Free Will

[madnak]

Levers and pulleys are deterministic. I'm not quite sure what you're saying. You seem to be swaying back and forth between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Do you mean a deterministic free will that is also supernatural?

[DougShrapnel]

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You can observe the physical effects but there is no way to determine if free will was the cause. Again the only evidence you have regarding free will is your own personal subjective experiences. The evidence that you keep using continues to shows that we can't observe free will not that we expect to observe free will but don't. It's not evidence that free will doesn't exist, it's evidence that we can't observe the processes of free will. Which we all agree to.

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We can determine where free will can possibly affect the process. In particular, we know that the brain works deterministically at the cellular level, and therefore free will would have to work below the cellular level (probably at the quantum level).

If I can consistently and completely identify the mechanics of a thing, then I can be sure there are no supernatural influences. If there were such an influence, I'd be able to trace it to a physical impossibility at some location in the mechanism.

We don't know how the brain works structurally, but we do know many of the mechanisms involved in brain function. We also know that actions are the result of physical nerve processing. If we could completely identify the functioning of a brain - observe every molecule and its actions - then we'd be able to rule out free will absolutely (above the quantum level) so long as each molecule in the brain behaves according to the deterministic properties which we've identified (so far no molecule has failed to "act like a molecule" in a deterministic fashion). If a molecule deviates from expected physical behavior, then we can identify the departure from the laws of physics as the source of a supernatural input.

But again, so far everything we've observed, expect at the quantum level, follows certain deterministic rules, and we know that the brain is composed of these elements that are deterministic above the quantum level. If free will worked at any level above the quantum level, we would expect to have seen the breaks and distortions. No distortions means no supernatural free will above the quantum level. And it's looking more and more like quantum randomness is "truly" random. Therefore, if free will were to work even at the quantum level it would have to "balance" itself somehow in order to maintain the appearance of randomness. And that's getting even sillier.

We're not quite there yet, but we're closing in. Very soon there will be nowhere for free will to hide. If you understand every component of a system and exactly how it works, then you can easily deny the possibility of some "unknown" component having an effect on the system. Of course, such an unknown component may exist, but if every event within the system is perfectly explained based on the mechanisms of the known components...

[/ QUOTE ]I may be flawed in my approach of glossing over the finer points you made in your post. If I may ask you some differnt questions?

Does consciousness exist? Is it usefull? What is it's use? In order to examine free will you need to directly interface with the consciousness not with the molecules. I'm not making the case that free will maifests itself at the quatum level. I'm not trying to make a case for supernatural. I'm just trying to make the case that natural is far wierder than most imagine. Less wierder than some imagine, but that's a differnet thread. QM isn't likely to be the silver bullet for free willers. However the nature of the world that has strikingly different properties than it's composites at the QM level is an importnat facet in the case for free will, but by no means a strong argument. When we can observe directly consiousness, I may be forced to change my mind. Then again maybe it's you that will be changing your mind, of course without free will, It would be more difficult for you. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[DougShrapnel]

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Levers and pulleys are deterministic. I'm not quite sure what you're saying. You seem to be swaying back and forth between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Do you mean a deterministic free will that is also supernatural?

[/ QUOTE ]Emergance, different properties than it's components. It will take us a bit of cource for our conversation to go down this road. It's not an inquiry needed to be explained for my position to hold regarding free will. It was more so to describe the rather misleading analogy of mind and computer that many people use.

[madnak]

But emergent properties of a deterministic system are still deterministic properties. So you are talking about compatibilism?

I would agree that consciousness is an important emergent property, but I also think it's deterministic.

[Piers]

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A) The ability of a rational being to be able to make a decision. That is a being acts in one way but could have acted another way independent of any probability constraints.

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B) For example, if someone had all the information they wanted about every particle in the universe (or multiverse or whatever) then they still could not predict how you would act at a later date. Further, they could not predict that you would act this way with x% certainty for any number of attempts and be correct x% of the time.

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Your example does not illustrate your definition of free will, further I do not believe your example makes much sense.

It’s not possible to know all the information about every partial in the universe in any sense, and detailed accurate predictions are beyond us. Further you cannot run the universe though several times to get a probability of something happening. There is no uncertainty; there is only one thing that will happen and you just need to wait to see what it is. Probability is a measure of your lack of information not any real effect.

The universe is immutable and unsolvable.

[DougShrapnel]

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But emergent properties of a deterministic system are still deterministic properties. So you are talking about compatibilism?

I would agree that consciousness is an important emergent property, but I also think it's deterministic.

[/ QUOTE ]I am not sure if we are discussing free will still. But is it your opinion that every singularity, assuming that the big bang existing as a singularity ends up exactly as it did this time? If you say no, it doesn't make a case for will, only randomness. If you say yes, and you are making a case for something along the lines of predestiny, I could argue down that avenue. I'm getting slightly off topic becuase I have to posit some medium for which free will can exist in. The medium I posit is consciousness. If I must use the common terms, which I believe using them will get me in trouble seeing as there is always a counterarguement. And the arbitrary dicohtomies IMO hinder understanding not improve it. But if I must. It's a strong emergence position, based a paradigm similiar to supervenience.

If I can reiterate my thought on free will. Free will exists in the consciousness, Consciousness cannot be directly observed. The only method to observe consciousness is our own conciousness observing itself. To say that free will doesn't exist is to say that consciouness is useless. If you believe the only realivent data, your consciousness, examining itself points to it being useless, I could not possibly take a position against that, as I can not accuratly observe your consciousness. The debate on free will is decided at the consciousness level. Not the QM level or the molecule level.

I guess if I wanted to say something that we can agree on. If free will is to exist there must be a fundemental property of the nature of reality that we don't yet understand.

[Schweitzer]

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A) The ability of a rational being to be able to make a decision. That is a being acts in one way but could have acted another way independent of any probability constraints.

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B) For example, if someone had all the information they wanted about every particle in the universe (or multiverse or whatever) then they still could not predict how you would act at a later date. Further, they could not predict that you would act this way with x% certainty for any number of attempts and be correct x% of the time.

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Your example does not illustrate your definition of free will, further I do not believe your example makes much sense.

It’s not possible to know all the information about every partial in the universe in any sense, and detailed accurate predictions are beyond us. Further you cannot run the universe though several times to get a probability of something happening. There is no uncertainty; there is only one thing that will happen and you just need to wait to see what it is. Probability is a measure of your lack of information not any real effect.

The universe is immutable and unsolvable.

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People don't seem to like my definition so perhaps it wasn't a good one.
Again, I made that definition in an attempt to incorporate quantum mechanics. If I were to shoot an electron towards a collecting sheet then due to the quantum nature of particles I could not predict where the electron would hit. I could however construct a probability distribution for where the electron would hit that was exactly accurate. I would argue that even though we cannot predict the particle's path it does not have the free will to choose its own path because it is still operating under these probability constraints.
I attempted to use this analogy for the brain. Even though a human being cannot be exactly predicted, we could theoretically construct a probability distribution for his actions. If we could do this then I would argue that human beings do not have free will.

I agree it is practically impossible to obtain all the information in the universe however we would not need to run the universe through several times to decide whether our probability distribution was accurate. If we did this enough times at different instances to different people then statistics would be able to show us whether our probabilities were accurate or not.

You also said that the universe was unsolvable. Did you mean that practically it is impossible or even that in theory it was impossible? Practically it very well may be but if you believe that even theoretically you could not predict what would happen in the universe then I would disagree with you. I think that at some level the universe is deterministic and could in theory be predicted. (Yes I mean even quantum phenomena could eventually be precisely predicted). At the very least it could be fairly accurately predicted in the way I have described.

Kind of off topic but for an interesting, oversimplified documentary on string theory, m-theory, and multiverse theory check out this bbc documentary:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...;q=bbc+horizon

[madnak]

That sounds reasonable.

[DougShrapnel]

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That sounds reasonable.

[/ QUOTE ] Really? Wow, I was afraid I was going to get uterly distroyed by you on this topic. I thought to myself when you joined in, Self you are pretty screwed now that madnak is in. I do understand that you don't agree with my position, but I'm glad that you think it is a reasonal position to hold.

[arahant]

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My definition of free will: The ability of a rational being to be able to make a decision. That is a being acts in one way but could have acted another way independent of any probability constraints.

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Could you clarify your last sentence? The first sentence is basically meaningless. It looks to me like your definition includes random action as free will, which I'm sure you didn't wish to imply.

As far as arguments for and against...

The 'pro' argument would be either "I think I have free will", or "the bible implies I have free will". Both are obviously flawed. I've never actually heard any others, but I'd like to.

The 'con' argument is along the lines of "there is no reason to believe in free will, and it would violate the framework of physics as we know it".

God and free will are the same beast. Neither has any measurable impact on the observable world. Lots of people believe in them. We continue to hack away at any falsifiable prediction of either.

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The last sentence was an attempt to address the quantum nature of particles. A being can technically act in an infinite number of ways but that does not mean it has free will. Small particles are uncertain by nature, they can only be predicted to do things based on probabilities. Thus a brain made up of many of these particles can never be perfectly predicted but we could calculate a probability for every possible course of action that was accurate. If a being was able to take actions independent of our predicted probabilities then based on my definition it would have free will.

I am not sure if you meant this or not but in terms of perfectly random actions I do not address this because I do not believe randomness exists. I do not consider chaotic motion or the quantum world to be random since they can be estimated using probabilities. I can not think of anything truly random though I may be very ignorant on this issue.

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Heh...well, I can't think of a definition of 'random' that doesn't depend on probabilities. Probabilities are just a quantification of randomness. Obviously we're on the same page, but I think you would do well to clean up the language a little.