6 ms·

Testing Free Will with Single-Neuron Measurements of Pre-Conscious Activity

aschampion 12y ago
Sensationalist, neuroscience vs. philosophy drivel from the author. There's nothing extreme about reductionist physical determinism in philosophy of mind literature. This methodology, besides being grossly inadequate at the experimental goals as portrayed in the article, doesn't add substantial evidence to the philosophical debate. Supervenience, epiphenomenalism, etc., all allow for fully deterministic physics of mind with various mechanisms of free will available (even if only as an explanatory agent in some). And I say this as someone who shares a similar metaphysical outlook as Kreiman. Luckily Kreiman's work isn't about free will, but neural mechanisms of decision making. And it's quite interesting in that context. He (and Bok and Boyden) say as much in the article, but for some reason scientific journalism has to create equivocal contexts for everything because they're convinced whatever they're reporting on isn't interesting enough for what it is. And apparently it works, because it ends up here.
amalag 12y ago
Trying to figure out where electricity comes from by changing the color of light bulbs.
- rgrieselhuber 12y ago
  Yeah, fuck science man.
- randallsquared 12y ago
  Do you have some testable evidence that there's something outside the room (in your analogy)?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - amalag 12y ago
    Where is your testable evidence that you are not actually dreaming right now? Can you "prove" it? The point is that certain things are logically axiomatic, I could give you many more examples. So the logical axiom that we exist is used in modern society. To suggest that is is untrue and that science cannot proceed while accepting the existence of the self will only backfire and scientific endeavors in that direction will prove increasingly futile.
    - goblin89 12y ago
      > Where is your testable evidence that you are not actually dreaming right now? Can you "prove" it? Isn't science about doing one thing, but doing it well? I thought if it can't be tested and disproved (as the dream possibility), then it's ‘out of scope’. > the logical axiom that we exist is used in modern society. By the above, this axiom would not in any way involve science—another framework would've to deal with it. (IANAS, though.)
      - amalag 12y ago
        So is the existence of free will in the scope of science? Are you suggesting that science cannot help us determine if reality actually exists but it can tell us if free will exists? EDIT: I think it cannot for the simple reason that the so called individual is trying to figure out if there is scientific evidence of his own existence.
        goblin89 12y ago
        I think I see your point. No, whether free will exists does not seem like a proper question that science could ask (again, IANAS though).
stickperson 12y ago
I had a professor in college who was adamant that we do not have free will. His argument basically boiled down to this: we are who we are because of our genes, our environment, and random events that go on in the brain. We can't control any of them. Sure, you may be able to control your environment, but how we choose to do so is influenced by everything in the past. We think the way we do because of events we couldn't control. Here's an interesting paper he wrote on the subject: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full
- mtrimpe 12y ago
  The problems with/about free will have more to do with people's emotions than anything else. For some reason people just can't accept determinism; possibly because it often seems to lead to a belief in nihilism and that is judged (perhaps rightfully so) to be destructive/dysfunctional. On the other hand the only way free will makes sense if it's a property of all the universe and thus essentially is just the phenomenological experience of the passage of time. Since we conflate free will and consciousness that would mean people would have to accept that there's nothing special about human consciousness and that your dog is also conscious and that even your table must then in some be 'at least a little-bit' conscious. And that is something we also categorically seem to refuse to accept. Either way I'd say determinism and universal consciousness are just different sides of the same coin and our opposition to them says more about our adherence to religious concepts and insistence about humanity's 'special status' in the universe than anything else.
- warble 12y ago
  A powerful point, but it relies on the idea that a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome. I'm not sure that's true?
  - gphil 12y ago
    > a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome Nobody knows if this is true or not, or even whether we could know this to be true or not. For more info: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
vectorpush 12y ago
I will never understand this obsession with the concept of "free will". What the hell does the term "free will" even mean? In my non-expert opinion, apparent free will is indistinguishable from any other description of "free will". I am thrown into existence, then I absorb information about how the environment works, then I make decisions based on that information. How else could it be? If my locus of control exists outside my physical brain, how useful could it possibly be since the data I use to make ALL decisions is stored in my physical brain? If we propose that information is also stored in some type of cosmic non-corporeal spirit-brain, nothing really changes, the same questions of agency simply move from the physical brain to the realm of the inexplicable spirit-brain.
- Sapient 12y ago
  I think the interesting and more important questions that stem from this are around the consequences of not having free will. Are we punishing people for doing things they were unable to NOT do? As Sam Harris said in his talk on free will, if a crocodile bit your hand off, you wouldnt 'blame' the crocodile, you wouldnt demand it be put down, and you may even take your family to see the crocodile saying 'See, thats the bugger who bit my hand off'. If we have no free will, then a human killer is as much to 'blame' for killing as the crocodile is.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Most humans are susceptible to various kinds of social pressure, which is what "blame" amounts to. Crocodiles are not. This is a fact about the possibly deterministic physical instantiations of humans and crocodiles, and is independent of whether that determinism is - in fact - present or absent. To my mind, people care about free will because one or both of: 1) They want there to be space for a soul to be really guiding actions (otherwise God is punishing souls for no reason, and that breaks some theologies). Other dualist notions can also have troubles here. 2) They confuse physical determinism with classical determinism. Think Greek mythology; if something was fated, it would happen "whatever you do" - which motivates despair, "so why bother?", &c (for the Greeks, the answer was Virtue Ethics). In physical determinism, your actions are a part of what's "fated" - including your reflecting on determinism, including your making whatever decision you make - but if you were a different you, and made a different decision, or didn't try as hard, or tried harder, that would lead to a different outcome, so while you are uncertain about what you're deciding, you're also uncertain about the outcome, and you need very much to try.

Sensationalist, neuroscience vs. philosophy drivel from the author. There's nothing extreme about reductionist physical determinism in philosophy of mind literature. This methodology, besides being grossly inadequate at the experimental goals as portrayed in the article, doesn't add substantial evidence to the philosophical debate. Supervenience, epiphenomenalism, etc., all allow for fully deterministic physics of mind with various mechanisms of free will available (even if only as an explanatory agent in some). And I say this as someone who shares a similar metaphysical outlook as Kreiman. Luckily Kreiman's work isn't about free will, but neural mechanisms of decision making. And it's quite interesting in that context. He (and Bok and Boyden) say as much in the article, but for some reason scientific journalism has to create equivocal contexts for everything because they're convinced whatever they're reporting on isn't interesting enough for what it is. And apparently it works, because it ends up here.

amalag 12y ago

Trying to figure out where electricity comes from by changing the color of light bulbs.

rgrieselhuber 12y ago
Yeah, fuck science man.
randallsquared 12y ago
Do you have some testable evidence that there's something outside the room (in your analogy)?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- amalag 12y ago
  Where is your testable evidence that you are not actually dreaming right now? Can you "prove" it? The point is that certain things are logically axiomatic, I could give you many more examples. So the logical axiom that we exist is used in modern society. To suggest that is is untrue and that science cannot proceed while accepting the existence of the self will only backfire and scientific endeavors in that direction will prove increasingly futile.
  - goblin89 12y ago
    > Where is your testable evidence that you are not actually dreaming right now? Can you "prove" it? Isn't science about doing one thing, but doing it well? I thought if it can't be tested and disproved (as the dream possibility), then it's ‘out of scope’. > the logical axiom that we exist is used in modern society. By the above, this axiom would not in any way involve science—another framework would've to deal with it. (IANAS, though.)
    - amalag 12y ago
      So is the existence of free will in the scope of science? Are you suggesting that science cannot help us determine if reality actually exists but it can tell us if free will exists? EDIT: I think it cannot for the simple reason that the so called individual is trying to figure out if there is scientific evidence of his own existence.
      - goblin89 12y ago
        I think I see your point. No, whether free will exists does not seem like a proper question that science could ask (again, IANAS though).

stickperson 12y ago

I had a professor in college who was adamant that we do not have free will. His argument basically boiled down to this: we are who we are because of our genes, our environment, and random events that go on in the brain. We can't control any of them. Sure, you may be able to control your environment, but how we choose to do so is influenced by everything in the past. We think the way we do because of events we couldn't control. Here's an interesting paper he wrote on the subject: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full http://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4499.full

mtrimpe 12y ago
The problems with/about free will have more to do with people's emotions than anything else. For some reason people just can't accept determinism; possibly because it often seems to lead to a belief in nihilism and that is judged (perhaps rightfully so) to be destructive/dysfunctional. On the other hand the only way free will makes sense if it's a property of all the universe and thus essentially is just the phenomenological experience of the passage of time. Since we conflate free will and consciousness that would mean people would have to accept that there's nothing special about human consciousness and that your dog is also conscious and that even your table must then in some be 'at least a little-bit' conscious. And that is something we also categorically seem to refuse to accept. Either way I'd say determinism and universal consciousness are just different sides of the same coin and our opposition to them says more about our adherence to religious concepts and insistence about humanity's 'special status' in the universe than anything else.
warble 12y ago
A powerful point, but it relies on the idea that a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome. I'm not sure that's true?
- gphil 12y ago
  > a single set of initial conditions can only result in one outcome Nobody knows if this is true or not, or even whether we could know this to be true or not. For more info: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

vectorpush 12y ago

I will never understand this obsession with the concept of "free will". What the hell does the term "free will" even mean? In my non-expert opinion, apparent free will is indistinguishable from any other description of "free will". I am thrown into existence, then I absorb information about how the environment works, then I make decisions based on that information. How else could it be? If my locus of control exists outside my physical brain, how useful could it possibly be since the data I use to make ALL decisions is stored in my physical brain? If we propose that information is also stored in some type of cosmic non-corporeal spirit-brain, nothing really changes, the same questions of agency simply move from the physical brain to the realm of the inexplicable spirit-brain.

Sapient 12y ago
I think the interesting and more important questions that stem from this are around the consequences of not having free will. Are we punishing people for doing things they were unable to NOT do? As Sam Harris said in his talk on free will, if a crocodile bit your hand off, you wouldnt 'blame' the crocodile, you wouldnt demand it be put down, and you may even take your family to see the crocodile saying 'See, thats the bugger who bit my hand off'. If we have no free will, then a human killer is as much to 'blame' for killing as the crocodile is.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Most humans are susceptible to various kinds of social pressure, which is what "blame" amounts to. Crocodiles are not. This is a fact about the possibly deterministic physical instantiations of humans and crocodiles, and is independent of whether that determinism is - in fact - present or absent. To my mind, people care about free will because one or both of: 1) They want there to be space for a soul to be really guiding actions (otherwise God is punishing souls for no reason, and that breaks some theologies). Other dualist notions can also have troubles here. 2) They confuse physical determinism with classical determinism. Think Greek mythology; if something was fated, it would happen "whatever you do" - which motivates despair, "so why bother?", &c (for the Greeks, the answer was Virtue Ethics). In physical determinism, your actions are a part of what's "fated" - including your reflecting on determinism, including your making whatever decision you make - but if you were a different you, and made a different decision, or didn't try as hard, or tried harder, that would lead to a different outcome, so while you are uncertain about what you're deciding, you're also uncertain about the outcome, and you need very much to try.