In his classic 1980s experiments, University of California, San Francisco, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet noted a consistent change in brain wave activity (a so-called “ready potential”) prior to a subject’s awareness of having decided to move his hand. Libet’s conclusion was that the preceding activity was evidence for the decision being made subconsciously, even though subjects felt that the decision was conscious and deliberate. Since that time his findings, supported by subsequent similar results on fMRI and direct brain recordings, have featured prominently in refuting the notion of humans possessing free will.
It doesn't even need to be a data processing bug. There's nothing surprising about the experiment's results in the first place! Just because A happened a few milliseconds before B doesn't mean that A caused B. Both could have been caused by a third event that wasn't observed. Or maybe they actually happened at the same time but B had a higher latency to the observer. It's just bad science to assume otherwise and jump to conclusions.
The latency difference is actually quite a reasonable thing to suspect, since it probably takes much longer for an "I hereby make this decision" transaction to be committed to the brain's data store than it takes for an fMRI machine to detect electromagnetic signals. There's no evolutionary advantage in waiting for your logs to sync to disk before you initiate run_away_from(lion);
> They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for.
"Free will" is a philosophical term. Brain waves and chemical latencies are not, they're in the realm of biological sciences. Explanations of how chemical and electrical reactions occur before a person is aware of their own conscious decision does not negate their consciousness or any aspect of their free will.
Similarly, if you put your hand over a flame and it takes a half second before you consciously feel pain, the pain is still just as real.
In a more extreme example, suppose we could perfectly model the human brain and could explain every sensation you've ever felt by mapping every chemical and electrical reaction in your brain, such an explanation would not make the sensation any less real.
In fact, our own consciousness is the only thing we can authoritatively know for sure is real. When you dig deep enough, "I am" is the only thing we know for certain.
I think this is a commmon goalpost-moving strategy. The likes of Dennett et al don't deny that first-person experience is real, but rather that it is inexplicable or mysterious somehow. For the case of free will, Dennett is excellent at showing how homonuculus thinking pervades even careful thought on the issue.
>> consciousness is the only thing we can authoritatively know for sure is real
> this is a commmon goalpost-moving strategy
It's not a goalpost-moving strategy, it's the ultimate one. Your comment exemplifies the difference between science and philosophy. The very idea that "once we know X, we will fully understand humanity" is a common but misguided refrain in science. Science may very well eventually discover "X", but any argument that it will provide widespread meaning or understanding is essentially a philosophical argument.
Silly but fun example as an experiment: scientists create a device that allows you to read and respond to each and every neuron that fires in your head, and also know the downward effects of these firings on your senses, organs, and thoughts. On one hand, that will provide incredible insight into how humans think and process information. On the other, it will fundamentally change what we consider "thinking" and "reacting" to stimuli. Even if scientists created such a gadget, we'd need philosophers to understand how it effects us.
>any argument that it will provide widespread meaning or understanding is essentially a philosophical argument.
You're just stating this, what you are saying doesn't actually mean anything.
> we'd need philosophers to understand how it effects us.
I have no problem with philosphy, Dennett is a philospher. But what you're saying makes no sense to me. What kind of understanding are you talking about?
Your link clarifies the timeline a bit, but the key question remains unanswered: Can we trust a person's own recollection of the timestamp associated with a decision?
Making a decision is one thing. Being aware that one has made a decision is a completely different thing, and the circuitry for introspection doesn't always seem to work even when you try. It can take seconds, minutes, or even weeks before you realize that you've been doing something. The prefrontal cortex is very expensive to operate, so the stupid Android battery optimizer tries to bypass it whenever possible.
Nice article. I don’t believe in free will, but I never liked that Libet experiment. So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will, and most of the time people didn’t even bother trying - they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.
> they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.
I feel the exact same way.
It's like saying because a pain signal takes some time to come from your foot to your bran that then the pain is not real, when it is merely delayed.
It seems to me it's only natural that there's a delay between the decision being made and the perception of the decision happening. Doesn't absolutely mean the decision was "illegitimate" and certainly that can't be deduced from the delay.
Free will is, in common parlance, a mechanism which produces decisions which stems from that consciousness and perception. If the decision precedes it, then free will does not exist (and in my opinion cannot).
Humans are still demonstrably able to perform decisions which vary based on input, of course, so in that sense, "free" will is indisputable.
> If the decision precedes it, then free will does not exist (and in my opinion cannot).
One of the problems I have with the Libet experiment is that the subject-reported awareness of conscious thought time is assumed to be accurate. But how can it be? The subject is being asked to move their hand. That takes a conscious effort. But the subject is also being asked to monitor thinking about moving their hand. That's a whole new task. Then they're being asked to report on their memory of thinking about moving their hand. Yet another task.
Normally when you move your hand, you just move it without the additional perceptions of "I am now thinking about moving my hand. I am now going to tell someone of the moment that I became aware of thinking about my hand." We don't normally reflect upon our motor movements in such a fashion. If you stopped to reflect upon each step before you took it, you'd be tripping on yourself all the time. So the reporting task is an unnatural and artificial burden above and beyond our normal mode of thought. I would contend that the extra tasks introduce a delay in the subject's self-awareness because the subject has to now additionally wait for the constructive thought "observing myself in the act of thinking about moving my hand" to rise to the threshold wherein that thought becomes part of the internal monologue of the conscious mind.
On top of that, perhaps the mind plays a trick on itself regarding conscious thought. When your eyes quickly saccade from one spot to another, there is motion blur, but you don't perceive it; your mind edits it out since it conveys no useful information about the world. Similarly, when you are contemplating taking an action, your brain has to make certain calculations before it can execute that action. Your motor cortex needs to communicate with the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe. You need to refer to past calculations of similar movements so that you don't overshoot or miss the mark. All of that takes time. Perhaps the brain edits out that time because it would be wasteful and non-productive to monitor the experience of "thought delays."
> which stems from that consciousness and perception. If the decision precedes it
The decision being made before that result is perceived is certainly not the way to prove the decision doesn't come from consciousness and perception (biases and heuristics aside, thanks to millions of years of animal brains).
And it might be that, for most decisions, perceptions and heuristics do play a part. That again doesn't mean all decisions are pure automatons.
> The decision being made before that result is perceived is certainly not the way to prove the decision doesn't come from consciousness and perception (biases and heuristics aside, thanks to millions of years of animal brains).
Why not? Surely if consciousness and perception are creating the decision, they should be the first which contain information about it.
> And it might be that, for most decisions, perceptions and heuristics do play a part.
Certainly. It seems highly unlikely to me that perceptions and heuristic do not play a part: as an additional input into the decision-making system, derived from physical sensory input and memory.
> That again doesn't mean all decisions are pure automatons.
How does it not? I presume the distinction lies in the exact definition of "pure automaton", but it sounds to me like the term's intent is to try to divorce human decision-making from pure, causal (or, in the worst case, random) reaction to input.
I don't see how this would be possible. How would the non-"pure automaton" part look like?
Hint: we're saying the same thing. The only difference between such a program and a human is in the number of degrees of freedom of the algorithm (and hence the complexity of relationship between the input and the output).
Humans do not possess a free will in this sense either. How could they? Their actions have to be causally dependent on the input, otherwise their behaviour would be magical and unrelated to reality.
Quantum mechanics obviously provides a physical mechanism to implement free will. Whether this is the case is a different matter but the laws of physics don't rule it out.
It's not so obvious to me. The usual argument I've heard is that quantum randomness might sometimes be controlled by a non-physical entity external to our universe (in the sense of biasing measurements in critical moments). While an interesting fantastic idea, I don't think it brings much to the table, given that it is not testable. Is this what you meant or something else?
Otherwise, quantum mechanics at best leaves room for randomness (non-determinism, stochasticity) of the will, not what people usually mean when they say it.
If quantum randomness is controlled by a non-physical entity then it's just moving the goal posts. For me it's really simple. Free will is people not having a pre-destined path. If the non-determinism of quantum mechanics influences the way the lives of people change through their decisions this means there is free will. Everything else is really just pure philosophical drivel that can't be verified.
I agree. I just don't call this scenario free will, but nondeterminism, since it's less confusing. From my experience, when people talk about free will, they are not simply referring to nondeterminism.
Subjectively speaking, nondeterminism doesn't really seem to "buy" me anything. It does not restore any of the agency. In fact, if it is true, it gives me even more of a " arbitrary puppet" feeling than if the mind is deterministic.
> So many tenuous connections had to be made to connect electrical signals with free will
Wait... I thought you don't believe in free will?
> they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.
To me it really appears you do believe in free will.
When one doesn't believe, one would need a proof that the phenomenon which many people (especially philosophers and the religious apologetics) call "free will" even exists. Not the vice versa. Only a believer, by definition, believes in something without a proof.
It’s not worth worrying about. If there is no such thing as free will, there is no point in trying to do anything (such as carefully choosing words to be consistent with the non-existence of free will). For simplicity, might as well live my life and post on internet forums as if there is free will.
Free will may or may not exist, but certainly there is no "I" that has it. Our cognition is so distributed and situated that we can't really ever say that "I" decided anything.
Many desires exist within us. Desires motivate us to act. Our will is the harmonization of those many desires into intended actions.
The individual self is an illusion. We are the confluence of infinite influence. There is no single I. Weird but true. Identity and personhood is a useful social construct, but it doesn't make any sense when considered.
In the same vein: whatever "external" influences you think undo the possibility that your will is free -- the chemicals in your blood, your experiences from childhood -- aren't you that system in its entirety?
The problem with the concept of free will isn’t in how we define the self, it’s in how we define free will. What do you actually mean by ‘free will’? I would put forward that, if you really start examining things, most people’s idea of free will is equivalent to the popular notion of a soul. That is, it’s something which exists separately from the body, yet which can somehow think and feel and decide. This conception of free will is not really coherent, since free will ceases to function when the body dies or loses functionality when certain parts of the brain are damaged.
You can redefine free will to just be the collection of algorithms and processes that play out as your brain decides how to respond to environmental stimuli, but then I think you have departed far enough from most people’s conception of what free will is to essentially just be redefining terms to suit your argument. FWIW, I think the best explanation of free will is that it doesn’t exist, but instead that it’s an explanatory framework we impose upon each other as a way of regulating people’s behavior.
That's really interesting. If that's what people mean, I agree with you.
When I hear someone deny the existence of free will, it sounds to me like they're saying a person's decisions are not really their own. If that's what they mean, I think it's preposterous -- of course your decisions are yours, that's definitional.
Or, you know, human brains being systematically bad at a specific kind of timekeeping that they've never evolutionary-historically had a reason to be good at?
T+0: decision is made and brain waves change
T+?ms: decision is reported to sensory systems and associated with a wall-clock time.
Honestly, "free will" is the least interesting aspect of this comment thread.
What's more interesting is the original experiment "proving" subconscious decision making found its way to pop-psychology, and for years now, we're being bombarded with assertions that every justification of a decision is a post-hoc rationalization invented by the brain, and it has nothing to do with the real reasons for that decision.
It feels really dumb, and I'd be glad if it turned out to be just an artifact of bad data processing.
Anytime anyone makes a claim about how neuroscience tell us X, just remind yourself, no one can explain how memories are stored. That’s the current state of neuroscience. We think maybe there are different kinds of memory because there are several ways to damage memory creation and retrieval, but have no idea how they work.
We do have many ideas and evidence how they work. We can identify where they are stored, change them and turn them on and off... in mice. This is the golden age of memory research.
You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.
Biology is driven by complex but precisely known rules (from molecular dynamics down to quark-gluon interactions). That doesn't mean we know how biology works , not even for a single person, because it's complex. Psychology attempts to do something much harder, understand the behavior of entire populations of nervous systems. Both are complex, but in principle not uncomputable.
And there's a definition of free will: that actions of humans axiomatically cannot be precomputed.
> but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior
Where do you draw the line between a "very simple animal" and "non-simple animal"? Because there enough animals that have the behavioral patterns completely matching these of humans.
Human behavior is not particularly exceptional, unless you'd want to refer to our activities causing a new extinction.
”Now, researchers who questioned Libet and those who supported him are both shifting away from basing their experiments on the Bereitschaftspotential. (The few people I found still holding the traditional view confessed that they had not read Schurger’s 2012 paper.)”
> “Courage is the solution to despair. Reason can provide no answers.” –Ernst Toller (First Reformed, 2017)
I’ve felt the despair of this article for a time (and the quote above gave me some peace), but some recent hope came from Daniel Schmachtenberger[1]. He postulates that our conception of debate in our current information ecology selects and optimizes for bias. He refers to the Hegelian dialectic as an alternative to debate—of an earnest synthesis from understanding both a thesis and its antithesis, resolving paradox with a higher order model. I’ve heard this described as steel-manning[1] another’s argument to find its signal (as opposed to straw-manning the noise).
But Schmachtenberger, as well as Bret Weinstein I believe, proposes that the game-theoretic win/lose dynamic of our current system is so entrenched that it really selects for this type of narrative warfare which doesn’t promote this type of open and honest information ecology for this to really work yet. So there’s something to their post-game-theoretic frameworks (Bret’s “Game B”) that make me a lot less fatalistic and anarchist about the whole complexity game.
Interestingly, this is quite easy to do if you focus yourself on achieving knowledge (i.e. you attempt to falsify your hypotheses and test your beliefs adequately). The real problem is that this isn't, maddeningly, a winning approach. You can be right[0], know you are right, follow a logical chain to the rightness and still lose. Superior knowledge guarantees nothing!
I definitely find the OP's perspective a little obnoxious. Being less-wrong is actually fairly easy (in the grand scheme of things), the problem is that nobody cares about being right.
Prof Daniel Cohen gives a Ted talk that I haven't watched but which, based on write ups, gives a nice antidote to this. Simply adopt the attitude that "losing" an argument is a good thing because you come away with a more refined view of the world. the real winner is the person that makes cognitive gains.
That wasn't what I was referring to. The winning there isn't winning the argument, which is really a trivial position to avoid. I first achieved it when I was a teenager and consistently achieved it in my early 20s. I have no reason to believe this is exceptional for anyone with a mild interest in epistemology (Crocker's Rules, etc. are examples of these being rapidly realized by individuals)
The thing I was referring to is winning at life. You can be less wrong (in the sense described above) and lose at life.
I.e. the more refined view of the world does not monotonically move you towards most conventional victories (improved prosperity, happiness, life standards).
Sibling comment has a link to more (and reinforces the triviality of achieving the more-information-mindset), besides SSC and Scott Aaronson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298154
I find Schmachtenburger hard to listen to. He rejects all media outright because it's all not true or propaganda. Might as well go live in a cave. If you listen to news, whether it's a podcast, a news channel, an article, or whatever, there's always a bias. But the solution isn't to reject all bias, it's to accept that bias is fundamental to human existence and to learn how to deal with bias while consuming that media. It's why I can listen to certain kinds of conservative media and not have my head explode - even if I disagree with many of their premises, I'm able to recognize what is fact, what is supposed fact, what is informed analysis and what is pure opinion, such that I can still extract value from it. More importantly, I can generally can recognize whether somebody is making a good faith argument or simply pushing a point to achieve certain goals or push an agenda.
Yeah, I would discern personal bias from institutional distortion.
I can deal with biases because like you said I can sense truthfulness (good faith), and triangulate multiple sources to form an image by trusting my own bias. Bias and different perspectives are everywhere and carry valuable signals.
What I can’t sense is that I can check all sources to find what is actually true. His solution is to proxy our sense-making to some collective intelligence (community) grown in a positive-sum game. But our current game is zero-sum, and information becomes competitive rather than collaborative, which incents (guarantees) institutional distortion (e.g. obscuring, disinforming, context-shrinking).
Aside for describing the problem, I think he covers some practical ways to make sense of things in the broken information ecology, but I haven’t gone over that part in any detail yet.
I'm exactly the same. I actually consider it a matter of intellectual honesty to listen to 'the other sides' of what I believe/think. I didn't know this was called Hegellian dialectic but that's exactly it (just generalized beyond dichotomy, a multi-dimensional 'tension' to account for nuance and complexity).
I find that it gives me a much better "BS" (bad faith or belief-driven argument) whichever side it comes from; and the good arguments are then free to flow irrespective of our perception of 'sides': it does not matter who said it, or whether it contradicts other elements; if there's truth to it, then it deserves to be explored, integrated. That's reality for us.
I've come across the term Hegelian dialectic and tried to read up on it many times before but it wasn't until your comparison with steel-manning that I feel like I've started to make headway with understanding it. Thanks!
It’s mentioned in the first minute of Schmachtenberger interview linked in the first footnote above (now corrected!). Rebel Wisdom might be the forum/community you’re looking for. Also, I do like Chomsky’s notion that manufactured consent is not a concerted conspiracy, but a collective disposition unconsciously enacted. I find it compatible with these other concepts.
Take a group of diehard anti-free-will determinists to the deciding World Series game and have them watch their home team’s batter lose the Series … how many would bother to attend the game if they accepted that the decision whether or not to swing occurred entirely at a subliminal level?
It's interesting that whenever the discussion of free-will comes up, it's always in the context of someone making a decision on how to interpret if or how someone else has free-will. The diehard anti-free-will determinists have no choice in attending the game, and if they do or not is not dependent on how they see the outcome of the game as deterministic or not. In this vein, the classic free-will argument of if criminals deserve punishment if they don't have free-will is an argument made from a hubristic point of view, as if those deciding the punishment exist outside of determinism. This is often an attempt to get anti-free-will types in a contradiction, similar to the claim/argument that there no atheists in foxholes.
The problem with super determinism isn't contradiction it's the absurdity of the conclusions.
Every action, every thought, every motion of the atom is completely predetermined. Okay, fine, but then my deliberation on what to do next is also predetermined. But here I am recognizing that it is, so couldn't I just neglect the computation I do in my head if I really believed my next actions were predetermined?
This isn't hypothetical, I'm here, speaking to you, right now, about how if I believed in super determinism I don't need to deliberate on any future actions. You might say: Well you're going to anyway if it's determined and not if it's not determined. And so we are in an absurdity. My deliberation about my own determination is already determined and regardless of if it's determined that I stop deliberating or determined that I continue deliberating.
This just doesn't jive with observational experience. Not say that determinism isn't still sensible, but super determinism is not sensible, in my opinion, it would seem to me that the future is not fully predetermined, but that doesn't say anything about me being able to choose possible futures, just that my brain, as a computational mechanism, has to consider the possible futures because they are, you know, possible!
Going further with your line of reasoning, then it is also determined for some to find free will logical/believable, and some not to, irrespective of the truth or reality, no?
Related to this, I'd recommend looking into Philosopher John Searle and his thoughts on consciousness. He's pro-determinism and gives a good argument for why free-will is an illusion but one an illusion we can never 'escape' from.
He's also famous for the Chinese Box thought experiment, widely derided by everyone apart from his own students as the most high profile, idiotic, uninformative, trivially debunked thought experiment of all time, which teaches us negative information (in that it actually wastes time bringing up useless shit that otherwise wouldn't receive scholarly discussion except that he's an old white guy that was in the field early).
Searle is an absolute waste, nobody should engage with his drivel, ever, period.
Because of one thought experiment? It certainly generated a lot of conversation for being so trivially debunked. But it's not like it's the only thing he's ever talked about. And the old white dude reference is unnecessary.
But anyway, I think Searle had a point about semantics not being syntax with the Chinese Room. They system doesn't understand anything other than how to translate from A to B. And that's not what understanding language is about (see the later Wittgenstein or any philosophy of language).
However, as Daniel Dennett pointed out in his rebuttal, although one can produce a somewhat convincing fake to some people, similar to "passing" the Turing Test with ELIZA or any bot we've created so far, a genuine Chinese room would have to know the nuances of language at such a level that there would be no question that it understands what Chinese words mean. So Searle was wrong in his setup of the thought experiment, becuase it assumes the room is only following syntatic rules, instead of understanding the web of context and meaning that words take place in.
Such pessimism! But why not instead begin with a different set of assumptions. Consciousness may well not exist, it's just a word. People have made up words for patterns they perceive but do not exist all the time. Osiris does not exist, afterlife does not exist, yet they moved thousands of tons of rock to build pyramids.
- Free will does not exist either, let's face it, the evidence will keep getting more and more conclusive. So, why despair? Our brains are not "magic machines acting on a dangerous world", our brains generate the world. Free will is our little game.
- All of our thinking is ex-post facto rationalizations. We seem to be good at creating models of this generated world. There is no distinct boundary between "reasoned thinking", "a hunch" and "trust your feelings", they re all beliefs that stem from different sets of assumptions.
- Our feelings are calculations, for which we don't yet have a model, but a hunch (e.g. time is absolute) is not to be discarded lightly, but only when reasoned thinking provides a much more satisfactory view of the world (time is relative). Very few tools are of guidance in that respect, only Occam's razor.
- The world that our brain generates includes the AI machines of the future, for which we will have to somehow rationalize and reason about even without a good model.
- Until we build a better model of our individual and collective behavior, our motivations and our beliefs, we must stick with the current political/judicial model. Neuroscience has not yet deciphered human intention to a comprehensive mathematical theory. Patience, we 'll get there.
oh that's fair, however, not having free will does not mean one does not have will at all. We re still motivated by our constitution as persons and animals, we will choose to despair or not, just that decision won't be ex nihilo. In a way it s rather comforting, like deciding to "sit back and enjoy the ride" .
How is choosing to despair or not, not a confirmation of our free will? *I guess you're saying the "choice" is a product of things beyond our control, so our will is determined / not chosen. Confusing way to say it, but if that's what you meant, nevermind.
ignore--Future behavior will absolutely a product of mindset (despair or not).--
Gawd, each decade we extend our "reason" beyond what we thought possible. We've always been at our limits. His weak example of batters is simplistic and silly. Batters study the hand position so that they can recognize the pitch type and make a probabalistic decision. Same goes for goalies who stop unseen pucks, position, probabilities, stick/ice/shooter all rolled up into "Only god saves more!".
I agree with the overall premise, but I disagree with conflating our physiological perceptual limitations with the psychological biases that color our attempts to exercise pure logic and reason.
If you experience an optical illusion and it's explained to you, your reasoning power will enable you to fully accept that your perceptions are incorrect. But if you have a bias that causes you to have a strong opinion on a controversial subject, even if someone tries to point out to you that your bias is rendering your perceptions invalid, and even if you accept in theory that that is the case, it likely won't change your strongly held belief.
For example if you have a strong opinion regarding the existence of the Christian God, and someone tells you that your bias is affecting your opinion, you might concede that you have some kind of bias, but most likely you'll continue to believe that your opinion is right.
I believe that the strongest root of bias is society. Paraphrasing Sartre, bias is the others. So I disagree with the other thing the author is conflating: that society often holding ridiculous opinions is because individuals can't think rationally.
It's the other way around: individuals can't think very rationally because they're pressed by society.
Whoever you are talking to, you need to be on a similar place when it comes to the balance of reason and emotions. Otherwise you talk a language that is too different.
So in one culture you talk with reason; in another, you talk with emotions. In the full scale of the world - in the context of civilisation as discussed in the article - there is too much variation among the people; especially among the mix of cultures there are now in every country, so it can become very difficult to come to agreements. This is because if you are not careful what you are trying to say will make no sense to anyone.
One effective way is to identify who thinks how, allow themselves to organise into groups based on how the ratios of reason or emotions, then address each group in a manner that that group would understand.
I too have come to wonder whether what we call "reasoning" is merely the same faculty we use to make sense of observations in the outside world, simply turned inward. Just a read-only abstraction layer on top of a complex mass of patterns encoded into a neural network.
An approach to "free will" is to notice that it is an useful concept for organizing our experience, and so, why not use it? How it's useful:
- when we can say "this ought to happen", and work towards that to happen.
- when we can say "I desire this but intend that", and follow-through our intention rather than our desire.
- when we can not model a person's action on a purely cause-and-effect basis, and there appears to be an inherent unpredictability in their decision.
It is useful to say/think that there's "free will" at play, as there's a certain character to the situations (and why not name it, so it's easier to recognize).
Above three scenarios owing to Kant (Critique of Practical Reason). The first two, we generally do not ascribe to other species, which might imply that they have less free will than we do.
Some people are more prone to be dictated by feelings.
The other part are more prone to be dictated by logic.
These groups will never agree!
Studies show people with brain injury unable to feel, are unable to make sound decisions (pure rational thought).
We know what happens when only feelings decide, that would wreck society overnight.
Luckily, the way our brain works. Intuition/feelings come first, and then we can rationalize and filter, based on logic!
> The other part are more prone to be dictated by logic.
you are right to say "prone to", because as a matter of fact what is happening with logic is usually to give ourselves a reason to fall back on what we believed in the first place. It's very hard to truly convince very rational people that they are wrong (most people don't switch opinions)
It's a popular meme, but to me, it doesn't seem to reflect reality well.
Also, there's a parallel comment thread that points out the research conclusions on which this meme is based might have been an effect of bad data processing.
Most of the way through he seems to be making the case that consciousness and will are illusory, and that we are indistinguishable from mechanisms. But towards the end, he seems to allow that we can take measures to improve our decision-making abilities.
My interpretation of Buddhist psychology is that, for the most part, our behaviour (decision-making) is the result of "causes and conditions", i.e. our actions are generally not "voluntary"; but that we can nevertheless, through introspection and practice, improve our understanding and decision-making.
I think his poker-bot needs an "introspection circuit" to oversee and direct the learning process. I do not accept his contention that poker-bots demonstrate that deep-learning/AI can ever model a conscious mind without such a circuit.
[Edit: I spent several decades studying Buddhism; I returned to an uncompromising rationalism about 10 years ago, and I'm much better now. Doesn't that suggest that people can change their minds?]
From a traditional Buddhist perspective free will is necessary. If everything was predetermined, the entire path of practice to freedom from suffering would be pointless. However the past karma has an large influence on the present and cannot be ignored.
I thought that it was karma that led to your being born in an age in which a Buddha had existed, karma that led to you encountering the teachings, karma that led to you being able to become a monk, karma that led to your introduction to a teacher, and karma that led to your success in your practice. Nearly everything about the path is determined by karma, no?
But all of that kind of karma results from kind (or skillful) actions, and I think the idea is that those moral/immoral actions have to be deliberate, to have any impact on your karma. The way I heard it, most actions that bear at all karma, only bear on karma for this life; actions that create heavy-lifting, multi-life karma are rare.
The entire practise of Buddhism requires free will.
Without free will, it would be impossible to follow the eightfold path.
You may be thinking that karma predetermines all our behaviour. This is a false view that the Buddha specifically denied.
Our current state, and our current actions are determined by a combination of past conditioning (karma) and our will/intentions in the current moment.
You could think of it as a function with two main input streams.
Because it's recursive (past will/intentions feeds back in as karma) it makes the trajectory nonlinear, which is why it's such a difficult path to navigate.
As I indicated, I am no longer a Buddhist; one reason is that the karma/rebirth story was completely unconvincing to me (karma makes no sense without rebirth).
I am convinced by the multiple experimental demonstrations that decisions seem to occur before any cerebral "act of will" can be detected; and the baseball batter story is a nice thought experiment. It's deeply counter-intuitive; the only way I can grok it is that most of what seems to be free will is just observation of "what you were just thinking". But the belief that we have some measure of control is very hard to get rid of.
Not trying to convert you back to Buddhism, but if that's you only objection, I have to tell you Karma does not require rebirth.
In fact the Buddha refused to respond one way or another when asked what happens to us after death.¹
Karma can be seen as operating from moment to moment. It's easier to think of it as 'past conditions', i.e. the initial conditions that led to our current state.
This applies physically as well as psychologically.
Definitely sounds like a religious person trying to argue against logic and reason... using logic and reason. He is not the first, he won't be the last.
My interpretation was more-or-less diametrically opposite; I took it that he was a committed mechanist, arguing that the mind is a machine (he's a neurologist); and trying to deal with the (personal and unverifiable) experience of being conscious and having what seems to be will.
> We spectators are equally affected by the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. Take a group of diehard anti-free-will determinists to the deciding World Series game and have them watch their home team’s batter lose the Series by not swinging at a pitch that, to the onlookers, was clearly in the strike zone. How many do you think would be able to shrug off any sense of blame or disappointment in the batter? Indeed, how many would bother to attend the game if they accepted that the decision whether or not to swing occurred entirely at a subliminal level?
im kind of a determinist even though I don't enjoy it, I think if you're a determinist and you still get up every morning, you've made some kind of arrangement with the paradox of having no choice yet "having" choice such that enjoying a baseball game is pretty low difficulty level among determinist daily challenges.
We are possibly being driven to both great advancement and species destruction by the emergence of what we call "consciousness" -- the evolutionary advantage of a theory of mind that allows for complex and powerful collaboration and knowledge-sharing, with a sometimes counterproductive by-product, the illusory concept of the self.
I actually agree with much of this, "reason" as we know it, is not necessarily an intrinsically beneficial thing, it's just had a decently long track record of providing stability and improved standards of living.
For much of human history though, reason took a back seat to centralized power and shared belief systems (even if they were not based on reason). E.g.: Egyptian society could get a lot more done if everyone believed in the sun god, and that the pharaoh was god-like. Shared beliefs, even if false or unreasonable, increased stability and allowed society to better organize.
Roughly since the enlightenment, reason has had a similarly strong ability to organize society, and the civilizations that embraced it have tended to live longer than those that don't. In the context of history, it's arguably more of a social tool than a underlying value.
The author is probably more qualified to discuss these matters than me, but it still seems to me like he is getting trapped by his too rigid categorizations.
Just because we're not good at explaining our behaviour after the fact, doesn't mean we lack agency or 'will.'
So, this is an interesting exhibit. When people complain about postmodernism, this is what they are complaining about.
Personally, I strongly disagree, though of course there are plenty of huge obstacles in the way, most of them bake in our "human hardware". It doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to get past them.
There is something apparently ironic about any article presenting a rational argument for the proposition that conscious reasoning is an illusion. I suppose they are expected to work through epiphenomenalism.
and it's probably a data processing bug in the analysis! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...