Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 257 posts

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

#161

Post by dragonwriter »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #115
dragonwriter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

That still means you are the proper cause of your actions. The preceding history exists too, but isn't very relevant to the process of choice.

> That still means you are the proper cause of your actions. The preceding history exists too, but isn't very relevant to the process of choice.

How is it not relevant to the process of choice when it fully determines all aspects of it including the outcome? It is as relevant to the process of choice as the choice itself is to the action it produces.

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

#162

Post by Balgair »

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…

Aside: fMRI is under quite the firestorm lately for use as a tool of mental processing. It's a great tool for head trauma or other medical diagnostics. But for interpreting the brain's activity, it's not what it's been billed as. The now classic issue is the 'Dead Salmon' experiments in 2009 out of Dartmouth. That paper was a lightening rod and the arguments are yet to die down; the field is in flux (pardon the pun).

https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-th...

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

#163

Post by dahart »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #147
taneq wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! All of the "YOU don't actually choose to move your hand, it's THIS PART OF YOUR BRAIN" stuff makes no sense. What do you think 'you' are if not your brain plus your body?

There is no "you" or "self", that's the illusion. The "self" which exercises "free will", that's just another psychologically constructed phenomenon, just like thoughts and ideas and images. If "you" choose to move your hand, it's really just the environment, your senses, and your brain dictating that movement, your sense of self is there as a feeling. Meditation reveals that this is not necessary, this sense of self…

You’ve used the word “your” a lot in order to try to show there is no “you”. How is “your memory module” distinct and different from “your self”? How is a “preference circuit” distinct and different from free will? How does this argument amount to any more than reductionist word semantics? What does “you” or “self” mean to you, what was the expectation that you’re trying to break down, and how is it different than the sum of your memories and preferences and functioning body parts? Does it matter that my memory module and preference circuit chose a different movie than yours did?

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

#164

Post by GoblinSlayer »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #160
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still means you are the proper cause of your actions. The preceding history exists too, but isn't very relevant to the process of choice.

That is if you assume the world is Markov, but in our granularity of thought and limited perception, the only way we can reconcile subsequent observations is through history. In other words, you can't peer into the universe itself at any individual moment to observe all properties because you have access to partial information, the world could be markov, but the lack of your perceptive abilities requires that you tre…

A choice happens in a short timeframe, Libet measured half a second for the simplest choices. Distant history simply doesn't happen in the right time.

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

#165

Post by mannykannot »

finghin wrote: post #56
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…

I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger). Can…

I agree with you on this issue, and I suspect education is at least partly responsible for the 'definitions first' approach.

When teaching a topic in math, it is usual to start with definitions, and this is often also the case with science, but that is not how progress is made: more typically, the definitions follow from learning more about what starts as a vague or speculative concept, or was not even imagined before the studying was done (entropy, for example).

Philosophy is not immune to the problem; it is not that uncommon for me to find an author basing an argument on an ontology or a metaphysical claim that I suspect could be, at some future time, empirically refuted, or where some thing is "in a sense" like something else, without establishing that the sense in which they are similar is relevant (for example, there is a sense in which learning how to ride a bicycle is like learning how to perform addition, but it would take more than this sense to conclude that riding a bicycle is, to any useful degree, just a matter of learning a set of propositions.)

As you say, definitions can be used to avoid an issue, and while I agree with Dennett on many things, I feel that he and his fellow compatibilists are doing this with free will, which I consider to be the true 'hard problem' of consciousness.

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

#166

Post by twodave »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #150
twodave wrote: 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…

You claim this "thread" leads to all reason and truth being invalid, which is overreaching, to put it plainly. How do you reckon that all mathematics, the periodic table of elements, the planetary bodies in our solar system, are suddenly invalidated because humans weren't deciding to study them, but were merely following natural behavioral patterns? If we don't have free will, does that invalidate all aliens' civiliz…

I didn't intend to imply that truth would not exist--rather that we'd have no way to validate it, truth and reason being human concepts. If we invalidate our own faculties (I don't see any other way to categorize not having free will) then while there absolutely still is truth out there, we are hopelessly incapable of validating any of it.

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

#167

Post by twodave »

gameswithgo wrote: post #5
twodave wrote: 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?

Yes, in my opinion the only way for reason and free will to exist are if some supernatural being were to grant it to us. That said, in order to truly have knowledge of anything we must first be able to assert free will. Otherwise even this God figure's interference in our natural lives may just be interpreted as an outside stimulus that we're dutifully responding to according to the laws of nature.

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

#168

Post by twodave »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #150
twodave wrote: 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…

You claim this "thread" leads to all reason and truth being invalid, which is overreaching, to put it plainly. How do you reckon that all mathematics, the periodic table of elements, the planetary bodies in our solar system, are suddenly invalidated because humans weren't deciding to study them, but were merely following natural behavioral patterns? If we don't have free will, does that invalidate all aliens' civiliz…

Also I thought by calling this whole debate nonsense I would be seen to believe that free will must exist. It's simply not derived from some haphazard biological coincidence, in my opinion.

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

#169

Post by twodave »

wruza wrote: post #12
twodave wrote: 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…

I’m interested in topic. Can you please expand a little or point to a book/idea that does? The “reason and truth” part specifically. Why truth would be invalid if there exist only complex finite automata? Can’t complex enough entities reason about this system while being a part of it, coincidentally being able to do that without contradiction?

I speak of reason and truth as human constructs. If we cannot be sure that we have free will, then, while truth exists in abundance, we have no ability to validate it. I say this all a bit tongue in cheek because I absolutely believe that we have free will. And in any case, to suggest otherwise to me would seem like a cop-out for the consequences of my own decisions.

The first 3-4 chapters of the book Miracles by C.S. Lewis cover this topic pretty well in my opinion, even if you're not spiritual-minded.

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

#170

Post by twodave »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #26
twodave wrote: 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…

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?

If you really believed that you wouldn't say things like "we understand". Because if you really believe there's no free will then all human understanding is a sham.
Post reply on HN