The illusion of volition(AKA free will)

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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Of course you have free will. If you didn’t you would not have been able to review several ideas on the subject and choose which one to investigate further. Nature, revelations, God(s), or anything did not impose the direction on you, you choose to review it and choose which idea to support. Cute intellectual constructs don’t change the basic fact that this is observable and easily provable. In fact, if you did not have free will you would have just absorbed the first idea you heard like the proverbial billiard ball and this “article” would have simple supported the so called momentum your helpless brain already had on the subject.

In fact, free will is a prerequisite for all advance knowledge. Man would not even know what free will is without the ability to integrate the complex knowledge to come to such a high level of understanding. That requires the ability to choose and ignore facts as part of integrating facts into a concise whole.

42

Oh that.

Well I don’t think it is a matter of philosophy.

I agree. It’s a moral issue.

Drug companies want to sell drugs and will enlist whoever they can to help them do that. It has nothing to do with determinism.

Drug companies only respond to the what people demand, and they demand that chemicals be formulated and marketed which will solve all of their personal problems. The idea that all brain activity is solely chemical and that drugs can control any behavior and compensate for any mood has become the dominant paradigm of this society. And it’s rise can be directly linked to the decline of the idea that people are personally morally accountable for their free choice of how they behave.

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Are they random processes?

Most likely. Attempts to find “hidden variables” which are deterministic causes unable to be observed have led to contradiction. For example the physicist J.S.Bell derived a set of inequalities that would be satisfied by particle which have interacted and become “entangled”. If reality is local (interactions with in a time t limited to factors no more than t*c distant, where c is the speed of light) these inequalities would hold. However real live genuine reproduced experiments show that these inequalities are violated and the predictions of quantum mechanics are corroborated by these experiments. quantum mechanics is predicated on probable outcome hence not deterministic.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_inequality_experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_uncertainty

ruveyn1

44

Chemicals are the answer when the reality of the existence of volition is denied.

I’m claiming that the physical processes observed in the brain are symptoms, and not causes.

If you claim that the mind is wholly physical, then then there is no such thing as free will, and the answer to every problem known to man lies in finding just the right chemicals to ingest.

So, if the mind is wholly physical, and there is no such thing as free will, by what means does man discover the answer to any problem, much less an identification of the right stuff to ingest?

Conversely, since there is such a thing as free will, are you concluding that the mind is something more (or less) than wholly physical?

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So, if the mind is wholly physical, and there is no such thing as free will, by what means does man discover the answer to any problem, much less an identification of the right stuff to ingest?

I’ll be happy to leave that question for those who hold the amoral solely chemically driven brain model of human behavior to answer.

Conversely, since there is such a thing as free will, are you concluding that the mind is something more (or less) than wholly physical?

Yes. While I completely agree that the brain functions by chemical reactions and that they remain completely true to all of the physical laws governing them… I also hold the view that they are initiated or catalyzed by something else… the mind. Common speech idioms allude to this self reflective subject/object quality: “I was just talking to myself”, or “…so I said to myself”. Something is obviously talking while something else is listening to, and most importantly, ~considering~ what is said.

When Ayn Rand refers to “man’s mind” or “reason” or “objectivity”, in my view she is referring to someting other than the physical brain alone.

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true volition may, by definition, be incapable of being proven. maybe it can only be proven false and once you do that you’re out like a light.

It’s axiomatic–you can’t prove it in the sense of deriving it logically from something else (because the process of logical identification depends on it), but you can validate it, in the sense of pointing out the things that lead to the recognition of it existing.

You have to be pretty naive to think that volition means the ability to choose free from any constraints. Of course there are constraints. The existence of constraints doesn’t mean that you lack the ability to direct your consciousness within those constraints, though.

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So, if the mind is wholly physical, and there is no such thing as free will, by what means does man discover the answer to any problem, much less an identification of the right stuff to ingest?

Conversely, since there is such a thing as free will, are you concluding that the mind is something more (or less) than wholly physical?

Either way, what you call MInd (the name of an object) and I call Minding (the name of a process) is the effect of the brain which is a physical entity right down to the ground floor.

A physical brain can produce non-deterministic effects.

ruveyn1

48

I’ll be happy to leave that question for those who hold the amoral solely chemically driven brain model of human behavior to answer.

And I’ll be quite content to let them prattle amongst themselves. :slight_smile:

Yes. While I completely agree that the brain functions by chemical reactions and that they remain completely true to all of the physical laws governing them… I also hold the view that they are initiated or catalyzed by something else… the mind. Common speech idioms allude to this self reflective subject/object quality: “I was just talking to myself”, or “…so I said to myself”. Something is obviously talking while something else is listening to, and most importantly, ~considering~ what is said.

When Ayn Rand refers to “man’s mind” or “reason” or “objectivity”, in my view she is referring to someting other than the physical brain alone.

And what laws, pray tell, does the mind, as you distinct from the brain functions, function by?

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Either way, what you call MInd (the name of an object) and I call Minding (the name of a process) is the effect of the brain which is a physical entity right down to the ground floor.

A physical brain can produce non-deterministic effects.

ruveyn1

Considering that causality is the law of identity applied to action - if it is the brain producing the effects, how does the brain not determine the effects?

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And I’ll be quite content to let them prattle amongst themselves. :slight_smile:

And what laws, pray tell, does the mind, as you distinct from the brain functions, function by?

Moral laws.

The mind of man, which Ayn Rand held in such high esteem, is what gives us the objective self reflective rationality to be aware that we are morally accountable for our behavior.

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Considering that causality is the law of identity applied to action - if it is the brain producing the effects, how does the brain not determine the effects?

I think Ruveyn1 is in the right here, but I would like to clarify the position he’s arguing from. I think his explanation contains an inexactness: namely, he uses “brain” to refer to a human body and its environment, as a whole.

It is in fact a human body, as a whole, which is functioning, in its physical environment, to produce a conscious mind. It’s not just the brain, in a vacuum. The mind is the product of various brain functions (and the body which supports them physically, but that part is implied in Ruveyn’s post as well, obviously), but also sensory organs, and through them information from the environment in which it is in (this implication seems less obvious, just from saying “the brain”).

The conscious mind is a process that is the result of all these functions working together. The most relevant (to our discussion) functionality of this conscious mind is thinking (the use of certain methods of processing information, which are stored in the brain). This method (thinking) is selective, meaning that the mind is able to choose whether to perform the processing of some input (be it direct sensory input or information, concrete or abstract, stored in memory).

If this method wasn’t selective, then the mind would be a deterministic process (its results would be entirely determined by the specifics of the human being and his environment, and so would its decisions). But it is selective. It very clearly is, one can observe this directly. But, direct observation aside, the attempts proponents of determinism make to explain away the results of this ability of the mind to be selective in its thinking (i.e. two people of similar intelligence, growing up with similar information available to them, and one becoming a rational thinker the other a delusional religious fanatic) are laughable.

P.S.

Just to head off any possible misunderstandings, I’d like to make a couple of short points clear:

  1. The law of identity does not contradict choice, as long as we make it clear what choice is: the ability to focus or not (the ability to function or not). That is what we choose. We do not choose to break with cause and effect within our bodies. We choose to sidestep a process, and deprive ourselves of what the necessary outcome of that process + a given input is, in favor of a blankout. That’s it. We’re not choosing between rational thought nr. 1 and rational thought nr. 2, we’re choosing between rational thought and blank.

  2. The mind is a mechanism, made up of physical components. A mechanism that is conscious of itself and others, and able to turn some of its processes on or off, but a mechanism nonetheless. It’s not magic, that ignores causality. Every action within it has one specific reaction, just like every action in the outside world has one specific reaction.

  3. Perhaps the most important one, because I think it directly answers your question: “Every action has one specific reaction” does not equal “every action is the result of another action”. In fact, the second statement is clearly a logical contradiction, since we’re short of at least one “uncaused” action.

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“Every action has one specific reaction” does not equal “every action is the result of another action”. In fact, the second statement is clearly a logical contradiction, since we’re short of at least one “uncaused” action.

Simply brilliant, Nicky.

…and that missing uncaused action can be found in our ability to initiate moral choice independent of causality. Only the consequences our actions set into motion follow the laws of causality.

53

If the brain is the mind, it’s first impulse (in the solely electro-chemical “if-then”) must by simple logic supplied by it’s own internal program–thereby eliminating"free will", or it (“free will”) is outside the brain in metaphysical limbo, which would nearly make us totally unable to accesd it. Free will is either capricious or purposeful, therefore it’s origin is either capricious or purposeful.

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I agree. It’s a moral issue.

Drug companies only respond to the what people demand, and they demand that chemicals be formulated and marketed which will solve all of their personal problems. The idea that all brain activity is solely chemical and that drugs can control any behavior and compensate for any mood has become the dominant paradigm of this society. And it’s rise can be directly linked to the decline of the idea that people are personally morally accountable for their free choice of how they behave.

It can be linked? Do you even have anything to back up this claim??

If you had sophisiticaed enough technology you could probably do a lot of things to the brain, and thus effect the mind. However this would require very advanced technology. As Euiol pointed out, you seem to be under the impression that we are living in a brave new world type dystopia. However, no one is implementing drugs as a form of social control. The only problem is that there are poor incentive structures when it comes to selling drugs.

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If there is a Mind-Body problem then there is also a Stomach-DIgestion problem. Digestion is what the Stomach does. Mind(ing) is what the Brain does.

ruveyn1

56

Chemicals are the answer when the reality of the existence of volition is denied.

I’m claiming that the physical processes observed in the brain are symptoms, and not causes.

If you claim that the mind is wholly physical, then then there is no such thing as free will, and the answer to every problem known to man lies in finding just the right chemicals to ingest.

wrong, there could be a chemical that is free will and is thus the answer to all our questions about consciousness.

57

Do you even have anything to back up this claim??

No.

It is only my own personal conclusion drawn from the fact of being able to observe and reflect upon the workings of my own mind… as well as observing the world around me. This conclusion only applies to me. If you have arrived at the different conclusion that there is only a chemical brain and no mind and that behavior is amoral and driven solely by chemical reactions, I’m totally ok with that, as each of us gets exactly what we deserve as the consequences of acting on our different views.

If you had sophisiticaed enough technology you could probably do a lot of things to the brain, and thus effect the mind. However this would require very advanced technology. As Euiol pointed out, you seem to be under the impression that we are living in a brave new world type dystopia.

The prevailing social narcoculture solidly agrees with your sophisticated technology view. In 2011 alone, more than 4 billion drug prescriptions were filled in the US at a cost of $319,000,000,000. That’s $1,000 per year for every man woman and child living in the US.

However, no one is implementing drugs as a form of social control.

The technology has already been evolving for some time as billions of dollars of psychotropic drugs are ingested every year. And whatever their effects… no amount of drugs will never make evil people good.

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  1. Perhaps the most important one, because I think it directly answers your question: “Every action has one specific reaction” does not equal “every action is the result of another action”. In fact, the second statement is clearly a logical contradiction, since we’re short of at least one “uncaused” action.

In the case of the brain is to mind analogy, it is closer to hand is to grasp than stomach is to digestion.

As to actions, it is only entities which act. Reactions are processes. Actions and reactions apart from the entities which act and/or react is, at best, confusing.

59

Moral laws.

The mind of man, which Ayn Rand held in such high esteem, is what gives us the objective self reflective rationality to be aware that we are morally accountable for our behavior.

Would you consider moral laws to be derived from the wholly physical?

60

Would you consider moral laws to be derived from the wholly physical?

The effects of moral law are most definitely physical as well as mental and emotional. I regard moral law as operating in exactly the same way as the law of gravity. Both are absolutely objective, and neither is the least bit affected by our emotions, thoughts, beliefs, or theories about them. Both are utterly impersonal… and no one is exempt.

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