Compatibilism: What's that About?

[Jarhyn]

he wasn't. It's you who is wrong

NO U!



The brain obviously alters itself.

To understand how the brain alters itself one merely need to know how a backpropagation Algo works.

Someone can say "you should want to do °°°" or even just "°°° is a thing that may be done by a human in our universe".

Now if, after this, I discover I do not want to do some thing, we have a baseline. I don't want to do it.

Now let's imagine for a moment they keep talking about it until the point where I find that now, I DO want to do it.

Now, someone else's brain has, through normal action, decided to act such that now I want something. Someone else has decided for me that I shall want something.

Do you wish to claim I cannot also do this to myself? That I can not do it without actually needing to speak words around it out loud? Do you deny that in a neural network that has been evolving for millions of years that somehow it never evolved to be connected to itself in such a useful way?

At any rate, in time, there is only now, the current moment. Antecedents stop being antecedents the moment they become what they currently are in time and space.

When an electron and a proton come close enough together in the right conditions, they stop being the antecedent of "close enough and in the right conditions" and start being entirely "the proton itself". The antecedents are gone, their causality a triviality to what they currently are. In the moment you are not your past, your history, those hashed forever and destructively so of the original state.

Things may be caused by their history, but their history stopped causING it after their history causED it, and it just became "what it is now".

prior to conscious representation.

Prior to the feedback element of conscious representation maybe, but not prior to the actual process that is deciding. The lag time of subvocalization and reporting is what is tripping you up here.

You want to separate out conscious "awareness" from the decision. The fact it takes some parts of me a moment to record ("realize") a decision was made does not invalidate that the decision was made and that it was made by me. I am not the thing being narrated TO, I am the thing that is being narrated OF. Of course that takes a little time to come back through, neuronal activity waves are not instant or even speed of light!

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Decision making is a process by which a course of action is determined through an interaction of information within the neural networks of a brain.

Of course.

This has nothing to do with free will. The label misrepresents the nature, mechanisms and means of decision decision making.

What’s Free Will About?

In 2013, the Tsarnaev brothers set off home-made explosives at the Boston Marathon, killing several people and injuring many others. They planned to set off the rest of their devices in New York city. To do this, they hijacked a car, driven by a college student, and forced him at gunpoint to assist their escape from Boston to New York.

On the way, they stopped for gas. While one of the brothers was inside the store and the other was distracted by the GPS, the student bounded from the car and ran across the road to another service station. There he called the police and described his vehicle. The police chased the bombers, capturing one and killing the other.

Although the student initially gave assistance to the bombers, he was not charged with “aiding and abetting”, because he was not acting of his own free will. He was forced, at gunpoint, to assist in their escape. The surviving bomber was held responsible for his actions, because he had acted deliberately, of his own free will.

A person’s will is their specific intent for the immediate or distant future. A person usually chooses what they will do. The choice sets their intent, and their intent motivates and directs their subsequent actions.

Free will is when this choice is made free of coercion and undue influence. The student’s decision to assist the bombers’ escape was coerced. It was not freely chosen.

Coercion can be a literal “gun to the head”, or any other threat of harm sufficient to compel one person to subordinate their will to the will of another.

Undue influence is any extraordinary condition that effectively removes a person’s control of their choice. Certain mental illnesses can distort a person’s perception of reality by hallucinations or delusions. Other brain impairments can directly damage the ability to reason. Yet another form may subject them to an irresistible compulsion. Hypnosis would be an undue influence. Authoritative command, as exercised by a parent over a child, an officer over a soldier, or a doctor over a patient, is another. Any of these special circumstances may remove a person’s control over their choices.

Why Do We Care About Free Will?

Responsibility for the benefit or harm of an action is assigned to the most meaningful and relevant causes. A cause is meaningful if it efficiently explains why an event happened. A cause is relevant if we can do something about it.

The means of correction is determined by the nature of the cause: (a) If the person is forced at gunpoint to commit a crime, then all that is needed to correct his or her behavior is to remove that threat. (b) If a person’s choice is unduly influenced by mental illness, then correction will require psychiatric treatment. (c) If a person is of sound mind and deliberately chooses to commit the act for their own profit, then correction requires changing how they think about such choices in the future.

In all these cases, society’s interest is to prevent future harm. And it is the harm that justifies taking appropriate action. Until the offender’s behavior is corrected, society protects itself from further injury by securing the offender, usually in a prison or mental institution, as appropriate.

So, the role of free will, in questions of moral and legal responsibility, is to distinguish between deliberate acts versus acts caused by coercion or undue influence. This distinction guides our approach to correction and prevention.

Free will makes the empirical distinction between a person autonomously choosing for themselves versus a choice imposed upon them by someone or something else.

Compatibilist free will is a carefully constructed label, a purely semantic argument that does not relate to cognition.

Compatibilist "free will" is the common meaning and usage of the term. It is nothing strange or contrived.

If you're looking for something strange or contrived see the hard determinists' definition of free will as "freedom from causation", or "freedom from oneself", or, most recently, "freedom from one's own brain".

The world is always present in the conditions of the present moment. Everything that came before brings us to this moment;
''Each state of the universe and its events are the necessary result of its prior state and prior events. ("Events" change the state of things.) Determinism means that events will proceed naturally (as if "fixed as a matter of natural law") and reliably ("without deviation"). - Marvin Edwards.

Which brings us back to causal necessity. Why does the hard determinist imagine that we must be "free from causal necessity" before we can be free to do anything else? You know, all the stuff we're already free do, like choosing for ourselves what we will have for dinner from the many possibilities on the restaurant menu.

We're already free to do all these things, even though they are all causally necessary. Could it be that causal necessity is neither a meaningful nor a relevant constraint?

Being born in a place, culture, time, to a family (genes, etc) and society not of your choosing,

Yes. There are many things about us and our lives that we did not choose. However, there are many more things in our lives that we now choose for ourselves, like what to have for dinner.

it is largely circumstances that choose you.

That's obviously a figurative statement. The only elements of any circumstances that can actually perform choosing are the brains of intelligent species. So, I presume you're speaking of my parents, not choosing me specifically, but rather simply choosing to have sex. But neither parent was there in the restaurant. Choosing what to have for dinner was all me.

That you ended up in a restaurant for dinner involved a range of circumstances, which I;m sure you understand. Everything that has makeup and properties acts according to its makeup and properties, which is entirely 'it' or 'me.'

Of course. There will always be a history of specific causes leading up to any current event. But that is always the case for every event, so it is not surprising at all that I was in the restaurant, reading the menu, and deciding for myself, according to my own criteria, what I would have for dinner.

There's nothing magical about causal necessity. It should be no more surprising than the notion of history.

If salad is determined, steak is never a possibility. If determined and replayed over and over, just like a movie, it's salad each and every time for eternity.

Well, we could also stop pressing the Replay button on the time machine. But, keeping within the thought experiment, "I will have the salad" will always be true and "I could have had the steak" will always be true as well. Both would be true on every replay of the event.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Nope, decisions are determined by information exchange between cells, networks and regions and fed into the experience of deliberation while conscious thought is active. Thought(s) form as the information is processed and reported in conscious form.
The agency is not conscious deliberation itself, but underlying unconscious information processing feeding the conscious experience with fully formed thoughts.
The illusion of conscious agency - as pointed out - is revealed when something goes wrong within the underlying system, connectivity, memory function, etc.

Again, regardless how the brain internally accomplishes the task, the brain actually does perform choosing. Choosing (1) inputs multiple possibilities (such as the meals on the restaurant menu), (2) applies some criteria of comparative evaluation (such as tastes, dietary goals, price), and based on that evaluation (3) outputs a single choice (such as "I will have the salad, please").

If the brain fails to perform this choosing, the customer in the restaurant will be unable to order dinner.

Nothing from the field of neuroscience contradicts this. In fact, you will see in your own quotes from neuroscientists repeated references to the function of decision-making.

And the only "free will" that they reject is the notion of a supernatural agency operating separately from the brain itself.

Second, we presume a chain of perfectly reliable cause and effect, preceding the choosing, within the choosing, between the choosing and the action, and following upon the action. There is no break in the causal chain.

That is true of everything in the universe or world that is deterministic. It may even be true for QM;

I strongly suspect that reliable causation applies also to quantum events, and that the problem is simply a matter of prediction rather than an absence of reliable causation. Matter organized differently behaves differently. With each new level of organization you also get new behaviors and new rules (new "laws of nature").

I limit my concerns to the physical, biological, and rational mechanisms. These can be explained by the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences. In order to preserve determinism, we assume that each of these mechanisms is perfectly reliable within its own domain and that every event is the reliable product of some specific combination of physical, biological, and/or rational causation.

“It might be true that you would have done otherwise if you had wanted, though it is determined that you did not, in fact, want otherwise.” - Robert Kane

Dear Mr. Kane, a person chooses what they will do about their wants, needs, and desires. And that is what free will is about. It is about fixing our intention upon some specific action, whether it is deciding what we will have for breakfast or deciding how our property should be distributed after we die. That is what the "will" in free will is about: the intention to actually do something, whether we feel like doing it or not.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Each and every customer in the restaurant has antecedents;

Of course. Every event is the reliable result of prior events going back in time as far as anyone can imagine. The question is, what are we to make of this logical fact? The answer is that it is a meaningless and irrelevant fact that the intelligent mind may acknowledge and then ignore. It makes itself irrelevant by its own ubiquity.

''It is unimportant whether one's resolutions and preferences occur because an ''ingenious physiologist' has tampered with one's brain, whether they result from narcotics addiction, from 'hereditary factor, or indeed from nothing at all.' Ultimately the agent has no control over his cognitive states.

Professor Taylor has fallen into the dualism trap. The agent has no need to control his cognitive states because the agent IS his cognitive states. Now, if his cognitive state is being manipulated by an "ingenious physiologist", then the agent is being unduly influenced, and the agent lacks free will.

"So even if the agent has strength, skill, endurance, opportunity, implements, and knowledge enough to engage in a variety of enterprises, still he lacks mastery over his basic attitudes and the decisions they produce. After all, we do not have occasion to choose our dominant proclivities.'' - Prof. Richard Taylor -Metaphysics.

And, again, a list of things we do not choose cannot disprove the list of things that we do choose. That would be a logical fallacy.

Everything that has happened before brings you to this point and this action. There are no exclusions, clauses or exemptions. ''Each state of the universe and its events are the necessary result of its prior state and prior events. ("Events" change the state of things.) - Marvin Edwards.

We're not arguing over the "facts on the ground", but rather what those facts do and do not imply. For example, which of those antecedent events is the most meaningful and relevant prior cause of the dinner order: the big bang or the person's own choosing? Decide quickly, because the waiter needs to know who gets the bill for dinner.

 

[pood]

Will does precisely what is determined by the workings of the brain (not open to choice), nothing more, nothing less.

“Will does precisely what is deterimined by the workings of the brain.”

Great. I agree. And, you say you are not a dualist. Great. Neither am I.

It follows that you must agree that “I” am the workings of the brain.

Therefore, once again, your own words logically reduce to:

”Will does precisely what is determined by me.”

But if will does precisely what is determined by ME, then it logically follows that I AM the one choosing!

Again, that’s compatibilism. Perhaps you’ll have a gestalt swith and realze that you are actually arguing for compatibilism.

 

[Jarhyn]

Will does precisely what is determined by the workings of the brain (not open to choice), nothing more, nothing less.

“Will does precisely what is deterimined by the workings of the brain.”

Great. I agree. And, you say you are not a dualist. Great. Neither am I.

It follows that you must agree that “I” am the workings of the brain.

Therefore, once again, your own words logically reduce to:

”Will does precisely what is determined by me.”

But if will does precisely what is determined by ME, then it logically follows that I AM the one choosing!

Again, that’s compatibilism. Perhaps you’ll have a gestalt swith and realze that you are actually arguing for compatibilism.

My money is still on "can't for reasons of existential conflict with 'free will' and the power of a human to DECIDE what they will do, either to defend against or forgive the past evil of others or to forgive continuing evil of self."

Hard determinism seems built as a method more of absolution so logic is not going to assail it.

 

[rousseau]

.

You seem to be speaking against the same dualistic nonsense that DBT is: I don't give a shit about nonsensical libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist.

The sad part is that you have not understood a word I said. Nothing I have said supports dualism. Just the opposite.

Of course you don’t support dualism. But here is what you wrote in the other thread:

BS. I am supporting the proposition that it is the state of the brain, neural architecture, state and condition, that determines behaviour, not free will.

Of course, if you are not a dualist, then you realize that I AM my brain. And that means that I AM my neural architecture, state and condition.


And, since you are not a dualist, but given your own words quoted above, we can recast those words to the simpler formulation, viz.

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior, not free will.

And, with your own words, your have supplied a reductio of your hard determinism! If “I” determine my behavior, that just IS (compatibilist) free will! So your quote logically reduces to:

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior.

Welcome to compatibilism, DBT!

Talk about creative interpretation!

Then again, creative interpretation and careful wording is the very essence of compatibilism.

The brain is the agency of response, therefore free will, is a far cry from proving free will. Careful wording and creative interpretation doesn't prove the proposition.

That takes neuroscience: how the brain works, how decisions are made and actions taken.

And I keep explaining to you that neuroscience is not what gets you there, either. You need: a few entry level SW courses, an assembly language course, a machine architecture course, a course on basic ML and a course on HTMs.

You need to understand a neuron well enough to create an artificial one, and then to understand the behavior of neurons in concert well enough to understand how they give rise to the expression of algorithms based on the field of their connection biases.

Then you might understand how a choice function can be implemented in neural media.

But none of that is necessary to show real examples of active choice functions in machines.

To me it looks like the arguments you and fromderinside are making are compatible with each other.

At a fundamental level, FDI is arguing that there is no centralized mover in the system, just a system that moves. If I'm understanding you correctly, you basically agree with this but choose to call it free will, while fromderinside doesn't.

fromderinside uses the lack of a centralized mover to conclude that will doesn't exist - which is true according to his definition of will. While you define the system as one that operates, making your definition of will true as well

I agree with the congruence of these two thoughts. We are a system that operates which will always land on one outcome. We can choose otherwise but what makes that so isn't that the next choice wasn't inevitable, but that the human body operates in an environment where it's free to act out a range of activity. We can choose otherwise because there are minimal constraints on our behavior - experientially we experience a feeling of freedom to choose. And in a way we are choosing, the brain activity happening is us.

The brain chooses - the choice it ended up making was inevitable - both of these things can be true.

No? There are, in any given event, "central movers".

To understand this one needs to understand just a single neuron, in relation to many other neurons:

This neuron has a bias value. In meat neurons it's a bit more messy on the activation curve and result, but essentially this bias value determines how many of the "many other neurons" it takes to "activate" the neuron, to make it output a "1".

If enough of the neurons "above" that one have activated, the input will exceed the bias, and it will fire.

The most simple "central mover" here is the bias.

There are other parts to the geometry of the neuron: it's connection weights, Its refractory period, it's refractory radius, it's refractory weight.

Some nifty switching can happen in the domain of local refractory behaviors, too, but it takes about a week to align myself on that math and I have no cause to right now.

But moreover, it ends up coming together in process that something IN that process does to itself modifies the process itself. At some level there is an executive loop, but fuck if I know where it is or how it's shaped, and fuck if I would tell anyone if I did. Pointing out the location and nature of the soul is dangerous.

What you're describing sounds like 'no centralized mover' to me - complicated electrochemical impulses. Unless you want to call the entire nervous system our 'centralized mover'.

And that's partly what I'm getting at - you both agree that the brain is material, but are defining it differently, and perceiving it differently. You can't really resolve that debate.

 

[Jarhyn]

.

You seem to be speaking against the same dualistic nonsense that DBT is: I don't give a shit about nonsensical libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist.

The sad part is that you have not understood a word I said. Nothing I have said supports dualism. Just the opposite.

Of course you don’t support dualism. But here is what you wrote in the other thread:

BS. I am supporting the proposition that it is the state of the brain, neural architecture, state and condition, that determines behaviour, not free will.

Of course, if you are not a dualist, then you realize that I AM my brain. And that means that I AM my neural architecture, state and condition.


And, since you are not a dualist, but given your own words quoted above, we can recast those words to the simpler formulation, viz.

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior, not free will.

And, with your own words, your have supplied a reductio of your hard determinism! If “I” determine my behavior, that just IS (compatibilist) free will! So your quote logically reduces to:

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior.

Welcome to compatibilism, DBT!

Talk about creative interpretation!

Then again, creative interpretation and careful wording is the very essence of compatibilism.

The brain is the agency of response, therefore free will, is a far cry from proving free will. Careful wording and creative interpretation doesn't prove the proposition.

That takes neuroscience: how the brain works, how decisions are made and actions taken.

And I keep explaining to you that neuroscience is not what gets you there, either. You need: a few entry level SW courses, an assembly language course, a machine architecture course, a course on basic ML and a course on HTMs.

You need to understand a neuron well enough to create an artificial one, and then to understand the behavior of neurons in concert well enough to understand how they give rise to the expression of algorithms based on the field of their connection biases.

Then you might understand how a choice function can be implemented in neural media.

But none of that is necessary to show real examples of active choice functions in machines.

To me it looks like the arguments you and fromderinside are making are compatible with each other.

At a fundamental level, FDI is arguing that there is no centralized mover in the system, just a system that moves. If I'm understanding you correctly, you basically agree with this but choose to call it free will, while fromderinside doesn't.

fromderinside uses the lack of a centralized mover to conclude that will doesn't exist - which is true according to his definition of will. While you define the system as one that operates, making your definition of will true as well

I agree with the congruence of these two thoughts. We are a system that operates which will always land on one outcome. We can choose otherwise but what makes that so isn't that the next choice wasn't inevitable, but that the human body operates in an environment where it's free to act out a range of activity. We can choose otherwise because there are minimal constraints on our behavior - experientially we experience a feeling of freedom to choose. And in a way we are choosing, the brain activity happening is us.

The brain chooses - the choice it ended up making was inevitable - both of these things can be true.

No? There are, in any given event, "central movers".

To understand this one needs to understand just a single neuron, in relation to many other neurons:

This neuron has a bias value. In meat neurons it's a bit more messy on the activation curve and result, but essentially this bias value determines how many of the "many other neurons" it takes to "activate" the neuron, to make it output a "1".

If enough of the neurons "above" that one have activated, the input will exceed the bias, and it will fire.

The most simple "central mover" here is the bias.

There are other parts to the geometry of the neuron: it's connection weights, Its refractory period, it's refractory radius, it's refractory weight.

Some nifty switching can happen in the domain of local refractory behaviors, too, but it takes about a week to align myself on that math and I have no cause to right now.

But moreover, it ends up coming together in process that something IN that process does to itself modifies the process itself. At some level there is an executive loop, but fuck if I know where it is or how it's shaped, and fuck if I would tell anyone if I did. Pointing out the location and nature of the soul is dangerous.

What you're describing sounds like 'no centralized mover' to me - complicated electrochemical impulses. Unless you want to call the entire nervous system our 'centralized mover'.

And that's partly what I'm getting at - you both agree that the brain is material, but are defining it differently, and perceiving it differently. You can't really resolve that debate.

Well, no single central mover. There is always a straw that breaks the camel's back, a signal that says "yes, this, now".

If someone asked me objectively "why did this fault happen on this system" I would be able to say "this number was too low". That is a central mover to the event.

The conflict comes insofar as DBT abandons the reality that the process alters itself, that we do decide upon what we will want to some extent, and that the thing implements evaluable choice functions.

The problem I have is the use of "determinism" to attain "absolution".

 

[fromderinside]

Columnar organization was described in 1957. (https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/jn.1957.20.4.408

Organizing principles were studies and theories were constructed from that time forward.

HTM is an AI construct that attempts to find analogs in observed neuroanatomy and brain function. HTM is not derived from brain function nor does not reflect how the brain works. For you to make that claim you'd have to be able to model actual brain function, cortex, midbrain, Llwherever.

HTMs are not specifically about columnar organization. They are about refractory period, which indicates that indeed you don't know what they are.

The reason they are important is because the advance happened around neural refractory period, not columnar organization.

It is these refractory periods, the temporal component of the neuron, that really brings it closer to human neural function. As it is, most teams developing this technology, are developing it by vigorously reverse engineering the human brain.

I don't need to reverse engineer a whole brain, though, for my points. I just need to prove: instructions, interpreters, and static analysis happen in machines built of switches, and show both machines are constructions of switches. I don't need to show how all the switches come together for both, just one or the other.

Then I need to show that the neurons in our head are capable of implementing all the switch types and then some. This is where HTMs come in, since the temporal component allows OR and NOT logics to arise, which are important for building more interesting systemic truth and state efficiently.

This is why you need to understand how neurons and meat can be observed as doing the same thing as the metal, once the basic pieces of free will are observed.

There are two issues here: first, "does determinism rule out free will?"

Well, computers certainly have all the pieces of compatibilist free will, just not generally automated all together.

Humans clearly have the ability to do anything the metal can and then some.

So, that eliminates your core premise.

Then you are just left with special pleading and no-true-scotsman.

Therefore because the metal implies compatibilist free will, as the meat is more capable than the metal, the meat has compatibilist free will.

I never said HTM was about columnar organization. I hinted that cortical structural organization was discovered and specified in 1957 by Mountcastle from NCU for the Somatosensory and, as it turns out, the entire sensory and association cortex.

We've all known about various refractory periods in neural information architecture ever since I entered college in the sixties. It comes with the neural chemistry of information transmission in biological systems. You should have gotten I knew such since I told you about my masters and dissertation experiments were detection, resolution and transmission of acoustic information in the ascending NS done in the early seventies.

I choose audition because it is, by far, the fastest sensory information form for input to output in mammals, less than 10ms from reception to neck beginning to move.

You just can't accept that anyone knew anything about how the brain worked until some programmer digitally modelled a HTM biologically limited brain fart.

Your metal to meat attempt at proof of will ain't. Information is neither metal nor meat. And logic isn't material. What you need is an experiment that fetches objective material from subjective conjecture, a logically and practically impossible task.

 

[Jarhyn]

Columnar organization was described in 1957. (https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/jn.1957.20.4.408

Organizing principles were studies and theories were constructed from that time forward.

HTM is an AI construct that attempts to find analogs in observed neuroanatomy and brain function. HTM is not derived from brain function nor does not reflect how the brain works. For you to make that claim you'd have to be able to model actual brain function, cortex, midbrain, Llwherever.

HTMs are not specifically about columnar organization. They are about refractory period, which indicates that indeed you don't know what they are.

The reason they are important is because the advance happened around neural refractory period, not columnar organization.

It is these refractory periods, the temporal component of the neuron, that really brings it closer to human neural function. As it is, most teams developing this technology, are developing it by vigorously reverse engineering the human brain.

I don't need to reverse engineer a whole brain, though, for my points. I just need to prove: instructions, interpreters, and static analysis happen in machines built of switches, and show both machines are constructions of switches. I don't need to show how all the switches come together for both, just one or the other.

Then I need to show that the neurons in our head are capable of implementing all the switch types and then some. This is where HTMs come in, since the temporal component allows OR and NOT logics to arise, which are important for building more interesting systemic truth and state efficiently.

This is why you need to understand how neurons and meat can be observed as doing the same thing as the metal, once the basic pieces of free will are observed.

There are two issues here: first, "does determinism rule out free will?"

Well, computers certainly have all the pieces of compatibilist free will, just not generally automated all together.

Humans clearly have the ability to do anything the metal can and then some.

So, that eliminates your core premise.

Then you are just left with special pleading and no-true-scotsman.

Therefore because the metal implies compatibilist free will, as the meat is more capable than the metal, the meat has compatibilist free will.

I never said HTM was about columnar organization. I hinted that cortical structural organization was discovered and specified in 1957 by Mountcastle from NCU for the Somatosensory and, as it turns out, the entire sensory and association cortex. Weve all know about various refractory periods in neural information architecture ever since I entered college in the sixties. It comes with the neural chemistry of information transmission in biological systems. You should have gotten I knew such since I told you about my masters and dissertation experiments were detection resolution and transmission of acoustic information in the ascending NS.

You just can't accept that anyone knew anything about how the brain worked until some programmer digitally modelled a HTM biologically limited brain fart.

Your metal to meat attempt at proof of will ain't. Information is neither metal nor meat. And logic isn't material. What you need is an experiment that fetches objective material from subjective conjecture.

You assumed columnar organization was what I was talking about and it was not.

At any rate, I've shown all the elements necessary for compatibilist free will in systems of metal and electrons.

You are the hard determinist between us. Just the fact that free will's elements exist at all, regardless of whether in meat, flush your hard determinism down the toilet.

Proving the existence of the process in meat is just a nicety; you are the one nonsensically claiming that meat capable of far richer behavior than the metal is somehow unable to do the things the metal does.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Will exists. Will, being necessitated, simply cannot be described as "free."

Will, being necessitated, cannot be described as "free of necessitation". But it can be "free of coercion and undue influence".

A list of things that our will cannot be free of does not eliminate anything from the list of things our will can be free of.

Will does precisely what is determined by the workings of the brain (not open to choice), nothing more, nothing less.

One of the "workings of the brain" is choosing what we will do, as in choosing whether to order the steak or the salad.

We have will. Will plays its role, but will is not "free" - which essentially means the absence of necessitation, coercion or force.

Choosing what we will do can be free of coercion (external force).
Choosing what we will do can be free of the necessity of stopping at the traffic light if the light is green.

But nothing is ever free of reliable cause and effect, that is, causal necessity. So it would be silly to expect our choices to be free of causal necessity. Fortunately, free will requires nothing of that sort.

As determinism is essentially necessitation, the idea of free will is not compatible with determinism.

Determinism is specifically causal necessity, which is derived from simple cause and effect. And nothing is ever free of reliable cause and effect, because without it we could never reliably cause any effect, and would have no freedom to do anything at all.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The brain chooses - the choice it ended up making was inevitable - both of these things can be true.

Exactly.

 

[Jarhyn]

Will exists. Will, being necessitated, simply cannot be described as "free."

Will, being necessitated, cannot be described as "free of necessitation". But it can be "free of coercion and undue influence".

A list of things that our will cannot be free of does not eliminate anything from the list of things our will can be free of.

Will does precisely what is determined by the workings of the brain (not open to choice), nothing more, nothing less.

One of the "workings of the brain" is choosing what we will do, as in choosing whether to order the steak or the salad.

We have will. Will plays its role, but will is not "free" - which essentially means the absence of necessitation, coercion or force.

Choosing what we will do can be free of coercion (external force).
Choosing what we will do can be free of the necessity of stopping at the traffic light if the light is green.

But nothing is ever free of reliable cause and effect, that is, causal necessity. So it would be silly to expect our choices to be free of causal necessity. Fortunately, free will requires nothing of that sort.

As determinism is essentially necessitation, the idea of free will is not compatible with determinism.

Determinism is specifically causal necessity, which is derived from simple cause and effect. And nothing is ever free of reliable cause and effect, because without it we could never reliably cause any effect, and would have no freedom to do anything at all.

I think DBT's problem is an inability to look at subcontext; an inability to see look at "forest" and see "tree", an inability to see "deterministic universe" and then observe within it "stochastic agents". The behavior of the stochastic agents is globally determined but from the perspective of the agents still stochastic.

Locally stochastic behavior in a globally deterministic system is still stochastic to the locality.

 

[rousseau]

.

You seem to be speaking against the same dualistic nonsense that DBT is: I don't give a shit about nonsensical libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist.

The sad part is that you have not understood a word I said. Nothing I have said supports dualism. Just the opposite.

Of course you don’t support dualism. But here is what you wrote in the other thread:

BS. I am supporting the proposition that it is the state of the brain, neural architecture, state and condition, that determines behaviour, not free will.

Of course, if you are not a dualist, then you realize that I AM my brain. And that means that I AM my neural architecture, state and condition.


And, since you are not a dualist, but given your own words quoted above, we can recast those words to the simpler formulation, viz.

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior, not free will.

And, with your own words, your have supplied a reductio of your hard determinism! If “I” determine my behavior, that just IS (compatibilist) free will! So your quote logically reduces to:

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior.

Welcome to compatibilism, DBT!

Talk about creative interpretation!

Then again, creative interpretation and careful wording is the very essence of compatibilism.

The brain is the agency of response, therefore free will, is a far cry from proving free will. Careful wording and creative interpretation doesn't prove the proposition.

That takes neuroscience: how the brain works, how decisions are made and actions taken.

And I keep explaining to you that neuroscience is not what gets you there, either. You need: a few entry level SW courses, an assembly language course, a machine architecture course, a course on basic ML and a course on HTMs.

You need to understand a neuron well enough to create an artificial one, and then to understand the behavior of neurons in concert well enough to understand how they give rise to the expression of algorithms based on the field of their connection biases.

Then you might understand how a choice function can be implemented in neural media.

But none of that is necessary to show real examples of active choice functions in machines.

To me it looks like the arguments you and fromderinside are making are compatible with each other.

At a fundamental level, FDI is arguing that there is no centralized mover in the system, just a system that moves. If I'm understanding you correctly, you basically agree with this but choose to call it free will, while fromderinside doesn't.

fromderinside uses the lack of a centralized mover to conclude that will doesn't exist - which is true according to his definition of will. While you define the system as one that operates, making your definition of will true as well

I agree with the congruence of these two thoughts. We are a system that operates which will always land on one outcome. We can choose otherwise but what makes that so isn't that the next choice wasn't inevitable, but that the human body operates in an environment where it's free to act out a range of activity. We can choose otherwise because there are minimal constraints on our behavior - experientially we experience a feeling of freedom to choose. And in a way we are choosing, the brain activity happening is us.

The brain chooses - the choice it ended up making was inevitable - both of these things can be true.

No? There are, in any given event, "central movers".

To understand this one needs to understand just a single neuron, in relation to many other neurons:

This neuron has a bias value. In meat neurons it's a bit more messy on the activation curve and result, but essentially this bias value determines how many of the "many other neurons" it takes to "activate" the neuron, to make it output a "1".

If enough of the neurons "above" that one have activated, the input will exceed the bias, and it will fire.

The most simple "central mover" here is the bias.

There are other parts to the geometry of the neuron: it's connection weights, Its refractory period, it's refractory radius, it's refractory weight.

Some nifty switching can happen in the domain of local refractory behaviors, too, but it takes about a week to align myself on that math and I have no cause to right now.

But moreover, it ends up coming together in process that something IN that process does to itself modifies the process itself. At some level there is an executive loop, but fuck if I know where it is or how it's shaped, and fuck if I would tell anyone if I did. Pointing out the location and nature of the soul is dangerous.

What you're describing sounds like 'no centralized mover' to me - complicated electrochemical impulses. Unless you want to call the entire nervous system our 'centralized mover'.

And that's partly what I'm getting at - you both agree that the brain is material, but are defining it differently, and perceiving it differently. You can't really resolve that debate.

Well, no single central mover. There is always a straw that breaks the camel's back, a signal that says "yes, this, now".

If someone asked me objectively "why did this fault happen on this system" I would be able to say "this number was too low". That is a central mover to the event.

The conflict comes insofar as DBT abandons the reality that the process alters itself, that we do decide upon what we will want to some extent, and that the thing implements evaluable choice functions.

The problem I have is the use of "determinism" to attain "absolution".

FWIW, I basically agree with the gist of your argument.

I read some Anthony Giddens (sociology of all things) recently that I believe speaks to this discussion from a high level. His theory is that an agent and it's environment represent a duality - neither has primacy over the other. The agent is both constrained and enabled by the environment, but the agent is also able to act out creatively and change his environment (which applies to your argument).

It's a kind of fallacy to look at living things as entirely passive, at the whims of culture and time. They are also internally creative and act on the world. To reduce the free will argument to humans being nothing but a conglomeration of atoms ignores any of our properties as a living animal. That doesn't necessarily make the basic free will argument wrong, just not really that interesting, and a little reductive.

 

[Jarhyn]

.

You seem to be speaking against the same dualistic nonsense that DBT is: I don't give a shit about nonsensical libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist.

The sad part is that you have not understood a word I said. Nothing I have said supports dualism. Just the opposite.

Of course you don’t support dualism. But here is what you wrote in the other thread:

BS. I am supporting the proposition that it is the state of the brain, neural architecture, state and condition, that determines behaviour, not free will.

Of course, if you are not a dualist, then you realize that I AM my brain. And that means that I AM my neural architecture, state and condition.


And, since you are not a dualist, but given your own words quoted above, we can recast those words to the simpler formulation, viz.

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior, not free will.

And, with your own words, your have supplied a reductio of your hard determinism! If “I” determine my behavior, that just IS (compatibilist) free will! So your quote logically reduces to:

I am supporting the proposition that I determine my behavior.

Welcome to compatibilism, DBT!

Talk about creative interpretation!

Then again, creative interpretation and careful wording is the very essence of compatibilism.

The brain is the agency of response, therefore free will, is a far cry from proving free will. Careful wording and creative interpretation doesn't prove the proposition.

That takes neuroscience: how the brain works, how decisions are made and actions taken.

And I keep explaining to you that neuroscience is not what gets you there, either. You need: a few entry level SW courses, an assembly language course, a machine architecture course, a course on basic ML and a course on HTMs.

You need to understand a neuron well enough to create an artificial one, and then to understand the behavior of neurons in concert well enough to understand how they give rise to the expression of algorithms based on the field of their connection biases.

Then you might understand how a choice function can be implemented in neural media.

But none of that is necessary to show real examples of active choice functions in machines.

To me it looks like the arguments you and fromderinside are making are compatible with each other.

At a fundamental level, FDI is arguing that there is no centralized mover in the system, just a system that moves. If I'm understanding you correctly, you basically agree with this but choose to call it free will, while fromderinside doesn't.

fromderinside uses the lack of a centralized mover to conclude that will doesn't exist - which is true according to his definition of will. While you define the system as one that operates, making your definition of will true as well

I agree with the congruence of these two thoughts. We are a system that operates which will always land on one outcome. We can choose otherwise but what makes that so isn't that the next choice wasn't inevitable, but that the human body operates in an environment where it's free to act out a range of activity. We can choose otherwise because there are minimal constraints on our behavior - experientially we experience a feeling of freedom to choose. And in a way we are choosing, the brain activity happening is us.

The brain chooses - the choice it ended up making was inevitable - both of these things can be true.

No? There are, in any given event, "central movers".

To understand this one needs to understand just a single neuron, in relation to many other neurons:

This neuron has a bias value. In meat neurons it's a bit more messy on the activation curve and result, but essentially this bias value determines how many of the "many other neurons" it takes to "activate" the neuron, to make it output a "1".

If enough of the neurons "above" that one have activated, the input will exceed the bias, and it will fire.

The most simple "central mover" here is the bias.

There are other parts to the geometry of the neuron: it's connection weights, Its refractory period, it's refractory radius, it's refractory weight.

Some nifty switching can happen in the domain of local refractory behaviors, too, but it takes about a week to align myself on that math and I have no cause to right now.

But moreover, it ends up coming together in process that something IN that process does to itself modifies the process itself. At some level there is an executive loop, but fuck if I know where it is or how it's shaped, and fuck if I would tell anyone if I did. Pointing out the location and nature of the soul is dangerous.

What you're describing sounds like 'no centralized mover' to me - complicated electrochemical impulses. Unless you want to call the entire nervous system our 'centralized mover'.

And that's partly what I'm getting at - you both agree that the brain is material, but are defining it differently, and perceiving it differently. You can't really resolve that debate.

Well, no single central mover. There is always a straw that breaks the camel's back, a signal that says "yes, this, now".

If someone asked me objectively "why did this fault happen on this system" I would be able to say "this number was too low". That is a central mover to the event.

The conflict comes insofar as DBT abandons the reality that the process alters itself, that we do decide upon what we will want to some extent, and that the thing implements evaluable choice functions.

The problem I have is the use of "determinism" to attain "absolution".

FWIW, I basically agree with the gist of your argument.

I read some Anthony Giddens (sociology of all things) recently that I believe speaks to this discussion from a high level. His theory is that an agent and it's environment represent a duality - neither has primacy over the other. The agent is both constrained and enabled by the environment, but the agent is also able to act out creatively and change his environment (which applies to your argument).

It's a kind of fallacy to look at living things as entirely passive, at the whims of culture and time. They are also internally creative and act on the world. To reduce the free will argument to humans being nothing but a conglomeration of atoms ignores any of our properties as a living animal. That doesn't necessarily make the basic free will argument wrong, just not really that interesting, and a little reductive.

As I said, I think it really boils down to absolutionism on behalf of the hard determinist, seeking forgiveness or to forgive via the "necessity" of it all, forgetting that part of what made it necessitated was someone making a bad decision.

 

[fromderinside]

Columnar organization was described in 1957. (https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/jn.1957.20.4.408

Organizing principles were studies and theories were constructed from that time forward.

HTM is an AI construct that attempts to find analogs in observed neuroanatomy and brain function. HTM is not derived from brain function nor does not reflect how the brain works. For you to make that claim you'd have to be able to model actual brain function, cortex, midbrain, Llwherever.

HTMs are not specifically about columnar organization. They are about refractory period, which indicates that indeed you don't know what they are.

The reason they are important is because the advance happened around neural refractory period, not columnar organization.

It is these refractory periods, the temporal component of the neuron, that really brings it closer to human neural function. As it is, most teams developing this technology, are developing it by vigorously reverse engineering the human brain.

I don't need to reverse engineer a whole brain, though, for my points. I just need to prove: instructions, interpreters, and static analysis happen in machines built of switches, and show both machines are constructions of switches. I don't need to show how all the switches come together for both, just one or the other.

Then I need to show that the neurons in our head are capable of implementing all the switch types and then some. This is where HTMs come in, since the temporal component allows OR and NOT logics to arise, which are important for building more interesting systemic truth and state efficiently.

This is why you need to understand how neurons and meat can be observed as doing the same thing as the metal, once the basic pieces of free will are observed.

There are two issues here: first, "does determinism rule out free will?"

Well, computers certainly have all the pieces of compatibilist free will, just not generally automated all together.

Humans clearly have the ability to do anything the metal can and then some.

So, that eliminates your core premise.

Then you are just left with special pleading and no-true-scotsman.

Therefore because the metal implies compatibilist free will, as the meat is more capable than the metal, the meat has compatibilist free will.

I never said HTM was about columnar organization. I hinted that cortical structural organization was discovered and specified in 1957 by Mountcastle from NCU for the Somatosensory and, as it turns out, the entire sensory and association cortex. Weve all know about various refractory periods in neural information architecture ever since I entered college in the sixties. It comes with the neural chemistry of information transmission in biological systems. You should have gotten I knew such since I told you about my masters and dissertation experiments were detection resolution and transmission of acoustic information in the ascending NS.

You just can't accept that anyone knew anything about how the brain worked until some programmer digitally modelled a HTM biologically limited brain fart.

Your metal to meat attempt at proof of will ain't. Information is neither metal nor meat. And logic isn't material. What you need is an experiment that fetches objective material from subjective conjecture.

You assumed columnar organization was what I was talking about and it was not.

At any rate, I've shown all the elements necessary for compatibilist free will in systems of metal and electrons.

You are the hard determinist between us. Just the fact that free will's elements exist at all, regardless of whether in meat, flush your hard determinism down the toilet.

Proving the existence of the process in meat is just a nicety; you are the one nonsensically claiming that meat capable of far richer behavior than the metal is somehow unable to do the things the metal does.

No. I assumed you meant HTM which I had already looked up and provided  Hierarchical Temporal Memory reference for you to verify your thinking with what I found.

The theory took from biology some organization of cortex and other signal structures such as Hippocampus and neural tissues such as the pyramidal cell. All I did was note Neuroscientists had already found several kinds of organization among cortical sells such as the six column organization of with innervation arriving at levels three and four in those arrays by 1957.

You cellular model is temporally linked which I might suggest that attribute too had already been discovered and studied by 1965.

Living stuff didn't begin with meat, it was plant and algae related. Meat is something you thought was cute, but I think is both inaccurate and cumbersome. Leaving that aside chemical structure doesn't define life. And life is not what you characterize it to be. Those who take Physiological Psychology have good stories about scientific misadventure such as Cyril Burt finding a Burt face recognition cell in cats (another time).

BTW I've already many times correctly identified will, consciousness, and choice as subjective constructions. You've have never shown me other than a model of subjective will which is also subjectively based. A model is not a material thing. You can make something act like the will you conceive but you can't specify the actual material basis for it beyond implementation of models. Models are models, farts are farts, and Alice doesn't live here any more. Not material.

 

[DBT]

Nobody said they do. It's irrelevant.

The fact that the future is behind a horizon for us is certainly relevant.

It is exactly the horizons and limitations of our knowledge that are relevant to the fact that we are locally stochastic processing engines. That is entirely relevant to whether WE in our operation see "choices".

Once all that other shit of the past has conspired to condense in a single locality, it is not that other shit anymore, it is the locality, and the locality is where decision and choice happens. Because I am the thing, the locality, I say "I make the decision". Because I as the locality have a number of alternatives in the bin, I say "I have choices". Because I have in this same locality a process that can evaluate those decisions beyond their initial genesis, I can say "my will is free". Because I can transmit the plan for external analysis, I have done so objectively.

In our operation of seeing choices, we have to operate choice functions. Those choice function operations can be evaluated on their success criterion (re: unit test) outside of live execution meaning they are objectively capable of "evaluation of freedom to goal".

These are the requirements for compatibilist free will. Therefore compatibilist free will.

does not relate to cognition.

The core process of cognition does not relate to cognition? That's just silly.

At any rate, you seem to wish that humans are somehow fundamentally incapable of doing what a computer observably does, and what we observably do through such.

As Marvin is keen to point out, there are many things which I did not choose for myself, but when those things became a part of myself, only I myself choose on that basis. Because part of the things that become a part of myself are... From myself, it seems trivially true that the brain alters itself.

But moreover, I've made a machine that alters itself the way the brain does so I can absolutely attest to the fact the brain alters itself.

You have all the pieces you seem to demand, but I expect the real reason you don't want to accept that people have and make choices, even to be evil and do terrible things, is entirely separate from what you claim here as your basis for rejecting personal responsibility for personal decisionmaking.

What a mish mash.

We are not talking about stochastic, probabilistic or random events. The subject matter is related to free will in relation to determinism.

You keep wandering off topic. It is irrelevant. A waste of time.

If you can't stay within the parameters of the debate, don't bother.

 

[DBT]

Decision making is a process by which a course of action is determined through an interaction of information within the neural networks of a brain.

Of course.

This has nothing to do with free will. The label misrepresents the nature, mechanisms and means of decision making.

What’s Free Will About?

In 2013, the Tsarnaev brothers set off home-made explosives at the Boston Marathon, killing several people and injuring many others. They planned to set off the rest of their devices in New York city. To do this, they hijacked a car, driven by a college student, and forced him at gunpoint to assist their escape from Boston to New York.

On the way, they stopped for gas. While one of the brothers was inside the store and the other was distracted by the GPS, the student bounded from the car and ran across the road to another service station. There he called the police and described his vehicle. The police chased the bombers, capturing one and killing the other.

Although the student initially gave assistance to the bombers, he was not charged with “aiding and abetting”, because he was not acting of his own free will. He was forced, at gunpoint, to assist in their escape. The surviving bomber was held responsible for his actions, because he had acted deliberately, of his own free will.

A person’s will is their specific intent for the immediate or distant future. A person usually chooses what they will do. The choice sets their intent, and their intent motivates and directs their subsequent actions.

Free will is when this choice is made free of coercion and undue influence. The student’s decision to assist the bombers’ escape was coerced. It was not freely chosen.

Coercion can be a literal “gun to the head”, or any other threat of harm sufficient to compel one person to subordinate their will to the will of another.

Undue influence is any extraordinary condition that effectively removes a person’s control of their choice. Certain mental illnesses can distort a person’s perception of reality by hallucinations or delusions. Other brain impairments can directly damage the ability to reason. Yet another form may subject them to an irresistible compulsion. Hypnosis would be an undue influence. Authoritative command, as exercised by a parent over a child, an officer over a soldier, or a doctor over a patient, is another. Any of these special circumstances may remove a person’s control over their choices.

Why Do We Care About Free Will?

Responsibility for the benefit or harm of an action is assigned to the most meaningful and relevant causes. A cause is meaningful if it efficiently explains why an event happened. A cause is relevant if we can do something about it.

The means of correction is determined by the nature of the cause: (a) If the person is forced at gunpoint to commit a crime, then all that is needed to correct his or her behavior is to remove that threat. (b) If a person’s choice is unduly influenced by mental illness, then correction will require psychiatric treatment. (c) If a person is of sound mind and deliberately chooses to commit the act for their own profit, then correction requires changing how they think about such choices in the future.

In all these cases, society’s interest is to prevent future harm. And it is the harm that justifies taking appropriate action. Until the offender’s behavior is corrected, society protects itself from further injury by securing the offender, usually in a prison or mental institution, as appropriate.

So, the role of free will, in questions of moral and legal responsibility, is to distinguish between deliberate acts versus acts caused by coercion or undue influence. This distinction guides our approach to correction and prevention.

Free will makes the empirical distinction between a person autonomously choosing for themselves versus a choice imposed upon them by someone or something else.

Your example is essentially an expression of ''acting in accord to one's will without external force or coercion' as the definition of compatibilist free will.

Which fails in any instance because of the given reasons. It is the non chosen state and condition of a brain that determines thought, decision making and all related actions at any moment in time.

Yes, there is a distinction to be made between external force or coercion and inner necessitation.

We either act according to our will, or we are forced against our will, but be it forced or necessitated, it's still plain old will.

The agency is not will, but information processing.

 

[DBT]

he wasn't. It's you who is wrong

NO U!



The brain obviously alters itself.

To understand how the brain alters itself one merely need to know how a backpropagation Algo works.

Did someone say it doesn't?

Someone can say "you should want to do °°°" or even just "°°° is a thing that may be done by a human in our universe".

Now if, after this, I discover I do not want to do some thing, we have a baseline. I don't want to do it.

Wow. Another demonstration of not understanding the issue.

I could try to explain, but if you can't get it by you never will.

Now let's imagine for a moment they keep talking about it until the point where I find that now, I DO want to do it.

Now, someone else's brain has, through normal action, decided to act such that now I want something. Someone else has decided for me that I shall want something.

Do you wish to claim I cannot also do this to myself? That I can not do it without actually needing to speak words around it out loud? Do you deny that in a neural network that has been evolving for millions of years that somehow it never evolved to be connected to itself in such a useful way?

At any rate, in time, there is only now, the current moment. Antecedents stop being antecedents the moment they become what they currently are in time and space.

When an electron and a proton come close enough together in the right conditions, they stop being the antecedent of "close enough and in the right conditions" and start being entirely "the proton itself". The antecedents are gone, their causality a triviality to what they currently are. In the moment you are not your past, your history, those hashed forever and destructively so of the original state.

Things may be caused by their history, but their history stopped causING it after their history causED it, and it just became "what it is now".

Try to brush up on the nature of decision making by referring to neuroscience.

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

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

Michel Desmurget and a team of French neuroscientists arrived at this conclusion by stimulating the brains of seven people with electrodes, while they underwent brain surgery under local anaesthetic. When Desmurget stimulated the parietal cortex, the patients felt a strong desire to move their arms, hands, feet or lips, although they never actually did. Stronger currents cast a powerful illusion, convincing the patients that they had actually moved, even though recordings of electrical activity in their muscles said otherwise. ''


''Our thoughts, though abstract and vaporous in form, are determined by the actions of specific neuronal circuits in our brains. The interdisciplinary field known as “decision neuroscience” is uncovering those circuits, thereby mapping thinking on a cellular level. Although still a young field, research in this area has exploded in the last decade, with findings suggesting it is possible to parse out the complexity of thinking into its individual components and decipher how they are integrated when we ponder. Eventually, such findings will lead to a better understanding of a wide range of mental disorders, from depression to schizophrenia, as well as explain how exactly we make the multitude of decisions that ultimately shape our destiny.''

Quote:
"And the electrical activity in these neurons is known to reflect the delivery of this chemical, dopamine, to the frontal cortex. Dopamine is one of several neurotransmitters thought to regulate emotional response, and is suspected of playing a central role in schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and drug abuse," Montague says. "We think these dopamine neurons are making guesses at likely future rewards. The neuron is constantly making a guess at the time and magnitude of the reward."

"If what it expects doesn't arrive, it doesn't change its firing. If it expects a certain amount of reward at a particular time and the reward is actually higher, it's surprised by that and increases its delivery of dopamine," he explains. "And if it expects a certain level (of reward) and it actually gets less, it decreases its level of dopamine delivery."

Thus, says Montague, "what we see is that the dopamine neurons change the way they make electrical impulses in exactly the same way the animal changes his behavior. The way the neurons change their predictions correlates with the behavioral changes of the monkey almost exactly."

Whether one feels ''compelled'' or not, the decision making process itself is determined by the immediate condition of the neural circuitry (connectivity) and its own immediate information state (input and memory) in the instance of decision making (neural information processing), and not an act of conscious will. The latter is a consequence of the former, therefore cannot be described as being 'free' under any circumstances.

 

[DBT]

Nope, decisions are determined by information exchange between cells, networks and regions and fed into the experience of deliberation while conscious thought is active. Thought(s) form as the information is processed and reported in conscious form.
The agency is not conscious deliberation itself, but underlying unconscious information processing feeding the conscious experience with fully formed thoughts.
The illusion of conscious agency - as pointed out - is revealed when something goes wrong within the underlying system, connectivity, memory function, etc.

Again, regardless how the brain internally accomplishes the task, the brain actually does perform choosing. Choosing (1) inputs multiple possibilities (such as the meals on the restaurant menu), (2) applies some criteria of comparative evaluation (such as tastes, dietary goals, price), and based on that evaluation (3) outputs a single choice (such as "I will have the salad, please").

If the brain fails to perform this choosing, the customer in the restaurant will be unable to order dinner.

Nothing from the field of neuroscience contradicts this. In fact, you will see in your own quotes from neuroscientists repeated references to the function of decision-making.

And the only "free will" that they reject is the notion of a supernatural agency operating separately from the brain itself.

That the brain acts according to its physical makeup is not a sufficient condition to qualify as free will.

Neural architecture and agency, therefore free will, is not enough to prove the proposition.

If we are said to have 'free will,' will itself must play a crucial role in the decision-making process. It doesn't.

Will plays no part in the unconscious information processing activity that leads, in microseconds, to the experience of thought, deliberation, decision making and the will to act.

If will plays no part in regulating decision making, and no alternate actions are possible, will simply cannot be defined as free.

Free, by definition means that any one of number of possibilities can be realized....which, according to the given definition of determinism, is not possible.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Your example is essentially an expression of ''acting in accord to one's will without external force or coercion' as the definition of compatibilist free will.

Free will is when someone decides for themselves what they will do while free of coercion and other forms of undue influence. These include any significant mental illness that impairs a person's ability to perceive reality, to reason, or to resist an impulse.

So, it is not just external factors but it can also be internal factors that have an extraordinary influence upon our ability to choose for ourselves what we will do.

Which fails in any instance because of the given reasons.

This definition of free will is commonly understood and correctly applied by most people when judging a person's responsibility for their actions. The customers in the restaurant, choosing for themselves what they will have for dinner, are obvious examples of free will.

And your own choices, as you respond to the comments here in this forum, are further evidence of this operational free will.

All of the reasons you've given for denying free will have been using entirely different definitions of free will, such as "freedom from causal necessity", "freedom from oneself", "freedom from one's own brain", etc.

It is the non chosen state and condition of a brain that determines thought, decision making and all related actions at any moment in time.

And there you go, insisting free will must include "freedom from one's own brain". You are insisting that we must view free will as a "soul" operating outside the brain, when we both know that our brain is the organ that is doing the decision making.

What the brain has decided to do, whether to have the steak for dinner, or the salad, is what we have decided to do.

Yes, there is a distinction to be made between external force or coercion and inner necessitation. We either act according to our will, or we are forced against our will, but be it forced or necessitated, it's still plain old will.

If we are forced to do something against our will, then we are not free to decide for ourselves what we will do. Our will is subject to their will, and thus our will is not free. A coerced will is not plain old will. Plain old will is freely chosen by us, without coercion or undue influence.

The agency is not will, but information processing.

And information processing includes deciding whether to have the steak or the salad for dinner. You know, plain old free will.