The joke
There is likely an old discussion about free will – but I didn’t find it. So, take this as a refreshment.
Dr Benjamin Libet researched a phenomenon that we need .8 sec of neuronal activity to deliberately lift our hand (for example). He also worked out the timing: .5 sec of neuronal activity before we become conscious of an urge to lift our hand, followed by .2 sec of neuronal activity until we actually lift our hand.
The narrow research sparked speculations (including Libet’s) how we do not have free will. All speculations were indicating an unknown (and mysterious) “cause” of the initial neuronal activity – implying that we do not have free will.
To address this, I have started a joke on 22 May 2011. At the time I was participating at Nature’s forum and posted the joke without punchline:
“Since Libet’s finding started to filter out,
there were speculations about our free will.
What, my free will is useless – I’ll give it up!
Take it my friend and tell me what to do.”
A couple of days later I posted the punch line:
“Now, how could I – give up something I did not have.”
Before the punchline, all comments were simply ignoring the background. After the punchline, there was complete silence. After that we agreed that so-called “readiness potential” should be renamed into neuronal activity required for intent – or intent for short.
Enjoy the day,
Dr Benjamin Libet researched a phenomenon that we need .8 sec of neuronal activity to deliberately lift our hand (for example). He also worked out the timing: .5 sec of neuronal activity before we become conscious of an urge to lift our hand, followed by .2 sec of neuronal activity until we actually lift our hand.
The narrow research sparked speculations (including Libet’s) how we do not have free will. All speculations were indicating an unknown (and mysterious) “cause” of the initial neuronal activity – implying that we do not have free will.
To address this, I have started a joke on 22 May 2011. At the time I was participating at Nature’s forum and posted the joke without punchline:
“Since Libet’s finding started to filter out,
there were speculations about our free will.
What, my free will is useless – I’ll give it up!
Take it my friend and tell me what to do.”
A couple of days later I posted the punch line:
“Now, how could I – give up something I did not have.”
Before the punchline, all comments were simply ignoring the background. After the punchline, there was complete silence. After that we agreed that so-called “readiness potential” should be renamed into neuronal activity required for intent – or intent for short.
Enjoy the day,
Comments (42)
Sorry, I thought that it was clearly spelling it out.
For your benefit:
Quoting Damir Ibrisimovic
Hope that your anticipation is now elevated...
Enjoy the day,
As one might expect with something as complex as the brain, the issue is not as clear cut as some would propose. The free will vs determinism debate can continue. Admittedly "Free" might not be the right adjective for "will".
Free will is like a dance. We acquired the dance movements and simply dance in the tune of music.
Acquired means that we internalised (made habitual) the new sequence of new moves, feelings and thoughts. In the beginning, we perform haltingly until movements became habitual. And then we dance…
Over time we learned many dances and now we simply intend dance moves. Unfortunately, we became lazy and stopped learning new dances. We still can choose between old dances to perform – but our free will is weakened then.
Unfortunately, the joke presents the clear-cut picture of our free will.
Unfortunately, because it was my favourite past time. And now new discussions are waste of time.
Your argument to the contrary is vague and without any weight.
Enjoy the day,
I'm enjoying the day, along with my elevated level of anticipation.
Dear all,
The Joke topic is not receiving more comments. I guess that the existence of our free will is now accepted. So, I'll close the topic.
If you have additional comments, please do not hesitate...
Hearty, :cool:
Do you think that anyone ever seriously doubted the existence of free will? And people like Libet, aren't they just trying to understand free will rather than to prove that there is no such thing?
Back in 2011, many scientists (and laiks) believed that we do not have free will - and arguments were hotly debated...
Unfortunately, Dr Benjamin Libet believed that we only have free will in cancelling our urges. He was also unsure about "mysterious what" triggers Readiness Potential. I believe that he would agree that he missed some critical evidence provided by scenarios of my joke...
Even Hawkings tried to add a back in time trigger (See "The Big and Small and Human Mind") But, his proposal was absurd and dismissed. In the end, we do not need for a quantum leap back in time...
Hearty,:cool:
Aren't these the two essential aspects of free will.. First, we need to cancel our urges so that our actions are not merely reflections of, or "caused by", reactions to our surroundings. That's will power. Second, while will power is suppressing all urges, it needs to maintain the capacity to freely trigger, when necessary, a selected action. What more is necessary, and why the "back in time" assumption?
The "I" that's choosing is the entire rational animal, including all its internal brain workings, unconscious deliberations, etc. It remains true that "I chose to raise my hand" regardless of whether the machinery went into motion before the conscious part of the rational animal became aware of the choice, because "I" refers to the total rational, social animal, not to some etherial inner observer, puppet-string puller, etc.
But admittedly the illusion of in inner "I" is very difficult to get rid of - it takes Buddhists, for example, several years of serious meditation :)
I disagree. We are not entirely rational animals...
For the rest, let's examine the scenarios needed to explain free will:
The first three scenarios (joke) are about intended habitual moves. Dr Benjamin Libet researched only the third scenario - that the reason why his/other's interpretation of the test results was faulty...
The fourth scenario is about learning nonhabitual move that is turning nonhabitual move into habitual.
Quoting gurugeorge
I do not know in detail about Buddhists' meditation but it fits nicely with the fourth scenario of learning new thoughts, feelings and actions...
I will need a bit more to change my mind. Please, elaborate more using this four scenarios. :)
Hearty, :cool:
Please, see my previous reply to gurugeorge with four scenarios for free will...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You intuit the fourth scenario.
The "back in time" was a ridiculous attempt to enable "free will" in the third scenario only. You can skip that...
I think that we need a little bit more to agree... :)
Hearty, :cool:
In all 4 scenarios, the boundary of the "I" is the total physical animal; its own awareness of itself, its internal modeling of itself, is secondary, and it doesn't matter if that happens some time after the brain machinery has worked to produce whatever action it produces.
The Buddhist (and also general "non-dual" - as it's called - Asian philosophical) idea is that we are accustomed to thinking of "I" as an internal receiver of impressions, perceptions, experiences, etc., conceived of either as a sort of notional point on which all experiences impinge (by analogy with artistic perspective - which not coincidentally was being developed in a big way in the West roundabout the same time that modern philosophy and science developed) or as a kind of aware, awake "capacity" or "space" (this is the metaphor that's more usually favoured in the East).
If you reflect on your everyday experience, it normally seems as if the true "I" is something behind the eyes, looking out at the world through them, sort of prisoner inside the head in some sense, or inside the body, along for the ride. In Christianity, something like this idea is meant by the "soul," the thing that's notionally free in terms of the classical free-will debates.
This is an illusion, and we all have it (or most of us do, most of the time). A large part of the purpose of Eastern meditational systems is to either knock the illusion out of commission (considered a lesser result, because it's usually temporary) or to get into a position where you may still have the illusion, but you don't take it seriously, you don't habitually live from it (considered the greater result, usually called "enlightenment").
The Libet experiments only pose a problem if you believe that the "I" is something like this "soul," this "ghost in the machine" If no such thing exists, then the various timings of what goes on within the skin bag are of little importance to the question of free will, the cash-value of which is really more in the libertarian or political sense: one's will is free when it is not coerced - that is to say, this human animal, and all the workings within its skin bag, is the active entity, the entity whose will can be free or not, and either subject to coercion or not (one may also consider freedom from various kinds of internal incoherences too, which have an effect somewhat analogous to external coercion, in that they also limit one's potential to act).
To put all this another way, when one says "I" one may, on the one hand, be referring to one's sense of oneself as the "ghost," but on the other hand, one may be referring to oneself as the human animal that one is. In the former case, there is no free will, because the entity in question simply doesn't exist (to either have free will or not) and all the puzzles arising from that are nugatory. If the latter sense, then all ordinary talk about free-will makes perfectly ordinary, intelligible sense, even taking into account findings like Libet's.
Tentatively agree. I would also add well-documented cases of feral children. A feral child exhibits animal-like behaviour. However, even then there is an "I" hidden in our genome. :)
We can also assume that "I" is hidden within every unicellular organism. Social like behaviour, for example, was exhibited by yeast cells. When there is not enough food - cells start to die to provide themselves as food-packets for the rest of the colony. An "altruism" at the cellular level...
Humble pea also demonstrates identity awareness. When a single plant is split in two - each half grows independently roots in competition with another half.
In general, identity seems to be an attribute of life in general. And that means that four scenarios can be applied to all life-forms...
Quoting gurugeorge
Libet's experiments covered only the third scenario. And that was a problem...
Hearty, :cool:
I believe that I identified the core of our disagreements - "soul"; the "ghost in the machine". You are assuming something like Descartes' dualism...
Descartes assumed that only humans have a soul enabling choices. The rest of living organisms behave like machines driven by the tick-tock of causes and effects...
Rest assured that I'm not in favour of dualism either... :)
Yeast and humble pea - also demonstrate identity in their own way. I can only reaffirm that identity is a basic attribute of life in general...
Hearty, :cool:
I dunno, I think the "I" is more of a complex thing than you can get at that level, although I'd agree there is directedness and teleology even at that simple level. But for the "I" you need not just those, but also the capacity for self-reflection, I think - some kind of internal self-and-world-modeling capability.
Quoting Damir Ibrisimovic
I don't assume it, it's a tacit premise in most discussions about Free Will with a capital "F" and "W," since it's the supposed bearer of free will. Although formerly it would have been cast in more plainly religious terms (spiritual and material, etc.), not in terms of Cartesian dualism.
And it's perennially tempting, because everyone has that illusion of being something inside the head peeping out, something mysteriously extra, something over and above the human animal that they are.
From the angle of "determinism," it's quite unproblematic to conceive of a deterministic robot having free will in a deterministic universe. Regardless of the fact that both the robot and the universe are deterministic, the robot's deterministic computing machinery would still have to make decisions and choices on scant information (because it lacks full Laplacian omniscience) and the level at which free will operates would mean simply that its choices were not forced by something external to the deterministic robot-bundle. And we are such robots, only we are "moist robots" as Scott Adams put it, robots made of squishy biochemical machinery instead of silicon and steel.
The puzzles about free-will only appear when the "soul" thing (however else it's conceived) is conceived of as not being causally concatenated with the rest of the universe. It seems paradoxical, but it's not: the very fact that we are deterministic machines thoroughly embedded in a deterministic universe (if it is a fact) is what allows us to have the kind of free will that we do have, the kind of free will that's (as Dennett says) worth wanting. (If the universe isn't fully deterministic, it doesn't affect this argument much - clearly it's deterministic enough in most respects.)
I think that we agree that the kernel of identity is present at the unicellular level. It is also present in plants - although the form of identity seems very strange compared with human. I would reiterate that identity is a basic atribute for life in general...
Quoting gurugeorge
Is that a new disagreement? :)
I disagree with your picture of a robot with programmed free will in the deterministic universe. (The deterministic universe is originally Descartes' picture.) I have another picture of the universe - agent-driven universe. In this universe, an agent (with an "I") has various degrees of freedom (Free Will)...
I guess that we will difficult path to an agreement here. I suggest the complex adaptive system theory to bridge this chasm. (I do not trust Wikipedia, but it might be helpful as an introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system ...)
Hearty, :cool:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/altruism-selfishness-evolution-mathematics-princeton-bath-university-a7148471.html ;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140606/ ;
Hearty, :cool:
Yeah, I think your position is too Panpsychist for my tastes :) As I said, I'm willing to admit that there's a kind of directedness and teleology baked into nature, but that's not yet identity, which requires an internal modeling capacity, which requires a level of computing sophistication simple organisms just don't have.
Essentially, every living unit needs to have at least a kernel of a description of its world and itself within it. That is required for an organism to navigate through its world...
At each higher level, there are new complexities added...
Complex Adaptive Systems is not panpsychism. The theory is well modelled and simulated...
Enjoy the day, :cool:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2745.2003.00795.x ;
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00425-013-1910-4 ;
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050811104308.htm ;
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/11/3863 ;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4222137/ ;
And here is an attempt to interpret data in a different way:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173758 ;
However, the last link does not explain how plants distinguish between self and non-self. It also does not take into account that a single plant was drafted into two separated plants with identical genome...
And there is more... :)
Hearty, :cool:
As I said, an organism needs at least a description of its world and itself within it required to successfully navigate in its world. The description can be rudimentary. Please note that even smallest unicellular organisms have a very complex genome...
Enjoy the day, :cool:
Yes, I understand, that's the allowance I was making for directedness and teleology. There must indeed be some kind of rudimentary, "blind" computation of boundaries, etc. But the point I was making was that you don't get identity in the sense we're talking about, where free will comes into the picture, without the capacity for self-reflection. The organism may "know" about boundaries, in the sense that they're automatically computed and taken account of in its peregrinations, but it doesn't know in the way that we know, it isn't modelling itself to the degree that it actually has a sense of its own identity.
I was under the impression we agreed that human identity is indeed more complex than yeast's. The only thing we need now - is to weed out deterministic terminology. There are no cause and effect driven robots and computations.
Hearty, :cool:
I don't see how you can get away from talk about cause/effect and determinism, especially if agency talk can be broken down into deterministic talk. On the other hand, it might be possible to cast deterministic talk in terms of agency talk, but that strikes me as analogous to preferring to calculate the orbits of the planets from a geocentric point of view: theoretically, you could do it, but why?
Descartes considered the universe as a gigantic "clock" - devised and put in motion by God. The tick-tock of the "clock" were causes and effects. (The clock was back then the most complex automata.)
Shortly after we had automata of all kinds - like The Duck and automatic looms using punch-cards... After we have the first adding/subtracting machines and later the first conceptual computer...
The agents in Complex Adaptive System theory - are not like cause & effect. They are rather in interplay with other agents within the web of agents...
You are partly correct that the agency can be simulated within cause & effect driven - deterministic machine. The simulation is based upon the iteration of N unidirectional steps. The reason is simple - we do not have the hardware. There are suggestions for agent ? agent hardware, but we must wait...
Hearty, :cool:
The scenarios of the joke are simple enough to test it in a cafe with a friend. Since we can assume that enough people tested the scenarios from 22 May 2011 - we can start to talk about it as a theory...
Hearty, :cool:
The joke is a bit ironic...
The proposal is "Free Will exists" and it's not new. With enough tests, the proposal is promoted into theory. What is new are scenarios to test the new theory. :)
I'm not really interested to judge the capacity of other people to recognise pure reasoning...
Enjoy the day, :cool:
The I that I would refer to would be the ego of Freud, of the personality... Although people have objected to Freud's ego as well.
They certainly have lol :)
Philosophically I say to myself...
REALLY?!
Actually I was addressing the entirety of your post (including the free will stuff). But I will post in this thread since it was more active and it is what you want. :)
You mentioned how "dark matter" was proposed to resolve an issue while not necessarily being in existence. What I was suggesting was that by saying "free will doesn't exist" fails because it already assumed the existence of an intentional agent could be disputed.
A free will denier could say using "propositional attitudes" "all attributions of intentionality" is a social construct or an evolutionary illusion. This is common in constructivism. An eliminativist believes it is a placeholder until something better comes along. That is Churchland's view. Others like Dennett believe intentionality is indispensable as a scientific theory but ultimately (on a raw non-epistemic ontological level) it does not exist and we are just playing pretend.
Quoting Damir Ibrisimovic
Fwiw, I agree it exists. I am some sort of a dualist but haven't made up my mind on what type. But I want to make the eliminativist arguments known going forward.
Quoting creativesoul
...came this...
Quoting Damir Ibrisimovic
...to which I replied as such...
Quoting creativesoul
...and was then a bit astonished at this...
Quoting Damir Ibrisimovic
...which seems to miss the point entirely.
If someone is talking in terms of "giving up free will", either they are already presupposing that they had it to give, or they are someone who is talking about giving up on the idea/belief/notion called "free will".
Those are two very different kinds of situations. You need people to quote from that are of the first group above. If you quote from someone who is from the second, the joke is nonsensical in that context. The joke doesn't work with someone who knows that there is nothing more to "free will" than being a human conception.
It was originally coined/invented as a means(an attempt) to exonerate the God of Abraham from the existence of evil.
The joke - in order to elicit response(s) confirming the quality - requires an audience that already believes that humans have free will or do not recognize the fallacious nature of the language use, and thus are easily swayed.
Testing that joke - as a purported 'theory' - will show two groups of people; those who recognize it's fallacious, and those who do not. Who needs a theory to show that some people do not recognize fallacious reasoning/thought in the wild(during normal everyday events).
I fail to understand how something being a Complex adaptive system takes it away from being a cause and effect system. The reasoning still seems to stand that if we knew all the components and their interplay, that we could determine (with a certain degree of certainty) the chance of agents acting a particular way. Heck, we don't know close to everything about the mind, sociologically, economics, psychology, et cetera, yet we still notice patterns and use them to predict many forms of behavior. We will only grow in that capacity (predicting) in the future. And even if we never are able to do the above, it won't be proof of our "free will". Whether we actually make choices or have them pre-chosen by the machine, we will still feel like it was the "I" doing it.
And the point is??? :)
Enjoy, :cool:
How precisely, language use determines whether or not Free Will exists? :)
I'm under impression that you are trying to make a point out of thin air...
Enjoy the day, :cool:
You are trying to make a point out of thin air...
Enjoy the day, :cool: