Hello, Randy. Yes, I think that questions of will and consciousness affect our self-definition. These questions determine whether we are rational beings, responsible for our lives and our actions, or whether we are just pieces of meat that get smeared with our brains.
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Yes, the consequences can be unpredictable. If there is no responsibility for our decisions, why bother? You can just go with the flow, people have no choice anyway, everything is predetermined by the processes in the brain. I really hope that everything that people respect and value science for will prevail in matters of consciousness and will. What I see now is really scary. Many leading scientists say terrible things and I don’t know how to perceive it.
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It’s not hard to find instances of humans being irrational, and there are situations where human intuition is simply wrong. I would even contend that our irrationality is an important part of being human. We value art, and I think we would be much poorer if we didn’t. However, much of what we appreciate in art isn’t rational.
I am a bit more pragmatic when it comes to free will. Does it feel like I am responsible for my actions, and do I expect others to be responsible for their actions? Yes, and I see nothing wrong with that. This is how I want to the world to be, even if free will is an illusion.
With that said, even if our brain activity is deterministic, I still think it is complex enough for that not to matter. At any one time, the state of your brain is the accumulation of all you have gone through in life, and there are any number of processes that are affecting your brain in that moment.
In a similar manner, the weather on our planet is very complex, and even though it is fully deterministic there is no way we can accurately predict what the weather will be like 3 weeks from now. Weather patterns are also the product of 4.5 billion years of geology on this planet, not to mention the processes that formed our solar system. And yet, this fully deterministic process still produces sunsets that we find beautiful. When looking at that sunset, does it really matter that it is a deterministic process? I don’t think so.
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We are, as you say, not purely rational but that doesn’t take away our responsibility. It just makes it more challenging. In addition to making good conscious choices we must also remain cognizant of our non rational inclinations. Unless we maintain a positive relationship between our conscious deliberation and our preconscious insights it will be harder to be responsible for our actions. But that difficulty is not an excusing condition; being responsible is a skill event, not just a simple matter of rule following.
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I wouldn’t use those worlds. I also don’t think they are mustache twirling villains trying to justify their dark sexual fantasies. Misinformed, misguided, misinterpreted and so on work better for me as descriptors. They are just products of the modern world. Driftwood going with the current.
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Since I root my conception of free will in emergent rationality and not detachment from causation, I cheer the work of neuroscientists. The more we understand about the functioning of the brain, the better.
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It’s interesting to look at it from the opposite direction. Do we have free will when it comes to holding other people responsible for their actions? I have heard people discuss the idea that we should rethink how we punish people in our justice systems if free will doesn’t exist. My response is that we have no choice but to jail them since we lack the free will to do otherwise. It’s a two way street.
The one thing I do keep coming back to is that we recognize that most of us think alike. We all seem to have the same distaste for injustice and the unnecessary harming of others. There seems to be a basic shared morality across most of humanity, or at least a morality most people accept. If humans didn’t have these shared characteristics then the world would be very different.
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The work of neurobiologists is important. But the goal of neurobiologists is to find the neural correlate of such processes as consciousness and free will, to create a unified theory, fully completed and supported by facts. But many scientists, instead of humility, try to pass off wishful thinking as reality. If these scientists follow their own principles, don’t their statements about free will make science useless? If our choice is just an illusion, then why is the illusion in the brain of Charles Darwin, for example, more important and correct than the illusion of a person who believes in a flat earth? If our entire conscious life is an illusion, why should we believe science? After all, the discoveries of scientists are not facts, but the imagination of their deterministic brain. Maybe I am behind the scientific progress, but as far as I know, the brain is also not fully understood now and there is a lot of work to be done.
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I agree. I think they are products of their environment. They say what their predecessors said and they accept the point of view of their environment in order to fit in. But the beauty of science is that there are people like Copernicus, Darwin, a whole generation of twentieth-century physicists who didn’t just agree with the majority, but made a scientific revolution. And I hope that in the future neuroscience will have its own Darwin who will make a revolution.
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I agree. One of my questions here is whether the absence of free will (whatever that means), better to say limited ability to consciously control one’s actions is a proven scientific fact, or is it the personal beliefs of some scientists? Can we say that science has refuted consciousness, responsibility for one’s actions and the ability to consciously control one’s actions, even if very limited? Maybe reducing everything to atoms is not the best option in the case of the brain and its functions? In some places reduction works well. But in the case of the brain, isn’t it missing a lot? You can disassemble an airplane into its screws and describe each of them, but will this pile of disassembled parts be able to fly?
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Like much in philosophy, as much hangs on how you define things as much as the logic of the argument.
Descartes started with “I think, therefore I am”, and that works for me. We have consciousness.
I accept that our senses inform us of external reality, and that we can logically process that to serve our own interest, communicate, anticipate the future and prepare accordingly. We are rational.
Symphonies, art, technology, and scientific discovery demonstrate that we are creative and inventive. Our world is full of work that would not exist otherwise. We are creative.
Will is the application of consciousness, rationality, and creativity to choose and achieve some desired goal. We participate in all of that. To me, “will” is therefore essentially “free will”, even if there is material reducibility and prior states. After all, what is lacking, and what does the freedom to make the choice you do not wish, even mean?
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I agree. As I wrote above, I do not know if it is appropriate to talk about free will. Probably many people when they hear these words think about dualism and the like. I know that consciousness, will and so on are products of the brain. I do not think that my magical will initiates actions and is the cause of actions. If I can consciously make at least some choice in my life, being limited by genetics, experience, environment, my beliefs, then I will be happy. For example, I want to eat a chocolate bar, but I have diabetes, I remember this and decide to abstain from chocolate. The image or smell of chocolate is the cause, they cause processes in my brain, I realize this, then I remember that I can not eat chocolate and with an effort of will I refuse it. I wonder, in decisions of this type, is my decision conscious or is it an illusion?
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To be honest, Descartes ended with “I think, therefore I am”, since that was the only thing that could be concluded using just reason.
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Like the claims of pseudoscientific “New Atheism”, the claims that neuroscience shows that we don’t have free will reflect philosophical incompetence. It doesn’t take too much effort to think of free-will and deterministic spins on any observation. As has already been pointed out, appealing to the free will of the reader/viewer to accept the author’s disbelief in free will is logically problematic. And their version of determinism is, too often, just an excuse that people aren’t responsible for their actions rather than a seriously thought out system.
Some of the purported evidence against free will is spectacularly bad interpretation. For example, a study scanned brains of volunteers asked to randomly choose to add or subtract two numbers when they appeared on a screen. They reported that detecting brain activity in a specific region enabled a computer to predict how people would decide with 60% accuracy, faster than the people stated their decision. Well, identifying a region of the brain involved in decision-making is useful data.
But this is claimed to prove determinism and disprove the possibility of a spirit independent of the brain. Both claims are silly. I could predict how people will choose with 50% accuracy by saying “They will always pick addition”. 60% right when random would get about 50% is not all that impressive. If a spirit exists independent of the brain, 1. it has to translate its decisions into physical signals at some point to get the body to act on them and 2. it might not bother being involved in such a trivial task.
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And, following the likes of Geoffrey Hinton, even though he now publicly says his concept of a neural network as to how the brain works was wrong, he does see the concept of a neural network as a precursor to understanding how the brain does work.
We are learning that we are machines in the same way that our current, but not human-replica, of Generative AI is expressed from the concept of neural networks.
We are able to predict the next thing based on a “sending the signal” back to everything that allowed us to get to that point in our thinking. Our “new” machines can share learned weights efficiently. We do this very inefficiently (e.g., via reading and talking).
As we have faster and faster processors, availability of more and more data, we are getting close to understanding who and what we are.
And, I’m wondering, as faith informed humans, does our faith itself evolve as we understand more about the physical aspects of how we work. In the same way we understood millennia ago that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. We are understanding that we as humans aren’t the center of intelligence and may I even posit faith?
Good summary of Dr. Hinton’s thinking a year ago before he won the Nobel prize: https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?si=sO_q7jWItw1LlljP
The sound of one hand clapping?
The large number of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) on the web do not amount to proof of anything critically important, but they present solid evidence that mind (soul) and body do separate from time to time - the body has no heartbeat and the brain is also flatlined - yet consistent reports from unconnected sources paint a vivid picture of the sentience, separated from the body as well as able to perceive verifiable elements in common.
They include perception (vision and hearing) that matches other persons’ realities such as conversations in a nearby room, or things as mundane as serial numbers on equipment on a high shelf, hence not visible to anyone in the room attending to the evidently dead patient.
These experiences occur world-wide and are consistent with cultural norms, e.g. in Western examples Jesus is a consistent actor, to the point that a few have found themselves in the grip of a horrifying Hell experience, who then called on Jesus, and been rescued.
Has anyone with an educated professional opinion regarding the brain as a deeply psycho-chemical phenomenon hence calling into serious question the idea of “free will” ever explained NDEs and their attendant “impossible side effects” as part of their understanding of the body as a purely physical phenomenon?
Yet none of us is easy to describe as a will-less automaton. A middle ground, currently impossible for nearly anyone to describe, seems necessary. The multiple interacting neural layers of cause-effect-cause-effect etc. that result in the impression that we feel that we have made a choice just about has to include ideation–structures such as “I want health more than that chocolate treat” - followed by “Just this once!” etc.
For me the bottom line is that the phenomenon of consciousness winds up being far more sophisticated than reacting to pain and pleasure. Infants arrive capable of that; pets evolve sophisticated relationships with their owners. Doubtless studies of apparent ideation and choice in the human brain have used animals as simpler items of study.
From what little I have read of neurobiology, it seems that most scientists expect human consciousness to be the result of deterministic biological processes in the brain. Some have pointed to quantum effects, but most think the brain is too slow, warm, and wet to be conducive to quantum effects. However, research is only part way down the path towards full understanding.
Even if scientists find ample evidence for determinism in human consciousness, I think there is still a lot of theological room for Dualism and other beliefs. I don’t think science alone is going to have the final say for many people.
That’s a philosophical, theological, and ethical question that science is just not capable of answering.
Can you figure out how the plane works by understanding how those parts interact? Yes.
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Sounds like a research problem for Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia faculty and staff,
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I found your post perplexing. Why “Yet” … none of us is easy to describe as a will-less automaton. Was there something in what you quoted from me which seemed to you to suggest I thought differently?