Do we have free will?

_{Denyse O'Leary

June 8, 2015

Mind, Neuroscience, News}

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From Prager University, here. From transcript of audio:

Now, if all you are is a brain, an exhaustively physical system of neurons and synapses, then there’s no “you” that’s gonna be making a “choice” at all. Your thought processes are basically just a complex series of colliding electron-dominos crashing into one another. It’s just physical cause and effect, right — something that can be exhaustively understood in terms of physics and chemistry? There’s no “you” that’s an agent that’s deliberating, or choosing, or exercising free will.

And that’s why, if you are just a brain, you cannot have free will. You would just be a physical machine — a very complex but programmed computer.

But, if you’re something more than your brain — if you’re the thing that has the brain — then, when I ask you “Where do you want to go for lunch?,” you’re going to start deliberating — you’re going to be weighing your taste preferences, the commute time, perhaps even counting calories. You’d be weighing various reasons to choose one place over another. You wouldn’t be caused to think about any of these things. You would choose to think about these things, and you could stop anytime you wanted to.

So, what we have here, therefore, are two different types of things: an immaterial mind and the material brain. You are the thing that has the brain — you are not your brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

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Comments

Carpathian
This is no longer a creator simply of life then and excludes a lot of possible designers including aliens with only intelligence at their disposal.
ID proposes that there is evidence of intelligent design in nature. As to the possible designers, that's a different area of study. But nobody could claim that every possible intelligent designer is a candidate for the design of life. At the same time, you couldn't exclude all aliens since you don't know what aliens are capable of.
As far as the fine tuning argument goes, I have a lot of difficulty accepting that the forces of nature don’t simply balance themselves. Calling that fine-tuning is a stretch.
If you haven't read it, you might enjoy the article I posted. It's not just the forces of nature ... it's the components that the forces work on. Carbon, water, oxygen, CO2 - how these have multiple diverse properties that work together in an 'ensemble', for example:
Henderson also was struck by the same wonderful synergy and parsimony by which each compound satisfies several different ends. His prose grows practically rhapsodic as he considers the fact that water and CO2 are not only physically fit in so many ways for carbon-based life, but are made up of the three atoms that together form the universe of organic chemicals, the material basis of all living things [3: p. 220]. The same few atoms which are uniquely fit to make up the complex molecular fabric of living things (proteins, DNA, etc.) are also uniquely fit to form an ideal matrix and ideal buffer for the thriving of those same ‘life forms.’
So the question would be how these diverse elements happened to come together to create an environment where life could emerge and develop. They call it "fitness of the environment". Merely saying "that's the way nature is" is not different than saying "that's the way God made it".Silver Asiatic_{June 16, 2015
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Silver Asiatic:
Because the intelligent designer designed the environment – which shows evidence of having been fine-tuned for life.
This is no longer a creator simply of life then and excludes a lot of possible designers including aliens with only intelligence at their disposal. As far as the fine tuning argument goes, I have a lot of difficulty accepting that the forces of nature don't simply balance themselves. Calling that fine-tuning is a stretch.Carpathian_{June 16, 2015
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Carpathian
For instance, how does an intelligent designer know what a future unseen environment will do to an organism that he is designing today?
Because the intelligent designer designed the environment - which shows evidence of having been fine-tuned for life. http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.1Silver Asiatic_{June 16, 2015
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Mapou:
It is also an insult to my God who designed the brain in all of its intricate glory.
This is also something I wonder about when I hear the arguments of most IDists. They seem to believe that the god they believe in has some sort of restrictions that they have somehow identified. In this mind/brain debate, they have reduced the brain to a dumb terminal. In the case of evolution itself, they seem to think that their intelligent designer is not powerful enough to design a life-form that could evolve on its own in response to changes in that organism's environment. Humans however have developed systems that respond to external changes such as autopilots for aircraft. Why is the intelligent designer not capable of this?Carpathian_{June 16, 2015
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Silver Asiatic:
But I’ll also repeat my previous comment – I think the case for ID is so strong that nobody can really debate it in a civil manner.
I disagree. I think the case for ID is very weak. What I see instead is different forms of the argument that evolution without a guiding intelligence is very improbable. What I would like to see from the ID side is an argument that stands on its own. For instance, how does an intelligent designer know what a future unseen environment will do to an organism that he is designing today? As improbable as "materialistic" evolution is, I see the solution to this ID problem as being much more unlikely.Carpathian_{June 16, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: Zachriel seems to be the last man standing. I had hoped that Larry Moran would be able to engage in the debate but he got demoralized, apparently, and just ran away.
Zachriel, and to a lesser degree Moran, belong to that rare kind of people who actually feel quite comfortable arguing in favor of “against all odds things might be due to chance” at UD. Clearly not everyone is cut out for this—most ppl rather prefer to remain quiet.Box_{June 16, 2015
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ID's "opponents" are busy singing to their own choir in their own echo chambers. That way they can get away with lying, misrepresenting, equivocating and overselling their position's claims. Heck ID's opponents actually believe that genetic and evolutionary algorithms simulate unguided evolution even though those algorithms are goal-oriented and guided towards a solution. You can't debate people who think that way and there isn't any sense in trying.Virgil Cain_{June 16, 2015
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Are there any ID opponents left out there? Zachriel seems to be the last man standing. I had hoped that Larry Moran would be able to engage in the debate but he got demoralized, apparently, and just ran away. I was surprised that he had so little to say anyway. I guess it's like Mark Frank, spending years here arguing in circles and just shutting out everything that his position simply couldn't comprehend. Or RDFish ... totally incoherent.Silver Asiatic_{June 16, 2015
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True words, Box. I don't mind it being a little quieter here. It's the sound of victory. :-)Silver Asiatic_{June 16, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: I think the case for ID is so strong that nobody can really debate it in a civil manner. Our opponents tend to attack and then get irrational. So that’s why it has gotten quieter here, in my opinion.
I second that. Other than "against all odds things might be due to chance" the other side hasn't been able to present one single counter-argument to ID, during the past several years.Box_{June 16, 2015
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evnfrdrcksn I think the quality of some of the clashes actually decreased quite a lot - some of the people who generated a number of posts were just making a lot of noise. I hope you'll still take the time to read news items and articles here - as well as the many resources offered from guys like BA77. That's the more serious material and some of the posters who either left or were banned really didn't take the material seriously. It seemed like they just wanted to hear themselves talk. But I'll also repeat my previous comment - I think the case for ID is so strong that nobody can really debate it in a civil manner. Our opponents tend to attack and then get irrational. So that's why it has gotten quieter here, in my opinion.Silver Asiatic_{June 15, 2015
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Box, Mung, Axel: I've always scrolled right past your posts (a man has to retain his sanity). Funny you should speak up now.evnfrdrcksn_{June 14, 2015
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22...It has been quieter. And less interesting. The appeal of this blog was seeing opinions clash. I rarely contributed comments, but I surely paid in page views.evnfrdrcksn_{June 14, 2015
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31 No kidding, mung?! Take care, evnfrdrcksn. Watch the door doesn't bang you on the butt on the way out, .Axel_{June 12, 2015
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Not that he's leaving of his own free will, lol.Mung_{June 12, 2015
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#31, let the doorknob hit you where the good Lord split you.Box_{June 12, 2015
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...signed, A Long Time Reader, Small Time Commenter. So long!evnfrdrcksn_{June 11, 2015
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well...this blog has become a weird echo chamber since barry chased away the dissidents. it's unreadable and not at all entertaining. have fun with getting page views from now on. i suppose this will end up in the web graveyard that world news blog is buried in. sad. this blog would make me think, occasionally.evnfrdrcksn_{June 11, 2015
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Mapou: Please note that I have been researching intelligence and the brain for decades.
Obviously you are not the only one. In post #21 I cite E.F.Kelly Ph.D. Professor of research and member of the Neuroscience Group at University of Virginia. IMHO he supports the arguments against your position I offered in post #17.
Mapou: I understand a little bit about its operation and various functions.
Based on what you write I find that extremely unlikely.
Mapou: The truth about the brain and mind is so strange and magnificent that, when revealed, it will blow everybody’s socks off, materialists and Christians alike. It won’t be too long now. Do keep your ears and eyes open. And I say this as a Christian.
If so, this revelation won’t be consistent with your absurd version of dualism.Box_{June 10, 2015
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A few readers may find these videos interesting: The Case for the Soul - InspiringPhilosophy - (4:03 minute mark, Brain Plasticity including Schwartz's work) - Oct. 2014 - video The Mind is able to modify the brain (brain plasticity). Moreover, Idealism explains all anomalous evidence of personality changes due to brain injury, whereas physicalism cannot explain mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBsI_ay8K70 The Case for the Soul: Refuting Physicalist Objections - video Computers vs. Qualia, Libet and 'Free won't', Split Brain (unified attention of brain despite split hemispheres, visual and motion information is shared between the two hemispheres despite the hemispheres being split), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB5TNrtu9Pkbornagain77_{June 10, 2015
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Obviously "the mind" is not completely immaterial. Consciousness is immaterial. The brain determines the experiences that consciousness experiences. The brain plus consciousness equal "the mind." It's a merge of the two. Easy to prove that. Brain asleep, consciousness not experiencing anything. Brain damage alters personalities and the entire experience and capacity for thinking. Or just drink a fifth of Jack Daniels. Or take a hallucinogenic. It seems to be a bi-lateral union. OK then.mike1962_{June 10, 2015
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Since we don't actually control the generation of our thoughts (propositions for action), we can't be said to be absolutely free. However, we can accept or reject said thoughts by continuing or discontinuing our attention for them. According to Eastern philosophies, apparent determinism of thought-into-action is in fact a symptom of a conditioned person who is living their life on autopilot. Thoughts are proposed by the unconscious mind (called citta -- the reservoir of all past impressions) and then are automatically accepted into the next stage of development, until it comes to the senses who perform action. The stages are called (translated) as thinking, feeling, willing, knowing (procedures/planning) and acting. At every stage of this development the thought-into-action process can be arrested by the conscious soul who stands apart from the faculties of the mind. Thus "free will" is in fact a much more bureaucratic process, in which the soul approves or disapproves thoughts-into-action at various stages of development. But the kicker in this philosophy is that, although the approve/reject decisions of the conscious being are "responsible" for how this process end up (action or no action), it doesn't mean that the soul is the one who "does" it. In this philosophy, the approve/reject decisions of the soul are implemented through matter by God's energies, called Shaktis.tarmaras_{June 10, 2015
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Box:
Mapou, One more question: why do you offer your implausible ideas if you are not willing to defend them?
Implausible in YOUR opinion, of course. The chasm between your worldview and mine is so wide and deep, we would both be wasting our time arguing back and forth about it. Please note that I have been researching intelligence and the brain for decades. I understand a little bit about its operation and various functions. It is an insult to my intelligence when I hear someone argue on the basis of second-hand medieval church dogma that the mind is 100% immaterial and that, therefore, the brain is essentially gelatinous goo, i.e., good for nothing. It is also an insult to my God who designed the brain in all of its intricate glory. I am a card carrying dualist, through and through. I am not a partial dualist like some Christians. You people are not true dualists as you claim. You are a bunch of closet monists. The truth about the brain and mind is so strange and magnificent that, when revealed, it will blow everybody's socks off, materialists and Christians alike. It won't be too long now. Do keep your ears and eyes open. And I say this as a Christian. PS. No need to reply. I'm done with this discussion.Mapou_{June 10, 2015
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EF:
“gummint” is just more of us doing what the rest of us want done
I suggest you look up the principal-agent problem, i/l/o Government agents as agents who can develop their own agendas and interests, and also where democratic polities are prone to manipulations and marches of folly. This may help: http://kairosfocus.blogspot.com/2013/01/acts-27-test-1-on-celebrating-new-year.html KFkairosfocus_{June 10, 2015
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How can anyone take seriously the proponents of the notion that we have no free will? According to their own proposition: They have no choice but to assert that we have no free will. That they experience a sense of "certainty" as they make that assertion is beyond their control. They can't help but make that assertion, regardless of the truth of the matter. "No free will" is not really their own idea, but is the merely the result of the workings of whatever mindless forces have taken possession of them. On the one hand, as stupid as that assertion is, it seems reasonable to believe that mindless forces have indeed taken possession of those who assert that we have no free will. On the other hand, the implications of believing one has no free will are so diabolical that it seems more reasonable to conclude that those who sincerely make that assertion are indeed possessed by dark forces, but not mindless ones.harry_{June 10, 2015
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evnfrdrcksn
since barry has chased all the ‘disagreeables’ away…
I'm glad you responded because it has been quieter. I assumed that the disagreeables weren't chased away, but they just went away after their arguments were defeated so often.
if we don’t care, then democracy is useless.
True, but if there's no free will, then everything is useless.Silver Asiatic_{June 10, 2015
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Bornagain77, Thank you very much for those illuminating additions. They reminded me of ‘Irriducible Mind’ by Edward F. Kelly et al.
I must also acknowledge here that I myself initially embraced the computational theory practically without reservation. It certainly seemed an enormous step forward at the time. Fellow graduate students likely remember my oft-repeated attempts to assure them that the CTM [Computational Theory of the Mind] would soon solve this or that fundamental problem in psychology. But all was not well. [‘Irriducible Mind’, ch.1, E.F.Kelly]
Rationality is not bottom-up, but contextual instead:
Any scheme based on atomization of meaning would necessarily fail to capture what to me had become the most characteristic property of word-meaning, a felt Gestalt quality or wholeness, at a level of generality that naturally supports extensions of usage into an indefinite variety—indeed whole families—of novel but appropriate contexts. The existing proposals could only represent the content of a general term such as “line” by some sample of its possible particularizations, and in so doing rendered themselves systematically unable to distinguish between metaphorical truth and literal falsehood. I also noted with a certain degree of alarm that this crucial property of generality underlying the normal use of words seemed continuous with developmentally earlier achievements. Skilled motor acts and perceptual recognition, for example, require similar on-the-fly adaptations of past learning to present circumstance. The importance of incorporating more general knowledge of the world into language-processing models, for example, had already begun to be recognized, and new formal devices were being introduced to represent what the computer needed to know (what we ourselves know) about various sorts of “typical” situations it might encounter. But it seemed clear to me that all of these knowledge-representation devices, such as “frames” (Minsky, 1975), “scripts” (Schank & Colby, 1973), and “schemata” (Neisser, 1976), suffered essentially the same problems I had identified in the Katz and Fodor account of word meaning. Specifically, they required the possible scenarios of application to be spelled out in advance, in great but necessarily incomplete detail, and as a result ended up being “brittle,” intolerant of even minor departures from the preprogrammed expectations. Many of the themes just sounded have been confirmed and amplified in more recent work. On the positive side, our knowledge of the content, organization, and development of the human conceptual system has increased enormously. The old Socratic idea that concepts must be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient features has given way to a recognition of the role of perceptual-level examples, prototypes, and family resemblances in the content of real human concepts (Medin & Heit, 1999; Rosch & Lloyd, 1978; E. E. Smith & Medin, 1981). The contributions of a fundamental human capacity for metaphorizing at levels ranging from everyday language to the highest flights of creativity, are also now more widely appreciated (Gentner, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001; Hofstadter & FARG, 1995; Holyoak & Tha-gard, 1995; Lakoff, 1987, 1995; see also our Chapter 7). [‘Irriducible Mind’, ch.1, E.F.Kelly] [My emphasis]
Box_{June 10, 2015
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Mapou, I found Box's arguments against your position to be well stated and very reasonable. Perhaps you can lay pride aside and humbly exercise your free will and admit that you have been wrong in your thinking about contextual understanding?
Your Computer Doesn't Know Anything - Michael Egnor - January 23, 2015 Excerpt: Your computer doesn't know a binary string from a ham sandwich. Your math book doesn't know algebra. Your Rolodex doesn't know your cousin's address. Your watch doesn't know what time it is. Your car doesn't know where you're driving. Your television doesn't know who won the football game last night. Your cell phone doesn't know what you said to your girlfriend this morning. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/01/your_computer_d_1092981.html What Is a Mind? More Hype from Big Data - Erik J. Larson - May 6, 2014 Excerpt: In 1979, University of Pittsburgh philosopher John Haugeland wrote an interesting article in the Journal of Philosophy, "Understanding Natural Language," about Artificial Intelligence. At that time, philosophy and AI were still paired, if uncomfortably. Haugeland's article is one of my all time favorite expositions of the deep mystery of how we interpret language. He gave a number of examples of sentences and longer narratives that, because of ambiguities at the lexical (word) level, he said required "holistic interpretation." That is, the ambiguities weren't resolvable except by taking a broader context into account. The words by themselves weren't enough. Well, I took the old 1979 examples Haugeland claimed were difficult for MT, and submitted them to Google Translate, as an informal "test" to see if his claims were still valid today.,,, ,,,Translation must account for context, so the fact that Google Translate generates the same phrase in radically different contexts is simply Haugeland's point about machine translation made afresh, in 2014. Erik J. Larson - Founder and CEO of a software company in Austin, Texas http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/05/what_is_a_mind085251.html Defending the Christian Faith – Pastor Joe Boot – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqE5_ZOAnKo "If you have no God, then you have no design plan for the universe. You have no prexisting structure to the universe.,, As the ancient Greeks held, like Democritus and others, the universe is flux. It's just matter in motion. Now on that basis all you are confronted with is innumerable brute facts that are unrelated pieces of data. They have no meaningful connection to each other because there is no overall structure. There's no design plan. It's like my kids do 'join the dots' puzzles. It's just dots, but when you join the dots there is a structure, and a picture emerges. Well, the atheists is without that (final picture). There is no preestablished pattern (to connect the facts given atheism)." Pastor Joe Boot - quoted from the 13:20 minute mark of the video
bornagain77_{June 10, 2015
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Mapou, One more question: why do you offer your implausible ideas if you are not willing to defend them?Box_{June 10, 2015
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See you around, Box.Mapou_{June 10, 2015
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