Now we're talking. Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says free will is a myth:
After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.
Sapolsky bases his belief on biology. Lots of research suggests that neurons fire in our brains and actions are then carried out before we exert any conscious control over them. After the fact, our brains invent stories to "explain" why we did what we did.
I think Sapolsky is right. Hell, I don't even believe in consciousness, only self awareness. But I go further still: I believe free will is a myth thanks not to biology but to basic physics. The universe appears to be governed by mathematical law, and there's no good reason to think this suddenly stops at the boundary of the human brain. All that happens is that as biological structures get more complex they get harder to predict. ChatGPT is hard (impossible?) to predict too, but no one thinks it has free will.
The best argument against all this is: Oh come on. Jim Jordan just lost a vote for Speaker of the House and you're saying this was merely the end result of billions of years of a clockwork universe ticking away?
That's a pretty good argument! It really does seem unlikely, doesn't it? And Kevin, you don't act as if you lacked free will, do you?
Nope. Like everyone else I act as if I have control over my actions. And I treat other people as if they have control over their actions. I am a slave to the way my brain is constructed, just like you.
Needless to say, this is a very old religious and philosophical argument, and neither Sapolsky nor I are going to settle it. But we're right.
Is probably more of a spectrum of free will, or a lack thereof.
So I guess what you're saying is, Gym Jordan has no free will to end his run at being Speaker, and as a result, will be forced to resign at a later date because he lacked the free will to step in and stop the sexual predation of Ohio State athletes even though he was told about it at the time?
Free will means our actions are not pre-ordained.
That our brain is a complex thing that makes decisions without us controlling it is not the absence of free will. Those decisions are not pre-ordained.
If we are going to talk about free will, we need to use the accepted definition. Which is that everything is literally going to happen a certain way, and that we can’t change it.
That is not what is being proposed by Kevin or Sapolsky.
Based only on reading the lengthy free sample of his book[1] I have no problem accepting Sapolsky's argument. I'm quite happy to accept that everything I do (including making the typo I just corrected) is the determined outcome of my genes reacting to my social and physical history. I think all that is true... and it doesn't make any difference.
It makes no difference to how I live because, as Kevin said, "All that happens is that as biological structures get more complex they get harder to predict." The determined outcomes of my biological processes, or yours, are not predictable on that basis.
Sapolsky opens with an hypothetical shooter whose finger pulls a trigger. Whether the shooter's brain generated an action potential well in advance of the man's conscious intent to shoot, or not, makes no difference to an observer. Up until the shot is heard, all possible observers -- including the shooter -- are in doubt whether the gun will be fired or not. After it is fired, we can look back and debate which of an endless number of pre-existing factors went into determining that action. (For a demonstration of just that, see the endless examinations of the history of Lee Harvey Oswald, or Jack Ruby.)
No post-hoc examination will ever find "the" cause of an action. And, crucially, the determining causes are even less accessible to the person who acts, than they are to another observer.
My point is, since the myriad untraceable (and largely unknowable) determinants of any action are impossible to analyze post-hoc and even less useful in trying to predict action beforehand, what's the point? "He did it because he meant to do it," is a useful fiction that fills in our inevitable, and uncorrectable, ignorance of causes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free-ebook/dp/B0BSKQ5ZDM
I read in the Book My Brilliant Stroke of Insight by a Harvard neurology prof that if a car pulls in front of you your subconscious gets you into road rage, but if the rage lasts longer than 15 seconds you have made a conscious decision to stay angry.
Seems to make sense to me...
Getting high in the dorm room again, I see. Well then, I'll join ya. What is free will you ask and I will reply that historically, it's an escape hatch for those who want to maintain that God is omnipotent, omniscient, _and_ benevolent. To which the obvious -- and historical -- question is why would this supposedly benevolent God subject humanity to multiple horrific miseries in this life if it already knows the outcome? That is, when this particular flavor of deity already knows, i.e., you're destined, to go to the Good Place or the Bad Place as may be?
The historical reply to what is after all a very obvious objection was to bafflegab and mumble some cop-out bullshit about God granting humanity 'free will' to choose between 'good' and 'evil', now go back to your hovel, serf, and stop asking so goddamn many questions. And since the original definition of free will was both muddled and malleable, so has been the discussion ever since.
For more on this subject start with the wiki's entry on Compatibilism.
Of course, these days, everyone knows that physicists have deteremined that we live in an Einsteinian Block Universe, that is a universe embeded in a static block of four-dimensional spacetime where every particle traces out an immutable world line. Circling back then, the actual question seems to be asking why 'Our fate is that fact is precast, yet all still _seems_ at stake!' (I'll have to look up the original quote; I'm pretty sure I've mangled it.)
Er, that should be: "Our fate is that our fate is precast, yet all still seems at stake!"
The old argument is put in a different light by new scientific results.
The no free will argument is one made by Harari in Homo Deus, that brains are algorithms that are sensitive to inputs, and that a well trained AI could replicate the outputs of such an algorithms if presented with the inputs that it received, and could actually control these outputs by knowing what new inputs to present. For instance, since this blog is about politics, one could predict how someone could vote and how to customize political ads/inputs so as to change that vote.
Well, no, that's not the no free will argument. The argument is that there is no free will in a deterministic universe, which ours just happens to be. For a real hoot, check out superdeterminism to see just how little wiggle room there is for free will.
"a deterministic universe, which ours just happens to be"
Um..quantum mechanics?
Or maybe on re-read, you are not presenting your own theory so I should argue with someone else.
Randomness doesn't get you to free will. I like to call determinism with quantum randomness "quantum determinism". At some level there are unpredictable events, but those events still lead to a deterministic outcome.
Heh. You thought I was smart enough to come up with this stuff all by myself? I'm flattered that you think so well of my perspicacity. Your judgement is off -- waaaaay off -- of course. But still, somehow, I'm flattered.
So my dissertation sprung from autonomic neural activity in my brain and not from conscious thought? Color me skeptical.
One problem is that, as far as I know, self awareness and consciousness mean the same thing, and in any cast the data you cite on neural predecessors of action is really a test of volition, not consciousness. And even then, it is problematic.
It has already been shown that introspective reports of timing that are critical to answering this question are biased and unreliable. While it is true that some researchers have been able to predict which of two buttons will be pressed before any movement has taken place with 60% accuracy, it is also true that they failed to predict 40%, and that is not inconsiderable. What happened in them? As Dick Neisser used to say, you not only have to explain the mean, you also have to explain the variance.
The experiments you are referring to, where neural activity comes prior to consciousmess of action, are all very short time scales, on the order of a half second or less. Something that happens in 500 milliseconds has very little bearing on decision process that occupy seconds, minutes, hours or even days. Or in, say dissertation research, years. There are also alternate ways of accounting for that neural activity that do not involve determinism.
For example, you go into a psych lab and you know you are going to have to press a button. I can think of very strong natural selection reasons for, once a goal has been conceived in the indefinite future, that the motor planning cortex would immediately set to work figuring out how to make it happen and have a plan ready to go once a decision is made to execute.
The guy you read is by no means the last word on the subject and does not represent any sort of consensus. Neuroscientis Adina Roskies is, like me, unsurprised that things might be going on in the brain prior to a movement. And Alfred Mele has argued that the awareness of an intention to move is ambiguous at best. Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands but also which hand to move and found that the felt intention correlated much more closely with neural activity, which is consistent with my picture about the motor planning cortex unconsciously getting plans ready and the individual consciously deciding when to put them into action. Miller and Trevena similarly argued that the initial unconscious neural activity does not represent a decision to move but merely indicates that the brain is paying attention. The attention signal precedes the movement signal by 100 ms and does not require subjective reports. Haggard has pointed out that there are two different circuits in the brain, one controlling stimulus-response actions and a different one controlling voluntary actions, and that many of these experiments are not really measuring the voluntary circuit at all. And in any case, using voluntary motor control as evidence for any sweeping generalizations about consciousness is seriously unjustified. Libet himself, who kicked off this whole line of experiments in the 1980's, did not think that his data was evidence on the subject of free will, pointing out that at a minimum the conscious mind retains the ability to veto movement at the last moment. Data has shown not significant neural difference between a decision to move and a decision not to move. That is hard to explain if that neural activity is supposed to determine actions.
There is also a significant question of language. Despite some attempts, terms like consciousness and free will (which is what these experiments are really talking about and free will and consciousness are not the same thing; you can be conscious of your existence without willing to do anything) do not have operational definitions. As with most things lacking an operational definition, the use of these terms tends to be slippery and slide between different meanings without explicit acknowledgement.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett has taken a close look at the issue of language in these discussions and concluded that there are definitions of free will that are compatible with determinism (called, oddly enough, compatibilism if you want to look it up).
I don't want to get off on a rant here, but lets just deal with the physics argument.
Please.
The fundamental laws of physics are indeed deterministic, as they are expressed in differential equations that take an initial state and propagate it forward in time. That is true even for quantum mechanics. The quantum state vector evolves deterministically as it also satisfies a differential equation. But that by no means implies that the behavior of the particles described by that state vector is in any way deterministic. They're not. Bell's theorem and its many experimental confirmations (won the Nobel last year) shout that quite loudly.
We do not live in the Newtonian clockwork universe. Such a universe does not exist and probably cannot exist. Deterministic laws easily yield nondeterministic behavior. Quantum theory is one example, chaos is another (and there is some evidence that neruons depend on chaos to function). And don't get me started on whether or not the things we discuss in physics are elements of reality (they are not).
Roger Penrose learned some years ago about the pitfalls of trying to pin any argument about consciousness or free will on physics in The Emperor's New Mind. I had an opportunity to ask him about that once and he would like to leave it in his past. Until you can use fundamental laws of physics to predict brain function, it is best to avoid such claims. There is one of those Sidney Harris "and then a miracle occurs" gaps smack in the middle of such an argument.
There is still intense argument over the meaning of these experiments. Sapolsky expresses an opinion. It is by no means the only opinion, nor even the most common opinion and certainly is not a consensus. As I've shown, there is quite a lot of evidence that points in other directions.
Hmmm ... it occurs to me you are using a restricted definition of 'determinism'. Would you say the past is indeterminate? I'm guessing you'd say it isn't (and if you say it is I'd certainly be interested in the argument you're making!) So, for the sake of argument, if the past is deterministic, then so is the future. This is obvious when you note that as yet that there physics gives no reason why there is a preferred time the demarcates the past from the future. More so when you realize that world lines are static (If they weren't, there would have to be a time outside of time for them to evolve.) This is just the Einstein Block Univers, by now over a century old.
I can make a few specific points about your specific examples, such as chaotic != deterministic. That is -- as you note -- chaos exists even in a Newtonian universe. But being unable to calculate outcomes doesn't mean that trajectories aren't determinite, it merely means that you can't ala Leibniz extropolate them infinitely far into the future.
The same is true for quantum mechanics; a Bayesian would note say that probabilities are a measure of beliefs based upon prior knowledge, not something intrinsic to the setup (frequentist.) Yes, I know about Bell's inequality, it's first rigorous confirmation (the Bell-Aspect experiment) and it's subsequent restriction to narrower and narrower slices of wiggle room by better and better experimental setups. But people tend to trumpet the results while glossing over the assumptions that must hold for these reults to have meaning in the real world. I've already linked to one class of theories(?) that result when you relax them: Superdeterminism. Now I'll post another, which is Sabine Hossenfelder's take on what on what Superdetermism really is as well as the historical motivations: Turns out Bell was emotionally wedded to the notion of (full circle) 'free will', hence the assumption of 'statistical independence'.
That's one take on what Bell's Inequality really means, there are many others (as many as the number of textbook authors who have strong notions about how linear algebra should be taught) that for example throw out the assumption that information can propagate no faster than the speed of light. Boy, let me tell you, back in the day there were a lot of usenet Einstein Was Wrong cranks who hung their hat on this one.
But that's all beside the point, which is that as far as we can tell, the universe is a static block of world lines (I would continue with 'that are imbedded in a four-dimensional spacetime, but embedded is such a ... strong word.) That being the case, the universe is deteministic to the nth degree and there is no room in it for 'free will'.
Oh, one other thing, speaking to the general topic: Randomness, even so-called 'quantum randomness' does not in any way eqaute to free will. Why people would believe otherwise smacks of mystism. IMHO, of course.
Yeah... Entropy isn't a physical concept.
I was trying to make two points at once that were probably highly separable and I think came off as clumsy.
What I meant to get at was that the mechanistic universe, the clockwork universe, the holographic universe, are all expressions of what we can understand at the moment and in the future they will all be supplanted by the next universal idea.
Our free will now is not the ideal we would like it to be, but, as seems obvious, as brains increase in complexity the capacity of free will increases and this will keep going on until, should we survive, we get to something we can actually describe as unobstructed free will, unobstructed by any deterministic bias.
So, increasing free will is like an arrow of evolution.
It's important to act as if humans have free will. The important thing is to ensure that their neural nets are socialized to be cooperative, even though no one can control their neural net.
I'm curious as to what the difference is between self-awareness and conciousness. If anything, self-awareness seems like the more complicated problem. Conciuousness seems like basically being able to remember and record information, while self-awareness uses a model of self (as well as recorded data) in modeling and predicting the future.
I expect that ChatGPT is conscious, but not really self-aware. Corporations, on the other hand, are both conscious and self-aware.