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

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

#181
"Free Will" is a nebulous concept, so of course nothing can disprove it.

The question I always ask with this is "free from what?". Not freedom to do something... that's not how freedom works. freedom is generally defined from the lack of control. So freedom from what?

From someone else controlling your will? Sure, we have that mostly - though we can definitely screw with people's minds. I can't make you think something. But I can, say, get you drunk and change your decision making ability. Teh yes/no question is trivial as soon as the definition is specific enough.

From literally any connection to your memory? Of course we don't have that because we know we use memories to make decisions. Again, the question becomes trivial.

Why is this still treated as hard? I'm sure it's because people are attaching vague definitions based on emotional wants. I want to be free! of what? just free!

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

#182

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…

it's not just illogical, it's an infinite regress. It's purposely adding in an extra layer that by definition can't be discounted. So if you disprove one layer of free will, you still have an infinite number of possible ways you still have (or don't have) free will at yet deeper levels.

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

#183
post #56

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'll take "will" to be a given. There is something that is capable of thinking, and the thoughts it has are will. A decision, then, is when that entity has a thought that has intention.

I think it becomes nebulous by adding "free" to the equation, because it's not defined in relation to something specifically. Free from what? How would you differentiate it from a decision that's not "free" in this sense?

Free from thoughts? Free from gods? Free from memory? Free from circumstances? To differentiate it from "non-free will", we have to define what we actually care about, and then use it only with that scope.

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

#184
post #56

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…

If someone else can predict what decisions you will make with 100% accuracy can it still be free will? Some argue it can't, they like to believe that their mind is a unique snowflake that can never be reproduced, anything else means they don't have free will.

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

#185
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…

Counterpoint: "You" are the sum of your evolutionary and biological history and your personal experiences. You can be the cause of something because it would be difficult or impossible to assign it to any small number of that history. The root cause---the unmoved mover---is a red herring, I think.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Distant history sets up the thresholds of the neurons as well as their architecture and makeup.

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

#187
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…

Computational irreducibility breaks the apparent paradox. "You" are an extremely complicated computational system. Even if the choices you make are fully deterministic given the current arrangement of the atoms, molecules, cells in your body and the situation of those in the wider universe (which is an oversimplification of the quantum mechanical reality), "you" are still making the choices and you still have free will in that sense. due to computational irreducibility, there is no system that could ever replace you without being you. Even if you could magically perfectly replicate the human mind in a digital form, it would still experience different inputs and possess different methods of output, and the digital simulation would immediately diverge. There would be two of "you", and each would be different and would have their own free will.

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

#188

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. 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.

AFAIK, in physics this property is called indempotence: the choice is determined by the state of mind at the time of the choice and not by history that led to that state. Theoretically many different histories can lead to this state, or the history may not exist at all, if mind was created in this state 5 minutes ago, in all these cases the subsequent behavior will be the same.

Theoretically, yes. (Good point!) But the number of variables is large enough that I think you can discard the many different histories as well as the non-existent history.

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

#189

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 thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact mo…

Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0].

An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past".

At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you?

Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon?

Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will.

[0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.

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

#190
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my brain was in a jar, but all my sensory perception linked to a robot body on the other face of the planet (without my brain knowing), I would probably consider that robot body me.

And if someone managed to build a model of the human brain and "uploaded" your brain into it such that it acted identically to your biological brain, would you also consider that "you"? Are there two of "you" now? Note: I'm not disagreeing with you, just kind of following the road your comment lays out.

Don't put too much emphasis on "you" there...the two will diverge quickly. :-)
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