Cause and Effect: Belief in a strictly materialistic Darwinian Evolution leads one to believe, albeit falsely, that there is no Free Will. And if there is no Free Will, then there is no Right and Wrong and no Moral Law. However, this belief is completely contrary to everything that is practiced and observed in nature, humanity, and the cosmos regarding cause and effect. This line of reasoning is what led to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc and is the hidden underlying ideology / worldview justifying and directing many countries' Social Darwinian based foreign and domestic policies to the present. The Social Darwinian Materialistic Ideology / Worldview (Survival of the Fittest among nations, i.e. the continuous lawless struggle for resource wealth and world rule without regard to human moral / ethical standards or International / U.S. Laws) is the Root Cause of modern era World Wars and Perpetual Wars.
This is the correct question in free will problem. You r your body in relation to the exterior world. Therefore it's impossible to be free because you r just a part of universe even the universe is indeterministic.
@@logicalone1968 I think its to easy to assume that, that’s the same argument for God, „ I don’t understand how the Univers could even exist so it must be god“ we don’t even know why we have consciousness, if every decision would be unconscious we wouldn’t need consciousness. But we have it, that’s the only thing about the Univers we can actually know for our self. So i think we should jump to conclusions to early.
Me: "OK brain, you have to decide when to flex the wrist... or you have to decide whether to push A or B. Brain: "I don't give a shit. It's too much work to decide something which doesn't matter. I'll pass it down to the subconscious." Subconscious: "I don't give a shit, I will load a pre-set pattern for 2 variables (be it "A vs B" or "flex now vs not yet") You will have your pattern fed to your conscious before you know it". Me: "Thank you brain, that sounds like the most comfortable and efficient way to handle this stupid test".
Yeah, expert shmecxpert, i just go with my gut and my good cents and sumpthin i call television. Id wager muh GED this feller got bout as muach cents as a housefly on a batch of mie muthers kristel math. Lol. I have 12 kids. Them is the phutuure gat ised 2 it.
I mean almost every modern day theoretical physicist agrees that it does not really exist, such as Stephen Hawking and Einstein, this dude is some random "philosopher" that I have never heard of before, and probably just majored in psychology and knows nothing about the universe.
Free will in the mid-grade sense of “could have done otherwise” will always remain fundamentally incomprehensible. Comprehensibility imposes the restriction upon our explanation of events that all events must have a prior cause. This is how our minds necessarily make sense of things. In what other form would a “reasonable” explanation of behavior take? “Could have done otherwise” requires two components that contradict this requirement of causal explanation. First, it requires that a degree of “wiggle room” or indeterminacy exists in the world. The randomness implied in this defies the need for sufficient causal explanation. Just try making sense of quantum indeterminacy to get a feel for the way such a thing is beyond our grasp. Second, it requires agent causation, the notion that I am the source of my decision. At bottom, this requires that my “self” can spontaneously generate something like a “first cause” or an “uncaused cause”. It is not difficult to see why such a thing will forever evade the requirements of comprehension. By definition it resists such requirements. All this, of course, is not an argument against believing that free will exists. It very well may be reasonable to believe that something exists while also recognizing that it is incomprehensible. Why should we assume (as it will always be an assumption) the the truth of things conforms precisely to the requirements of a certain mental function? An example of a thing we tend to regard as self-evidently true is our own consciousness. Our own first person, subjective experience is as self-evident a reality as we’re going to face, and yet it too is incomprehensible. To make sense of this, consider that any thing which is comprehended assumes there is something which comprehends. Everything that is perceived assumes a perceiver. In addition, the object of comprehension must remain on one side of this subject/object dichotomy. The eye cannot turn inwards to perceive itself. Considering this, one also notices that free will, in terms of agent causation, is always fundamentally connected to subjectivity. Perhaps these fundamental realities must simply be accepted as undeniable axioms of our existence. To deny them is itself highly unreasonable. That’s at least how it seems to me.
1:24 Everything we do or don't do is based on a "medical condition". This is either at a micro degree which is not apparent or at a macro degree like a brain tumor which is very apparent as in the case of Charles Whitman. If I go and commit a crime which was actually due to a microscopic brain tumor but with the current medical technology we have today, the brain tumor could not detected and therefore, I am deemed responsible for my actions is ridiculous. We simply don't have free will.
To say you really could have done otherwise is to forget that our brains are also subject to the laws of physics. This is the error that has led to our confusion (and has apparently confounded some neuroscientists. Even if it turned out that our brains work on quantum mechanical principles (and there's not much evidence for this) - that still doesn't get you the ability to consciously do otherwise. That would get you to a random outcome with a reliable probability distribution of collapse of some complex wavefunction at most. It's really easy to get these two different things mixed up. The quantum weirdness of electrons being everywhere at once - or spinning all possible ways at once *until you measure them* with a photon - *SEEMS* a lot like the subjective feeling we get when we are considering alternate possibilities in the future. Truly - there seems to be an eerie similarity between these two phenomenon - UNTIL YOU LOOK CLOSELY. These are two completely different aspects of physics - do not get them confused! Quantum mechanics doesn't let you *CHOOSE* what you find after you measure the spin direction of the electron. You can't choose spin up or spin down! For some people people forget this rather important detail when they conflate the two situations. When we are picking from different possible future scenarios and trying to decide we are using past knowledge, communicated language - and our mental model of the world to run mental thought experiments. Though it seems similar this is just completely different from any kind of quantum mechanical activity. We're not collapse of a wavefunction - we are making up our minds given what we've learned about the past - apples and oranges. Sam Harris really just crushes the idea that you could ever have "chosen" to do otherwise - even in the subjective sense (I suggest you look him up). Even if we could have done otherwise - it certainly wouldn't be our conscious intent that was in control of that choice. People seem to have a really hard time with this - but the truth is we can do no such thing - and you don't need these experiments to rule it out, you just need to think about what it would mean if you COULD do that (you get something profoundly ridiculous - a kind of infinite regress where you can never say you consciously started the ball rolling). Determinism at the deepest level of our thinking *MUST* be true. There really would have to be some other dimension or physical reality we have no evidence for for it to be otherwise - whatever we find there would have to make less sense than quantum mechanics. That doesn't mean we can ever perfectly predict our future behavior or that the future is "fixed" - the uncertainty principle and pseudo-randomness of complex systems ensures this. Fatalism is untrue, but determinism has to be true - or we just don't live in a causal reality with a-causal quantum randomness at bottom.
*****- hi - thanks for your comment. Yeah that's how I often think of it too (pachinko machine is a really good analogy for the high level) - at least that would appear to be consistent with the physics we know so far. What I'd like to know is why you have arrived at the impression that the brain does have a kind of random number generator that it exploits. I mean - I'm not saying it doesn't - I have often wondered if that's what is going on in some sense at bottom, but it seems to me that we would need to understand the mechanism by which the quantum randomness translates into inputs for the pseudorandom and otherwise classically behaving system. I think one would have to show how some of the quantum effects get reinforced instead of sort of washed out as you reach the classical limit (that'd be a mathematical masterpiece to show that convincingly to be sure...). Maybe I am not thinking about this right - but I just feel like we should be cautious about fully embracing some of the ideas advanced by Roger Penrose and others (there are a lot of detractors of these arguments yet and we're far from consensus). Again - I don't understand enough yet to really critique his position, but my understanding is that the participation of QM or how it plays into our brain's operations is far from being well understood.
You're right to say that it is unlikely that quantum mechanics is unlikely to affect the brain. I think that we have to keep in mind how much is unknown about the architecture of the brain as far as conscious decision making goes. Ultimately, we can reasonably say that the mind emerges from the brain but, beyond that, I'm not sure what can be said about how decisions get made. The work is ongoing in neuroscience.
ConQuiX I'm quite sure that I agree with you. I've never considered that quantum mechanics plays any part in mind behaviour. Firstly, a definition of Free Will is rarely forthcoming. I consoder it to be "Free Wish". The word "will" meaning "a want", from German, Wollen, "Ich will" meaning "I want". Taking "Free Will" to mean that, I do not beleive that we have any influence over what we desire. I like cake, I don't like celary. I didn't decide that. However, not only are our desires and actions influenced by initial conditions of genetic make up and external inputs of environment, nurture and social experiences but also continuous judgement and feedback of the impact of our actions that we may undertake. How often are our initial desires to, say, eat all the cake, adjusted when we consider the impact of that action on our own wellbeing, through excessive calorie intake and also if that would mean that others would not get a fare share of cake, and so reduce our social standing and regard within that group, as we'd risk being considered inconsiderate, selfish and greedy.
***** Don't you have to prove that quantum effects scale up in the nervous system? The workings of neurons seem to be almost entirely chemical. Quantum mind theories are fringe and unsubstantiated at best. They are outright lunacy and woo at worst.
***** The question of whether those effects scale up is what is important. Even in the best example, photosynthesis, it isn't quite clear if those effects are biologically significant. Even in cellular processes where there are some quantum effects, for the most part, they can be considered classical systems. You haven't shown that the brain is subject to these quantum effects and, more importantly, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that consciousness is effected by quantum effects in any biologically relevant way.
if there is no free will, then why would we need to have the ability to read our own minds? why doesn't every action just involuntarily cut strait to the chase without any conscious perception? if there is no choose in anything anyway, why not have it feel that way as well?
The Libet experiments are/could be interesting in their own right but would only be interesting for free will if it would conclusively prove all actions are made without conscious thought (and only in hindsight sends back signals to the conscious part of the brain). Not proving it (or only with some actions) does nothing for the question of free will (in the strict libertarian philosophical sense). The question of true (libertarian) free will is about whether our will is determined, not whether our will determines our actions (most people don't deny that). And since the will has to be determined - due to causality (the only other option being randomness, which isn't free will) - the concept of true free will is an incoherent one.
There is a problem with the idea of a "first cause" we can use the term colloquially but in fact it isn't really coherent. In order to have something cause an effect it first must exist, as energy can not be created or destroyed. Time is a measure of motion and a parameter for existence. Energy has always been in one form or another. Nothing could initiate time as a whole because that would require the time to do the action of initiating. Essentially looking for the first cause goes into an infinite regression. And there is no beginning or "first" to an infinite regression.
Robert LC - Digital Artist who says our will has to be determined ? Why because you believe consciousness is chemical? Why do you believe that when there is no proof of what consciousness is or where it comes from . Only that it has a relationship with the brain . That doesn’t mean it is the brain or is controlled by it. How do you know it doesn’t defy the laws of nature by not being apart of it but instead only interacting with it? The only thing that is determined /random in this matter is the options that are presented to us for our free will to decide on which one to take . And because time is a construct there is an infinite number of possibilities which means you cant predict shit .
Causality is a priori it is a philosophical assumption that cannot be proven that underpins science. Once you understand that then the conflict of free will becomes less difficult. we bring causality to our experience to explain how reality appears to us not reality bringing causation to us so it depends on your assumptions that will determine how you view many things.
I am aware that it is "conventional wisdom" that free will exists. But why would we even think free will exists in the first place? The very concept of it was a fabrication/assumption by philosophers. Up until that assumption was made, we just "live". Animals just do what they do. Children just live their lives. At no point would I have ever thought something as arcane as free will was even relevant until I was told it exists in school. The religious certainly believe in it because without free will almost every single religion is false or indadequate. I think it would be a good idea to just stop using the term free will because it is a recursive tautological absurdity.
Because free-will, like existence, is self-evident. In order to deny free-will it requires a consciousness to comprehend, deliberate upon, and decide whether or not there is free-will. Basically, you can't rationally deny free-will without having free-will; denying free-will is self-refuting.
177SCmaro Not at all. I think you don't understand what the definition of free will is. Your statement does not refute free will at all. I can just as easily as you imagine a future in which you would have always denied free will is false. Where is the self-refutation there? Answer: nowhere.
TheReddaredevil223 "Your statement does not refute free will at all" My statement wasn't aimed at refuting free-will. It was aimed at demonstrating that it requires free-will to deny free-will. Thus the answer is, again, you can't rationally deny free-will without having free-will. You can't make a choice; i.e. deliberate upon and decide between alternatives, without having the ability to choose i.e. free-will. In order to deny free-will, you would have to argue that you can make the choice to deny free-will without choosing, which is self-refuting.
177SCmaro How does it require free will to deny it? Nobody can argue that they are responsible for what they believe. So whether one believes in free will or determinism was not their choice, just like whether or not someone believes in a god. Determinists and those who espouse free will have had their brains affected in a way which caused them to believe there is no free will or vice versa. Whether it was a certain pattern of soundwaves hitting their eardrums, or photons hitting their retinas, external stimuli constantly create chain reactions throughout the brain, ultimately ending up with a belief or disbelief in whatever idea has been proposed. I don't believe free will exists, but I didn't make the choice to deny free will - my experiencing the right stimuli the right time made it inevitable. Just like I can't choose to believe in unicorns, I can't choose to believe in any philosophical idea I'd like, and neither can anybody else. Though external factors can affect these beliefs, these factors are completely beyond our control.
Super interesting stuff. It's one of those subjects that you can go crazy thinking about. Especially when you start getting into multiverse hypotheses and supernatural factors.These types of discussions are best done under the influence of something. Makes for interesting conversations where no one really makes any sense, but will still agree with everything you say.
I have so many problems with the validity of the experiment. About halfway through my main objection is raised. The experiment proves absolutely nothing.
Why doesn't anyone speak of compatibilists? Why can't there be determinism and free will together? One may have a determined life but using free will alter their life and in turn changing the course? there will constantly be determined actions that are coming your way, but no matter what you create the decision to do which ever you please.
The problem lies in this part: "but no matter what you create the decision to do which ever you please". First, the no matter what is pure hubris, and second you don't create your decisions.
CosmoShidan although that's a somewhat loose metaphor, in those terms your brain cells are both the gun holder and the gun. Your brain produces your experience of decision making: so you are slave to what it considers as right.
Alex Spevak So you are saying that my cells are coercing me to do good against my will with my cells? That sounds circular and one of the reasons why deterministic arguments fail to meet a satisfactory answer since free will is to act without another controlling your person. Saying that with one's own brain cells says my cells control myself with myself. Otherwise you have to appeal to god on that one, or that you make the fallacy that the brain is computer by overlooking the fact human beings are what program them; i.e. control their processing against their will.
CosmoShidan not quite, I'm saying your cells produce your experience of will. It's rather like cancer - it comes from your cells, but nobody would give themselves cancer. Similarly, your brain controls you; you don't control your brain.
I suppose there isn't free will within the model that the self is controlled by the brain. But the fact is that we are the brain, and we are the processes that determine our actions, therefore, isn't it ourselves who act? I guess the whole debate of free will/no free will seems silly to me.
"Free will" is the term that people use to describe their lack of understanding of neural functioning. "Free will" is the illusion of "control" caused by monentary indecision. You place a couple objects down on a scale balance that rocks back and forth a bit before one side settles down lower as the heavier of the two. Does the rocking of the scale balance represent "freedom" in the "decision" that the scales are going to make? You have mixed feelings in many decisions that you make, but ultimately one set of neural pathways will prove to be the most heavily reinforced.
The neuroscientific approach to this is very interesting and may indeed provide irrefutable evidence to support an answer to this question. However, you can use basic logic to answer the question of whether one could have done otherwise at any given moment. As he said, the brain has to work in such a way that, given everything physically being the same up to the moment of decision, that the brain could do one thing or another.The answer to this is clearly "no." The workings of the brain are purely chemical, electrical and mechanical in nature. The state of the brain at any given moment is the result of all influences, conditions and experiences before that moment since the big bang that have cumulatively resulted in the current physical arrangement of atoms, molecules, cells and electrical signals of the brain. There is no non-physical force or energy acting upon it. As a result, the brain works in a deterministic manner and all functions, including decisions, are decided by the structure and chemical and electrical processes of the brain at any given moment. Given those exact same conditions, it's impossible for them to have done otherwise without some non-physical force acting upon it, which would break a number of natural laws. But let's suppose that it could do different. Given the exact same conditions, history, influences, preferences, etc. your decisions at any moment could be different. All things being the same, you could choose to do A or B with no bearing at all on the physical mechanics and processes of the brain. It's some higher non-physical ability to make a decision. What does it make its decision based upon then? Is it based upon your personal preferences, habits, experiences, etc.? Or is it not determined upon them at all and, rather, is random. How could it not be purely random if not based upon anything? Is a random decision any more free than a determined one? Sure, you "could have done otherwise" with a random decision, but it hardly even a "decision" then, is it? It's certainly not *your* decision. So, regardless of how you look at it, I would assert that true free will is logically impossible. If I had scientific evidence to back that claim up, that would be great, but I really don't need it to form a valid opinion and an argument on the subject.
The deterministic universe died in 1927. Quantum mechanics, and, in particular, the uncertainty principle, imparts a probability on events but it does not guarantee them. You could be doing a laser experiment, for instance, and you could calculate a probability for the individual photons to hit your target at a certain rate. Then you could fire the first photon and that photon could end up hitting the floor, or the ceiling, or going outside and hitting a bird, or end up on a path to the other side of the universe. The implications for our brain are staggering. If a thought begins as a single electron imparting a signal, then the number of interactions that electron could make are immense. And since the interactions of the electron over time is probabilistic, that means the single interaction required for the thought to begin is random (probability only applies to multiple events, since a single event can just as easily turn out to be any possible result). So I think your second paragraph is more representative of the true state of free will. It's not free will, but it is somewhat random.
Gregory Evans I can agree with that. The question then becomes whether the number and nature of interactions on a quantum level from the beginning of the decision making process to its conclusion could vary enough to have a significant effect on the macro-level of any given decision. That would require experimentation and research, probably. Regardless, if not strictly deterministic, at best decisions are guided randomness. Whether the decision is determined by the conscious memories and preferences, the underlying physical structure, mechanisms and electrical signals of the brain, or the random outcome of quantum interactions (or, likely a combination of all of these), the act of decision is either a determined process or a somewhat random one, neither of which constitute free will in the sense people like to think of it.
Gregory Evans Did your brain choose where the photon went? No, you have no control over the subatomic randomness of electron interactions. You don't impose your "free will" over the randomness of events in the universe, thus "free will" still doesn't exist truley.
Edward Rubin You misunderstood him. He wasn't suggesting that true free will existed nor that the brain had any control over those random events. He was rebutting my argument for a deterministic nature of choice, suggesting, instead, that there was an element of randomness, not solely deterministic interactions. But he agreed, as well, that that randomness doesn't allow for free will either.
2:10 That account of "could've done otherwise" is reminiscent of a philosopher saying "We know it's possible in practice, but we want to know if it's possible in principle". A sufficient and necessary sense of the saying is "could've done otherwise" in roughly the same circumstances.
The fact that walls are solid and that objects have colour are illusions too. Are you going to start trying to walk through walls or dismiss art as pointless because of this? Just as free will, these illusions are beneficial, pleasant, and convincing enough that knowledge or ignorance of the reality makes no difference one way or another. It only, as Xorran said, helps us understand the world in which we live that much more, ultimately leading to knowledge and developments which directly improve our lives and the lives of those who come after us.
Interestingly we largely function as though free will does not exist already. We regularly improve our ability to predict the actions of individuals, we regularly improve our ability to correct socially unacceptable behaviors, each of these things requires an element of determinism to be useful. So if someone proves free will does not exist it would only really work to reinforce systems we are already using and maybe push more research on understanding how we function. Whether it exists of not free will seems less useful than concepts of determinism that have allowed up better understand of peoples actions from how they learn, to why they commit crime, ways we can help fight addictions, change or reinforce habits, etc. Strong evidence against free will wouldn't even be enough to stop the argument about whether or not it exists because some people would just never let go of the idea that there is something more to the mechanism by which they choose their actions. Even people that believe in determinism often still use phrases like "Which should I choose?" even though they interpret that more as a system by which pros and cons statistically compared to needs and values before and inevitable result is attained. In short, very little would change.
Although his criticisms are not entirely invalid, it does seem that he is overtly relying in his position on the fact that we lack complete and accurate information: like knowing exactly what subconscious activity in the brain is, vs what would pass for a final decision. To sum up why his position itself is almost entirely invalid: events can either be determined or random. For almost any functional invocation of free will, a person would have to be in control of determinism (deciding by themselves) or randomness (choosing what accidentally pops in their head) - and neither one seems possible.
just coz u cant explain something, it doesnt meant its random. those are ussupported poitns. we think killing flies doesn't affect world. well can u operate without one finger? probably could. but that wouldn't be a complete body of urs.
It is hard to tell the difference between a determined outcome and a random one. In a determined universe all the women I meet before I marry one are already chosen. In a non-determined universe all the women I meet before I marry one happen at random. The outcomes of this process are identical in both worlds. The experience would seem like free will is true. After all, I definitely made a great choice in who I married. If I was unhappily married, I might sway to the determined side. Or, that I can't think a thought before I think it. That might make my experience of thought coming into my head feel determined. Or not. So, being that this subjectivity of experience is also apparently true, e.g., I can feel one way or the other, we need to search deeper for answers. And I would argue that we have. There is no free will in physics or in any of the fundamentals of reality. Free will appears to be a higher order emergent property of consciousness which puts the answer square in the realm of psychology. In other words, free will exists, but only in particular context. Same as baseball. Baseball does not exist in the fundamental laws of physics or in the constituent parts that make for higher order phenomenon. But baseball does, in fact, exist. It just exists within a different framework. That framework is conceptual and perceptual. So, free will works well within a societal framework. Making 'choices' to eat Chinese instead of Italian is perfectly reasonable way to talk about such things. If a person runs over another person with their car we demand they take responsibility for their actions. This is a reasonable way to conduct a society. But, on a fundamental level of reality we have no evidence of free will. Given knowledge of the state of all the particles in the universe, we could know what the previous state or future state was or will be. Free will is not a fundamental reality.
Not sure in what way baseball is different from fundamental reality which can be analogous with free will. Freedom entails independence, baseball is structured.
Alex Spevak Oh...sorry I was saying that free will 'exists' in the same way that baseball does. You sort of missed that whole point probably because my explanation was inarticulate. Free will in not found in atoms or molecules. That is why it doesn't exist in fundamental reality the way you don't find baseball in atoms and molecules. Free will is found as a concept in macroscopic reality just like baseball. I'm saying that 'free will' exists. But it is limited to context. "Free will" is appropriate language to use to explain subjective reality but not objective reality. I suppose that the deeper reason why I would argue this is because people tend to fall into a trap. That trap is from a false dilemma which might lead to delusion and sometimes fatalism. You're stuck either inventing an imaginary supernatural soul which has free will, or concluding that everything is determined in which people imagine they have no responsibility for anything. Because determinism seems to be the case throughout reality but free will is a reasonable language to use in social context, I'm saying that it is appropriate to believe free will exists if 'free will' is an emergent phenomenon of more fundamental phenomenon.
Then you support the idea that free will is subjectively real, but concede that it is not objectively real? It should be possible to explain any emergent property. What exactly is the explanation for free will - that you feel like you have choice?
Problem is that the old concept of free will implies some supernatural force for the will to not be subject to the laws of nature. It makes no sense to scientifically study supernatural phenomena. So it makes sense to redefine free will so it does not include supernatural elements. This way it can fit in a deterministic (as in the past determines the future, be it probabilistically or in a superdeterministic way) universe. Free will would be the set of processes in the brain associated with decision making and/or how it is being these processes. It effectively can be called will since those are related to our decisions and it can be called free, since even if it is not supernaturally free, it is free in the sense that those processes occur in a system with degrees of freedom, even if each specific particle has an already determined path or probability distribution.
I don't like his definition of free will. He makes free will sound like randomness. You have free will - not if you would make a different decision given the same exact set of events - but would you make a same decision given different event. The whole point of free will is that you are independent from your inputs. You freely decide what is in the best interest to you. Given the same circumstances you should make the same decision regardless of whether your mind is encoded in neurons or silicone. To me that is the free will.
hamobu Indeed. Also, if you would make different decisions, then there's a real question to be asked about what sense in which the choices are "yours", because apparently they're not dependent on your personality or desires - and even more shockingly, it appears to be independent of what's going on around you, which isn't exactly a good thing.
ilikethisnamebetter There is no conflict there. If I see a car coming towards me, I will move out of the way. The fact that I know exactly what I will do in a given situation tells me that I have free will, and not the opposite.
hamobu I think you're missing the point. You _don't_ know what you will do in any given situation. Of course you will move out of the way of the car (a self-preserving robot would do that), but will you "choose" a striped or a spotted tie? (assuming you like ties..). One can imagine a more sophisticated version of the Libet experiment that could predict which "choice" you would make BEFORE you are conscious of it. A _conscious_ choice would be required for actual free will (despite what Mele, and others, sometimes suggest). If consciousness only comes after the "choice", then there is no real choice at all, and no free will.
ilikethisnamebetter Choosing something is a process. The fact that the process takes some time does not mean that free will does not exist. You are saying that free will ought to be instantaneous, and I don't see why. Yes we can probe to see where the process is going before it gets there, but that does not meant that there is no rational mind making decisions (although in case of choosing a tie there might not be since person may not care about the decision and just pick one randomly) Question is: am I the captain of my ship or just a driftwood that is carried by currents.
In the XIX century the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a entire book about this subject: On the Freedom of the Will (german: Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens); I have read almost all of his works, and in my humble opinion, this one is, maybe, his life's magnum opus. Grossly speaking, for the German philosopher, we don't have an free will, because all of our actions are conditioned or maybe even determined by constrains and/or situations that came before us, or our actions. An very trivial example could be the lack of physical free will: A person could want to fly, because he/she in exercising his intellectual free will, has determined that flying would be the easiest way to travel; but as a person's body lacks in physical free will (we don't have wings!) he/she wouldn't be able to exercise his intentions.
While the experiments don't conclusively prove free will, the unknown aspects of the results do not rule out a lack of free will. The results are what we would expect in a deterministic world with no free will. However an even easier experiment which conclusively refutes the possibility of free will is to simply examine the thought process in your mind. Do you create the thoughts that come into your mind? Considering these are one of the primary drivers for decisions, then if not how can free will exist? Choices are the result of past experiences, genetics and your brain's ability to solve problems (which is also a genetic issue). I would have thought this would be common knoweldge among philosophers.
***** Dude whether or not you agree with it, it's not stupid. I mean Paul Davies even argues for it in one of his books, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that the past can "load up" given certain interpretations of QM.
***** Put a proverbial cat in a box along with a video camera. When you pull the camera out, will the tape be blank? If not which history will it have recorded? The dead cat or the live one?
Arrogance might, yeah. That said, I separate information the brain receives from the action processes. If I react to an optical illusion, that's my choice. It is 'influenced' by the illusion, yes, but in the end, the way I've taught myself to think is still operating just as it does.
Hm. I suppose the disconnect here is that I represented my thoughts poorly. Cultivation does not cause the feeling of free will. The way you have tailored your thought processes causes the feeling of free will. Everyone has their own way of thinking, from Penn Jillette to Queen Elizabeth to you and I. My choosing the world 'cultivate' was relevant to my point that it's up to us how we define our thought processes. Because if we don't like them, we can then change them.
The ability to resist impulse is not only proof that mind is master over the body, but also master over the brain. If you're incapable of resisting impulse, much like an animal, you do not have free will. Discipline is the practice of free will.
Free will is the ability to act without past actions or Randomness determining your actions. No matter has been observed to act in such a way therefore the matter that composes the human brain must not either.
+Übermensch I agree that materialistic reductionism forces your conclusion. If you accept that, then you have to convince yourself that free will and everything that follows (moral accountability, meaningfulness of relationships, etc.) are all illusions. I think this is premature. If only based on our strong subjective experience, we have to also consider that materialistic reductionism may not apply universally (namely conscious human experience)
well right now it is inderteminism that is the correct theory simply because havent figured how the electron of the atom function. but i do believe determinism is true to the core because we see so many logic thing and proven logic thing in nature.
Sam Harris summed up the argument quite well. It goes something like this: "most of physics is deterministic on the macro scale, we know the laws very well when it comes to non quantum actions. Every atom in the universe acts according to physics, and your brain is not exempt. This means that if your mind is acting in a non-quantum way, then your actions are predetermined based off of the stimulus that it receives. But, if our neurons act with a bit of quantum uncertainty, fine! who cares, you can not control the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, this means that on a macro scale, you lack free will, and on a quantum scale, its pure randomness of electrons, neither of these lead to free will" Argument over.
Sam Harris is incoherent on free will. He spends all of chapter 4 waffling back and forth between "now you have it" and "now you don't". Makes you dizzy! Anyway, free will is not "freedom from causation". That's an irrational concept. And no one really expects it! Just ask anyone why they chose A instead of B and they'll happily tell you why A was the best choice. Free will is when we decide for ourselves what we will do, when free of external coercion (literal or figurative "gun to the head" scenarios) or other undue influence (hypnosis, mental illness, authoritative command, etc). And it is compatible with determinism, as in: (A) My choice was caused by my own purposes and my own reasons, therefore it was my own free will. (B) My choice was caused by my own purposes and my own reasons, therefore it was causally inevitable. This only gets mucked up by "hard" determinism, which is an invalid version of determinism because it selectively chooses to ignore human causal agency. For a more detailed treatment, see marvinedwards.me/2017/08/19/determinism-whats-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/
The first time I heard Sam Harris saying that free will was an illusion, I trusted him because I really looked up to him and trusted his knowledge. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. So I started thinking to myself "I feel like drinking some beer, I know I was trying to cut back on the alcohol.. but it's what I feel like doing.. and the way Sam puts it.. everything is predetermined and I have no control over my actions. I guess I'll just drink as much as I want and not worry about it because if I end up quitting later or not, it's already predetermined and beyond my control so I'll just do whatever comes natural and sit back and watch the story of my life unfold. I took the same attitude with exercise as well and my diet. And now.. I'm an alcoholic, I've gained 60 lbs, and I feel like crap and I have no energy and never exercise or eat right. Everything is falling apart. Then I discovered Jordan Peterson who talks about personal responsibility, and now I'm trying to turn my life around. The whole "Free will is an illusion" philosophy ruined my life, but taking responsibility for my future is sorting me out. But I've got a long way to go to get back to where I was.
Yes the universe operates on terms of an understood set of laws. But that does not disclude free will because all that says is that free will have to operate within a certain framework of understanding. Saying that laws indicates that beings with a conscious must exhibit certain behavior is just a human interpretation of what natural laws are.
The universe appears completely deterministic, even down to the quantum level. The brain is a machine, it will act through cause and effect. I don't see any room for free will. It would appear that free will would break the laws of physics, for example forcing an electron to go where it wasn't supposed to go, without a cause. Well, I don't see how we could control the movement of an electron without using a cause. (?) It's a bizarr idea that we would have free will.
The problem with that is in order for the claim, "Free-will does not exist" to be true, it requires you to deny consciousness (consciousness implies free-will), the problem with that is it requires consciousness to deny consciousness. In other words, the argument that "free-will does not exist" is self-refuting.
177SCmaro Why does consciousness imply free will? We don't know what consciousness really is, because we don't have a theory of the brain yet. It isn't self-refuting since you can't demonstrate that your premises are correct. Only if you are correct in your premises will what I said be self-refuting.
antiHUMANDesigns You really need me to explain to you why consciousness implies free-will? Okay then.... it's pretty simple really, ask yourself this, how could a non-conscious thing make a choice (i.e. exercise free-will)? It can't. Consciousness is required to make a choice, therefore it implies free-will. For you to make the claim "free-will does not exist" requires you to be conscious of and choose to make that claim (if you weren't conscious you could not understand any of the concepts _IN_ _ORDER_ _TO_ _MAKE_ _THE_ _CLAIM_), ergo, you do have free-will, thus the claim is self-refuting.
177SCmaro How can a non-conscious thing make a choice? Like this: if (hunger >75%) eat_food(); That is a pretty generic computer programming example. That is how you make a program make a choice based on what it knows about something. And a computer program is not conscious. ("If more than 75% hungry, then eat food") Neither does it have free will, because a computer program is completely deterministic. There is absolute *nothing* showing that a brain would be any different in this regard.
antiHUMANDesigns "How can a non-conscious thing make a choice? Like this: if (hunger >75%) eat_food();" "a computer program is completely deterministic." You just refuted your own example. If the computer is deterministic it is a non-conscious thing _NOT_ making a choice, i.e. deterministic. Your example of a non-conscious deterministic thing making a choice is, like your argument, self-refuting and thus not valid. The reason should be self-evident, basically, if it's "determined", it's not choice-making. -duh So you still have the problem of the self-refuting argument of "free-will does not exist". Moreover, conflating non-conscious things with conscious beings is obviously fallacious. Just because a machine can function in some ways _like_ a human brain does not make it no different than a human brain. That would be like saying the leg of a table and a human leg are no different because they both support the weight of something.
Think you have free will? Ok, use your free will to perform the following test. Think of a type of music that you hate. Or even better, think of a song that you hate. Now put on that song and use your freewill to make it your favorite song in the world from now on. Make that song the kind of song that you listen to over and over and show to all your friends like you most likely have with your current favorite song. This exercise can only end positively because if it works, you now have a new favorite song to love. Go ahead, use your freedom of will to perform this action. If you don't want to, and that is your excuse, use your free will to want to perform this test. If you cannot, you do not have freewill. If you can, you still do not have free will because you just did what I told you to do. Where is the freedom in being moved or not moved for reasons that we cannot identify?
ThIs is not what free will is. Free will is not magical an you can't use it to change your preferences. Free will is being able to choose your next action. Sometimes you can't and you react autonomously, sometimes you can.
Let me see, demonstrate my free-will, by following your commands? Erm, no. I will, however exploit my free-will to say this, "HA! you thought I was going to insult you, because that is the predictable behaviour on the internet. And I could have done that, but I CHOSE not to."
Without cause and effect there’s no way we CAN have free will because without cause there can be no effect (effect as in choice followed by action). You are your brain and your body and rationality is only a fraction of it.
Attempting to refute causality won't defend free will. Uncaused decisions cannot be attributed to anything or anyone. In fact, acausality makes free will even more impossible.
The amazing work of Dr. Adrian Raine shows us that our behavior is determined through genetics, learning, and other biological factors. The prefrontal cortex function determines whether someone who has no caring in them kills someone else for looking at him the wrong way. If the prefrontal cortex works well then that person will reason that he will go to prison for lashing out and therefore he will not lash out. Someone without this reasoning ability will lash out without giving it any thought at all. Those are also people with the socalled "Warrior" gene. Then the size of the amygdala plays a huge role in compassion for another living being. The outlet of oxytocin plays a huge role in compassion as well. There are many different domino effects going on in a brain which determine behavior. Dr. Robert Sapolsky talks about this as well. But, we can train our compassion ability.
P1) We have a will (wants/desires). P2) Our wants and desires are formed by external stimuli (prior causes). C) Causality is required for a will (of any kind) to exist. Therein lies the problem with applying acausality as a prerequisite for the existence of _free_ will; it entails the commision of the logical fallacy of proving too much, as doing so necessarily negates the possibility of the existence of _any_ will.
@@Chefshitpiece From whence are our genetics derived? _Your_ genetics are derived from those of _your parents._ Thus, your genetics, too, are both prior causes, as well as having origins that are external to _you._
@@Chefshitpiece Sure, but ultimately, ALL of our decisions are contigent, at the very least, on our own birth, which is, in and of itself, a prior cause that was necessarily external to ourselves. Without this external prior cause, we could make no decisions at all, and therefore, we would possess no will of any kind. It comes down to a root cause analysis. The root cause _is_ necessarily external and prior to any decisions we make.
@@Chefshitpiece My objection isn't to hard determinsm. Rather, it is to the notion that hard determinsm is incompatible with free will when then majority of people talk about free will, they aren't referring to _literal_ free will in the Libertarian sense anyway.
So everything being the same from the beginning of the universe, could he have decided not to say anything at all instead of telling us about free will?
The first definition of free will that is offered, "regular free will," or perhaps "the legal system's version of free will" includes discussion of a "medical condition" being present. However, if the medical condition is "being human," and being human means being determined, then there is no free will.
I really dislike this "philosophers" trying to get into neuroscience and making things up. He said at the beginning of the video that humans do have free will, the rest of the video is just an attempt to shift the burden of proof, ie: you can't disprove it therefore it exists.
He only said courts say that people have free will. There's no general "free will" claim to be proven. Philosophers have different accounts of the concept with different claims. Some are impartial to science.
Jon theGreat Actually, the thing is, free will is a concept that is in the realm of the discussion of moral issues that cannot be grounded in facts about the world, or else its leading into eugenics.
He is making an important distinction between libertarian free-will and compatiblist free-will. He thinks we have the later, not the former. Philosophers need to go into other disciplines, they tend to be smarter, thus are better for interpreting the data, or drawing conclusions from the data, then the scientist are.
There are three impossible freedoms: freedom from causation, freedom from oneself, and freedom from reality. Therefore free will never implies any of these. The "free" in free will means "free from coercion". It means we authentically decide for ourselves, free from being forced to choose or act against our will. If the will were free from causation then it could never implement its intent. If the will were free from oneself then it would be someone else's will. If the will were free from reality then it would not be a will, but rather only a wish within a dream.
On the contrary - the fear of facing the truly disturbing implications of the absence of free will probably explains why so many people are so desperate to hang on to it.
whynottalklikeapirat Whether or not an argument is "petty" has no impact on whether its sound or not. Your counter-argument is too emotional. When I tell someone you have a conscious, and you have control over the signals your brain sends to make your actions, and that YOU are responsible for consequences, what other conclusion should I come to when that triggers them? Get a job.
What if the -500 millisecond "burst" is the moment when people have somewhat the same realization as Mele reports here? The "no urge is coming, what should I do? Maybe I will just wait a little bit and say 'Now!'" thingy, and the -200 millisecond time at which people report first being aware of their intention to flex is really when the consciously decided to say "Now!" - after all, the time here is the same it took people to react on the reaction time test: around 200 milliseconds.
As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". To claim that free will exists when we appear to live in a materialistic world is an extraordinary claim and yet the evidence for it is non-existent. A lot of words were spoken quite eloquently but no evidence for free will was presented.
15brent I think the extraordinary claim is that free will does not exist. We use it many times every day, it is plainly obvious in every major decision you make. I would like to see the evidence for the contrary. Example - Given a set input a computer has only one out put every time, thus no free will. The human mind, however, given the same input would have hundreds, maybe thousands of outputs to contemplate and then choose which one is best for it, thus free will.
15brent Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is, in itself, an extraordinary claim. Sagan was a good scientist, but his philosophizing was nothing short of awful.
Philosophy has a habit of getting itself confused with science. Objectivity, nihilism, and free will are all considered philosophy, but the reality is that they are all near indisputable facts of the universe, derived through observation/science.
Aaron Z That's incredibly question begging. You can't deduce nihilism, objectivity, or free will from the universe. You're viewing the universe through a philosophical lens to get to any of that. This is why science doesn't and can't, by its legitimate methods, pronounce on a whole slew of things.
TheRazgrizBlaze Yes, it can be. Scientific advance has answered some philosophical questions. However, most philosophical questions are completely outside the realm of science.
TheRazgrizBlaze Science will never be able to adjudicate on questions of meaning, purpose, value, and morality. There are questions outside the scope of science. See Peter Medawar's The Limits of Science.
How could we ever think there's free will? I mean after a pattern was made in the brain, and we stop time to ask whether it will decide one of 2 options, it will require you to ask the question when you have exactly 50- 50 % for any decision to be made by the given pattern to that point. If it is not exactly 50% then, like in any balancing device the decision with more probability will be taken. That will be the decision, no matter how little better chance that decision had. Now, this exact 50% chance to both sides is infinitely small, meaning the brain is mostly pre- programmed and most decisions are easily predictable, and other decisions depend on the current chemical/physical state of the brain. And even in this super rare condition of 50-50 chance, you can not call it "free will" because at this confusing metal state, it will take an external intervention to actually make such a decision. In which case it wasn't actually your decision but the influence from the external source which made you pick that decision.
There has been many test and those test have been passed,.. then swepted under the rug by the controllers of the mainstream media, the institution of science, governments, schools, churches, religion, the 1% and all the people who live in fear... not me though. I've had an out of body experience and I'm not afraid of you, so I'm telling you now. All 5 senses are located all over the astral body, like if you touch something you can smell it and when a person is in this state, they feel wonderful.
***** ohh..astral projection right? yeah i ve heard about this...it happens to me once i am dreaming...i enter the astral plane the ethereal plane the outalands the shadow plane every night! so you are a noob compared to me.pppffffhhh pls!
IAmValenwind i love when people on youtube act like they know to whom they speak... i study and perform Mentalism since 2005 so pls dont teach me about senses.Mindreading,precognition,zap hypnotism,neurolinguistic programming,dual reality are some of the aspects of my performance acts.Harassing the brain power is a field in deep research from me the last decade.I have ended up to personal conclusions the last 1 year after all the knowledge research and practice i ve done but i share them only to people who are in the same field with me.And so far i see that you are not this kind of man/woman
Screwyouguysimgoinghome yes, the key word in your sentence is "act"... as opposed to reality. i am quite familiar with all the things you speak of, and in particular use hypnosis and NLP in my intimate life as well, hypnosis in particular since the late 80's, but if you think any of those things have any basis in woo, you are sorely mistaken, and really ought to go back to school.
i disagree. it is freedom that allows change, not a regress into causality. does physics really establish causality as the fundamental process in nature? the principle of sufficient reason; is it true?
maybe you should demonstrate that by stating why you chose this word combination as opposed to an other one, such as saying "free will definitely exists" as opposed to what you've wrote.
I agree with your criticism of Cosmo's comment. However... if we don't have free will then what are we even doing? We are able to comprehend that without free will, this conversation is useless, but also that we will be unable to decide to discontinue or continue dialoging. But that's rubbish, of course we have free will, anyone can see that.
"if we don't have free will then what are we even doing?" Good question...I don't know neither..lets find out. You can't dismiss something just because it would make you uncomfortable or confused. This issue does make me uncomfortable and confused (duh) but this should occupy no room in the argument of whether or not we have free will. This is all I'm saying. Trust me bro, I know no more about the subject than you or the next guy but I know that dismissing the argument based on the obvious lack of understanding is a no-go to me.
Nice to see a better analysis of the Libet experiments. If the subject is asked to "decide" to "randomly" flex a muscle, how can they accomplish such a self-contradictory task? It may all be a simple matter of suggestibility, an attempt to give the person in charge what they want. So I like to pose a different question, "Were the student subjects in the experiment required to participate to get credit for their class? Or were they truly volunteers, allowed to choose for themselves of their own free will?" The answer is irrelevant! The point is that we all know what we ordinarily mean by the words "free will". And it has nothing to do with anything supernatural.
Bahaha right back at ya! Zero free will means that although our choices are involuntary, or not fundamentally ours, we are nevertheless often causally determined to be motivated.
If the material world depends on human consciousness, and involves the type of randomness that we see in quantum experiments (with wave function collapse), there is no reason to deny the free will as an emergent outcome of such a process.
There is no evidence at all that the material world depends on consciousness. Quite the contrary actually. If you ingest some material known as Lsd that material will change your consciousness quite a bit, not the other way around. The idea that consciousness collapses the wave function in the double slit experiments is a misunderstanding. It's not actual human observation that collapses the wave function, it is our measurement that does because when we measure activity at the quantam level we have to use certain means to get the measurment which interferes with the wave function.
So here's a question, isn't there technology that will show the areas of the brain that are active in regards to this experiment, and not just when the muscle burst is about to happen? Meaning something that is measuring the time and the activity the entire duration of the experiment in relation to them coming to the idea of moving their wrist and then the choice to do so. This removed from any sort of muscle burst being the "triggering factor" of data collection. Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, however, that would be data I would be highly interested in seeing.
This issue is much more simple than most people realize. In order to make a "decision" to do something, you must want to do it. (I started writing this because I "wanted" to.) Wanting something is simply the arising into consciousness of the feeling of desire. If that desire is strong enough, it will get you to do something. If it isn't, it won't. Now where does desire come from? Do we consciously create it? Hardly. If we could create desire, we would all be walking around in a state of bliss all the time, creating a strong enough desire to deal with anything we had to do, that we didn't want to do. And that would be that. But we aren't all in a state of bliss all the time, are we? So we don't consciously create desire; it simply arises on its own when it does (like all feelings and all thoughts do,) and we happily follow, if at all possible. Free will is an illusion in that we have to do what we desire to do, if that desire is strong enough. When a conflict arises, for example, when we want to go do two or more things that are all happening in different places at the same time, we always head in the direction of the strongest desire. Right now, you are reading these words because you have a stronger desire to that, literally, than anything else. Its really that simple. But if you think your "choice" IS what you desire, think again. Watch your motivations and you will discover that you cannot choose to do anything that you don't already want to do. Try changing your sexuality (right now.) See, you can't, because you don't already want to! Desire comes first, then action. The idea that we "choose" first, is simply not the case, and is only believed by anyone because we all were told when we were kids that, "We all have free will."
And just to add onto that, if we could all conveniently choose to desire to do every chore we had to do, then it would be the desire for that convenience and bliss that would be the cause of our action. So even if everyone COULD consciously decide to like everything, there would still be no room for free will.
"In order to make a "decision" to do something, you must wan't to do it". False as you can do stuff you really don't want to do and can halt yourself from doing stuff you really feel like doing(temptations). . . . .
The more important question is can we Develop free will using technology... imagine we have technology to travel back in time and live exactly the same life, but slightly different - and do this millions of times. Does this give us free will? Also if we go into virtual reality and can reprogram the laws of physics that determine us in the simulation... and we can reprogram pretty much our genetics and every aspect of our environment, does this give us free will? We can rewind the virtual reality simulation to have millions of choices living the same life, but slightly different - so is this free will? Can free will be "invented" in our universe even though we may not have free will now? Is it predeterminted that free will is developed in a universe that originally had no free will? Paradox and recursion problems here.. Science and computing can answer these questions... Not philosophy.
a little vaccuum within reality... that vaccuum still exist within reality... Either way wouldn't that server that holds us all and that virtual environment still be bound to a finite reality? all processes that exist within that pseudo virtual reality are still constraining the individual from doing things... unless you would have some type of infinite reality... but then that would mean your holding some type of environment that is more massive than what the actual universe would hold... and that's not something that is looked at as a possibility...
For those that dont believe in free will, just remember, when your partner cheats behind your back. If free will doesnt exist, it seems absurd to lay blame on your partner.
+Rostos1978 Why is it always something immoral with you people? Technically every praise you have is absurd to give your partner as well. >This is because you are talking in terms of "ultimately" without the *illusion*.
+ShouVertica That is correct...But does any human live that way? So basically, to deny free will, one is suggesting that all of humanity is living under a delusion.
Rostos1978 But would I blame you for your actions or the things that caused you to do that? You are thinking short-term and close-minded. (just like the US justice system). Sure, you bear the responsibility for pulling the trigger, but what about all the events that caused you to do that? Did you spontaneously get up and decided "oh I should murder someone today!"? If you did, how did you know how to murder people, what made that mental state of yours happen? I already stated the *illusion* of free will exist within humanity. I did not say that humanity should cast aside that illusion nor would they be able to.(without an absurd amount of knowledge)
Yes. Because measuring the time delay between between deciding to move your wrist and your wrist actually moving is a clear indicator of whether or not we have free will. Congratulations, scientists. You did it. You really did.
I saw a guy do the same type of experiment but he had to flex either his left or right hand and he did it in a MRI machine and the guy watching his brain on the screen said he could tell what hand he would flex 6 or 7 seconds before he actually did it. I don't remember the name of it but I remember I typed in something like unconscious knows before we do.
There is no way to verify that someone could have done differently. This video was produced 11 years ago. Much progress has been made on how the brain works. Some philosophers and neuroscientists (Dennett, Harris, Sapolsky, e.g.) claim that humans have little to no free will.
4:12 he says that EEG is measuring electrical conductivity on the scalp. That's nonsense, he's thinking of the galvanic skin response measurement, which is not at all what EEG measures. EEG measures actual electric fields created by the firing of the neurons underneath the scalp
Or it could be that the eye to mind has a delay as well. Or that humans are bad at judging the placement of hands of clocks moving so fast?Or many other factors...
It's almost like he said, I see free will like thinking about something before doing it, In other words, planing a head in time, even if it's only planing 1 second in advance. Like "Now im gona move my hand." But it's not free will that the thought itself came up in my head. But that seems more like a filosofical question about the existense of time itself. And is not really a matter needed to discuss, since it doesn't do any good. More then helping/treat more criminals insted of punnishing them.
But what about the left/ right mouse button clicking..how can the neuroscientists predict that..with around 90% accuracy..2 to 3 seconds before we make the particular click
Free Will : I can choose A or B. I flip a coin. Head = A, Tails = B. I made a free choose based on a random outcome. All these arguments are just building a "straw man".
HOW WE BE SURE THAT READINESS POTENTIAL REALLY CORRELATE WITH DECISION MAKING? COULD IT NOT POSSIBLE THAT THEY ARE THE CORRELATES OF TENSION, ANXIETY OF A SUBJECT IN AN EXPERIMENTAL SET UP?
+4991544 No, you cannot choose to be anything other than what you are. That is why many self-help books are useless. They do not take into account factors such as determinism, randomness, genes, misfortunes, etc.
+Steve Kennedy Then you have no choice. But, determinism does not exclude the possibility that help from a book is an inevitable consequence of certain prior causes. And more than randomness, genes and misfortune, I would submit that complexity, unpredictability, incomplete information and wrong inferences are the real culprits where self help books are concerned.
Well, we shouldn' t blame him, he didn't choose to muddy the waters ;-). but he does say that we don't have good evidence for something else that explains freewill, yet there are decades of research that show prediction, verification, and replication of past consequences of behavior relative to current actions/choices
The mid-grade level is actually undesirable behavior. Having inconsistent behavior at that level would actually be something to avoid. The regular free will, what we talk about in courts, is simply chaotic intelligence. Every mammal has this. The mid-grade is true random chaotic intelligence. But thus would be unlikely to ever cause more desirable results, in the same way that aiming a gun less accurately is unlikely to improve your effectiveness in combat unless you can't adapt to systematic error, which would make you no longer intelligent. And the premium level, if you will, is a cop out. It just moves a deterministic+random intelligent process outside of what we call the universe and says that now you have free will. Of course, if that deterministic process worked the same, and the universe were the same, then this free will is still an illusion.
So the decision came later? What causes the decision? You? For what reason did you do it? What caused the reason? What caused the process by which people make decisions? You can't escape causation.
Not certain you made your point clear. So what is the empirical evidence of free will? I realize it truly "feels" like I make my own decisions, but I can "feel" the earth is flat and the heavens rotate around us. Feeling does not mean evidence. The gift of "free will' suggests a spiritual higher creative power to "give' the gift. And here we go down the path to greater questions.
What he is trying to say is that the dimension of the intention is of a significance. Flexing a hand doesn’t require a great strength of will. So the Libet experiment is not applicable for the whole range of “acts of will”. The Libet Experiment is interesting but merely as basic, simple studies of this art. It’s just the beginning...
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Cause and Effect: Belief in a strictly materialistic Darwinian Evolution leads one to believe, albeit falsely, that there is no Free Will. And if there is no Free Will, then there is no Right and Wrong and no Moral Law. However, this belief is completely contrary to everything that is practiced and observed in nature, humanity, and the cosmos regarding cause and effect. This line of reasoning is what led to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc and is the hidden underlying ideology / worldview justifying and directing many countries' Social Darwinian based foreign and domestic policies to the present. The Social Darwinian Materialistic Ideology / Worldview (Survival of the Fittest among nations, i.e. the continuous lawless struggle for resource wealth and world rule without regard to human moral / ethical standards or International / U.S. Laws) is the Root Cause of modern era World Wars and Perpetual Wars.
"Do I believe in free will?
I have no Choice"
Dillinger R. The absence of free will is not not having a choice it’s not being able to choose what choice you have
@Rad Derry I like that one.
Hitchens
@@oWiKeDx Sam Harris.
That's good
What is "you"? Are you your brain, your whole body, or your experiences? What is consciousness exactly?
Yes.
You are your body and mind/personality. The body is the source of your mind. Not separated.
This is the correct question in free will problem. You r your body in relation to the exterior world. Therefore it's impossible to be free because you r just a part of universe even the universe is indeterministic.
@@Viktor-ej9ss I am agreed. Therefore you r free like the freedom of any electron. You r a part of universe after all. Am I right?
@@logicalone1968 I think its to easy to assume that, that’s the same argument for God, „ I don’t understand how the Univers could even exist so it must be god“ we don’t even know why we have consciousness, if every decision would be unconscious we wouldn’t need consciousness. But we have it, that’s the only thing about the Univers we can actually know for our self. So i think we should jump to conclusions to early.
Me: "OK brain, you have to decide when to flex the wrist... or you have to decide whether to push A or B.
Brain: "I don't give a shit. It's too much work to decide something which doesn't matter. I'll pass it down to the subconscious."
Subconscious: "I don't give a shit, I will load a pre-set pattern for 2 variables (be it "A vs B" or "flex now vs not yet") You will have your pattern fed to your conscious before you know it".
Me: "Thank you brain, that sounds like the most comfortable and efficient way to handle this stupid test".
Does free will exist? Yes, unless married. Chuckle....
lol
Lol
Married is not a word. It's a sentence.
@@RichLuciano1 - Another gem.
1Skeptik1- A gem.
Look at all these youtube kids here being smarter than a professor of philosophy.
That's deep thoughts you still young
like TH-camrs to comprehend it .
Yeah, expert shmecxpert, i just go with my gut and my good cents and sumpthin i call television. Id wager muh GED this feller got bout as muach cents as a housefly on a batch of mie muthers kristel math. Lol. I have 12 kids. Them is the phutuure gat ised 2 it.
I mean almost every modern day theoretical physicist agrees that it does not really exist, such as Stephen Hawking and Einstein, this dude is some random "philosopher" that I have never heard of before, and probably just majored in psychology and knows nothing about the universe.
@@truesheltopusik1140 Einstein have been proved wrong stfu kid
Free will in the mid-grade sense of “could have done otherwise” will always remain fundamentally incomprehensible. Comprehensibility imposes the restriction upon our explanation of events that all events must have a prior cause. This is how our minds necessarily make sense of things. In what other form would a “reasonable” explanation of behavior take?
“Could have done otherwise” requires two components that contradict this requirement of causal explanation. First, it requires that a degree of “wiggle room” or indeterminacy exists in the world. The randomness implied in this defies the need for sufficient causal explanation. Just try making sense of quantum indeterminacy to get a feel for the way such a thing is beyond our grasp. Second, it requires agent causation, the notion that I am the source of my decision. At bottom, this requires that my “self” can spontaneously generate something like a “first cause” or an “uncaused cause”. It is not difficult to see why such a thing will forever evade the requirements of comprehension. By definition it resists such requirements.
All this, of course, is not an argument against believing that free will exists. It very well may be reasonable to believe that something exists while also recognizing that it is incomprehensible. Why should we assume (as it will always be an assumption) the the truth of things conforms precisely to the requirements of a certain mental function? An example of a thing we tend to regard as self-evidently true is our own consciousness. Our own first person, subjective experience is as self-evident a reality as we’re going to face, and yet it too is incomprehensible. To make sense of this, consider that any thing which is comprehended assumes there is something which comprehends. Everything that is perceived assumes a perceiver. In addition, the object of comprehension must remain on one side of this subject/object dichotomy. The eye cannot turn inwards to perceive itself.
Considering this, one also notices that free will, in terms of agent causation, is always fundamentally connected to subjectivity. Perhaps these fundamental realities must simply be accepted as undeniable axioms of our existence. To deny them is itself highly unreasonable. That’s at least how it seems to me.
You get it..
Darn it, why the volume is so low even after i maxed out my laptop volume.
Fez Its Okay Here....Check on Other Devices....
Yeh! Too low volume!!!!😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬
1:24 Everything we do or don't do is based on a "medical condition". This is either at a micro degree which is not apparent or at a macro degree like a brain tumor which is very apparent as in the case of Charles Whitman.
If I go and commit a crime which was actually due to a microscopic brain tumor but with the current medical technology we have today, the brain tumor could not detected and therefore, I am deemed responsible for my actions is ridiculous. We simply don't have free will.
To say you really could have done otherwise is to forget that our brains are also subject to the laws of physics. This is the error that has led to our confusion (and has apparently confounded some neuroscientists. Even if it turned out that our brains work on quantum mechanical principles (and there's not much evidence for this) - that still doesn't get you the ability to consciously do otherwise. That would get you to a random outcome with a reliable probability distribution of collapse of some complex wavefunction at most.
It's really easy to get these two different things mixed up. The quantum weirdness of electrons being everywhere at once - or spinning all possible ways at once *until you measure them* with a photon - *SEEMS* a lot like the subjective feeling we get when we are considering alternate possibilities in the future. Truly - there seems to be an eerie similarity between these two phenomenon - UNTIL YOU LOOK CLOSELY.
These are two completely different aspects of physics - do not get them confused! Quantum mechanics doesn't let you *CHOOSE* what you find after you measure the spin direction of the electron. You can't choose spin up or spin down! For some people people forget this rather important detail when they conflate the two situations. When we are picking from different possible future scenarios and trying to decide we are using past knowledge, communicated language - and our mental model of the world to run mental thought experiments. Though it seems similar this is just completely different from any kind of quantum mechanical activity. We're not collapse of a wavefunction - we are making up our minds given what we've learned about the past - apples and oranges.
Sam Harris really just crushes the idea that you could ever have "chosen" to do otherwise - even in the subjective sense (I suggest you look him up). Even if we could have done otherwise - it certainly wouldn't be our conscious intent that was in control of that choice. People seem to have a really hard time with this - but the truth is we can do no such thing - and you don't need these experiments to rule it out, you just need to think about what it would mean if you COULD do that (you get something profoundly ridiculous - a kind of infinite regress where you can never say you consciously started the ball rolling).
Determinism at the deepest level of our thinking *MUST* be true. There really would have to be some other dimension or physical reality we have no evidence for for it to be otherwise - whatever we find there would have to make less sense than quantum mechanics. That doesn't mean we can ever perfectly predict our future behavior or that the future is "fixed" - the uncertainty principle and pseudo-randomness of complex systems ensures this. Fatalism is untrue, but determinism has to be true - or we just don't live in a causal reality with a-causal quantum randomness at bottom.
*****- hi - thanks for your comment. Yeah that's how I often think of it too (pachinko machine is a really good analogy for the high level) - at least that would appear to be consistent with the physics we know so far. What I'd like to know is why you have arrived at the impression that the brain does have a kind of random number generator that it exploits. I mean - I'm not saying it doesn't - I have often wondered if that's what is going on in some sense at bottom, but it seems to me that we would need to understand the mechanism by which the quantum randomness translates into inputs for the pseudorandom and otherwise classically behaving system.
I think one would have to show how some of the quantum effects get reinforced instead of sort of washed out as you reach the classical limit (that'd be a mathematical masterpiece to show that convincingly to be sure...). Maybe I am not thinking about this right - but I just feel like we should be cautious about fully embracing some of the ideas advanced by Roger Penrose and others (there are a lot of detractors of these arguments yet and we're far from consensus). Again - I don't understand enough yet to really critique his position, but my understanding is that the participation of QM or how it plays into our brain's operations is far from being well understood.
You're right to say that it is unlikely that quantum mechanics is unlikely to affect the brain. I think that we have to keep in mind how much is unknown about the architecture of the brain as far as conscious decision making goes. Ultimately, we can reasonably say that the mind emerges from the brain but, beyond that, I'm not sure what can be said about how decisions get made. The work is ongoing in neuroscience.
ConQuiX
I'm quite sure that I agree with you.
I've never considered that quantum mechanics plays any part in mind behaviour.
Firstly, a definition of Free Will is rarely forthcoming. I consoder it to be "Free Wish". The word "will" meaning "a want", from German, Wollen, "Ich will" meaning "I want".
Taking "Free Will" to mean that, I do not beleive that we have any influence over what we desire. I like cake, I don't like celary. I didn't decide that.
However, not only are our desires and actions influenced by initial conditions of genetic make up and external inputs of environment, nurture and social experiences but also continuous judgement and feedback of the impact of our actions that we may undertake.
How often are our initial desires to, say, eat all the cake, adjusted when we consider the impact of that action on our own wellbeing, through excessive calorie intake and also if that would mean that others would not get a fare share of cake, and so reduce our social standing and regard within that group, as we'd risk being considered inconsiderate, selfish and greedy.
***** Don't you have to prove that quantum effects scale up in the nervous system? The workings of neurons seem to be almost entirely chemical. Quantum mind theories are fringe and unsubstantiated at best. They are outright lunacy and woo at worst.
***** The question of whether those effects scale up is what is important. Even in the best example, photosynthesis, it isn't quite clear if those effects are biologically significant. Even in cellular processes where there are some quantum effects, for the most part, they can be considered classical systems.
You haven't shown that the brain is subject to these quantum effects and, more importantly, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that consciousness is effected by quantum effects in any biologically relevant way.
if there is no free will, then why would we need to have the ability to read our own minds? why doesn't every action just involuntarily cut strait to the chase without any conscious perception? if there is no choose in anything anyway, why not have it feel that way as well?
The Libet experiments are/could be interesting in their own right but would only be interesting for free
will if it would conclusively prove all actions are made without conscious thought (and only in hindsight sends back signals to the conscious part of the brain).
Not proving it (or only with some actions) does nothing for the question of free will (in the strict libertarian philosophical sense).
The question of true (libertarian) free will is about whether our will is determined, not whether our will determines our actions (most people don't deny that).
And since the will has to be determined - due to causality (the only other option being randomness, which isn't free will) - the concept of true free will is an incoherent one.
There is a problem with the idea of a "first cause" we can use the term colloquially but in fact it isn't really coherent. In order to have something cause an effect it first must exist, as energy can not be created or destroyed. Time is a measure of motion and a parameter for existence. Energy has always been in one form or another. Nothing could initiate time as a whole because that would require the time to do the action of initiating. Essentially looking for the first cause goes into an infinite regression. And there is no beginning or "first" to an infinite regression.
Robert LC - Digital Artist who says our will has to be determined ? Why because you believe consciousness is chemical? Why do you believe that when there is no proof of what consciousness is or where it comes from . Only that it has a relationship with the brain . That doesn’t mean it is the brain or is controlled by it. How do you know it doesn’t defy the laws of nature by not being apart of it but instead only interacting with it? The only thing that is determined /random in this matter is the options that are presented to us for our free will to decide on which one to take . And because time is a construct there is an infinite number of possibilities which means you cant predict shit .
Causality is a priori it is a philosophical assumption that cannot be proven that underpins science. Once you understand that then the conflict of free will becomes less difficult. we bring causality to our experience to explain how reality appears to us not reality bringing causation to us so it depends on your assumptions that will determine how you view many things.
I'm reminded of the Woody Allen line about being brilliant and having no idea what's going on.
If you sound a tone, and ask people to indicate where the dot was, they will get that wrong, too. The delay proves nothing.
People believe we don't have free will for many reasons which are absurdity at best .
I am aware that it is "conventional wisdom" that free will exists. But why would we even think free will exists in the first place? The very concept of it was a fabrication/assumption by philosophers. Up until that assumption was made, we just "live". Animals just do what they do. Children just live their lives. At no point would I have ever thought something as arcane as free will was even relevant until I was told it exists in school. The religious certainly believe in it because without free will almost every single religion is false or indadequate. I think it would be a good idea to just stop using the term free will because it is a recursive tautological absurdity.
What??
Because free-will, like existence, is self-evident. In order to deny free-will it requires a consciousness to comprehend, deliberate upon, and decide whether or not there is free-will. Basically, you can't rationally deny free-will without having free-will; denying free-will is self-refuting.
177SCmaro Not at all. I think you don't understand what the definition of free will is. Your statement does not refute free will at all. I can just as easily as you imagine a future in which you would have always denied free will is false. Where is the self-refutation there? Answer: nowhere.
TheReddaredevil223 "Your statement does not refute free will at all"
My statement wasn't aimed at refuting free-will. It was aimed at demonstrating that it requires free-will to deny free-will.
Thus the answer is, again, you can't rationally deny free-will without having free-will. You can't make a choice; i.e. deliberate upon and decide between alternatives, without having the ability to choose i.e. free-will.
In order to deny free-will, you would have to argue that you can make the choice to deny free-will without choosing, which is self-refuting.
177SCmaro How does it require free will to deny it? Nobody can argue that they are responsible for what they believe. So whether one believes in free will or determinism was not their choice, just like whether or not someone believes in a god.
Determinists and those who espouse free will have had their brains affected in a way which caused them to believe there is no free will or vice versa. Whether it was a certain pattern of soundwaves hitting their eardrums, or photons hitting their retinas, external stimuli constantly create chain reactions throughout the brain, ultimately ending up with a belief or disbelief in whatever idea has been proposed.
I don't believe free will exists, but I didn't make the choice to deny free will - my experiencing the right stimuli the right time made it inevitable. Just like I can't choose to believe in unicorns, I can't choose to believe in any philosophical idea I'd like, and neither can anybody else. Though external factors can affect these beliefs, these factors are completely beyond our control.
finally someone who is skeptic about both free will in the naive sense and the science currently available. refreshing and great video!!!
Free will absolutely exists and the least evidence of ANY FREE WILL validates all free will!
Super interesting stuff. It's one of those subjects that you can go crazy thinking about. Especially when you start getting into multiverse hypotheses and supernatural factors.These types of discussions are best done under the influence of something. Makes for interesting conversations where no one really makes any sense, but will still agree with everything you say.
The very idea that you ''can go crazy THINKING ABOUT, IMPLIES THAT YOU HAVE IN YOU THE FREE WILL TO DECIDE HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT NOW...This is rubbish
You don’t understand the definition of free will.
I have so many problems with the validity of the experiment. About halfway through my main objection is raised. The experiment proves absolutely nothing.
Da Koos how do?
Why doesn't anyone speak of compatibilists? Why can't there be determinism and free will together? One may have a determined life but using free will alter their life and in turn changing the course? there will constantly be determined actions that are coming your way, but no matter what you create the decision to do which ever you please.
The problem lies in this part: "but no matter what you create the decision to do which ever you please". First, the no matter what is pure hubris, and second you don't create your decisions.
Alex Spevak So are my brain cells pointing a gun to my head if I do not perform an act which is right?
CosmoShidan although that's a somewhat loose metaphor, in those terms your brain cells are both the gun holder and the gun. Your brain produces your experience of decision making: so you are slave to what it considers as right.
Alex Spevak So you are saying that my cells are coercing me to do good against my will with my cells? That sounds circular and one of the reasons why deterministic arguments fail to meet a satisfactory answer since free will is to act without another controlling your person. Saying that with one's own brain cells says my cells control myself with myself. Otherwise you have to appeal to god on that one, or that you make the fallacy that the brain is computer by overlooking the fact human beings are what program them; i.e. control their processing against their will.
CosmoShidan not quite, I'm saying your cells produce your experience of will. It's rather like cancer - it comes from your cells, but nobody would give themselves cancer. Similarly, your brain controls you; you don't control your brain.
I suppose there isn't free will within the model that the self is controlled by the brain. But the fact is that we are the brain, and we are the processes that determine our actions, therefore, isn't it ourselves who act? I guess the whole debate of free will/no free will seems silly to me.
he did a great job of describing why there isnt free will, which wasnt his intent.
😐
@@themacocko6311 ...not like he had a choice.
"Free will" is the term that people use to describe their lack of understanding of neural functioning. "Free will" is the illusion of "control" caused by monentary indecision.
You place a couple objects down on a scale balance that rocks back and forth a bit before one side settles down lower as the heavier of the two. Does the rocking of the scale balance represent "freedom" in the "decision" that the scales are going to make?
You have mixed feelings in many decisions that you make, but ultimately one set of neural pathways will prove to be the most heavily reinforced.
The neuroscientific approach to this is very interesting and may indeed provide irrefutable evidence to support an answer to this question. However, you can use basic logic to answer the question of whether one could have done otherwise at any given moment. As he said, the brain has to work in such a way that, given everything physically being the same up to the moment of decision, that the brain could do one thing or another.The answer to this is clearly "no." The workings of the brain are purely chemical, electrical and mechanical in nature. The state of the brain at any given moment is the result of all influences, conditions and experiences before that moment since the big bang that have cumulatively resulted in the current physical arrangement of atoms, molecules, cells and electrical signals of the brain. There is no non-physical force or energy acting upon it. As a result, the brain works in a deterministic manner and all functions, including decisions, are decided by the structure and chemical and electrical processes of the brain at any given moment. Given those exact same conditions, it's impossible for them to have done otherwise without some non-physical force acting upon it, which would break a number of natural laws.
But let's suppose that it could do different. Given the exact same conditions, history, influences, preferences, etc. your decisions at any moment could be different. All things being the same, you could choose to do A or B with no bearing at all on the physical mechanics and processes of the brain. It's some higher non-physical ability to make a decision. What does it make its decision based upon then? Is it based upon your personal preferences, habits, experiences, etc.? Or is it not determined upon them at all and, rather, is random. How could it not be purely random if not based upon anything? Is a random decision any more free than a determined one? Sure, you "could have done otherwise" with a random decision, but it hardly even a "decision" then, is it? It's certainly not *your* decision.
So, regardless of how you look at it, I would assert that true free will is logically impossible. If I had scientific evidence to back that claim up, that would be great, but I really don't need it to form a valid opinion and an argument on the subject.
The deterministic universe died in 1927. Quantum mechanics, and, in particular, the uncertainty principle, imparts a probability on events but it does not guarantee them. You could be doing a laser experiment, for instance, and you could calculate a probability for the individual photons to hit your target at a certain rate. Then you could fire the first photon and that photon could end up hitting the floor, or the ceiling, or going outside and hitting a bird, or end up on a path to the other side of the universe.
The implications for our brain are staggering. If a thought begins as a single electron imparting a signal, then the number of interactions that electron could make are immense. And since the interactions of the electron over time is probabilistic, that means the single interaction required for the thought to begin is random (probability only applies to multiple events, since a single event can just as easily turn out to be any possible result).
So I think your second paragraph is more representative of the true state of free will. It's not free will, but it is somewhat random.
Gregory Evans I can agree with that. The question then becomes whether the number and nature of interactions on a quantum level from the beginning of the decision making process to its conclusion could vary enough to have a significant effect on the macro-level of any given decision. That would require experimentation and research, probably. Regardless, if not strictly deterministic, at best decisions are guided randomness. Whether the decision is determined by the conscious memories and preferences, the underlying physical structure, mechanisms and electrical signals of the brain, or the random outcome of quantum interactions (or, likely a combination of all of these), the act of decision is either a determined process or a somewhat random one, neither of which constitute free will in the sense people like to think of it.
Gregory Evans Did your brain choose where the photon went? No, you have no control over the subatomic randomness of electron interactions. You don't impose your "free will" over the randomness of events in the universe, thus "free will" still doesn't exist truley.
Edward Rubin You misunderstood him. He wasn't suggesting that true free will existed nor that the brain had any control over those random events. He was rebutting my argument for a deterministic nature of choice, suggesting, instead, that there was an element of randomness, not solely deterministic interactions. But he agreed, as well, that that randomness doesn't allow for free will either.
KryptonianCodeMonkey Indeed. :)
2:10 That account of "could've done otherwise" is reminiscent of a philosopher saying "We know it's possible in practice, but we want to know if it's possible in principle". A sufficient and necessary sense of the saying is "could've done otherwise" in roughly the same circumstances.
so even if free will doesn't exist, what difference does it make?
Practically none, you still have to make those decisions, though it makes a huge difference in understanding of humanity and world around us.
The fact that walls are solid and that objects have colour are illusions too. Are you going to start trying to walk through walls or dismiss art as pointless because of this? Just as free will, these illusions are beneficial, pleasant, and convincing enough that knowledge or ignorance of the reality makes no difference one way or another. It only, as Xorran said, helps us understand the world in which we live that much more, ultimately leading to knowledge and developments which directly improve our lives and the lives of those who come after us.
Interestingly we largely function as though free will does not exist already. We regularly improve our ability to predict the actions of individuals, we regularly improve our ability to correct socially unacceptable behaviors, each of these things requires an element of determinism to be useful. So if someone proves free will does not exist it would only really work to reinforce systems we are already using and maybe push more research on understanding how we function. Whether it exists of not free will seems less useful than concepts of determinism that have allowed up better understand of peoples actions from how they learn, to why they commit crime, ways we can help fight addictions, change or reinforce habits, etc. Strong evidence against free will wouldn't even be enough to stop the argument about whether or not it exists because some people would just never let go of the idea that there is something more to the mechanism by which they choose their actions. Even people that believe in determinism often still use phrases like "Which should I choose?" even though they interpret that more as a system by which pros and cons statistically compared to needs and values before and inevitable result is attained.
In short, very little would change.
Kyle Davis People who decide to beat bad habits and addictions are not slaves to their bodies. They are spirits,
***** how do you figure?
Bahaha! Zero free will means that a choice is always involuntary. This will leave no room for having motivation.
I disagree. Wouldn’t that mean motivation is also not our choice to have or not have...
Although his criticisms are not entirely invalid, it does seem that he is overtly relying in his position on the fact that we lack complete and accurate information: like knowing exactly what subconscious activity in the brain is, vs what would pass for a final decision. To sum up why his position itself is almost entirely invalid: events can either be determined or random. For almost any functional invocation of free will, a person would have to be in control of determinism (deciding by themselves) or randomness (choosing what accidentally pops in their head) - and neither one seems possible.
just coz u cant explain something, it doesnt meant its random. those are ussupported poitns. we think killing flies doesn't affect world. well can u operate without one finger? probably could. but that wouldn't be a complete body of urs.
It is hard to tell the difference between a determined outcome and a random one. In a determined universe all the women I meet before I marry one are already chosen. In a non-determined universe all the women I meet before I marry one happen at random. The outcomes of this process are identical in both worlds.
The experience would seem like free will is true. After all, I definitely made a great choice in who I married. If I was unhappily married, I might sway to the determined side. Or, that I can't think a thought before I think it. That might make my experience of thought coming into my head feel determined. Or not. So, being that this subjectivity of experience is also apparently true, e.g., I can feel one way or the other, we need to search deeper for answers. And I would argue that we have. There is no free will in physics or in any of the fundamentals of reality. Free will appears to be a higher order emergent property of consciousness which puts the answer square in the realm of psychology.
In other words, free will exists, but only in particular context. Same as baseball. Baseball does not exist in the fundamental laws of physics or in the constituent parts that make for higher order phenomenon. But baseball does, in fact, exist. It just exists within a different framework. That framework is conceptual and perceptual.
So, free will works well within a societal framework. Making 'choices' to eat Chinese instead of Italian is perfectly reasonable way to talk about such things. If a person runs over another person with their car we demand they take responsibility for their actions. This is a reasonable way to conduct a society. But, on a fundamental level of reality we have no evidence of free will. Given knowledge of the state of all the particles in the universe, we could know what the previous state or future state was or will be.
Free will is not a fundamental reality.
Not sure in what way baseball is different from fundamental reality which can be analogous with free will. Freedom entails independence, baseball is structured.
Alex Spevak
Oh...sorry
I was saying that free will 'exists' in the same way that baseball does. You sort of missed that whole point probably because my explanation was inarticulate. Free will in not found in atoms or molecules. That is why it doesn't exist in fundamental reality the way you don't find baseball in atoms and molecules. Free will is found as a concept in macroscopic reality just like baseball.
I'm saying that 'free will' exists. But it is limited to context. "Free will" is appropriate language to use to explain subjective reality but not objective reality.
I suppose that the deeper reason why I would argue this is because people tend to fall into a trap. That trap is from a false dilemma which might lead to delusion and sometimes fatalism. You're stuck either inventing an imaginary supernatural soul which has free will, or concluding that everything is determined in which people imagine they have no responsibility for anything. Because determinism seems to be the case throughout reality but free will is a reasonable language to use in social context, I'm saying that it is appropriate to believe free will exists if 'free will' is an emergent phenomenon of more fundamental phenomenon.
Then you support the idea that free will is subjectively real, but concede that it is not objectively real?
It should be possible to explain any emergent property. What exactly is the explanation for free will - that you feel like you have choice?
Problem is that the old concept of free will implies some supernatural force for the will to not be subject to the laws of nature. It makes no sense to scientifically study supernatural phenomena. So it makes sense to redefine free will so it does not include supernatural elements. This way it can fit in a deterministic (as in the past determines the future, be it probabilistically or in a superdeterministic way) universe. Free will would be the set of processes in the brain associated with decision making and/or how it is being these processes. It effectively can be called will since those are related to our decisions and it can be called free, since even if it is not supernaturally free, it is free in the sense that those processes occur in a system with degrees of freedom, even if each specific particle has an already determined path or probability distribution.
I don't like his definition of free will. He makes free will sound like randomness. You have free will - not if you would make a different decision given the same exact set of events - but would you make a same decision given different event. The whole point of free will is that you are independent from your inputs.
You freely decide what is in the best interest to you. Given the same circumstances you should make the same decision regardless of whether your mind is encoded in neurons or silicone. To me that is the free will.
hamobu Indeed. Also, if you would make different decisions, then there's a real question to be asked about what sense in which the choices are "yours", because apparently they're not dependent on your personality or desires - and even more shockingly, it appears to be independent of what's going on around you, which isn't exactly a good thing.
hamobu If it's inevitable, how is it "free"?
ilikethisnamebetter There is no conflict there. If I see a car coming towards me, I will move out of the way. The fact that I know exactly what I will do in a given situation tells me that I have free will, and not the opposite.
hamobu I think you're missing the point. You _don't_ know what you will do in any given situation. Of course you will move out of the way of the car (a self-preserving robot would do that), but will you "choose" a striped or a spotted tie? (assuming you like ties..). One can imagine a more sophisticated version of the Libet experiment that could predict which "choice" you would make BEFORE you are conscious of it. A _conscious_ choice would be required for actual free will (despite what Mele, and others, sometimes suggest). If consciousness only comes after the "choice", then there is no real choice at all, and no free will.
ilikethisnamebetter Choosing something is a process. The fact that the process takes some time does not mean that free will does not exist. You are saying that free will ought to be instantaneous, and I don't see why. Yes we can probe to see where the process is going before it gets there, but that does not meant that there is no rational mind making decisions (although in case of choosing a tie there might not be since person may not care about the decision and just pick one randomly)
Question is: am I the captain of my ship or just a driftwood that is carried by currents.
In the XIX century the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a entire book about this subject: On the Freedom of the Will (german: Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens); I have read almost all of his works, and in my humble opinion, this one is, maybe, his life's magnum opus.
Grossly speaking, for the German philosopher, we don't have an free will, because all of our actions are conditioned or maybe even determined by constrains and/or situations that came before us, or our actions.
An very trivial example could be the lack of physical free will: A person could want to fly, because he/she in exercising his intellectual free will, has determined that flying would be the easiest way to travel; but as a person's body lacks in physical free will (we don't have wings!) he/she wouldn't be able to exercise his intentions.
"Destiny" or "Fate" is used by almost every lazy person in existence.
Rarely is it used by the successful as motivation.
I have free will because I have no choice but to accept that I have free will.
That doesn't make a lick of sense
@@themacocko6311 Sense of Lick. A make doesn't that ?
While the experiments don't conclusively prove free will, the unknown aspects of the results do not rule out a lack of free will. The results are what we would expect in a deterministic world with no free will.
However an even easier experiment which conclusively refutes the possibility of free will is to simply examine the thought process in your mind. Do you create the thoughts that come into your mind? Considering these are one of the primary drivers for decisions, then if not how can free will exist?
Choices are the result of past experiences, genetics and your brain's ability to solve problems (which is also a genetic issue). I would have thought this would be common knoweldge among philosophers.
***** Dude whether or not you agree with it, it's not stupid. I mean Paul Davies even argues for it in one of his books, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that the past can "load up" given certain interpretations of QM.
***** Put a proverbial cat in a box along with a video camera. When you pull the camera out, will the tape be blank? If not which history will it have recorded? The dead cat or the live one?
I liked his clear description of the issues with these experiments and their claims.
Free-will does exist, it's the phenomenon of feeling like you are making the decision by yourself. So the real question is: what causes that feeling?
The way you've cultivated your own brain, of course.
Cultivation doesn't stop optical illusions, or necessarily any other type. Arrogance might, though.
Arrogance might, yeah. That said, I separate information the brain receives from the action processes. If I react to an optical illusion, that's my choice. It is 'influenced' by the illusion, yes, but in the end, the way I've taught myself to think is still operating just as it does.
Cultivation doesn't cause the feeling of free-will.
Hm. I suppose the disconnect here is that I represented my thoughts poorly. Cultivation does not cause the feeling of free will. The way you have tailored your thought processes causes the feeling of free will. Everyone has their own way of thinking, from Penn Jillette to Queen Elizabeth to you and I.
My choosing the world 'cultivate' was relevant to my point that it's up to us how we define our thought processes. Because if we don't like them, we can then change them.
The ability to resist impulse is not only proof that mind is master over the body, but also master over the brain. If you're incapable of resisting impulse, much like an animal, you do not have free will. Discipline is the practice of free will.
Free will is the ability to act without past actions or Randomness determining your actions.
No matter has been observed to act in such a way therefore the matter that composes the human brain must not either.
Sangwoo Sung Any other definition would be completely devoid of meaning.
Sangwoo Sung Without free will as I originally defined it there is no choice to be made, just the illusion of a choice.
Sangwoo Sung Without free will as I defined it choice is an illusion.
+Übermensch I agree that materialistic reductionism forces your conclusion. If you accept that, then you have to convince yourself that free will and everything that follows (moral accountability, meaningfulness of relationships, etc.) are all illusions. I think this is premature. If only based on our strong subjective experience, we have to also consider that materialistic reductionism may not apply universally (namely conscious human experience)
well right now it is inderteminism that is the correct theory simply because havent figured how the electron of the atom function. but i do believe determinism is true to the core because we see so many logic thing and proven logic thing in nature.
Free will is not total. Depending on each individual choice, free will has constraints.
By the way, adjust your volume.
@@dan78789 Hello Schopenhauer.
@@dan78789 Google Arthur Schopenhauer
This video is just 15 minutes of "Maybe, maybe not."
Yes, I think it is better than to 'know' something you can't :)
Sam Harris summed up the argument quite well. It goes something like this: "most of physics is deterministic on the macro scale, we know the laws very well when it comes to non quantum actions. Every atom in the universe acts according to physics, and your brain is not exempt. This means that if your mind is acting in a non-quantum way, then your actions are predetermined based off of the stimulus that it receives. But, if our neurons act with a bit of quantum uncertainty, fine! who cares, you can not control the uncertainties of quantum mechanics, this means that on a macro scale, you lack free will, and on a quantum scale, its pure randomness of electrons, neither of these lead to free will"
Argument over.
Sam Harris is incoherent on free will. He spends all of chapter 4 waffling back and forth between "now you have it" and "now you don't". Makes you dizzy!
Anyway, free will is not "freedom from causation". That's an irrational concept. And no one really expects it! Just ask anyone why they chose A instead of B and they'll happily tell you why A was the best choice.
Free will is when we decide for ourselves what we will do, when free of external coercion (literal or figurative "gun to the head" scenarios) or other undue influence (hypnosis, mental illness, authoritative command, etc).
And it is compatible with determinism, as in:
(A) My choice was caused by my own purposes and my own reasons, therefore it was my own free will.
(B) My choice was caused by my own purposes and my own reasons, therefore it was causally inevitable.
This only gets mucked up by "hard" determinism, which is an invalid version of determinism because it selectively chooses to ignore human causal agency.
For a more detailed treatment, see
marvinedwards.me/2017/08/19/determinism-whats-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/
The first time I heard Sam Harris saying that free will was an illusion, I trusted him because I really looked up to him and trusted his knowledge. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. So I started thinking to myself "I feel like drinking some beer, I know I was trying to cut back on the alcohol.. but it's what I feel like doing.. and the way Sam puts it.. everything is predetermined and I have no control over my actions. I guess I'll just drink as much as I want and not worry about it because if I end up quitting later or not, it's already predetermined and beyond my control so I'll just do whatever comes natural and sit back and watch the story of my life unfold. I took the same attitude with exercise as well and my diet. And now.. I'm an alcoholic, I've gained 60 lbs, and I feel like crap and I have no energy and never exercise or eat right. Everything is falling apart. Then I discovered Jordan Peterson who talks about personal responsibility, and now I'm trying to turn my life around. The whole "Free will is an illusion" philosophy ruined my life, but taking responsibility for my future is sorting me out. But I've got a long way to go to get back to where I was.
Yes the universe operates on terms of an understood set of laws. But that does not disclude free will because all that says is that free will have to operate within a certain framework of understanding.
Saying that laws indicates that beings with a conscious must exhibit certain behavior is just a human interpretation of what natural laws are.
The universe appears completely deterministic, even down to the quantum level. The brain is a machine, it will act through cause and effect. I don't see any room for free will. It would appear that free will would break the laws of physics, for example forcing an electron to go where it wasn't supposed to go, without a cause. Well, I don't see how we could control the movement of an electron without using a cause. (?) It's a bizarr idea that we would have free will.
The problem with that is in order for the claim, "Free-will does not exist" to be true, it requires you to deny consciousness (consciousness implies free-will), the problem with that is it requires consciousness to deny consciousness. In other words, the argument that "free-will does not exist" is self-refuting.
177SCmaro Why does consciousness imply free will? We don't know what consciousness really is, because we don't have a theory of the brain yet.
It isn't self-refuting since you can't demonstrate that your premises are correct. Only if you are correct in your premises will what I said be self-refuting.
antiHUMANDesigns You really need me to explain to you why consciousness implies free-will? Okay then.... it's pretty simple really, ask yourself this, how could a non-conscious thing make a choice (i.e. exercise free-will)? It can't. Consciousness is required to make a choice, therefore it implies free-will. For you to make the claim "free-will does not exist" requires you to be conscious of and choose to make that claim (if you weren't conscious you could not understand any of the concepts _IN_ _ORDER_ _TO_ _MAKE_ _THE_ _CLAIM_), ergo, you do have free-will, thus the claim is self-refuting.
177SCmaro How can a non-conscious thing make a choice? Like this:
if (hunger >75%) eat_food();
That is a pretty generic computer programming example. That is how you make a program make a choice based on what it knows about something. And a computer program is not conscious.
("If more than 75% hungry, then eat food")
Neither does it have free will, because a computer program is completely deterministic.
There is absolute *nothing* showing that a brain would be any different in this regard.
antiHUMANDesigns "How can a non-conscious thing make a choice? Like this:
if (hunger >75%) eat_food();"
"a computer program is completely deterministic."
You just refuted your own example. If the computer is deterministic it is a non-conscious thing _NOT_ making a choice, i.e. deterministic. Your example of a non-conscious deterministic thing making a choice is, like your argument, self-refuting and thus not valid.
The reason should be self-evident, basically, if it's "determined", it's not choice-making. -duh
So you still have the problem of the self-refuting argument of "free-will does not exist".
Moreover, conflating non-conscious things with conscious beings is obviously fallacious. Just because a machine can function in some ways _like_ a human brain does not make it no different than a human brain.
That would be like saying the leg of a table and a human leg are no different because they both support the weight of something.
When they told me to sit in the chair; I would have sat on the floor. :P
Think you have free will? Ok, use your free will to perform the following test. Think of a type of music that you hate. Or even better, think of a song that you hate. Now put on that song and use your freewill to make it your favorite song in the world from now on. Make that song the kind of song that you listen to over and over and show to all your friends like you most likely have with your current favorite song. This exercise can only end positively because if it works, you now have a new favorite song to love. Go ahead, use your freedom of will to perform this action. If you don't want to, and that is your excuse, use your free will to want to perform this test. If you cannot, you do not have freewill. If you can, you still do not have free will because you just did what I told you to do. Where is the freedom in being moved or not moved for reasons that we cannot identify?
ThIs is not what free will is. Free will is not magical an you can't use it to change your preferences. Free will is being able to choose your next action. Sometimes you can't and you react autonomously, sometimes you can.
Dammit !! Now I cant get that wretched Dave Matthews Band song "Ants Marching" out of my F***ing Head !!!! Thanks A lot !!
Let me see, demonstrate my free-will, by following your commands? Erm, no. I will, however exploit my free-will to say this, "HA! you thought I was going to insult you, because that is the predictable behaviour on the internet. And I could have done that, but I CHOSE not to."
Without cause and effect there’s no way we CAN have free will because without cause there can be no effect (effect as in choice followed by action). You are your brain and your body and rationality is only a fraction of it.
All you're saying is that free will has limitations.
Attempting to refute causality won't defend free will. Uncaused decisions cannot be attributed to anything or anyone. In fact, acausality makes free will even more impossible.
Milton Freidman?
Exactly what I was thinking
0:50 I’m glad Alfred Mele too gets his grass from the gas station. I hope my parol officer doesn’t read this...
The amazing work of Dr. Adrian Raine shows us that our behavior is determined through genetics, learning, and other biological factors. The prefrontal cortex function determines whether someone who has no caring in them kills someone else for looking at him the wrong way. If the prefrontal cortex works well then that person will reason that he will go to prison for lashing out and therefore he will not lash out. Someone without this reasoning ability will lash out without giving it any thought at all. Those are also people with the socalled "Warrior" gene. Then the size of the amygdala plays a huge role in compassion for another living being. The outlet of oxytocin plays a huge role in compassion as well. There are many different domino effects going on in a brain which determine behavior. Dr. Robert Sapolsky talks about this as well. But, we can train our compassion ability.
P1) We have a will (wants/desires).
P2) Our wants and desires are formed by external stimuli (prior causes).
C) Causality is required for a will (of any kind) to exist.
Therein lies the problem with applying acausality as a prerequisite for the existence of _free_ will; it entails the commision of the logical fallacy of proving too much, as doing so necessarily negates the possibility of the existence of _any_ will.
@@Chefshitpiece
From whence are our genetics derived? _Your_ genetics are derived from those of _your parents._ Thus, your genetics, too, are both prior causes, as well as having origins that are external to _you._
@@Chefshitpiece
Sure, but ultimately, ALL of our decisions are contigent, at the very least, on our own birth, which is, in and of itself, a prior cause that was necessarily external to ourselves. Without this external prior cause, we could make no decisions at all, and therefore, we would possess no will of any kind. It comes down to a root cause analysis. The root cause _is_ necessarily external and prior to any decisions we make.
@@Chefshitpiece
My objection isn't to hard determinsm. Rather, it is to the notion that hard determinsm is incompatible with free will when then majority of people talk about free will, they aren't referring to _literal_ free will in the Libertarian sense anyway.
@@Chefshitpiece
Nor do I. Nor do most people talking about free will.
Do you belive in free will ? ... I have no choice!
Christopher Hitchens said that . Can you explain what he meant by that cos I didn't really get it?.
the sentence is paradoxical, it's a way to mock the belief in free will. If you have no choice in life, you can't have free will.
So everything being the same from the beginning of the universe, could he have decided not to say anything at all instead of telling us about free will?
Title of the video asks a question. Answered in the first 10 seconds. Continues on for 15 mins.
If you read into it a bit you would find that it is not as simple a question as you might guess.
Interesting however I think you have missed the main point.
lol the experiments dont prove shit, I can sit there and not flex and what they going to do?
The first definition of free will that is offered, "regular free will," or perhaps "the legal system's version of free will" includes discussion of a "medical condition" being present. However, if the medical condition is "being human," and being human means being determined, then there is no free will.
I really dislike this "philosophers" trying to get into neuroscience and making things up. He said at the beginning of the video that humans do have free will, the rest of the video is just an attempt to shift the burden of proof, ie: you can't disprove it therefore it exists.
He only said courts say that people have free will. There's no general "free will" claim to be proven. Philosophers have different accounts of the concept with different claims. Some are impartial to science.
No, right at the beginning he was asked if people have free will. His response was "yes, they do".
I see, my mistake.
Jon theGreat Actually, the thing is, free will is a concept that is in the realm of the discussion of moral issues that cannot be grounded in facts about the world, or else its leading into eugenics.
He is making an important distinction between libertarian free-will and compatiblist free-will. He thinks we have the later, not the former. Philosophers need to go into other disciplines, they tend to be smarter, thus are better for interpreting the data, or drawing conclusions from the data, then the scientist are.
There are three impossible freedoms: freedom from causation, freedom from oneself, and freedom from reality. Therefore free will never implies any of these. The "free" in free will means "free from coercion". It means we authentically decide for ourselves, free from being forced to choose or act against our will. If the will were free from causation then it could never implement its intent. If the will were free from oneself then it would be someone else's will. If the will were free from reality then it would not be a will, but rather only a wish within a dream.
There's alot of scared determinists not wanting to take responsibility of their own individual lives. :)
On the contrary - the fear of facing the truly disturbing implications of the absence of free will probably explains why so many people are so desperate to hang on to it.
Perhaps the Truest comment in the section. Sent Vero
sent vero
Demonstrating only that your thinking has an emotional and rather petty starting point, as well as being strangely simplistic.
He has no free will over that just as you have no free will making your snide comment. And I have no choice but to point this out.
whynottalklikeapirat Whether or not an argument is "petty" has no impact on whether its sound or not. Your counter-argument is too emotional.
When I tell someone you have a conscious, and you have control over the signals your brain sends to make your actions, and that YOU are responsible for consequences, what other conclusion should I come to when that triggers them?
Get a job.
What if the -500 millisecond "burst" is the moment when people have somewhat the same realization as Mele reports here? The "no urge is coming, what should I do? Maybe I will just wait a little bit and say 'Now!'" thingy, and the -200 millisecond time at which people report first being aware of their intention to flex is really when the consciously decided to say "Now!" - after all, the time here is the same it took people to react on the reaction time test: around 200 milliseconds.
As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". To claim that free will exists when we appear to live in a materialistic world is an extraordinary claim and yet the evidence for it is non-existent. A lot of words were spoken quite eloquently but no evidence for free will was presented.
15brent I think the extraordinary claim is that free will does not exist. We use it many times every day, it is plainly obvious in every major decision you make. I would like to see the evidence for the contrary. Example - Given a set input a computer has only one out put every time, thus no free will. The human mind, however, given the same input would have hundreds, maybe thousands of outputs to contemplate and then choose which one is best for it, thus free will.
15brent Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is, in itself, an extraordinary claim. Sagan was a good scientist, but his philosophizing was nothing short of awful.
Free will isn't a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. Science doesn't have all the answers.
TheRazgrizBlaze
No, but to claim philosophy must be subordinate to science is question begging.
Philosophy has a habit of getting itself confused with science. Objectivity, nihilism, and free will are all considered philosophy, but the reality is that they are all near indisputable facts of the universe, derived through observation/science.
Aaron Z That's incredibly question begging. You can't deduce nihilism, objectivity, or free will from the universe. You're viewing the universe through a philosophical lens to get to any of that. This is why science doesn't and can't, by its legitimate methods, pronounce on a whole slew of things.
TheRazgrizBlaze Yes, it can be. Scientific advance has answered some philosophical questions. However, most philosophical questions are completely outside the realm of science.
TheRazgrizBlaze Science will never be able to adjudicate on questions of meaning, purpose, value, and morality. There are questions outside the scope of science. See Peter Medawar's The Limits of Science.
How could we ever think there's free will? I mean after a pattern was made in the brain, and we stop time to ask whether it will decide one of 2 options, it will require you to ask the question when you have exactly 50- 50 % for any decision to be made by the given pattern to that point. If it is not exactly 50% then, like in any balancing device the decision with more probability will be taken. That will be the decision, no matter how little better chance that decision had. Now, this exact 50% chance to both sides is infinitely small, meaning the brain is mostly pre- programmed and most decisions are easily predictable, and other decisions depend on the current chemical/physical state of the brain. And even in this super rare condition of 50-50 chance, you can not call it "free will" because at this confusing metal state, it will take an external intervention to actually make such a decision. In which case it wasn't actually your decision but the influence from the external source which made you pick that decision.
THE SOUL IS FREEWILL when you think biggest.
soul is just a word...nothing we can examine or test or see or feel or experiment with...soul is like god. no one can prove its existence
There has been many test and those test have been passed,.. then swepted under the rug by the controllers of the mainstream media, the institution of science, governments, schools, churches, religion, the 1% and all the people who live in fear... not me though. I've had an out of body experience and I'm not afraid of you, so I'm telling you now. All 5 senses are located all over the astral body, like if you touch something you can smell it and when a person is in this state, they feel wonderful.
*****
ohh..astral projection right? yeah i ve heard about this...it happens to me once i am dreaming...i enter the astral plane the ethereal plane the outalands the shadow plane every night! so you are a noob compared to me.pppffffhhh pls!
IAmValenwind
i love when people on youtube act like they know to whom they speak...
i study and perform Mentalism since 2005 so pls dont teach me about senses.Mindreading,precognition,zap hypnotism,neurolinguistic programming,dual reality are some of the aspects of my performance acts.Harassing the brain power is a field in deep research from me the last decade.I have ended up to personal conclusions the last 1 year after all the knowledge research and practice i ve done but i share them only to people who are in the same field with me.And so far i see that you are not this kind of man/woman
Screwyouguysimgoinghome
yes, the key word in your sentence is "act"... as opposed to reality. i am quite familiar with all the things you speak of, and in particular use hypnosis and NLP in my intimate life as well, hypnosis in particular since the late 80's, but if you think any of those things have any basis in woo, you are sorely mistaken, and really ought to go back to school.
i disagree. it is freedom that allows change, not a regress into causality. does physics really establish causality as the fundamental process in nature? the principle of sufficient reason; is it true?
Yes, free will exists, duh.
***** If you don't have free will then what is the point of inventing moral codes? Also, please elaborate your proposition, if you will.
maybe you should demonstrate that by stating why you chose this word combination as opposed to an other one, such as saying "free will definitely exists" as opposed to what you've wrote.
CosmoShidan you argument has nothing to do with the objective scientific issue of whether or not humans have or have no free will.
I agree with your criticism of Cosmo's comment. However... if we don't have free will then what are we even doing? We are able to comprehend that without free will, this conversation is useless, but also that we will be unable to decide to discontinue or continue dialoging. But that's rubbish, of course we have free will, anyone can see that.
"if we don't have free will then what are we even doing?"
Good question...I don't know neither..lets find out.
You can't dismiss something just because it would make you uncomfortable or confused.
This issue does make me uncomfortable and confused (duh) but this should occupy no room in the argument of whether or not we have free will. This is all I'm saying. Trust me bro, I know no more about the subject than you or the next guy but I know that dismissing the argument based on the obvious lack of understanding is a no-go to me.
I'm a simple man. I see Les Grossman, I click.
Nice to see a better analysis of the Libet experiments. If the subject is asked to "decide" to "randomly" flex a muscle, how can they accomplish such a self-contradictory task? It may all be a simple matter of suggestibility, an attempt to give the person in charge what they want. So I like to pose a different question, "Were the student subjects in the experiment required to participate to get credit for their class? Or were they truly volunteers, allowed to choose for themselves of their own free will?" The answer is irrelevant! The point is that we all know what we ordinarily mean by the words "free will". And it has nothing to do with anything supernatural.
Bahaha right back at ya! Zero free will means that although our choices are involuntary, or not fundamentally ours, we are nevertheless often causally determined to be motivated.
If the material world depends on human consciousness, and involves the type of randomness that we see in quantum experiments (with wave function collapse), there is no reason to deny the free will as an emergent outcome of such a process.
There is no evidence at all that the material world depends on consciousness. Quite the contrary actually. If you ingest some material known as Lsd that material will change your consciousness quite a bit, not the other way around. The idea that consciousness collapses the wave function in the double slit experiments is a misunderstanding. It's not actual human observation that collapses the wave function, it is our measurement that does because when we measure activity at the quantam level we have to use certain means to get the measurment which interferes with the wave function.
So here's a question, isn't there technology that will show the areas of the brain that are active in regards to this experiment, and not just when the muscle burst is about to happen? Meaning something that is measuring the time and the activity the entire duration of the experiment in relation to them coming to the idea of moving their wrist and then the choice to do so. This removed from any sort of muscle burst being the "triggering factor" of data collection. Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, however, that would be data I would be highly interested in seeing.
This issue is much more simple than most people realize. In order to make a "decision" to do something, you must want to do it. (I started writing this because I "wanted" to.) Wanting something is simply the arising into consciousness of the feeling of desire. If that desire is strong enough, it will get you to do something. If it isn't, it won't. Now where does desire come from? Do we consciously create it? Hardly. If we could create desire, we would all be walking around in a state of bliss all the time, creating a strong enough desire to deal with anything we had to do, that we didn't want to do. And that would be that. But we aren't all in a state of bliss all the time, are we? So we don't consciously create desire; it simply arises on its own when it does (like all feelings and all thoughts do,) and we happily follow, if at all possible. Free will is an illusion in that we have to do what we desire to do, if that desire is strong enough. When a conflict arises, for example, when we want to go do two or more things that are all happening in different places at the same time, we always head in the direction of the strongest desire. Right now, you are reading these words because you have a stronger desire to that, literally, than anything else. Its really that simple. But if you think your "choice" IS what you desire, think again. Watch your motivations and you will discover that you cannot choose to do anything that you don't already want to do. Try changing your sexuality (right now.) See, you can't, because you don't already want to! Desire comes first, then action. The idea that we "choose" first, is simply not the case, and is only believed by anyone because we all were told when we were kids that, "We all have free will."
And just to add onto that, if we could all conveniently choose to desire to do every chore we had to do, then it would be the desire for that convenience and bliss that would be the cause of our action. So even if everyone COULD consciously decide to like everything, there would still be no room for free will.
"In order to make a "decision" to do something, you must wan't to do it". False as you can do stuff you really don't want to do and can halt yourself from doing stuff you really feel like doing(temptations). . . . .
Don't get the "merely" bit. Sounds ok to me. So, what matters and what doesn't?
If physics is not deterministic it does not necessarily mean free will exists...but it certainly makes it more likely.
@@Chefshitpiece This supposition would not get a jaywalker out of trouble since those enforcing the law would be blameless in the same sense as well.
The more important question is can we Develop free will using technology... imagine we have technology to travel back in time and live exactly the same life, but slightly different - and do this millions of times. Does this give us free will? Also if we go into virtual reality and can reprogram the laws of physics that determine us in the simulation... and we can reprogram pretty much our genetics and every aspect of our environment, does this give us free will? We can rewind the virtual reality simulation to have millions of choices living the same life, but slightly different - so is this free will? Can free will be "invented" in our universe even though we may not have free will now? Is it predeterminted that free will is developed in a universe that originally had no free will? Paradox and recursion problems here.. Science and computing can answer these questions... Not philosophy.
a little vaccuum within reality... that vaccuum still exist within reality...
Either way wouldn't that server that holds us all and that virtual environment still be bound to a finite reality? all processes that exist within that pseudo virtual reality are still constraining the individual from doing things... unless you would have some type of infinite reality... but then that would mean your holding some type of environment that is more massive than what the actual universe would hold... and that's not something that is looked at as a possibility...
For those that dont believe in free will, just remember, when your partner cheats behind your back. If free will doesnt exist, it seems absurd to lay blame on your partner.
+Rostos1978 Why is it always something immoral with you people? Technically every praise you have is absurd to give your partner as well.
>This is because you are talking in terms of "ultimately" without the *illusion*.
+ShouVertica That is correct...But does any human live that way? So basically, to deny free will, one is suggesting that all of humanity is living under a delusion.
Rostos1978 And?
Rostos1978 But would I blame you for your actions or the things that caused you to do that?
You are thinking short-term and close-minded.
(just like the US justice system).
Sure, you bear the responsibility for pulling the trigger, but what about all the events that caused you to do that?
Did you spontaneously get up and decided "oh I should murder someone today!"?
If you did, how did you know how to murder people, what made that mental state of yours happen?
I already stated the *illusion* of free will exist within humanity. I did not say that humanity should cast aside that illusion nor would they be able to.(without an absurd amount of knowledge)
+ShouVertica Do you understand the difference between free will and determinism?
Let us be glad that we have willing commentators on subjects that very few of us, thankfully any, care to talk about.
Yes. Because measuring the time delay between between deciding to move your wrist and your wrist actually moving is a clear indicator of whether or not we have free will.
Congratulations, scientists. You did it. You really did.
I saw a guy do the same type of experiment but he had to flex either his left or right hand and he did it in a MRI machine and the guy watching his brain on the screen said he could tell what hand he would flex 6 or 7 seconds before he actually did it. I don't remember the name of it but I remember I typed in something like unconscious knows before we do.
There is no way to verify that someone could have done differently. This video was produced 11 years ago. Much progress has been made on how the brain works. Some philosophers and neuroscientists (Dennett, Harris, Sapolsky, e.g.) claim that humans have little to no free will.
Only some
4:12 he says that EEG is measuring electrical conductivity on the scalp.
That's nonsense, he's thinking of the galvanic skin response measurement, which is not at all what EEG measures. EEG measures actual electric fields created by the firing of the neurons underneath the scalp
Or it could be that the eye to mind has a delay as well. Or that humans are bad at judging the placement of hands of clocks moving so fast?Or many other factors...
Why did they cut out the mid- and high grade degrees of free will?
It's almost like he said, I see free will like thinking about something before doing it, In other words, planing a head in time, even if it's only planing 1 second in advance. Like "Now im gona move my hand." But it's not free will that the thought itself came up in my head. But that seems more like a filosofical question about the existense of time itself. And is not really a matter needed to discuss, since it doesn't do any good. More then helping/treat more criminals insted of punnishing them.
What if you have the urge to fart? Will it show up early on the computer?
But what about the left/ right mouse button clicking..how can the neuroscientists predict that..with around 90% accuracy..2 to 3 seconds before we make the particular click
Free Will : I can choose A or B. I flip a coin. Head = A, Tails = B. I made a free choose based on a random outcome. All these arguments are just building a "straw man".
HOW WE BE SURE THAT READINESS POTENTIAL REALLY CORRELATE WITH DECISION MAKING? COULD IT NOT POSSIBLE THAT THEY ARE THE CORRELATES OF TENSION, ANXIETY OF A SUBJECT IN AN EXPERIMENTAL SET UP?
Free will is an emotional experience, a sense of agency. It doesn't mean that we have choices. The only choice that you have is to be what you are.
+Steve Kennedy Um...is that a choice? Is that as far as you can get on the question?
I do not understand what you are asking.
+Steve Kennedy "The only choice that you have is to be what you are." Is this a choice? Can I choose not to be what I am?
+4991544 No, you cannot choose to be anything other than what you are. That is why many self-help books are useless. They do not take into account factors such as determinism, randomness, genes, misfortunes, etc.
+Steve Kennedy Then you have no choice. But, determinism does not exclude the possibility that help from a book is an inevitable consequence of certain prior causes. And more than randomness, genes and misfortune, I would submit that complexity, unpredictability, incomplete information and wrong inferences are the real culprits where self help books are concerned.
Well, we shouldn' t blame him, he didn't choose to muddy the waters ;-). but he does say that we don't have good evidence for something else that explains freewill, yet there are decades of research that show prediction, verification, and replication of past consequences of behavior relative to current actions/choices
The mid-grade level is actually undesirable behavior. Having inconsistent behavior at that level would actually be something to avoid.
The regular free will, what we talk about in courts, is simply chaotic intelligence. Every mammal has this.
The mid-grade is true random chaotic intelligence. But thus would be unlikely to ever cause more desirable results, in the same way that aiming a gun less accurately is unlikely to improve your effectiveness in combat unless you can't adapt to systematic error, which would make you no longer intelligent.
And the premium level, if you will, is a cop out. It just moves a deterministic+random intelligent process outside of what we call the universe and says that now you have free will. Of course, if that deterministic process worked the same, and the universe were the same, then this free will is still an illusion.
So if i think green color what is the force to it?? MIND!
So the decision came later? What causes the decision? You? For what reason did you do it? What caused the reason? What caused the process by which people make decisions? You can't escape causation.
Free will: I think, therefore I am.
Not certain you made your point clear. So what is the empirical evidence of free will? I realize it truly "feels" like I make my own decisions, but I can "feel" the earth is flat and the heavens rotate around us. Feeling does not mean evidence. The gift of "free will' suggests a spiritual higher creative power to "give' the gift. And here we go down the path to greater questions.
What he is trying to say is that the dimension of the intention is of a significance. Flexing a hand doesn’t require a great strength of will. So the Libet experiment is not applicable for the whole range of “acts of will”. The Libet Experiment is interesting but merely as basic, simple studies of this art. It’s just the beginning...
If a decision is made beyond cause and affect then it is arbitrary and without reason. So it is random, can that really be called a choice?
What about Spinoza's book, Ethics?
Who was the speaker?
Please increase volume