There is no free will, but, there is free will. Easy.
Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how any kind of scientific experiment could possibly support the concept of free will. If the universe is deterministic, then obviously there is no free will - since humans are part of the universe. If it is non-deterministic then all we can say about events we identify as non-deterministic is that we don't understand them.
This is not obvious at all, even with deterministic and computable universe there is a good analog of free will. The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe (this is not true with superdeterminism, which requires choices that experimenters make to be correlated with the quantum states of particles they are studying, b…
> The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe
What do you mean by 'separable'? Humans are a product and part of the universe.
> This separability would allow to talk about choice, as it allows to modify or swap the human in question and recompute the future in the same universe where the human may make another choice.
I'm not sure what this shows. If you swap the human for a different one then you would expect a different choice. If you can't 'recompute' the exact same universe with the exact same human, that also doesn't show anything other than your inability to recompute.
> If this is true, you may be able to easily predict some of the choices human will make based on his state several seconds before that, but for longer time intervals the only way is to let the human live and make the choice (even if it lives in your computer simulation).
The fact that we can't perfectly predict what a human will do doesn't mean there is free will. It just means we don't understand the system enough.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#53Would love for someone to describe effectively what free will means. Because to me the concept itself doesn't make much sense to me and never has. I don't have free will over my breathing, in one definition (since it can be consider "involuntary"). In another definition I could say I have free will over my breathing because I could hold my breath. What is an example of free will? And what is hypothetical experiment t…
For me, free will is the feeling and belief that if I want my body to do something I have a pretty good chance of making it do that. Additionally, I can decide to train some reflexive behavior and tailor it to be more of what I want my automatic responses to be. It's a feeling of integration between my desires and my actions that doesn't feel like it's driven from outside my body. For example, if I get a muscle twitc…
>integration between my desires and my actions
how did you decide to have these desires? if it's a good feeling, then you didn't decide that such a desire will give you this feeling; if it's based on a computed most-advantageous outcome, then you didn't decide that either. If it's a choice between the two, then who decides and how (infinite regression)?
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#54Ah, the hallmark of 20th century pseudo-intellectualism: operationalize an ill-defined concept (e.g. "free will," "rationality," "empathy"), produce a dubiously reproducible experiment, maybe write a controversial paperback making ridiculously hyperbolic claims, let the press go apeshit, $$$. Other flavors include: Pluck a plausible, edgy explanation out of a vast hypothesis space (e.g. evolutionary psychology), over…
A good question to ask does the answer to any of these nebulous ill defined questions have any non socio-politcial consequences? If the answer is no, be very very dubious.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#55Ah, the hallmark of 20th century pseudo-intellectualism: operationalize an ill-defined concept (e.g. "free will," "rationality," "empathy"), produce a dubiously reproducible experiment, maybe write a controversial paperback making ridiculously hyperbolic claims, let the press go apeshit, $$$. Other flavors include: Pluck a plausible, edgy explanation out of a vast hypothesis space (e.g. evolutionary psychology), over…
>> (both neural networks and sybolic reasoning systems).
Woa, woa. Symbolic reasoning _has_ been claimed to model the way the brain works (the original Pitts and McCulloch neuron was a propositional logic circuit that purported to model the way actual neurons work) but that sort of thing is much more common in connectionism. In fact, it's basically the whole story of connectionism ("let's copy the brain").
In any case first order logic was originally proposed as the foundation of maths, and nothing to do with how the human brain works.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thesis was that taking the action or not taking the action resulted in different EEG patterns, Bereitschaftspotential or not, and that the spike was visible before the person was consciously taking the decision. So it's not just the neural activity from the decision-making process, it's the neural activity from taking a specific decision, seen before the decision is taken by the person. As if the decision was tak…
Isn't this an inherent problem with looking at brain activity for this sort of thing? Suppose free will is real, and a person makes the decision and then takes the action. The brain waves marking that the decision was made HAVE to show up before the person is aware that they have made a decision, because both their awareness has to be 'signaled' by a brain wave coming from a decision. The deciding process, the decisi…
You are mixing up definitions. You use "you" to mean "brain". Under that model, of course you can't disprove free will. But the model you are using is not at all useful, as you illustrate in your confusion.
The idea of free will is typically assigned to a "conscious self-model", not just a brain. The self-model generally accepted to be an emergent construct of the brain.
Thus, in the "conscious free will" model, if the brain makes a decision and hands it over to the "self-model", there is -obviously- no free will. The conscious self-model is simply an observer after the fact. Any notion of agency that it experiences is an illusion.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#57> He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘…
“It’s only acausal if you thought that awareness is what causes movement”
Exactly, people believed that the thoughts they are aware of when making a decision to move were actually how they decided to move.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#58Ah, the hallmark of 20th century pseudo-intellectualism: operationalize an ill-defined concept (e.g. "free will," "rationality," "empathy"), produce a dubiously reproducible experiment, maybe write a controversial paperback making ridiculously hyperbolic claims, let the press go apeshit, $$$. Other flavors include: Pluck a plausible, edgy explanation out of a vast hypothesis space (e.g. evolutionary psychology), over…
A good question to ask does the answer to any of these nebulous ill defined questions have any non socio-politcial consequences? If the answer is no, be very very dubious.
And if the answer is yes, be very very suspicious!
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not obvious at all, even with deterministic and computable universe there is a good analog of free will. The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe (this is not true with superdeterminism, which requires choices that experimenters make to be correlated with the quantum states of particles they are studying, b…
> The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe What do you mean by 'separable'? Humans are a product and part of the universe. > This separability would allow to talk about choice, as it allows to modify or swap the human in question and recompute the future in the same universe where the human may make another choice.…
If universe is deterministic and computable, then it is possible to create a simulation of a part of the universe that would be complex enough to contain humans and would be simple enough to pause computation, make changes to the state, copy the state, etc. So for simplicity i will talk about this simulated universe.
Separable here roughly means that to compute further states of a human you need to follow only particles in that human and not deal with variables describing the whole universe.
You can recompute exact same universe with exact same human, but it will give you the same result. Recomputing with different human shows that different choice was possible in principle.
In the simulation we can perfectly predict what the human will do, but if computational irreducibility conjecture is true there is only one algorithm to make that prediction, which is running the simulation itself. And because running the simulation is equivalent to letting the simulated human to live that means we do not predict, but merely observe the choice.
This is not exactly what everyone thinks when talking about free will, but this is a close enough equivalent that can exist in a computable universe, because multiple choices are available, and the choice is made by the part of the universe representing the human.
Re: Benjamin Libet's argument against free will is being questioned
#60> He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘…
“It’s only acausal if you thought that awareness is what causes movement” Exactly, people believed that the thoughts they are aware of when making a decision to move were actually how they decided to move.
Yes, I think the confusion of thoughts with the mind seems to be at the root of much of the controversy surrounding free will. Narrativized thought is not necessary for action although it often accompanies it. Too often we mistake the verbal part of our mind for our whole mind, it is only a part though it happens to be the loudest!