UKH

Are you one?  youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c&

Such an amiable charming narrator...

In reply to paul mitchell:

The story of 'Tony' who faked his own madness so well he was confined to Broadmoor for 12 years reminds me of the plot of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Interesting too how journalists and psychiatrists are sometimes the baddies. A unique look at the ever shifting universe of mental heath.

In reply to paul mitchell:

I know a business leader/creator who has some of the 'milder' psychopathic tendencies, in being manipulative/cunning, and able to detach from having compassion, and being charming. Quite handy in the business world. Likes his coffee black too, which is more common among psychopaths. Mostly decent as a person though. 

In reply to Timmd:

I suspect it's actually a spectrum that we all sit on, with Hannibal Lecter at one end and Florence Nightingale at the other, or something like that.

In reply to Phantom Disliker: I agree.

 

In reply to Timmd:

I like black coffee. Strong black coffee. Italian strength number 4 in fact.  I also like Cappuccinos. I suspect I am a psychotic capitalist. 

In reply to Phantom Disliker:

More likely peas from the same pod who applied themselves differently.

Kind regards

A CEO

In reply to BnB:

You do know that your whole life is the playing out of the interaction of your genes (which you didn't choose) and your environment (which you didn't choose) in a causally governed universe don't you? "Applied one's self" is a way to inject free will and moral responsibility without admitting that these things actually require magic/a soul/supernatural shit, and therefore aren't real. 

I think the argument that capitalism rewards certain psychopathic behaviour is pretty self-evident, but it doesn't mean that it only rewards that behaviour. The right combination of genes and environment will produce both fluffy bunnies and total psychos who can both do well in business, with different strategies.

In reply to paul mitchell:

I missed this guy's full 'Psychopath Night' show at the Crucible a couple of years back. I had tickets but had to leave work on time to get there; my last appointment of the day was some wanker with one of their retinas half hanging off, moaning about going blind in one eye. The fact that I saw them (rather than sending them to sit in Rotherham A&E for eternity) and missed my night at the theatre probably means I'm not a psychopath.

In reply to Phantom Disliker:

You don’t need to suspect. 

It is. 

From full on empath to full on psychopath we all fit along that scale to some degree. 

In reply to paul mitchell:

Horizon did a program or two about psychopaths a few years ago. It stems from a lack of activity in a certain part of the brain. IIRC 2% of the population are psychopaths. Half of them are bad psychopaths who go around murdering people, the other half are good psychopaths who generally behave in a civilised manner. The good ones are useful when there's a war on as unlike everyone else, they quite enjoy the excitement and are perfectly happy to kill other people.

In business psychopaths often do well on a personal level but in fact aren't very effective in senior roles. The kind of person who you ask of, "how did he ever get that job?"

In reply to Removed User:

Another nail in the free will coffin. To quote Sam Harris, "it's brain tumours all the way down"*.

*Refers to the classic case of Charles Whitman whose mass murdering antics were explained by a tumour interfering with his amygdala...and implying that whatever behaviour you want to explain, if you look at the physical structure and function of the brain closely enough, you'll find an explanation in there. So unless you think you can take responsibility for the physical structure of your brain, you don't have much of a case for claiming responsibility for your behaviour. Big implications, if you take it seriously (or you can hang on to the supernatural shit, that's easier after all).

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Luckily, most of us are able to recognise when our behaviour is not normal and change it. That’s the freewill part. 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

An interesting idea. I hold that the biggest challenge in modern life is to choose whether to adapt yourself to your environment, or to adapt your environment to you. High functioning sociopaths (CEOs, hospital consultants, Gordon Brown) are adept at building worlds to govern. The less adaptable can struggle or display anti-social tendencies. I completely embrace the overwhelming influence of genes and formative environment. But from my own experience, which is a statistically pointless sample of one, I’m conscious of some key choices that set me down a virtuous, rather than anti-social path. Of course you could argue that those choices were driven by environment and I couldn’t prove you wrong.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

What's normal? We all behave differently. We all have different standards of how we "should" behave, depending on how we've been educated (again, not our choice). 

I agree that you *feel like* you have a choice whether to the have the soup or the pate, or whether to punch your boss or your wife or neither, but that feeling of choice is an illusion that we've been endowed with by evolution. Our actions are dealt out by our brains, and our conscious selves (which aren't particlarly robust entities anyway, just ask a Buddhist) give post-hoc rationalisation for what we just did*.

There isn't a way of including free will into the scientific world view: I'm afraid it's not real. Those that try just do so by redefining free will to "feeling like you have a choice" - which we can all agree on.

*see Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion

In reply to BnB:

Me too. The things we do that are preceded by a whole lot of conscious weighing-up of options feel like the most free decisions - and punching someone in the face while you're pissed and incredibly angry feels much less free.

Yes. Your brain did that stuff, and your brain is made of atoms and is part of the causal universe. It would have made a different choice (which would have felt equally "free") had your genes and/or environment been different. So the only way you might try to argue against this is by injecting something supernatural that trumps the causality of the physical universe. In which case, I'll accuse you of talking bollocks, and I'll be right.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Not really. Just because we don’t understand what’s going on at the quantum level, doesn’t mean it’s supernatural. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

The quantum excuse for free will is a con. No one who's studied it believes in it. It's just finding a gap in physics and then inserting something you want to be true for emotional or political reasons. You could put God, fairies or crystal magic in that gap too if you like, but it doesn't make them consistent with the scientific world view. 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I am not a number!!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Most of us behave in roughly the same way to a specific stimulus. There are a range of responses which would be regarded as normal, those within one standard deviation of the average perhaps and there are those which are clearly not. Giving your dog a biscuit or locking it in another room if it won't stop barking would be recognised as normal. Cutting its head off, as one psychopath once did, is obviously not normal.

Mostly we can tell the difference between black and white even though we may struggle to define which shade of grey marks the boundary between the two.

In reply to Removed User:

How would you describe someone who can't resist the urge to propel themselves up precipices of increasing difficulty? Is this a recognised disorder and what it is called?

In reply to krikoman:

Yes you are.
You are 32247

In reply to Removed User:

Absolutely - all of us who are successful at functioning in society are successful because we recognise the behaviours that lead to that success (generally being nice and trustworthy but not a total sap) and we exhibit them ourselves in order to get the reward of success. Cutting off your dog's head is going to make everyone think you're a psycho and not want to co-operate with you, that's why it's a bad idea (from an explanatory rather than moral perspective) and why the genes for such behaviour don't win out. But recognising deviant or psychopathic behaviour and "choosing to do otherwise" isn't an argument in favour of free will.

Yes - and the cultural differences are all about the shades of grey. You're not going to find a tribe in Papa New Guinea whose cultural norms involve celebrating the infanticide of the high-status' members first born or relentless incest, because these behaviours don't lead to great results for the individuals nor the tribe. But on less black-and-white issue where either way will do for society to work (e.g. giving rights to minorities, eating animals), it's a matter of education what we think is right and wrong, acceptable and deviant.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think the implications almost make our approach to justice seem quite archaic and Victorian in it's approach. 

In reply to Timmd:

So do I.

Edit: You'd like Free Will by Sam Harris if you haven't read it, especially if you have Buddhist/meditation sympathies. It's very short and easy for a philosophy book. Here's Harris blowing poor Joey Rogan's mind with the ideas:

youtube.com/watch?v=aAnlBW5INYg&

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Freewill..  one part of the brain regulating the other. Rational elements, over ruling compulsive. 

In reply to summo:

Quite. A large percentage of what we do is basically reacting to stimulus and using muscle memory to perform unconscious actions. 

Free will is our ability to work out what the consequences of our actions are and act accordingly. 

The quantum world affects a great deal of things randomly. You have to be able to react consciously to a whole range of potential outcomes. The idea that everything is preordained, is pretty supernatural in itself, if you ask me. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

You're doing a Daniel Dennet and saying that just because something feels like a free choice, that means it's (as good as) *caused* by the conscious self. But that defies the laws of physics, and thus is not true. There is a genuine paradox, because the experience of  choice is so vivid, and so clearly seems to be important in the causal chain of events. Admitting it's a paradox is one thing, but saying "it's not a paradox, it's real magic" just doesn't satisfy me I'm afraid.

You're mistaking determinism (that the universe runs according to laws which predict the evolving state of everything as time progresses) for fatalism (that every event is pre-ordained). Quantum mechanics does away with fatalism, but it doesn't make the universe non-deterministic. It gives predictions in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, but everything that happens is still bound and caused by the present state and the sate before that. Quantum theory does not open the door to uncaused woo-woo; and adding randomness into the mix doesn't help any case for free will no matter how you do it. It's random after all, that's no help when you're making choices; what you need is events to be caused by something other than the preceding state of the universe, and for that uncaused woo-woo, you need magic.

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

They’re non-deterministic as far as human brains are concerned. Everything you do is based on a probability. That in itself introduces errors in the outcome. So I agree with fatalism being nonsense. 

Deterministic just means you can predict the outcome with certainty given all the information. But you can never have all that information. 

In reply to Removed User:

There are approximately 40 million people in the UK between the ages of 20 and 65.  If you assume that males are more likely to be the murdering type, then that still leaves 20 million and 1% of 20 million is 200 000.
That's a lot of people going around murdering! 

In reply to FactorXXX:

It's not that psychopaths feel compelled to kill, not many of them anyway. It's just that they have no particular reservations about doing so.

In reply to Lusk:

You're actually not far off from a number I once was, 324, my first clock number as an apprentice.

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

The past state is of no consequence.  It is represented purely in terms of how the current state is constructed.  

It is non deterministic from our viewpoint - you can’t predict when a non trivial quantum event will happen.  Sure on average, average stuff happens but statistical tendencies are not determinism.  

There is a gaping hole in our knowledge of what lies behind quantum physics.  It may yet be a purely deterministic pilot wave system subject to thermal noise and formally chaotic dynamics.  Or it may be something even harder to understand than quantum physics....

In reply to paul mitchell:

The program this clip came from was very interesting.

youtube.com/watch?v=m2bPMDTXQTY&

In reply to wintertree:

 

except if you're a Robin and need to navigate. It might be deterministic then.

youtube.com/watch?v=TVorG6_csSA&

 

In reply to Removed User:

Not quite as per your original quote of: "IIRC 2% of the population are psychopaths. Half of them are bad psychopaths who go around murdering people" then?

In reply to krikoman:

I think 32247 is your UKC indoctrination number...

In reply to wintertree:

All I'm saying is that there are laws that tell us how the state of the universe evolves over time.

We're just equivocating over the definition of "determinism". It's arbitrary whether we describe the statistical predictions provided by QM as making the theory "deterministic", because we agree that it's different to classical mechanics, but follows known laws.

True. But it isn't a hole into which you can shove whatever spiritual magic woo-woo you like and say you're being consistent with the scientific world view. It doesn't provide a (gaping or otherwise) cubby hole for God, the soul, free will, or crystal magic to hide in.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I disagree...

But it isn’t.  The statistical predictions only have validity over a large number of quantum systems. They are of no use what-so-ever for a single quantum system.  If single quantum systems start being used to make critical decisions with wide ranging consequences that is not deterministic.  Generally quantum’s nature is burried but in the lab people are teasing it out to ever larger scales.

Agree

I agree with most of those.  However - god - well whatever is behind the universe is unknown and hiding behind the limits of QM and GR.  Seems highly unlikely to be a god of any sort humans have imagined, but it must be *something*.  Free will - nobody knows how consciousness comes to be or what it really is.  Lots of people say “it’s emergent” and call that science but until there are experiments reliably making and not making consciousnesses basses on testable hypothesis it’s all just belief based thinking.  Until we actually have a testable theory of consciousness and until we have fully excluded non trivial quantum effects from that (which biology has not done, with increasing examples of non trivial quantum behaviour being found in living systems) I’m holding off from any grand proclamations...

Actually, I’ve got a theory... Free will is real and it’s an emergent property!

In reply to BnB:

Why is that more likely than  ''I suspect it's actually a spectrum that we all sit on, with Hannibal Lecter at one end and Florence Nightingale at the other, or something like that.'' ?

In reply to wintertree:

I think we have autonomy within a certain set of parameters, which feels like free will, but it's not free will in the 'absolute' sense.  

They're grim statistics, but if you look into who goes to jail, illiteracy, being sexually abused as children, and being taken into care feature more highly among prisoners than the general population, and for prostitutes, too, being sexually abused as children or being raped while below the age of consent and growing up in care are more commonly found among them than the general population  (a friend posted about different attitudes towards it being legalised on facebook, and I googled and came across some statistics to do with northern Ireland). More cheerily , if somebody is naturally practical, or musical, or mathematical, they've not had any free will about their natural aptitude which is hopefully likely, if they're going to be fulfilled, to influence the course of their life. I didn't have any freewill in being left handed, and the way in which I think and approach certain things which can mirror other left handed people.  When I'm problem solving something, I can get six different ideas coming to mind all at once, and this divergent thinking is apparently a trait found (not exclusively) in left handed people - which may affect my life in a positive way in which I didn't 'free willfully' choose.

I think we just have autonomy within certain parameters or boundaries, being the limits of or physical, mental, psychological. or emotional abilities, which are influenced by a mixture of of parents and upbringing, our inherited 'package' and different kinds of luck.  

Edit: I suppose one needs to attempt to define what free will is, as part of thinking about whether we have it or not... 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Thanks, I shall have a look. I found meditation a bit strange, like I felt mentally detached somehow, trying to be less bothered by life is probably as Buddhist as I get.   

In reply to Jon Stewart:

You can't put free will into the same category as God or magic. To do so claims a knowledge of brain function science simply doesn't possess.

If the eminent neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, remains baffled by the origins of thought and selfhood then what makes you so certain that free will is just another category of woo?

Edit: Worth noting that Marsh is firmly in the rationalist/atheist camp.

In reply to Timmd:

I completely agree with the concept of a spectrum. However, ignoring the fictional/real aspects of the comparison, I'm suggesting that Hannibal and Florence, far from being at opposite ends of the spectrum, are/were quite likely both to be found at the "sociopathic" end.

Florence was renowned as a data-driven administrator, able to channel her formidable talents to exceptional pioneering and constructive effect, like Steve Jobs. Remember she was a statistician first and a nursing pioneer second. Google is your friend.

A quick google in another direction will offer up several articles describing Mother Teresa as another example of a saintly sociopath. I can't comment as I don't know enough about her career.

In other words, just as we embrace the idea of the spectrum, it's important not to apply simplistic labels of good and bad according to people's emotional intelligence or facility with numbers

In reply to wintertree:

Fine, so if that's the case in the brain processes that generate consciousness, then we've thrown a whole load of dice-rolling into the causal chain and it's not deterministic. And that helps the case for free will?

When I say God, I mean the guy that's in the Bible. I'm down with some secular appreciation of the deep mystery of nature; but I'm not going to call the deep mystery of nature "God" as a way to conflate the guy in the Bible some with some totally abstract concept that has no interest at all in the moral choices of human beings (and thereby give some credence to the idea of the religious' God). So no, God, the guy in the Bible, is not hiding in the gaps between the things we understand about nature.

We don't know how it comes to be, but unless you're some outrageous hippy, we know it's generated by the brain. And we all know exactly what it is subjectively, in perfect and complete detail - in fact, it's *all* we really know.

I'm fully with David Chalmers that the hard problem of consciousness is a thing. It's the most relevant and most open problem of science. I quite like Penrose's quantum whatnots in microtubules as a possible approach to the problem. I do not like the "consciousness doesn't really exist" approach of Dennet. I find computational theories of consciousness to just be a more detailed form of consciousness denial (Granziano's attention schema theory is one of these). Tononi's integrated information theory seems to at least accept the problem as it is. One of them might be on the right track...but this is all by the by. 

This isn't the problem of free will. No matter what the solution to the hard problem turns out to be, there is no reason at all to think that it will inject some new form of causality into the universe. That's asking the theory to provide something that we might emotionally or politically like to have, but scientifically we don't need it. Regardless of *how* the brain generates consciousness, it's just a biological process that performs a brilliant magic trick resulting in the internal experience of a creature. The magic trick results in the limited consciousness of a rat, and the more complex consciousness of a monkey, and the more complex still consciousness of a human. And they're all just biological organisms going about their business of holding genes that replicate as a consequence of the organism's social behaviour. The conscious experience is what guides such creatures' social behaviour, it's part of the mechanism of biology. There is no need for the magic of free will to explain what we see in the world and what we experience as conscious creatures. It's just like god, it would be nice and convenient emotionally and politically if it existed, but it doesn't. It's not needed and isn't consistent with a scientific world view.

Haha.

In reply to Stichtplate:

Not really. As I've said in my reply to wintertree, we don't have to solve the hard problem of consciousness to see that free will is asking for some completely new (i.e. magic) form of causality whereby the "self" (which isn't really anything, it's just the way the experience generated by the brain feels to to us) is the primary of cause of stuff happening. That just doesn't make sense. We know that consciousness and the self are generated by the brain (but we don't know how the magic trick is done), and we know that the brain is made of atoms that obey the causal laws of nature. There just isn't room here for the new/magic kind of causality that you need for free will.

I'm as baffled as everyone else who's thought about how the brain generates consciousness. But the hard problem of consciousness isn't the problem of free will. I don't know in what sense Marsh believes in free will - maybe in the weak "compatibilist" sense (i.e. a totally watered down version of free will that's compatible with a deterministic, scientific world view)?

 

In reply to Stichtplate:

Him being baffled doesn't disprove that freewill is another category of woo, too, though. The best we can currently do is look at what seems to influence how people turn out as people, and draw conclusions from that. Doing this (currently) seems to suggest that we have less free will than we feel like we have - this might turn out to be an incorrect point of view. 

It's possibly the most profound thing we'll look into when it comes to unravelling being human...

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Surely consciousness, self and how thoughts are generated are all factors at the heart of the question of free will? Given that our knowledge in these areas is patchy at best, the complete dismissal of freewill isn't definitively supported by the science.

 Forgive me if I'm over simplifying your position, but you seem to be saying free will is an illusion and that choice is dependent on the environment we're born into coupled with the individual physiological characteristics of our brains. No argument on environmental influence, but given that we know lifestyle and interests can have a profound effect on brain structure, are you not slipping into a chicken and egg type argument?

In reply to Timmd:

No, but it does indicate that the complete dismissal of free will just isn't backed by research.

In reply to Stichtplate:

Is free will even a matter for research? Whilst we can research drives and compulsions etc I've always thought free will and determinism to be more matters for philosophy.

In reply to wintertree:

I've never really seen how calling something an emergent property is any sort of explanation.

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

That really neatly explains our voting choice at Brexit then. Which half of the country are approximately psycho. As it was scientifically pre ordained in a genetic nurtural sludge or fudge. 

In reply to Stichtplate:

Definitely related. You certainly need consciousness and a self if you're going to have free will. But having free will is asking for more, and indeed too much: to believe in free will, you need to believe that the conscious self has some sort of special magic powers over and above the normal causality of the physical univers. I.e. It's woo-woo. 

Well you can't have *complete* dismissal supported by the science. You have to explain why it feels like we have free will, even though the idea of the "self" being the primary cause of events is incoherent, because we know that the self is the result of brain processes which are governed by the same laws of nature as everything else. The idea of free will is consistent with a religious world view where humans have a non-material soul, but it isn't consistent with the idea of humans as animals, made out of atoms and executing behaviours that are adaptations to their environment.

Not really. Brain structure and function are altered by the environment. Along with this goes changes to the internal experience. Complex social creatures need to make decisions. Evolution found that the best way to do this was to create a brain with a conscious self that thought it was somehow separate to the physical organism, and in charge of it. 

If you reflect on the idea of being a self that possesses a body (rather than just being a body), it just falls apart without something like an immortal soul to hold it together. Get rid of the soul, God, magic and woo-woo, and oh dear, free will's been rejected too. 

But don't worry, it leads to much better ethical ways of thinking than the old religious crap. 

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

To take an alternate view; to reject free will is to embrace pre-determined fate. i.e. It's woo-woo.

I suppose you could view humans as meat robots, or you could accept that as far as complex thought and reasoning ability goes, the human brain far outstrips anything else on Earth, manufactured or evolved. Humans have the ability to break their programming.

Definitely a chicken and egg argument. Do you really think evolution created a brain to suit complex social creatures? I don't think evolution works like that.

I just can't see it that way. The human brain isn't matched by anything else in nature. It has transcended it's original evolutionary function of gene propagation. If we're all pre-programmed automatons how do so many individuals manage to do such unique and extraordinary things?

Looking at the sort of characteristics that promote success, it's hard to see how ethical thinking is purely the result of evolutionary processes.

 

In reply to Stichtplate:

False dichotomy: I'm saying that free will is an incoherent concept (without something like an immortal soul), but I'm not embracing fatalism. We can't in principle predict what complex systems do (not even classical ones, but certainly not quantum ones). You can have a complex, totally unpredictable system that's still causal though. Each thing that happens is caused by all the events that led up to it, but you could never have predicted it. There is no woo-woo in this view. It just says that we live in a natural universe that behaves according to natural laws.

I'm not denying the incredible complexity of humans, compared to say worms or even cows. We don't spend all our time just relentless eating, shitting and f*cking until we're dead, some of us compose symphonies, or put huge mirrors into orbit to see what's over the galactic horizon. This is all great, but it isn't "breaking the programming" - it's just the programming chucking out some really cool outputs. We have very flexible programming.

Yes, I suppose it is a chicken and egg argument, in that it works precisely like the chicken and the egg. They both evolved simultaneously as the same biological thing!

This sounds like a luny religious argument to me, along the lines of..."we can't be evolved from apes, they don't even wipe their arses after having a crap! And they f*ck in public! We are devine beings made in the image of our Lord in heaven, not mere beasts!". We do the great stuff like art and science because we're the best apes there are.

Do you think we are fundamentally different in terms of having "free will" - are we something magic that's not just a meat machine made up trillions of clattering atoms? In what way? And at what point in evolution did the magicness get put in? Did god do it because we're special and the whole universe was created just for us?

I'm saying that discarding free will and moral responsibility makes way for a reason-based ethical system that's free of blame, retribution and all that crap. Instead, such a system just finds ways to decrease suffering as far as possible. This way of thinking could make for a better society in which peoples lives are less shit and more fulfilling. Evolution gave us the tools to come up with reason (the system of rational thought), and we can use reason to organise our world as best as possible so that there is less suffering and more fun and fulfilment. It might sound like nihilism to view people as meat machines, but if you follow through the consequences, it's not only true (i.e. consistent and free from woo-woo), it's also the best way to do things, if you don't like being unhappy yourself (true by definition) and don't think others should be made unhappy either (not so universally held, sadly).

 

Edit: This examines the tension between the rational, ethical side of humanity with our base evolved animal instincts:

youtube.com/watch?v=p1EhaANeYCI&

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Jerry Coyne, author of the excellent "Why Evolution is True" has some good stuff on free will and morality:

 

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/category/free-will/

In reply to Jon Stewart:

 

 

OK...I'm not religious, have (in extremis) failed to wipe my arse, have (surreptitiously) f*cked in public and (in no way, shape or form) am I remotely devine. I've also done f*ck all for art or science. I still believe in free will!

Why do you have to see it as magic? The universe (as far as we know) hasn't thrown up anything remotely similar, in terms of ability, to the human being. Does that mean we're inherently magic???

You can discard all that crap, but humans are still going to be human. Magically disappear the concept of free will...you'll still have blame and retribution.

Instead, such a system just finds ways to decrease suffering as far as possible. This way of thinking could make for a better society in which peoples lives are less shit and more fulfilling. Evolution gave us the tools to come up with reason (the system of rational thought), and we can use reason to organise our world as best as possible so that there is less suffering and more fun and fulfilment. It might sound like nihilism to view people as meat machines, but if you follow through the consequences, it's not only true (i.e. consistent and free from woo-woo), it's also the best way to do things, if you don't like being unhappy yourself (true by definition) and don't think others should be made unhappy either (not so universally held, sadly).

I don't see how discarding free will as a concept will decrease suffering and increase fun and fulfilment. Just as likely would be a world full of cocks excusing their cockishness because "hey, its not my fault. I'm the unavoidable result of biology and environment".

Edit: I'm going to watch the clip in the morning. I remain convincible but my head hurts and I'm going to bed. 

In reply to Shani:

Great, thanks, I'll have a listen.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I’m struggling with fatalism, probability and randomness. 

You can’t have fatalism if there is true randomness. As soon as you allow random events to occur then you have to allow for random thoughts and actions and humans appear to have the ability to act on a probability of something happening. If they relied on a true/false reaction we’d never get anything done as we would never have enough information. 

 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

I agree. I would describe fatalism as the idea that you could some how "zoom out" to see the timeline of your life (or of the universe), with all the events that will ever happen, with a cursor going along it marking the present time.  You can't have this kind of timeline if randomness makes the next event unpredictable.

We live in a universe in which time goes on and events unfold, according to the laws of nature. The laws of nature don't allow us to predict how complex systems behave, so there is no timeline of stuff that happens into the future. You have to wait for events to unfold - and lots and lots of different events could happen next. There's a huge space of possibilities into which events happen.

As soon as you introduce randomness, you lose any ability to predict the future. And human brains are incredibly complex so you they're inherently unpredictable things even without genuine randomness introduced by quantum mechanics. Quantum events being important in brain function could make them doubly unpredictable.

This gets us out of the fatalist nightmare where nothing matters because it's all already been decided in the big book of fate in the sky. We're still here, we're still conscious, and we have to make decisions every day, and no one can predict what the outcomes of those decisions will be. So you can't just sit back and not feel as though you're acting through free will. We're not just clockwork, we are conscious beings that make decisions which could go either way.

But there's no justification in saying that you're responsible for who you are or what you do (which is what I see as the make or break of free will). You didn't choose your genes, you didn't choose your environment, so you didn't choose your brain structure, and you can't choose what to think. Brains work in such a way as to generate a sense of self that feels as though it's in the driving seat, located midway behind the eyeballs. The brain is the "behaviour control centre" of the human meat machine, and the way it works is by conjuring a conscious "self" that thinks and feels and experiences the world, along with emotions, colours, flavours and all the rest (note that with sufficient meditation or psychedelic drugs, the sense of self will just disappear completely - this "self" thing is just the normal pattern of neural activity in the brain, and with an abnormal pattern the self evaporates into thin air). This "self" is how the human meat machine navigates the world and how complex, creative behaviour is directed and coordinated with other meat machines. But the "self" isn't in charge - that's an illusion. The human meat machine is just a very complex biological creature, going about its biological business in exactly the same way that a cat or a monkey does. We just do it with rather more variety and style.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

This is the sticking point for me. I've seen many people make a conscious decision to radically change their lives for the better and conversely, seen a few throw everything away and descend into utter chaos. The variety of human experience is just too wide to validate the argument that behaviour is purely the result of genes plus environment. Put simply, the outliers of human behaviour are far too extreme (far, far more extreme than any other behaviours observed in nature) to support our experiences as the functions of biological automatons.

Edit: and cheers for the Minchin. I was expecting some weighty but worthy haranguing.

In reply to Stichtplate:

What about the chimp brain? Not similar enough for you? As Tim Minchin says, "we're just f*cking monkeys in shoes". I don't see any justification for saying that human beings are an entirely separate category of thing in the universe from our ancestors - we're just the same, but a bit more complex. I see it as magic because free will literally demands a new type of physics that's not present anywhere else in the universe: it means that we humans posses the ability to cause the otherwise uncaused. And that is magic/woo-woo.

The short half-podcast Shani posted articulates the argument better than I can:

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/this-american-life-on-n...

Does the free will you believe in have an on (in humans)/off (in other primates) character, or is it a sliding scale? If it's on/off, when in evolutionary history was it switched on, and how? 

Absolutely fair points, I didn't really explain how discarding free will could make us behave better, and the truth is that it wouldn't, just as you say. People will still be people - and precisely because they are monkeys in shoes.

What I should have said is that a scientific understanding of human behaviour, one which does not credit us with free will and moral responsibility, would give the philosophical foundations for better policies which which would decrease suffering. A better justice system that was not retributive; economic systems that worked in tune with our evolved nature but which were organised to achieve the best outcomes for everyone; education systems which teaches us how to build successful societies in which people fulfil their potential. People would still act like cocks, twas ever thus, but good policies and effective institutions built on firm knowledge of how the world works would improve life for everyone. We currently live in a world in which our laws and institutions don't know what they're based on - but I'll stop here because the phrase "Judeo-Christian values" popped into my head and the urine in my bladder started to reach 100 degrees centigrade.

In reply to Stichtplate:

I don't see how that's evidence for free will.

So, my life starts going down the pan. Let's say I just can't stay off the booze and drugs, I fail to turn up at work, or arrive having not slept and stinking of malt whisky, and have to keep going to the loo to do lines of coke to keep myself awake. Having lost my job, I can't afford to live independently and I descend into some state of addiction, chaos and total social isolation, after my family and friends have eventually given up trying to help, because whatever they do, they just find me pissed up and full of drugs again.

What's going on here? Well, the booze and drugs are ways to activate the reward systems in my brain, and my brain keeps directing my behaviour to take the actions that activate those neural pathways. That's what evolution designed the system to do, but it did so in an environment where food, sex and winning in fights were available stimuli to chase after, whereas refined chemicals that directly stimulate the reward systems weren't. My life descends into chaos because of evolved drives/neurochemistry and the set-up of our society that gives me access to as much booze and drugs as I can get down my neck. Maybe my job is shit boring and low status and doesn't offer any activation of the reward systems even when it's going well, and I haven't managed to form or maintain any bonds with people because my social skills leave a lot to be desired and I'm sexually unattractive. These social and sexual avenues aren't providing any opportunity to light up the reward systems either. Booze and drugs it is then, and consequently my life goes into free fall as my brain chases after the stimuli that it's evolved to chase.

Or maybe, I'm starting to get depressed because I've got no friends and my job sucks, and I'm drinking too much, but have a good day and decide to apply for a sideways move into another location. When I get there, I meet some people at work who I bond with, they introduce me to some of their mates and I eventually find a romantic partner who's really into climbing. They encourage me to take up rock climbing, which I find I really like. It becomes an obsession, I get into training, I quit drinking and improve my diet, and I start feeling physically really good. I now look pretty good naked as well, my partner seems really happy to be with me, I feel confident and because of my confidence, I start to really excel at my job. Pretty much everything I do now is activating the reward circuitry in my brain: I'm eating good food, I'm getting praised and having my high status acknowledged by peers, I'm getting laid, and I don't have any interest in trying to directly stimulate the reward circuitry with drugs and booze. But my behavoiur has been guided by precisely the same meat machine control centre, but with different environmental inputs. The outcome is radically different.

So tell me, where is the free will in that?

 

In reply to Stichtplate:

If one assumes that the people who descend into chaos, wouldn't want to, couldn't there be suggested to be a lack of freewill in their inability to improve their circumstances (or stop them from getting worse)? 

If it was otherwise, couldn't they just decide to do better at life?

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Both of your examples are perfectly explicable from the point of view of a biological machine whose prime directive is the propagation of genetic material. Much else in human behaviour just doesn't fit; abandoning family, status and a lucrative career to work in an African AIDS orphanage or simply donating a kidney to a stranger. If people perform such acts of altruism, unpublicised and without exception of financial or spiritual reward, then what's the biological driver?

As someone up-thread pointed out, this is really a philosophical debate, at least until neuroscience can pin down how thoughts are formed and how much of the self is physiologically or experientially derived.

 

In reply to Timmd:

Big assumption Timmd. Have you never just thought 'F*ck It'? Have you never purposefully taken the bad path just for the sheer devilment of it. I was often guilty on both counts until I grew up a bit.

Not really. 'Doing better at life' is usually bloody hard work (unpalatable to many), and can also require a fair amount of luck, or a the very least, an absence of bad luck.

 

In reply to Stichtplate:

Not when I've been in a good place psychologically, deep down I've always wanted improvement or to be getting to a better place. When I haven't been living well I've always known it and wanted to change. 

Why isn't it unpalatable to everybody, or not unpalatable to anybody, that is - isn't what is inherent in different people so that they approach the effort needed in different ways (sometimes by avoiding it), an argument 'against' free will? If not, why not?

You're totally right about luck. 

In reply to Stichtplate:

Firstly, I promise I'm not trying to "win" an argument here, just to make one. As you say, it is a philosophical question and doesn't really have an answer. I haven't really admitted it so far, but I do see a big problem with the no free will angle: it seems to make consciousness "epiphenomal", i.e. it doesn't do anything. This can't be right, so there is a genuine paradox here.

Sometimes I think the no free will position can be reconciled with the subjective experience of making decisions and acting on them. And then other times they seem to be at odds. John Searle gets slagged off by the no free will crowd, but this seems totally right to me:

youtube.com/watch?v=_rZfSTpjGl8& (10 mins of chat, no piano or jokes this time)

I chose those examples precisely because they illustrate the core of the moral responsibility argument: either you can "pull your self together" or you can "let things slide" and you're responsible for which way it goes. As you say, these examples are perfectly explicable as meat machines going about their biologically motivated existence. So moral responsibility and free will aren't needed to explain these kind of examples, right? Something stronger, more extreme is needed to demonstrate that free will is the best explanation for what humans are up to?

You're absolutely right that lots of human behaviour isn't well explained by a direct quest to propogate genes - but note that that wasn't the argument in the drugs 'n' booze vs. clean cut successful life  example: evolution explained the appeal of the drugs 'n' booze by drives being mis-directed leading to destructive behaviours. The same can be said with every other example you can think of. We've developed the capacity for altruism so that we can build cooperative societies which allow our genes to propogate. They can't propagate nearly so well in a dog-eat-dog set-up. And this capacity for altruism can be misdirected, from the genes' perspective, e.g. giving up all hope of getting laid to help AIDS kids (with whom you share very little genetic material) in Africa.

Or think about it this way: at the end of a week when I've done nothing except kick kittens to death, I end up feeling pretty down. I'm not very social, I've got no energy, no sex drive, and I get frankly withdrawn and depressed. However, when I've been busy giving vital organs to AIDS victims, feeding the homeless and curing cancer for no personal gain, I feel pretty good about myself. I can't wait to go to the pub and tell everyone about the funny stories that happened along the way (but I don't boast about my heroic deeds, obviously). I feel energised, I'm confident, and actually it's quite a simple matter to get laid on those weeks, whereas on the kittty-killing weeks no one seems to want to go anywhere near my penis. Funny that, isn't it?

You can pick a million and one different behaviours that don't directly help the propagation of genes. But the genes are playing the long game. The loss of the individual organisms (that is, gene carriers) that take an idea too far and end up not breeding, or just develop a pathological version of something that was meant to be a good idea are just collateral damage. A great example is homosexuality: this is a terrible way to spread genes, yet it persists. Some people think that gays make such great uncles that they contribute to the genetic "long game" but that's clutching at straws. I for one hate children and take absolutely no interest in the lives of my nephews. What homosexuality demonstrates is the flexibility of the programming. The mechanical genes-and-life-and-what-have-you process chucks out all kinds of completely bizarre and random behaviours in the blind hope that something will work in a particular niche that may or may not ever exist. This is how come humans can dominate every environment on the planet, from desert to ice cap to rainforest to shitty pissing down bleak cold temperate islands.

There isn't any human behaviour you can point to that will demonstrate that we've "escaped our programming". The more extreme the example, the more it shows that evolution will spit out any old random weirdness, just on the off-chance that it might work out in that particular niche. This is why we should view the examples of weirdness with a keen rational, moral eye: is it doing any harm? If not, leave it alone. If it is, how best can that harm be reduced?

This gets to the big political problem with free will: it's at the root of fallacious right-wing thinking. Being gay or transgender is a "lifestyle choice" and should be punished to disincentivise it. Those who are rich deserve to be rich, because we all have responsibility for whether our lives are successes or failures. If you're poor, then that's because you're stupid and lazy, so don't ask me for hand-outs. Belief in free will is the foundation of the false, anti-scientific, hangover-religious world view that supports bad right wing politics. 

But don't ditch your belief in free will for political reasons, ditch it because it's incoherent.

In reply to Jon Stewart: I've come across 'the older brother effect' for homosexuality, and a study which found that the more biological older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay, that is, there's a correlation to be found which isn't present when there's brothers who are adopted or who don't share the same mother. One theory is that biology looks for a 'sweet spot' so that a son is born with just the right balance of masculine and feminine traits which are desirable to a female, balance of macho and sensitive/nurturing I suppose. Quite interesting.  

 

In reply to Timmd:

Sounds like over-interpretation to me. The older brother effect is pretty robust, and if you ask me it just shows that physical, biological environmental factors (like levels of hormones in the womb) have physical, biological consequences (like homosexual male offspring). I'm not sure "looking for a sweet spot" is what's going on. More like a scatter-gun approach, if indeed this effect is really an adaptation rather than a totally "unintended" consequence of variable female hormone production.

 

 

In reply to Jon Stewart: On reflection I think I'd agree. 

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Firstly, that you're not even trying to "win" an argument makes it even more galling that you are doing.

Right, so if we can agree (a bit) that neuroscience has been pretty unhelpful in settling this debate, then an objective answer is out of our reach (admittedly, extrapolating from almost  everything else in the universe would seem to negate free will, but aren't humans unique?). The lack of a definitive objective answer then gives more weight to the subjective and people overwhelmingly 'feel' they are making their own choices in life (OK, I'm clutching at straws).

It'd help, yes.

The evolutionary altruism seems a big ask, but on reflection it's no bigger a stretch than a shit tonne of commonplace biological systems evolution has come up with.

Excellent point, and though motivation is essentially unfathomable, altruism can also be observed in the animal kingdom.

Great, flexibility of programming. Is it possible that humans and the societies that we've created are so complex, the environmental niches we inhabit so varied, that evolution gave us programming so flexible as to offer merely general rules and guidance rather than behavioural tramlines?

I can't prove that humans have escaped our programming, largely because defining what that programming might entail would be an almost impossible task, given that you'd have to be able to encompass the entirety of all the weird and wacky behavioural stuff that people engage in

But I don't see a belief in free will as the root of fallacious right-wing thinking. Personally I believe all that crap comes down to the ridiculous notion that it's possible to sit in judgment on people when it's obviously difficult enough to judge the moral implications of individual actions.

My view of free will is certainly a lot less coherent than it was a couple of days ago! I think you've shifted me from an adherent to a fence sitter. 

 

In reply to Stichtplate:

Perhaps a lack of free will means he can't deliberately try to not win. It just happens. 

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Your reasoning seems sound, in that physical factors, whether they are genetic or environmental, will all act as agents in influencing responses. The question of free will then becomes one of whether those physical, theoretically observable and measurable factors could ever be sufficient to precisely determine the outcome response, which would leave free will with no role to play.

I see an analogy here will physics. The above logic is Newtonian, maybe even Einsteinian. But quantum theory and physical quantum effects are now known to be very real and not at all explainable by classical physics.

Perhaps there's a comparable (or even the same) quantum-type effect going on in the brain that we're yet to discover.

In reply to Gone for good:

I don't think you're a psychopath because coffee strength goes up to 5. Phew! 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Did I misunderstand or did he confuse conscious decision making with free will? Or is that his argument basically conscious decision making equals free will?

I do live my life on the assumption of determinism, and I still make decisions that affect my life, whether conscious or not. Are they really incompatible?

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

I don't think he's confusing them. He's saying what we know to be true:

1. We live our lives by consciously making decisions - and this gives us an inescapable *feeling* of free will (he doesn't say it equals free will, he says that free will might be an illusion)

2. Science tells us that there are causally sufficient conditions for everything that happens, and there is no reason (other than the subjective experience) to think that brains can somehow sidestep the causal structure of the physical universe

If both these are true, which 1. definitely is and 2. seems almost certain to be, then we're left asking the question: what's the point of the conscious experience and the illusion of free will. Why did we evolve it if it plays no causal role?

Searle (not in this clip) believes it's completely fair to take as given that consciousness acts causally in the world ("I decide to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up"), and this is basically a pro-free will position. If you're really committed to the no free will position, it seems like the conscious decision making plays no causal role (epiphenomenalism). And that can't be right...?

I think if you hang on to the idea of being a conscious "self" that's in charge of your body, then they're incompatible. You can't throw out consciousness like Dan Dennett tries to (if it seems to me that I am conscious then I definitely am conscious; I think therefore I am), but maybe you can throw out the self. If the self is an illusion - which is entirely plausible - then maybe there's no paradox? 

In reply to john arran:

That sounds to me like looking for a gap to squeeze free will into. If all the observable causes leave something unexplained, let's assume it's free will (but with no explanation for how free will works in a causal universe).

I think everything a human does can, in principle, be explained in terms of causally sufficient conditions, the playing out of the genes interacting with the environment. I can't imagine what kind of thing could defy this explanation. And then looking at what the brain does at the neurobiological level, it's a bunch of neurons processing information by zipping action potentials down their axons and dendrites (quite how this generates consciousness is a mystery - the hard problem - but we know that it does). At this level, each neurobiological event has causally sufficient conditions too. I don't see any gap into which free will can be slid.

I quite like the idea of the quantum type effect as analogy rather than literally...but I'm not convinced that the problem is as radical as to need a new type of physics. It's not like black body radiation where current theories simply cannot explain the observed behaviour of the natural world. It's only how the world feels subjectively to us that doesn't quite fit. And if you chuck out the idea of the self that's in control (or at least the commitment that this is really what's going on, and see that it's an illusion) I think that the problem might disappear without any appeal to new physics.

It might be worth noting that people in other parts of the world have been been banging on about the self being an illusion for bloody ages, and western science hasn't given them the time of day.

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

He does seem to say that making decisions is pointless if you accept determinism. Which seems to just confuse the issue. Our brains continue to control our actions regardless.

We're aware that we our brains control our actions. We can review our own decision making process and improve it. Even achieve more long term ambitions through actively changing our brain to behave differently, like Honold soloing El Cap. This process relies on memory obviously, which seems to be integral to consciousness. That seems to be compatible with determinism. Does consciousness go further than that? I'm not sure of a good definition of it.

I'm not sure people even agree of the definition. I think memory of past decisions and the ability to review and play out possible outcomes of different decisions would be beneficial. But is that how people see free will? It doesn't mean we could have made a different decision in the past. So doesn't break causality.

In reply to Stichtplate:

I don't think we're on "tramlines" - there's no way of predicting human behaviour. As you say, it's far too complex, the programming far too flexible. But that lack of predictability isn't free will.

Most people who engage in fallacious right-wing thinking couldn't give a coherent justification for what they believe, they just feel it and blurt it out. But watch what certain right-wingers on this site say and how much of it is about how disadvantaged people should "buck their ideas up" and "take responsibility". Moral responsibility is a key foundation of the conservative world view, and scientifically, it makes no sense, as I've argued here.

Has your sense of self started to disintegrate yet?

 

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

He says that there's no way of getting out of the illusion: even if you say you accept determinism you've still got to decide whether the to have the veal or the steak. No matter how much you accept determinism, that still feels like free will.

Well, it gives us a very strong feeling of being in control and being "able to do otherwise". Do you have that feeling?

There's no problem with the definition of consciousness. We all know precisely what it is because we wake up every day and become aware that "it's like something to be me". It's not like anything to be unconscious. That difference defines consciousness.

No, I think you're reducing free will to something very weak rather than facing the undeniable experience of volition, that we "could have done otherwise" in every decision we make.

 

In reply to Jon Stewart:

My sense of self as an autonomous functioning human being, capable of directing my own life through rational decision making?

It began eroding 22 years ago, almost completely disintegrated now. Still glad I met the wife though.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Not so much looking for a gap to squeeze free will into so much as saying that if free will is real then a gap must exist. Then going on to speculate on how traditional cause-effect and free will could co-exist, but not obviously if still following our usual cause-effect model.

I do agree though, that given everything seems to be explained sufficiently without free will, Ockham would suggest there's no need to go out of our way to shoehorn it in.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Here's another analogy for you - with evolution.

Many folk assume that evolution is somehow directed towards a certain goal or advantage, whereas in fact it can be explained perfectly well simply by natural variation and subsequent advantage selection.

We assume we have made a decision by free will when in fact that will have been the only course of action that could have brought us to our current reality.

And then we're back with quantum mechanics and the infinite multiverse model  We could have made a different decision, but if we had we'd now be in a different universe, so the decision we made was the only one available that would get us here.

In reply to john arran:

Haha. Someone must've played the "multiverse provides solution to free will" card before...and I doubt there's any good refutation of it.

Right now, I've got to decide whether to carry on listening to music and posting on UKC; do something useful; or go out for a walk in the Howgills. Whichever universe I end up in, it's going to feel like a product of my free will (even though it isn't).

In reply to Jon Stewart:

My brain controls my body. I have memory of past decisions. Beyond that I must admit I'm not sure what I consider free will to be. I know decisions have big effects on my life, and the lives of others. So am I in the illusion or not? Can he prove I am?

Not sure I offered my definition, just pondering what others have said. I think I can review past decisions and alter future behaviour. I can't alter the past. If that's a clockwork universe, or more probabilistic I don't see how it alters the discussion of free will. I don't feel I could have done otherwise, I can ponder what might have happened but that's obviously different. And obvious behave differently in future. The 'wish' or 'desire' to have done differently would be a strong driver to make better decisions in future.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think that’s flawed logic.  During anaesthesia for example, various parts of the brain are screamingly active, but links between them are surpressed and memory formation is surpressed.

So consciousness may persist but with no way to remember that period.  Not unlike people functioning when almost paralytically drunk.

Lack of memory of consciousness does not imply lack of consciousness.  

A video I saw this week featured a guy explaining consciousness as an interface between other people and the inner workings of your brain. A bit like a computer monitor shows you the icons but you don’t see the code that lies underneath, or the electronics underneath the code. 

The subconscious is the code and background tasks that are hidden away. Without this divide the human brain wouldn’t be capable of interfacing or operating as it would just be far too busy and distracted all the time. 

We already know that the brain ignores a huge amount of information coming from the eyes and makes a load of stuff up to fill in the gaps, guessing about what you’re seeing. We had no idea that we operated like this up to a few years ago. 

I can believe that a lot of instant descisions we make are done subconsciously as reactions or prelearned processes but we still need to learn. It’s the learning side of descision making where ‘freewill’ is most evident. Making carefully considered decisions over long periods of time with lots of guessing using probabilities. I suspect we are too used to seeing things in a binary descision making computer system type model rather than a probability type of model. 

Humans are quite comfortable holding two completely opposite and conflicting views on something at the same time. Paradoxes that would crash a computer program or lock it into inactivity. 

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

But do you experience making decisions? I do. This afternoon, I made the decision to go out to the Dales rather than just stay in. It definitely felt like I could have done otherwise. I felt that I was free to stay in, or to go somewhere other than where I went. I could have put on different music while I was driving. I felt that I was free to drive the van off the road into the river, had I felt like it, but I just didn't fancy it at the time. It was my choice: I, my conscious self, caused my actions, and it didn't feel like there was any other reasonable explanation for what happened during the afternoon.

I'm surprised if you don't experience being alive in this way.

If you feel, like I do, that you decide what to do through your own free will, then you see the illusion. If you don't experience the feeling of being in control of your actions, then no, I guess you don't see the illusion. I mean it's also possible that some people see the two Muller-Lyer lines as equal length, but it means they have a neurological anomaly!

I agree it doesn't.

So you feel completely passive as your body goes around living and doing stuff? You know what it's like to feel "x might have happened" but not "I could have chosen to do y instead". You're failing the Turing test! Or, maybe you exist in some kind of permanent meditative/psychedelic state of ego-loss in which thoughts are experienced without any sense of a "thinker"?

In reply to wintertree:

All true. But we still know what it is to be conscious, even if we can't prove that we really were unconscious when we thought we were. Such examples give insight into what's needed to have continuity of consciousness, but they don't make any real difference to what consciousness is.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

The other problem with freewill is it is practically impossible to prove it exists. In the sense that you can never re-run the tape to see if an action would play out the same or not. Much like changing the initial conditions in a chaotic system, ie the weather, by a miniscule amount has large effects further down the line. In short is my decision to reply to this thread an act of freewill or the end product of a whole load of social conditioning, and random causes that made such a reply enevitable?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Yes, I make decisions and control my actions but I'm not aware that I could have made a different decision. Before I make a decision I don't know the outcome for sure. And after I make it I obviously remember the outcome and I can ponder the what-ifs.

No, I make decisions all the time, decisions that have real effect.

That's kind if what I said above. We can ponder what-ifs. That doesn't mean I have to accept I could have done things differently.

Not sure how to answer this, although not in any "special" state. Other people experience things as I do, which I think is the assumption most of us make about others, in the broader sense anyway. It's in retrospect we consider other decisions we might have made. Although in reality we couldn't have done anything different. I'm not sure where a belief we could have comes from. Just a side effect rather than beneficial?

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

I was thinking the other day that freewill is impossible to measure. For instance if you stood at a fork in the road and both ways ahead were equal, and you flipped a coin to decide which way to go. Heads left, Tails right. Then some might argue that you are abdicating you freewill to the flip of a coin. But what if someone was standing at the fork flipping the coin for you? So that someone else is abdicatiing their freewill on your behalf. That I realised is pretty much all our decisions, not to a figure flipping a coin but to genes and memory and experience. Every decision you make rides on the back of all your previous experience and biology. So whether you buy eco-washing up liquid or bleach, or climb or walk is formed from the past. We cannot return to initial conditions and re-run the decision so to all pretence and purposes we have freewill, it is practially impossible to act as if you hadn't got freewill because your biology won't let you, even if everything you do is a subtle case of cause and effect.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

But it is used in society to justify a salary or a punitive prison sentence. Beyond using them as carrots and sticks, or for the protection of others. A retrospective moral judgement. Doesn't that only make sense if we assume that a person could have chosen to do otherwise?

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

of course it is, how could we do otherwise? But we are geared to think we and others have freewill even if we don't. If you are threatened you are programmed to respond so it is only practical to assume some form of autonomny from other people even if the reality is not the case. So I can say that someone has acted in a particular way because events in their life led up to that moment but equally events in my life led up to me punishing them. I have no more autonomy in dishing out a sentence than they had in commiting the crime. We are both playing out the consequences of cause and effect.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Accept it's the luck of the draw.

I think you're confusing past and future.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

Past event inform future events. Strictly speaking future events are past events we don't yet know about

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

I'm not sure what that statement teaches us?

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

Freewill is an illusion that we have no way of escaping is what I believe

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

"I'm not aware" is an odd choice of words here. What I'm getting at is the jarring difference between what I experience, the feeling that I could have done otherwise, with the scientific understanding that I couldn't have done anything else because I live in a causal universe and all the sufficient conditions were in place.

I can't quite work out whether you feel something different to me when you make or reflect on decisions but you're just using different words to describe it; or whether you experience something different that doesn't include the feeling of volition and you're just "aware" of what you're doing without the sense of being in charge of it; or whether you don't actually have any internal subjective experience at all. This is something I'd never considered, given that we know each other pretty well in person, and is a bit worrying!

I don't "accept" it - I think it's incoherent in the scientific world view, and requires magic/a non-material soul that somehow acts causally in the physical universe/woo-woo. But that doesn't mean I don't feel it every minute of every day.

It comes from the experience of being a conscious decision making agent. An experience that you may or may not be familiar with...

Quiet a fascinating turn in the discussion though - I'd taken it as a given that we all feel like we have free will. Apparently not.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

My position too. 

But I'm fascinated by why we've evolved this way of doing things. I'm pretty sure that it's an incredibly elegant solution that evolution has come up with to make us behave in ways that propagate our genes, it just seems like a ludicrous length to go to!

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Yes, I like that way of looking at it. 

The distinction you're making there is between behaviours that don't really feel free - e.g. the flow state of downhill skiing and those that feel very free because we consciously deliberate over them. That feeling  of acting out of free will is no evidence that free will is real - and it's not real, because it's inconsistent with the scientific world view. The brain is part of the physical, causal universe, and unless you're prepared to inject some magic into the system, you can't have free will.

Was it Robert Sapolky? He's the dude (and he doesn't believe in free will).

In reply to Jon Stewart:

 

His book Behave is one of my favourites

In reply to Jon Stewart:

A Primate's Memoir is excellent and contains a stupendous example of animal altruism.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

I agree. Or should I correct that, I agree with the illusion part (or delusion). But since it's retrospective and can be considered, I think you can escape it.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Tell me about it. Now I know you're suffering delusions when I'm supposed to be on belay.

I think there's a difference between feeling you're making choices, and feeling you could have made other choices. Not sure I can explain it any better than I did already, which perhaps isn't very well.

I see the delusion in the free will delusion as being real, but being retrospective, not in the moment. Perhaps a convenient or inconvenient side effect depending on how the dice fall.

Ha ha, don't worry. I'm totally there making decisions all the time. Weighting up the options, maybe acting impulsively.

Talking about it does confuse the issue, i.e. what I think I actually feel. I'm not sure you can actually feel anything so complex, it requires consideration. Feelings to me are happy/sad/angry etc. Maybe there's a test that'll reveal I'm talking bollocks and I'm deluded about my lack of delusion.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

Interesting how can you escape it?

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Not sure I was ever in it. But not sure anyone else is either. In the moment anyway. Just confused, recalling the options they were aware of beforehand, and the decision made in retrospect?

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

how do you know then that your decision was not predestined as a result of past experience? How can you know that you have freewill and have not just been programmed to think you have? After all could you have answered this thread in a different way or is it not the case that the beliefs and influences through your life created the way you argue your point and the points you argue. There was no way you could have done otherwise, but you cannot know that because you can not go back in time and reset the arguements

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Now I'm a bit confused, should you be asking me? I ask because I'm not sure I disagreed with anything you said here. I don't think we have free will, in the sense that past decisions could have been different.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

I think I am kind of confused myself.

To try and clarify: I believe that our decisions are predestined from the moment we are born but we can only act as if we had freewill because we have no way of knowing what those future decisions will be. And we can only treat other people as having freewill for the same reasons.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Well we all got there in the end.  

I think the term free will itself is part of the problem. We make decisions and are aware of that process. Like you say, we don't know the outcome or we wouldn't be trying to make a decision. But whether it's predestined or random, you don't have to feel you have free will to be aware of the decision making process.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

I agree with that

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Free will enables us to make the best decisions according to our experience and current knowledge.

Free will also enables us to deliberately choose a different decision. But what would be our motivation for doing so? Whatever the motivation is, that's also part of our assessment based on experience and current knowledge.

It follows then that either decision could equally be attributed to circumstances, or in other words, programming. Therefore not really free will.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

There's a book title in that. When are you going to publish The Delusion Delusion?