No - just trying to stir the water.
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As part of a larger historical project on Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton, I wrote about his views on human freedom in a mechanistic universe. ASA Database Search: Results
There has not yet been very much literature on the history of the idea that science does not rule out free actions. Here’s a more recent article focusing on Eddington and Compton:
(99+) The Earliest Missionaries of ‘Quantum Free Will’: A Socio-Historical Analysis | Boris Kožnjak - Academia.edu
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In connection with this thread, I re-post this information from the ASA:
Dear Edward,
The next online event of the Affiliation of Christian Biologists (ACB) and the Affiliation of Ministers, Theologians, and Philosophers (AMTaP) is slated for Tuesday, November 12 at 7:30-9:00 pm EST (4:30-6:00 pm PST). Dean W. Zimmerman, will give a dualist perspective on the human soul in a talk entitled “Souls and Bodies: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives.” To receive the Zoom link for this November 12 event by email, please pre-register in advance.
Description of Dean W. Zimmerman’s Presentation: It is sometimes said that, in contemporary philosophy, a dualism of body and soul is dead. This is not entirely true. Dualisms that distinguish mental states from physical states are common in philosophy of mind; and there are good arguments for some form of dualism. Given these arguments, a more fully-fledged dualism of mental and physical substances becomes plausible. And the fate of body-soul dualism is not irrelevant to Christianity. There are good theological reasons to believe, not just in survival of death, but also in an intermediate state of existence prior to bodily resurrection – which requires (or at least fits best with) a dualism of bodies and souls.
Dean W. Zimmerman is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University. He is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers and holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Philosophy from Brown University with specializations in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion. His areas of interest include early 20th century analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. He has authored numerous articles and co-edited several books and journal issues on these topics. Among them are Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (2008), Persons: Human and Divine (2007), and the “Personal Identity” issue of The Monist (Vol. 87, No. 4; 2004).
This event will be a great follow-up to Joel B. Green’s monist perspective presented on October 22. Stay tuned for more information about additional online events in this ACB/AMTaP collaborative series that are scheduled for January 14, 2025, and a date in February 2025 (to be determined). Also, don’t forget about the ASA Winter Symposium related to AI on January 25, 2025. It ties in nicely with our series on human consciousness and human identity.
Best wishes and God’s blessings,
Brian Greuel and Walter Rogero
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The fun part is that he (or she) had to say that because there is no free will and that I had no choice to respond this way.
I heard something similar, the idea that our consciousness is merely an observer and our notion that we make decisions is an illusion.
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Yes, that’s exactly what they say. The brain makes a decision a few seconds before we realize it and then deceives us as if it was we who made the decision. Such statements can be encountered more and more often. I don’t know how things are in neuroscience in general, but I see statements from various scientists that consciousness is an illusion quite often. I have seen disagreement with this point of view from philosophers, some neurobiologists, but they seem to be a minority. Perhaps scientists who have the opposite point of view simply do not want to get involved in useless debates.
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Thus, their brains are deceiving them into thinking that they are giving meaningful reasoning.
The fact that brain activity can be detected somewhat before a decision is expressed tells us nothing whatsoever about the existence of free will. If we have free will, it either influences the brain activity before we can express the decision, or else assesses the output of that brain activity.
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I agree with you. I don’t understand why these people act as if they have free will, but at every corner they declare that there is no free will. I am also surprised how science can prove this lack of will, if the scientific experiment itself assumes the conscious participation of the observer. It seems to me that these scientists are simply confused in their concepts, considering this will as something out of body or magic, but even then they cannot prove it, because science does not deal with miracles and spirits.
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I have heard of experiments where the accuracy of predicting actions was about 70-80 percent. Haynes said that they can predict an action even 8 seconds in advance and do it quite accurately. There was also an experiment where people were asked to add up any numbers in their heads and the experimenter could predict what those numbers were. I don’t know how to interpret these results, maybe you can help me? I am already confused and my head is starting to hurt, only here on this forum can I count on adequate answers😅
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Apart from a general reminder to critically examine the data and interpretations, the reality is that these experiments tell us something about what parts of brains are involved in certain types of decisions and nothing about free will, determinism, dualism, monism, or other philosophical questions.
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If I decide to drive from place A to place B, my brains will make many small decisions during the journey. Some of those decisions will be semi-automated reactions to what happens on the road. For example, if a moose jumps on the road, I probably react to that before my brains can make any conscious decisions. Does that show there is no free will in my life? Of course not.
Our life is a mixture of freely made decisions and semi-automatic reactions to various stimuli. In ordinary life, a large part of our small ‘decisions’ are semi-automated reactions to what happens. Such reactions are necessary for survival but they certainly do not prove there is no free will. My rapid reaction to the moose on the road tells nothing about the decision to drive from place A to place B.
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I would like to clarify how scientists can predict the actions of subjects a few seconds in advance? Do I understand you correctly that even if brain activity precedes an action and that if this action can be predicted in advance, this does not mean that this action is not free?
The “prediction” is based on detecting patterns of brain activity. These patterns are, to some extent, detectable before the subject acts. But of course the brain activity precedes the action. The signal has to travel from the brain to whatever part of the body implements of communicates the decision, and the appropriate action must be taken. Those take some time.
Suppose, for example, that the decision is in fact an act of free will that is physically achieved by the brain. The so-called predicting would merely be observation of the decision-making process. The observation tells us nothing about the role of free will. It merely tells us where the decision is taking place in the brain.
Suppose that the decision is made by the exercising of free will by a spiritual component of human nature that is completely independent of the physical brain. But then that spiritual component has to convey that decision to the body in order for the decision to be implemented. The signal detected from the brain scans would then be the brain activity in response to the signal that the brain receives from that spirit after it decided.
Of course, there are plenty of other possible concepts of whether we have free will, whether we have a spiritual nature, and how that spiritual nature is interconnected with the physical brain. But all of them will generate the same observation of a signal in the brain shortly before a decision. The actual scientific data is completely uninformative about free will, dualism, etc. All claims on those topics reflect the philosophical biases of the person making the claim rather than the science. In fact, my view is rather deterministic, but that is based on theological considerations. Science simply can’t say if free will exists - there is no experiment that could not be interpreted either way with a little thought.
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One description I have always been amused by:
“Your conscious mind is there to rationalize what your unconscious mind has already decided.”
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Sounds like Jonathon Haidt’s line. I agree with him. First heard about The Righteous Mind here. The best.
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As far as I remember Haidt did not say that people are unconscious pieces of meat. He said that genetics largely determines behavior, but upbringing and environment are also important. He said that man is a young creature from the point of view of evolution, so many processes of the nervous system are still automated, but I can’t remember where he says that all decisions are made unconsciously and consciousness only rationalizes them. His analogy of the elephant and the rider shows that the emotional part (the elephant) is very strong and in many cases prevails over the rational part (the rider).
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“Amused by…” as in you disagree? Or as in …“this seems true, and amusingly so”?
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I have a healthy skepticism of most conclusions in neurobiology which is more reflexive than anything else. The description amuses me because it reminds me not to be too egotistical, that my conscious mind might not be as powerful as I think it is.
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The idea that most people are constrained by their history to make the decisions they do, can give us compassion, too.
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He certainly did not say that. Has anyone ever said that? It certainly isn’t anything I believe.
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