Does free will exist?

[Devil's Advocate]

You know, these forums should have some sort of option where it gives you more detailed 'stats'. I know this is only going to be my 61st official post, but if there was a way to keep track of stuff like 'Words Per Post'...

I have a feeling mine would be abnormally high... *EDIT* That's poor grammar, isn't it?

 

[Moonbat]

ok, thought experiment time

Imagine that in front of you there are two buttons, the first labelled 'press me' the second labelled 'don't touch'. You have 4 choices, you can either:
press the button labelled 'press me' or
press the button labelled 'don't touch' or
you can press neither button or
(attempt to) press both buttons at the same time.
So we have 4 simple choices.
According to Interference's view of free will none of us will actually choose (with free will) which button(s) to press (or not press) but the choice we make will depend entirely on who we are, i.e our experiences to date. For those of us that are particularly obtuse we will probably press the 'don't touch' button, for those of us that see ourselves as non-conformists will probably choose not to press either button, and for those of us that are greedy will try to press both at the same time.
Ok, so far so boring, with no particular conclusion or evidence of free will, but now we can bring in the experiment mentioned by Harebrain (Volitional acts and readiness potential) It should be possible to stop the person actually pressing the button that they have chosen to press (as the choice is made subconsciously before the button is pressed, even before the presser is aware of making the conscious descision) then give them the option of chaging their choice. I'm am confident that some (if not many) will happily change their choice of which button to press and then press the other. This would prove that the person is not just a collection of thier experiences and has the chance to effect the future they choose (actually no it wouldn't because the act of stopping them would then add to thier experiences and so would be part of the effect that makes them choose the other button (Dagnammit!))

Ok, forget I just said that

How about we stop them after they have made a choice (possible even recognising which button they would choose (due to brain activity, I am clutching at straws here)) but before they press the button without actually telling them that we have stopped them to allow them to change their choice, lets say an emergency alarm startles them and forces them to hesitate before making the choice again. If someone changes thier mind without a prompt from us (the experimentor) has exercised free will.

I still think it suffers from the 'just a product of our experiences to date' malarkey.

 

[Peter Graham]

I agree that those of us supporting the notion that free will exists need to find a snappy definition or one liner.

The great old chestnut I had to endure in my younger days was the studenty/solipsistic "what if everything in the world is a figment of my imagination?" To which my reply was always "test your theory. Go and jump in front of an express train. Then come back and tell us if you were right."

We don't need to do anything quite so dramatic here. But what we do need to do is something useless and time consuming. Something which cannot possibly be a prudent or logical choice for us to make at any level. Something which shows beyond reasonable doubt that we are not just a pre-programmed human sat nav, making choices solely in response of events.

So, go online and order a copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles from a bookshop in Berlin. When it arrives, smear the title page in jam. Then remove all of chapters 3-11 inclusive, turn them into a paper brick and paint it with red oxide. Leave the paper brick on a bird table until it rots away. Leave the rest of the book in a bin in your local park.

In anticipation of the opposing argument - which is more likely? That you are the sort of person who can be prevailed upon by someone they've never actually met to waste their time and money doing something which they know to be completely pointless, or that the very fact that you can waste your time and money doing things that are completely pointless shows that you are exercising choice and free will?

Regards

Peter

 

[Interference]

So, go online and order a copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles from a bookshop in Berlin. When it arrives, smear the title page in jam. Then remove all of chapters 3-11 inclusive, turn them into a paper brick and paint it with red oxide. Leave the paper brick on a bird table until it rots away. Leave the rest of the book in a bin in your local park.

I -- will -- obey ...






or do I merely choose to

 

[HareBrain]

HareBrain - I think the question that is actually plagueing (sp?) you is not about free will, at all. What you're really wondering about (from what I've discerned after reading your posts) is the idea of Conscious versus Sub-conscious thinking/decision-making/choices. All of the arguments you have presented so far seem to support that. As I said before, I believe these are separate issues.

That pinponts our disagreement, then, because I believe them to be one and the same. I do so because I contend that:

1. Free will is the ability to exercise one's will in the absence of (or, able to take into account) external influences.
2. Free will can only be exercised by the conscious.
3. The subconsciousness is external as far as the conscious is concerned. Same with biology. (Edit: I appreciate this might strike many as absurd. Actually, it might be absurd. I might have to come back to it - or start a "what is consciousness?" thread.)

I am not just contesting your claim that there is no free will (though I believe there is). I'm also contesting the validity of your arguments. Not because I think you're full of **** (I don't), but because I feel your arguments are related less to 'free will', and more to 'consciousness', if you know what I mean.

I see your point, but again, I think they're the same. If you want to separate free will from consciousness, then in my opinion you have to define it better than the ability to make choices. And maybe it wasn't the best term to use in the thread title.

BTW, I've never argued that there is no free will (or "conscious decision-making" if you prefer), only that the weight of non-conscious influences on us means we have to achieve a relatively high state of self-awareness before we can hope to truly use free will. Everyone has the capacity, but it's rarely exercised, I would argue.

Of course, the value of the whole discussion is probably only in typing practice, because as Moonbat has pointed out, we can never truly know whether the choices we make are real or only apparent, anyway (because they might all be much more subtle variants on the "torture the kitteh or not" non-dilemma).

As far as your arguments themselves go - that our decisions are frequently the product of sub-conscious thinking; we do things without fully knowing why; personality, upbringing, experiences etc. play a large part in our choices, etc. - I absolutely agree with you. A lot of our decisions are undoubtedly the result of some sub-conscious process.

But how would you tell which ones weren't?

(I'm not sure if we're talking about the same king of "decisions" btw, because you then go on to use a reflex action as an example. I'm talking about the apparently conscious, non-reflex decisions, eg which PC to buy)

In anticipation of the opposing argument - which is more likely? That you are the sort of person who can be prevailed upon by someone they've never actually met to waste their time and money doing something which they know to be completely pointless, or that the very fact that you can waste your time and money doing things that are completely pointless shows that you are exercising choice and free will?

What's most likely is that those who want there to be free will, will behave in the way that seems to prove its existence.

Also, if the history of the internet has taught us anything, it's that people are never averse to expending a great deal of energy and money in order to waste their time.

 

[Ursa major]

2. Free will can only be exercised by the conscious.
3. The subconsciousness is external as far as the conscious is concerned. Same with biology. (Edit: I appreciate this might strike many as absurd. Actually, it might be absurd. I might have to come back to it - or start a "what is consciousness?" thread.)

I think you will need to prove that the subconscious mind is not capable of exercising free will to prove your point 2. I'm not convinced, simply because I currently believe those scientists who are saying that consciousness is a much smaller part of the brain's function than previously thought.

As to your point 3, how separate are the conscious and subconscious parts? Do you mean physically, as in they never use the same neurons? Is this true? (This is a genuine question as I have no idea what the right answer is.)

 

[Chinook]

It took a somewhat less than infinite number of monkeys to make the first Shakespeare

Shakespeare was made out of monkeys??? Wow, I didn't know that!

 

[Interference]

Ahem ... someone thinks someone should read his Darwin. We're all monkeys, bud

 

[Ursa major]

Then why can't any of us ape his achievements?

 

[Interference]

Some of us try -- very hard

 

[Chinook]

Descended from Monkeys is a whole different barrel than being composed out of more than one. Also, I'd like to see some evidence of the experiment you are alluding to, and exactly how did they piece together what individual monkeys had typed? If it was a computer simulation, I would again say that's cheating.

One liner? "In ethics, free will implies that individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions."

Most civilized societies use this reasoning in courts of law, so it would seem that the majority (If you can say that the majority supports the system of law they abide under) agrees that there is such a thing as free will, because with freedom comes responsibility.

 

[Ursa major]

If you're interested in monkey-authoring, you could look here:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/50139-give-a-virtual-monkey-a-virtual-keyboard.html
​

Is this aping the real world, or is it the use of guerilla tactics....

​

 

[Chinook]

I do believe that Ursa should be held morally accountable for the way he is pun-ishing us.

 

[HareBrain]

I think you will need to prove that the subconscious mind is not capable of exercising free will to prove your point

Ursa, glad you posted as I meant to tackle this idea of yours earlier and forgot. I don't understand how the subconscous mind could be capable of exercising free will, even if free will did widely exist. Maybe we mean different things by it -- could you give an example where you think your subconscious does exercise free will?

As to your point 3, how separate are the conscious and subconscious parts? Do you mean physically, as in they never use the same neurons? Is this true? (This is a genuine question as I have no idea what the right answer is.)

As I said, I'm not nailing my colours to this idea of separation, but one argument would be that higher consciousness (as opposed to subconscious) is the part of our awareness that is capable of reflecting on the workings of our minds, and as such, it can take a position that is external to that which it is reflecting upon. But as far as I know, there's no evidence for physical separation in terms of neurons etc -- in fact I don't think anyone has yet shown where consciousness comes from or how it arises in terms of biology or neuroscience.

One liner? "In ethics, free will implies that individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions."

Most civilized societies use this reasoning in courts of law, so it would seem that the majority (If you can say that the majority supports the system of law they abide under) agrees that there is such a thing as free will, because with freedom comes responsibility.

The fact that legal systems hold others morally accountable for their actions doesn't necessarily imply the existence of free will, only (as you pretty much say yourself) a belief in it.

 

[Parson]

To quote a quasi-evangelist*: "Believe it and you shall achieve it!"





*Quasi-evangelist because I am utterly convinced what they are selling has the soul of self hypnosis wrapped in a blanket of Biblical texts taken out of their context. This process can be creatively used to make the Bible say almost anything.

 

[dustinzgirl]

I believe that someone will give me a nice used RV with a 440 in it and all working appliances and a bathroom and sleeps 4.

 

[Interference]

They don't do those in the 440 range, what else can we tempt you with?

 

[Ursa major]

Ursa, glad you posted as I meant to tackle this idea of yours earlier and forgot. I don't understand how the subconscous mind could be capable of exercising free will, even if free will did widely exist. Maybe we mean different things by it -- could you give an example where you think your subconscious does exercise free will?

No, for the simple reason I don't know where my subconscious mind takes over from my conscious mind (and vice versa). What I mean by this is that I'm not sure there is the equivalent of a border (or, say, something akin to the distinction between a software application and an underlying operating system).





Let's return to my mention of the subconscious supply of puns. There is not a simple difference between unbidden and engineered puns, in the sense that the former are not always simple and the latter are not often complex. It seems to me that the neural mechanisms required to generate word-play are so similar that either they are:

1. always in the subconscious mind, but are capable of being invoked by the conscious mind;
2. duplicated (and thus entirely separate, which begs the question of just how much dictionary/thesaurus/etc information I'm carrying two copies of);
3. not innate to either the conscious or subconscious mind but existing simultaneously in both.

(By the way, I think my pun-making has been learnt. I did not tell jokes at school and I certainly did not engage in word play. Obscure "facts" were my thing, which has come in handy in pub quizzes.)

Here inside my head, I don't feel that my conscious mind is invoking some low-level pun routines. When I'm struggling to find a pun, I can feel myself going through all the steps. That seems to rule out explanation 1.

Explanation 2 sounds highly unlikely. How would the information be kept at all in step? Why doesn't my unconscious** mind beat my conscious mind to the punch? (And I know - or feel I know - that it doesn't: when I've struggled to find some word-play, and posted it, and then edited out (most of) the typos, up pops an extra play on words.)

Explanation 3 sounds the most likely to me: the pun-making is orthogonal to the "boundary" between the conscious and unconsconscious minds. It functions in either a step-by-step way or can drive itself. The reason the unbidden pun can arrive much later than the engineeredone could be that my conscious mind has taken over the required neural pathways, not allowing the subconscious mind to use them.

Given this, the difference between conscious and unconscious decision making may simply be one of how the conscious mind sees it it at that moment; the routines may be the same.



** - I'm aware that I'm using subconscious and unconscious interchangeably; there's for a very good reason for this: ignorance.

 

[Parson]

Ursa, this makes a great deal of sense to me. I know that I've often had it that I knew that there was something that was not quite right with my Sunday sermon on Saturday night. But when I awoke (often immediately or sometimes in the shower) the right idea that I had been struggling to get out for hours on Saturday "pops into my head." I feel as though my subconscious has processed it overnight and by the grace of God has come peculating to the top in time for me to make a necessary adjustment.

 

[HareBrain]

Ursa, I see the point you're making (I hope) but I don't think subconscous decision-making can be classed as an exercise in free will, because there is no "will", in the sense of "The mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action". But I appreciate there are other, less strict definitions of "will".

The exercise of will (whether truly free or only apparently free) would not be in the generation of the puns but the decision what to do with them.