Free Will

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Flip McWho
How about this. Free will is the ability to choose to do whatever we can do at any point in time. Which we all have. This ability won't be exercised to its extreme all that much because everybody will filter the ability through such things like reaction, emotional feeling and personality. But essentially we all have it.

The question is whether your choice can be independent of any cause besides yourself.

[MORON]

aneeshm
A consciousness conscious of itself needs no further justification of its own existence . Similarly , it needs no justification for having free will , as the fact that the consciousness has free will can be perceived by itself , about itself .

If the consciousness perceives a lack of free will, there is no free will

Nor has consciousness ever been replicated in a physical system , I believe.

I must be a floating spirt rather than a "human being" than, since a human is physical and obviously that is not conscious.

Kidicious
The question is whether your choice can be independent of any cause besides yourself.

The self can be deterministic too.....

Flip McWho
Free will is the ability to choose to do whatever we can do at any point in time.

Which is true for all given I/O system we one limits what something "can do". In other words, a rock has "free will" too.

A rock can do nothing, and it has the ability to' choose' to do nothing.

That is not dis-similar to the determistic man that can only do one thing, and he can 'choose' to do that one thing.
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The fact that the mind is a largely determistic process (meaning, casual), and possiblely an entirely determistic process. If this is not the case, the concept of the self would be impossible. There are so many things that we hold ourselves as continous over time, for example I like to waste time on forums and I know I will do so in the future barring other events. If I have "free will" over the matter, I can would not be able to know whether I will like to spend time on forums since I would be able to "choose it" at some random time. Our minds are full or feelings, ideas and concepts that we get absolutely no direct control over (we can't choose to alter memories directly, or force ourselves to believe a lie directly, or something) however their interaction is determistic and predictable.

The ulitmate determination of action is those sets of casual parts of the self, and the "allowed set of choices" is already an completely minimal compared to physically allowed actions.

The actual decision from the "set of choices" is made by using the determistic preset criteria as well, except it happens at a conscious level. The consciousness is like a computer program monitering a chess program considering the next move. It does not actually "make" a decision, only get to "view" the decision getting made. the consciousness don't get to "view" every part of the decision process and thus attributes it to "magic" which sometimes is interpreted as an ill defined concept called free will.

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The fact that I am posting on ploy is no different than my identifying the characters on my screen.

I don't full know why either works, and there is a set of solutions. (for characters, the set {a,b....,z} ) Hell I can consider identifying characters with my "conscious mind" and I would still get a determistic result. (I can not "choose" to think that the characters that compose of 'word' are {a, d, g, z} )

The fact that I post on poly rather than eat lunch is no different than the fact that I know 'word' set of characters {w, o, r, d} rather than some other set. I considered my options, and I picked one that is self evident to my brain processes. If you nitpick, the only difference is that picking to post on ploy involves more uncertainties in input, but that does not effect the argument. That is like reading badly scribbled writting and guess some of the characters is "free will", which is nothing more than dealing probability.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MORON
Our minds are full or feelings, ideas and concepts that we get absolutely no direct control over (we can't choose to alter memories directly, or force ourselves to believe a lie directly, or something) however their interaction is determistic and predictable.

I question this.

....

That's all.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Agathon
Nobody really believes in Free Will anyway.

Think about how many assumptions you make about how people will react, and how often you are right. If you add it up, people are 99.9% predictable. We can jot down the other 0.1% to our own ignorance.

People are more predictable than the weather, and we don't ascribe some mystical free will to the weather.

What a load of bull****. Our ignorance goes far beyond 0.1%

[Lorizael]

A very cogent post, MORON. A lot of what you said I have thought about before in less organized terms. Anywho, the only trouble that I have with purely deterministic systems is our ability to perceive the interactions within those systems.

For example, you speak of consciousness as something merely observing the actions of the actual decision making process in our brain. I agree with this to a large extent, except that I would add that the components of our consciousness can be part of the set of variables that influences the decision making process. Not important, though.

What is important is that there is something we call consciousness that can observe thoughts and feelings and actions, as well as light and sound, gravity and motion, etc...

Most modern theories seem to indicate that consciousness emerges from the complex interactions of our little understood brain. But there is one ultimate question here that cannot be answered, which is... essentially... what.

We know how and why eyes and the neural systems behind them can detect and process light, but we do not know what is actually going on that allows the consciousness to see things. There is no adequate way to describe the fact of seeing.

This is true for all other sensory data. We know how it happens, but we cannot say precisely what it is that is happening.

But this fact seems to separate us from the rest of the universe. This fact that, somehow, after all the processing and analyzing and interpreting and referencing is done by our brain, we are then able to actually see our perception of the photons hitting our eyes. We assert that while photons may have an effect on say, a rock, the rock does not actually feel the photons hitting it. It does not perceive, it does not see, it is merely affected.

The question is... what is the difference between being affected by something and perceiving something? It is thought that humans perceive things, and that we react according to our perceptions, and that this is somehow different from just being affected by things.

But is there any concrete difference, or is this merely our own bias?

And if there is a difference between being affected by something and perceiving something, is this the seat of self and will?

[MORON]

Our minds are full or feelings, ideas and concepts that we get absolutely no direct control over (we can't choose to alter memories directly, or force ourselves to believe a lie directly, or something) however their interaction is determistic and predictable.

Kidicious

I question this.

Okay, I merely stated that 'some' parts of our brains are determistic and predictable, and it is sufficent to define the vast majority of behaviours of the mind. (the fact that I don't punch my hand though the my computer screen, for example)

So after those parts of the mind have defined "valid choices" than we are to decide on the "final choice."

If the decision is not determistic, than it can be modelled probablistically. From an observer's point of view that is the only way to model it, and the consciousness as we 'know' it is an observation.

So throwing dice is free will...... I guess I can agree with it somewhat. If we use that definition of free will, than all the fanfare surrounding it is unjustified.
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Lorizael
For example, you speak of consciousness as something merely observing the actions of the actual decision making process in our brain. I agree with this to a large extent, except that I would add that the components of our consciousness can be part of the set of variables that influences the decision making process. Not important, though.

Consciousness as we know it is an observation. Knowledge is fundamentally observation and data processing rather than "action." We know of consciousness because we "observe it", and I believe it would make sense to think of consciousness as an type of observation.

If you want to think of how processes in the "consciousness" do data processing and "make decisions", just consider the consciousness observing an input/output devices, monitering both input and output as well as steps inside of it.

We know how and why eyes and the neural systems behind them can detect and process light, but we do not know what is actually going on that allows the consciousness to see things. There is no adequate way to describe the fact of seeing.

The question is... what is the difference between being affected by something and perceiving something? It is thought that humans perceive things, and that we react according to our perceptions, and that this is somehow different from just being affected by things.

Perception, I believe, is merely results of preprocessing done by the unconscious parts of the brain.

The process where I look at a computer and I "know it is computer" rather than a stream of photons is what is people are confused about. Why do we see "computer" rather than "photon"?

To deal with this, one can simply go back to considering the consciousness as an observation.

So the consciousness "observes" a computer. From the perspective of the consciousness, the photon is irrelevent. If I use some LSD, I would see crazy light patterns in my mind, but there is no photons involved. The same would be true if I have a vivid dream. To the consciousness, "what happens outside of it" is fundamentally irrelevent, as it only knows its inputs.

The processing of "seeing a computer is simply"
photon -> eyes -> brain pattern recognition function -> "consciousness"

Now if I dream, it would be
brain memory system + random brain process -> "consciousness"

Fundamentally, the consciousness "sees thought and feelings" because thats what its inputs are and what generates those inputs is really quite irrelevent, nor is the inputs all that "special".

This all could still feel quite strange, to equate "thought" as an normal input, so I'll provide an analogy.
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Consider a high level computer program, say the event driven visual basic, and imagine it as a "consciousness process." Since it is an input/output system we can do that.

Inside your program, say there is a function that gets automatically run after a button is clicked by the mouse. Now the physical sensors of the computers are connected to the mouse, and there are voltage changes, hundreds of logic gates inbetween it and the operating system warpping the function around and tons of things going on.

However, to the high level program, none of the electron movements is at all relevent. From its perspective, all it knows is "someone clicked a button". (the programmer designing the logic of the software certain don't care about electrons)

This is entirely analogous to the human "thought" of "someone touched me on the forehead." Neither are direct physical events and from the knowledge perspective of each, both mean exactly the same thing.

We can do this for other observations. For example the program might be warned by the operating system that there is no more memory in the system, and from its perspective it would be the same as "having a bloody huge headache and can't think"
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Just because the consciouness operates on a higher level of abstration, requiring massive data preprocessing, does not mean much in itself. The fact that the brain don't know about photons when seeing things is not different from the fact that computer programs don't 'know' about electrons. It knows only its inputs and the same is true for consciousness.

[Lorizael]

Uh. Dude. Thanks. But that's what I said.

My only point is that there is no coherent definition of what you call observation.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lorizael
The reason that free will and morality are often lumped together is that if someone possessing free will commits a morally wrong act, then they can be blamed for it and held responsible for it. If you cannot reasonably place blame on a person for an action of theirs, because they were coerced in some fashion, then it is generally thought to be wrong to punish them.

This excludes compatibilism, which is probably the most sensible view of free will. A compatibilist believes that all human action is subject to causal laws, but that we have learned to isolate certain causes as indicative of moral responsibility for reasons of social utility.

The religious people hate it because they need an incompatibilist conception of free will, but I've never quite been able to make sense of how that is supposed to work.

Any doctrine of free will needs to face up to the fact that human beings are on the whole massively predictable creatures. If we weren't, interaction with others would be impossible.

Also, in most western philosophical perspectives, the existence of free will is what allows human beings to do good in the universe. All other things simply exist to carry out their natural function, whereas human beings can either do good or bad, and this is up to them.

Well, only if you are Aristotle. I imagine a modern scientist would have a heart attack at talk of functions.

[Lorizael]

I tend to think compatibilism is a cop out.

Also, function is a word with certain meanings. It might be better to say simply that everything else in the universe is subject to the rules of the universe. One of those rules might be evolution that, while it has no actual purpose or function, creates such things in animals (and humans too, realistically).

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lorizael
I tend to think compatibilism is a cop out.

I think it is descriptively correct (that is what we do), but I think that a greater awareness of the issues would expose moral responsibility for the cultural construct that it is.

Not that I have any strong views on the subject. It's not really my thing and I haven't done much work on it outside of Aristotle's discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics.

Also, function is a word with certain meanings. It might be better to say simply that everything else in the universe is subject to the rules of the universe. One of those rules might be evolution that, while it has no actual purpose or function, creates such things in animals (and humans too, realistically).

I know. It was a joke only philosophers could laugh at.

[Lorizael]

I have a rather surprising dearth of philosophical knowledge. Everyone thinks I should know about it. But everything that I think I pretty much came up with on my own. And then I take a philosophy class and learn that some jackass thought of it two thousand years ago. Grr.

[Flip McWho]

Which is true for all given I/O system we one limits what something "can do". In other words, a rock has "free will" too.

A rock can do nothing, and it has the ability to' choose' to do nothing.

That is not dis-similar to the determistic man that can only do one thing, and he can 'choose' to do that one thing.

Firstly a rock has no concept of choice so the analogy to it is totally irrelevant. The rock exercised no choice since it literally can't move.

Secondly, we are always gonna be limited in the choices we can make. Such things that I'll term hard limits which are absolute restrictions on our choice. Things such as physical capabilities, cartain mental capabilities, environment. Things that can't be changed at the time of decision. Such things I'll term soft limits also will influence our decision, these are limits such as our emotions, other mental capabilities (for example the speed at which you can process information available) and personality. All these things will work to determine your choice to some extent. However, unless it is a biological function (such as breathing, pissing etc), free will is exercised when you make a choice and carry out the action. As I said previously, free will exercised to its extreme (doing things with no causal connection to the past) will rarely happen. I used the word can do in the definition to highlight certain things that will always limit some of the options available. For example we can't do anything that contravenes laws of physics, we can't do anything that we can't do in the environment we're in. We can't for example have a swim if we're in the middle of the desert. However because we can't do it doesn't mean we don't have free will.

[Flip McWho]

Essentially I agree that we are causally determined. Though i don't agree that we are to the extent that our actions are totally determined, we still exercise some choice, not matter how limited.

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by OneFootInTheGrave
just to ask, does concept of "free will" necessarily have to be tied in to morality aspect of existance.

Yes. Free will is about making moral choices.

Decisions about purely physical issues are not subject to free will. If all the rest of the universe was purely deterministic, that would still be totally irrelevant to the topic.

If some remote galaxy "decides" to spontaneously combust, it does not do so on the basis of free will. How and why physical events take place is a matter for science, not ethics.

[Terra Nullius]

Hey, aneeshm, I was just thinking about you!

Could you give us a run down (or suitable reference) on the Hindu teachings regarding free will, please? I don't remember hearing anything about it.

I've been racking my brains (yes, both of them) to come up with a buddhist pespective, but I can't recall anything that quite fits. On the gross level, I'd expect it to be similar to RCC teachings, but I can't find anything so far about how the subtle consciousness enacts moral choices.