Very cool, if true

Eh. I think "subjective", "illusory" and "nonexistent" are three different categories. The article, as many of its kind, presupposes that they are the same.

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I'm not sure I agree. It seems to me that free will is nonexistent (or even worse, incoherent), but we have subjective experiences that provide the illusion of free will.

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Surely free will is as real as anything else in our observer-led reality? You put a bunch of sense data together and come up with the word "chair" to describe the phenomenon. You put another bunch of sense data together and come up with the word "free will" to describe the phenomenon.

You have a sense of something being a chair, you have a sense of free will. I think the distinction between external stimuli and internal stimuli is largely arbitrary.

I'm not arguing here that the underlying objective reality of some set of energy states, which we describe as a chair in a subjective way, not being there in a persistent manner when we don't think about them, but I think what you describe as free will is just another set of energy states that exist when we don't think about them as well.

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Well said!

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Surely free will is as real as anything else in our observer-led reality?

Some things have definitions you can test, and have been tested. Free will fails on both counts.

In face, it even fails on having a definition...

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Surely you can test free will as much as you can test any other psychological construct such as "happiness" or "sense of style"? You ask people, you presume they're answering reasonably accurately and truly. If you can't test people's senses by asking them questions about them then surely that's all of psychology out of the window.

"Do you feel as if you are in control of your moment to moment actions in the absence of external forces preventing that control?"

or

"Do you feel you're the one making your decisions?"

If the answer is yes then you have a sense of your own free will. That you can explain it mechnistically is neither here nor there. Just because I can explain the chemical processes that you describe as happiness, does that make you not happy? (in the sense that if I can explain them at all, not to you specicially).

I guess the definition of free will might be "the sense that you are in control of your actions". What might be wrong with that definition?

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Both of those questions test a _sense_ of free will, they have nothing to do with free will itself. You definition seems radically at odds with what most people mean by the term.

Edited Date: 2009-03-05 10:25 am (UTC)

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As I said before, we only have chairs in the same way i.e. that we only have a sense of a chair. Chair is a subjective, observer-led construct. Just because there are many of us that can point to the same bunch of energy states (which is also an observer led construct, but if I wanted the objective non-construct I wouldn't be able to talk about it because I've never seen it) and call it a chair is due to intransients in physiology and experience, not because there is some chair quality that exists outside of our heads.

So my argument is that all phenomenon are subjective, observer led and only our sense of that phenomenon. So talking about "free will" as being discrete from "my sense of free will" makes no sense.

In other words: most people are wrong.
(or I'm wrong and you're about to set me straight, either will do ;)

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not because there is some chair quality that exists outside of our heads.

Nonsense. The mere fact that multiple people are pointing to the same set of energy states and referring to it as a 'chair' indicates that there is something there that is "stable" and can be recognised. There _are_ external states, and we can recognise them. That there aren't "platonic chairs", and that these things are all approxminations/models, and that we have access to them only through sense impressions doesn't change the external world one bit.

If you want to refute the existence of any reality whatsoever outside of your head then why are you arguing with me? Just change your internal representation of me so that I'm agreeing with you, and have done...

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I never stated that there isn't an objective reality, which exists outside of our heads, just that we only have a subjective impression of it which is defined by physiology and experience. Just because lots of people can point at a thing and call it a chair is due to intransients in those physiologies and experiences.

In fact I said "I'm not arguing here that the underlying objective reality of some set of energy states, which we describe as a chair in a subjective way, not being there in a persistent manner when we don't think about them, but I think what you describe as free will is just another set of energy states that exist when we don't think about them as well."

So I'm saying that there are external states but we only have a subjective view of them. These views are similar due to similarities in our physiologies and experience. The phenomenon of a chair is just as much a construct as the phenomenon of free will, in that both are our "sense" of that phenomenon. Therefore a sense of free will is the same as free will.

If you turn a bucket over and say "I have a chair" and that object functions to you like a chair from your point of view, how is that different to observing your intentions and actions, thinking that, from your point of view, your intentions lead into your actions and declaring "I have free will"?

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And I, If you remember correctly, argued that there was no useful definition of Free Will in terms of said energy states.

If you turn a bucket over and say "I have a chair" and that object functions to you like a chair from your point of view, how is that different to observing your intentions and actions, thinking that, from your point of view, your intentions lead into your actions and declaring "I have free will"?

Because in the first case we might argue over what it actually is we're describing (whether it's a chair, a stool, etc.) but we're both agreeing that there is an external object with certain characteristics. In the second case you're arguing that there is _nothing more than a feeling_, not a feeling _and something that is causing it_.

It's the difference between arguing that you have a sense of a chair existing and therefore that chair exists, and being able to point at something and say "That is a chair". In both cases the sense of chair definitely exists, but in the first case _only the sense exists_, which is clearly not what most people mean when they say "There's a chair". They mean there's an actual, physical thing, which they call a chair, not that they sense chairiness.

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which is clearly not what most people mean when they say "There's a chair". They mean there's an actual, physical thing, which they call a chair, not that they sense chairiness.

I would tentatively suggest that what they think they mean is not necessarily what they actually mean. I'm sure most people dothink of chairs in an objective fashion and think they are talking about some Plato-istic ideal chair, but it doesn't mean that the concept of chair exists anywhere outside of the heads of entities which at the very least have bottoms and sit down.

Regarding that there is some external state that we can all experience and label together is a perfectly reasonable point. How does a sense of free will then differ in any way from all other psychological constructs? You can claim that you feel it (like happiness or sadness or voices in your head) or others can claim that you act as if you have it, but I can't see how it differs from those other traits.

Further we can talk about it and I can say things like "I feel as if my actions are directed by my own intentions" and you can say "I feel that way too", much as we can say "when I see a sunrise I feel in awe of the world" and you can say "nah, they're rubbish". We can analyse, discuss and compare our internal states as if they were external states and find commonality of experience the same as discussing chair-ness, so long as our physiology and experiences are similar enough to do so.

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it doesn't mean that the concept of chair exists anywhere outside of the heads

Of course not. The symbol "chair" exists only in people's heads. That doesn't mean there isn't anything there though, it just means that the label is extrinsic to it.

When people say "there's a chair there" they are referring to there actually being something there, not just a feeling of chairness. If you want to argue that there is nothing there then I'm going to call the whole argument off now, as, to refer back to earlier, you can just change your feelings about the argument to "Andy agreed with me." and I will have done.

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If you want to argue that there is nothing there then I'm going to call the whole argument off now

That's twice you've suggested I've said there's nothing there and I've at least twice said explicitly that's not what I'm saying (the first time before you suggested I was saying there was nothing there). Where have I suggested that there's nothing there?

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Sorry, you've said that there's something there, but then you've acted as if that the idea of that something in our heads is as good as that something. That when people say "I believe there is a chair" then the sheer act of them having a sense of chairiness is a perfectly good stand-in for them actually seeing one, someone else seeing one, chair detection devices going "ping" when pointed at that space, etc. My argument is that these two things are most definitely not the same.

You keep coming back to "I have a sense of free will, therefore I have free will.", and I keep saying "That's not the same thing." and yet you seem to keep persevering with this approach.

Or am I misunderstanding?

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To be precise, I keep talking about free will, and you keep talking about the feeling of it. When I point this out above, you just said "Aah, but what they mean isn't what they think they mean." which strikes me as...silly.

It's like me saying "Unicorns don't exist." and then you say "But people feel Unicorns." and me saying "But they don't believe Unicorns are a feeling, they believe they really exist." and you replying "what they think they mean is not necessarily what they actually mean."

Many people really, actually, totally believe that there is such a thing as free will. I do not. This is my original statement, and I stand by it, until someone can give me a definition of free will, and can show that it exists.

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One more point:

If all we have are imaginings in our heads, then why do some of them have predictive qualities, and some of them not? My theory is that this is because some of them are based on (suitably) accurate models of the world around us, while some of them are not. What's your theory?

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I think about moving my fingers to type, words come out, I do this on a daily basis, it has a predictive quality, I will my fingers to move and they do what I ask. My will translates into action without any other process preventing it. It appears to me that this will is entirely my own and is free from external effects at this time. It is my free will.

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And is this "thinking that causes things to happen" deterministically caused or is it uncaused?

Because if it's deterministically caused by the sum total of all the things in the universe that led up to it then it's _not free will_.

If, on the other hand, you manage to summon the power of primal cause from beyond space and time, and then bend it to your "will" (which is somehow not made up of the particles of the universe, but something non-space/time bound) then that might be free will, but I'd like to know what, exactly, it is you mean by that.

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That things are different from some objective standpoint is without question true. That things look different from the human viewpoint is also without question true.

If I gave you a list of numbers and asked if they were random and, to the best of your knowledge they appeared random to you, any use you put them to which random numbers were of use continued to work perfectly as if they were random and they were to all intents and purposes random numbers, what difference would it make if from some other point of view they had a period of 10^150 then repeated or were stochastic but the pattern was beyond any human understanding?

If the question is "from the universe's point of view do we have free will" the answer is no.
If the question is "from the individual human's point of view do we have free will" I would say the answer is yes.
If the question is "from a sociologists point of view do we have free will" they might answer "there is a pattern but there is also noise".

Maybe the problem is that to ask "do we have free will" is a pointless question because we're not giving enough information.

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If the question is "from the individual human's point of view do we have free will" I would say the answer is yes.

First define "free will" to me. I'm not happy to argue about it without a definition.

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As I said earlier "I guess the definition of free will might be "the sense that you are in control of your actions". What might be wrong with that definition?"

I also asked these questions which might be useful in determining if someone else thought they had free will:

"Do you feel as if you are in control of your moment to moment actions in the absence of external forces preventing that control?"

or

"Do you feel you're the one making your decisions?"

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"I guess the definition of free will might be "the sense that you are in control of your actions". What might be wrong with that definition?"

The fact that it's a definition of a feeling, not of the actual thing. Many people _actually believe_ that their choices are determined, in some nebulous way, by something other than matter grinding away and producing deterministic effects.

Nothing to do with feelings at all.

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We have subjective experiences that provide the illusion of science, too.

(Before I have to don the asbestos long underwear, note that I didn't say science was invalid or nonexistent - just that it comes to us through our senses, which are highly subjective, including our sense of reason...)

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Science is a process used to try and find patterns in the subjective experiences. You observe, theorise, predict and test.

Nobody has ever observed, or made predictions about free will - or even manage to come up with a coherent definition...

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The very pattern recognition which informs our sciences is a function of the subjective atmosphere of our minds...

Round and round and round she goes.

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You seem to be saying that either we have perfect knowledge, or we have nothing and anything goes.

It seems, to me, that there are huge shades of grey in-between. That there's a difference between:
1) "I believe I have spotted a pattern and that it is meaningful."
and
2) "I believe I have spotted a pattern and that it is meaningful. I have thus codified the apparent rules in this pattern, and then made a series of predictions based on those rules. Following this, I checked the predictions and discovered that my rules successfully predicted things we didn't already know. Other people then also created predictions based on these rules and successfully checked them."

In the first case, the person could be right and they could be wrong - we have no idea.

In the second case it seems much more likely that they are onto something - because they've checked their theory against reality and it matches, and other people have also done so. The odds of this happening if the pattern is purely in their head seems slim to me.

While (2) clearly can't be taken as _fact_ - because we have no access to fact - it seems to me to be more reliable than (1).

Thoughts?

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Mostly I was trying to point out that we have no access to fact, and that since many people have observed and cross-checked patterns indicating that they have some kind of free will, it seems to me no less meaningful than any other application of pattern recognition and checking-against-external-reports that we might do.

Also to the point, should we have free will, it is a condition of our heads, so to speak (our personalities and egos.)

Trying to determine the existence of free will based on whether it creates results we don't already know about is fairly useless, IMO, because the mind is somewhat of a locked box. You can observe the operations of someone else's mind secondhand, through psychoanalysis, but you can't psychoanalyze any more information than you get from the person's words and deeds. Until we learn to understand neurology and neurochemistry far better than we do right now, it's not nearly possible to evaluate the mind as we would a mechanical device. If it were, we could be building self-aware AIs.

The original article uses as one of its bases the idea that "the possible space for [free will's] operation shrinks" as neuroscience advances. But this idea is erroneous, and based on another fallacy - the idea that only the forces visible to us can be operating in a space that we have some ability to access. It's not based on a scientific methodology.

We can't observe how language works, neurologically (we can see that certain regions of the brain are clearly running it, but we can't fully see what they're doing) but that doesn't mean it's nonexistent. (Interestingly enough, language also has a lot to do with pattern recognition, apparently. Cool!)

(...On the original question, I tend to believe that we have some amount of free will, but also that there are various influences which weigh on the behavior of our will: to draw an analogy, when you get into a car, it is not predetermined where the car would go (the way it would be if you stepped onto a subway train) but you are likely to drive somewhere which is accessible by road, and follow the traffic laws in doing so, simply because that's the easiest way of getting somewhere in a car. But that analogy seems unrelated to my original critique, which is one of methodology. I only toss it in here as a point of reference.)

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many people have observed and cross-checked patterns indicating that they have some kind of free will

They have? Can you point me at this?

because the mind is somewhat of a locked box
But starting off with a definition of "free will" that can be investigated would be a good start. I've never seen a definition _at all_ that made any sense. Could you point me at one you agree with?

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Um,

drainboy above gives a pretty basic example with "I think about moving my fingers to type, words come out".

You point out that "thinking that causes things to happen" may be deterministically caused, but I'm going to say that this is like saying a factory brings you to work because a factory made the car that brings you to work. Or that Joe Bob, who works in the factory that made your car, brings you to work (etc.) You couldn't drive the car if the car didn't exist, but just because the car was created by outside forces doesn't mean you're not driving it.

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But that's the entire question! Is "you" deterministic or do "you" have free will? If your thinking is deterministic then you have no free will, if it isn't then you might (but we'd still need to investigate _that_).

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