4 ms·

I must confess, I don't understand your argument, nor the one at the linked blog post. Why do they need to show evidence against determinism? There is a growin

by joeyo 15y ago

I must confess, I don't understand your argument, nor the one at the linked blog post. Why do they need to show evidence against determinism? There is a growing body of evidence that choices are "made" by the brain long before we are consciously aware of them. The most parsimonious explanation for these data is that the brain comes to a decision through a mechanistic process of integrating evidence and then the conscious self is informed of that decision. It's at this point that we feel that we have made a choice. One nice prediction of this theory is that brain disorders that disrupt the communication of the decision making circuitry and the parts of the brain that are normally informed about it should produce the impression that ones choices are being externally controlled. And indeed there are a wide variety of disorders with these features (schizophrenia, alien hand syndrome, etc). Some of the pieces are missing--what is this pathway and which brain structures are involved in the perception of agency--but I think it makes a lot more sense than believing in non-causal free will. EDIT: Another compelling piece of evidence comes from brain stimulation. When you electrically stimulate the surface of the brain (say, as part of a surgical procedure to localize a tumor) you will find areas that evoke movements of the arm, eyes, legs, etc. The experiment is: you do this without telling the patient exactly when it will happen and then afterwards ask them, "why did you move your arm?" Many people will confabulate and say, "I felt like it" or "you asked me to". This isn't always the case: sometimes people will report that their arm felt like it moved "on it's own", but I think it is very suggestive.

jerf 15y ago
I am the thing making decisions. To the extent that the thing making decisions didn't exist exactly when and where either I or the neuroscientists thought it was, that's merely one in a very long list of things that we were wrong about, and that our definitions were wrong. Declaring that this disproves "free will" is really overdoing it; it's akin to declaring "gravity" disproved after astronomers established that gravity works in space as well as on Earth. Yes, sure, "gravity pre-better-astronomy" was disproved, but that did not cause things to start suddenly floating off the Earth. First you draw a dichotomy where there shouldn't be one, then you demonstrate the dichotomy doesn't exist, then you declare that the whole thing is all wrong; it's just "A -> B, not A, therefore C" when you get down to it. I am already well aware that the-thing-making-decisions is more than just the conscious mind itself, but while we have the words "subconscious" and "conscious" in reality there's no clean line between the two.
- joeyo 15y ago
  > I am the thing making decisions. Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. If someone makes a decision, but doesn't tell you about it, is it your decision? What if they make a decision and then inform you about it later, is it yours now? Finally, what if they make a decision, tell you about it, and then you actually enact it? Can we even call this yours?
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    >Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. Why call one part of my brain me, but not the other part of my brain me? I took jerf's point to be that the part doing the awareness/recording can be different from the part deciding, but that doesn't mean the part deciding isn't me.
    - joeyo 15y ago
      I don't personally think there is a single, unitary self-- a man in the head so to speak. It may be a convenient useful fiction but it probably misleads our intuition on these matters.
  - jerf 15y ago
    You're injecting the term "someone" as if it has some sort of meaning. What is this "someone" who isn't me? Define it, precisely. How do I determine whether some neuron in my brain is either mine, or this "someone"'s? I'd contend this "someone" is an artifact of your thought processes, not a real thing that you can actually define, and furthermore when neuroscientists disprove the existence of this "someone", it is their own artifact that they are disproving, not anything that corresponded to reality in the first place. This is an interesting result, just as in the gravity example I gave earlier, but it certainly seems to be very common for scientists to get a little too expansive about the artifact they have disproved.
jessriedel 15y ago
The point is that if physical law is deterministic, then none of these experiments are going to tell you anything about free will that you didn't already know. Yes, they tell you that people are confused when they say "I decided to do X" when, in fact, the normal decision making part of the brain wasn't involved with doing X because X was actually artificially stimulated by the experimenter's electric probe. But if you believe in determinism already, what does this tell you about the possibility of free will? Given determinism, we already know that all actions and choices can be traced back to previous causal events, so we already know people are confused when they think that their choices are somehow not caused by previous events but come from their soul or whatever. So none of the empirical facts are under dispute. The question then is a purely philosophical one: is there a sensible notion of free will given determinism? Should (normative claim!) we treat people like they have free will, i.e. punish/reward them for their actions?
- nooneelse 15y ago
  > "The point is that if physical law is deterministic..." Under current QM, it doesn't appear that things like alpha decay happen predictably or at one time vs another for any reason. And that isn't simply a problem of not knowing the state of the system; hidden variable theories have not met with empirical success. So, imagine we could have two universes, both with our laws of physics, and identical up to time=0. Current QM allows that at t=1 in one universe radioactive decay occurs which then produces chain of events A, while in the other universe at t=1 there is no decay and thus chain of events B. Why then call these universes and their physical laws deterministic? They seem rather not.
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    I'm a physics grad student doing work in quantum decoherence, so I'm aware of all this. When discussing free will, "determinism" really is shorthand for the idea that the cause of all events can be traced back to previous events in known physics, including fundamental probabilistic events. The key claim is that there is no "soul" (or any other causal source which cannot in-principle be explained by known physics) producing choices. (Yes, you bundle up all the probabilistic quantum events which occur in your brain and identify that as "free will", but I don't think most people would find that compelling. Not the least of which because then it seems like a plutonium atom has just as much right to the term "free will" as you do.)

by joeyo 15y ago

jerf 15y ago

I am the thing making decisions. To the extent that the thing making decisions didn't exist exactly when and where either I or the neuroscientists thought it was, that's merely one in a very long list of things that we were wrong about, and that our definitions were wrong. Declaring that this disproves "free will" is really overdoing it; it's akin to declaring "gravity" disproved after astronomers established that gravity works in space as well as on Earth. Yes, sure, "gravity pre-better-astronomy" was disproved, but that did not cause things to start suddenly floating off the Earth. First you draw a dichotomy where there shouldn't be one, then you demonstrate the dichotomy doesn't exist, then you declare that the whole thing is all wrong; it's just "A -> B, not A, therefore C" when you get down to it. I am already well aware that the-thing-making-decisions is more than just the conscious mind itself, but while we have the words "subconscious" and "conscious" in reality there's no clean line between the two.

joeyo 15y ago
> I am the thing making decisions. Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. If someone makes a decision, but doesn't tell you about it, is it your decision? What if they make a decision and then inform you about it later, is it yours now? Finally, what if they make a decision, tell you about it, and then you actually enact it? Can we even call this yours?
- nooneelse 15y ago
  >Well if that's your premise, then I think we're already done. Why call one part of my brain me, but not the other part of my brain me? I took jerf's point to be that the part doing the awareness/recording can be different from the part deciding, but that doesn't mean the part deciding isn't me.
  - joeyo 15y ago
    I don't personally think there is a single, unitary self-- a man in the head so to speak. It may be a convenient useful fiction but it probably misleads our intuition on these matters.
- jerf 15y ago
  You're injecting the term "someone" as if it has some sort of meaning. What is this "someone" who isn't me? Define it, precisely. How do I determine whether some neuron in my brain is either mine, or this "someone"'s? I'd contend this "someone" is an artifact of your thought processes, not a real thing that you can actually define, and furthermore when neuroscientists disprove the existence of this "someone", it is their own artifact that they are disproving, not anything that corresponded to reality in the first place. This is an interesting result, just as in the gravity example I gave earlier, but it certainly seems to be very common for scientists to get a little too expansive about the artifact they have disproved.

jessriedel 15y ago

The point is that if physical law is deterministic, then none of these experiments are going to tell you anything about free will that you didn't already know. Yes, they tell you that people are confused when they say "I decided to do X" when, in fact, the normal decision making part of the brain wasn't involved with doing X because X was actually artificially stimulated by the experimenter's electric probe. But if you believe in determinism already, what does this tell you about the possibility of free will? Given determinism, we already know that all actions and choices can be traced back to previous causal events, so we already know people are confused when they think that their choices are somehow not caused by previous events but come from their soul or whatever. So none of the empirical facts are under dispute. The question then is a purely philosophical one: is there a sensible notion of free will given determinism? Should (normative claim!) we treat people like they have free will, i.e. punish/reward them for their actions?

nooneelse 15y ago
> "The point is that if physical law is deterministic..." Under current QM, it doesn't appear that things like alpha decay happen predictably or at one time vs another for any reason. And that isn't simply a problem of not knowing the state of the system; hidden variable theories have not met with empirical success. So, imagine we could have two universes, both with our laws of physics, and identical up to time=0. Current QM allows that at t=1 in one universe radioactive decay occurs which then produces chain of events A, while in the other universe at t=1 there is no decay and thus chain of events B. Why then call these universes and their physical laws deterministic? They seem rather not.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  I'm a physics grad student doing work in quantum decoherence, so I'm aware of all this. When discussing free will, "determinism" really is shorthand for the idea that the cause of all events can be traced back to previous events in known physics, including fundamental probabilistic events. The key claim is that there is no "soul" (or any other causal source which cannot in-principle be explained by known physics) producing choices. (Yes, you bundle up all the probabilistic quantum events which occur in your brain and identify that as "free will", but I don't think most people would find that compelling. Not the least of which because then it seems like a plutonium atom has just as much right to the term "free will" as you do.)