reality? Naw.

Plan? React IAW programming maybe. On second thought. Naw.

Reality? Persons don't exist in reality.

Persons exist in the past responding to their perceptions of the past as well as their senses and memories can get them.