A technical question about free will

[jogger08152]

[ QUOTE ]
What is "true free will?"

[/ QUOTE ]
The ability to select one of two or more mutually exclusive courses of action, attempt the action, and influence the universe (most likely in a very minor way) thereby, such that if I had chosen to act differently, a different outcome would have resulted. An adequate definition of free will as a doctrine is available on dictionary.com: "-noun, Philosophy. the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces. " [Emphasis mine -Jogger]

[ QUOTE ]
That [my perception of having free will]'s not obvious to me. Can you explain why it should be?

[/ QUOTE ]
I perceive myself to make choices all the time. I assume this perception is common to everyone. However, if you have no sense that you are able to make choices, there's probably nothing for us to discuss in this area.

[ QUOTE ]
If you wanted to stop, then there would exist a cause for your stopping (the desire to stop typing). The statement "if" here represents a causal contingency - how is this consistent with your presentation of free will (which you have described as being the opposite of causal contingency)?

[/ QUOTE ]
Where have I so described it? On the contrary, if free will exists I think it must be causal, in the sense that it (and the actions that flow from it) must exert an influence on "what happens next". Only if it is not able to influence future events - as would seem to be the case if everything is predetermined - would it *not* be causal.

[ QUOTE ]
Thus, your statement amounts to "if I know for a fact what I'm going to choose, then I can't choose otherwise." While tautologically true, this statement is completely circular and has no apparent relevance to determinism, free will, or physics.

[/ QUOTE ]
It isn't relevant whether or not I know what "choices" I will make. What would be relevant would be if someone (with vast knowledge and computational ability, of course) could predict them unfailingly before I was born.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think it matters a great deal, yes. It seems to me that a universe that is completely deterministic, that is, whose future interactions are all perfectly predictable given some present set of knowledge, would automatically preclude free will, since free will implies the ability to make choices that potentially affect outcomes. (Thus, if the outcome is already known, then my "choices" that lead to it must also be known, and therefore are in some sense, "immutable in advance", and thus aren't really choices at all. Instead they would have to be, in some form, mere consequences of the laws of the universe.)

[/ QUOTE ]

This isn't a valid argument, and it doesn't work as an appeal to my intuition (partly because I think the intuition of "free will" is essentially a western cultural construct in the first place, partly because appeals to emotion just aren't valid rationally, and partly because I have no such intuition and so the example fails to resonate and seems like nonsense to me).

[/ QUOTE ]

In what way is this argument invalid? Do you see a way in which determinism and free will might not be mutually exclusive? Maybe you define free will differently than I do; as I think about it this seems likely from your first question (and your assertion that you don't seem to experience it).

Best regards,
Jogger

[arahant]

FWIW, I approach this problem from a different direction.

There is really no reason to believe in 'free will' beyond some people's subjective experience. I, too, don't really have a sense of 'free will'...rather, I can feel, and gain some insight into, the way I (my brain) makes decisions.
A number of experiments have been done which indicate that people have a sense of 'free will' even when their actions are not voluntary, so the subjective sensation of itself provides no evidence for the existence.

We have yet to identify any possible mechanism that could account for the interaction of some mystical 'free will' and regular matter (a requirement, obviously). I won't argue about whether QM ALLOWS for 'free will' (I don't think it does...), but it certainly provides no MECHANISM.

It doesn't seem to me to be possible to ever reach a level of knowledge that would exclude free will....just like God, we can always just change the definition to fit every new understanding of the universe. Even within classical mechanics, one can always claim that there are minute and immeasurable 'free will effects' in the brain.

So to me, the more important question is, 'why would you think free will existed?'.

[madnak]

[ QUOTE ]
The ability to select one of two or more mutually exclusive courses of action, attempt the action, and influence the universe (most likely in a very minor way) thereby, such that if I had chosen to act differently, a different outcome would have resulted. An adequate definition of free will as a doctrine is available on dictionary.com: "-noun, Philosophy. the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces. " [Emphasis mine -Jogger]

[/ QUOTE ]

The second definition doesn't follow from the first. Nothing in your first definition implies that a choice is not itself a physical or divine event.

[ QUOTE ]
I perceive myself to make choices all the time. I assume this perception is common to everyone. However, if you have no sense that you are able to make choices, there's probably nothing for us to discuss in this area.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nobody is arguing that we don't make choices, or that they don't affect outcomes. This is especially true depending on your definition of "choice" - if a choice is simply a selection of one options from a group of options, then choices are clearly deterministic - a supercomputer chess program can defeat you, but if it chose to make different moves then it wouldn't. You've failed to explain why a human making moves in a chess game is different from a computer making moves in a chess game - both consider the possible (legal) moves, evaluate the outcomes, and form a decision based on criteria such as effectiveness (likelihood that the move will result in a positive outcome). You've presented no reason to believe that the fact human beings experience their choices subjectively (while computers, presumably, don't) somehow means that the decisions people make aren't based on concrete standards and criteria. Even if you were to establish this, the leap to some supernatural or nondeterministic mechanism would still be wholly unjustified.

[ QUOTE ]
Where have I so described it? On the contrary, if free will exists I think it must be causal, in the sense that it (and the actions that flow from it) must exert an influence on "what happens next". Only if it is not able to influence future events - as would seem to be the case if everything is predetermined - would it *not* be causal.

[/ QUOTE ]

First, "predetermination" isn't analagous to determinism. It's largely a straw man. A full determinist does believe that there is only one course the future will take - that doesn't meaningfully imply that such a future is "predetermined," only that its events are causally dependent upon preceding events (and such events can very well include choices).

[ QUOTE ]
In what way is this argument invalid? Do you see a way in which determinism and free will might not be mutually exclusive?

[/ QUOTE ]

Gotta go, I'll cover the rest later. But in answer to this, I think Hume covered it nicely.

[Skidoo]

[ QUOTE ]
You've failed to explain why a human making moves in a chess game is different from a computer making moves in a chess game

[/ QUOTE ]

No one has proven anything either way. On the other hand, why assume an essentially equivalence when their effects are so profoundly different?

[ QUOTE ]
First, "predetermination" isn't analagous to determinism.

[/ QUOTE ]

Either the course of events is uniquely determined by preceding conditions or it isn't.

[Bill Haywood]

I can show you how quantum mechanics creates the ILLUSION of free will.

Our perception of free will depends on the belief that the universe is not predetermined -- we can make choices.

A Newtonian universe of only clacking pool balls really would be fixed. But there is one thing out there that is not predetermined. According to my crude understanding of quantum physics, one implication is that the precise moment when a radioactive particle decays cannot be predicted. Radioactive breakdown introduces heat, therefore it impacts events. And since a butterfly in Brazil creates tornadoes in Kansas, the indeterminacy of radiation has endless effects.

It is because the universe has genuine randomness that we can preserve a sense of free will.

Our future is not fixed by fate, but unfortunately, we can't fix it either. But it's pleasant feeling like we can.

[jogger08152]

Madnak,

The link is fantastic, thanks very much!

As far as your other comments, this one is the most important from my perspective:

[ QUOTE ]
Nobody is arguing that we don't make choices, or that they don't affect outcomes.

[/ QUOTE ]
Actually I'm making that argument, but I'm making it conditionally. It seems to me that if the universe is wholly deterministic, then we don't make choices (even though we feel like we do). If we do make choices, then the universe is not wholly deterministic.

The wiki link you provided contrasts the positions of hard determinists with those of (free will, not political) libertarians, indicating that the former believe the universe is deterministic and that therefore there is no free will, whereas the latter believe that there is free will and that therefore the universe cannot be deterministic.

Absent any physical knowledge, as MJC says, "all bets are even money" - there's no reason to prefer one viewpoint over the other. Except: I do perceive myself to be exercising free will. This, for me at least, lends credence to the libertarian conclusion. The problem is, in Newtonian physics, the position of the hard determinists seems to come off much better than that of the libertarians, which throws the issue back into question. My question simply had to do with whether quantum physics offsets or supercedes the Newtonian problem, and the author of the article notes that this possibility is "out there", advocated by Roger Penrose among others. That's more or less what I wanted to know: it sounds like at least some quantum physicists do believe QP throws favorable light on the possibility of free will.

So, thank you for your help. This covered exactly the material I was interested in.

Best regards,
Jogger

[Metric]

Just FYI, although Roger Penrose is a brilliant guy and truly a deep thinker of physics, a large majority of quantum physicists (including myself) think he's "just plain wrong" on a couple of speculative issues that he likes to talk about, including in particular 1)the "quantum consciousness stuff" and 2) his gravitationally induced "objective reduction" stuff, though the latter appears to be experimentally testable, and so retains some status as a respectable idea.