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The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#31
If you try the experiment yourself—and you can do it right now, just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist—you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision.

One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:

it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision

That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.

Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#32

The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-physical consciousness telling your body to move. This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are present before you are conscious of your decision to mov…

That may be true, but I think our current conception of free will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely deterministic.

I think physical systems are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#33

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept. It seems it is just a neb…

I am also of the opinion that the concept is either incoherent or meaningless.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#34

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept. It seems it is just a neb…

I think there's quite a bit of historical philosophical, and theological, debate on the topic. Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".

This needle is threaded by contemplation of what it means for someone to “choose.” If one freely chooses whatever one wants, then one has free will but one will always choose their desires.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#35

The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-physical consciousness telling your body to move. This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are present before you are conscious of your decision to mov…

That may be true, but I think our current conception of free will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely deterministic.

Why does determinism preclude free will? If I am the physical processes that occur in my brain, then my decisions are rooted in those processes. Even if those processes are deterministic and there was only ever one outcome for my decisions, I can still say that I have free will because it was the very unfolding of those deterministic processes which led me to me to expressing my free will. There is only a clash between free will and determinism when you imagine that your consciousness is in some vague sense separate from the physical world.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#36

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept. It seems it is just a neb…

The late John H Conway deduced a consistency proof that if people have free will, so do elementary particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

He discusses it more in the following lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be...

Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free).

I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will.

"If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu...

MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...

"Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t."

Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers.

Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite

-> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE)

-> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits

-> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin)

-> Free will exists (Conway)

This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#38
post #4

This sort of debate always struck me as nonsense. If our actions are not derived of our own free will, but just exist as a small part of nature, then if you follow that thread far enough you’ll understand that all reason and truth would also be invalid, being just the effect to some coincidental cause. This incidentally would render theories about the subject of free will invalid as well. Thus if there is no free wil…

Suppose an all powerful god controls everything that happens to us. Could not such a God give us the knowledge that we have no free will?

Suppose God is infinite, and we are finite. If free will is finite, then we have free will, and have knowledge of good and evil. Yet it also means we can never know God's will, which is infinite.

Does infinity mean an unchanging concrete block? No! Recursion and fractals are infinite. There may yet be a perfect, infinite pattern that this world is designed to follow.

Would it be possible to know the whole pattern? No. But could we know enough to fit into that? Yes. And I think that it requires the surrender of self-will, which is usually deterministic.

In earthquakes, bridges (nicely rational, rectangular shapes) often crack (with fractal tree-shaped fractures). It is for our own good to surrender to a greater design than our own finite understanding.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain is a deterministic system. We understand the dynamics of deterministic systems from the study of physics, so what is free will in terms of a system with an already decided outcome?

Quantum Physics has perfectly random outcomes

In QM, you may teleport into the sun, but it was never registered for de-coherent macro objects, even for few millimeters. A brain is macro, neurons and their signals are pretty macro. Why should a brain or its parts even slightly depend on QM effects? Modern CPUs which have much smaller parts can work for years and not experience QM randomness bugs. Nothing is deterministic or “the same” at quantum level, but at the classical scale it doesn’t matter, because chances to observe any difference or randomness in an usual object lifetime are essentially zero.

Re: The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

#40
The word "freedom" doesn't appear in this discussion, so I'll ask: what does "freedom" mean if you don't have "free will"?

At random (not really, it was near the box as I typed):

mcquire>You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand.

Was that person free to move or not move their hand?

I decide to emigrate to New Zealand because they seem to run their country sanely. But is that a free choice or did I undertake this without a real choice to do otherwise?

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