Free will and intelligence

[New Buddha]

In a physical sense non at all. A psychological change maybe....

This was somewhat argumentum ad absurdum question.  The notion that you and I could choose to meet some place, could choose to discuss the topic and could choose to abide by our shared belief that freedom of choice does not exist, is on the face of it absurd.  And furthermore, if we reach the conclusion that free will does not exist, we CANNOT change our behavior because we just decided that we exercise no control over our behavior.  What purpose would a "psychological change" serve if we are unable to make choices regarding our behavior.

 

If you have two concepts that are indistinguishable, then one of them is redundant.

Edited December 28, 2014 by New Buddha

[New Buddha]

.... (it seems like something spooky is going on)....

A million years from now our descendants will still be unable to predict the outcome of a heads/tails coin toss.  Is this because the Universe is spooky?  Or does it have something to do with the nature of knowledge?  And maybe science is not about making "predictions".

Edited December 28, 2014 by New Buddha

[Amirtut]

But, just because it feels spooky does not mean it is, not when we stop and think about it. Unexplained perhaps, but why spooky?

A few times, my garage door just opened spookily, like it had a will of its own. A middle-schooler who doesn't have the context to know why, might be spooked out; but, an adult will shrug it off as caused by some radio-wave that happens to be at the right frequency. However, if the adult did not have a clue to the reason, the event would be unexplained, but not actually spooky in an intellectual sense.

That is perfectly understandable, I'm not a QM expert maybe someone can explain it better then me. What seems to be happening is a violation of special relativity namely that two particles are "communicating" with each other over space-time and distances that would mean that the communication or data is travailing faster than the speed of light, which we know is impossible in the standard model of physics. Einstein said something to the extent that an objects mass would increase proportionally as it reached closer and closer to the speed of light, eventually the objects massive would become infinite if it kept increasing in velocity to overtake the speed of light, so therefore nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, close to the speed of light yes, but not faster. This is the what Einstein called "action at a distance" although Einstein was later shown to be incorrect through bells experiment but there still was a problem with measurements, and there still is no clear explanation as to what is actually happening. Basically, QM isn't fitting into the standard model without breaking something in somewhere in the classic model which is well established, and all this comes down to measurement, and in QM there is no consensus. There are some very strange ideas coming out of QM.

Like Parallel universes, String theory, Many-worlds interpretation, etc.

For example, there is this crazy idea that there infinite universes, and somewhere in those universe there is an earth, there is you, and me. Actually some of those universes you could argue even a God exists because you have to accept every-possible outcome IS possible. I'm a King of the world somewhere in a parallel universe. If that isn't religious mumbo-jumbo being, replaced by "scientific" feel good, mumbo-jumbo then I don't know what is.

We have people like Deepak Chopra selling bull-crap like "Quantum healing" and people take him seriously.

Edited December 28, 2014 by Amirtut

[Amirtut]

This was somewhat argumentum ad absurdum question.  The notion that you and I could choose to meet some place, could choose to discuss the topic and could choose to abide by our shared belief that freedom of choice does not exist, is on the face of it absurd.  And furthermore, if we reach the conclusion that free will does not exist, we CANNOT change our behavior because we just decided that we exercise no control over our behavior.  What purpose would a "psychological change" serve if we are unable to make choices regarding our behavior.

 

If you have two concepts that are indistinguishable, then one of them is redundant.

 

 

A million years from now our descendants will still be unable to predict the outcome of a heads/tails coin toss.  Is this because the Universe is spooky?  Or does it have something to do with the nature of knowledge?  And maybe science is not about making "predictions".

Hi, do you choose to defecate or do you have to does your body make your do it? Because this comes into the problem of uncertainty, at an anatomical level. Because there are always situations seemingly where you don't have free-will and situations seemingly were you do have free will. By the way, I'm a Compatibilist, but I still do believe free-will is an illusion. As pointed out by Stephen Hawking in the Grand Design, [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WnogjOIFY3oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=grand+design&hl=en&sa=X&ei=t_CfVP61No2raev5gTg&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=free%20will&f=false,(should be page 44) I don't know if you have the book, but if you do I recommend you read page 32 especially.

Edited December 28, 2014 by Amirtut

[New Buddha]

@Amirut,

We form concepts such as apples, oranges, bananas, Constitutional Monarchy, Constitutional Republic, etc. for a reason.  All of them are different from one another.

 

I asked, What is the difference between Free Will and "Non-Free Will" ? and I'm not trying to be difficult, but you never have defined HOW things would be different?  Or even explained how things COULD be different if Free Will does not exist?

 

Why is it necessary to have an "opposite" of Free Will?  Is this just dialectic reasoning?  If so, then what is the opposite of the Illusion of Free Will?

Edited December 28, 2014 by New Buddha

[Amirtut]

@Amirut,

We form concepts such as apples, oranges, bananas, Constitutional Monarchy, Constitutional Republic, etc. for a reason.  All of them are different from one another.

 

I asked, What is the difference between Free Will and "Non-Free Will" ? and I'm not trying to be difficult, but you never have defined HOW things would be different?  Or even explained how things COULD be different if Free Will does not exist?

 

Why is it necessary to have an "opposite" of Free Will?  Is this just dialectic reasoning?  If so, then what is the opposite of the Illusion of Free Will?

The burden of proof is not on me. If you say there is free-will then you have to show/define it. I can't show you an opposite of something which I believe to be an illusion, it would not make any sense. It would be like saying I think God is an illusion because I can disprove that a God exists (I am not called upon to prove a negative), that reasoning is fallacious. The burden of proof is on the person making the positive claim re: Russell's teapot. This is why I said from the start free-will is an illusion. By your argument we can say, three millennia of art, and culture is based on religion, therefore what does it really matter if a God exists or not? Or asking me the question how things would be different if we didn't have religion, these questions to me at least are pretty much meaningless from a purely philosophical view, I would go as far as to say they are red hearings.

I don't think we're going to agree on this, free-will is one of the hardest problems in modern philosophy, as It has to deal with the issue of conciousness and qualia.

Here is an interesting article to look into: http://time.com/3529770/neuroscience-free-will/

Now this isn't to say, that I don't live my life as if I do have free-will, I like to think I (as in having qualia sense) am making a decision out of free-will.

I hate the idea of not having free-will, because that mean a lot of religious scriptural nonsense is correct to some degree in the sense of Qadar (fate) in Islam. But I am also a realist, and I have to accept the data which is pointing us towards the idea that free-will is an illusion, i.e. that we don't really have true autonomy, we just "feel" like we do.

Edited December 29, 2014 by Amirtut

[Devil's Advocate]

The burden of proof is not on me. If you say there is free-will then you have to show/define it....

 

If you say there isn't, you're hardly positing yourself to demand anything.

[New Buddha]

@Amirtut,

"The burden of proof is not on me. If you say there is free-will then you have to show/define it."

 

I observe myself and friends, acquaintances, co-workers, etc. making decisions every day.  That's proof enough for me.  You are the one making the extraordinary claim that "No, they are not, they are merely under the illusion that they are making decisions".  Why is the burden of proof on my shoulders and not yours?  Your the one making the more extraordinary claim.  And, correct me if I'm wrong, this is a voluntary exchange of ideas is it not?  Why do you need to resort to such a defensive tactic to avoid providing evidence of you what you claim?

 

I have, in fact, been trying to get you to grasp (on your own) the self-contradictory flaw in your "illusion" argument.

 

The very concept of "proof" presupposes "falsehood" right?  This is why I keep asking you about illusion.  The very idea of illusions implies that some things are not-illusions - otherwise, how would you know that what you are observing is an illusion?  If everything is an illusion, then nothing is an illusion.  This is the same error made by other philosophies that reject the senses as valid means of gathering objective information about ourselves, our world and our Universe because they are subject to illusions.  But the very fact that we do know the difference (or can figure it out in time) is also why senses are objective - not infallible - but objective.

 

This is also similar to religious arguments about an "omnipotent and omniscient" God.  Claiming that God is omniscient and omnipotent leads to the same type of contradiction as your "everything is an illusion" argument.  Any such claims are self-contradictory. I don't need to claim that "God doesn't exist."  I can just reject any definition of God that rests on contradictions.

 

None the less, I'm not even asking you to prove that we do or do not have Free Will.  I'm merely asking you (for third time now) how can you tell the difference?

 

If you all your interested in doing is "burden of proof" crap, then I'll bow out of the discussion.

Edited December 29, 2014 by New Buddha

[Jon Southall]

The determinist view is that all action is the result of cause and effect, that every effect is the result of a specific cause. Freewill seems to be an illusion to determinists. They reason that our decisions are determined by our nature, and our nature is determined by our biology and environment. When we appear to have a choice, and then make a decision (or fail to make a decision - which itself might be an option), determinists reason that we would not have acted otherwise as for a given cause, there cannot be a range of possible effects. The experience of choice was really an illusion.

Volitional acts are thought to be the consequence of choice. This would imply that a 'choice window' is the effect of some cause, allowing some human beings to assert themselves within limits. This would be almost like a causality reset switch where rather than our actions being determined without our own input, we can reset the chain and then become a first cause of a new chain of cause and effect. Maybe this 'choice window' is a unique quality or characteristic of a volitional being.

Objectively speaking there is very little physical evidence for this choice window, however from our firsthand experience of life it should be obvious that it does exist and we are the cause of some of our actions. We may be deluding ourselves but I doubt it. Anyone who has been drunk for example senses an impairment of their decision making ability and clarity of thought, together with a loss of control over their actions. What is it that is being impaired? I would say it is the 'choice window' capability, so-to-speak.

Edited December 30, 2014 by Jon Southall

[Devil's Advocate]

Choice window... I like that.

 

Choices are determined in the context of what is possible. No one can choose the impossible, but that leaves a wide range of possible action.  So future choices are delimited to a window of opportunity created by effects of past choices.  I prefer to think of cause and effect as choice and consequence.

[New Buddha]

The opposite of Free Will is not Determinism, it is evasion - of which Determinism is just one variant (an all powerful God guiding our actions is another).

 

Cause and Effect is a matter of perspective - there is no universal, cardinal reference point.

 

Did the good batter cause the home run?  Or did the bad pitcher cause the homerun?  Or maybe it was the wind?  Or the location of the sun in the sky which kept the outfielder from leaping up and catching the ball?  Which is the cause and which is the effect?

 

Was the decision to post this reply caused by a previous effect?

 

It's turtles all the way down, I tell you!

Edited December 31, 2014 by New Buddha

[Jon Southall]

"Cause and Effect is a matter of perspective - there is no universal, cardinal reference point."

What did Rand mean by the "law of identity applied to action"?

[Jon Southall]

This article will be of interest to anyone following this discussion:

http://www.franzkiekeben.com/rand.html

[New Buddha]

@Jon,

 

There is a great deal of context dropping in the above link #38.

 

"But now Rand's view of causation can be seen for what it really is: it means absolutely nothing. All Rand's "law of causation" tells us is that entities act in accordance with their nature. But that tells us nothing about how any given entity must act. It merely says that they act the way that they act."

 

It is not the job of philosophy to tell how given entities "must" act.  It is the job of science  to observe and describe (not predict) how entities act in certain situations.  It is the job of philosophy, and more specifically epistemology, to establish that the village witch cannot put a hex on your chickens and cause them to lay double-yolk eggs.  And that you cannot, by wishing, count one loaf of bread as two.

 

Other philosophies claim that there is an un-bridgeable gap between the noumenal and the phenomenal, and therefore all knowledge is subjective, and must be doubted and mistrusted.  Rand argues that, no, the senses are valid sources of OBJECTIVE knowledge.  But no where does she say that our knowledge is infallible or omniscient.

 

Rand states:

 

"“Existence is identity, Consciousness is identification”

 

This does not mean:  Existence = Identification. Nor does it mean: Identity = Identification.

 

The fact that "Things act according to their nature" does not imply that we can identify, before hand, the outcome of every event to an infinite degree of precision.  Often, in defense of Determinism, you hear something along the lines of: "Obviously, since it's theoretically possible to understand the position of every single particle in a causal Universe, it's also possible to predict what they will do next, and therefore, humans don't have Free Will."

 

Nonsense.  Science is not about prediction.  Science, and all knowledge for that matter, is about Description.  And a description of an event, either past, present, or future does not = the event, i.e. a description is an ABSTRACTION.

Edited December 31, 2014 by New Buddha

[dream_weaver]

The determinist is caught in a Chinese finger cuff. Struggling to make his case only tightens the apparatus encasing his digits. Only by relinquishing the struggle is he freed from the bond. Peikoff makes an eloquent case in one of his ARI presentations: A proponent of the philosophical position of determinism relinquishes his case by any attempt to present material to bolster his position. The mere attempt to present information deigned to bolster a contrary position presupposes, on the determinist behalf, a mind capable of choosing on a basis of evidence (i.e,: free-will).

 

Harriman captures, in a few paragraphs of "The Logical Leap", this essence:

I have been assuming in the above a firm distinction between forms of grasping causality: in personal terms, though one's own efficacy, and then, in regard to the external world, impersonally, without reference to human efficacy. But this distinction, so clear to us today, had to be learned across many centuries.

 

How we grasped this distinction is not covered in his treatise on induction. Obviously it is not grasped by all, but only by some. Continuing:

When they turn to cause and effect in the external world, primitives (and children left to themselves) typically continue to interpret the causal processes they perceive on the model of their early personal experience. Projecting their own pattern outward, they think of causal agents in the external world, some or all, as being personal entities, and they construe causation as the expression of inner desires or intentions. The obvious historical example of such anthropomorphism is the animist idea that even inanimate entitles are en-souled things who act with ends in view (see The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts) Theism maintains the same view of causality, merely consolidating the multitude of en-souled causal agents into relatively few efficacious deities ore even into a single omnipotent One.

 

The Law of Identity, as a self-evident, axiomatic grasp of a physical law of nature is not grasped by all:

In this respect, religion represents the mind and metaphysics of primative man. Such a mind has little or no concept of an impersonal material world, one in which the action of external entities flows not from souls or desires, but from the law of identity, i.e., from the physical nature of the acting entities in the absence of any consciousness, immanent or transcendent.

 

According to Harriman, explicitly here, and to Rand and Peikoff implicitly in their writings:

The impersonal metaphysics was the great - and historically recent - achievement of the Greeks, specifically of Aristotle's secularism and advocacy of reason. It was this approach that led to the clear Greek distinction between the animate and the inanimate, which included the fact that consciousness can belong only to the animate. Once the Greek approach was embedded in the mind of the West (and leaving aside relapses such as the Middle Ages), causation could no longer be conceived in terms of the personal efficacy of supernatural agents. Thus did the objective view of cause and effect displace the anthropomorphic view that, at the beginning, had seemed to be merely an innocent extension to [the] nature of m[a]n's own causal experience.

 

In conclusion:

Western civilization broadened the concept of "cause," by regarding personal efficacy [free-will] as merely a subtype of it. This was a crucial precondition of the development of modern science. It amounts to bringing causality for the first time fully into the realm of reality and identity - i.e., to breaking its primordial bonds to mysticism.

 

(extensive, moderately commented, quotation from page 24-25 of "The Logical Leap")

 

[Severinian]

Now, as we know from quantum physics, there is unpredictability in the universe, which is what one should expect from a universe with free will, so it's likely that we do have it.  

 

But what if that wasn't the case? I mean, many Objectivists, including Nathaniel Branden and Stefan Molyneux, claim that it's *logically* impossible to prove determinism, because they say that you use your free will in order to judge whether something is true or false. That argument never made sense to me. Isn't free will simply the ability to choose your focus? So you can choose to focus on the rational FACULTY in your mind/brain or not, you can choose to focus on a work impulse or the more tempting video game impulse, etc. But surely it's not the consciousness itself that does the calculations, proving or disproving things? Do you see what I mean? A fish has consciousness too, but surely it can't reason? So in theory, determinism could be proven, if someone had super-advanced knowledge of a brain and could predict the person's choices during temptations, etc? 

 

Branden says that if determinism is right, one couldn't say that a theory is highly probable (including determinism), or that your reason is more valid than that of a raving lunatic. But just to play the devil's advocate here, couldn't you say that all knowledge is in some way connected in your mind, and you could see the results of reason applied to reality, therefore it is highly probable that you are guided by true reason, and a lunatic isn't? Maybe there's a fundamental flaw in my thinking of how the mind works, but I just can't completely get this. 

Edited January 2, 2015 by Severinian

[New Buddha]

@Severinian #41

 

"Now, as we know from quantum physics, there is unpredictability in the universe, which is what one should expect from a universe with free will, so it's likely that we do have it."

 

"So in theory, determinism could be proven, if someone had super-advanced knowledge of a brain and could predict the person's choices during temptations, etc? "

 

These two statements are just wrong.  You need to understand the difference between PROBABILITY and PREDICTION.

 

There is a 1:6 equal probability that a six-sided dice will land on any given number.  Your prediction that the next roll of a dice will be "3" is just a WAG (Wild-Ass-Guess).  This is true now, and will be true for your decedents 1 million years from now.  And it's not because the Universe at the quantum level is random or a-causal (it's not), nor is it because we lack powerful enough computers, etc.

 

The word "Prediction" should vanish from the vocabulary of any rational person.

Edited January 2, 2015 by New Buddha

[Severinian]

Well, obviously I understand the difference between probability and prediction, but I don't see your point here. Obviously, a prediction that the dice will land on 3 is just a wild guess, but if you threw it 100 times, it would be a pretty safe bet to predict that not all the throws would end up on 3. 

Likewise, consider a theoretical more advanced version of the free will test which neuro-scientists today claim proves determinism (it doesn't) - They measure your brain waves and predict what you're going to do and focus on, etc, with 100% success. Then, wouldn't determinism be a fact? Branden's lunatic argument here just doesn't make sense. Our reason gives further evidence of its validity all the time. 

[New Buddha]

@Severinan #43

 

"Well, obviously I understand the difference between probability and prediction, but I don't see your point here."

 

You are the one that made the following statement:  "Now, as we know from quantum physics, there is unpredictability in the universe, which is what one should expect from a universe with free will, so it's likely that we do have it."

 

QM has nothing - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING - to do with prediction, or free will.  It is a model of the atomic/subatomic world based on probabilistic mathematics.  Period.  If you believe otherwise, please elaborate.

 

"They measure your brain waves and predict what you're going to do and focus on, etc, with 100% success. Then, wouldn't determinism be a fact?"

 

If they predict you behavior 10 days in advance, then you might have a point.  But maybe you are referring to Libet's famous experiment regarding the presence of measurable readiness potential prior to the  conscious awareness of a decision being registered by the subject?

[Severinian]

You really need to elaborate your point. How can you say that QM has nothing to do with prediction or free will? Before QM, the world seemed to be, at least in principle, predictable to scientists, the momentums and positions of atoms were like a domino, therefore, from that perspective, you could predict things. Now they've dug deeper into reality, and they've found that there is no predictability anymore, there is APPARENT randomness, which could either be genuine randomness, domino effects we haven't discovered, or free will. Of course there is PROBABILITY when you scale up, and that is just like my example with dices. You can't predict what one roll is going to be, but if you roll 1 million times, you will probably see a more or less even distribution among the numbers. 

Yes, I think it was Libet's experiment. 

[New Buddha]

The concepts of "randomness" and "ordered" are just that - concepts.  Yes, we can within certain contexts objectively state that something is "more random than X" or something is "more ordered than X" - but these concepts are epistemic, and not ontological.  The Universe is neither ontologically random nor ontologically ordered.  The Universe just is.  We might say that an exploding firecracker is more random than the "exploding" sun, because the sun has been doing so for billions of years and we can discern 11 year cycles or change in magnets poles, sunspots, etc.  But, ontologically speaking, one is no more random than another. 

 

When trying to observe/measure  what is taking place at the particle level we cannot do so because the act of measuring disturbs the event more than is acceptable.  I say "more than is acceptable" because at both the QM and Classical level, there is no such thing as infinite precision (or universal/cardinal reference point)  when making a measurement.  When a police man uses a lidar to measure the speed of your car, the energy from the lidar changes the momentum of your car.  However, for the purposes of trying to determine if someone is going 55 MPH or 56 MPH, the amount of change in momentum is negligible and the imprecision of the lidar is acceptable.  And what's more, no two lidar's will measure the exact same velocity of the same vehicle - except to an acceptable level of precision.

 

At the QM level, the mathematics is based on probability.  This is not because the Universe is "random" but rather it allows for a more accurate modeling of what is taking place.  A QM model is a description of what is taking place - it is not interchangeable with what is taking place on a 1 for 1 basis.  This belief that models = reality is at the heart of a lot of bad science (see Global Warming).  

 

There is also no one, universal, once-and-for-all, "now we finally got it right" model.  This is true for QM, Relativity or even Structural Engineering.  Models serve a purpose, they are not ends within themselves.  The worth of a model is not how closely it "models" something, but rather how well it serves the users ends.

[Severinian]

When you say that the universe is not ontologically random nor ordered, are you talking about the context of human knowledge and understanding? That it's impossible for us, at least today, to come to a rational conclusion about it?

And are you saying that the popular representation of quantum mechanics is completely backwards? That there is no apparent randomness, just limitations on our measurement methods? 

[New Buddha]

@Severinian #47

 

"When you say that the universe is not ontologically random nor ordered, are you talking about the context of human knowledge and understanding? That it's impossible for us, at least today, to come to a rational conclusion about it?"

 

That is not what I'm saying.  I'm saying that random vs. ordered is an epistemic Unit of Measure (on an ordinal scale) established by Man to serve some purpose.

 

When you roll a dice one time, your inability to model beforehand every possible variable which will "cause" it to land on 3 is not because the world is a spooky, a-causal, random, irrational place.

 

To expand on your comment regarding rolling a dice 100 times.  You and I both agree that we can calculate the probability that the number 3 will come up 1/6 times over 100 rolls.  That's easy.  But  what if I asked you to calculate the probability that, not only the number of times that a 3 will be rolled out of 100, but also how many times will the dice strike the floor 8 times, spin in a counter clockwise direction 4 times, bounce off the baseboard of your living room wall, and that the thee dots will land perfectly aligned with true North?  Could you do so?  And please don't tell me that it's "theoretically" possible.  It's not.  That type of thinking is what leads to centralized planning of the economy and is an abuse of the word "theory".

 

"And are you saying that the popular representation of quantum mechanics is completely backwards? That there is no apparent randomness, just limitations on our measurement methods?"

 

It's a little more complicated than that.  But much of the early 20th Century QM physics was deeply influenced by some form of dialectic reasoning.  But on the whole, I would say that yes, the popular interpretation of not only quantum mechanics but math in general is backwards.

 

Edit:  I'll repeat myself:  Science (and knowledge in general) is not about prediction, it's about observation and description.

Edited January 3, 2015 by New Buddha

[Severinian]

"That is not what I'm saying."

Well, that seems to be what you're saying. To put it another way, existence IS either determined or random, etc, but it's impossible for us to predict and measure things perfectly, and thus it's irrelevant to have theories about it? 

[New Buddha]

"That is not what I'm saying."

Well, that seems to be what you're saying. To put it another way, existence IS either determined or random, etc, but it's impossible for us to predict and measure things perfectly, and thus it's irrelevant to have theories about it? 

I'll try one more time....

 

Do you understand what I mean when I say that randomness/orderliness is an epistemic standard, and not an ontological one?  If you don't agree with this, fine.  But so far I don't see in your replies that you even apprehend the distinction that I'm trying to make. 

 

As an analogy:  Is 50 degrees hot or cold?  Is a bowling ball heavy or light?  Is 60 mph fast or slow?