Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Marvin Edwards]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

 

[fromderinside]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

You put the cart before the horse.

What you think we decide as conscious thought is subvocal text about what our processes arrived to as a way forward after we've processed what we've received. Our conscious did not decide anything. That which we subvocalize is also driven by past 'decisions' and calculations from memory so we show as consistent face to others. The combined processing merely rose to parroted vocalizations of more or less automatic switching of routines conditioned within our working brain. aided by a squirt and twitch or two triggered by even earlier reactive process actions.

You can't even find legs for your position on which it can stand.

My view is that consciousness, the one articulating, arose after language became possible during our development of capabilities for toolmaking and even then it had to wait for the rise of visualizing processes.

I say this because your example of David as being significant re capabilities depended on David being able to see the possibility that defeating one would do the job of winning the day. Merely having a slingshot would accomplish nothing otherwise. All of that is necessary for that event to take place and all of that can be explained by capabilities evolving to conditions. No wiling needed. Indeed the apparent existence of such is not possible without the antecedent capabilities already inherent in the individual.

 

[DBT]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

Our ''our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are'' are equally determined by determinants beyond our control or ability to alter through an act of will.

Will itself is determined. We have the ability to process information and respond to our inputs, but that is determined by genetic makeup, neural architecture and the environment acting upon us, we have will, the drive to act and respond, but will is a reflection of the elements that determine its expression.

We have volition, but volition is not free will.

We have Will, but Will is not Free Will.

''Volition - the cognitive process by which an organism decides on and commits to a particular course of action.''

Will - used to express capability or sufficiency

3: the act, process, or experience of willing : VOLITION
4a: mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring, or intending

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

You put the cart before the horse.

What you think we decide as conscious thought is subvocal text about what our processes arrived to as a way forward after we've processed what we've received. Our conscious did not decide anything. That which we subvocalize is also driven by past 'decisions' and calculations from memory so we show as consistent face to others. The combined processing merely rose to parroted vocalizations of more or less automatic switching of routines conditioned within our working brain. aided by a squirt and twitch or two triggered by even earlier reactive process actions.

You can't even find legs for your position on which it can stand.

My view is that consciousness, the one articulating, arose after language became possible during our development of capabilities for toolmaking and even then it had to wait for the rise of visualizing processes.

I say this because your example of David as being significant re capabilities depended on David being able to see the possibility that defeating one would do the job of winning the day. Merely having a slingshot would accomplish nothing otherwise. All of that is necessary for that event to take place and all of that can be explained by capabilities evolving to conditions. No wiling needed. Indeed the apparent existence of such is not possible without the antecedent capabilities already inherent in the individual.

The notion that we're all sleepwalking through our decision-making is a bit far-fetched. Consider the person making a significant decision, like buying a car or deciding where to vacation, who uses pencil and paper to list the pros and cons of their different options. Or consider a group of people, like a Parent-Teacher Association or a government legislature, who work together to formally discuss alternatives and vote to make a decision. Or visit Amazon's Books section and see the many books to help people make better decisions.

Even in minimalist experiments, like those of Benjamin Libet, the subject must be awake in order to volunteer to participate, and must be awake to view the equipment they must use, and must be awake to hear the instructions to know what they are expected to do. The subject's participation in the experiment is motivated by their initial willingness to do so. A choice they are expected to make free of coercion and undue influence (see "voluntary" in your favorite dictionary).

Even if all our decisions were made unconsciously, they would still be choosing operations. The customers in the restaurant would still browse the menu, consider their options, and output a single choice in the form of an "I will", such as "I will have the Chef Salad, please". And, the waiter would take their order, bring them their meal, and later bring them the bill, holding them responsible for their deliberate act. No one forced the customer to come in, sit down, and order the salad.

Now, suppose someone did. Not a guy with a gun, but simply the child's mother. The child sees the deserts on the menu and insists upon a fudge sundae for lunch. The mother vetoes this and orders him the Chef Salad instead. The child eats the salad, but it was not a choice of his own free will. It was his mother's choice. And the waiter will bring the bill to the mother, not the child.

Oh, and David was willing to fight Goliath. Had he not been willing to do so, then someone else would have to, or the battle would be lost.

So, this "No wiling needed." mantra does not hold water.

 

[fromderinside]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

You put the cart before the horse.

What you think we decide as conscious thought is subvocal text about what our processes arrived to as a way forward after we've processed what we've received. Our conscious did not decide anything. That which we subvocalize is also driven by past 'decisions' and calculations from memory so we show as consistent face to others. The combined processing merely rose to parroted vocalizations of more or less automatic switching of routines conditioned within our working brain. aided by a squirt and twitch or two triggered by even earlier reactive process actions.

You can't even find legs for your position on which it can stand.

My view is that consciousness, the one articulating, arose after language became possible during our development of capabilities for toolmaking and even then it had to wait for the rise of visualizing processes.

I say this because your example of David as being significant re capabilities depended on David being able to see the possibility that defeating one would do the job of winning the day. Merely having a slingshot would accomplish nothing otherwise. All of that is necessary for that event to take place and all of that can be explained by capabilities evolving to conditions. No wiling needed. Indeed the apparent existence of such is not possible without the antecedent capabilities already inherent in the individual.

The notion that we're all sleepwalking through our decision-making is a bit far-fetched. Consider the person making a significant decision, like buying a car or deciding where to vacation, who uses pencil and paper to list the pros and cons of their different options. Or consider a group of people, like a Parent-Teacher Association or a government legislature, who work together to formally discuss alternatives and vote to make a decision. Or visit Amazon's Books section and see the many books to help people make better decisions.

Even in minimalist experiments, like those of Benjamin Libet, the subject must be awake in order to volunteer to participate, and must be awake to view the equipment they must use, and must be awake to hear the instructions to know what they are expected to do. The subject's participation in the experiment is motivated by their initial willingness to do so. A choice they are expected to make free of coercion and undue influence (see "voluntary" in your favorite dictionary).

Even if all our decisions were made unconsciously, they would still be choosing operations. The customers in the restaurant would still browse the menu, consider their options, and output a single choice in the form of an "I will", such as "I will have the Chef Salad, please". And, the waiter would take their order, bring them their meal, and later bring them the bill, holding them responsible for their deliberate act. No one forced the customer to come in, sit down, and order the salad.

Now, suppose someone did. Not a guy with a gun, but simply the child's mother. The child sees the deserts on the menu and insists upon a fudge sundae for lunch. The mother vetoes this and orders him the Chef Salad instead. The child eats the salad, but it was not a choice of his own free will. It was his mother's choice. And the waiter will bring the bill to the mother, not the child.

Oh, and David was willing to fight Goliath. Had he not been willing to do so, then someone else would have to, or the battle would be lost.

So, this "No wiling needed." mantra does not hold water.

Awake. Now there's a neat perversion. Transect the brain at the pons and, wallah, a sleeping being no matter what. Goes back to 1948, that little nugget. Remove communication from systems at a given level and the brain, source of mind, is a wasteland.

Significance of conscious decision making is based on the conscious as fundamental part of being. All you write is dressing based on some romantic notion manipulating language is where will resides, constitutes, willed behavior.

My entire presentation demonstrates other than conscious is essential, that conscious is an artifact of response. No way for decisions to originates there. I'm not a fan of behaviorism but they do demonstrate any mammal can manage interacting with a manipulandum to get nourishment. Animals are conditioned to respond to change or perform. What behavior follows is consequent to doing directed, conditioned, things to get reinforcement. Where is anything free or willed in that? Producing sub-vocalizations as being evidence of where thought originates is just mush. Going in to any behavior one finds it driven not originating.

Or, it you prefer, those things upon which you suggest will exercises are evolved, determined by modifications in pervious instructions, not originating from consciousness. Those things through which response flows is generated from sensed and experienced external events, adaptations to the world retained consequent of fitness. Not a whole lot of free anything there.

As for the dangling David that he 'volunteered'? Hogwash. Machina est. David is written following a societally driven program. Remember. David is an example why man should follow the 'teachings' of some imaginary faerie.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

Our ''our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are'' are equally determined by determinants beyond our control or ability to alter through an act of will.

A person need not be the cause of themselves in order to be the cause of other events. This notion that a "real" cause must not have any prior causes is absurd, because there are no causes that can pass that test. Every prior cause of me would fail that test, because it also has prior causes, and they too have prior causes, ad infinitum. So, unless you wish to assert that there are no "real" causes to be found anywhere, it is best to drop that requirement.

Will itself is determined.

YES! A person's deliberate will is causally determined by the choosing operation. The prior cause of any deliberate act is the act of deliberation that precedes it.

We have the ability to process information and respond to our inputs, but that is determined by genetic makeup, neural architecture ...

That's all us. The ability to process information is us. Our genetic makeup is us. Our neural architecture and our brain is us. These are not external determinants. They are us in the act of determining what we will do.

... and the environment acting upon us, ...

And that's not us, but rather an external influence, such as the issue we've encountered that requires us to make a choice.

... we have will, the drive to act and respond, but will is a reflection of the elements that determine its expression.

The most important elements that determine our will are all us.

We have volition, but volition is not free will. We have Will, but Will is not Free Will.

Correct. Free will is about the choosing operation that causally determines our will. Was this choosing operation free of coercion or not free of coercion? Was this choosing operation free of significant mental illness that impaired our reasoning, or distorted our view of reality with hallucinations, or imposed upon us an irresistible impulse, or not free of these extraordinary influences?

''Volition - the cognitive process by which an organism decides on and commits to a particular course of action.''

Similar to the OED, "Volition, n. 1. a. With a and plural. An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination."

Volition is a synonym for will. It is something we have chosen (resolved or determined) to do. Both definitions include the fact that our will is usually the result of a choosing operation ("an organism decides on", "due consideration or deliberation"). And then this chosen intent motivates and directs our subsequent actions ("commits to a particular course of action", "a resolution or determination" to do something.

Will - used to express capability or sufficiency

Good grief, that's meaning number 7, and their example is "the back seat will hold three passengers". Not quite the topic we're discussing here.

3: the act, process, or experience of willing : VOLITION
4a: mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring, or intending

The "will" we are discussing here is our chosen intent for the immediate or distant future. And you will see "choosing" and "intending" in many of those definitions listed. However, we are not concerned here with "wishing" or "desiring".

In the Merriam-Webster list of definitions of "will" as a verb, at the number one spot is "1 - Used to express futurity". And you will find that notion of the future in all of the subsequent definitions.

In the Merriam-Webster list of definitions of "will" as a noun, you find "1: a legal declaration of a person's wishes regarding the disposal of his or her property or estate after death". It is a person's specific intention for a distant future.

So, for our purposes, the definition I'm using for "will", as a specific intent for the immediate or distant future, something that we choose to do, and something that motivates and directs our subsequent actions, seems best.

 

[Jarhyn]

DBT thinks of all choices as essentially a  Hobson's Choice. That is, they aren't real choices, because the result is always predetermined. However, Hobson's choice was even more real--the customer could have any horse in the stable as long as it was the one closest to the door. That genuine alternative was to have no horse at all. In the end, the argument comes down to sophistry, because nobody but a hard determinist defines "free choice" in such a way that it would be of no practical use to anyone, and we would just have to invent a new word for the kind of "choice" that we experience throughout our lives. Or we could just keep using "choice" the way we always have an ignore the hard determinist. It's a pity that they aren't free to invent their own vocabulary, but that's the path they've chosen to tread.

There is no choice, whether you own a horse or not is determined. If you 'decide' to buy a horse, events have inevitably brought you to the point of considering (inevitable) the purchase, followed by the purchase itself. You are a horse owner through determination/necessity.

Of course there is "choice". Even if a choice is fully determined by past events that one has no control over, it is still a choice at the point it is made. The whole point of making a choice is to act on one's understanding of how causal reality is working out, given that we don't actually know how it is working out. Whether or not the future is fully determined by past events, we still don't know how it will turn out. So we choose actions based on our best calculation. That's all we can do, and that is why people call uncoerced choice "free will". It is choice made freely within the limits of our knowledge about the future. Once it is made, we know we can't change it, but we can imagine what we would have done differently, if we had only known the future.

Choice is defined as an act of choosing between two or more possibilities. Determinism by definition fixes the outcome in each and every instance of decision making - in any given instance, it is this option for you, that option for someone else - which is the opposite of free choice. What is fixed by antecedents is not freely chosen. As the option open to you in any given instance is fixed/determined, you have the illusion of free choice.

[tʃɔɪs] NOUN
1 - an act of choosing between two or more possibilities.

Two or more possibilities exist in the simulation of alternatives as imagined within the present material state. A probability with a higher predicted likelihood as identified by the meat is selected, chaos is added against consistency to produce unpredictable vectors against "perfect failure", and then the winner is selected.

WIthin the relevant reference frame, and yes I'm talking about reference frame as in physics, there are indeterminable events.


These local indeterminabilities, given the ostensible universal property of LOCALITY, mean that even if time is treated as "crystalline", free will exists from the perspective and within the reality of the processes in the system, from the perspective of compatibilism.

Marvin, this thread has made me ask the questions of myself and I would be remiss to not pass them on insofar as it impacts "indeterminism"

Our universe, on its most basic levels, does not change on its own. There is an interaction against something called the "virtual particle field", and this seems like a massive dice roller of sorts that resolves events.

Experiments have been done on event processes to replay and unwind them, even, and it has been discovered as far as I recall that they replay consistently. This is why I expect determinism to be probably right.

Even so, imagine this universe is as it is except that this is not consistent, and every interaction got a new dice roll. Very little would change. The universe would be less compressible, much more difficult to replay, less possibly "cheaty" on how the rolls are defined, but that is about it. And it would be "indeterministic". The real issue here is that things are only predictable down to a point and we have measures beyond what point prediction is not possible. From the perspective of meat inside the universe in question, really the best we can do is understand the architecture of events in our universe, and acknowledge there is a stream of input that is indistinguishable from randomness, and events which after time function well enough as such.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Marvin, this thread has made me ask the questions of myself and I would be remiss to not pass them on insofar as it impacts "indeterminism"

I trust that there is no causal indeterminism, but only predictive indeterminism. Every event is reliably caused, but we do not always know the causes. Every event is brought about by reliable causal mechanism, but we do not completely understand all of these mechanisms. Random or chaotic events are problems of prediction, our inability to determine (know) the cause or to understand the mechanism.

Our universe, on its most basic levels, does not change on its own.

I would have to disagree. Our universe consists of "stuff, in motion and transformation". Changing and transforming is just something that the universe does, constantly. But it does so in a perfectly reliable fashion, even though we cannot understand or predict all events. The biggest transformation is the collapse of the universe into a super-dense ball of matter, a huge black hole, and then to expand again in a Big Bang where stars and planets and all the more familiar stuff shows up.

There is an interaction against something called the "virtual particle field", and this seems like a massive dice roller of sorts that resolves events.

I'm afraid the interaction of particles is beyond my ken (and my Barbie, too). But I agree that everything is constantly being resorted (but in a reliable way).

Experiments have been done on event processes to replay and unwind them, even, and it has been discovered as far as I recall that they replay consistently. This is why I expect determinism to be probably right.

I'm pretty sure that is not something happening in any scientific experiment. It is rather a thought experiment, rather than a scientific one. But, we can always rewind a tape recording and play it back, and it will always produce the same images.

... The real issue here is that things are only predictable down to a point and we have measures beyond what point prediction is not possible.

Exactly.

From the perspective of meat inside the universe in question, really the best we can do is understand the architecture of events in our universe, and acknowledge there is a stream of input that is indistinguishable from randomness, and events which after time function well enough as such.

Right. But I take offense at being referred to as "meat" until I'm dead. Even in "Stranger in a Strange Land" people were not treated as meat until after they died, and then they were eaten ceremonially by their friends and family.

 

[pood]

@Marvin, Yes, even if all our choosing operations were made unconsciously, they are still ours. We are our brains.

As I recall in the Libet experiments, volunteers were have found to make decisions subconsciously before becoming aware of their choices, but also when they became conscious of then they had the conscious ability to veto them. Someone called this “free won’t” but it’s all just the same thing — free will.

Hard determinists seem to think that for us to have “true” free will, some form of dualism must obtain — that there must be some kind of homunculus in the brain that guides its operations, including the subconscious ones, to create a preferred outcome. Inputs to the brain are not enough for free will, their argument seems to be. But of course the homunculus model posits an infinite regress of homunculi, for how does the first homunculus decide what to do?

We make decisions based on inputs to the brain, said inputs being both subconsciously and consciously acted upon. Of course the inputs in their totality determine our responses after a fashion, but this does not negate the idea of free will because free will depends upon these inputs to be reified. If our actions are not determined by their inputs, whatever else would they be determined by? But because “I’m hungry” determines, after a fashion, my decision to eat, it doesn’t mean that I must eat, or that I have no choice in what I eat. Acting without coercion on antecedent events after due deliberation is free will. If one wishes to deny this, the whole thing collapses to a terminological dispute that in my view will never be settled to the satisfaction of all parties.

I should add though, to return to the main topic of this thrtead, that quantum indeterminism really is indeterministic. It’s not a matter of being unaware of the causes.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

You put the cart before the horse.

What you think we decide as conscious thought is subvocal text about what our processes arrived to as a way forward after we've processed what we've received. Our conscious did not decide anything. That which we subvocalize is also driven by past 'decisions' and calculations from memory so we show as consistent face to others. The combined processing merely rose to parroted vocalizations of more or less automatic switching of routines conditioned within our working brain. aided by a squirt and twitch or two triggered by even earlier reactive process actions.

You can't even find legs for your position on which it can stand.

My view is that consciousness, the one articulating, arose after language became possible during our development of capabilities for toolmaking and even then it had to wait for the rise of visualizing processes.

I say this because your example of David as being significant re capabilities depended on David being able to see the possibility that defeating one would do the job of winning the day. Merely having a slingshot would accomplish nothing otherwise. All of that is necessary for that event to take place and all of that can be explained by capabilities evolving to conditions. No wiling needed. Indeed the apparent existence of such is not possible without the antecedent capabilities already inherent in the individual.

The notion that we're all sleepwalking through our decision-making is a bit far-fetched. Consider the person making a significant decision, like buying a car or deciding where to vacation, who uses pencil and paper to list the pros and cons of their different options. Or consider a group of people, like a Parent-Teacher Association or a government legislature, who work together to formally discuss alternatives and vote to make a decision. Or visit Amazon's Books section and see the many books to help people make better decisions.

Even in minimalist experiments, like those of Benjamin Libet, the subject must be awake in order to volunteer to participate, and must be awake to view the equipment they must use, and must be awake to hear the instructions to know what they are expected to do. The subject's participation in the experiment is motivated by their initial willingness to do so. A choice they are expected to make free of coercion and undue influence (see "voluntary" in your favorite dictionary).

Even if all our decisions were made unconsciously, they would still be choosing operations. The customers in the restaurant would still browse the menu, consider their options, and output a single choice in the form of an "I will", such as "I will have the Chef Salad, please". And, the waiter would take their order, bring them their meal, and later bring them the bill, holding them responsible for their deliberate act. No one forced the customer to come in, sit down, and order the salad.

Now, suppose someone did. Not a guy with a gun, but simply the child's mother. The child sees the deserts on the menu and insists upon a fudge sundae for lunch. The mother vetoes this and orders him the Chef Salad instead. The child eats the salad, but it was not a choice of his own free will. It was his mother's choice. And the waiter will bring the bill to the mother, not the child.

Oh, and David was willing to fight Goliath. Had he not been willing to do so, then someone else would have to, or the battle would be lost.

So, this "No wiling needed." mantra does not hold water.

Awake. Now there's a neat perversion. Transect the brain at the pons and, wallah, a sleeping being no matter what. Goes back to 1948, that little nugget. Remove communication from systems at a given level and the brain, source of mind, is a wasteland.

Well, if you do damage to specific parts of the brain you will disrupt specific functions. Conscious awareness is just one of the many functions of our brain. Michael Graziano, in "Consciousness and the Social Brain", locates awareness in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the adjacent temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Injuries to this area can result in Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome, where the patient loses awareness of half his field of vision. Items on one side of the room (usually the left side) never show up in conscious awareness, until you walk him to the other end of the room and turn him around.

This is not a loss of vision, but an actual loss of awareness. Toss a ball at the patient from the missing side and he will reflexively bat it away, but he won't be able to explain why he did it. He is simply unaware of that side of the room and unaware that he is missing anything. To miss it would require awareness. But the part of the brain that would provide that awareness of unawareness is no longer functioning.

My entire presentation demonstrates other than conscious is essential, that conscious is an artifact of response. No way for decisions to originates there.

Well, dear friend, decisions must originate somewhere, because there is a crowd of people in the restaurant browsing the menu and deciding what they will have for dinner. And if the actual decision-making is occurring beneath awareness, then those brain areas had best bring it to conscious awareness in time to answer the waiter's question, "What will you have for dinner?" Otherwise they will go hungry.

I'm not a fan of behaviorism but they do demonstrate any mammal can manage interacting with a manipulandum to get nourishment. Animals are conditioned to respond to change or perform. What behavior follows is consequent to doing directed, conditioned, things to get reinforcement. Where is anything free or willed in that?

Well, if the behavior is being manipulated by the experimenter, this would not be a case of free will. And most people would consider such external manipulation to be an unfree choice. See: "It’s OK if ‘my brain made me do it’: People’s intuitions about free will and neuroscientific prediction".

Producing sub-vocalizations as being evidence of where thought originates is just mush. Going in to any behavior one finds it driven not originating.

The question, though, is who is in the driver's seat. The brain is driving the behavior and choosing what the body will do, and that same brain is providing the explanation for its actions. That brain, inside that specific person, is clearly in the driver's seat.

Or, it you prefer, those things upon which you suggest will exercises are evolved, determined by modifications in pervious instructions, not originating from consciousness.

Every event has a history of prior causes going back to any point in time. But the most meaningful and relevant causes are usually the most direct causes. For example, the event of deliberate choosing is usually the most meaningful and relevant cause of a deliberate act. And if you want an explanation of that choosing, you'll need to ask that brain to provide a verbal explanation. And if you want to alter that process of deliberation, then you'd best be prepared to spend a lot of time counseling that person, to help them make better choices in the future.

Those things through which response flows is generated from sensed and experienced external events, adaptations to the world retained consequent of fitness. Not a whole lot of free anything there.

You seem to be ignoring the process of deliberation. For example, "If I do this, then how will I explain it?" You see, most of us as children have been asked the simple question, "Why did you do that?" And we've learned that the world expects us to explain our actions.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

@Marvin, Yes, even if all our choosing operations were made unconsciously, they are still ours. We are our brains.

As I recall in the Libet experiments, volunteers were have found to make decisions subconsciously before becoming aware of their choices, but also when they became conscious of then they had the conscious ability to veto them. Someone called this “free won’t” but it’s all just the same thing — free will.

Yes, I remember that the ability to cancel the choice at the last moment was discussed in that first Libet experiment.

Hard determinists seem to think that for us to have “true” free will, some form of dualism must obtain — that there must be some kind of homunculus in the brain that guides its operations, including the subconscious ones, to create a preferred outcome. Inputs to the brain are not enough for free will, their argument seems to be. But of course the homunculus model posits an infinite regress of homunculi, for how does the first homunculus decide what to do?

Good point.

We make decisions based on inputs to the brain, said inputs being both subconsciously and consciously acted upon. Of course the inputs in their totality determine our responses after a fashion, but this does not negate the idea of free will because free will depends upon these inputs to be reified. If our actions are not determined by their inputs, whatever else would they be determined by? But because “I’m hungry” determines, after a fashion, my decision to eat, it doesn’t mean that I must eat, or that I have no choice in what I eat. Acting without coercion on antecedent events after due deliberation is free will. If one wishes to deny this, the whole thing collapses to a terminological dispute that in my view will never be settled to the satisfaction of all parties.

To me, the key is that the most significant inputs to the deliberation process come from within us, and are essential parts of who and what we are. No prior cause of us can participate in the deliberation process without first becoming a part of who and what we are. In the end it is truly we, ourselves, that are making the choice.

I should add though, to return to the main topic of this thread, that quantum indeterminism really is indeterministic. It’s not a matter of being unaware of the causes.

Well, we're going to different churches on that one. I will hold to my belief that all events are reliably caused, even random and chaotic events.

 

[Jarhyn]

Marvin, this thread has made me ask the questions of myself and I would be remiss to not pass them on insofar as it impacts "indeterminism"

I trust that there is no causal indeterminism, but only predictive indeterminism. Every event is reliably caused, but we do not always know the causes. Every event is brought about by reliable causal mechanism, but we do not completely understand all of these mechanisms. Random or chaotic events are problems of prediction, our inability to determine (know) the cause or to understand the mechanism.

Our universe, on its most basic levels, does not change on its own.

I would have to disagree. Our universe consists of "stuff, in motion and transformation". Changing and transforming is just something that the universe does, constantly. But it does so in a perfectly reliable fashion, even though we cannot understand or predict all events. The biggest transformation is the collapse of the universe into a super-dense ball of matter, a huge black hole, and then to expand again in a Big Bang where stars and planets and all the more familiar stuff shows up.

There is an interaction against something called the "virtual particle field", and this seems like a massive dice roller of sorts that resolves events.

I'm afraid the interaction of particles is beyond my ken (and my Barbie, too). But I agree that everything is constantly being resorted (but in a reliable way).

Experiments have been done on event processes to replay and unwind them, even, and it has been discovered as far as I recall that they replay consistently. This is why I expect determinism to be probably right.

I'm pretty sure that is not something happening in any scientific experiment. It is rather a thought experiment, rather than a scientific one. But, we can always rewind a tape recording and play it back, and it will always produce the same images.

... The real issue here is that things are only predictable down to a point and we have measures beyond what point prediction is not possible.

Exactly.

From the perspective of meat inside the universe in question, really the best we can do is understand the architecture of events in our universe, and acknowledge there is a stream of input that is indistinguishable from randomness, and events which after time function well enough as such.

Right. But I take offense at being referred to as "meat" until I'm dead. Even in "Stranger in a Strange Land" people were not treated as meat until after they died, and then they were eaten ceremonially by their friends and family.

I am a creature of meat. Together this meat has made something more, I ken. There is an image in it now that will fade and disrupt when I die -- whose loss from the universe in majority is my death.

Personally I hope there is a secret order to the resolution: a compressibility, replayability, and secret sequentialness to the resolution of our universe because it means that if I exist proximally enough to a unique enough event in that sequence, I stand to be reinstantiated by whatever may observe this set, if only for the sake of better understanding "what happened here?"

Regardless, I hope to run a good bicentennial myself, here. I expect somewhere around the halfway point I'm going to need to re-instantiate somehow. I'm confident we're going to know how by the time I have to worry too badly about it. I expect "mri scan someone, the freezie-pop them and take a layer-by-layer picture of them as at as high a resolution as we can" will be something that can be done well enough by the time I'm in a condition to want it done of me, and then we can experiment with putting the full monte we find of it in different media.

But even without that, perhaps what happens here, owing to some algorithmic simplicity of description for this thing, and thus likely discovery or instantiation elsewhere in any other such thing as can host it, may afford such.

It is not so much that things are being resorted so much as...

There is a configuration of matter in relative proximity to a place.

The proximal configuration could, based on it's theoretical constituent parts, be arranged in some other way that is more stable.

IFF a virtual particle configuration happens at this nexus that represents an improvement of stability within the system, then that configuration takes precedence: an event happens and the universe is different. Stability happens and the instability winks out of existence as far as I am aware.

 

[DBT]

Messed up the quote system, doubled up posts, multiple quotes, bah.

The 'selection' - how things go within a determined system- is not subject to freely willed regulation. If free will is the point, nothing is actually being freely willed. Desires are formed and acted upon according to the state of the system and the information acting upon it. To label this as 'free will' is absurd.

 

[DBT]

@Marvin, Yes, even if all our choosing operations were made unconsciously, they are still ours. We are our brains.

As I recall in the Libet experiments, volunteers were have found to make decisions subconsciously before becoming aware of their choices, but also when they became conscious of then they had the conscious ability to veto them. Someone called this “free won’t” but it’s all just the same thing — free will.

Yes, I remember that the ability to cancel the choice at the last moment was discussed in that first Libet experiment.

Hard determinists seem to think that for us to have “true” free will, some form of dualism must obtain — that there must be some kind of homunculus in the brain that guides its operations, including the subconscious ones, to create a preferred outcome. Inputs to the brain are not enough for free will, their argument seems to be. But of course the homunculus model posits an infinite regress of homunculi, for how does the first homunculus decide what to do?

Good point.

We make decisions based on inputs to the brain, said inputs being both subconsciously and consciously acted upon. Of course the inputs in their totality determine our responses after a fashion, but this does not negate the idea of free will because free will depends upon these inputs to be reified. If our actions are not determined by their inputs, whatever else would they be determined by? But because “I’m hungry” determines, after a fashion, my decision to eat, it doesn’t mean that I must eat, or that I have no choice in what I eat. Acting without coercion on antecedent events after due deliberation is free will. If one wishes to deny this, the whole thing collapses to a terminological dispute that in my view will never be settled to the satisfaction of all parties.

To me, the key is that the most significant inputs to the deliberation process come from within us, and are essential parts of who and what we are. No prior cause of us can participate in the deliberation process without first becoming a part of who and what we are. In the end it is truly we, ourselves, that are making the choice.

I should add though, to return to the main topic of this thread, that quantum indeterminism really is indeterministic. It’s not a matter of being unaware of the causes.

Well, we're going to different churches on that one. I will hold to my belief that all events are reliably caused, even random and chaotic events.

That 'we are our brain' doesn't establish freedom will. Everything that has a brain can only act according to whatever their brain architecture produces, not their will. Will is not free, it plays its determined behavioral role.

The ''selfhood'' argument fails to establish freedom of will.

''Some compatibilist might say that our brains changing are “us” (a sort of “selfhood” argument), but they neglect the fact that our brains do not just change through an internal process alone and even if it did, why wouldn’t a tumor be considered an internal process? Why are abnormal processes excluded from such “selfhood” here? Again, the normal/abnormal distinction is arbitrary, when people have as much control over their incremental brain changes than they do a quicker change due to a tumor.

I think these ideas stem from slow, incremental brain changes giving people an illusion of control, where as fast changes drop that illusion.

Imagine, if you will, that 10 years from now your brain will be configured as very different from what it is today. Your environmental and biological conditions lead to someone with many different beliefs, ideas, and the way you decide on things is drastically different. Now imagine that your brain took a leap from one state to the other in an instant. To others around you it would appear you are behaving entirely differently. That you were no longer “you”. Something happened to change your brain, and you had no control over that happening. Your “programming” was changed and you had no say over the change! The main difference between than brain state and the one that took ten years to get to is the time and causal process.''

 

[DBT]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

Our ''our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are'' are equally determined by determinants beyond our control or ability to alter through an act of will.

A person need not be the cause of themselves in order to be the cause of other events. This notion that a "real" cause must not have any prior causes is absurd, because there are no causes that can pass that test. Every prior cause of me would fail that test, because it also has prior causes, and they too have prior causes, ad infinitum. So, unless you wish to assert that there are no "real" causes to be found anywhere, it is best to drop that requirement.

Will itself is determined.

YES! A person's deliberate will is causally determined by the choosing operation. The prior cause of any deliberate act is the act of deliberation that precedes it.

We have the ability to process information and respond to our inputs, but that is determined by genetic makeup, neural architecture ...

That's all us. The ability to process information is us. Our genetic makeup is us. Our neural architecture and our brain is us. These are not external determinants. They are us in the act of determining what we will do.

... and the environment acting upon us, ...

And that's not us, but rather an external influence, such as the issue we've encountered that requires us to make a choice.

... we have will, the drive to act and respond, but will is a reflection of the elements that determine its expression.

The most important elements that determine our will are all us.

We have volition, but volition is not free will. We have Will, but Will is not Free Will.

Correct. Free will is about the choosing operation that causally determines our will. Was this choosing operation free of coercion or not free of coercion? Was this choosing operation free of significant mental illness that impaired our reasoning, or distorted our view of reality with hallucinations, or imposed upon us an irresistible impulse, or not free of these extraordinary influences?

''Volition - the cognitive process by which an organism decides on and commits to a particular course of action.''

Similar to the OED, "Volition, n. 1. a. With a and plural. An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination."

Volition is a synonym for will. It is something we have chosen (resolved or determined) to do. Both definitions include the fact that our will is usually the result of a choosing operation ("an organism decides on", "due consideration or deliberation"). And then this chosen intent motivates and directs our subsequent actions ("commits to a particular course of action", "a resolution or determination" to do something.

Will - used to express capability or sufficiency

Good grief, that's meaning number 7, and their example is "the back seat will hold three passengers". Not quite the topic we're discussing here.

3: the act, process, or experience of willing : VOLITION
4a: mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring, or intending

The "will" we are discussing here is our chosen intent for the immediate or distant future. And you will see "choosing" and "intending" in many of those definitions listed. However, we are not concerned here with "wishing" or "desiring".

In the Merriam-Webster list of definitions of "will" as a verb, at the number one spot is "1 - Used to express futurity". And you will find that notion of the future in all of the subsequent definitions.

In the Merriam-Webster list of definitions of "will" as a noun, you find "1: a legal declaration of a person's wishes regarding the disposal of his or her property or estate after death". It is a person's specific intention for a distant future.

So, for our purposes, the definition I'm using for "will", as a specific intent for the immediate or distant future, something that we choose to do, and something that motivates and directs our subsequent actions, seems best.

Mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring or intending is the brain responding to its environment and information exchange. What a brain or the condition it is in is not freely willed.

Arguing that this is 'self,' 'me' or 'us' doesn't equate to freedom of will. If there are lesions, tumors, chemical imbalances, etc, present, these are equally ''us'' and the behaviour that is produced by the presence of these conditions, though undesirable, unwanted, unchosen are equally 'us' or 'self'

''The brain state you have at any given moment is dictated by causal processes that are ultimately out of your control. To dismiss this because we “want”, “desire”, “make decisions”, and so on, but then use qualifiers to disqualify other causal mechanisms that would play into those wants, desires, or decision making processes because they seem “less free” – is to make arbitrary distinctions between what causal processes grant “free will” and what one’s prevent “free will”. These arbitrary qualifiers miss the greater point, which is that we don’t have this free will: FREE WILL and no process is “more free”.

 

[Jayjay]

...
Neither space nor time are absolutes, and as a result, the concepts of past, present, and future are only coherent to a specified observer or reference frame.

It's therefore inescapable that the future is as immutable as the past (because any observer's future could be another observer's past); But of course this has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom of choice, due to the inaccessibility of information about their own future to any specific observer.

I can't fully agree. Nobody can observe the future, since we all live in the present (technically, a few milliseconds before we process incoming sense data). From our perspective, the future is always going to be unobservable, and there may be a good reason for that. We are ephemeral beings that come equipped with a central nervous system that makes reasonable guesses about what the future will be. We can only imagine various outcomes without ever perceiving any that are not happening to us in the moment. We manage to reconstruct imaginary events from the past by drawing on memory associations, which are not always reliable. The past will always appear immutable and the future mutable. Imagination allows us to take on different perspectives, but they only exist in our imagination, including the ones that represent future possibilities. The term "free will" is only going to make sense in a context that we make sense of.

Free will is entirely illusory, from a 'god's eye view', but nobody has that view, and freedom of choice stems not from the absence of inevitability, but from the absence of predictability.

Bingo!

I can't choose a different breakfast to have had yesterday; And I can't choose a different breakfast than the one I am going to have tomorrow - but I can't know which breakfast I am going to have tomorrow until I get to tomorrow, so it's entirely my choice what it will be.

There is the additional wrinkle that there might be many different realities spun off of quantum interactions and that the future you end up in is only one of those. Alternate versions of your self could exist in different futures. At least, that is one interpretation of how quantum reality works.

The choice of breakfast is a macro event that is not usually very strongly affected by random quantum effects. So in practice, you're 99.9999...% sure to have fish for breakfast tomorrow, even if you don't know it today, and only a very small chance of something else.

Unless you are a physicist who's rigged a machine to observe whether some radioactive isotope that has a roughly 50-50 chance of decaying, will actually decay, and then chooses his breakfast based on the result of the observation. But I would argue that most people are not hypothetical physicists trying to make a point, nor are most our choices by accident so on the fence that they'd be perturbed by quantum mechanical random events.

 

[Jayjay]

Marvin, the world of quantum mechanics is not science fiction but straight science. The problem is that all the metaphorical interpretations of QM seem like science fiction. That's what led physicist David Mermin to coin the expression "Shut up and calculate", which was intended to stop all of crazy attempts to explain it in an intuitive manner. Unfortunately, science isn't just about measurement and calculation. That's more what engineers do. Theoretical physicists try to create intuitively satisfying (i.e. causal) models of how physical events work. But QM behaves in such a strange way that it looks like causation in the physical world is just an illusion, which was very disturbing to Einstein. Everett's MWI has become popular precisely because it restores determinism to the quantum world, but at the expense of positing an infinite (or near infinite) number of alternative realities. People find that idea extremely troubling. Sean M Carroll's book explores that discomfort, explains why he thinks MWI is the most plausible of all interpretations of QM, and explores a number of different alternatives to it. So I would recommend looking at his book, if you are interested. It was written for folks who don't care for the notion of "many worlds".

To your other points, I would point out that future possibilities all occur in the MWI framework. We just end up finding ourselves in one of the possibilities. There are other versions of us that find themselves in different realities, and there is no way for any of us to observe or detect those other realities. So I fully endorse the points you are making about freedom of choice in the reality that we find ourselves living in--only one of the possible future realities at the time we were making the decision. If we don't bother looking at quantum events, then we can only observe a deterministic reality, because your choices don't affect the past. The wave collapse into a reality only occurs during observation with a recording device of some kind. As Carroll puts it, the recording device becomes entangled with the phenomenon it is interacting with. Future wave collapses are only probabilistically determined.

Sorry, but I don't go along with that. QM works in the same real world with the rest of us. Many possibilities resolve into one reality. There is never more than one real future. However there are always a multitude of possible futures. The multitude of possible futures are located solely within our imagination. The single real future will exist in empirical reality.

"Real future" seems like a contrivance, because it's just as imaginary as all the other futures until it's no longer the future.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

That 'we are our brain' doesn't establish freedom will.

Free will is established by every case where we choose for ourselves what we will do, while free of coercion and undue influence. This is operational free will, a deterministic event which is used to assess a person's responsibility for their actions.

Free will is, just like all other events, a causally necessary event. But the fact of causal necessity plays no meaningful role in understanding free will (or anything else for that matter).

Coercion and other extraordinary influences can impair or remove our free will on a cases by case basis. When a guy with a gun forces us to subjugate our will to his, then we do not have free will in that case. When our brain is injured or mentally ill, such that we are unable to perform a rational choosing operation, then we do not have free will.

Everything that has a brain can only act according to whatever their brain architecture produces, not their will. Will is not free, it plays its determined behavioral role.

The brain causally determines will by choosing what we will do. Will I have an apple or will I have an orange? I had an apple this morning, so I will have an orange now. That is how will is causally determined.

The ''selfhood'' argument fails to establish freedom of will.
''Some compatibilist might say that our brains changing are “us” (a sort of “selfhood” argument), but they neglect the fact that our brains do not just change through an internal process alone ...

What our brain does, it does. What the environment does, it does. Both our selves and the environment are part of the real world.

But the choosing process happens entirely within our own brains. And it is the choosing process that actually alters the brain, creating the will to do something, and it is then that will to do something, that motivates and directs our subsequent actions, as we carry out our chosen intent.

... and even if it did, why wouldn’t a tumor be considered an internal process?

Assuming the tumor interferes with our ability to decide for ourselves what we will do, then it is indeed a part of the internal process, but only as an extraordinary influence that disrupts the normal process.

Why are abnormal processes excluded from such “selfhood” here? Again, the normal/abnormal distinction is arbitrary, when people have as much control over their incremental brain changes than they do a quicker change due to a tumor.

Abnormal internal process are not excluded at all. They are treated as extraordinary influences that either impair or remove a person's ability to decide for themselves what they will do. The distinction between a normal process and an abnormal process is quite important. If there is significant mental illness then that will be treated medically and psychiatrically. If there is no mental illness, then there is no need for medical or psychiatric remedies.

Despite the significance of of this distinction, hard determinists try to bury it. They instead insist that we abandon such distinctions because they can both be chalked up to causal necessity. The absurdity of this argument is that all all meaningful distinctions can be removed by the same argument, because all events are equally causally necessary, without distinction.

If causal necessity can be used to bury one distinction, then it can bury them all. And half of intelligence is the ability to make distinctions and the other half is the ability to infer generalities. So going along with the hard determinists would make us all half wits.

I think these ideas stem from slow, incremental brain changes giving people an illusion of control, where as fast changes drop that illusion.
Imagine, if you will, that 10 years from now your brain will be configured as very different from what it is today. Your environmental and biological conditions lead to someone with many different beliefs, ideas, and the way you decide on things is drastically different. Now imagine that your brain took a leap from one state to the other in an instant. To others around you it would appear you are behaving entirely differently. That you were no longer “you”. Something happened to change your brain, and you had no control over that happening. Your “programming” was changed and you had no say over the change! The main difference between than brain state and the one that took ten years to get to is the time and causal process.''

Ironically, one of the things that has not changed over the past 60 years, is the simple solution to the determinism "versus" free will paradox. There is no conflict between the notion that my choices are both reliably caused (determinism) and that they are reliably caused by me (free will).

People do not have an "illusion" of control. People empirically observe themselves controlling things, whether it be walking to the kitchen, driving a car, or choosing for ourselves what we will do. There is no illusion here.

On the other hand, the hard determinists have this delusion in which an entity called "determinism" is controlling everyone's choices from before they were even born. They view reliable cause and effect as a constraint, when actually reliable causal mechanism are the very things that enable every freedom that we have to do anything at all.

 

[fromderinside]

The point is that 'our choice' is not a free will choice. Our choice, what we have for breakfast tomorrow or whatever is determined by countless factors, place, time culture, preferences developed through experience, an interaction of genes and environment, biology, how you feel in the morning, etc, etc....not some magical freedom of the will or a play of words to that effect, that will is in reality free.

Among those "countless factors" that causally determine our choice you will find our own goals and our own reasons, our own genetic dispositions, our own prior life experiences, our own thoughts and feelings, and all the other things that make us uniquely who and what we are. And as long as it remains us that is the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice, then our experience of choosing for ourselves what we will do is an empirical truth about the real world. It is not an illusion.

The choice is not free of causation. It is most certainly reliably caused. But it is a fact, of reality, that our own deliberation was the most meaningful and relevant cause of that choice. We are not having any illusions about it. It was really us.

But suppose it wasn't really us? Suppose someone with a gun forced us to do something against our will? In that case we would not be free to decide for ourselves what we would do. By the threat of lethal harm, the guy with the gun subjugates our will to his.

And it is because of such possibilities that we need to make the distinction between cases where we are free to decide for ourselves what we will do (free will) versus cases where we are not (not free will).

Whether the choice was of our own free will or whether it was forced upon us by a guy with a gun, it will always be a matter of causal necessity.

And that is the problem with the notion of causal necessity. It makes no meaningful distinctions between any two events. It gives us nothing we can use to make any practical human decision. All it can tell us is "I don't know what you will decide, but it will be causally necessary from any prior point in time". And that is not helpful information!

You put the cart before the horse.

What you think we decide as conscious thought is subvocal text about what our processes arrived to as a way forward after we've processed what we've received. Our conscious did not decide anything. That which we subvocalize is also driven by past 'decisions' and calculations from memory so we show as consistent face to others. The combined processing merely rose to parroted vocalizations of more or less automatic switching of routines conditioned within our working brain. aided by a squirt and twitch or two triggered by even earlier reactive process actions.

You can't even find legs for your position on which it can stand.

My view is that consciousness, the one articulating, arose after language became possible during our development of capabilities for toolmaking and even then it had to wait for the rise of visualizing processes.

I say this because your example of David as being significant re capabilities depended on David being able to see the possibility that defeating one would do the job of winning the day. Merely having a slingshot would accomplish nothing otherwise. All of that is necessary for that event to take place and all of that can be explained by capabilities evolving to conditions. No wiling needed. Indeed the apparent existence of such is not possible without the antecedent capabilities already inherent in the individual.

The notion that we're all sleepwalking through our decision-making is a bit far-fetched. Consider the person making a significant decision, like buying a car or deciding where to vacation, who uses pencil and paper to list the pros and cons of their different options. Or consider a group of people, like a Parent-Teacher Association or a government legislature, who work together to formally discuss alternatives and vote to make a decision. Or visit Amazon's Books section and see the many books to help people make better decisions.

Even in minimalist experiments, like those of Benjamin Libet, the subject must be awake in order to volunteer to participate, and must be awake to view the equipment they must use, and must be awake to hear the instructions to know what they are expected to do. The subject's participation in the experiment is motivated by their initial willingness to do so. A choice they are expected to make free of coercion and undue influence (see "voluntary" in your favorite dictionary).

Even if all our decisions were made unconsciously, they would still be choosing operations. The customers in the restaurant would still browse the menu, consider their options, and output a single choice in the form of an "I will", such as "I will have the Chef Salad, please". And, the waiter would take their order, bring them their meal, and later bring them the bill, holding them responsible for their deliberate act. No one forced the customer to come in, sit down, and order the salad.

Now, suppose someone did. Not a guy with a gun, but simply the child's mother. The child sees the deserts on the menu and insists upon a fudge sundae for lunch. The mother vetoes this and orders him the Chef Salad instead. The child eats the salad, but it was not a choice of his own free will. It was his mother's choice. And the waiter will bring the bill to the mother, not the child.

Oh, and David was willing to fight Goliath. Had he not been willing to do so, then someone else would have to, or the battle would be lost.

So, this "No wiling needed." mantra does not hold water.

Awake. Now there's a neat perversion. Transect the brain at the pons and, wallah, a sleeping being no matter what. Goes back to 1948, that little nugget. Remove communication from systems at a given level and the brain, source of mind, is a wasteland.

Well, if you do damage to specific parts of the brain you will disrupt specific functions. Conscious awareness is just one of the many functions of our brain. Michael Graziano, in "Consciousness and the Social Brain", locates awareness in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the adjacent temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Injuries to this area can result in Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome, where the patient loses awareness of half his field of vision. Items on one side of the room (usually the left side) never show up in conscious awareness, until you walk him to the other end of the room and turn him around.

This is not a loss of vision, but an actual loss of awareness. Toss a ball at the patient from the missing side and he will reflexively bat it away, but he won't be able to explain why he did it. He is simply unaware of that side of the room and unaware that he is missing anything. To miss it would require awareness. But the part of the brain that would provide that awareness of unawareness is no longer functioning.

My entire presentation demonstrates other than conscious is essential, that conscious is an artifact of response. No way for decisions to originates there.

Well, dear friend, decisions must originate somewhere, because there is a crowd of people in the restaurant browsing the menu and deciding what they will have for dinner. And if the actual decision-making is occurring beneath awareness, then those brain areas had best bring it to conscious awareness in time to answer the waiter's question, "What will you have for dinner?" Otherwise they will go hungry.

I'm not a fan of behaviorism but they do demonstrate any mammal can manage interacting with a manipulandum to get nourishment. Animals are conditioned to respond to change or perform. What behavior follows is consequent to doing directed, conditioned, things to get reinforcement. Where is anything free or willed in that?

Well, if the behavior is being manipulated by the experimenter, this would not be a case of free will. And most people would consider such external manipulation to be an unfree choice. See: "It’s OK if ‘my brain made me do it’: People’s intuitions about free will and neuroscientific prediction".

Producing sub-vocalizations as being evidence of where thought originates is just mush. Going in to any behavior one finds it driven not originating.

The question, though, is who is in the driver's seat. The brain is driving the behavior and choosing what the body will do, and that same brain is providing the explanation for its actions. That brain, inside that specific person, is clearly in the driver's seat.

Or, it you prefer, those things upon which you suggest will exercises are evolved, determined by modifications in pervious instructions, not originating from consciousness.

Every event has a history of prior causes going back to any point in time. But the most meaningful and relevant causes are usually the most direct causes. For example, the event of deliberate choosing is usually the most meaningful and relevant cause of a deliberate act. And if you want an explanation of that choosing, you'll need to ask that brain to provide a verbal explanation. And if you want to alter that process of deliberation, then you'd best be prepared to spend a lot of time counseling that person, to help them make better choices in the future.

Those things through which response flows is generated from sensed and experienced external events, adaptations to the world retained consequent of fitness. Not a whole lot of free anything there.

You seem to be ignoring the process of deliberation. For example, "If I do this, then how will I explain it?" You see, most of us as children have been asked the simple question, "Why did you do that?" And we've learned that the world expects us to explain our actions

You play the game backwards. We develop aptitudes and capabilities IAC with demands or we cease to exist. We use those aptitudes and capabilities to remain living. Deciding isn't a thing, it's a conceit. We do what we co IAC with demands for getting by. We congregate around systems and beliefs as social means to persist because group processing works better than individual processing most of the time. We are rational only to the extent that we can resist urges such a fight or flight or take or share. Mass impulses sometimes override individual governors putting groups at risk which suggests having more than one group is baked into our genetics as well.

What we do within in groups or between individuals is mostly driven by ceremony so 'decisions' are devices for moving forward within a pairing or group. They are effects of weighted arbitration among existing options not actions. We may ride a horse because we've developed the capacity to control certain aspects of horse behavior in return for giving the horse certain benefits with regard to shelter, cleaning, and feeding. We don't command the horse. The horse behaves as a horse with rider not as a ridden animal.

Those sensibilities you cite are basically learned social ritual and procedures IAC with the culture and groups in which we function. Most can be worked out IAC stochastic functions. Just arbitration and rationalizing with a social reference component. In your terms its explaining (rationalizing) not deciding. It's certainly constrained by expectations and capabilities. All of this is called coercion. It's not done freely.

 

[DBT]

That 'we are our brain' doesn't establish freedom will.

Free will is established by every case where we choose for ourselves what we will do, while free of coercion and undue influence. This is operational free will, a deterministic event which is used to assess a person's responsibility for their actions.

Free will is, just like all other events, a causally necessary event. But the fact of causal necessity plays no meaningful role in understanding free will (or anything else for that matter).

Coercion and other extraordinary influences can impair or remove our free will on a cases by case basis. When a guy with a gun forces us to subjugate our will to his, then we do not have free will in that case. When our brain is injured or mentally ill, such that we are unable to perform a rational choosing operation, then we do not have free will.

Everything that has a brain can only act according to whatever their brain architecture produces, not their will. Will is not free, it plays its determined behavioral role.

The brain causally determines will by choosing what we will do. Will I have an apple or will I have an orange? I had an apple this morning, so I will have an orange now. That is how will is causally determined.

The ''selfhood'' argument fails to establish freedom of will.
''Some compatibilist might say that our brains changing are “us” (a sort of “selfhood” argument), but they neglect the fact that our brains do not just change through an internal process alone ...

What our brain does, it does. What the environment does, it does. Both our selves and the environment are part of the real world.

But the choosing process happens entirely within our own brains. And it is the choosing process that actually alters the brain, creating the will to do something, and it is then that will to do something, that motivates and directs our subsequent actions, as we carry out our chosen intent.

... and even if it did, why wouldn’t a tumor be considered an internal process?

Assuming the tumor interferes with our ability to decide for ourselves what we will do, then it is indeed a part of the internal process, but only as an extraordinary influence that disrupts the normal process.

Why are abnormal processes excluded from such “selfhood” here? Again, the normal/abnormal distinction is arbitrary, when people have as much control over their incremental brain changes than they do a quicker change due to a tumor.

Abnormal internal process are not excluded at all. They are treated as extraordinary influences that either impair or remove a person's ability to decide for themselves what they will do. The distinction between a normal process and an abnormal process is quite important. If there is significant mental illness then that will be treated medically and psychiatrically. If there is no mental illness, then there is no need for medical or psychiatric remedies.

Despite the significance of of this distinction, hard determinists try to bury it. They instead insist that we abandon such distinctions because they can both be chalked up to causal necessity. The absurdity of this argument is that all all meaningful distinctions can be removed by the same argument, because all events are equally causally necessary, without distinction.

If causal necessity can be used to bury one distinction, then it can bury them all. And half of intelligence is the ability to make distinctions and the other half is the ability to infer generalities. So going along with the hard determinists would make us all half wits.

I think these ideas stem from slow, incremental brain changes giving people an illusion of control, where as fast changes drop that illusion.
Imagine, if you will, that 10 years from now your brain will be configured as very different from what it is today. Your environmental and biological conditions lead to someone with many different beliefs, ideas, and the way you decide on things is drastically different. Now imagine that your brain took a leap from one state to the other in an instant. To others around you it would appear you are behaving entirely differently. That you were no longer “you”. Something happened to change your brain, and you had no control over that happening. Your “programming” was changed and you had no say over the change! The main difference between than brain state and the one that took ten years to get to is the time and causal process.''

Ironically, one of the things that has not changed over the past 60 years, is the simple solution to the determinism "versus" free will paradox. There is no conflict between the notion that my choices are both reliably caused (determinism) and that they are reliably caused by me (free will).

People do not have an "illusion" of control. People empirically observe themselves controlling things, whether it be walking to the kitchen, driving a car, or choosing for ourselves what we will do. There is no illusion here.

On the other hand, the hard determinists have this delusion in which an entity called "determinism" is controlling everyone's choices from before they were even born. They view reliable cause and effect as a constraint, when actually reliable causal mechanism are the very things that enable every freedom that we have to do anything at all.

Compatibilist wording is carefully phrased to give an impression of freedom within a determined system. Decision making is an ability enabled by means of a brain. The brain just does what it does based on architecture, environment, inputs.

Declaring selfhood or ownership of the cognitive process, like ''My Choices'' - which is true in a sense, we are the sum total of body/brain/mind - which does not involve regulation through the agency of will or freedom of will.

Incompatibilists do not claim that determinism ''is controlling our behaviour.'' It's not as if 'our behaviour' is somehow separate from the world and its objects and events, and our behaviour could have been different if it wasn't for that pesky, meddling thing called determinism. That's not how determinism works. Nothing is separate. Nothing is being forced against its will. You may not like the way things go, but that is a matter of perception and desire, the desire for alternatives, that things could be different....if only.