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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)

#191

Post by mcguire »

Balgair wrote: post #162
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).…

Yes, I was hesitant about that, but I was operating under the assumptions of the described experiments. :-)

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

#192

Post by mcguire »

red75prime wrote: post #139
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…

> If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?

If you boil water, you see an amount of water changing state from a liquid to a gas, not individual molecules simply gaining momentum.

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

#193

Post by mcguire »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #105
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…

But who is making the decision, is it "you", or is it the fabric of the Universe itself, the quarks, which is making the "decision" for you?

Yes, in a sense. :-)

I'm making the decision, because it is difficult to assign the decision to any small group of things at a lower level. The quarks are part of that process, but are just doing quark things.

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

#194

Post by chr1 »

myWindoonn wrote: post #57
chr1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained. Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained. But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are com…

Nobody in the simulation you've described would actually make any choices; the choices are predetermined, baked into the heap of the CA/TM being used to drive the computation. Conway's Free Will concerns situations where the choices cannot be predetermined, as a consequence of the Kochen-Specker lemma.

Situations where the choices cannot be predetermined, are not free will, they are just randomness, because they do not depend on the one making the choice.

That said, knowing that the choice is predetermined and knowing the choice, is often very different.

For simple systems if you know the initial state you can easily predict all the future states by using a formula and not doing the computation the system performs.

But for many systems like rule 30, the only way to predict the future state is to perform exactly the computation the system is performing. So if the TM describes a person, the only way to know future states of the TM from initial state is to wait for the person in the TM to make the choice.

In Conways example, free will would be if experimenters decision what to measure is based on the state of the part of the universe describing the experimenter alone, and not connected to the parts describing other experimenters performing related measurement.

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

#195

Post by wruza »

Thorrez wrote: post #97
wruza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Does it make sense for an automaton to say "I will search for truth. I am searching for truth. I have found truth." when that automaton has been preprogrammed to say that and had no choice in the matter? Here's a version of this argument: https://youtu.be/BsAEj6UsrI0?t=297

That boils down to the question “can deterministic system contain inner truths?”. While I can’t really answer that now, imagine a deterministic system that has some truth in it that may be observed from outside (by e.g. us, its creators). Then claiming that there is no sense in automaton reasoning is equivalent to claiming that this system doesn’t have an attractor for that. But if there is such attractor, then we may watch this automaton in “realtime” looking for truth (being catched by an attractor), move to it (along its field), and then state that it found it (by observing a fixed point). Or it could spiral into “truth point” never reaching it, like we usually do.

Iow, systems are not required to have truths or elements that are pre-aimed to balance themselves along these truths, but our world doesn’t have to be like that (unless proven otherwise).

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

#196

Post by jsmith45 »

PeterisP wrote: post #124
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 concept…

Yeah. The main reason I feel a need to believe in free will, is because if I assume a perfectly deterministic world, how do one defeat the following question:

Why is it worth putting any effort in? In a perfectly deterministic world whatever will happen will happen. Me deciding to just not try won't change anything, since me doing so was predetermined in the first place.

That argument is pretty trivially defeated by believing the concept of free will. (Even if this belief is false). And yeah, I know the previous argument is deeply flawed, but giving a satisfactory counter argument not based on free will is tricky at best.

This ties deeply to the concept of illusion of free will. If you can conclusively and convincingly prove that there is no free will, you can lose some of the benefits of the illusion of free will.

For example, if hypothetically one were to prove that the world is fully deterministic, and no free will exists, then it opens a bunch of other philosophical questions. Is it right (moral) to punish people who commit crimes?

If the person were pre-ordained to commit the crime, and could never have actually prevented themselves from doing it, can they really be blamed? Obviously, if somebody has a faulty brain that makes them more likely to commit crimes (and has shown this, by committing said crimes), then locking them up to protect everyone else might be reasonable. Trying to rehabilitate them (i.e. change the inputs of their deterministic though process, such that they would not do the same in a similar situation in the future) is also reasonable. And perhaps punishments as a deterrent mechanism might still be valid.

But I really have to question if it is actually moral/ethical to punish somebody for something if they truly had no choice in the matter. It seems as society we feel the answer might be no, as we choose not to punish people who are incapable of understanding that what they did was wrong (like young children, or those deemed legally incompetent/insane). This is generally also true of animals, which are usually not punished for doing something we deem as "wrong", but instead are often relocated, or killed (not as punishment, but to prevent further danger, since giving an animal life without parole to protect people is not deemed viable).

This is only one of a whole list of philosophical questions we would want to revisit if we truly knew free will does not exist.

I go with a deterministic universe above because it simplifies the arguments. A non-deterministic universe in theory could have some of the same difficulties, but it is harder to formulate the relevant arguments.

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

#197

Post by twodave »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #178
twodave wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>That said, in order to truly have knowledge of anything we must first be able to assert free will. This is not a coherent argument. You claim to have better insight than hundreds of years of Epistemology?

I'm simply asserting that a lack of free will constitutes lack of control over one's own thoughts. Do you disagree with this or am I just not communicating well?

Edit: I'm also not saying anything that hasn't been said before. Just because you personally haven't read the authors or pieces that agree with my point of view doesn't mean they don't exist.

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

#198

Post by chordalkeyboard »

konschubert wrote: post #103
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors. > In which case, you don't really have an opinion,…

The Copenhagen-Style quantum collaps isn't really Physics. Other than that, where is Physics probabilistic?

The Copenhagen interpretation is an interpreation. The thing being interpreted has probabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics#Uncertainty_...

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

#199

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #108
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events? I don’t think it deterministic, at the lowest levels the physics is probabilistic. But I’m sure you can imagine how to express “opinion” as a subjective experience of a brain state that is wholly determined by deterministic factors. > In which case, you don't really have an opinion,…

The parent comment has exactly demonstrated that is already meaningful. Coherence is tricky, because there are a lot of concepts and words already that we use every day, that are certainly meaningful and useful, but that would have a hard time to pass your "coherence" test.

> The parent comment has exactly demonstrated that is already meaningful.

Would you mind explaining? I don’t see that they have done that.

> Coherence is tricky, because there are a lot of concepts and words already that we use every day, that are certainly meaningful and useful, but that would have a hard time to pass your "coherence" test.

Perhaps so but the existence of day-to-day commonplace irrationality is no justification for importing irrational specters into philosophy.

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

#200

Post by coldtea »

garmaine wrote: post #146
coldtea wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Trolling is not appreciated on HN.

You intervened in a subthread you weren't involved in, to rudely ask "what's my point", failed to understand the exchange that followed, and continued by throwing the "rulebook" at me.

Is being a spiteful busybody appreciated on HN?

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