There isn't really a 'freewill problem'.

[Subsymbolic]

My certainty is in knowing how we can make statements about understandings of natural phenomena.

We make them within models.

And not without them.

Perhaps explaining the relevance of this metaphysical statement and then, you know arguing for it rather than stating it dogmatically.

You cannot make any objective statements about consciousness based only on subjective reports.

You certainly can. You can make objective statements about the reports of how their conscious experience seemed to them. You are simply confused about what Libet is trying to achieve here. He doesn't care if these reports are true, in fact one of the things he is demonstrating is the gap between how things are reported to seem and the biology.

Less yet on guessing about the timing of decisions.

Perhaps it would be helpful if you told me precisely which set of experiments you are talking about.

They are random and there are too many variables that cannot be accounted for.

Random? that's an interesting claim...

Some feel pain when you push so hard and others don't feel much at all.

It's amazing that you can reject something in paragraph one and rely on it a few paragraphs later, please try to be at least internally consistent. Even if you were, it's still the case that Libet isn't interested in what people feel, but what they report they seem to feel. These are not the same thing. One is phenomenology and one is heterophenomenology, to use Dennett's terminology.

You need a testable model to make objective statements.

Other metaphysics are available - falsification, coherence and so on.

And with consciousness you need a physiological model not subjective statements or guesses.

I don't think you do, perhaps connecting consciousness with its putative neural correlates needs that, but consciousness is a mental event that rather resists all that, which is probably why Libet is only interested in verbal and behavioural reports of how it seemed. There's a difference, A difference you are still not seeing.

Progress in producing a working model to explain how some activity results in conscious animal experience has not progressed very far.

Sure, but that's not what Libet is trying to do as I have explained multiple times.

There is no working model that comes close to explaining the phenomena.

Well, there is, but that's not remotely relevant to this discussion.

So we are left with researchers who must do something. So they time subjective guesses to the millisecond to mark time.

As I said, perhaps a link to the particular experiment that you are misunderstanding would be helpful...

 

[bilby]

No we can't. Not rationally.

Of course we fucking can. We can imagine ANYTHING. Rationality comes AFTER, and is used to decide whether what we imagined was actually possible. To reject imaginings without applying rationality to them is assuming your conclusion, and leads to really bad results, and a total failure to understand anything useful at all...

Oh.

So THAT'S your problem.

I was wondering.

 

[Emily Lake]

I was being sarcastic but only up to a point.

Up to a point because I believe the only knowledge we have is subjective experience. You know pain whenever you experience pain. You know redness whenever you experience it.

As to knowledge of the so-call objective world, I think it doesn't amount to knowledge at all.

How do you square your viewpoint with the collected body of human knowledge, the sciences, etc?

Science works, we build rockets, we learn things, and we even manage to record that knowledge so that others can learn and further that knowledge. If that's a delusion... it's a remarkably powerful, prevalent, and persistent delusion shared by all humans and a good chunk of animals that engage in teaching and passing on acquired knowledge to their progeny.

And you could make exactly the same argument about our senses. You could argue that the colours we perceive must be real since we use them and it works wonderfully, and so we would be supposed to know real colours that would be out there. Except this is contradicted by science. The colours as we experience them can only be inside our heads, somehow, and whatever is outside that we believe we perceive can only be something like electromagnetic waves of various wavelengths, whatever that is. No blue. No red. Just "electromagnetic waves".

So, instead of knowing the world, we know our model of the world. So, at least that's something we know. Some of this model is perceptual, some of it abstract formalism. Same effect. It's a model. And instead of knowing the world, we trust our model, and that's good enough. I can say the same thing, it works! But we're subject to naive realism, which is simply that we naively take our perceptual model to be the actual world outside. We really believe there's a blue flower there and a red tomato. We really do. And then we extend our belief to our abstract and formal scientific model of the world. And, clearly, we also suffer a kind of naive realism about it, too, the one you display by insisting science is real knowledge of the world. Some things never change.
EB

That's... very philosophical, I guess. But it gets too close to the borderline solipsist argument for me. It's a pointless and meaningless distinction.

 

[fast]

What is the difference between freewill and freedom? I ask with profound hesitancy. I should probably ask instead, what is freedom. I'm just nervous that I'm going to get a bozo the clown response similar to how a person claims inaccuracy when criminality is denied despite legal context. I don't want a play on ambiguity. Also, while there are differences between things, similarities shouldn't be foresaken.

 

[untermensche]

No we can't. Not rationally.

Of course we fucking can. We can imagine ANYTHING. Rationality comes AFTER, and is used to decide whether what we imagined was actually possible. To reject imaginings without applying rationality to them is assuming your conclusion, and leads to really bad results, and a total failure to understand anything useful at all...

Oh.

So THAT'S your problem.

I was wondering.

So go ahead show me how it is rational to say a cyclone has "will" no less "free will".

How would this will be created? By what activity?

What would it's purpose be?

 

[Subsymbolic]

What is the difference between freewill and freedom? I ask with profound hesitancy. I should probably ask instead, what is freedom. I'm just nervous that I'm going to get a bozo the clown response similar to how a person claims inaccuracy when criminality is denied despite legal context. I don't want a play on ambiguity. Also, while there are differences between things, similarities shouldn't be foresaken.

Traditionally freewill concerns being able to have the intention to do something while freedom concerns actually being able to act. So if I encase you in concrete, leaving room only for you to breath, I remove rather a lot of freedom but zero freewill. If I SciFi brainwash you then I remove freewill - there's a further argument as to whether this also removes freedom. I say yes. others don't.

 

[untermensche]

You certainly can. You can make objective statements about the reports of how their conscious experience seemed to them....

How consciousness seemed to somebody else is the definition of a subjective not objective report.

You cannot turn subjective reports into objective reports.

To imagine you can is a serious problem.

 

[Subsymbolic]

You certainly can. You can make objective statements about the reports of how their conscious experience seemed to them....

How consciousness seemed to somebody else is the definition of a subjective not objective report.

You cannot turn subjective reports into objective reports.

To imagine you can is a serious problem.

Here's a quote from Libet's very first paper on this:

the brain ’decides’ to initiate or, at least, prepare to initiate before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place”

In this case, the whole damn thing was recorded with plenty of time references. The action that was used to report any apparent awareness was to bend the wrist or fingers. As such there was a report of precisely when the subject felt they had become aware of 'the urge, want or intention'. There's no attempt to specify what this appearance of an urge want or intention was or even if it was in fact an illusion, merely a desire to place the reporting of the seeming of it very clearly in a timeline.

This report is as objective as one can wish. The time it occured is as objective as one can wish. The report can then be placed in a timeline with other information, for example the point at which the first action potentials occur and the point at which action occurs.

You want to say this sort of heterophenomenology isn't objective then please offer the argument, don't just assert stuff.

 

[DBT]

I'll ask you the same questions.

In the Libet experiments what is the objective testable model of consciousness in play?

Making conclusions from data connected to no testable model is not science. It is religion.

You are ignoring the necessity of a sequence of events beginning with input from the senses and culminating with conscious response. If you considered this, there would be no need to ask your questions, you would understand that it is indeed the brain with its senses and its information processing, memory function, etc, that is the agent of consciousness and response....

 

[bilby]

No we can't. Not rationally.

Of course we fucking can. We can imagine ANYTHING. Rationality comes AFTER, and is used to decide whether what we imagined was actually possible. To reject imaginings without applying rationality to them is assuming your conclusion, and leads to really bad results, and a total failure to understand anything useful at all...

Oh.

So THAT'S your problem.

I was wondering.

So go ahead show me how it is rational to say a cyclone has "will" no less "free will".

How would this will be created? By what activity?

What would it's purpose be?

I could ask you the same question about your 'woman'.

Which is the entire point.

You are assuming your conclusion. You can demonstrate the existence of free will, as long as you are able to start with an entity that you define as having free will.

That's not logic, or reason; it's circular argument and pointless mental masturbation.

 

[Kharakov]

The cyclone blew the roof of a house. If it has free will, it chose that house freely. If it does not have free will, the universe had planned for the cyclone to destroy that particular roof, at its inception.

Do you believe that cyclones have free will?

In case you didn't read the fine print, your psych loan doesn't include free will, but it comes with a free whooshing sound every time something goes over unter's head.

 

[Emily Lake]

Pettiness and politics is what you find in the Universities. People that place reputation over knowledge.

I rather think that depends on both the university in question as well as the discipline being studied. There was very little pettiness or politics involved in my math degree.

 

[Emily Lake]

For those of you arguing that free will doesn't exist, or that choice is an illusion...

Can you explain how imagination and invention are deterministic? Can you explain how the building of new knowledge upon prior knowledge, and the extrapolation of what is known into the realm of the not-yet-known comes to be? What mechanism separates dream from imagination?

 

[DBT]

For those of you arguing that free will doesn't exist, or that choice is an illusion...

The term free will is irrelevant, it tells us nothing about behaviour or decision making. A brain makes choices based on its information state at any given instance in time. Decision making is not free will. Selection involves weighing the cost to benefit ratio between available options based on a given set of criteria, needs, wants, desires, fears, not free will.

Can you explain how imagination and invention are deterministic? Can you explain how the building of new knowledge upon prior knowledge, and the extrapolation of what is known into the realm of the not-yet-known comes to be? What mechanism separates dream from imagination?

Invention is built on the framework of past discoveries. Once upon a time we lived in caves and had no idea of how to build houses....our mental software has developed since then...at an ever expanding rate.

 

[fromderinside]

Can you explain how imagination and invention are deterministic? Can you explain how the building of new knowledge upon prior knowledge, and the extrapolation of what is known into the realm of the not-yet-known comes to be? What mechanism separates dream from imagination?

Invention is built on the framework of past discoveries. Once upon a time we lived in caves and had no idea of how to build houses....our mental software has developed since then...at an ever expanding rate.

Besides the energy for that blinding flash of insight didn't just appear out of a/the vacuum.

 

[DBT]

Can you explain how imagination and invention are deterministic? Can you explain how the building of new knowledge upon prior knowledge, and the extrapolation of what is known into the realm of the not-yet-known comes to be? What mechanism separates dream from imagination?

Invention is built on the framework of past discoveries. Once upon a time we lived in caves and had no idea of how to build houses....our mental software has developed since then...at an ever expanding rate.

Besides the energy for that blinding flash of insight didn't just appear out of a/the vacuum.

Depends on what is inside my skull....it could be a vacuum, ya never know. Sort of like Schroedinger's cat, both could be true at the same time, a brain present and no brain present. Superposition if you like, with a touch of entanglement and a dollop of probability bound up in a deterministic package....

 

[untermensche]

So go ahead show me how it is rational to say a cyclone has "will" no less "free will".

How would this will be created? By what activity?

What would it's purpose be?

I could ask you the same question about your 'woman'.

Which is the entire point.

You are assuming your conclusion. You can demonstrate the existence of free will, as long as you are able to start with an entity that you define as having free will.

That's not logic, or reason; it's circular argument and pointless mental masturbation.

I am not assuming anything.

We can imagine the choice is free.

Or we can say the universe planned it at it's inception.

Take your pick.

 

[untermensche]

Invention is built on the framework of past discoveries. Once upon a time we lived in caves and had no idea of how to build houses....our mental software has developed since then...at an ever expanding rate.

Invention is first seeing what exists and imagining something else.

Then it is trying to make your imagination real.

You are claiming that the act of turning imagined things into real things is merely a reflex. As hard as that is to imagine.

With absolutely no evidence.

 

[Emily Lake]

Invention is built on the framework of past discoveries. Once upon a time we lived in caves and had no idea of how to build houses....our mental software has developed since then...at an ever expanding rate.

I challenge that assertion. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that our brains haven't changed in any measurable way since the ice ages (maybe prior to that). Other animals don't display invention or innovation, nor do they display the same degree of stacked knowledge.

How exactly has our "software" changed over time?

Simply asserting that invention is built on a framework of past discovery doesn't sufficiently answer the question. What's the process? How did that first discovery occur, and what makes the distinction (in a deterministic view without free will) between an observation and an extrapolation? What process, without will, produced the change from simple shelter in a cave to building houses? What process, without will, produced the shift from running away from fire to harnessing it for our benefit?

 

[ruby sparks]

For those of you arguing that free will doesn't exist, or that choice is an illusion...

Can you explain how imagination and invention are deterministic?

How could they possibly be anything else?

Other than perhaps random, which is not free will, and would in any case affect every entity and lifeform.

However, as I've said at least a few times, you may be talking about something which your interolocuters would agree with even if they disagree about the term used to describe it, so if that's what's happening, it's literally pointless to discuss, agree or disagree, imo, because there may be at least two different things on the table.