I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.
God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee
I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.
me choosing to fire the serotonin orgasm neuron over and over until i die of brain aneurysm :meow-bounce:
Reminder that a physicalist approach to the hard problem of consciousness is inherently nonsensical and contradictory. Moreover it's entirely undialectical and Engels would call you a dumb dumb for believing it.
I will explain if somebody wants me to but only once, I've had this discussion many times here and it never amounted to much.
I will explain if somebody wants me to but only once,
pls do
I’ve had this discussion many times here and it never amounted to much.
just do what I do, make a copypasta for special occasions so you can rapidly deploy knowledge fast
I'm not happy with how I worded my arguments before because most people didn't seem to be able to grasp them completely. I'll try to do a long writeup later today or tomorrow. Stay tuned.
DIVINE LINK SEVERED
You are a flesh automaton controlled by neurotransmitters
Umm. Sort of? Apparently gut bacteria play an important role in cognition, too.
straight up when people say shit like "the brain is just a very advanced computer" i want to debug them with a heavy rock like shut up lmao
Yeah, like there aren't very many computers that are natural noise isolaters. Usually that takes a heavy degree of expensive statistical modeling because digital just isn't cut out for that.
I’m not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us “free will”.
Yeah, because it's not a question of biology or physics. Scientific inquiry can reveal a lot about the observable world. We have philosophy for everything that isn't that.
Scientific inquiry can reveal a lot about the observable world. We have philosophy for everything that isn’t that.
to be fair science is itself a philosophy. An empirical philosophy about how to make hypotheses, test them through observation of controlled experiments, and then record results
Empiricism relies on our subjective images and models (that exist only within our mind) of the objective material world to make its conclusions. If you try to use empiricism and only empiricism to investigate the subjective images themselves (and thus the mind itself) you end up chasing your tail IMO.
Empiricism relies on our subjective images and models (that exist only within our mind) of the objective material world to make its conclusions
Well there's nothing else to go off of because our brain is the only thing we have to interface with reality. No matter what device we use to measure reality, it is our "subjective models that exist only within our minds" that ultimately take in the data from those devices of measurement. So I'm not sure what else there is.
If you try to use empiricism and only empiricism to investigate the subjective images themselves (and thus the mind itself) you end up chasing your tail IMO.
is there an alternative I'm not aware of? All alternatives I'm aware of still rely on the subjective interpretations of reality within the human mind, but without the rigors of empirical philosophy and peer review processes being applied to stave of cognitive biases and methodological failures and so on. I know it can be a limited conceptual framework, but it's limited for specific reasons.
Okay I have some thoughts. I'm going to be taking a more computational approach.
So we have no free will. Everything we do is determined, i.e. given the current state of your brain, as well as extraordinary advanced technology, you can "calculate" what your next behavior will be. An issue arises: you are not a brain, but a brain in a body. We are not goop floating in a void, but a sensing and acting entity.
I'm not much of a Cognitive Psychology kind of guy, but one of the more interesting theories that has emerged in recent years is embodied cognition. This theory is a reaction against the traditional "brain in a jar" approach where cognition occurs only in the brain, and instead posits that cognition is a process of the brain and the body. The body's sensors structure incoming information before it sends it to the brain. This "re-structuring" of information is so complex that these sensors, as argued by proponents of embodied cognition, perform a computation on information before it reaches the brain.
Okay, so we can't just take our brain's state in order to calculate our next behavior, we need our body's state as well. We put that into our Human Predictor 9000.
But another problem arises: we are not just a brain in a body, but a brain in a body in an environment. That is to say, we are not just a body floating in space but are a body forever grounded in an environment. This environment acts on us in so many ways. We're talking background radiation, oxygen levels, amount of green things we can see in an immediate moment, how much stuff is touching our skin, voices and other sounds of events happening in our environment. We've established that our body is just as integral to cognition as our brain, but our body, like our brain, is exposed to all these happenings in our environment. You know what that means.
Time to simulate the universe.
Maybe it's a big step to go from our local environment to the entire universe, but if we don't then we will have to draw a line somewhere. Drawing a line, however, is going to create a computational model which, at some point, deviates from the modeled reality. At this point I'm reminded of the beginning of the Baudrillard book where a map that accurately depicts the territory would have to completely cover it. In this case we need to simulate an entire universe so as to understand our own. But don't we already have access to a simulation of our Universe? Isn't our own Universe the calculation of itself? Why bother creating a simulation? I suppose you could argue that a simulation would allow you to calculate the Universe at a rate faster than it actually proceeds, though I'll let other nerds think about that possibility.
If we take our Universe to be the calculation of itself, then we can extrapolate that to ourselves. What will I be doing in 60 seconds? We can calculate that, but it's going to take 60 seconds to run. If you want a better calculation than that then I'm afraid you're going to have to go and muck about in the nonsense world of thought and will.
Yeah, this is how I think about it too. Talking about brain and body reminded me of this CGP Grey video which i recently saw and thought interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
We have a limited range of agency based on the material conditions that prevail around and up to any given position. But yeah the idea that we have anything more than limited potentialities is idealistic claptrap.
yeah. if we all just did the path of least resistance people wouldn't recover from mental health ills or addiction.
There is no mathematical trick to see when a ruleset for Langton's Ant will make a highway - the only way to know the ant's behavior is to run the process step by step. Physical constants seem to point towards a specific end for the cosmos. But the shape it takes between beginning and end? That is uncalculable. You have to let the process play out to know for sure. And that's before bits of matter start believing they can change the shape.
Maybe the only thing you need to make a free agent in a deterministic universe is the belief in free agency.
Sorry am I totally off base in my understanding of what is meant by "Free will" and it actually just means there's some degree of unpredictability at the micro scale?
No, you seem to understand the concept. I am attempting to suggest that the physical process of consciousness could create free will in an otherwise deterministic universe. Which is a pretty big assumption. But determinism itself is a rather large assumption, too. We can model the orbit of a planet or the chemical bonds of a molecule, and there is a predictive capacity in these models. An astronomer can tell you next when Mars and Earth are closest, a chemist how carbon will link up with various atoms. But it's still just a model; a simple story representing much more complicated processes. The position of the planets 100,00,00 years from now is unpredictable. Our models ignore quite a lot of gravity because it's very small and very inconsequential - in the short term. Maybe there is a mathematical formula to existence - all matter and energy accounted for and stuffed inside a formula. Or, maybe there isn't. All we know is, we haven't found it yet.
I think free will is perfectly compatible with determinism.
Hofstadter had this good analogy. Imagine you laid out a series of many, many dominos. These dominos form the equivalent of "and" or "nand" gates of whatever arbitrary complexity you'd like. With this you're able to input a binary string of 8 digits, say, and knock over whichever rows of dominos in the input section you'd like. The dominos flop over enter a few adders, square root functions, enter a bus to hold as memory (all with as many dominos as you deem necessary), and at the end the dominos flop over if the inputted number is prime or they don't flop over if they're not - now, why if you inputted 11011111 (223) did the last domino fall? It's realistic and valid to say, the last domino fell because 13 is prime - and reductive and useless to say, because another domino hit it. That's the equivalent of saying we are merely stimuli and responses. If you don't like dominos, imagine the same with a calculator or whatever. Why do the pixels in the screen light up in a NO when I inputted 221 in thus program? The most useful answer is "because 221 is not prime" and not to start delving into quintillions of electrons' wave functions in the silicon.
The other really interesting thing about being physical beings with consciousness is that it doesn't seem to really matter what happens at the physical level of molecules or atoms - we run the same. If you had heard a particularily moving piece of music for the first time at 8 years old you'd be the same person if you had heard that same music with 1 second delay (really choose 0.5 sec or 0.01 sec the point stands) - even though the air molecules that careened into your ear lobes were not the same! Consciousness and free will seem to be robust and float above these very base material laws of physics.
That doesn't mean you can will yourself to be full when your economic system is not providing food, but it does mean you have a choice with how you will react to that as an individual - will you steal, will you beg, will you work with your neighbors, will you so on and so on. I like to think of it as a "volition cone" where the point is the current moment and it widens in some imaginary "action/possibility space" according to some function that essentially describes your class. You are free to act within your future volition cone but cannot escape outside of it short of revolution.
I actually like referring to Catherine Malabou for this. She was a neuroscientist and in What Should We Do With Our Brain? she makes the case that assuming human psychology is deterministic is actually liberalism. It seeds the people who think in deterministic terms to be inactive because choosing to act is unrealistic. Her view is that neuroplasticity is actually a dialectical process:
Humans make their own brains, and they do not know that they do so. Our brain is a work, and we do not know it. Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. The reason for this is that most of the time flexibility superimposes it-self on plasticity, even in the midst of scientific discourses that take themselves to be describing it entirely ‘‘objectively.’’ The mistake in certain cognitivist discourses, for in-stance, is not that they reduce the mental to the neuronal or the mind to a biological entity. I am myself entirely materialist, and such affirmations do not shock me at all. The error is in thinking that neuronal man is simply a neuronal given and not also a political and ideological construction (including of the ‘‘neuronal’’ itself). One notes that many descriptions of plasticity are in fact unconscious justifications of a flexibility without limits. Sometimes it seems as though in nervous systems, from the aplysia to the human, a faculty is deployed—a faculty described precisely in terms of synaptic plasticity—to fold, to render oneself docile vis-a-vis one’s environment, in a word, to adapt to everything, to be ready for all adjustments. It is as though, under the pretext of describing synaptic plasticity, we were really looking to show that flexibility is inscribed in the brain, as though we knew more about what we could stand than about what we could create. That said, securing a true plasticity of the brain means insisting on knowing what it can do and not simply what it can tolerate. By the verb to do or to make [faire] we don’t mean just ‘‘doing’’ math or piano but making its history, becoming the subject of its history, grasping the connection between the role of genetic nondeterminism at work in the constitution of the brain and the possibility of a social and political nondeterminism, in a word, a new freedom, which is to say: a new meaning of history.
I'm sorry but this sounds like it's talking about neuroplasticity rather than the concept of free will. And I just mistaken in what is generally meant by free will?
It's a long ass book but I guess I can try to paraphrase. However, it will lose a lot of the nuance and philosophical justification: the concept of free will Malabou is putting forward is that it's a dialectical process. The world presents you with environmental change as a thesis, your body's tendency toward homeostasis presents you with an antithesis, and through making a decision and taking action you apply synthesis.
A lot of neuroscientists talking about choice focus on the act of attention because it's more easily measurable than intention. If multiple stimuli enter an animal's brain simultaneously, this creates a very noisy (random or pseudorandom) situation in which the brain is forced to act as a modulator to the signals it's receiving. Usually what happens is that it isolates a specific stimulus to focus on, thus taking a bunch of branching action potentials and directing them down one pathway like a lightning strike after one of its multiple leaders makes contact with the ground. This is why you can understand the voice of the person speaking to you even when you're in a crowded room surrounded by loud talkers.
Which stimulus an animal focuses on can be based on many factors like habit, history, or randomness. If I sedate you and put you in a blank white room with identical cookies set equidistantly all around you, obviously you didn't choose to be in this blank room, but if you pick a cookie at random it will have technically been your choice, because isolating all other possible factors only leaves your brain to go for one at random. With no external stimuli standing out, you are left with just the signal generated by you.
But Catherine Malabou's thesis essentially includes another option: you can also break functional fixedness and destroy the white box and sue me for sedating you and putting you in a box. In this way we can connect theories of attention, choice, and neuroplasticity (in the way it's reacting to a new situation) with struggle and revolution. If you were simply a passive actor, then a third option might not have been conceivable.
Yes, there are many material factors of history affecting your decision, but ultimately you will reach a point where either a new synaptic connection will be made or a signal will be suppressed, and I'm not sure that's something that we can 100% consistently model even with a neuron-by-neuron brain simulator (many phds are still trying, but free choice and consciousness still elude them). Not even behaviorists could account for all the statistical noise in animal responses, only trendlines.
I also think that if our minds were totally susceptible to deterministic functions, we'd be more easily influenced by cybernetic regimens or such regimens would be better designed. Instead we're all here talking about communism even though it's not presently in our best interests.
:galaxy-brain: the urge to assert free will is a response to the stimulus of suggesting there is no such thing as free will :galaxy-brain:
if we're just reactive stimulus clockwork rube golberg machines then I don't think we'd need to be anymore conscious than an automaton.
The problem with philosophy is because all the arguments for free will sound as correct as all the ones against it.
There are in fact unpredictable non-random systems. Chaotic systems are fully deterministic but require perfect knowledge of their initial conditions to predict accurately.
Which sounds like the universe we're living in. We can only make inferences about the beginnings of the universe, so of course we don't know everything that will happen. The debate is ridiculous anyway. Even if we have free will we're still living under capitalist oppression. The only theory I care about is Communist theory until the last capitalist loses their head.
We can only make inferences about the beginnings of the universe.
Yes, but I feel I should clarify that "initial conditions" are relative. They're just the parameters at a particular time, perhaps the time you start observing or simulating a system. In a deterministic system, perfect knowledge of all parameters at any one time is enough to determine them at any other time.
Of course, it's not possible to perfectly the mass or velocity of something. Much less everything in the universe. You're right though many large scale systems in the universe exhibit chaos. e.g. 3 or more body gravitation, weather. But the universe is not fully deterministic, there is randomness at the quantum scale. This randomness led to the distribution of matter at the largest scale of the universe early on, but it's unclear to me whether they ever add up to randomness at large scales today. Like if you rewound the universe 2 years and played it all again, what would change due to quantum randomness? idk, maybe the weather?
The further ahead one tries to predict them, the less accurate their prediction will be. Prediction and reality diverge exponentially until some upper limit based on the systems large scale properties.
So weather forecasts are limited to like 10 days, and decreasingly accurate. So we just re-predict it over and over.
Then why would we be more conscious than a rockslide?
I'm not qualified to argue philosophy but when I say that free will sounds as true to me as the alternative these are the arguments I'm talking about and the ones you'd have to be calling nonsensical.
edit: "A 2020 survey found that 59% of philosophers accept compatibilism" so it looks like even trained philosophers find the arguments worthy in about equal amounts.
I'm also not qualified to argue philosophy and I think our brains are kinda like a really complex rockslide. My analogy is that computing devices appear to be pretty complex and can be made more so but are just built up from simple machines combined and layered up to their complexity, both in hardware and software. I imagine our brain like that.
