Why free will is impossible to prove
To prove that free will exists or not we'd need to know everything because it isn't impossible that our minds may be affected by the cat next door or an atom's state in a galaxy far far away.
Basically we need to be omniscient.
Omniscience is impossible.
Why?
Think of numbers. We may be able to determine why the number 1 or 12,398,775,489 doesn't matter to the free will question BUT numbers are infinite and so it would require an infinite amount of time to check each number for its effects on our minds, specifically whether it influences our ability to make free choices.
Thus making it impossible for us to know whether we have free will or not.
Your thoughts...
Basically we need to be omniscient.
Omniscience is impossible.
Why?
Think of numbers. We may be able to determine why the number 1 or 12,398,775,489 doesn't matter to the free will question BUT numbers are infinite and so it would require an infinite amount of time to check each number for its effects on our minds, specifically whether it influences our ability to make free choices.
Thus making it impossible for us to know whether we have free will or not.
Your thoughts...
Comments (42)
The reaction to increase entropy, is connected to active and passive transport through the membrane. It is also connected to neuron firing, since neuron firing will increase entropy by blending the cations. The neurons quickly segregate the cations and reset the entropy potential.
Free will and consciousness is the artifact of the second law. They both add complexity in an attempt to increase brain entropy, to offset the continuous neuron insistence that it lower brain entropy at the membrane.
An analogy is putting worms in a jar. The worms want to increase entropy and scatter. However, like the neurons, we try to place them close together in opposition to their natural state. Consciousness and will is analogous to a way for the worms to escape to satisfy the second law.
No two people are exactly the same in terms of personality and consciousness. There will be common things but also differences This is an artifact of entropy. Culture may try to impose uniform standards; one size fits all, which lowers group entropy in an attempt to create determinism; predictable interactions. The result will be choices by some, that resist the one size; increase system entropy. The will power to do so is connected to the second law in action.
In classical symbolism the first law is God and the second law is Lucifer/Satan. God creates the universe; energy balance. While the deterministic order in space and time lowers universal entropy. The second principle; Lucifer, creates change in the order driven by the second law. Lucifer and Satan are the first symbolism of will power.
Pure 100% determinism would lower universal entropy and/or prevent it from increasing. If we add entropy, perturbations occur that reflect a departure from zero entropy change; free will.
Yes. In order to prove determinism, we would need an account from the beginning of time down to the present. We don't, we won't, and therefore we can't.
We suppose that when we look at a rock, we can trace its beginning starting with the big bang. Stars formed, burned, exploded, and produced heavier matter that coagulated into disks, then solar systems and planets. Geology takes it from there down to the rock we are sitting on. Biology works the same way -- life arose on the planet one step at a time and thus we are sitting on the rock. All accounted for. The fact that one voted from Clinton and not Trump is rooted in the way all the atoms between the big bang and the voting booth.
Absurd, though it sounds reasonable, because at every step this or that field of energy or particle of matter could have interacted much differently, and we could all be inorganic slime on the surface of a dead planet or dust in a vacuum.
So here we are and energy fields and particles are interacting as much now as ever, except that creatures with even a little sentience are one more factor in making outcomes uncertain. Creatures with more sentience (like the cat) have a larger influence. We are also creatures with more sentience, but we are far short of enough to know with certainty how or whether things could have been different.
My thought is that sentient creatures have some limited capacity to make choices. That's about as far as I can go.
So your arumgent is that since we cannot disprove determinism then we cannot prove freewill.
That is an impossible standard. I also cannot disprove fairies or unicorns. However that neither proves or disproves their existence.
Determinism is what is known as an unfalsifiable claim, it cannot be proven or disproven and consequently cannot be used to prove or disprove, as you don't know if it is real.
On the other hand we can empirically demonstrate freedom of choice.
So given your unfalsifiable claim vs. empirical evidence, I'd say the evidence has a lot more weight and creditability.
You haven't said anything about my argument.
Quoting EnPassant
I read that the physicist Boltzmann introduced probability in physics and his explanation turned out to be the correct one. I think thermodynamics was born with Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of physics.
Quoting Jeremiah
I understand that if one lowers the standard to "empirical" evidence one can prove/disprove free will but I'm looking for a sound deductive argument to deal with the issue of free will.
Anyway, I'm saying we can't prove free will exists not that we can't disprove determinism. If my argument is sound it'll take an infinite amount of time to do so, making it impossible.
Quoting Heiko
I think otherwise. To opt for what one did not want would count as evidence for our ability to resist innate preferences.
That makes sense to me. This is probably an idiosyncrasy but I think free will will eventually evolve if it hasn't already. Thanks
If we you were to start with sodium and potassium salts and place these is water, they would dissolve and diffuse to form a steady state uniform solution. This is the direction of increasing entropy. The neurons, as well as all cells, start with the uniform solution, and the segregate these ions on opposite sides of the membrane. This is lowering entropy, using a small ionic material that is easy to reverse, since it naturally wants to go the other way.
When neurons fire, the ions blend. Firing neurons helps entropy increase. It is a second law affect. Consciousness makes the brain fire at will, since consciousness is an entropy generator. It is needed to help neurons reverse.
Free will have a connection to entropy. The choices we make are not perfect in the sense that the same ionic pathways are used for all. Each person's memory is different so the path of potential from here to there is never quite the same.
The reason the cells use sodium and potassium ions is due to the way each impacts water. Sodium ions bond stronger to water than water does to itself, via hydrogen bonds, while potassium ions bond to water weaker than water binds to self via hydrogen bonds. The entropy potential set by the ion pumping is extended into the water, with the water touching all things in each side go the membrane. Many organic things are fixed in structure. The entropy potential starts with the ions, is bridged by the water, and is anchored by the organics. Consciousness impacts matter at the nanoscale, with much of that defined by our unique DNA signature.
The digits in the decimal expansion of pi are said to be random. Does this mean that we can choose these digits and act upon them to make random choices?;-
If a digit is 1, do x (eg treat yourself to a coffee)
if it is 2, do y (go to the cinema)
if it is 3, do z, etc.
One could also do the same with quadratic residues, which are apparently proved to be 'random'. If we can act upon purely mathematical entities does this mean we have escaped the determinism of matter as numbers are not material things. Thoughts?
btw did you read The Diceman by Luke Rhenehart? Great read.
https://www.bookdepository.com/Dice-Man-Luke-Rhinehart/9780879518646?redirected=true&utm_medium=Google&utm_campaign=Base1&utm_source=IE&utm_content=Dice-Man&selectCurrency=EUR&w=AFFPAU9SKBXBUNA80R8S&pdg=pla-308360991107:kwd-308360991107:cmp-711089934:adg-39921983227:crv-163908794634:pid-9780879518646:dev-c&gclid=Cj0KCQjwpvzZBRCbARIsACe8vyK93wFogPY-WzE2FZ-Esv87PRLPFYCXr9kZNJtAM9744ZwgIqVX0kMaAlEcEALw_wcB
Exactly how I am lowering the standard of empirical evidence? Freedom of choice is empirically demonstrable and your statement here is just a hollow facade. You need to give a real reason as to why this evidence should not be considered.
Quoting TheMadFool
You are trying to use determinism, an unfalsifiable claim as the standard of proof for free will.
In your own words. . . .
Quoting TheMadFool
You can't use an unfalsifiable claim as the standard of proof. Now, I am sure like all "philosophers" you think this is a matter of interpretation, opinion or whatnot; however, it is not. What you are demanding amounts to arguing that if one cannot disprove fairy magic then we can't really know if gravity is a force that attracts objects with mass.
I guess most people would understand it that way. This does not make it true, however: It is the reign of pure reason itself that does not leave any choices. Simply because choosing the one right answer is at the same time one's duty as a rational thinking being. If you would do otherwise you wouldn't act as rational being and thus negate free will.
You can't prove free will until you disprove mind control Sun spots.
You can't prove free will until you disprove that this is a computer simulation.
You can't prove free will until you disprove
Using unfalsifiable claims as the standard of proof is just thoughtless and leads nowhere.
Would this question qualify as a Qualia? Is a sense of what an individual experiences as free will, free will ?
You tell me.
'will' is antecedent to thought and action therefore it cannot be free but originates prior to and outside of consciousness.
M
...and yet we choose.
I would think that you've overstated the case here. Seems to me that in order for a will to be free, it must be free from influence, which is clearly impossible. There is no such thing as free will. We need not know everything in order to know that what we do, and what we choose to do is influenced by lots of things.
Free will presupposes volition. In order to choose better, one must first know of better.
The closest we can come to having free will is recognizing the influences that the world and others have upon us, and then being quite judicious about who and what we allow to influence us.
No, you could have decided you wanted something else more.
Why? In the moment you have a choice between two things you want.Say you want to smoke a cigarette and you want to refrain from smoking a cigarette. Whichever you choose in the moment you could have chosen the other. In other moments you may indeed choose the other. So, it is not an unequivocal case of choosing what you don't want to do, and thus a contradiction; which is the way you were painting it.
Because you cannot decide to do both. Either your free decision is the one or the other.
Of course you cannot do both; that's trivially true and irrelevant. Your claim was that you could not have done other than what you did.
Yes, because only one option can be my free choice.
You haven't explained why that must be so.
At a particular moment I chose to smoke a cigarette, at that moment I could have chosen not to smoke it; there is no inherent problem or contradiction in that.
If one option is your free decision the others cannot.
You're just repeating the same assertion, but you're not backing it up with any argument.
It is a contradiction to say that any option other than my free choice could be my free choice. If (A) is my free choice then (B) is not.
If you had chosen the other option it would have been your free choice; no contradiction. You could have freely chosen to smoke a cigarette or you could have freely chosen not to. You could not have both smoked and not smoked a cigarette on the one occasion. You seem to be conflating these two conditions.
Now you are speculating. Then my initial (A) decision would not have been free. But I chose (A).
I have no idea what you are talking about, unfortunately.
If my decision was free, then I could have chosen otherwise. If my decision was not free (i.e. it was completely determined by something other myself) then I could not have chosen otherwise; indeed I could not have really chosen at all.
Of course, we know that our decisions are constrained by a multitude of factors; they cannot be "completely free". But we don't know that rigid determinism is the case; if it were we would not be free at all; and although it is logically possible that we could have chosen otherwise than we did, under determinsim it would not be actually possible.
Of course.
Quoting Janus
Formally.
Your "of course" seems to indicate that you acknowledge you have been talking nonsense.
Yes, speaking formally we could have chosen otherwise regardless, it expresses merely logical possibility. Whether we could have actually chosen otherwise we can never know, because once we have chosen there is no way of checking whether we could have chosen otherwise.
But all of that is really irrelevant to our original disagreement which was over your claim that free choice must be between what we want to do and what we don't want to do. I have demonstrated that this is false.
In fact most of our significant ethical decisions involve choosing between two things that we want to do; one that we judge will or may be harmful, or not as beneficial, to ourselves and/ or others, and another that we want to do for purely hedonistic, selfish or self-indulgent reasons.
I like your focus on entropy, but we would need to make a distinction between physical entropy and informational entropy here.
The point of neurons is in fact to zero the hardware costs of being "conscious" and so create a basic freedom when it comes to the informational or "software" entropy of the system.
So like the circuits of a computer, neurons are designed so that it "costs nothing" to switch their states. And so all physical constraints on freewill - the making of informed choices - are thus removed.
It does of course cost quite a lot to keep neurons running. They burn glucose like hard-working muscle - even when we sleep. Humans could only support their big brains because it was matched with a shift to a cooked and calorie dense diet.
But neurons themselves fire all the time. They are set up so they just keep charging up and discharging as their basic steady-state level of operation. What "consciousness" - or global attentive focus - does is modulate those firing rates. It speeds them up or slows them down. It creates larger states of synchrony and asynchrony so as to weave meaningful information patterns.
So the neurons are just a constant cost. They are going to fire anyway. So there is no effective cost for using them for one thing rather than another. And this thus opens up the infinite possibilities that allow us to think about anything at all at any time ... to the degree it is then ecologically and pragmatically useful, of course.
Now we get to the informational entropy. The brain exists to model the world in a useful predictive fashion. And so it is set up to minimise the possibility of the world being surprising. It wants to minimise the Shannon information uncertainty that exists "out there".
So consciousness - as our running attentional model of the world - in fact is organised by the goal of decreasing its information entropy. It is pointed intelligently at the task of constructing a mental state of order - where the world unfolds in a smoothly-predicted and intention-fulfilling fashion.
And this is the freewill ideal. Anything that we could wish, we can make be the case. By learning and planning, we can limit the possibility of being surprised by the world telling us, well no, you can't do anything you want in fact.
So it is all about this separation from physical entropy which allows this new game based on informational entropy. We have to pay for that freedom by burning a heck of a lot of glucose all the time. We do have to meet the greater cost imposed by the second law. But then that gives us our freedoms as reality modellers, seeking to minimise our informational entropy.
We are free to pursue our own organismic goals because we have made a bargain with nature where we burn much more than we could ever extract as useful work. But hey, that capacity for work can then be freely applied to any intention or plan we could possibly conceive. Freewill exists because we can afford the underlying fuel bill, eventually reaching the point as civilised technological humans where the cost of any choice becomes too "cheap" to be a concern.
It is like they said about atomic energy. It would be too cheap to bother monitoring. It might as well be given away on a help yourself basis.
That wasn't actually true of course. But for a while now, it has seemed effectively true enough of fossil fuels and other natural resources like clean air and clean water. A consumer culture enshrines exactly that kind of "freewill" dynamic - where you can just afford to help yourself to the negentropy that sits around on the planet, simply begging to be entropified.
The next probable chapter of the freewill story will be the one that shows that, in the end, it does come back to paying for that right to burn. It only feels like we can make any choice we want. In fact, it is meant to be about modelling the world in a way that doesn't store up a bunch of nasty surprises.
No, "of course" you are not trying to understand because it does not fit into your speculation.
Quoting Janus
What you have demonstrated is that you can speculate about that you could have wanted what you did not want.
Quoting Janus
There we are going. So why do you say then we could? Notice: You are always talking in hindsight.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, and you can only choose as good as you can. Hope your best is good enough.
See what? "Best" is superlative.
Quoting Janus
Make your choice. I'll tell you if it's free.
Are you saying that by virtue of the basic laws of physics and chemistry our bodies must comply to, we don't have free will?
Entropy, if I understand correctly, is the random motion of particles which is actually a non-deterministic view of the world.
Quoting Jeremiah
I'm not making an unfalsifiable claim. I have a method to prove/disprove free will that is falsfiable but to do it we need an infinite amount of time.
My method depends on numbers:
1. We don't know whether numbers affect our ability to make choices
So,
2. We need to check their effects on our ability to make free choices
3. Numbers are infinite
4. To check each number's effects on our decision making process we require a non-zero amount of time
So,
5. To check ALL numbers (infinity) for their effect on our will (to determine whether it is free or not) will require an infinite amount of time
Basically, we can't do it.
This is NOT unfalsifiable in the sense a claim cannot be proved wrong because of the nature of the claim. It is unprovable on the basis of a fact about numbers.
Quoting Banno
are these choices free? Isn't that the issue?Quoting Marcus de Brun
Can you expand on that. Thanks.Quoting creativesoul
Yes, a limited version of freedom of will is defensible. I guess we need to be satisfied with that. Quoting creativesoul
Is it only about God? I think free will is central to everything we do apart from religion.
But that's true.
it was meant to be thought provoking, guess not very effectively.
Physical entropy is a state variable, while information entropy is not. As a physical variable, entropy is fixed for a given state of physical matter. For example, water at 25C and one atmosphere has a measured entropy of 6.6177 J ? mol-1 ? K-1. This value is a standard and is measured the same by all labs. This value remains the same no matter how we approach this state. The entropy of that state is not a random number, but a number that is fixed for that state. This is basic to chemistry but is rarely taught properly, outside chemistry.
Information entropy, which is a derivative concept, is not the same. Information entropy is more about loss, change and randomization. With physical entropy, I can start anywhere and as I long as I end up back to water at 25C and 1atmosphere, the entropy is the same as before. There is no randomization or loss. The information is restored again.
Brain entropy and neural information are both state variables since each implies the other. This type of memory is connected to physical states which are defined by fixed entropy in each state. This is not how computer memory or telecommunications works. Human languages, are subjective and arbitrary, whereas neuron memory is based on how matter works; universal laws of physics.
When the neurons pump and exchange cations, this defines a new physical state, at the neuron membrane, with a given entropy value, based on that state. This state is lower in entropy than previous, and defines a base level of neural information. Neuron firing alters this state into a higher entropy state. Long term memory is a physical state. It would need to be a high entropy state, so there is little need to alter it further. Alternation in the brain will preferentially occur with lower entropy memory; short term memory. We will push this toward long term.
Where willpower comes in is there are many ways to increase entropy toward the ceiling state of entropy; total firing of all the neurons, as long as the sum of all the new states reaches a certain entropy total value.
An analogy is collecting 1 liter of water. The entropy of water at 25C, above, is measured per mole of water; 18 grams. I can collect the water in teaspoons or pints. As long I reach the same final liter, all roads lead to Rome. Free will is connected to a unique path to the same place for all. Our conscious mind sort of deflects the path of free energy and diverts it in unique ways, with this unique river of free energy still reaching the lake. This translates to unique information.
Note: Entropy was a concept developed in the early days of steam engines. When you did an energy balance around the steam engine, one was always short. Entropy was added as an adjustment favor, so energy input matched energy output. Something was going on at the molecular level, which was not exactly clear. Yet it was there and reproducible; state variable. It was constant for a given state.
If we look at a mole of water in a beaker; 18 grams, all the molecules are displaying what appears to be random behavior that coincides with a bell curve. Yet, no matter who we reach that final state, all these molecules seem to average the same randomness and bell curve. Random is a subset of order when it comes to entropy states. Information entropy deals with the subsets and not the states. It gets bogged down in the weeds and never sees the state; lake. This is due to the disconnect between the subjectivity of human language and the universal logic of physical states.
Why? Of course, you would need to know if an atom in a far away galaxy would impact on your actions, but you don't need everything that is happening with this and other atoms, you only need to know whether they'll change your actions.