I've decided to make a thread...

...About 'Free Will'. Yods' argument that 'Atheism Automatically Disqualifies Free Will' prompted it. I figure I'll address that first, then throw some more 'down to earth' stuff around in the next post

---

Here's a summary of Yods' argument:

And here's a more fleshed-out version from the shoutbox:

I'm gonna try and stay away from the more theistic stuff for now (as it doesn't really impinge on this particular argument, isn't really my bag, and the 'soul' bit wasn't qualified in the shoutbox anyway )...


Indeterminableness:


What Yods seems to be talking about is Newtonian-style ‘cue ball’ physics. You hit the cue ball, the cue ball moves. (The Big Bang hit a lot of cue balls – they’re still bouncing to that tune). But at the quantum level: You try to hit a miniature cue ball, it says that to behold it is a sin. (And then actually asserts that you’ve pocketed its twin).

...Or to be clearer…

The predominant view on the ‘quantum scale’ of reality is that it's indeterministic [1]. Or ‘random’, if you will. What happened yesterday, at the quantum level, doesn’t necessarily predicate what’s going to happen today. The universe, at a deep down level, doesn’t seem to buy that whole ‘causal sway’ thing.

Point 1 for the athiests (in terms of "point 5" of Yods' summary). But there are several catches (and at least one fumble) on the way. 'Randomness' isn’t a great basis for free will either, and the big ole ‘Newtonian’ world clearly does follow rules… so let’s move into the realm that we know...(which is downright confusing too )…


Emergence:


Many complex processes in the world we know start with a set of 'basic' facts & interactions which we can understand, go through a bewildering array of interactions that we currently can't, and then finally 'emerge' with a set of results that we can again gauge. 'Emergent' [2] events like these often thwart our attempts to predict their outcomes. This is most likely a failing of ours, and there are 'deterministic' processes involved at every stage - just ones we don't understand.

But what would happen if we could observe one of these processes run again from first principles? Would the infamous 'chaos butterfly' flit its wings differently, causing different results? Certainly, in 'day-to-day' situations, outcomes can differ despite superficially identical starting points - 'developmental noise' effects everything from fly hairs, to fingerprints, to lab clones - suggesting that replication of such complex entities & systems will always involve variability.

This isn't to say that if we were to 'run the universe from the start' again everything wouldn't pan out exactly the same way (releasing all the 'butterflies' into precisely the same conditions, as it were). Just that we don't know either way . And seeing as we probably never will, 'material' athiests have plenty of reasons to conceive of the universe as producing outcomes which haven't been 'pre-written in stone'.

---

Footnotes:

[1] - A recent challenge to quantum indeterminacy sheds light on both sides of the free will debate: A man called 't Hoof has shown, theoretically, that there may be a deterministic base underlying the quantum world. But more recent experiments have proven one of his core conclusions to be wrong. And, in science, the testable thesis has to triumph over theoretical charms.

[2] - 'Emergence' is a very fuzzy term, used and abused by many disciplines (a la 'chaos' etc) but there does seem to be some 'hard science' backing for these decidedly 'nonlinear' claims.

__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~INTERLUDE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That's the 'philosophical' side touched on then. My feeling on the more esoteric stuff is, regardless of whether Free Will is real or not, it feels like it is, so we might as well treat it that way

This next post deals with things that impinge far more directly on our abilities to make 'free' decisions in our daily lives though, so it ain't quite so 'laissez faire'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Zombie in the Living Room:


We all know that we can be deliberately and accidentally duped, leading us to make poor decisions. We can be primed by advertisers to prefer their product over others for no good reason. Conmen can play on our better & baser natures simultaneously to induce a poor call on our part. Some scientists would even have you believe that peer-pressure can not only make you go against your own judgement, but actually start to see the false-group-view as being physically true.

Of course, challenges to our autonomy like this can mainly be overcome with awareness and willpower [1] etc. What's freakier is the number of ways in which we have less control over our perceptions, decisions & actions than we often assume. I'm talking here about the role our unconscious plays in decision-making...


Free Won't

The classic examples are Libet's "Free Won't" experiments, which suggest that we unconsciously prepare to act well before we consciously decide to - we seem to rationalise our agency of the action during/after the event. (A slightly more pleasing interpretation is that our body is constantly gearing up to perform suitable actions, and that we then 'executively' decide whether or not to perform them). But of course, neither of these explanations describe how we actually experience the process. And that's the point. We feel like we instigate every major thing we do.

My suspicion is that there's no end of blurring between consciousness and unconscious abilities. (And indeed, in the article linked above, they still leave plenty of leeway for some form of 'agency' to precede the body's preparation to act - just not necessarily one that we are fully aware of, or able to report in experiments anyway). As much as these type of experiments invite derision, with their unintuitive conclusions and antiseptic methodologies, there's no doubting the unconscious is playing some peculiar games with us, and we're only fleetingly aware of them at best.


When Your Unconscious Looks Out For You

Another classic example on this count is blindsight (a whole separate visual 'circuit' of which we have no 'conscious experience', but which never-the-less can inform our decisions/actions). Not that 'hidden' abilities like these necessarily prejudice our decision-making skills, but they certainly colour the idea that we're in complete command of our own boat

And in some ways that can be a good thing. There are numerous studies that suggest we'd be better off making instinctive decisions in certain situations: snap visual judgements, playing cards, even shopping (if you're in a neutral environment with all the facts honestly laid out, that is )


The Auto-Importance of Being Earnest

It's not all bad then, that we're not quite the Emperor on the throne when it comes to our own unimpeded decisions & actions. What is slightly more pertinent is the (potentially growing) number of ways in which we can be actively manipulated. Letting a hypnotist dance you round a stage in someone else's pantaloons doesn't break any of your inner rules. Enjoying the path a movie steers you down with its musical & visual cues takes you to somewhere you want to be. But there a plenty of 'antisocial' strategies that could be added to the 'traditional' ones noted at the start of this post: The business world seems to be hankering to track its workforces' motions & vocal tones, now that the profitability of 'non-rational' communication has been revealed; democratic jerryriggers would surely love to disenfranchise floating-voters whose vote-preference can be 'unconsciously' discerned; and the shoddy 'lie scanning' set-up being used in Indian law courts at the moment is a far cry from responsible science application.

There's always been confidence tricksters, and freedom's always been about being vigilant enough to keep hold of it. I reckon those two rules of life still hold true - just with some added techno twists on the way

---

Footnotes:


[1] - Would you believe that even willpower is considered to have a genetic component these days, so some of us may have to try harder than others in order to... try (Can't help thinking you might end up being better at it if you're forced down that route tho, Gattaca style )

Hmm, I hope I'm understanding all of this properly. Let me know if I'm not, of course. As far as I can understand, the thrust of the argument (though argument is probably the wrong word for it) is that quantum mechanics suggest randomness, which doesn't support the idea of free will, but at least contradicts the idea that everything is pre-determined.

This point forces me to be far more nuanced than I usually like to be. I completely agree that it's possible some things in the Universe, on a quantum level, are random. But I am inclined to believe that they only appear random to us, and more likely have an underlying order currently (or perhaps permanently?) beyond our comprehension.

Whether this is true or not, the more pertinent thing about this claim is that, given its very nature, there would be no way to ever prove it. We can never run through a perfectly identical experiment more than once. This makes this particular explanation technically possible, but impossible technically. And man oh man, does that last sentence sound like something you'd say, or what?

Of course, the funny thing about all this (which you already know, of course, but I should summarize for anyone who didn't read the older stuff) is that I wasn't actually making an argument against Free Will, because I happen to believe in it. I was simply making an argument about where the embrace of materialism must take us, rationally. This kind of dovetaila with the assumption (a fairly safe one, I think) that many Atheists reject religion on the grounds that there is no empirical evidence to support it (a circular argument, to my mind, but I digress...). If this is so, it won't actually do for them to turn around and place their faith in some unknowable quantum possibility simply so they can continue to believe they have a choice in what they do.

In other words, if someone believes only in the material universe, and also believes in applying an empirical (or even moderate!) burden of proof for a given belief, they must determine (in more ways than one, heh) that choice is an illusion. Framed this way (with the empahsis on lack of choice, rather than complete determinism), is there any way to dispute this that does not involve the supernatural?

Re: the last of the three posts.

Aye, and this is what will happen whether it's logically sound or not, of course. Fun to ponder. Something similarly fun to ponder: if we can never "do over" any quantum event, then it might as well treat it as predetermined rather than random, since it will only take place once, anyway. It will always remain completely indistinguishable from a predetermined event, simply because it happened.

The rest of your points are, as always, terribly interesting and sound, though ultimately they're about the ways in which thoughts bounce around and change one another, and the foggy idea of choice that results out of sheer, unfathomable complexity. It's easy to think of choice as real when you look at them all from a distance, but if you keep zooming in, at some point you'd have to come across something that behaves differently than all the other things we've ever observed, yes?

Are either of us nearing a truly practical consequence or application of any of this? I know I'm not, but it's still good to think about.

So are you saying you did or did not have a choice in making this thread?

__________________
"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Yep, I mainly introduced the quantum stuff to challenge your assertion that: "We have also never, ever found any matter that defied cause-and-effect for no discernable reason."

This is the tricky thing with quantum physics, especially for us laymen. Most of the practitioners involved swear blind that quantum events don't just appear to be indeterminate, but are, on a 'hard science', testable, 'reproducible' level (NB I shouldn't really have used 'random' as a shortcut for talking about this stuff, as it's got some 'aimless' connotations that 'indeterminacy' doesn't).

Einstein baulked at this (hence his 'God doesn't play dice' comment, and him dedicating the rest of his life to trying, and failing, to unify his 'creation' with the 'clockwork' rules of Newtonian physics). But the tests developed so far to assess the quantum scale have almost always supported the unintuitive suppositions that Relativity and its 'descendants' have thrown up.

I'm also waiting for the whole house of cards to collapse - it seems far more likely to me that what we're dealing with is imperfect knowledge of a highly complex (set of) systems. But, much to the chagrin of many a physicist, the experiments continue to suggest otherwise. (See the two links in footnote [1] for an interesting look at some recent theories & experiments, and some of the psychologies involved )

Well again, on our simple human time-scale, the scientists seem to have established 'replicable' tests for these peculiar phenomenon (superposition, entanglement, etc). I think the 'perfect rerun' argument doesn't invalidate these observations as being the best 'objective' appreciations available at this time. The impossibility of perfect replicability applies to all experiments, quantum, emergent or otherwise.

~EDITED (to remove repetition, and talk of indeterminant indeterminancies )~

The psychology of this is definitely intriguing.

As discussed above, 'materialists' aren't turning to 'unknowables' per se to substantiate their belief system, so i still disagree with your argument. If anything, the path taken is the opposite - highlighting lack of proof: We have no rational or scientific model for tracing the procedure of a prescriptive universe - IE we can't follow or fathom the route from the 'first principles' of the Big Bang (or whatever event took place at around that time) to current realities. It's beyond our ken.

But that's still dodging a bullet. The fact is that for someone who doesn't believe the universe is guided by a benevolent Godly hand, the idea of all events being precisely transcribed is an uncomfortable one. And this is clearly something that influences lots of 'material' scientists (see the linked articles again - and another intriguing 'avatistic' figure in Dawkins, who walks a very careful line between saying evolutionary processes aren't 'chaotic', but at the same time aren't completely 'prescriptive' either [which would imply a pre-set 'blueprint' inherent from time immemorial])

I think that's a fascinating 'bias' which probably does play upon those who are happy for the quantum field to provide an 'indeterminate' link in the universe's causal chain - and those who champion certain paths through the rules & 'irregularities' inherent in life's lush game.

On the best rational level i can achieve, i still prefer the logic (& the testable, 'materially useful', outcomes) of the mindsets outlined above to the 'God of the Gaps' principle you seem to be supporting. IE the idea that we can 'insert' causation (or agencies) into the gaps in our knowledge. We don't have proof that the world is 'end-to-end' deterministic (and we have some mechanisms that suggest ways that it might not be - even if some of them may be being grasped at ). We certainly don't have proof that the complex, apparently 'non-deterministic', behaviour that we see all around us is made possible through some 'supernatural' 'mechanism'.

I'm intrigued by your idea that rejecting supernatural belief-systems due to lack of evidence is 'circular' - I'd like to hear more on that . But i'm fairly sure that the explanatory route you're going down is the equivalent of tagging all the things we don't know as 'supernatural' - and i'm not convinced that that line of thought is particularly logical, free of biases, or has much explanatory power

This thread has been brought to you by gluon26854 from Alpha Centauri, which made Yoda's coffee slightly too piquant, nudging him into leaving a dangling modifier that enraged the part of my brainstem i inherited from a particularly feisty line of proto-geckos

Again, i'm not sure on what grounds the 'pure redo' argument has any particularly bearing on quantum events over other events. We can't perfectly redo or replicate any experiment. That doesn't mean we have to presume prescriptiveness.



Well, there was also some stuff on how our own biology impinges on our ability to make 'objective'/rational judgement calls - and how these processes can also be utilised to make good decisions that aren't necessarily, consciously ours. (And also all the nefarious stuff on how those processes can be manipulated, to further limit the 'window of opportunity' for what we might call unimpeded, conscious, 'free' decision-making & action-taking)

Not sure what you mean here. Zooming in 'biologically'? Anomalous decisions as a sign of 'free thought' external of a prescribed system?

The philosophy is all fun - and i think at the very least it can affect how we act, given our own biases etc

For me the 'daily' sharp end of biological 'self deception' & external-interference in our abilities to make 'conscious' decisions feels like it involves a whole load of practical considerations & consequences tho (Not least in reference to novel modern ways of appraising and influencing people's unconscious decision-altering aspects etc - from subliminal advertising, to direct 'brain stimulation', and on... )

Then again, we don't have proof that there isn't some "supernatural mechanism."

And if he does go down that route, it would not be *any* different than if someone attributed nothing or material ideas to those gaps. In short, it would be just as mute.

Moot?

Nah, i press mute on that line of argument . So long as you aren't expecting the 'nothing' to have any explanatory power or extra qualities in of itself the situation's pretty darn distinct. The 'supernatural mechanism' always comes with trappings - active inherent qualities, social dictates, invisible pink unicorn horns, what have you

No, I meant mute. (Tries desperately to not look like an idiot.)

I'd just like to note that I understood about 10% of all that.

Also, Chris, I'm pretty sure Golgs just called your mamma fat.

*leans back into his chair and waits for this argument to escalate*

__________________
http://www.last.fm/user/diezelpower/

Nah, i might have accused him of being illogical tho, which may be worse

You are free to think that

(I would suggest to you that all the energies we are aware of appear to be constrained or channelled by 'physical laws' in some way. And that your 'empty space' claim only makes sense in reference to quantum foam and the like. But i'm not sure you care )

Conceit #1: Randomness and free will are mutually exclusive. Randomness is the timing of the engine, and free will is the operator of the vehicle. Neither entity is dependent on the other, although the cognizant party (driver) continually seeks to control or manage the non-sentient party (engine timing).

Conceit #2: Unless one believes in multiple random universes- borne out of multiple Big Bangs, or something similar-- and multiple failures of marriage between laws of physics and Universe-development throughout the possible infinity of Universe-infancies, then the Universe is indeed a creation of a higher being. It is Created. It cannot be denied. The current laws of physics are such that they allow for Universe development (statistical chances of life-sustaining conditions), gravity development (stability of cosmic bodies), and therefore life.

Conceit #3: Perhaps the most philosophical conceit: The Universe has developed to a point where it can observe itself. Observe. Stabile conditions wrought by amenable laws of physics give way to, eventually, sentient creatures that can appreciate and observe its own environment, or Universe (with Hubble-like apparatus).

Conceit #4: Perhaps the most fantastical conceit: Black holes are verifiable and mysterious phenomenon that suggest a perversion of the current laws of physics (on the other side), yet are borne out of, and completely exist within, currently understandable and established cosmic phenomenon. This melding of random and ascertained-- existing in a stable enough Universe to have created sentient observers-- strongly suggests a higher presence and, therefore, a non-random state of the overall Universe as we currently see it.

__________________

I have to ask Karl, are there any precedents for these ideas, or have you just pulled em out of your... personal file on astrophysics & free will?

Care to expand on the 'randomness is the timing of the engine' bit. How so?

Again not hugely clear. Why is divorce of universe-development & the laws of physics a prerequisite for an 'undesigned' universe? I assume this is an Anthropic argument. In which case, it's a fun area to ponder, but not as clear-cut 'proof' of a Creator as you're stating. Here's a recent and reasonably-convincing challenge to one of the core principles you'd be relying on in this 'conceit'.

Theories of consciousness & evolution (underpinned by some natty physics) certainly do seem like some of the strongest routes for suggesting how life (more than the Universe per se ) might have partially slipped the shackles of complete determinism . I think i partially & tentatively agree with some of the sentiments involved here

I agree that 'miraculous' phenomenon do suggest a potential Creator (as one possible explanation ). But why does the 'contained' presence of 'chaotic volatility' (implied in your 'conceit') strongly suggest a Creator's hand? Why wouldn't 'He' make a completely stable universe, for example? Again we run up against the buffers of knowledge - but in this case about the potential motivations & natures of a potential God.

Golgot, I think you're too damned smart for your own good.

It all makes sense, yet I don't understand a word.

I decided I would post my thoughts on free will. Mind you, this is all based on emotion. Straight from the gut. However, I don't really think there's any actual solid foundation that can be established for this subject, so I don't mind using my gut. Evidence and facts aren't really possible here, in my opinion. Yoda wanted to hear what I had to say, too.

Starting from a theistic viewpoint it's of my opinion that an all-knowing supreme being cancels any possibility of free will. That's my basic argument for the core of the problem. However, the anti-theistic perspective is a bit trickier. One, I believe our choices are largely based on our surrounding environment. This is not the entirety of the answer, though. I also believe another large portion of our choices is based on past experiences (Ex. People who are afraid/have bad past experiences of talking in front of large crowds will make choices that keep them from talking in front of large crowds). However, the last part is something I believe that science will some day establish as genetic/DNA related (i.e. the creation of the brain from a DNA strain predetermines your responses to environment stimuli and experiences).

Of course, this is all just based on gut feelings, so I could easily be bat ***** crazy. But hey, it's on a topic that I don't mind being considered absolutely crazy.

Wow, you've dived straight onto the unicorn's horn there. (Would this be because an 'all-knowing' God would theoretically have to work in a deterministic universe to be able to know how things unfold? Hence no free will?)

Nature/nurture then?

It's strange that you say there's no 'solid foundation' to base this stuff on, then talk about our choices being mainly 'responses' to external cues, or built-in predispositions. Both those areas can be tackled by scientific study - and have been - and do suggest that a freaky level of our behaviour is 'predetermined'. From 'trait genes' to the '80pc' predictability of the average person in some social situations (see this 'non rational' communication article, cited previously, for that last stat).

But the strangest thing of all might still be that we seem to have some leeway. Not every influence & 'pre-determined' pattern of behaviour has been established yet etc, but even if they were to be, it still seems that we'd be left with a level of self-determination. As it were .

(What possible 'mechanisms' could lead this to be is a whole other challenging area of just-about-possible study. There are some ideas floating about in neurology and the like involving 'feedback' loops and other arcanery of a 'material' consciousness. Whether or not they pan out we'll have to wait and see )