

Is Free Will An Illusion? - dlnovell
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/is-free-will-an/

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jerf
Is X An Illusion?

Is "the word Illusion" an Illusion? Does it convey a sense of mystery and
secret knowledge where there is none?

When people actually claim something is an illusion, do they actually have a
clear idea in their head about what they mean, or are they playing semantic
games with flipping back and forth between mistaking the word map for the
reality territory and not?

Yes to that second one.

All "X is an Illusion" means is "that definition for X you thought you had?
It's not right." Which is a much less, well, _stupid_ way to put it. Of
course, it doesn't have the same ability to confer Special Knowledge that the
Plebes don't have.

Free will isn't an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be
clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word
games will change what is actually there. Time is not an illusion; something
is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we
thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually
there. Our sense of self is not an illusion; something is there, though what
it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no
amount of word games will change what is actually there. And so on.

Stop it with this damn worthless "illusion" word. Maybe go study General
Semantics instead, since all the word does is reify map/territory confusion
and basically doom what could otherwise be an interesting debate from the very
beginning, and General Semantics has some choice words on that topic.

~~~
fburnaby
I agree. I think the article has its vocabulary backwards. I like the
philosophy that: "if we feel it, then it's real". It's just that "free will"
nothing like we originally expected it to be (that is, it's non-magical). We
can learn new things about the nature of free will by studying the brain,
because that's where such things are created. To say that free will doesn't
exist because of this finding isn't too different from saying that desks don't
exist because they're really just collections of a bunch of molecules,
arranged just so. There is no magical essence called "desk", it's made up of
stuff, and we experience that arrangement of stuff accordingly.

See Dennett, (2003): "Freedom Evolves" for a more lucid account. He says the
same as is said in the article, but instead re-defines "free will" to fit the
reality of these conclusions - a more intellectually satisfying approach, even
though it's just a smart readjustment of semantics.

~~~
danielmims
"If we feel it, then it's real."

The word "real" loses all meaning once we start saying that what we feel --
any old fantasy, delusion, speculation -- is real. We also indulge one of the
central fantasies of human reflexive identity -- that we are supernatural --
when we say that what we feel is therefore, ipso facto, real.

As for Dennett, he is a serial question-begger and equivocator on this topic.
He doesn't merely change the definition of "free will" in that book. He
arbitrarily changes the definition to a trivial one; argues that that new kind
of free will is possible; and then reinserts his conclusions into a debate in
which the definition has not changed. Hence he has offered absolutely nothing
to the issue that we're all talking about -- free will that would allow for
culpability, or what I call non-trivial free will. I recommend Peter Van
Inwagen and Galen Strawson instead, who offer much more rigorous good-faith
arguments about free will.

~~~
fburnaby
Thanks, I'll check them out next when I get the chance.

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darkxanthos
I've always been on the fence on this issue due to two concerns I always saw
as conflicting until recently: * Causality * Perception of free will

In my mind, it always made sense that I couldn't have free will with causality
as then my brain is really just an insanely complex chaotic system that only
appears to be random. Allowing for freewill in something like that would
appear to warrant the idea of magic.

But then my friend remarked that instead of the universe being driven based on
causation why not imagine it all being correlation based? Any scientific
experiment really only proves correlation to a mathematical model. Unlike pure
math you can't _prove_ a hypothesis using anything nearly as rigorous as
induction (since the infinite is out of our reach).

By not taking that extra step of saying science proves causation of certain
phenomena and just leaving it at correlation I think ideas such as freewill
and the odd uncertainty of quantum mechanics can mesh with our macro level
view of the universe.

 __shrugs __I thought it was interesting at least. :)

~~~
msluyter
What you say here reminds me a bit of Hume. Hume attacked cause and effect by
noting that all we ultimately have access to are our perceptions, and that we
can never perceive "cause." We may see the hammer flying through the air, then
the window shattering, but we don't see any "cause" here. Just event A
followed by event B. For Hume, our mind naturally correlates these events, and
we call it cause and effect.

Kant then followed by saying that this account was incomplete and that cause
and effect are more like a type of lens through which we organize our
perceptions, without which, we couldn't make sense of the world.

*Vastly oversimplifying huge swaths of 18th century philosophy here, so don't take this very seriously.

~~~
darkxanthos
Sounds like some good places to start to learn more. Thanks!

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randallsquared
_Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an
unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is
laid?_

Is water really wet, or is water really made of non-wet atoms of hydrogen and
oxygen over which an illusory wetness is laid?

It's self-defeating to define free will in a way that inherently violates
physics, but it's easy to define it in a way that doesn't, but still preserves
what we mean intuitively by "free will": If it's possible to perfectly predict
(absent actual errors in either mechanism) what a system will do without
simulating it, the system doesn't have free will. If it's not possible without
simulating the system (and the actions of the system aren't actually random),
then it could be said to have free will.

This still leaves the possibility that it will turn out that humans don't have
free will, of course, or only have it in certain conditions.

~~~
danielmims
Unpredictability (or randomness) does not preserve the possibility of free
will. One must have control over the process. That's really the basis of why
we care about free will in the first place -- control.

~~~
randallsquared
I'm not talking about randomness (in fact, I specifically excluded that).
Anyway, it's not really meaningful to speak of a process having control over
itself -- it _is_ itself.

Free will either is defined in such a way that mind must transcend physics to
have it, or it's defined in a way that is meaningful inside the laws of
physics. I have nothing to say about the first definition, but given that most
here would agree that minds are constrained by physics, any remaining question
about free will _must_ refer to whether we can predict the actions of an
agent, and since it's obvious that we can if we have a sufficiently detailed
simulation of the agent, the only definition in which "free will" is still a
useful concept that meshes with our intuitive understanding of self-
determination is the one I mention in my earlier comment.

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karzeem
> Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has
> already made it.

> All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea
> of mind-body duality…

This is ultimately an issue of definitions, but for me, those two quotes are
the main takeaways. You have to decide whether there is such a thing as a self
that exists apart from the couple pounds of organic material inside your
skull. Science hasn't found hard evidence of such a thing.

If you give that credence (albeit while remembering that absence of evidence
!= evidence of absence), forget about whether you have free will — the bigger
question becomes to what extent "you" exist in the first place. If you're
comfortable reducing yourself to your brain (and science would probably
suggest that you should be), then it's not a problem; you do have free will,
as long as you're willing to define that as having a set of chemical reactions
sitting inside your skull, doing their thing.

If you aren't comfortable reducing yourself to your brain, the search for free
will and a self gets a lot more stressful.

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wsprague
I think part of the problem is to use "free will" as a name for thing (like an
organ, next to, say, the liver), rather than as a name for a process. If we
ask "how do we DO free will", we might start to get somewhere, I think.

I think we "do" free will rarely, with most of our lives running
automatically. When we hit trouble -- a turning point, a fork in the road so
to speak, where it is no longer obvious what to do -- THAT is when we have to
"do" some free will. But most of our lives aren't driven by free will or
conscious choosing, but rather by skills we develop when we are enculturated
into our society, skills that get trained into us so deeply we don't ever
think about them (automatically getting saying thank you, etc). (When we have
to consciously choose too much of daily life, we call that autism...)

At those turning points, I think we need language. First, language (words
either in our head or in conversation) clarifies the options by giving them
names. Second, language enable us to arbitrarily choose one of the options and
stick to it. Finally, language enables us to imagine the negation of a
situation once we have named it, and thus open us to creativity. Without
language, we can only do what we feel like instaneously.

So, while that was an interesting article, the debate is framed subconsciously
makes in a way that makes it impossible to get a good answer. Also, none of
these ideas are mine -- I am regurgitating the original thoughts of Heidegger,
Peirce, and Bourdieu.

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unignorant
"I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need
neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough,
and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite
of determinism is randomness, not free will!"

\--

That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly...
and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).

~~~
presidentender
_That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly...
and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics)._

Quantum mechanics accounts for unpredictability. It doesn't account for free
will. Just because you can't predict something accurately doesn't mean it has
a choice; think, for instance, of the weather.

~~~
lanaer
Or, if sub-atomic particles can behave truly randomly, then _perhaps_ they
might have free will, deciding what to do for themselves, which we can only
see as randomness (I do not think this is true, it’s just an interesting
thought). Sadly, that does not grant _us_ free will, only randomness.

Basically, we are completely mechanistic above the quantum level. At that
level may exist some randomness, but if so, it’s just acting like a random
number generator, where the generated numbers are then fed into the
deterministic process that is ourselves.

~~~
danielmims
Good points. I would take it a bit further by noting that a defense of non-
trivial free will cannot rely upon quantum mechanics (or any other engine of
unpredictability). By non-trivial free will, I mean a kind of free will that
allows for some control over what is being willed.

The thesis describing a wholly causal universe is known as "determinism." The
thesis of a less-than-wholly causal universe, no matter the degree to which
strong causality governs, is known as "indeterminism." Together, they describe
the entire set of possible worlds. Because free will is impossible in either
case, free will is thus absolutely impossible, no matter what.

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tybris
Be careful that your philosophy does not get caught in the definition of
words. I would think an illusion is something that occurs once you are aware,
because your awareness is fooled. If the awareness is the illusion, then who's
fooled? I wouldn't think you could fool an illusion, but the meaning of words
is quite subjective.

If you want to make a point, say something like: "free will is your mind
regurgitating sensory information and decisions you took moments before by
relating them to current senses and memory creating a feeling of awareness",
that takes away some of the thunder, but also part of the ambiguity.

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fnid
This is very in line with the discussion of Free Will in Waking Life:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U>

They mention quantum mechanics and the randomness there may have some impact
on free will.

Also, I think the double slit experiment is interesting. If we observe some
things with our mind, then the outcome can change. We can ignore things as
well. Introspection may enable free will.

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sorbus
"Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand;
seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity
already predicted their final decisions."

Who takes seven seconds to decide which hand to press with? And was it seven
seconds from the time they were given the instruction, or seven seconds before
they pressed the button (independent of when they were given the instruction)?

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growt
I read about this several times and I think this whole button experiment is
somehow screwed. The measure some brainwaves and draw such a fundamental
conclusion without really understanding what they measure. Maybe we are just
making our decisions in our mind before they get transformed into language or
actions. But that wouldn't imply that these are not our own decisions.

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roc
All I'm seeing is that we tend to follow our instinctual reactions. Which
isn't really surprising, considering how close we are to when our survival
depended almost entirely on making a snap judgment and executing.

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nopassrecover
If effect necessarily follows cause then yes.

If that is true, then "repeating" the universe would lead to exactly the same
outcome. Hence we have no free will.

~~~
danielmims
Importantly, even if effect doesn't necessarily follow cause (also known as
"indeterminism"), free will isn't possible. Hence free will is absolutely
impossible, alongside any conditions whatsoever.

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bitwize
Is free will an illusion?

Yes! \

    
    
               Let these two asses be set to grind corn!
    

No! /

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yannis
If there is no free will then our will is determined by our DNA. Since our DNA
is subject to continuous change via random events, then do we have 'random
will' and does that make it 'free will?'

