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Reason Won't Save Us
- laurex 7y agoWe 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.
- hprotagonist 7y agoIn 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. and it's probably a data processing bug in the analysis! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
- a1369209993 7y agoOr, 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.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoOh, wow. That's bigger news than the OP.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 7y agoread the article linked above, it debates the conclusion stated in the quotes.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoYeah, I meant the article.
- buboard 7y agoTo be clear, there are other types of experiments providing evidence for the absence of deliberate free will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unconscious_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Unco...
- ekianjo 7y agoYou 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.
- acqq 7y ago> 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.
- richk449 7y agoNice 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.
- PixelOfDeath 7y agoI prefer Hitchens answer to the question: "We have free will, we have no choice."
- richk449 7y agoSounds like sophistry to me.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoTry choosing to not be yourself or like the things you like or do the things you do. We're not so free. I've always worked off a model of "constrained will". We have will, it is just subject to a large number of constraints with a few degrees of freedom.
- apocalypstyx 7y ago"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." --Arthur Schopenhauer
- hprotagonist 7y agoso much for propaganda, then!
- raverbashing 7y ago> 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.
- kijin 7y agoIt 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);
- buboard 7y agoYou can read the original experiments for these questions. They were carefully designed and the latencies are accounted for. https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.h...
- speedplane 7y ago> 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.
- ppod 7y ago
- baxtr 7y agoInteresting article! ”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.)”
- glandium 7y agoRelated Mind Field episode (from Vsauce, coincidentally available for free as of writing): https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ https://youtu.be/lmI7NnMqwLQ (from 13:50 onwards)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- undershirt 7y ago> “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. [1] The War on Sensemaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ [2] a.k.a purva paksha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purva_paksha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purva_paksha
- arthurcolle 7y agoNarrative warfare is an interesting concept with hints of Chomsky. Did you just invent this? Or is this discussed in other forums?
- undershirt 7y agoIt’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.
- bearer_token 7y agoEnjoy a fictional exploration of this phenomenon, introducing the concept of a scissor statement. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ Then realize that we have algorithms optimizing for these statements already - news, social media, gossip. Some examination: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9sw0yr/sort_by_controversial/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9sw0yr/sort...
- dwoozle 7y agoYou cannot Reason a man out of Thrall.
- hliyan 7y agoI 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.
- zuminator 7y agoI 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.
- narag 7y agoI 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.
- known 7y agohttps://archive.is/9QhKt https://archive.is/9QhKt
- foobar_ 7y agoEmotions and feelings are fixed and finite and give predictable outcomes. Emotions can't save us either. Morals ... well, that's "reason" too.
- mhh__ 7y agoPossibly even worse, "Rationality will not save us" (Robert S. Mcnamara)
- thwarted 7y agoTake 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.
- jadbox 7y agoRelated 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. https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_c...
- bermanoid 7y agoHe'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.
- goatlover 7y agoBecause 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.
- 83457 7y agoCouldn't help but think of Snow Crash when I saw this title.
- minitoar 7y ago"See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.
- known 7y agoReason + Priority + Adapt = Survival
- mrwnmonm 7y agoAnyone decided his major after applying to it?
- dsubburam 7y agoAn 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.
- boyadjian 7y agoIt is time to stop having a white color background on internet sites, it is very aggressive for the eyes, instead, a sepia color would be much better.
- buboard 7y agoSuch 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.
- choonway 7y agoWe don't reason. We adapt. Even if a protagonist was dumped into an crazy isekai world where science and math doesn't apply, he would still do ok.
- mapcars 7y ago>steer civilization away from the abyss what is this abyss author is so afraid of?
- hyperluz 7y agoMaybe, Oclocracy or another dictatorship.
- speedplane 7y agoI 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.
- loopz 7y agoSome 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!
- ekianjo 7y ago> 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)
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt'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. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21296422.
- ekianjo 7y ago> that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills commonly believed? by who? I have never heard that claim before.
- denton-scratch 7y agoThanks for the article. I wonder if he's a Buddhist? 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?]
- bufferoverflow 7y agoDefinitely 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.
- denton-scratch 7y agoOh. 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.
- spicymaki 7y agoFrom 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.
- denton-scratch 7y ago
- toxicFork 7y agoWhoever 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.
- gerbilly 7y agoThe 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.'
- magwa101 7y agoGawd, 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!".
- zzzeek 7y ago> 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.
- mannykannot 7y agoThere 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.
- norswap 7y agoSo, 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. But make your own (rational :)) opinion.
- f137 7y agoLibet’s "preceding activity" is simply an example of branch prediction at work.