Feel Free To Insert A Predestination Pun Here
October 20, 2023 10:06 AM Subscribe
You might remember Robert Sapolsky from his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, about how external stress affects health, or maybe from his truly massive Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst (archive link). Now, in a move sure to infuriate you uncontrollably, he has written Determined: A Science of Life with No Free Will. "I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book,” he says in this LA Times review. Scientists differ on what led him to say that.
I can accept the argument that there are a bunch of neurological processes going on inside us, that due to latency we're not necessarily aware that a decision has been made until we've already committed to the action, and thus a lot of our own personal perception of decision making is suspect. We have kind of a retroactive justification for what our body has recently just done.
I'm not sure this means we don't have "free will," just that free will doesn't mean what we think it means.
And I definitely can't accept that it means we shouldn't be held responsible for any of our actions.
posted by Foosnark at 10:28 AM on October 20, 2023 [22 favorites]
I'm not sure this means we don't have "free will," just that free will doesn't mean what we think it means.
And I definitely can't accept that it means we shouldn't be held responsible for any of our actions.
posted by Foosnark at 10:28 AM on October 20, 2023 [22 favorites]
I mean, I don't believe in free will. At least, I hold that thought in my mind as truth. But I am also incapable of not believing that I make my own decisions. So it kind of doesn't matter, and there is certainly no way to respond to this from a policy perspective that will make anything better for anyone, anywhere.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:29 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:29 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
Yeah. Like, define free will for me first, then we can have this conversation.
posted by Horkus at 10:29 AM on October 20, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by Horkus at 10:29 AM on October 20, 2023 [16 favorites]
"I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book," he said.
"But I can't help it," he continued
posted by adamrice at 10:31 AM on October 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
"But I can't help it," he continued
posted by adamrice at 10:31 AM on October 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
Sad that Sapolsky not only missed out on a good philosophy class but didn't even have any friends who knew enough about philosophy to tell him he'd stepped in a puddle before he wrote a whole book about what it's like to jump into the ocean.
posted by straight at 10:31 AM on October 20, 2023 [22 favorites]
posted by straight at 10:31 AM on October 20, 2023 [22 favorites]
BF Skinner back in late 50’s or so, denied the existence of a volitional self. Behaviorism views behavior as a product of the environment and the organism merely reacts to its environment. Hence, Skinner wrote his stuff because something in the environment triggered him to do it. The NYT interview puts this guy into the same situation in that HE didn’t choose to write this book. It was a mechanical action based on nonvolitional reasons. There is no he there.
I just finished a great book - The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton. Though the book deals with the issue of what is the relationship of our experience of reality and whatever the real reality is out there, he ties a lot together discussing free will. He sees the denial of free will, via physics or physiology, as a confusion of perspectives such as space and time. It’s a long argument that I can’t summarize but it’s worth looking at.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:42 AM on October 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
I just finished a great book - The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton. Though the book deals with the issue of what is the relationship of our experience of reality and whatever the real reality is out there, he ties a lot together discussing free will. He sees the denial of free will, via physics or physiology, as a confusion of perspectives such as space and time. It’s a long argument that I can’t summarize but it’s worth looking at.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:42 AM on October 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
CONTEMPLATE BEANS
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on October 20, 2023 [21 favorites]
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on October 20, 2023 [21 favorites]
Straight,
There are a lot a areas of human thought where you wonder did this person ever take a class in Philosophy? I see it all the time here at MF, especially in areas of language and intelligence, human, animal, or otherwise. People in specific fields like CS, physics, psychology, etc know a lot about their field but what they don’t know is that these issues have been around for centuries and have been discussed and argued for centuries. Philosophy should be a required course just like critical thinking.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:53 AM on October 20, 2023 [27 favorites]
There are a lot a areas of human thought where you wonder did this person ever take a class in Philosophy? I see it all the time here at MF, especially in areas of language and intelligence, human, animal, or otherwise. People in specific fields like CS, physics, psychology, etc know a lot about their field but what they don’t know is that these issues have been around for centuries and have been discussed and argued for centuries. Philosophy should be a required course just like critical thinking.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:53 AM on October 20, 2023 [27 favorites]
Perhaps we are deterministically bound to believe in free will.
posted by Foosnark at 10:56 AM on October 20, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by Foosnark at 10:56 AM on October 20, 2023 [10 favorites]
Here's what I'm curious about and why I will end up buying the book. In the LA Times piece, the idea of picking up a pen goes like this: "If you reach out right now and pick up a pen, was even that insignificant action somehow preordained? [...] What the student experiences as a decision to grab the pen is preceded by a jumble of competing impulses beyond his or her conscious control." And sure, yes. But then, we spend a lot of mental energy--and very real physically-existing, evolutionarily-important calories--on reflection, rehearsal and planning. We think over the outcomes of prior actions and wonder about the outcomes of our future actions. Why? Our brains really value the sense of having a little homunculus in there reviewing and planning. We receive an emotional boost from the sense of freedom. Why? Are we just passengers of an unconscious that is using these things we interpret as emotional boosts and rewards to coldly calculate its way forward? And if so, why is it so important to that unconscious to create a sense of a free-willed consciousness?
posted by mittens at 10:59 AM on October 20, 2023 [17 favorites]
posted by mittens at 10:59 AM on October 20, 2023 [17 favorites]
Feel Free To Insert A Predestination Pun Here
I choose not to.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:02 AM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
I choose not to.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:02 AM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
Re: free will.
Sidney Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: "Are you telling me it's wrong to anthropomorphize people?"
posted by lalochezia at 11:07 AM on October 20, 2023 [31 favorites]
Sidney Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: "Are you telling me it's wrong to anthropomorphize people?"
posted by lalochezia at 11:07 AM on October 20, 2023 [31 favorites]
The very notion of free will is ridiculous. The notion that we don't have it is also ridiculous.
posted by night_train at 11:13 AM on October 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by night_train at 11:13 AM on October 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
I do agree with Sapolsky.
I think the first important thing in free will discussions is to say what you mean by free will. Because if you say to someone they have no free will, they may interpret it as you saying that they can't choose according to their preferences. But of course we always choose according to our preferences. So there is freedom in that sense. But the reason I think we don't have free will is that we aren't in control of our preferences (even attempts to alter our preferences must be a result of some pre-existing desire, since a person can't simply create a motivation where there was no motivation to start with).
we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and reward (from the article).
I agree with this. When I say we're not responsible for what we do, I mean we're not morally responsible in a way that justifies praise and blame. I like to think the we are only "mechanically" responsible. In other words, if a person commits a crime, it's justified to try to prevent them doing it again, but it's not justified to punish them. Put them in prison if that helps. But it should be for rehabilitative purposes, not punitive purposes.
To me this is literally the only difference there needs to be between a world where everyone believes in free will/moral responsibility and a world where nobody does. In the latter case you would only see criminals as "broken" (in a non-pejorative sense) and needing to be "fixed" (rehabilitated), rather than as "bad" and needing to be punished. Everything else could be the same in such a world. Things that we think of as good would still be good in that world. Our personalities and behaviour and motivations would still be the same.
posted by mokey at 11:36 AM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
I think the first important thing in free will discussions is to say what you mean by free will. Because if you say to someone they have no free will, they may interpret it as you saying that they can't choose according to their preferences. But of course we always choose according to our preferences. So there is freedom in that sense. But the reason I think we don't have free will is that we aren't in control of our preferences (even attempts to alter our preferences must be a result of some pre-existing desire, since a person can't simply create a motivation where there was no motivation to start with).
we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and reward (from the article).
I agree with this. When I say we're not responsible for what we do, I mean we're not morally responsible in a way that justifies praise and blame. I like to think the we are only "mechanically" responsible. In other words, if a person commits a crime, it's justified to try to prevent them doing it again, but it's not justified to punish them. Put them in prison if that helps. But it should be for rehabilitative purposes, not punitive purposes.
To me this is literally the only difference there needs to be between a world where everyone believes in free will/moral responsibility and a world where nobody does. In the latter case you would only see criminals as "broken" (in a non-pejorative sense) and needing to be "fixed" (rehabilitated), rather than as "bad" and needing to be punished. Everything else could be the same in such a world. Things that we think of as good would still be good in that world. Our personalities and behaviour and motivations would still be the same.
posted by mokey at 11:36 AM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
I'm an unapologetic layperson Sapolsky fan with the Behave audiobook languishing on his phone and who just last night watched part of a class lecture series he did on Kanopy that went over how SIDS was disastrously misdiagnosed for a generation around the turn of the 20th century. His lecture on depression (CW: suicide, etc.) as a true health issue was massively eye-opening for me, and I find his plain-spoken explanations of massive amounts of research over the course of history is accessible in a way that I like.
None of this means he's right about anything, but we dumb people are condemned to look to people who have spent more time with the stuff of our interests for detail and interpretation and unless we want to "do your own research" we/I are stuck with this. Then again, making a decision to take someone's word for something is? an example of free will, so again what do I know. For what it's worth, he does tend to describe history as producing "convincing" developments, even if later on he goes back over and says why they were wrong in whatever conclusion.
posted by rhizome at 11:47 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
None of this means he's right about anything, but we dumb people are condemned to look to people who have spent more time with the stuff of our interests for detail and interpretation and unless we want to "do your own research" we/I are stuck with this. Then again, making a decision to take someone's word for something is? an example of free will, so again what do I know. For what it's worth, he does tend to describe history as producing "convincing" developments, even if later on he goes back over and says why they were wrong in whatever conclusion.
posted by rhizome at 11:47 AM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
Ted Chiang, "What's Expected of Us"
posted by away for regrooving at 11:49 AM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by away for regrooving at 11:49 AM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
Today we know epilepsy is a disease. By and large, it’s accepted that a person who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be charged with murder.
The person who wrote this had the opportunity to review what a 'murder charge' requires but chose not to. Was their laziness a lack of free will?
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:54 AM on October 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
The person who wrote this had the opportunity to review what a 'murder charge' requires but chose not to. Was their laziness a lack of free will?
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:54 AM on October 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
I'm a compatibilist
A Raymond Smullyan dialogue on free will
I think some of our intuitive sense of free will comes from the way our neurons work as "threshold machines". Just the slightest change of input to a neuron can make the difference between it firing or not, and that propagates, and that happens all over the brain rapidly. We have a sense we could have chosen differently because that straw on the camel's back; and that sense of "we" because the neurons constantly excite and inhibit each other.
posted by Schmucko at 12:03 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
A Raymond Smullyan dialogue on free will
I think some of our intuitive sense of free will comes from the way our neurons work as "threshold machines". Just the slightest change of input to a neuron can make the difference between it firing or not, and that propagates, and that happens all over the brain rapidly. We have a sense we could have chosen differently because that straw on the camel's back; and that sense of "we" because the neurons constantly excite and inhibit each other.
posted by Schmucko at 12:03 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Well, as someone who hasn't read the book, and doesn't have much comment on the article, I can definitely state he's wrong. Zebras DO get ulcers. They are extremely resistant, but they can develop them.
Horses get ulcers from being confined in stables, lack of movement, travel, competition stress, and being fed large amounts on an unnatural feed schedule. As free-range grazers, horses process feed continuously throughout the day, and their gut doesn't deal well with being empty and suddenly having to deal with large amounts of hay and high concentrate grains.
Zebras in zoos develop ulcers from confinement, as well as from being in an unnatural environment with continual stimulus from people and unfamiliar sounds. They are even more susceptible to regimented feedings of processed fodder rather than continual grazing. Not all zoos, etc. but most...
Horses are given oral Omeprazole or Misoprostol for ulcers, but the additional stress of handling zebras has to be weighed against the benefits of the medication.
Equines with free will would rather roam the range than be in a stall. I doubt that horses and zebras are very philosophical. You have to discuss that kind of thing with a mule.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:09 PM on October 20, 2023 [40 favorites]
Horses get ulcers from being confined in stables, lack of movement, travel, competition stress, and being fed large amounts on an unnatural feed schedule. As free-range grazers, horses process feed continuously throughout the day, and their gut doesn't deal well with being empty and suddenly having to deal with large amounts of hay and high concentrate grains.
Zebras in zoos develop ulcers from confinement, as well as from being in an unnatural environment with continual stimulus from people and unfamiliar sounds. They are even more susceptible to regimented feedings of processed fodder rather than continual grazing. Not all zoos, etc. but most...
Horses are given oral Omeprazole or Misoprostol for ulcers, but the additional stress of handling zebras has to be weighed against the benefits of the medication.
Equines with free will would rather roam the range than be in a stall. I doubt that horses and zebras are very philosophical. You have to discuss that kind of thing with a mule.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:09 PM on October 20, 2023 [40 favorites]
The person who wrote this had the opportunity to review what a 'murder charge' requires but chose not to. Was their laziness a lack of free will?
FWIW, I can find only a handful of cases where epileptics were convicted of vehicular manslaughter-type charges, and all of them involve drivers who were either previously diagnosed, or had been concealing seizures from either/both their doctor and motor vehicle departments, and drove despite all that.
posted by rhizome at 12:10 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
FWIW, I can find only a handful of cases where epileptics were convicted of vehicular manslaughter-type charges, and all of them involve drivers who were either previously diagnosed, or had been concealing seizures from either/both their doctor and motor vehicle departments, and drove despite all that.
posted by rhizome at 12:10 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
The greatest risk of abandoning free will, Sapolsky concedes, isn’t that we’ll want to do bad things. It’s that, without a sense of personal agency, we won’t want to do anything.
I thought we didn't have free will? Didn't he just say we were predisposed to do something as minor as pick up a pen? Doesn't that mean we are also predisposed to continue what we are doing and continue feeling the way we do, nevermind any stimuli? Make up your mind.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:11 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
I thought we didn't have free will? Didn't he just say we were predisposed to do something as minor as pick up a pen? Doesn't that mean we are also predisposed to continue what we are doing and continue feeling the way we do, nevermind any stimuli? Make up your mind.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:11 PM on October 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
I spent about two months of my precious 2020 plodding through Sapolsky's Behave - 700 big pages and weighing 1.14kg. I started because it was there and I couldn't walk round it or jump over it . . . and because he was dating someone working on the same floor as me when we were all graduate students in the early 80s. By the time I got to the last chapter, I'd forgotten the difference between the fusiform gyrus and the amygdala which had been explained in elaborate detail earlier in the book.
Last week I went to the local author-signing launch of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell, who was working in the same lab as me in the early 90s. (I get around on the periphery of book-writing scientists, in an always the bridesmaid never the bride sense).
I shall account it a triumph of free will if I finish either Free Agents or Determined before Christmas.
For all you biological determinists out there, remember there is, even at this moment, a butterfly in Haiti stamping its foot saying "I refute it thus"
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:13 PM on October 20, 2023 [17 favorites]
Last week I went to the local author-signing launch of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell, who was working in the same lab as me in the early 90s. (I get around on the periphery of book-writing scientists, in an always the bridesmaid never the bride sense).
I shall account it a triumph of free will if I finish either Free Agents or Determined before Christmas.
For all you biological determinists out there, remember there is, even at this moment, a butterfly in Haiti stamping its foot saying "I refute it thus"
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:13 PM on October 20, 2023 [17 favorites]
Compatibilism (the philosophical position that free will is compatible with determinism) has always seemed fundamentally incoherent to me. Either the universe is a causal chain, and everything is determined by its antecedents, and we have no free will, or it's not, and there's something magical going on with humans in particular to give us the ability to intervene in the chain of causes and produce an outcome that is not predetermined. Until someone can explain how the latter can be the case (without simply waving your hand in the general direction of problems of quantum physics or spooky action at a distance or entoning a mantra of "chaos theory" and hoping that settles it), there is no free will of any kind. Choice is illusion, and the clockwork universe marches on and everything that happens was always going to happen the way it happened from the moment the universe emerged from whatever preceded it. Our luck, or curse, is that the antecedent causes for every action I take is the sum of every event in the universe that preceded it, a web of causality so freakishly complex that it is basically impossible to predict the future on the basis of it with the knowledge and tech we currently possess. But in reality it's not always that difficult to predict what some individual will do given their circumstances, if you know enough about them, or what great masses of people will do.
Maybe our picture of the physical world is fundamentally wrong, and we're not locked into a causal chain that will spin out until there is no matter or energy left in the universe. But we can only conceptualize free will on the basis of a basically different idea of how the world works from the one we have where everything operates according to mathematically describable laws.
posted by dis_integration at 12:20 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Maybe our picture of the physical world is fundamentally wrong, and we're not locked into a causal chain that will spin out until there is no matter or energy left in the universe. But we can only conceptualize free will on the basis of a basically different idea of how the world works from the one we have where everything operates according to mathematically describable laws.
posted by dis_integration at 12:20 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Well, I *do* think the universe is NOT deterministic, that's the conventional wisdom coming out of quantum physics.
But I think it's wrong to think of laws of physics forcing us to make our choices. I don't see anything contradictory in compatibilism. In a sense our choices also determine the regularities of the universe, the "laws of physics". I think of causes as descriptions and not prescriptions; if it helps to describe a regularity we see, we use language that one thing caused another. But that didn't have to cause the other. There aren't laws of physics imposed on high that we need to conform to. The laws of physics are generalizations from how things actually behave, so it's simply impossible for us to behave in contradiction to them, any more than it's possible for us to behave in a way we don't behave.
posted by Schmucko at 12:27 PM on October 20, 2023
But I think it's wrong to think of laws of physics forcing us to make our choices. I don't see anything contradictory in compatibilism. In a sense our choices also determine the regularities of the universe, the "laws of physics". I think of causes as descriptions and not prescriptions; if it helps to describe a regularity we see, we use language that one thing caused another. But that didn't have to cause the other. There aren't laws of physics imposed on high that we need to conform to. The laws of physics are generalizations from how things actually behave, so it's simply impossible for us to behave in contradiction to them, any more than it's possible for us to behave in a way we don't behave.
posted by Schmucko at 12:27 PM on October 20, 2023
But in reality it's not always that difficult to predict what some individual will do given their circumstances, if you know enough about them, or what great masses of people will do.
What? It's easy to figure out what the generic masses will do, because choice is not an illusion but choices are limited and most people like to go with the popular choices. If you think you can identify what any particular individual will do with decent accuracy, then you can become a billionaire.
And talking about camping and then seeing ads about camping is just our mind wanting to make a connection where none exists - like seeing animals in clouds - it's just as disconcerting to order a right side mirror for a 2005 Nissan Altima from Amazon and then endlessly see ads for them like I'm a 2005 Nissan Altima repair shop or something. Reality is that people have no idea about individuals, nor do algorithms, at least not yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:28 PM on October 20, 2023
What? It's easy to figure out what the generic masses will do, because choice is not an illusion but choices are limited and most people like to go with the popular choices. If you think you can identify what any particular individual will do with decent accuracy, then you can become a billionaire.
And talking about camping and then seeing ads about camping is just our mind wanting to make a connection where none exists - like seeing animals in clouds - it's just as disconcerting to order a right side mirror for a 2005 Nissan Altima from Amazon and then endlessly see ads for them like I'm a 2005 Nissan Altima repair shop or something. Reality is that people have no idea about individuals, nor do algorithms, at least not yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:28 PM on October 20, 2023
If you know someones desires and a bit about how they've reacted to similar situations in the past you can guess pretty well how they're going to react to a particular situation (if you have that prior knowledge about them). Not 100% reliably, but we overestimate how often people deviate from typical behavior.
Non-determinism in physics just means that certain things at the quantum level behave probabilisitically. It's an open question whether that means there isn't a kind of superdeterminism that controls that probabilistic behavior, that is, whether there is just stuff going on we don't yet know how to observe or measure that makes it "fully" determined. Probablistic causality is still unflinching, iron clad causality. Just with a bit of options. And again, that's all happening at the quantum level, not at the level of say, me making a decision.
posted by dis_integration at 12:39 PM on October 20, 2023
Non-determinism in physics just means that certain things at the quantum level behave probabilisitically. It's an open question whether that means there isn't a kind of superdeterminism that controls that probabilistic behavior, that is, whether there is just stuff going on we don't yet know how to observe or measure that makes it "fully" determined. Probablistic causality is still unflinching, iron clad causality. Just with a bit of options. And again, that's all happening at the quantum level, not at the level of say, me making a decision.
posted by dis_integration at 12:39 PM on October 20, 2023
he has written Determined: A Science of Life with No Free Will.
So, like Daniel Dennett?
"I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book," he said.
So, not like Daniel Dennett?
posted by penduluum at 12:46 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
So, like Daniel Dennett?
"I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book," he said.
So, not like Daniel Dennett?
posted by penduluum at 12:46 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
so I just meant to keep the peanut butter out but accidentally put it back in the fridge. I didn't INTEND to put it back, but I did. so, I have free will but I don't use it? I was predetermined to do that which I did not intend?
I did not know NATURE published speculative fiction!
posted by supermedusa at 12:53 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
I did not know NATURE published speculative fiction!
posted by supermedusa at 12:53 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
His interview on Huberman Lab was my introduction to him, and it's a really excellent (90-minute) intro IMO.
posted by tovarisch at 12:58 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by tovarisch at 12:58 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
There a bunch of philosophical questions which I think of as category errors. The question is meaningless, often, because the definition is meaningless.
Free will is one of those questions.
posted by constraint at 1:32 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
Free will is one of those questions.
posted by constraint at 1:32 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
Claiming that there is a 'will' (or self or spirit or daemon or god or flying spaghetti monster) that can act without causality is just hand waving, because if any of those things existed, they'd also operate within causality.
Any discussion of "free will" is basically theology.
posted by signal at 1:43 PM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
Any discussion of "free will" is basically theology.
posted by signal at 1:43 PM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
Whether it's scientifically true or not, the existence of free will is something we need to at least pretend is true just for the sake of maintaining a functioning society. It's cool to think about it and debate it, but we can never declare in any legal sense that there's no free will.
posted by pracowity at 1:43 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 1:43 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
I see a lot of "moving the goalposts" in the idea that laws of physics or determinism, or even now, determination of probabilities is somehow a restriction on us. If there weren't any regularities in our universe, we wouldn't be able to have any thoughts or memories at all. We wouldn't be able to start a thought and continue it, we wouldn't be able to rely on memory because we couldn't trace our memory back in time through a chain of "causes" to say the memory reflected something real.
Mercury didn't behave according to Newton's laws, its orbit precessed by 43 arcseconds per century. Oh wait, Newton's laws were wrong, we fix up our laws of nature to describe how it actually behaves. That's the way it works. Laws of nature aren't like human laws. They don't force or restrict, they describe.
There appear regularities in time, we can predict at least probabilities in the future from observations. But not in space. If we know how things are arranged here at one time, it doesn't tell us about elsewhere. So... we separate out the time dimension that has at least probabilistic regularity. So it shouldn't surprise us that where we've cordoned off those parts of our universe that are regular, we find regularity.
posted by Schmucko at 1:52 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Mercury didn't behave according to Newton's laws, its orbit precessed by 43 arcseconds per century. Oh wait, Newton's laws were wrong, we fix up our laws of nature to describe how it actually behaves. That's the way it works. Laws of nature aren't like human laws. They don't force or restrict, they describe.
There appear regularities in time, we can predict at least probabilities in the future from observations. But not in space. If we know how things are arranged here at one time, it doesn't tell us about elsewhere. So... we separate out the time dimension that has at least probabilistic regularity. So it shouldn't surprise us that where we've cordoned off those parts of our universe that are regular, we find regularity.
posted by Schmucko at 1:52 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Not having free will doesn't mean you don't really make decisions or that the decisions you make today were predetermined before you were even born and not influenced by anything that happened just before you made the decision. It just means that the decision you make is the only one you could make, given everything that has happened in your life - everything you've ever read, everything your parents did or didn't do, everything anyone has ever said to you, plus smaller things like whether the sun is shining or someone brought donuts to work or the guy you just passed in the hall seemed to look at you funny. If you decide after months of thinking about it to quit your job and move to Maine, you really did make a decision. You considered different facts and feelings and options and chose one option for reasons that made sense to you. But you couldn't have made a different decision. That decision was the result of a billion influences, big and small, and given those specific influences, that specific decision was the only possible result. That's what not having free will means.
That we lack free will in that sense seems like a very logical thing to accept as true. Where I have trouble is when I start thinking about the really, really small decisions. If you ask me to raise my finger sometime in the next 10 seconds and I pick a moment to do it, what was that decision based on if not my free will?
posted by Redstart at 2:21 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
That we lack free will in that sense seems like a very logical thing to accept as true. Where I have trouble is when I start thinking about the really, really small decisions. If you ask me to raise my finger sometime in the next 10 seconds and I pick a moment to do it, what was that decision based on if not my free will?
posted by Redstart at 2:21 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
I think in a way determinism is a contradictory idea. How do you KNOW that given all those causes there was only one possible result? The fact is that there WAS one result. But how do you KNOW it couldn't have been another?
posted by Schmucko at 2:32 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Schmucko at 2:32 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Determinism has a really bad and I think insuperable 'homunculus' problem in addition to all its other absurdities.
Look back towards the first nanoseconds after the beginning of time. If determinism is true, in that moment, that tiny supremely hot universe mst have contained all the information which determines everything that will happen over all time, and since information requires energy to exist, and the more information the more energy, unless the universe is strictly limited in time, that tiny dot must have contained infinite energy.
posted by jamjam at 2:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Look back towards the first nanoseconds after the beginning of time. If determinism is true, in that moment, that tiny supremely hot universe mst have contained all the information which determines everything that will happen over all time, and since information requires energy to exist, and the more information the more energy, unless the universe is strictly limited in time, that tiny dot must have contained infinite energy.
posted by jamjam at 2:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ted Chiang, "What's Expected of Us"
I think the premise of this story is incorrect. Nobody's going to fall into akinetic mutism messing around with the Predictor, because the Predictor is doing something we understand very well--playing a trick on us, arguing with us--thwarting our will rather than disproving it. We're used to that. The time-travel bit just makes it more maddening. "Shall I fall into a fatal depression over this device, or run over it several times in the parking lot?" I think we all know what we'd do.
posted by mittens at 2:54 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think the premise of this story is incorrect. Nobody's going to fall into akinetic mutism messing around with the Predictor, because the Predictor is doing something we understand very well--playing a trick on us, arguing with us--thwarting our will rather than disproving it. We're used to that. The time-travel bit just makes it more maddening. "Shall I fall into a fatal depression over this device, or run over it several times in the parking lot?" I think we all know what we'd do.
posted by mittens at 2:54 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
That decision was the result of a billion influences, big and small, and given those specific influences, that specific decision was the only possible result
Computational physicists and mathematicians have argued there could actually be many possible (a priori unknown) results, given a starting position (your birth, say) to where you are just before a decision is made (the sum of your experiences and neurological development).
To these physicists, the problem of free will could be in the realm of computational undecidability, in which free will can be argued to be allowed because an outcome cannot be predicted from initial conditions and requires "running the experiment", i.e., in the case of humans, experiencing life up to the moment of a decision being made.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:59 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Computational physicists and mathematicians have argued there could actually be many possible (a priori unknown) results, given a starting position (your birth, say) to where you are just before a decision is made (the sum of your experiences and neurological development).
To these physicists, the problem of free will could be in the realm of computational undecidability, in which free will can be argued to be allowed because an outcome cannot be predicted from initial conditions and requires "running the experiment", i.e., in the case of humans, experiencing life up to the moment of a decision being made.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:59 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
All of which to say, free will is still a complicated notion, and it doesn't help that a lot of discussion about it has come (however naturally) from theology and theologically-derived philosophy.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:14 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:14 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
I haven't read Sapolsky's book, but if I'm understanding his general point correctly, he's not arguing for "clockwork universe determinism." Instead he's saying that we humans are each a bundle of hormones, neurotransmitters, conditioned responses, etc, such that when presented with a stimulus, we cannot help responding to it in a certain way.
posted by adamrice at 3:15 PM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 3:15 PM on October 20, 2023 [7 favorites]
A lot of what people are talking about when they discuss free will is that most of us draw an arbitrary line somewhere separating "me" from the rest of the universe. And the question is whether some action was caused by "me" being me or caused or constrained by something outside of "me" even though "me" is something that is actually continuous with and created by the rest of the universe.
If I decide to give money to a charity, that is a free decision if I think about it and decide I want to do it even though my desires and thinking are all determined by my genetics and environment, it's still a decision that comes from "me."
If someone holds a gun to my head and threatens to kill me if I don't give money to the charity, that feels like it's not a free decision, it was caused by something that is "not me."
If I get drunk and click on "DONATE," the next morning I might feel like that wasn't a free decision because it was influenced by alcohol which is "not me" or I might feel like getting drunk and making rash decisions is part of who I am, so it was "me" that made that decision.
Where you draw those lines are arbitrary and differ depending on why you want to draw the line. The legal system draws lines for when people should be incarcerated for their behavior. Psychologists might draw different lines when trying to explain why some people do that behavior and some don't. Policy makers might draw different lines when they try to figure out what incentives increase or decrease that behavior.
Sure, everything's caused by the Big Bang. But that's a pointless observation if you're asking a doctor what is causing your back pain. Questions of free will are contextual in the exact same way. What counts as "free," what counts as "me," depends on why you're asking.
posted by straight at 3:28 PM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
If I decide to give money to a charity, that is a free decision if I think about it and decide I want to do it even though my desires and thinking are all determined by my genetics and environment, it's still a decision that comes from "me."
If someone holds a gun to my head and threatens to kill me if I don't give money to the charity, that feels like it's not a free decision, it was caused by something that is "not me."
If I get drunk and click on "DONATE," the next morning I might feel like that wasn't a free decision because it was influenced by alcohol which is "not me" or I might feel like getting drunk and making rash decisions is part of who I am, so it was "me" that made that decision.
Where you draw those lines are arbitrary and differ depending on why you want to draw the line. The legal system draws lines for when people should be incarcerated for their behavior. Psychologists might draw different lines when trying to explain why some people do that behavior and some don't. Policy makers might draw different lines when they try to figure out what incentives increase or decrease that behavior.
Sure, everything's caused by the Big Bang. But that's a pointless observation if you're asking a doctor what is causing your back pain. Questions of free will are contextual in the exact same way. What counts as "free," what counts as "me," depends on why you're asking.
posted by straight at 3:28 PM on October 20, 2023 [11 favorites]
"I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book,” Why bother if you're convinced it's already been determined whether or not your audience accepts your message?
Nobody's serious about giving up on reasoning, deliberation, persuasion, etc., all of which take something like free will for granted. We don't understand how these fit into our current best theories, but they're entirely undeniable and indispensable to life outside of some abstract debate.
The best thing to say about free will and the like is just: "It's puzzling. Like many things, we don't know or understand much about it yet."
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 3:30 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
Nobody's serious about giving up on reasoning, deliberation, persuasion, etc., all of which take something like free will for granted. We don't understand how these fit into our current best theories, but they're entirely undeniable and indispensable to life outside of some abstract debate.
The best thing to say about free will and the like is just: "It's puzzling. Like many things, we don't know or understand much about it yet."
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 3:30 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
This reminds me of the social psych discussion (I can't remember any of the actual terminology so this is all a very rough paraphrase) of how if someone steals something in a more collectivist culture the conditions (poverty, etc) that led to the theft are more likely to be considered than in an individualist culture in which the person is considered to be a bad person doing bad things. Or something.
From the LA Times article: Change is always possible, he argues, but it comes from external stimuli. Sea slugs can learn to reflexively retreat from an electrical shock. Through the same biochemical pathways, humans are changed by exposure to external events in ways we rarely see coming.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:52 PM on October 20, 2023
From the LA Times article: Change is always possible, he argues, but it comes from external stimuli. Sea slugs can learn to reflexively retreat from an electrical shock. Through the same biochemical pathways, humans are changed by exposure to external events in ways we rarely see coming.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:52 PM on October 20, 2023
I'd like to do a bit of a long quote from the first chapter of Determined to establish his "definition" of free will, because I think it may reveal a weakness (but I'm not a neuro-anything so don't have the background to say for sure): "Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun. Mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e., being in a particularly excited state). That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream. Which had its own action potential because of the next neuron upstream. And so on. Here’s the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man’s brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, smells, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life-changing event in recent months or years. [...] Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will."
But--and here I could be completely embarrassing myself--I don't think the process depends on a single neuron triggered by a single neuron, and on and on. Someone correct me on this, but isn't the brain performing fields of activity over wide areas, rather than single-dimension communication? Isn't that multi-dimensionality (god I hope I don't sound too new-agey here) part of what makes thought? In the same way that a lightbulb can't do anything but turn off or on, but a computer can make math out of a billion off/on switches, doesn't opening up that field create a space for will? And maybe not completely free--I don't know what "independent of the sum of its biological past" might mean, maybe that will is subtractive, but anyway, isn't that "single neuron triggers single neuron" just not an accurate picture of what's going on?
posted by mittens at 4:45 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
But--and here I could be completely embarrassing myself--I don't think the process depends on a single neuron triggered by a single neuron, and on and on. Someone correct me on this, but isn't the brain performing fields of activity over wide areas, rather than single-dimension communication? Isn't that multi-dimensionality (god I hope I don't sound too new-agey here) part of what makes thought? In the same way that a lightbulb can't do anything but turn off or on, but a computer can make math out of a billion off/on switches, doesn't opening up that field create a space for will? And maybe not completely free--I don't know what "independent of the sum of its biological past" might mean, maybe that will is subtractive, but anyway, isn't that "single neuron triggers single neuron" just not an accurate picture of what's going on?
posted by mittens at 4:45 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
I just picture this guy dusting his hands and saying "Well there's THAT sorted!"
I assume he'll solve the nature of consciousness and all such questions in a similar efficient fashion. All the philosophy programs will have to shut down, because thanks to this guy, we've got it all figured out.
posted by emjaybee at 5:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
I assume he'll solve the nature of consciousness and all such questions in a similar efficient fashion. All the philosophy programs will have to shut down, because thanks to this guy, we've got it all figured out.
posted by emjaybee at 5:33 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Pretty good recent debate between Sapolsky and Huemer (a philosopher) on free will. The first couple of minutes are a technology trainwreck, but after it gets going, the discussion is fun.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:15 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:15 PM on October 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have such a nerd crush on Robert Sapolsky. Primate's Memoir is a book I recommend routinely - funny, interesting, educational. I read a lot of Behave, making me quite an outlier; the early chapters are dense neurobiology, it is used as a textbook, and should be, but for a non-scientist, challenging, and I think it's one of those great unread books, except for scientists and diligent students. You should watch his Stanford Lectures on Human Behavioral Biology I think he's grappling, in print, with what free will is, what it means, and how what he understands about human brains affects that understanding. I'd be surprised if he hasn't read a fair bit of philosophy. I think I can say that many philosophers do not have a deep understanding of neurobiology, medicine, primatology. (Stanford profile, wikipedia)
We are deeply influenced by our genetics, nutrition and other influences in utero, upbringing, illnesses, and more. I'll read the book soonish. If you grow up as the 1st son, your path is rather different from the 4th daughter who is the 7th child. Read Wilkerson's Caste; she is most interested in race in America, but caste/ hierarchy is a huge element that Americans tend to ignore and she is an excellent writer who did her research. it plays into Sapolsky's primatology nicely.
I suspect we have some choice within some parameters, but the American idea of free will feels like a myth. If we approach it less from our individualistic culture, we could probably evolve more fairly and happily by making laws from a neurobiological viewpoint. Years ago I read an article about serial killers/ mass murderers, and of those whose brains could be studied; they all showed signs of brain damage. There's tons of documentation on how specific damage or strength in areas of the brain affects us profoundly.
I would be delighted to read this with other MeFites.
posted by theora55 at 6:24 PM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
We are deeply influenced by our genetics, nutrition and other influences in utero, upbringing, illnesses, and more. I'll read the book soonish. If you grow up as the 1st son, your path is rather different from the 4th daughter who is the 7th child. Read Wilkerson's Caste; she is most interested in race in America, but caste/ hierarchy is a huge element that Americans tend to ignore and she is an excellent writer who did her research. it plays into Sapolsky's primatology nicely.
I suspect we have some choice within some parameters, but the American idea of free will feels like a myth. If we approach it less from our individualistic culture, we could probably evolve more fairly and happily by making laws from a neurobiological viewpoint. Years ago I read an article about serial killers/ mass murderers, and of those whose brains could be studied; they all showed signs of brain damage. There's tons of documentation on how specific damage or strength in areas of the brain affects us profoundly.
I would be delighted to read this with other MeFites.
posted by theora55 at 6:24 PM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
> Sad that Sapolsky not only missed out on a good philosophy class but didn't even have any friends who knew enough about philosophy to tell him he'd stepped in a puddle before he wrote a whole book about what it's like to jump into the ocean.
You haven't skimmed the book or the bibliography but you're assuming he's not read up on the literature.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:40 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
You haven't skimmed the book or the bibliography but you're assuming he's not read up on the literature.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:40 PM on October 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
didn't even have any friends who knew enough about philosophy to tell him he'd stepped in a puddle before he wrote a whole book about what it's like to jump into the ocean
Is it a surprise to you that it’s easier to sell books about jumping in the ocean?
posted by atoxyl at 7:25 PM on October 20, 2023
Is it a surprise to you that it’s easier to sell books about jumping in the ocean?
posted by atoxyl at 7:25 PM on October 20, 2023
(a chapter and a half in, and it feels like maybe this thread went back in time to warn him, be sure to cover this point, and this one) (it's really good)
posted by mittens at 7:30 PM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by mittens at 7:30 PM on October 20, 2023 [9 favorites]
You haven't skimmed the book or the bibliography but you're assuming he's not read up on the literature.
Just doing a search in the google books preview for some prominent philosophers working on free will shows serious but somewhat spotty engagement. He cites Mele, Kane, Dennett, Frankfurt, Caruso, Pereboom, and Strawson, which is an intellectually diverse group! But he misses van Inwagen, Lewis, Beebee, Sartorio, Clarke, O'Connor, Swinburne, and Vihvelin. (Those are all just major players in the free will literature that I would expect any philosopher working in the area to know relatively well. There are undoubtedly lots and lots of other, less-well-known philosophers working on free will and related issues.)
For whatever it's worth, in the debate with Huemer that I linked earlier, Sapolsky doesn't strike me as either especially well-informed or especially badly-informed about philosophical work on free will. I actually have more reservations about some of the behavioral economics and social psychology "results" he appeals to than I do the philosophical moves. For example, the hungry judge effect is, I think, probably a statistical artifact. In any event, I found his remarks in the debate to be typically sensible, and I often agreed with him (even though I am a compatibilist, not an incompatibilist). At the same time, he sometimes seemed to entirely miss the point of Huemer's criticisms. Very interesting, though.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 7:31 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
Just doing a search in the google books preview for some prominent philosophers working on free will shows serious but somewhat spotty engagement. He cites Mele, Kane, Dennett, Frankfurt, Caruso, Pereboom, and Strawson, which is an intellectually diverse group! But he misses van Inwagen, Lewis, Beebee, Sartorio, Clarke, O'Connor, Swinburne, and Vihvelin. (Those are all just major players in the free will literature that I would expect any philosopher working in the area to know relatively well. There are undoubtedly lots and lots of other, less-well-known philosophers working on free will and related issues.)
For whatever it's worth, in the debate with Huemer that I linked earlier, Sapolsky doesn't strike me as either especially well-informed or especially badly-informed about philosophical work on free will. I actually have more reservations about some of the behavioral economics and social psychology "results" he appeals to than I do the philosophical moves. For example, the hungry judge effect is, I think, probably a statistical artifact. In any event, I found his remarks in the debate to be typically sensible, and I often agreed with him (even though I am a compatibilist, not an incompatibilist). At the same time, he sometimes seemed to entirely miss the point of Huemer's criticisms. Very interesting, though.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 7:31 PM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
> A lot of what people are talking about when they discuss free will is that most of us draw an arbitrary line somewhere separating "me" from the rest of the universe. And the question is whether some action was caused by "me" being me or caused or constrained by something outside of "me" even though "me" is something that is actually continuous with and created by the rest of the universe.
gonna throw out an idea here, dunno if it’s something original or just an idea i read somewhere and now think is mine:
what if there is free will but not for us?
by this i’m not appealing to the existence of some free-willed deity or something like that, but instead arguing that it’s possible that you could think about the universe of stimuli that act upon, interact with, and thereby determine the actions of what you believe to be your discrete inside-your-body free willed self as operating within systems that are themselves actually free-willed? so instead of slicing the universe into free-willed you and everything else, you’re a determined constituent component of larger free-willed networks that are mostly outside of your body?
so, like, under this interpretation you don’t have free will, I don’t have free will, but (for example) mitsubishi, the european union, the ioc and fifa, greenpeace, the filmmaking industry, cults of personality, academic psychiatric research associations, nasa, doctors without borders and various science-fiction fandoms all might have free will. there may be free will for churches and for nation-states — well, until we can get rid of them — but not for us.
now that i’ve typed this out i’m thinking maybe it’s just warmed-over hegel, but fuck me if i’ve ever managed to understand hegel.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:17 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
gonna throw out an idea here, dunno if it’s something original or just an idea i read somewhere and now think is mine:
what if there is free will but not for us?
by this i’m not appealing to the existence of some free-willed deity or something like that, but instead arguing that it’s possible that you could think about the universe of stimuli that act upon, interact with, and thereby determine the actions of what you believe to be your discrete inside-your-body free willed self as operating within systems that are themselves actually free-willed? so instead of slicing the universe into free-willed you and everything else, you’re a determined constituent component of larger free-willed networks that are mostly outside of your body?
so, like, under this interpretation you don’t have free will, I don’t have free will, but (for example) mitsubishi, the european union, the ioc and fifa, greenpeace, the filmmaking industry, cults of personality, academic psychiatric research associations, nasa, doctors without borders and various science-fiction fandoms all might have free will. there may be free will for churches and for nation-states — well, until we can get rid of them — but not for us.
now that i’ve typed this out i’m thinking maybe it’s just warmed-over hegel, but fuck me if i’ve ever managed to understand hegel.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:17 PM on October 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Assuming that the slice of the universe we inhabit is not deterministic, for which I think there is an excellent argument, we have unfettered free will in any circumstance in which we have time to consider an action. Our choices may be constrained by circumstances or imagination, but we have direct control over those choices, should we choose to exercise it and not just go with our gut.
However, many of the things we do are done essentially on autopilot to a greater or lesser degree depending on the precise circumstances. Driving, cycling, and even walking being the most obvious examples. We still have some measure of free will when executing these tasks, but it is generally a less direct kind of control. At best in the moment, you can exert high level control of the overall task, like a hands off manager, and exercise more immediate control over a single aspect of the entire project. You can tell your body to take longer strides or concentrate on maintaining a specific pace or keeping your hands at 10 and 2 or whatever. That goes out the window when your body/brain decide you're in immediate danger, however. At that point you have little to no control in the moment. The only real influence you have on your actions is prior training. The conscious mind simply isn't quick enough to react.
This is why I don't really blame individuals for being shit drivers. We have built a system that lets people behind the wheel with little training and build our infrastructure and even the cars themselves in a way that tricks our autonomous systems into prioritizing badly and encourages them to do things we don't want them to do. And then we're baffled by the constant mistakes and the fact that punishment that is usually far removed from the action doesn't actually work.
In short, if a stimulus and a reaction are less than a couple of seconds apart, your conscious mind has little to no influence over the outcome except through pretraining the neural networks that handle that shit for you. Worse, your conscious mind loves to lie to you about it by rewriting history before it gets committed to long term memory. Fully exercising free will requires forethought and a lot of work.
Thankfully, our parents help with the basic shit that gets us through the day by forcing routines upon us as children, giving us the mental bandwidth to train ourselves. Life is so much more of a struggle if we manage to lose that leg up (or never got it in the first place) and have to start over from scratch. The less you have to think about just to get out the door or get yourself from place to place, the more mental energy you have to devote to the rest of your life and keep yourself in the metaphorical driver's seat.
Poor training and a lack of mental bandwidth to solve it makes us stressed, reactive, and kinda shitty. Not necessarily shitty, I guess, but out of control, which often results in being shitty because we all come with built in programming that is very short sighted and selfish so that we don't..you know..die.
(Sorry for the scatterbrained nature of the comment, I'm up way past my bedtime)
posted by wierdo at 1:27 AM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
However, many of the things we do are done essentially on autopilot to a greater or lesser degree depending on the precise circumstances. Driving, cycling, and even walking being the most obvious examples. We still have some measure of free will when executing these tasks, but it is generally a less direct kind of control. At best in the moment, you can exert high level control of the overall task, like a hands off manager, and exercise more immediate control over a single aspect of the entire project. You can tell your body to take longer strides or concentrate on maintaining a specific pace or keeping your hands at 10 and 2 or whatever. That goes out the window when your body/brain decide you're in immediate danger, however. At that point you have little to no control in the moment. The only real influence you have on your actions is prior training. The conscious mind simply isn't quick enough to react.
This is why I don't really blame individuals for being shit drivers. We have built a system that lets people behind the wheel with little training and build our infrastructure and even the cars themselves in a way that tricks our autonomous systems into prioritizing badly and encourages them to do things we don't want them to do. And then we're baffled by the constant mistakes and the fact that punishment that is usually far removed from the action doesn't actually work.
In short, if a stimulus and a reaction are less than a couple of seconds apart, your conscious mind has little to no influence over the outcome except through pretraining the neural networks that handle that shit for you. Worse, your conscious mind loves to lie to you about it by rewriting history before it gets committed to long term memory. Fully exercising free will requires forethought and a lot of work.
Thankfully, our parents help with the basic shit that gets us through the day by forcing routines upon us as children, giving us the mental bandwidth to train ourselves. Life is so much more of a struggle if we manage to lose that leg up (or never got it in the first place) and have to start over from scratch. The less you have to think about just to get out the door or get yourself from place to place, the more mental energy you have to devote to the rest of your life and keep yourself in the metaphorical driver's seat.
Poor training and a lack of mental bandwidth to solve it makes us stressed, reactive, and kinda shitty. Not necessarily shitty, I guess, but out of control, which often results in being shitty because we all come with built in programming that is very short sighted and selfish so that we don't..you know..die.
(Sorry for the scatterbrained nature of the comment, I'm up way past my bedtime)
posted by wierdo at 1:27 AM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
Dispensing with the idea of free will sounds great because you won’t be held responsible for anything. But if you can’t make free choices we might as well cancel those elections. Oh, and you won’t get punished, but you might be subjected to certain restraints (let’s not call them ‘jail’) if it turns out your genetic and environmental programming make you likely to commit crimes. (David Eagleman already proposes this.)
posted by Phanx at 2:40 AM on October 21, 2023
posted by Phanx at 2:40 AM on October 21, 2023
"Well, as someone who hasn't read the book, and doesn't have much comment on the article, I can definitely state he's wrong. Zebras DO get ulcers. They are extremely resistant, but they can develop them."
The piece does actually say this, citing captivity as the differentiating factor. To be specific, how it is framed is this:
The zebra lives in a fight or flight world where it is chased by the lion. Neither the zebra nor the lion get ulcers because they are built and adapted specifically to handle their stresses, namely the lion wants to eat the zebra and the zebra wants to be able to avoid this. There is no hidden psychology, no time for existential crisis. Instead the zebra thinks: I am a Zebra. I do not want to be eaten. I need to run for my survival. The zebra does not live in a prison of carpool lanes, after school sports, a boss that asks you to work late, and such. The logic flows that it is these thoughts that cause our ulcer.
As you point out, it is only when the zebra is forced into an unnatural enclosure that the zebra develops more challenging concerns and it is here where the zebra gains the propensity to have an ulcer.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:59 AM on October 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
The piece does actually say this, citing captivity as the differentiating factor. To be specific, how it is framed is this:
The zebra lives in a fight or flight world where it is chased by the lion. Neither the zebra nor the lion get ulcers because they are built and adapted specifically to handle their stresses, namely the lion wants to eat the zebra and the zebra wants to be able to avoid this. There is no hidden psychology, no time for existential crisis. Instead the zebra thinks: I am a Zebra. I do not want to be eaten. I need to run for my survival. The zebra does not live in a prison of carpool lanes, after school sports, a boss that asks you to work late, and such. The logic flows that it is these thoughts that cause our ulcer.
As you point out, it is only when the zebra is forced into an unnatural enclosure that the zebra develops more challenging concerns and it is here where the zebra gains the propensity to have an ulcer.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:59 AM on October 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
Dispensing with the idea of free will sounds great because you won’t be held responsible for anything.
i find it far worse. we’re cursed to make choices we have no influence on. we cannot escape the illusion that we have the power to change our fate, but that fate meets us inexorably. it’s a greek tragedy. we’re all oedipus
posted by dis_integration at 7:27 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
i find it far worse. we’re cursed to make choices we have no influence on. we cannot escape the illusion that we have the power to change our fate, but that fate meets us inexorably. it’s a greek tragedy. we’re all oedipus
posted by dis_integration at 7:27 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
The primary cause of ulcers in humans is Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which are present in more than half of all humans, according to the Mayo Clinic. A recent Nobel Prize was awarded for work which conclusively established this.
It’s illuminating to witness even here how little penetration this fact seems to have made into the mainly victim-blaming bullshit narrative, flogged by the medical establishment for generations, that ulcers are caused by 'stress'.
It seems very likely to me that confined zebras get more ulcers than zebras in the wild because they have so much more contact with humans than because of the stress of confinement.
posted by jamjam at 7:57 AM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
It’s illuminating to witness even here how little penetration this fact seems to have made into the mainly victim-blaming bullshit narrative, flogged by the medical establishment for generations, that ulcers are caused by 'stress'.
It seems very likely to me that confined zebras get more ulcers than zebras in the wild because they have so much more contact with humans than because of the stress of confinement.
posted by jamjam at 7:57 AM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
The zebra does not live in a prison of carpool lanes, after school sports, a boss that asks you to work late, and such. The logic flows that it is these thoughts that cause our ulcer.
Even if zebras' don't get ulcers due to stress like jamjam says, this description of a zebra's life seems really reductive. It's the reason some scientists always put on their surprised face when individual zebras (or any biological thing really) actually shows it has a personality, and don't always behave exactly the same way as every other member of it's species, while everyone else is saying 'duh'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:26 AM on October 21, 2023
Even if zebras' don't get ulcers due to stress like jamjam says, this description of a zebra's life seems really reductive. It's the reason some scientists always put on their surprised face when individual zebras (or any biological thing really) actually shows it has a personality, and don't always behave exactly the same way as every other member of it's species, while everyone else is saying 'duh'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:26 AM on October 21, 2023
The snarktastic tone of the comments that disagree with Sapolsky mostly tell me that folks aren't willing to engage with his argument in good faith because of the implications of what he's saying. It has the tone of those who dismissed evolution because, "Haw haw, you think we're just smarter monkeys?!"
posted by peterme at 8:37 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by peterme at 8:37 AM on October 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
Strict determinism is indistinguishable from nihilism. It’s just another pathway to just say nothing is meaningful, nothing matters. It all just happens and we have nothing to do with it. I’m really curious why people find this position to be so attractive. It’s just like those who claim that reality is just a simulation in a giant computer. Also nihilistic. Clearly there are those who are trying to run away from reality by denying their responsibility for participating in it. But scientists are proclaiming strict determinism! Yes, but science is a human activity and under strict determinism it becomes as meaningless as everything else. It just happens. Thinking through to see the ramifications of your thought needs to be done.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:38 AM on October 21, 2023
posted by njohnson23 at 8:38 AM on October 21, 2023
I wonder if the focus on ulcers per se is a bit of a distraction from the larger point that stress absolutely does cause gastrointestinal symptoms (as well as a wealth of other health problems)?
posted by mittens at 8:55 AM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by mittens at 8:55 AM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
> Strict determinism is indistinguishable from nihilism. It’s just another pathway to just say nothing is meaningful, nothing matters.
ahem, as an ontological nihilist i must insist that people talking about epistemological nihilism make clear that that's what they're talking about. or at least, that's what i would insist if any of us existed.
putting aside the fact that nothing at all exists, your argument above seems pretty unsatisfying. to my eye it seems to be wish-based reasoning:
so i'd be on-board with your statement if it were reframed as follows: "i personally have arbitrarily decided to live as if free will exists, because its existence is necessary for the coherence of my ethico-epistemological framework."
1: chidi anagonye invented this term and concept and i will absolutely positively not entertain anyone suggesting otherwise.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:00 AM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
ahem, as an ontological nihilist i must insist that people talking about epistemological nihilism make clear that that's what they're talking about. or at least, that's what i would insist if any of us existed.
putting aside the fact that nothing at all exists, your argument above seems pretty unsatisfying. to my eye it seems to be wish-based reasoning:
- i would prefer not to live in a universe without x
- if y is true, x doesn't exist
- therefore y is false. checkmate, atheists!
so i'd be on-board with your statement if it were reframed as follows: "i personally have arbitrarily decided to live as if free will exists, because its existence is necessary for the coherence of my ethico-epistemological framework."
1: chidi anagonye invented this term and concept and i will absolutely positively not entertain anyone suggesting otherwise.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:00 AM on October 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
and like i stand by that snarky "checkmate, atheists!" statement in step 3. the argument "free will must exist because it's a necessary foundation for my concept of individual moral responsibility" is isomorphic to "god must exist because it's a necessary foundation for my concept of individual moral responsibility."
and you may be like, hey, if you've got another foundation for a concept of individual moral responsibility then go ahead and tell me it, to which i would reply something like well, first we must define virtue. you seem to have a good sense of what virtue is, could you explain it to me? and then we'd go around in circles for a little while until we'd reach an impasse in the conversation, a point where we'd both realize that neither of us can make any coherent claim about the matter at hand at all, and then we'd both walk away more confused than we were when we started.
philosophy!
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:07 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
and you may be like, hey, if you've got another foundation for a concept of individual moral responsibility then go ahead and tell me it, to which i would reply something like well, first we must define virtue. you seem to have a good sense of what virtue is, could you explain it to me? and then we'd go around in circles for a little while until we'd reach an impasse in the conversation, a point where we'd both realize that neither of us can make any coherent claim about the matter at hand at all, and then we'd both walk away more confused than we were when we started.
philosophy!
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:07 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Dear Metafilter community,
A miracle! Out of a vague cloud of ultimate non-existence, a reply to one of my comments has appeared. Twice! Unbelievable… It appears to be coherent and thought out, but what it claims denies any existence at all either for it itself, its creator, the place where it exists (here on the blue), myself, this reply to the reply, and everything else for that matter. I thought about flagging this posting, but “nonexistent” wasn’t an option. Faced with the paradox of something nonexistent proclaiming its nonexistence, I’m left with the choice of ignoring it or trying to openly deal with it as best as I can, given the fact that I’m replying about nothing. But, given all the recent hullabaloo about ChatGPT etc, I will assume that the two postings above were created by some jokester using an LLM and the claims made in the posting are just random Markov chain generated text, which being random has no intended meaning, except that that I create in my own mind while I read it. Who knew that nothing in itself could be so rich in content and meaning.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:25 AM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
A miracle! Out of a vague cloud of ultimate non-existence, a reply to one of my comments has appeared. Twice! Unbelievable… It appears to be coherent and thought out, but what it claims denies any existence at all either for it itself, its creator, the place where it exists (here on the blue), myself, this reply to the reply, and everything else for that matter. I thought about flagging this posting, but “nonexistent” wasn’t an option. Faced with the paradox of something nonexistent proclaiming its nonexistence, I’m left with the choice of ignoring it or trying to openly deal with it as best as I can, given the fact that I’m replying about nothing. But, given all the recent hullabaloo about ChatGPT etc, I will assume that the two postings above were created by some jokester using an LLM and the claims made in the posting are just random Markov chain generated text, which being random has no intended meaning, except that that I create in my own mind while I read it. Who knew that nothing in itself could be so rich in content and meaning.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:25 AM on October 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
look man no evidence exists for ontological nihilism, but isn't that a point in its favor?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:37 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:37 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
> Strict determinism is indistinguishable from nihilism. It’s just another pathway to just say nothing is meaningful, nothing matters. It all just happens and we have nothing to do with it. I’m really curious why people find this position to be so attractive.
It's not, it's just the acceptance that what makes things meaningful is not that our actions are the result of some logically impossible ghost in the machine, but that they're simply an expression of a summation of our experience, learning, aptitude, background, etc. I've never felt a logically impossible ghost in the machine to be a requirement for any meaning I've found in life. I enjoy life because I'm programmed robotlike to find joy in certain combinations of circumstances and in certain experiences, and I pursue those circumstances and experiences like a good little wind-up-toy. Oh, but you felt that for life to be meaningful, humans had to be somehow exalted, special, magical and ineffable? I can see how it might be jarring to think they weren't. But for me they're still magical and special in another way, which is their sheer complexity and sophistication. I don't mourn the loss of the ghost just like I never mourned the loss of the soul when I gave up God. It turns out those things were never necessary for my enjoyment of life. Food still tastes the same, beauty is still just as bewitching, achievements still give the same sense of pride. Because that's how I'm programmed to react to those things. Yes, it's reductionist and humiliating, but that's because we've lived with illusions for so long. I feel far more at peace believing my idea of the world reflects reality than by believing that despite all evidence humans are somehow magical and cosmically important. I find our absurdity and improbability a much more fulfilling mystery than any imagined story we've conjured about ourselves to make ourselves feel important.
posted by mokey at 10:01 AM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's not, it's just the acceptance that what makes things meaningful is not that our actions are the result of some logically impossible ghost in the machine, but that they're simply an expression of a summation of our experience, learning, aptitude, background, etc. I've never felt a logically impossible ghost in the machine to be a requirement for any meaning I've found in life. I enjoy life because I'm programmed robotlike to find joy in certain combinations of circumstances and in certain experiences, and I pursue those circumstances and experiences like a good little wind-up-toy. Oh, but you felt that for life to be meaningful, humans had to be somehow exalted, special, magical and ineffable? I can see how it might be jarring to think they weren't. But for me they're still magical and special in another way, which is their sheer complexity and sophistication. I don't mourn the loss of the ghost just like I never mourned the loss of the soul when I gave up God. It turns out those things were never necessary for my enjoyment of life. Food still tastes the same, beauty is still just as bewitching, achievements still give the same sense of pride. Because that's how I'm programmed to react to those things. Yes, it's reductionist and humiliating, but that's because we've lived with illusions for so long. I feel far more at peace believing my idea of the world reflects reality than by believing that despite all evidence humans are somehow magical and cosmically important. I find our absurdity and improbability a much more fulfilling mystery than any imagined story we've conjured about ourselves to make ourselves feel important.
posted by mokey at 10:01 AM on October 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
I do not believe that humans must be exalted, special, magical, or ineffable. To be meaningful does not imply any of those things. My coffee cup this morning was quite meaningful in that it held the hot coffee so I could drink it. Neither do I believe in a logically impossible ghost in the machine. If you chose to believe that you are a programmed (by who?) wind-up toy, that is your choice. Belief is an interesting word to use since to believe something does not imply that it is real. It appears that you have moved from one set of beliefs to another. That’s fine. Not an issue. But what are your ontological and epistemological assumptions? What really is and how do you really know it?
posted by njohnson23 at 10:35 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 10:35 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
What really is and how do you really know it?
Forty-two! No, that doesn't work...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:53 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Forty-two! No, that doesn't work...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:53 AM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've always liked Sapolsky, but hey I've also said that the anti-free-will gang is just barking up the wrong tree. They apply a rather reductionist perspective to something which is relative in nature.
posted by ovvl at 11:44 AM on October 21, 2023
posted by ovvl at 11:44 AM on October 21, 2023
Dude's overriding point is that our criminal justice system, and our judgements of other people, are premised on wrong beliefs about how we make decisions. It is above all a PRACTICAL point he makes, but one rooted in a deep sense of fairness. His big mistake is using the loaded term "free will", as evidenced by almost all the comments above, few of which seem to come from people who ever heard him lecture or read his books.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:47 PM on October 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:47 PM on October 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
Maybe I just read too many classic sf books growing up, but I have these thoughts:
A single unchanging timeline universe isn’t the same as a deterministic universe
A single unchanging timeline universe isn’t incompatible with free will
posted by bq at 2:15 PM on October 21, 2023
A single unchanging timeline universe isn’t the same as a deterministic universe
A single unchanging timeline universe isn’t incompatible with free will
posted by bq at 2:15 PM on October 21, 2023
Yes, i_am_joe's_spleen, that's exactly what led me to dismiss him. Anybody who stands up and says, "There's no such thing as free will" as if "free will" were a straightforward concept that people mostly agree what it is and you could say whether it exists or not seems to be ignoring most of the philosophical discussions for the past thousand years.
If that's just an attention-getting provocative statement to get people to listen to a much more interesting discussion then fine, but it worked the opposite way for me. A biologist has figured out what "free will" means and demonstrated we don't have it.
posted by straight at 2:16 PM on October 21, 2023
If that's just an attention-getting provocative statement to get people to listen to a much more interesting discussion then fine, but it worked the opposite way for me. A biologist has figured out what "free will" means and demonstrated we don't have it.
posted by straight at 2:16 PM on October 21, 2023
above all a PRACTICAL point - there's a practical criticism that telling people their decisions are mostly determined by a-rational forces outside their control is in tension with trying to rationally persuade them to reform our criminal justice system.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 2:22 PM on October 21, 2023
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 2:22 PM on October 21, 2023
Yeah, I can agree with many of the points that Sapolsky made, but not his leaping to conclusions.
Of course, Free Will is limited or uh determined by genes & environment. Of course any decision is limited or uh determined by the events leading up to it. But this in itself doesn't really prove that volition doesn't exist.
I have an Existentialist view, that as a human, personal choices exist within limits (and also that the world is absurd, but that's something else). Morality in our human cultures is proscribed in various forms, and we make choices on how closely we follow them. Determinists could say that our moralities are pre-determined, but Existentialists could say that our decisions about our morality are a personal choice. (Both meaningless, of course, unless invested with meaning.)
As far as the flawed criminal justice systems which exist in most of the world, of course we need more enlightened prison reforms. Which doesn't mean that anyone who commits any crime just goes free. I think that a Scandinavian/Nordic Penal Model, which puts emphasis on the overall impact on society, probably makes more sense. Maybe not perfect, but anything is better.
posted by ovvl at 5:32 PM on October 21, 2023
Of course, Free Will is limited or uh determined by genes & environment. Of course any decision is limited or uh determined by the events leading up to it. But this in itself doesn't really prove that volition doesn't exist.
I have an Existentialist view, that as a human, personal choices exist within limits (and also that the world is absurd, but that's something else). Morality in our human cultures is proscribed in various forms, and we make choices on how closely we follow them. Determinists could say that our moralities are pre-determined, but Existentialists could say that our decisions about our morality are a personal choice. (Both meaningless, of course, unless invested with meaning.)
As far as the flawed criminal justice systems which exist in most of the world, of course we need more enlightened prison reforms. Which doesn't mean that anyone who commits any crime just goes free. I think that a Scandinavian/Nordic Penal Model, which puts emphasis on the overall impact on society, probably makes more sense. Maybe not perfect, but anything is better.
posted by ovvl at 5:32 PM on October 21, 2023
Ted Chiang, "What's Expected of Us"
Yeah, I don’t see how the Predictor refutes free will in any way. The light only lights when you choose to press the button. The fact that it lights one second before you pressed the button doesn’t change that. I feel like the people who descend into akinetic mutism must be people whose minds are blown that you drive on a parkway but park in a driveway.
posted by ejs at 7:20 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I don’t see how the Predictor refutes free will in any way. The light only lights when you choose to press the button. The fact that it lights one second before you pressed the button doesn’t change that. I feel like the people who descend into akinetic mutism must be people whose minds are blown that you drive on a parkway but park in a driveway.
posted by ejs at 7:20 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure you've quite imagined the experience of telling yourself over and over that you're gonna decide to push the button but then not go through with it if the light flashes and every single time the light comes on you find yourself pushing the button anyway.
It might break the illusion that your conscious mind governs your decisions and give you the sensation that you're just constantly rationalizing decisions that are actually being made somewhere else in your brain, by someone / something that is not what you recognize as "you."
posted by straight at 7:39 PM on October 21, 2023
It might break the illusion that your conscious mind governs your decisions and give you the sensation that you're just constantly rationalizing decisions that are actually being made somewhere else in your brain, by someone / something that is not what you recognize as "you."
posted by straight at 7:39 PM on October 21, 2023
(The cure, one hopes, would be convincing yourself to draw the circle that defines "you" a little bigger to include whatever part of you is actually governing whether or not you push the button.)
posted by straight at 7:43 PM on October 21, 2023
posted by straight at 7:43 PM on October 21, 2023
> what if there is free will but not for us?
Cat owner; can confirm.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:11 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Cat owner; can confirm.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:11 PM on October 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure you've quite imagined the experience of telling yourself over and over that you're gonna decide to push the button […]
I have heard that hoary old chestnut about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result...
posted by ejs at 9:05 PM on October 21, 2023
I have heard that hoary old chestnut about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result...
posted by ejs at 9:05 PM on October 21, 2023
It appears to be coherent and thought out, but what it claims denies any existence at all either for it itself, its creator, the place where it exists (here on the blue), myself, this reply to the reply, and everything else for that matter.
I do not know this blue you speak of. I use the professional white looking background...
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:58 AM on October 22, 2023
I do not know this blue you speak of. I use the professional white looking background...
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:58 AM on October 22, 2023
If we imagine just for a moment that Free Will is meaningfully defined and exists, what would its agent be and how would it be isolated from any previous causality yet able to initiate causal chains from scratch?
Also, the absence of Free Will doesn't imply predetermination.
posted by signal at 4:54 AM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
Also, the absence of Free Will doesn't imply predetermination.
posted by signal at 4:54 AM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
i’ve taken and taught classes that had free will as their only topic. yes, there’s lots of philosophical squirming to try to refine the idea to make it work, to find a place for it. it’s all a kind of emotional reaction to the obvious conclusion that it’s fundamentally incompatible with our basic notion of cause and effect. you see this in religious views (like augustines silly idea that everything that happens is caused by god but we can choose whether we think it’s neat or not and that’s our free will, an idea similar to the stoics, or maybe the clinamen intervenes in the process of cause and effect opening up a space for choice), or secular contemporary ones. it’s very simple, if everything is an effect of an antecedent cause then so is my act of choice. meaning i didn’t choose. you really don’t need more than that.
posted by dis_integration at 5:46 AM on October 22, 2023
posted by dis_integration at 5:46 AM on October 22, 2023
> it’s very simple, if everything is an effect of an antecedent cause then so is my act of choice. meaning i didn’t choose. you really don’t need more than that.
i mean, there's the third option: it is neither true that free will exists nor that the universe is deterministic.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:29 AM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
i mean, there's the third option: it is neither true that free will exists nor that the universe is deterministic.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:29 AM on October 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
it’s very simple, if everything is an effect of an antecedent cause then so is my act of choice. meaning i didn’t choose.
The trouble I'm having with the above statement is, it turns out, the same trouble I'm having with the early parts of the book. If I make a choice to press a button--that is, if I'm capable of doing so, if free will turns out to be an actual thing--I will be making my choice using the same squishy neural goo that would be making me press the button in the no-free-will scenario. The physical substrate of the choice, the machinery of it, is going to look exactly the same. How could free will possibly look any different? I still have to have blood pumping, cells being oxygenated, synapses firing, in order to be alive enough to make a choice. To point to all of the biological processes and say, "these are the cause, rather than the decision in your mind," feels like begging the question.
I think someone upthread mentioned Sapolsky goes a little too into the nudgy/primey stuff, and there's definitely some of that in the book, which is disappointing--he explicitly talks about the Macbeth effect for instance--but you can scrape that all off and the substance of the argument remains intact.
Reading about all the elaborations of Libet's experiment, it's a little scary to think about, because there's a suggestion that our choices are really just post-hoc explanations our brains come up with for why we did something. In the case of the button, something I'm unaware of inside me may decide (if that's even the right word) before I become aware of it, before I make my own decision--or maybe there should be a lot more scare-quotes there: before "I" make "my own" "decision." Does that just move the homunculus behind a curtain? Are there two homunculi, one making secret decisions and the other watching and taking all the credit?
But it's hard to know what to do with any of this. Everything about the human mind is, "well, let's wait another 10,000 years so the scientists can come up with some explanation, but also, those scientists will have had to read every single philosopher since the dawn of time so there's no chance they left anything out." What are we supposed to believe about ourselves until then?
posted by mittens at 11:01 AM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
The trouble I'm having with the above statement is, it turns out, the same trouble I'm having with the early parts of the book. If I make a choice to press a button--that is, if I'm capable of doing so, if free will turns out to be an actual thing--I will be making my choice using the same squishy neural goo that would be making me press the button in the no-free-will scenario. The physical substrate of the choice, the machinery of it, is going to look exactly the same. How could free will possibly look any different? I still have to have blood pumping, cells being oxygenated, synapses firing, in order to be alive enough to make a choice. To point to all of the biological processes and say, "these are the cause, rather than the decision in your mind," feels like begging the question.
I think someone upthread mentioned Sapolsky goes a little too into the nudgy/primey stuff, and there's definitely some of that in the book, which is disappointing--he explicitly talks about the Macbeth effect for instance--but you can scrape that all off and the substance of the argument remains intact.
Reading about all the elaborations of Libet's experiment, it's a little scary to think about, because there's a suggestion that our choices are really just post-hoc explanations our brains come up with for why we did something. In the case of the button, something I'm unaware of inside me may decide (if that's even the right word) before I become aware of it, before I make my own decision--or maybe there should be a lot more scare-quotes there: before "I" make "my own" "decision." Does that just move the homunculus behind a curtain? Are there two homunculi, one making secret decisions and the other watching and taking all the credit?
But it's hard to know what to do with any of this. Everything about the human mind is, "well, let's wait another 10,000 years so the scientists can come up with some explanation, but also, those scientists will have had to read every single philosopher since the dawn of time so there's no chance they left anything out." What are we supposed to believe about ourselves until then?
posted by mittens at 11:01 AM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
What are we to believe? Just do what you’ve been doing and leave the arguments to those who enjoy arguing.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:13 PM on October 22, 2023
posted by njohnson23 at 12:13 PM on October 22, 2023
you know what, fuck it, i'm all in:
the ontological nihilism thing is a bit. it's an important bit, though, because it's good to destabilize received notions about what existence is or is not. the reason why ontological nihilism is a bit is identical to the reason why it's fun: announcing the position requires immediate deliberate self-contradiction (hence, the "no evidence exists for ontological nihilism but isn't that a point in its favor?" joke).
parmenidean monism — which can be loosely summarized as "exactly one thing exists, it doesn't move, change, or have any distinguishable features, it cannot be divided, and it has no end, no center, and no circumference" — is something much more serious and much more interesting. russell would millennia later refer to the problem that parmenides was wrestling with as "the problem of negative existentials", i.e. what does it mean to say that something does not exist? this is a complicated claim, because if you say that something does not exist you are in a way affirming its existence. how do you make sure that something doesn't exist? well, you identify the features of that thing and look around and if you don't see that thing, it doesn't exist. but identifying the features of a thing presupposes the existence of that thing, and if you can't identify the features of a thing, then how can you know it well enough to determine that it doesn't exist? parmenides's solution can be boiled down to "there is no nothing", which solves the problem of negative existentials — they don't exist! — and (he argues) leads to several knock-on problems. so for example, if there is no nothing then there's no possibility for motion, because there's no nothing for any moving something to move into, if there is no nothing there's no distinguishing features, because if something has feature x in one place and feature y in another then it lacks feature y in the first place, which is impossible because no negative existentials.
it's a fuckin' weird idea and i know what you're thinking: what about all these apparently moving, apparently changing, apparently differing things that seem to be happening all the time? parmenides defined the sort of knowledge that you can get through examining these alleged things as the "way of opinion"; his "there's one thing, it fills everything, it has no features, it neither moves nor changes" stuff is what he calls the "way of truth."
okay but anyway, it's ridiculous, right, it's all ridiculous, it's just as absurd to say there's one thing as it is to say there's zero things? however, the one-thing solution avoids overt paradox much better than either the zero-things solution or the many-things solution; the only problem is that it doesn't jibe with what seems to be sense data experienced and analyzed by human psyches, but there's no particular reason to presuppose that the universe as it appears to what appears to be us is in any way real.
the modern way, i think, to deal with this is through some sort of phenomenological bracketing — as the actual reality of things-in-themselves is inaccessible, bracket all of that off and focus on phenomena as they appear to what appears to be us, without regard to the reality of those phenomena. in parmenidean terms, this might be the strategy of focusing on the way of opinion rather than the way of truth, but we can't really tell because we have exactly one poem by parmenides, and the part of it on the way of opinion is largely lost.
even if you're comfortable with this kind of phenomenological bracketing maneuver, it's good to consider the possibility that all of what appears to be solid empirical data indicating the existence of a human-comprehensible universe is in fact line noise at most. if you apply the parmenidean acid test to your ideas, you will very frequently find that what you thought were rock-solid data-driven arguments for the validity of your claims are in fact actually just arbitrary statements of faith that you'd find profoundly annoying and not the slightest bit convincing were the arbitrary features of the arbitrary statements of faith ones that you wouldn't personally agree with, i.e. there is not a hair's distance between arbitrarily announcing faith in the evidence of the senses as a grounds for empirical determination of what actions are ethical and arbitrarily announcing faith in the existence of a god as grounds for empirico-religious determination of what actions are ethical. is this me saying "lol all you people out there who affirm the existence of more than one thing are just as bad as pseudochristians who will fight and die for the claim that earth is 6000 years old and flat as a pancake"? nope! it's me saying that you can and should understand the psychology that would lead someone to fight and die for that claim as something akin to your own reasoning processes rather than something weird and dumb that's alien to your own reasoning processes.
"but wait," you say, gesturing with your hand out to all the things that appear to exist, "things exist, you're being ridiculous." to this i respond with a tangent about how annoyed i am that we've all collectively decided to start using the technical philosophical term "begs the question" as if it means "raises the question," because the original technical sense was 1) really fuckin' useful 2) made for this just sort of occasion. it means to presuppose your conclusion as part of your assumptions. "ah," you say, "existence exists! look at all this existence out here, existing!" to which i respond "you are presupposing existence in your alleged empirical demonstration of existence. that doesn't work. yr begging the question, sry!"
am i saying you should immediately go out there and believe that exactly one thing exists? nope! am i saying that you should abandon all certainty about the fundamentals of existence? yup! am i saying that you should always take into account that you're necessarily doing metaphysics all the time, even or especially when you claim to be doing empiricism without metaphysics? yup! am i saying that this will help you understand where people you disagree with are coming from? yup! am i saying that you should therefore agree with those people? nope!
returning from the lofty heights of the oneness of being or whatever to the question of free will, i am dead serious when i try (and apparently, fail) to make the intervention that we should consider the possibility that free will exists but not for us. what does the concept of "free will" get you when you can't apply that concept to yourself, when the rules of the game forbid that? well, one thing it doesn't get you is a foundation for a personal ethics. another thing it doesn't get you is a claim to having a special status as a thinking entity. much of the wish-crafting around free will is built around finding a foundation for your ethics and a grounds for your claims to specialness. if you're not allowed to use it to get those things, do you still find it to be a useful or interesting concept?
i sure do! i find it particularly interesting in that context, and indeed find it totally uninteresting in the context of demonstrating foundations or specialness, since we as entities are so desperate for foundations for our knowledge and justifications for our senses of individual specialness that it is nearly impossible for us to stop telling lies to ourselves if we think those lies will give us those things which we so desperately desire. if you in advance foreclose the possibility of having free will — the possibility of getting your deepest desire — you can think about free will without the continual thought-destroying effort required to bat away your desire to have it.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:11 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
the ontological nihilism thing is a bit. it's an important bit, though, because it's good to destabilize received notions about what existence is or is not. the reason why ontological nihilism is a bit is identical to the reason why it's fun: announcing the position requires immediate deliberate self-contradiction (hence, the "no evidence exists for ontological nihilism but isn't that a point in its favor?" joke).
parmenidean monism — which can be loosely summarized as "exactly one thing exists, it doesn't move, change, or have any distinguishable features, it cannot be divided, and it has no end, no center, and no circumference" — is something much more serious and much more interesting. russell would millennia later refer to the problem that parmenides was wrestling with as "the problem of negative existentials", i.e. what does it mean to say that something does not exist? this is a complicated claim, because if you say that something does not exist you are in a way affirming its existence. how do you make sure that something doesn't exist? well, you identify the features of that thing and look around and if you don't see that thing, it doesn't exist. but identifying the features of a thing presupposes the existence of that thing, and if you can't identify the features of a thing, then how can you know it well enough to determine that it doesn't exist? parmenides's solution can be boiled down to "there is no nothing", which solves the problem of negative existentials — they don't exist! — and (he argues) leads to several knock-on problems. so for example, if there is no nothing then there's no possibility for motion, because there's no nothing for any moving something to move into, if there is no nothing there's no distinguishing features, because if something has feature x in one place and feature y in another then it lacks feature y in the first place, which is impossible because no negative existentials.
it's a fuckin' weird idea and i know what you're thinking: what about all these apparently moving, apparently changing, apparently differing things that seem to be happening all the time? parmenides defined the sort of knowledge that you can get through examining these alleged things as the "way of opinion"; his "there's one thing, it fills everything, it has no features, it neither moves nor changes" stuff is what he calls the "way of truth."
okay but anyway, it's ridiculous, right, it's all ridiculous, it's just as absurd to say there's one thing as it is to say there's zero things? however, the one-thing solution avoids overt paradox much better than either the zero-things solution or the many-things solution; the only problem is that it doesn't jibe with what seems to be sense data experienced and analyzed by human psyches, but there's no particular reason to presuppose that the universe as it appears to what appears to be us is in any way real.
the modern way, i think, to deal with this is through some sort of phenomenological bracketing — as the actual reality of things-in-themselves is inaccessible, bracket all of that off and focus on phenomena as they appear to what appears to be us, without regard to the reality of those phenomena. in parmenidean terms, this might be the strategy of focusing on the way of opinion rather than the way of truth, but we can't really tell because we have exactly one poem by parmenides, and the part of it on the way of opinion is largely lost.
even if you're comfortable with this kind of phenomenological bracketing maneuver, it's good to consider the possibility that all of what appears to be solid empirical data indicating the existence of a human-comprehensible universe is in fact line noise at most. if you apply the parmenidean acid test to your ideas, you will very frequently find that what you thought were rock-solid data-driven arguments for the validity of your claims are in fact actually just arbitrary statements of faith that you'd find profoundly annoying and not the slightest bit convincing were the arbitrary features of the arbitrary statements of faith ones that you wouldn't personally agree with, i.e. there is not a hair's distance between arbitrarily announcing faith in the evidence of the senses as a grounds for empirical determination of what actions are ethical and arbitrarily announcing faith in the existence of a god as grounds for empirico-religious determination of what actions are ethical. is this me saying "lol all you people out there who affirm the existence of more than one thing are just as bad as pseudochristians who will fight and die for the claim that earth is 6000 years old and flat as a pancake"? nope! it's me saying that you can and should understand the psychology that would lead someone to fight and die for that claim as something akin to your own reasoning processes rather than something weird and dumb that's alien to your own reasoning processes.
"but wait," you say, gesturing with your hand out to all the things that appear to exist, "things exist, you're being ridiculous." to this i respond with a tangent about how annoyed i am that we've all collectively decided to start using the technical philosophical term "begs the question" as if it means "raises the question," because the original technical sense was 1) really fuckin' useful 2) made for this just sort of occasion. it means to presuppose your conclusion as part of your assumptions. "ah," you say, "existence exists! look at all this existence out here, existing!" to which i respond "you are presupposing existence in your alleged empirical demonstration of existence. that doesn't work. yr begging the question, sry!"
am i saying you should immediately go out there and believe that exactly one thing exists? nope! am i saying that you should abandon all certainty about the fundamentals of existence? yup! am i saying that you should always take into account that you're necessarily doing metaphysics all the time, even or especially when you claim to be doing empiricism without metaphysics? yup! am i saying that this will help you understand where people you disagree with are coming from? yup! am i saying that you should therefore agree with those people? nope!
returning from the lofty heights of the oneness of being or whatever to the question of free will, i am dead serious when i try (and apparently, fail) to make the intervention that we should consider the possibility that free will exists but not for us. what does the concept of "free will" get you when you can't apply that concept to yourself, when the rules of the game forbid that? well, one thing it doesn't get you is a foundation for a personal ethics. another thing it doesn't get you is a claim to having a special status as a thinking entity. much of the wish-crafting around free will is built around finding a foundation for your ethics and a grounds for your claims to specialness. if you're not allowed to use it to get those things, do you still find it to be a useful or interesting concept?
i sure do! i find it particularly interesting in that context, and indeed find it totally uninteresting in the context of demonstrating foundations or specialness, since we as entities are so desperate for foundations for our knowledge and justifications for our senses of individual specialness that it is nearly impossible for us to stop telling lies to ourselves if we think those lies will give us those things which we so desperately desire. if you in advance foreclose the possibility of having free will — the possibility of getting your deepest desire — you can think about free will without the continual thought-destroying effort required to bat away your desire to have it.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:11 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
ugh there's like three phrases there that i wish i could have fixed before the editing window closed. one thing that this exercise has taught me is that refraining from affirming nonexistence (parmenidean monism) is, linguistically speaking, actually much harder than refraining from affirming existence (ontological nihilism).
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:21 PM on October 22, 2023
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:21 PM on October 22, 2023
"It might break the illusion that your conscious mind governs your decisions"
Or your conscious mind could just decide to not draw out any implications from these experiences and ignore them altogether.
After all, why spend time consciously deliberating about a topic if it's irrelevant to your decisions and actions?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 1:27 PM on October 22, 2023
Or your conscious mind could just decide to not draw out any implications from these experiences and ignore them altogether.
After all, why spend time consciously deliberating about a topic if it's irrelevant to your decisions and actions?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 1:27 PM on October 22, 2023
If we imagine just for a moment that Free Will is meaningfully defined and exists, what would its agent be and how would it be isolated from any previous causality yet able to initiate causal chains from scratch?
Maybe you're asking about what scientific advancements look like before they take place. Before Newton, forces were considered "occult". A mechanistic explanation for influence between bodies was required lest science degrade back into medieval mysticism. But now we take it for granted that when you move, you move the sun, and there's no intervening medium or mechanism. Before the advancement, this wasn't really intelligible, and can still seem like scientific magic.
For comparison, today we have a class of cognitive phenomena we don't understand very well -- consciousness, reasoning, intelligence, deliberation, apparently "free" decision-making, etc. And in physics we're not sure if cause and effect are fundamental constituents of reality or just concepts we use to describe it.
Under the circumstances, isn't the best answer to your questions -- we don't know, because maybe one or more scientific advancements would have to occur first?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 1:42 PM on October 22, 2023
Maybe you're asking about what scientific advancements look like before they take place. Before Newton, forces were considered "occult". A mechanistic explanation for influence between bodies was required lest science degrade back into medieval mysticism. But now we take it for granted that when you move, you move the sun, and there's no intervening medium or mechanism. Before the advancement, this wasn't really intelligible, and can still seem like scientific magic.
For comparison, today we have a class of cognitive phenomena we don't understand very well -- consciousness, reasoning, intelligence, deliberation, apparently "free" decision-making, etc. And in physics we're not sure if cause and effect are fundamental constituents of reality or just concepts we use to describe it.
Under the circumstances, isn't the best answer to your questions -- we don't know, because maybe one or more scientific advancements would have to occur first?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 1:42 PM on October 22, 2023
After all, why spend time consciously deliberating about a topic if it's irrelevant to your decisions and actions?
For fun!
posted by inexorably_forward at 5:30 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
For fun!
posted by inexorably_forward at 5:30 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
hah, I think it's fun!
well, let's wait another 10,000 years so the scientists can come up with some explanation
The cognitive neurosciences are pretty young, so 10,000 yrs is maybe a little much. Chomsky likes to compare where we're at in understanding the mind/brain to pre-Galilean physics. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
but also, those scientists will have had to read every single philosopher since the dawn of time
Hah, overkill, but OTOH it isn't an entirely scientific question whether an ordinary concept like "free will" is or isn't vindicated by a scientific theory. Someone's gotta think about the ordinary concept, whether the mapping to the science preserves enough of the structure, etc. Sounds like a future philosophical project that might draw on some previous philosophy.
What are we supposed to believe about ourselves until then?
That our curiosity outstrips our capacity to answer interesting questions?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 6:28 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
well, let's wait another 10,000 years so the scientists can come up with some explanation
The cognitive neurosciences are pretty young, so 10,000 yrs is maybe a little much. Chomsky likes to compare where we're at in understanding the mind/brain to pre-Galilean physics. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
but also, those scientists will have had to read every single philosopher since the dawn of time
Hah, overkill, but OTOH it isn't an entirely scientific question whether an ordinary concept like "free will" is or isn't vindicated by a scientific theory. Someone's gotta think about the ordinary concept, whether the mapping to the science preserves enough of the structure, etc. Sounds like a future philosophical project that might draw on some previous philosophy.
What are we supposed to believe about ourselves until then?
That our curiosity outstrips our capacity to answer interesting questions?
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 6:28 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
airing nerdy laundry: "Maybe you're asking about what scientific advancements look like before they take place. Before Newton, forces were considered "occult". …?"
Nope, I'm asking: "If we imagine just for a moment that Free Will is meaningfully defined and exists, what would its agent be and how would it be isolated from any previous causality yet able to initiate causal chains from scratch?"
posted by signal at 7:19 PM on October 22, 2023
Nope, I'm asking: "If we imagine just for a moment that Free Will is meaningfully defined and exists, what would its agent be and how would it be isolated from any previous causality yet able to initiate causal chains from scratch?"
posted by signal at 7:19 PM on October 22, 2023
"If we imagine just for a moment that Free Will is meaningfully defined and exists"
I was thinking meaningfully defining free will and knowing that it exists might require a scientific advancement. Like when Newton meaningfully defined forces and showed they exist. If the analogy holds, you're trying to imagine a scientific advancement before it happens.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 7:41 PM on October 22, 2023
I was thinking meaningfully defining free will and knowing that it exists might require a scientific advancement. Like when Newton meaningfully defined forces and showed they exist. If the analogy holds, you're trying to imagine a scientific advancement before it happens.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 7:41 PM on October 22, 2023
Dude's overriding point is that our criminal justice system, and our judgements of other people, are premised on wrong beliefs about how we make decisions. It is above all a PRACTICAL point he makes, but one rooted in a deep sense of fairness.
There’s something I never understood about this particular worry — how can fairness exist as a thing to aim for, absent free will? “I can’t help it, I was predestined to do this” applies just as well to judge, jury, and executioner, it seems to me, as it does to the accused. So why wring our hands about whether a process is fair?
it’s all a kind of emotional reaction to the obvious conclusion that it’s fundamentally incompatible with our basic notion of cause and effect.
This is a bit of a tangent, but in my opinion there is nothing basic about cause and effect. In my line of work the closest we get to showing causality is a randomized controlled trial: you select a group of people, you randomly allocate some of them to a treatment, you measure some outcome at the end to see if those treated fared better. By randomizing, the theory goes, we can isolate the effect of the treatment on the outcome. But it’s important to remember that all you can get out of this is whether the treatment works on average, and there will generally be a range of outcomes in both groups. Anyone whose medical care team has mucked about with drug choice and dosing for a condition with lots of evidence-based medication options will have an intuitive sense of this — it is not clockwork, and there is a lot we do not understand even in situations where we have what most scientists would accept as evidence of causality.
What’s my point? If even under controlled conditions we cannot predict an outcome with certainty, I’m not sure it’s worth worrying about whether our own outcomes are fully determined. If god is in the gaps — we are always going to have gaps. There will always be variance left over for the self, however constituted, to claim.
posted by eirias at 2:47 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]
There’s something I never understood about this particular worry — how can fairness exist as a thing to aim for, absent free will? “I can’t help it, I was predestined to do this” applies just as well to judge, jury, and executioner, it seems to me, as it does to the accused. So why wring our hands about whether a process is fair?
it’s all a kind of emotional reaction to the obvious conclusion that it’s fundamentally incompatible with our basic notion of cause and effect.
This is a bit of a tangent, but in my opinion there is nothing basic about cause and effect. In my line of work the closest we get to showing causality is a randomized controlled trial: you select a group of people, you randomly allocate some of them to a treatment, you measure some outcome at the end to see if those treated fared better. By randomizing, the theory goes, we can isolate the effect of the treatment on the outcome. But it’s important to remember that all you can get out of this is whether the treatment works on average, and there will generally be a range of outcomes in both groups. Anyone whose medical care team has mucked about with drug choice and dosing for a condition with lots of evidence-based medication options will have an intuitive sense of this — it is not clockwork, and there is a lot we do not understand even in situations where we have what most scientists would accept as evidence of causality.
What’s my point? If even under controlled conditions we cannot predict an outcome with certainty, I’m not sure it’s worth worrying about whether our own outcomes are fully determined. If god is in the gaps — we are always going to have gaps. There will always be variance left over for the self, however constituted, to claim.
posted by eirias at 2:47 AM on October 23, 2023 [3 favorites]
> What’s my point? If even under controlled conditions we cannot predict an outcome with certainty, I’m not sure it’s worth worrying about whether our own outcomes are fully determined. If god is in the gaps — we are always going to have gaps. There will always be variance left over for the self, however constituted, to claim.
A completely reasonable position, a kind of Kantian pragmatism about causality. But I think what it amounts to is the claim that maybe we don't accept that all events are the outcome of the events that preceded them and that the outcome is fundamentally determined by some law-like regularity. Perhaps there is a second kind of causality, what Kant called Spontaneity, that can (somehow) interevene in the causal chain to steer an event in another direction from the one it would have taken without that intervention, and that is, itself, as Spontaneity, not determined by any prior event. My claim here isn't necessarily that this is impossible and we know it not to be true. But it does mean that you have to argue against the concept of the world as determined by lawlike regularities, and have to suppose that there is some /other/ order of causality apart from the one we take as a given in order to offer explanations of the natural world. A supernatural causality, if you will. Maybe that's really how it works, but the I think you are forced into a dilemma:
1. *either* events are fully determined by antecedent causes (and there is no free will)
2. *or*, there is some kind of causality that can give rise to itself, spontaneously intervening and modifying the outcome of events.
The case of (2) means there is a fundamental mystery working in universe, an unexplainable source of events, since having no cause other than itself, it's unexplainable (i'm taking for granted a Spinozist understanding of explanation: you can only say you've explained something when you understand what caused it). Uncaused, it cannot be explained. Intrinsically inexplicable, it's a mystical, occult, or mysterious thing.
Maybe the world really is full of occult causes. But I think that's the *only* way you can make room for free will. I'm not willing to do that. I think there is one substance, one world, and nothing outside of it that could operate on it without being governed by its rules. Hence there is no free will. Kant thinks both positions are contradictory a priori, but I think its his weakest Antinomy since he argues that position 1 requires an infinite regress, but that's unacceptable, and therefore there must be *something* that was self-given and spontaneous. I'm fine with an infinite regress (what's wrong with the universe having always existed?).
posted by dis_integration at 7:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
A completely reasonable position, a kind of Kantian pragmatism about causality. But I think what it amounts to is the claim that maybe we don't accept that all events are the outcome of the events that preceded them and that the outcome is fundamentally determined by some law-like regularity. Perhaps there is a second kind of causality, what Kant called Spontaneity, that can (somehow) interevene in the causal chain to steer an event in another direction from the one it would have taken without that intervention, and that is, itself, as Spontaneity, not determined by any prior event. My claim here isn't necessarily that this is impossible and we know it not to be true. But it does mean that you have to argue against the concept of the world as determined by lawlike regularities, and have to suppose that there is some /other/ order of causality apart from the one we take as a given in order to offer explanations of the natural world. A supernatural causality, if you will. Maybe that's really how it works, but the I think you are forced into a dilemma:
1. *either* events are fully determined by antecedent causes (and there is no free will)
2. *or*, there is some kind of causality that can give rise to itself, spontaneously intervening and modifying the outcome of events.
The case of (2) means there is a fundamental mystery working in universe, an unexplainable source of events, since having no cause other than itself, it's unexplainable (i'm taking for granted a Spinozist understanding of explanation: you can only say you've explained something when you understand what caused it). Uncaused, it cannot be explained. Intrinsically inexplicable, it's a mystical, occult, or mysterious thing.
Maybe the world really is full of occult causes. But I think that's the *only* way you can make room for free will. I'm not willing to do that. I think there is one substance, one world, and nothing outside of it that could operate on it without being governed by its rules. Hence there is no free will. Kant thinks both positions are contradictory a priori, but I think its his weakest Antinomy since he argues that position 1 requires an infinite regress, but that's unacceptable, and therefore there must be *something* that was self-given and spontaneous. I'm fine with an infinite regress (what's wrong with the universe having always existed?).
posted by dis_integration at 7:55 AM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
The case of (2) means there is a fundamental mystery working in universe, an unexplainable source of events, since having no cause other than itself, it's unexplainable (i'm taking for granted a Spinozist understanding of explanation: you can only say you've explained something when you understand what caused it). Uncaused, it cannot be explained. Intrinsically inexplicable, it's a mystical, occult, or mysterious thing.
This is the most romantic description of error variance I have ever seen. Disclosure: without error variance I’d be out of a job, so I’m predisposed to keep it around :)
posted by eirias at 9:21 AM on October 23, 2023
This is the most romantic description of error variance I have ever seen. Disclosure: without error variance I’d be out of a job, so I’m predisposed to keep it around :)
posted by eirias at 9:21 AM on October 23, 2023
> Perhaps there is a second kind of causality, what Kant called Spontaneity, that can (somehow) interevene in the causal chain to steer an event in another direction from the one it would have taken without that intervention, and that is, itself, as Spontaneity, not determined by any prior event.
i am genuinely confused — like, i'm asking this question from a place of actual curiosity — why there being multiple sources of causality is so weird. let's interrogate that "chain" metaphor for causality. a chain consists of one link after another, in a line. presumably in the case of this chain the line is meant to lead back to some originary event, some uncaused causer or what have you.
as i see it, from my position of ignorance, there's no reason to adopt the chain metaphor. consider the case that we apply the chain metaphor to rivers. under that metaphor, we'd assume that (for example) all of the water in the nile comes from some particular spring in burundi. this is of course nonsense. gonna propose that causality is the same sort of thing. like, yes, you can find some particularly temporally distant uncaused "first cause" and designate it as the capital-s source, but the influence of that first cause is drowned out by trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other uncaused causes, all the other rivers flowing into the channel, each of which happens just as just-because as the most temporally distant of the uncaused causers. if the big bang is signal, the universe is mostly noise.
like what is even the incentive to perceive causality as a chain, given that we're not fussy enlightenment men and are no longer married to the idea of some sort of predictable clockwork universe? this isn't a rhetorical question; i'm sure someone has made a good argument for monocausal linear causality, but i just do not know what that argument is.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:08 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]
i am genuinely confused — like, i'm asking this question from a place of actual curiosity — why there being multiple sources of causality is so weird. let's interrogate that "chain" metaphor for causality. a chain consists of one link after another, in a line. presumably in the case of this chain the line is meant to lead back to some originary event, some uncaused causer or what have you.
as i see it, from my position of ignorance, there's no reason to adopt the chain metaphor. consider the case that we apply the chain metaphor to rivers. under that metaphor, we'd assume that (for example) all of the water in the nile comes from some particular spring in burundi. this is of course nonsense. gonna propose that causality is the same sort of thing. like, yes, you can find some particularly temporally distant uncaused "first cause" and designate it as the capital-s source, but the influence of that first cause is drowned out by trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other uncaused causes, all the other rivers flowing into the channel, each of which happens just as just-because as the most temporally distant of the uncaused causers. if the big bang is signal, the universe is mostly noise.
like what is even the incentive to perceive causality as a chain, given that we're not fussy enlightenment men and are no longer married to the idea of some sort of predictable clockwork universe? this isn't a rhetorical question; i'm sure someone has made a good argument for monocausal linear causality, but i just do not know what that argument is.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:08 AM on October 23, 2023 [2 favorites]
or heck maybe kant's played out maybe let's get hume in here. how about instead of a chain of causality we talk about a habit of causality?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:24 AM on October 23, 2023
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:24 AM on October 23, 2023
If your single line of causality meets my single line of causality, such as having both of us walk around each other while walking in opposite directions on the sidewalk, does that mean that both of us are now forever entangled?
posted by njohnson23 at 1:58 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 1:58 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
nope! literally all it means is that new uncaused causes can occur at moments after the start of the series of caused events. in the message you're responding to, i use "the big bang" to stand in for the start of the series of caused events. there are things that can happen for no particular reason and as the result of no particular cause, and those new things can happen at any moment.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:09 PM on October 23, 2023
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:09 PM on October 23, 2023
basically if we assume a spherical cow universe where thing x is an east-going zax and thing y is a west-going zax, and zaxes can't occupy the same space at the same time, and also that zaxes know how to walk around each other, because they're not dummies, then x and y walking around each other when otherwise they'd occupy the same space is a caused effect of them moving in such a way that they'd collide. hooray, one cause causes one event. but wait, there's more!
i hesitate to use the example i'm about to use because i don't think anything i'm talking about requires quantum mechanics or particle physics or is in any way really related to quantum mechanics or particle physics. i'm only using this example because quantum mechanics is our cultural go-to for discussing random events in the "how does the universe work, even?" context. but anyway.
okay so while our east-west zaxes are engaging in some cause and effect, elsewhere in the universe a pair of virtual particles spring into existence for no reason, come into contact, and annihilate each other. behold, a new uncaused cause has happened.
when i say "if the big bang is signal, the universe is mostly noise," i'm saying that it seems reasonable that the effects experienced in the universe are at this point much more strongly influenced by the runtime uncaused causes than whatever uncaused causes happened before runtime. sort of like how the vast majority of the water in the nile doesn't in fact come from one particularly distant spring in burundi.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:21 PM on October 23, 2023
i hesitate to use the example i'm about to use because i don't think anything i'm talking about requires quantum mechanics or particle physics or is in any way really related to quantum mechanics or particle physics. i'm only using this example because quantum mechanics is our cultural go-to for discussing random events in the "how does the universe work, even?" context. but anyway.
okay so while our east-west zaxes are engaging in some cause and effect, elsewhere in the universe a pair of virtual particles spring into existence for no reason, come into contact, and annihilate each other. behold, a new uncaused cause has happened.
when i say "if the big bang is signal, the universe is mostly noise," i'm saying that it seems reasonable that the effects experienced in the universe are at this point much more strongly influenced by the runtime uncaused causes than whatever uncaused causes happened before runtime. sort of like how the vast majority of the water in the nile doesn't in fact come from one particularly distant spring in burundi.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:21 PM on October 23, 2023
Maybe the world really is full of occult causes. But I think that's the *only* way you can make room for free will. I'm not willing to do that. I think there is one substance, one world, and nothing outside of it that could operate on it without being governed by its rules.
There universe can be entirely deterministic and you can still have the experience of a non-deterministic universe replete with randomness and free will.
Take a timeless block universe as an example. Everything is determined because it already exists and never has not existed. Every possible outcome lies somewhere in this universe. What our 3.5D at best monkey brains perceive, however, is but one slice through the whole, and which we see depends on choices and metaphorical (and occasionally literal) dice rolls.
More grounded in well proven reality, Schroedinger's equation is deterministic, yet wave function collapse (or many worlds branching, decoherence, or however you want to interpret the Born rule) has substantial randomness.
The point being that there is good evidence that free will can exist in a deterministic universe, it's just an emergent phenomenon rather than being fundamental to the working of the universe.
posted by wierdo at 4:35 PM on October 23, 2023
There universe can be entirely deterministic and you can still have the experience of a non-deterministic universe replete with randomness and free will.
Take a timeless block universe as an example. Everything is determined because it already exists and never has not existed. Every possible outcome lies somewhere in this universe. What our 3.5D at best monkey brains perceive, however, is but one slice through the whole, and which we see depends on choices and metaphorical (and occasionally literal) dice rolls.
More grounded in well proven reality, Schroedinger's equation is deterministic, yet wave function collapse (or many worlds branching, decoherence, or however you want to interpret the Born rule) has substantial randomness.
The point being that there is good evidence that free will can exist in a deterministic universe, it's just an emergent phenomenon rather than being fundamental to the working of the universe.
posted by wierdo at 4:35 PM on October 23, 2023
I think this all gets dangerously close to Penrose's consciousness-as-quantum-tubules, suggesting there may be something special in the material rather than in the process. That is, we think that since free will seems a little magical (all of us little prime movers unmoved), the mechanism behind it must involve a little magic too. Which is just another way of saying 'god in the gaps' I guess. Right now, at my bookmark, Sapolsky is talking about how people try to wedge free will into chaos theory: If there's anything we don't understand, if there's something that's hard to figure out, maybe the choice happens there.
But we are simulation machines, we are creatures that spend our entire waking lives lost in dreams. When I think about this sentence that I'm writing in my head, some of what I'm doing I can feel in my throat and tongue, as I simulate speaking the words; I hear the words in my head; more, I hear them echo. My brain is repeating these words, it is trying them out. (Do a math problem in your head. Don't do the math in the smart person, "i know what 12 x 12 is" way, picture a chalkboard with 12 x 12 written on it, picture figuring it out digit by digit, and watch as your brain struggles to simulate this process, as the numbers jump around, as the situation will not stay still.)
I keep talking about homunculi, and I think it's clear that even though there is no little guy in your head watching the screen, the brain makes consciousness by dreaming and modeling a little guy in your head. A wavering, jumping picture of a little guy, full of echos and repetitions. You have created your conscious self by dreaming and re-dreaming the things around you, most especially by dreaming the people around you. And if you have observed other people making choices, then choice-making becomes part of what your little model-person does. And maybe that's cheating. Maybe you shouldn't call that free will, since it's really just a picture of free will: What would a person with free will do? And then doing that.
But what else could free will be? We don't have souls. We have to work with the material we're made out of. But that work isn't usefully reducible to that material and its movements. You show me your new watch and I say, what a nice collection of quarks moving around. You say, no, look, it has all these apps, and I say, there's no such thing as an app, because if you look down at the level of a Planck length-- And then you go show your watch to somebody else.
It's impossible not to speak with the governing metaphors of your time, and I have lived through the age of computers (brains are hardware, thoughts are software!) and now LLMs (brains are graphic cards, thoughts are deep multidimensional matrices of numbers!), and I guess if this was 150 years ago I'd be rhapsodizing about galvanic influences or something. But I can't shake this idea that our thinking about will, about consciousness, really asks too much of us, expects too much of what is a very tenuous, messy process layered on top of epochs of nervous system evolution.
This afternoon I was thinking about this thread while staring out the window, and one of the cardinals that lives in my backyard came to sit on the fence next to the birdbath. I must have moved; he saw me and flew over to the other side of the japanese maple for cover. But why that branch? Why that tree? Why not fly off to the pines and cherries a little further away? He made a very small safe choice using a brain very different from mine. We know birds dream; we know the song parts of their brains light up during REM sleep. But maybe he doesn't have the machinery to make a little cardinal inside his head. Maybe he can't reflect and make a choice, it's all move-move-move then sleep and dream. Or maybe he has a little bit of will, and I have a little bit more will. Using the same machinery built along different points of the same evolutionary path, but with that machinery put to different purposes, more or less elaborate and reflective.
posted by mittens at 5:19 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
But we are simulation machines, we are creatures that spend our entire waking lives lost in dreams. When I think about this sentence that I'm writing in my head, some of what I'm doing I can feel in my throat and tongue, as I simulate speaking the words; I hear the words in my head; more, I hear them echo. My brain is repeating these words, it is trying them out. (Do a math problem in your head. Don't do the math in the smart person, "i know what 12 x 12 is" way, picture a chalkboard with 12 x 12 written on it, picture figuring it out digit by digit, and watch as your brain struggles to simulate this process, as the numbers jump around, as the situation will not stay still.)
I keep talking about homunculi, and I think it's clear that even though there is no little guy in your head watching the screen, the brain makes consciousness by dreaming and modeling a little guy in your head. A wavering, jumping picture of a little guy, full of echos and repetitions. You have created your conscious self by dreaming and re-dreaming the things around you, most especially by dreaming the people around you. And if you have observed other people making choices, then choice-making becomes part of what your little model-person does. And maybe that's cheating. Maybe you shouldn't call that free will, since it's really just a picture of free will: What would a person with free will do? And then doing that.
But what else could free will be? We don't have souls. We have to work with the material we're made out of. But that work isn't usefully reducible to that material and its movements. You show me your new watch and I say, what a nice collection of quarks moving around. You say, no, look, it has all these apps, and I say, there's no such thing as an app, because if you look down at the level of a Planck length-- And then you go show your watch to somebody else.
It's impossible not to speak with the governing metaphors of your time, and I have lived through the age of computers (brains are hardware, thoughts are software!) and now LLMs (brains are graphic cards, thoughts are deep multidimensional matrices of numbers!), and I guess if this was 150 years ago I'd be rhapsodizing about galvanic influences or something. But I can't shake this idea that our thinking about will, about consciousness, really asks too much of us, expects too much of what is a very tenuous, messy process layered on top of epochs of nervous system evolution.
This afternoon I was thinking about this thread while staring out the window, and one of the cardinals that lives in my backyard came to sit on the fence next to the birdbath. I must have moved; he saw me and flew over to the other side of the japanese maple for cover. But why that branch? Why that tree? Why not fly off to the pines and cherries a little further away? He made a very small safe choice using a brain very different from mine. We know birds dream; we know the song parts of their brains light up during REM sleep. But maybe he doesn't have the machinery to make a little cardinal inside his head. Maybe he can't reflect and make a choice, it's all move-move-move then sleep and dream. Or maybe he has a little bit of will, and I have a little bit more will. Using the same machinery built along different points of the same evolutionary path, but with that machinery put to different purposes, more or less elaborate and reflective.
posted by mittens at 5:19 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
there are things that can happen for no particular reason and as the result of no particular cause, and those new things can happen at any moment.
Let's say this is true. It doesn't have anything to do with whether we have free will or not. It means that the choices we make couldn't have been predetermined before we were born or even 5 minutes before we made them. But it doesn't mean we could have made different choices.
When you make a choice, it's based on all the inputs your brain has ever received. If you decide to quit your job, the decision is influenced by a billion things - all the advice you've gotten from books and videos and friends about finances, career, personal growth and following your bliss (or at least what you remember of it); examples set by your parents; all the interactions you've had with your boss and coworkers and the resulting feelings; your level of optimism and self-confidence; your current stress level (influenced by weather, diet, sleep, traffic, news, etc.) and much, much more. That specific set of inputs leads to you making a specific decision: to quit your job.
Maybe some of the inputs were completely random things that happened for no reason and could not have been predicted. Maybe every one of them was determined at the moment of the big bang. It doesn't matter. Whether or not you have free will doesn't depend on that.
Whether you have free will depends on the answer to this question: Could everything have happened exactly the way it actually did happen except for the final result? Given that exact same set of inputs, could you have decided not to quit your job? I tend to think the answer is no. If you think the answer is yes, how does that work? What is the thing that happens in your brain that makes it possible to take a set of inputs and make a choice that isn't completely dependent on the input? If your choice isn't dependent on the input, what is it dependent on? If it's random, that's not free will. If it's not random, it depends on something. But what?
posted by Redstart at 7:05 PM on October 23, 2023
Let's say this is true. It doesn't have anything to do with whether we have free will or not. It means that the choices we make couldn't have been predetermined before we were born or even 5 minutes before we made them. But it doesn't mean we could have made different choices.
When you make a choice, it's based on all the inputs your brain has ever received. If you decide to quit your job, the decision is influenced by a billion things - all the advice you've gotten from books and videos and friends about finances, career, personal growth and following your bliss (or at least what you remember of it); examples set by your parents; all the interactions you've had with your boss and coworkers and the resulting feelings; your level of optimism and self-confidence; your current stress level (influenced by weather, diet, sleep, traffic, news, etc.) and much, much more. That specific set of inputs leads to you making a specific decision: to quit your job.
Maybe some of the inputs were completely random things that happened for no reason and could not have been predicted. Maybe every one of them was determined at the moment of the big bang. It doesn't matter. Whether or not you have free will doesn't depend on that.
Whether you have free will depends on the answer to this question: Could everything have happened exactly the way it actually did happen except for the final result? Given that exact same set of inputs, could you have decided not to quit your job? I tend to think the answer is no. If you think the answer is yes, how does that work? What is the thing that happens in your brain that makes it possible to take a set of inputs and make a choice that isn't completely dependent on the input? If your choice isn't dependent on the input, what is it dependent on? If it's random, that's not free will. If it's not random, it depends on something. But what?
posted by Redstart at 7:05 PM on October 23, 2023
I don't think it's very interesting to rule out "free will" by defining "free will" as something incoherent, that couldn't possibly exist. If you do that, I think you've just committed a Commander-Data-style pedantic misunderstanding of what people were talking about when they were talking about free will.
Instead, inquire more closely what people mean when they talk about "free will" and why they care about the idea, and whether or not it means different things in different circumstances. Make sure you understand the question before giving your answer.
posted by straight at 7:09 PM on October 23, 2023
Instead, inquire more closely what people mean when they talk about "free will" and why they care about the idea, and whether or not it means different things in different circumstances. Make sure you understand the question before giving your answer.
posted by straight at 7:09 PM on October 23, 2023
that is correct, the existence of uncaused causes doesn't have anything to do with free will, aside from (i guess) being a precondition for free will, or at least a nondeterministic free will. like, this is true definitionally: without a new uncaused cause there's no potential deviation from deterministic causality.
i refuse to engage with any question that presumes that free will is something that pertains to humans or to other relatively humanlike living things. not because i am certain that humans don't have free will — i'm certain of effectively nothing — but instead because considering free will as something that's not for us lets us think about what free will is or might be without thinking about what we wish for ourselves.
could the red spot on jupiter have free will? that's a good question. could mitsubishi have free will? that's a very good question. could i have free will? could you? both of those questions are non-starters. because both of those can be reduced to "are we special?"
which is a boring question.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:10 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
i refuse to engage with any question that presumes that free will is something that pertains to humans or to other relatively humanlike living things. not because i am certain that humans don't have free will — i'm certain of effectively nothing — but instead because considering free will as something that's not for us lets us think about what free will is or might be without thinking about what we wish for ourselves.
could the red spot on jupiter have free will? that's a good question. could mitsubishi have free will? that's a very good question. could i have free will? could you? both of those questions are non-starters. because both of those can be reduced to "are we special?"
which is a boring question.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:10 PM on October 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
but against my better judgment, i will throw out the idea that if mitsubishi or the red spot on jupiter have free will, that means that it is possible for them to use unknowable rules from some hypothetical radically inaccessible private universe to generate causes — free decisions — that are uncaused by anything within our universe, regardless of whether or not they are caused in that hypothetical radically inaccessible private universe. a free-willed red spot or mitsubishi could then serve as a one-way bridge between universes, acting upon the caused things in our universe without being fully determined by those things.
how does mitsubishi manage to do this? it is by definition impossible to say. if it were possible to say, mitsubishi's radically inaccessible private universe outside of this universe's causation wouldn't be a radically inaccessible private universe outside this universe's causation, it'd just be a somewhat obscured part of our universe.
if you're not careful, by the way, this all might lead to talk about leibnizian monads. so like be warned.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:27 PM on October 23, 2023
how does mitsubishi manage to do this? it is by definition impossible to say. if it were possible to say, mitsubishi's radically inaccessible private universe outside of this universe's causation wouldn't be a radically inaccessible private universe outside this universe's causation, it'd just be a somewhat obscured part of our universe.
if you're not careful, by the way, this all might lead to talk about leibnizian monads. so like be warned.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:27 PM on October 23, 2023
could i have free will? could you? both of those questions are non-starters. because both of those can be reduced to "are we special?"
No, see I think what a lot of people are thinking about when they consider the idea of free will is stuff like, "Should I take ADHD medication? Would I be more free if I took ADHD medication? Will I still be me if I take ADHD medication? Am I more authentically myself with or without the ADHD medication?" A lot of what people are talking about in this thread is useless for answering the questions people actually care about regarding free will.
posted by straight at 3:53 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
No, see I think what a lot of people are thinking about when they consider the idea of free will is stuff like, "Should I take ADHD medication? Would I be more free if I took ADHD medication? Will I still be me if I take ADHD medication? Am I more authentically myself with or without the ADHD medication?" A lot of what people are talking about in this thread is useless for answering the questions people actually care about regarding free will.
posted by straight at 3:53 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
answering those questions is a little bit like trying to write poetry in a language you don't know. leave it for later.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:35 AM on October 24, 2023
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:35 AM on October 24, 2023
"hi! i'd like to answer the deepest darkest questions of the nature of cognition and reality, but i don't want to think very hard and i don't want to unsettle any of my comfortable received notions and please make it all about me."
like, come on.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:39 AM on October 24, 2023
like, come on.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:39 AM on October 24, 2023
We keep talking about making choices. Sometimes, someone else makes choices for you. Serious choices that can overturn your current life. For example, getting booted out of a job you liked and planned to keep doing. We are all in this together.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:09 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 8:09 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
which is a boring question.
But that's like your opinion man. Not everyone finds the same things boring. It's oddly limiting too, like "I want to know, given the extreme limitations of the things I've studied, if I can answer big questions while handwaving away complexities of the big things I haven't extensively studied"
Given that exact same set of inputs, could you have decided not to quit your job? I tend to think the answer is no.
Why would you think that? Did the person quit their job yesterday? Did one extra day of culminated inputs make enough difference? How much of that difference was societal expectations? I mean, just because you spent a lot of time studying philosophy and biology doesn't mean you couldn't answer that question with social science. Imagine a world where there is no pressure to remain - where change is good! In that world, the first time your wife argues with you, you divorce her. Would the decision to quit your job in that world be felt the same? Would it require the same culmination of events?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:16 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
But that's like your opinion man. Not everyone finds the same things boring. It's oddly limiting too, like "I want to know, given the extreme limitations of the things I've studied, if I can answer big questions while handwaving away complexities of the big things I haven't extensively studied"
Given that exact same set of inputs, could you have decided not to quit your job? I tend to think the answer is no.
Why would you think that? Did the person quit their job yesterday? Did one extra day of culminated inputs make enough difference? How much of that difference was societal expectations? I mean, just because you spent a lot of time studying philosophy and biology doesn't mean you couldn't answer that question with social science. Imagine a world where there is no pressure to remain - where change is good! In that world, the first time your wife argues with you, you divorce her. Would the decision to quit your job in that world be felt the same? Would it require the same culmination of events?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:16 AM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
> No, see I think what a lot of people are thinking about when they consider the idea of free will is stuff like, "Should I take ADHD medication? Would I be more free if I took ADHD medication? Will I still be me if I take ADHD medication? Am I more authentically myself with or without the ADHD medication?" A lot of what people are talking about in this thread is useless for answering the questions people actually care about regarding free will.
I mean there's an ontological question about whether one can really speak about free will if the universe is as we suppose it to be. I think that answer is no. The tragic structure of the human condition however is that, whether or not our choices are determined, we cannot escape the impression that we in fact make choices. We deliberate, we weigh options, we make decisions and are held responsible for them. So in the end it amounts to nothing whether or not we conclude that free will is an ontological contradiction. Like the skeptic facing the conclusion that knowledge is impossible, we walk right through it, ending up on the other side where we have to act as if there are some things we can know because otherwise we can't act at all. We cannot choose, nonetheless we must make choices. We are not responsible, all the same, we will face consequences. (we can't go on, we must)
posted by dis_integration at 8:25 AM on October 24, 2023
I mean there's an ontological question about whether one can really speak about free will if the universe is as we suppose it to be. I think that answer is no. The tragic structure of the human condition however is that, whether or not our choices are determined, we cannot escape the impression that we in fact make choices. We deliberate, we weigh options, we make decisions and are held responsible for them. So in the end it amounts to nothing whether or not we conclude that free will is an ontological contradiction. Like the skeptic facing the conclusion that knowledge is impossible, we walk right through it, ending up on the other side where we have to act as if there are some things we can know because otherwise we can't act at all. We cannot choose, nonetheless we must make choices. We are not responsible, all the same, we will face consequences. (we can't go on, we must)
posted by dis_integration at 8:25 AM on October 24, 2023
completely convinced that the whole argument, such as it is, hinges on defining terms in an impossible way and then gesturing toward the impossibility of the defined terms. it’s question-begging.
i see no reason that a solution involving
doesn’t save both the concept of free will and also the desire for a deterministic consensus universe.
i am also dead serious about the focus on institutions rather than individuals as free agents. as stated above i think i’m invoking something like hegel’s geist, but fuck me if I’ve ever been able to make sense of hegel.
but if you’re not with me on institutions as freely acting agents, feel free to back-apply the private universe outside of consensus universe determination concepts to questions like the adhd-med one — adderall, like other stimuli, generates determined consensus universe phenomenal events that can be used by the externally unknowable noumenal choice-maker without determining the choices it makes. i just think that the focus here on philosophy as a means of specifically self-understanding is in this case a little unhelpfully pre-copernican.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:34 AM on October 24, 2023
i see no reason that a solution involving
- private universes accessible only to the person or entity containing them, which can
- take in experiential inputs from the consensus universe and choose to act on them
- under rules differing in numinous, unknowable ways from the rules of the consensus universe
- (numinous” used deliberately to suggest the kantian noumenon/phenomenon split)
- with these choices thereby determined by neither our universe nor the inputs from our universe
doesn’t save both the concept of free will and also the desire for a deterministic consensus universe.
i am also dead serious about the focus on institutions rather than individuals as free agents. as stated above i think i’m invoking something like hegel’s geist, but fuck me if I’ve ever been able to make sense of hegel.
but if you’re not with me on institutions as freely acting agents, feel free to back-apply the private universe outside of consensus universe determination concepts to questions like the adhd-med one — adderall, like other stimuli, generates determined consensus universe phenomenal events that can be used by the externally unknowable noumenal choice-maker without determining the choices it makes. i just think that the focus here on philosophy as a means of specifically self-understanding is in this case a little unhelpfully pre-copernican.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:34 AM on October 24, 2023
Did the person quit their job yesterday? Did one extra day of culminated inputs make enough difference?
Yes! Obviously it did, since the decision was made today and not yesterday. Maybe today their boss did something that was the last straw. Maybe they happened to hear a song playing at the grocery store that made them nostalgic for a time in their life when they had less responsibility and that feeling tipped the balance toward a decision to quit. Maybe their mental state today happened (due to a particular combination of caffeine, sunlight, hormone levels, etc) to be one that made them feel more decisive and ready to take action.
Imagine a world where there is no pressure to remain - where change is good! . . . . Would the decision to quit your job in that world be felt the same? Would it require the same culmination of events?
No, of course not. If you lived in a world with different societal expectations your brain would have gotten a whole different set of inputs from the time you were born. Some of the inputs leading to a decision on quitting your job might be the same. You might have the same boss, the same workload, and the same financial situation. But what you saw other people do, the advice other people gave you, the stories told to you in books and movies - a lot of that would be quite different. So you might very well make a different decision.
When I talk about the exact same set of inputs, I mean absolutely everything that could have any effect on the workings of your brain. Every cup of coffee, overheard snippet of conversation or mosquito bite in your whole life up to that point. On a different day or in a different world, you might make a different decision about the same thing. But at this moment, in this world, given the specific set of inputs your brain has actually received up to that moment, I suspect there is only one decision you can possibly make.
posted by Redstart at 12:15 PM on October 24, 2023
Yes! Obviously it did, since the decision was made today and not yesterday. Maybe today their boss did something that was the last straw. Maybe they happened to hear a song playing at the grocery store that made them nostalgic for a time in their life when they had less responsibility and that feeling tipped the balance toward a decision to quit. Maybe their mental state today happened (due to a particular combination of caffeine, sunlight, hormone levels, etc) to be one that made them feel more decisive and ready to take action.
Imagine a world where there is no pressure to remain - where change is good! . . . . Would the decision to quit your job in that world be felt the same? Would it require the same culmination of events?
No, of course not. If you lived in a world with different societal expectations your brain would have gotten a whole different set of inputs from the time you were born. Some of the inputs leading to a decision on quitting your job might be the same. You might have the same boss, the same workload, and the same financial situation. But what you saw other people do, the advice other people gave you, the stories told to you in books and movies - a lot of that would be quite different. So you might very well make a different decision.
When I talk about the exact same set of inputs, I mean absolutely everything that could have any effect on the workings of your brain. Every cup of coffee, overheard snippet of conversation or mosquito bite in your whole life up to that point. On a different day or in a different world, you might make a different decision about the same thing. But at this moment, in this world, given the specific set of inputs your brain has actually received up to that moment, I suspect there is only one decision you can possibly make.
posted by Redstart at 12:15 PM on October 24, 2023
answering those [practical questions about how medication might affect my agency and identity] is a little bit like trying to write poetry in a language you don't know. leave it for later.
But to me, those are the real questions most people care about, what they're actually talking about when they use the term "free will." So much of this discussion sounds to me like:
But to me, those are the real questions most people care about, what they're actually talking about when they use the term "free will." So much of this discussion sounds to me like:
"Cancer" is really about unlimited growth without direction or purpose, and here's my argument for why Cancer is ultimately incoherent. And that's much more interesting and fundamental than these petty questions about which drugs are most effective for treating leukemia.posted by straight at 1:58 PM on October 24, 2023
alternately, stepping away from specific cases is necessary if you want to attempt to come up with definitions of free will and determinism that might fit together coherently, instead of just “reasoning” by cooking up a definition that precludes the existence of one or the other and then pretending that you’ve proved the nonexistence of one or the other.
you wanna go with the cancer analogy, i’m gonna take the “i just want to know if i’m still me if i’ve taken adderall so don’t bother me with trying to understand the conditions of possibility for free will” argument as roughly equivalent to “why should anyone care about methylation patterns in cells when i just want to know if i have cancer!”
or even: “i want to be able to detect whether i have tumors, so why do i care about detecting whether other people have tumors?”
if you’re going to say anything at all coherent about your adhd-meds-and-identity case, you’re going to have to find definitions of determinism and free will that aren’t nakedly contradictory (because there’s nothing inherently contradictory about those two concepts, despite how received definitions treat them as incompatible) and you’re going to have to decide whether whatever weird fallout might result from your definitions is worth the benefit you get from thinking in terms of those definitions.
and if you’re not coming away from the exercise with at least a few real weird implications, you’re likely fiddling around with received wisdom instead of actually thinking about whether adhd meds make you not you.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:55 PM on October 24, 2023
you wanna go with the cancer analogy, i’m gonna take the “i just want to know if i’m still me if i’ve taken adderall so don’t bother me with trying to understand the conditions of possibility for free will” argument as roughly equivalent to “why should anyone care about methylation patterns in cells when i just want to know if i have cancer!”
or even: “i want to be able to detect whether i have tumors, so why do i care about detecting whether other people have tumors?”
if you’re going to say anything at all coherent about your adhd-meds-and-identity case, you’re going to have to find definitions of determinism and free will that aren’t nakedly contradictory (because there’s nothing inherently contradictory about those two concepts, despite how received definitions treat them as incompatible) and you’re going to have to decide whether whatever weird fallout might result from your definitions is worth the benefit you get from thinking in terms of those definitions.
and if you’re not coming away from the exercise with at least a few real weird implications, you’re likely fiddling around with received wisdom instead of actually thinking about whether adhd meds make you not you.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:55 PM on October 24, 2023
if you’re going to say anything at all coherent about your adhd-meds-and-identity case, you’re going to have to find definitions of determinism and free will that aren’t nakedly contradictory
(the solution is to treat them as quantitative: adhd creates brains that have fewer connections between the dopaminergic bits and the executive-function bits, and more connections between the dopaminergic bits and the limbic-system bits. similarly, depression and anxiety atrophy the executive-function bits. adderall increases the amount of dopamine those dopaminergic bits have available to squeeze out. thus, we can calculate free will through a simple function that takes into account the amount of available dopamine, number of dopaminergic connections to the executive-functioning areas, and number of neurons in the executive-functioning areas. multiply by -1 to get the amount of determinism.)
posted by mittens at 4:37 PM on October 24, 2023
(the solution is to treat them as quantitative: adhd creates brains that have fewer connections between the dopaminergic bits and the executive-function bits, and more connections between the dopaminergic bits and the limbic-system bits. similarly, depression and anxiety atrophy the executive-function bits. adderall increases the amount of dopamine those dopaminergic bits have available to squeeze out. thus, we can calculate free will through a simple function that takes into account the amount of available dopamine, number of dopaminergic connections to the executive-functioning areas, and number of neurons in the executive-functioning areas. multiply by -1 to get the amount of determinism.)
posted by mittens at 4:37 PM on October 24, 2023
I am in rough waters in the book. (Is it okay to sorta-kinda liveblog the reading here? Someone mentioned doing books in FanFare but that's not really done, is it?)
So he's just explained why chaos theory can't serve as a hiding place for free will, and that was a great couple of chapters, strolling down memory lane--that Gleick book was huge to me when I was a teenager, possibly more mind-blowing than Hofstadter, if only because I could finish Chaos and it would take another decade before I actually got to the end of GEB. The argument he makes is convincing.
But then he moves to emergence, and that's where he loses me. Slime molds, neurons, bees and ants, all following extremely simple rules that result in complex organized paths and behaviors. That part, yes, anyone who has read a pop science book in the past forty years will be familiar. Could free will emerge as a function of these complex connections between neurons? I was really kind of excited by this chapter because it does seem like that's an accurate description of how free will would happen, if it does happen.
Sapolsky's answer is: "The mistake is the belief that once an ant joins a thousand others in figuring out an optimal foraging path, downward causality causes it to suddenly gain the ability to speak French. Or that when an amoeba joins a slime mold colony that is solving a maze, it becomes a Zoroastrian. And that a single neuron, normally being subject to gravity, stops being so once it holds hands with all the other neurons producing some emergent phenomenon. That the building blocks work differently once they're part of something emergent."
And that seems to miss the point of emergence entirely--which is that you stop thinking about the building blocks and start thinking in terms of the phenomena that the blocks have built. The ant doesn't learn the ability to speak French--the colony begins to exist as a distinguishable entity with goals and purposes of its own. The neuron doesn't gain free will, doesn't generate free will on its own.
In other words, for two chapters, he builds up an argument for emergence and then says, "but no, that's not how it works," and that is so unsatisfying!!! I'm sticking with the book nonetheless; he's on to quantum theory now, and it's a fun romp through bad rationales for magical powers. But I have to hold the emergence chapters against him! (He does refer to philosophers who have done work on this, and it would be nice to find a readable version of their work to see if the point makes more sense if you go into detail. But there are only so many hours in a day, and I must will myself to do my job.)
posted by mittens at 5:43 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]
So he's just explained why chaos theory can't serve as a hiding place for free will, and that was a great couple of chapters, strolling down memory lane--that Gleick book was huge to me when I was a teenager, possibly more mind-blowing than Hofstadter, if only because I could finish Chaos and it would take another decade before I actually got to the end of GEB. The argument he makes is convincing.
But then he moves to emergence, and that's where he loses me. Slime molds, neurons, bees and ants, all following extremely simple rules that result in complex organized paths and behaviors. That part, yes, anyone who has read a pop science book in the past forty years will be familiar. Could free will emerge as a function of these complex connections between neurons? I was really kind of excited by this chapter because it does seem like that's an accurate description of how free will would happen, if it does happen.
Sapolsky's answer is: "The mistake is the belief that once an ant joins a thousand others in figuring out an optimal foraging path, downward causality causes it to suddenly gain the ability to speak French. Or that when an amoeba joins a slime mold colony that is solving a maze, it becomes a Zoroastrian. And that a single neuron, normally being subject to gravity, stops being so once it holds hands with all the other neurons producing some emergent phenomenon. That the building blocks work differently once they're part of something emergent."
And that seems to miss the point of emergence entirely--which is that you stop thinking about the building blocks and start thinking in terms of the phenomena that the blocks have built. The ant doesn't learn the ability to speak French--the colony begins to exist as a distinguishable entity with goals and purposes of its own. The neuron doesn't gain free will, doesn't generate free will on its own.
In other words, for two chapters, he builds up an argument for emergence and then says, "but no, that's not how it works," and that is so unsatisfying!!! I'm sticking with the book nonetheless; he's on to quantum theory now, and it's a fun romp through bad rationales for magical powers. But I have to hold the emergence chapters against him! (He does refer to philosophers who have done work on this, and it would be nice to find a readable version of their work to see if the point makes more sense if you go into detail. But there are only so many hours in a day, and I must will myself to do my job.)
posted by mittens at 5:43 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]
liveblog the shit out of that shit
also i’m pretty sure books on fanfare happen on the regular — like, a while back i was thinking about starting a fanfare thing on flowers in the attic only to discover it had already been done.
anyway if you start it i’m down, i need to spend more time reading books and less time reading Internet. a fanfare for a book is basically metafilter methadone, but/and that would be on the whole a good thing.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:52 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]
also i’m pretty sure books on fanfare happen on the regular — like, a while back i was thinking about starting a fanfare thing on flowers in the attic only to discover it had already been done.
anyway if you start it i’m down, i need to spend more time reading books and less time reading Internet. a fanfare for a book is basically metafilter methadone, but/and that would be on the whole a good thing.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:52 PM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]
Could free will emerge as a function of these complex connections between neurons? ...it does seem like that's an accurate description of how free will would happen, if it does happen.
I agree, some kind of "strong emergence" from neural complexity of novel causal influences/capacities seems like the best bet for free will.
I'm sorry that possibility is carelessly dismissed in the book, I'd want to read the best available arguments for/against the view in a free will book.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 11:29 PM on October 25, 2023
I agree, some kind of "strong emergence" from neural complexity of novel causal influences/capacities seems like the best bet for free will.
I'm sorry that possibility is carelessly dismissed in the book, I'd want to read the best available arguments for/against the view in a free will book.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 11:29 PM on October 25, 2023
Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not--Sapolsky and Mitchell reviewed in Nautilus.
posted by mittens at 2:20 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by mittens at 2:20 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Kevin "Free Agents" Mitchell head-to-head [50m YT] with Sue "Skeptic" Blackmore for Intelligence2
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:33 AM on November 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:33 AM on November 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
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posted by mittens at 10:08 AM on October 20, 2023 [3 favorites]