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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)

#121

Post by pessimizer »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #15
mcguire wrote: post #11

This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand. An observer using fMRI or somesuch notes that they observe neural activity before you report making the decision, and they can even predict where and how you are going to move from observations of neural behavior. If you are a materialist, how is th…

I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs software. If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is software. A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. Of course, if all yo…

Introspection is an untrustworthy self-narrative. Repeating a bunch of language that you've been told describes why people behave as they do is indistinguishable from the introspection you describe. GPT-3 could definitely do it convincingly.

edit: I'd recommend Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions about introspection and consciousness http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

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

#122

Post by AgentME »

dragonwriter wrote: post #113
AgentME wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people get mixed up by the idea that "physics determines your actions", as if that's contradictory to "you determine your actions". I love the way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p... puts it, that "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

> "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations. But, it doesn't. The reason dualism and free-will are so deeply tied up is because “you are within physics” does not provide a means by which “you” can be the root cause of anything; if you are merely within physics, then you are simply a product of material causes and can only be (to the extent physics is deterministic) a fully-externally-determi…

I think people feel like they're the cause of something when they make a choice and then cause something by that choice. That whole choice process is carried out by physical reactions in our mind. Neurons fire and produce the thoughts representing alternative choices, the neurons fire to process the choices, to come up with different ways of judging the choices, the neurons fire in a way that picks the choice with the highest expected value, and then they fire in a way that produces a good feeling for thinking it through and making a choice, in order to weight the other neurons into doing this process more often. To our mind, from the inside, judging and making a choice feels like a basic feature of the universe, because it really is a basic feature of our brain itself, but that feature isn't a basic element of the universe, it's implemented in physics and neurons.

People are evolved to consider the decision process as a basic element in the world partly to recognize the decision-making ability in others, so we can instinctively predict other people's decisions, and know that we may be blamed by others for our decisions, and do that we can blame others for their decisions. So the ability to make decisions feels like a basic element of the world in ourselves and others, but that feeling is evolved into us to make us effective socially, it's not an element of the universe.

If you made an AI and an entirely self-contained virtual world for it to survive in, and you peeked into its memory, would you expect to find it actually caring (beyond mere curiosity) about whether the physics/software it existed in was deterministic (with pseudo-randomness, though still completely unpredictable to the virtual inhabitants), even though it wouldn't result in any possibly noticeable changes for it? If you traced the AI's beliefs and found that it believed that the correctness or free-ness of its decisions were linked to this question, you would assume the AI was very confused about something.

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

#123

Post by hnedeotes »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #38
gameswithgo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You wouldn't be able to distinguish between:

A) A universe with God;

B) A simulated universe (where the simulation due to the nature of being simulated will have all the characteristics that lead to the conceptualisation of God, hence being indistinguishable);

C) A fake universe - for similar reasons as the simulation, and conceptually being the same as a simulation, it will exhibit all the same characteristics - the equivalent non computational example would be seeding a planet with humans and letting them go about their lives while keeping an eye on them and intervening when wanted, or the story shown in Truman’s Show - the fake here refers to it not being what it seems, not to it not existing;

D) A universe where consciousness IS the essence of it and what gives rise to it in the first place, making every manifestation in it be direct manifestations of that consciousness and being effectively intertwined to the point where conscious parts can in some way affect the global consciousness and vice-versa, this eventually leads to the idea of A God as well, but is not "God" in the way we usually define it, it just quacks like it;

E) A universe different from all the previous descriptions, as in without an overarching conscious form modelling it - the fact that you would then have both free-will and subjective experience of it (since I think no one will argue that you can NOT "experience" things objectively) would probably lead you (or someone) to formulate any of these other ideas - simply because the universe to be experienceable has to have certain minimal rules - given that the rules/laws supersede the abilities of the subjects (cannot be/have been made by the subjects describing them themselves) it can look like any of the other universes.

A totally random universe doesn't seem to make sense because for it to exist in any way experienceable it has to have at least certain laws that govern its manifestation and any possible perception by “anything” in it, at which point it stops being completely random and has to be one of the other 5 descriptions, which again, will all be indistinguishable.

If this makes sense for you then:

> It is for our own good to surrender to a greater design than our own finite understanding

may or may not be a valid proposition. If you cannot distinguish between them then you have to assume that it might not make sense to blindly "surrender" to a greater design.

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

#124

Post by PeterisP »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

I find attempts to disprove free will incredibly boring. If there is no free will, then everything the investigators wrote and did is the result of some deterministic (or random) process which doesn’t have anything to do with logic or evidence and whether or not people accept the conclusion is also independent of reason and logic. Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any discussion or argument,…

The key issue probably is that determinism and lack of free will complicate the question of "what's the point of doing anything?", but complications like that are not really an argument for or against free will; we can't assume that life has to have a specific point and use that to justify statements about the nature of reality, it's the opposite way around.

Free will and an illusion of free will are distinct concepts, IMHO there's a consensus that we do have an illusion of free will and that there are some practical benefits for having such an illusion - but again, that's not necessarily an argument relevant to a discussion of whether free will actually exists.

Furthermore, lack of free will does not imply a lack of an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence, quite the contrary, it implies that you changing your mind is not just an arbitrary choice but is going to happen (or not) depending on the evidence you receive and how (and from whom) you receive it; it only means that, given your previous state and all your observations, the outcome (changing the mind) is predictable and isn't arbitrary. Perhaps it's influenced by some small seemingly random factors that are hard or impossible to observe and analyse (creating the illusion of choice or requiring to model the whole system as hard-to-predictable "black box") - for example, we obviously can't access all the exact details of our own brain state - but it's not determined by some "out of system" choice that's somehow distinct from what the brain does as a physical, deterministic "machine".

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

#125

Post by coldtea »

garmaine wrote: post #120
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re right, I’m convinced I don't think you are convinced. You were just meant to say so.

What is your point?

There is no point, it was a causal chain that made it inevitable for me to write the above comment

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

#127

Post by coldtea »

pessimizer wrote: post #119
coldtea wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. Well, in some way it is, in that they can cut your hands and feet, and you'll still be you. And perhaps if they could just put your head/brain in a jar, and you were still coscious, you'd still consider yourself you...

Or if they slice your brain down the middle in put it in two different jars, would they both think of themselves as you? Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?

>would they both think of themselves as you?

If they both continue to think, yes.

>Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?

When they lose consciousness?

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

#128

Post by amelius »

joefourier wrote: post #10

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…

> Can someone actually provide a definition of free will?

Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.

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

#129

Post by PeterisP »

cortesoft wrote: post #43
netizen-936824 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a brain being a physical system necessitate it being deterministic? It seems like the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the more things seem to be probabilistic than deterministic. The physical brain being probabilistic fits perfectly with the idea of free will.

I don't consider randomness as any more "free" than determinism - the concept of "choice" does not appear anywhere on the whole tradeoff spectrum between total randomness and total determinism.

It does emphasise the point that any discussion based on a dichotomy between determinism and free will is fundamentally flawed, as randomness can be a relevant factor, so an anti-determinism argument is not necessarily a pro-free-will argument.

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

#130

Post by sethammons »

PixyMisa wrote: post #82
cwalv wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a better distinction is how some things are "hard to define" but "easy to understand".

That's the problem. If you can't define it, you don't actually understand it.

The ol’ “I know porn when I see it” argument.
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