Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Well I suppose everyone's entitled to their opinion.
I don't think free will is exclusive to humans. What makes humans special is not free will, but the ability to "predict" the future, a faculty that is greatly enhanced by language.
I disagree, but certainly you are welcome to your views.
In my view, man alone is sentient, has free will and consciousness. The Bible, in Hebrew describes it this way:
And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath (neshamah) of life (chay); and man became a living (chay) soul (nephesh). – Genesis 2:7
Absolutely, as anyone with a dog or cat knows.
What makes humans special is ... the ability to "predict" the future
I'd put it differently - we're just a lot smarter. Even without language we'd be top of the heap.
a faculty that is greatly enhanced by language
Not so sure about that. I think language is more of an output. I'm sure most if not all of our thinking is unconscious.
However at a species level, and maybe this is what you meant, our much greater capacity for culture, in which language plays a central role, puts us far beyond our fellows.
Now you've got me going, bb... }};-` even though you're joking with me, I'll give you my explicative of what was deleted. But you know it was just one of my typos, of curse, I mean of course, eh? And jennyp was astute to find it and report the error. That was the last straw and time to ax those poorly written and 'proofed' posts. I'm going to hold on to that a little longer, until I can read through it without needing to edit -- I hope.
Now, since you were just playing along, I didn't need to write that... but I did.
My method of thinking about difficult problems like this is to assume that since the problem is still treated as unsolved, I have as good a shot at it as anybody. I read other people's ideas and then look for ways in which their ideas would make a difference in the way the world works. So far, in my humble opinion, no one has defined free will in a way that can be tested -- except to state obvious tautologies.
I have a very simple "turing test" for free will. First a candidate must demonstrate the ability to learn from experience -- that is, it must demonstrate an ability to recognise recurring situations and respond to anticipated consequenses. Second, the candidate must demonstrate a non-deterministic method of coping with dilemmas -- situations where there are multiple competing consequenses. Insects, reptiles and fish pretty much fail this test, and many mammals pass it.
It ain't a complete or pretty idea, but it has a rough correspondence to brain size and complexity, and it has the potential to be quantifiable and testable.
I'm glad to learn that you are the reason your post went away. My impression is AdminMod does not wander around willy-nilly, looking for posts to censor. I imagine it must be something like 99% of the time, posts are pulled because somebody complained.
If the complainant was you, I have no problem with that. I'm looking forward to your next post.
I tend to agree, but I don't want to assign percentages. There are lots of verbally challenged folks out there who make it through life OK.
Perhaps I should say that people have the ability to imagine doing things, physical as well as verbal, and to sequence these imagined behaviors, rehersing them and anticipating their consequences. I have seen cats and dogs do this, but they have a very limited ability to see beyond the immediate situation.
As you may have noticed, I seldom argue from authority and seldom post quotations.
No doubt you are comfortable asserting a position without authentication, but I am not – unless it is a matter of personal testimony. Also, the process has been useful to me, causing me to do a lot of research before formulating an opinion. I’m learning by leaps and bounds here.
I have a very simple "turing test" for free will. First a candidate must demonstrate the ability to learn from experience -- that is, it must demonstrate an ability to recognise recurring situations and respond to anticipated consequenses. Second, the candidate must demonstrate a non-deterministic method of coping with dilemmas -- situations where there are multiple competing consequenses. Insects, reptiles and fish pretty much fail this test, and many mammals pass it. It ain't a complete or pretty idea, but it has a rough correspondence to brain size and complexity, and it has the potential to be quantifiable and testable.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your view on how it should be defined!
Since you mentioned Turing (and I’m a research hound) – I found this little tidbit on his attitude about free will:
Alan Turing Scrapbook - The Inspiration
The whole essay is given in my book. It suggested that the traditional picture of determinism in physical theory, and the apparent conflict with the sense of free will, had been overturned by the new quantum physics. He thought that quantum physics was directly involved in the brain, an idea suggested by Arthur S. Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World. …
Quantum mechanics was then really 'new physics', only formulated in 1926. But it is still in many ways a mystery. The question of whether it has something to do with the nature of Mind has come to the foreground of serious enquiry again.
Roger Penrose's most recent ideas are linked with the research of Stuart Hameroff on the possibility that the physiology of microtubules in the brain depends crucially on quantum-mechanical effects….
In 1932, it was reading von Neumann's new book on the Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics that first brought Alan Turing to the edge of new work in mathematics. Then in 1933 he read about mathematical logic in the work of Bertrand Russell. Bringing mathematical logic to bear on the problem of mind and matter turned out to be Alan Turing's crucial innovation. In 1935 he was elected to a Fellowship of the college, and in the same year had his greatest inspiration: the idea of the Turing Machine ....
IMHO, one of the very best launching points on the web is Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, which has this great essay on theories of quantum consciousness. It sums up the Penrose/Hameroff view and offers these motivations for theories of quantum consciousness:
2. The unity of consciousness. It is claimed that consciousness has a unity, or wholeness to it, that cannot be explained by reducing consciousness to a scattered group of neurons. Rather, many think that quantum mechanical coherence (a phenomenon whereby many different objects can share a single wave function, and in some respects behave as a single particle) gives an explanation for this. Of course, it could be objected that this line of reasoning rests on a blatant content/vehicle confusion. From the fact that some of our introspections have a content with certain properties (we perceive our consciousness to be non-scattered, for example), it is concluded that the vehicle of this content must also have these properties (being non-scattered, for example). Of course this line of reasoning fails horribly. The bank's computer represents my checking account as a more or less unified entity, but the electromagnetic objects that constitute the vehicle of that representation are scattered widely, and could be scattered over a large geographic area -- perhaps even distributed with parts of record from other accounts --, depending on how their computer hardware is set up. One can write the word 'red' in blue ink. In general, there need be no match between the properties that characterize a content, and the properties of the vehicle that carry that content. Given this, there seems to be little motivation to try to explain the unity of consciousness via quantum mechanical coherence.
3. The mysteriousness of consciousness. Consciousness appears to be an extremely mysterious phenomenon. It is not clear how a collection of molecules whose chemical composition is not unlike that of a cheese omelet could be aware of anything, to feel pain, or see red, or dream about the future. Quantum mechanics also seems to be very mysterious -- particles going traversing two paths at the same time, for example. So perhaps they are the same mystery. Nobody phrases it that way, of course, but this seems to be a line of intuition that motivates many people. It is often argued that mere neurons could not be conscious or aware, and this seems to be because one can imagine all the working of of a neuron, or even a large group of neurons, without seeing how consciousness could be implicated. But because the mechanisms underlying quantum mechanical phenomena are less viaualizable, or comprehensible, or whatever, it seems not to be as clear that something as mysterious as consciousness couldn't work its way into the machine somehow. Clearly, this intuition survives only as long as the mechanisms of quantum mechanics are mysterious to the person making the argument.
In my view, free will encompasses the ability to hope, comprehend, plan, dream, love, hate, coordinate, control, organize, direct, communicate, sacrifice – to be sentient, self-aware. Without language, IMHO it would be difficult to know if a lower life form is capable of these things.
I'm pinging betty boop and Phaedrus because they might find this discussion interesting.
On another thread some time ago I related an anecdote about a Corgi dog we had. I don't know if you read it. She liked to torment our older, dumber dog. The Corgi and I sometimes played a game where I'd get between them and keep her away to "protect" the other. One time we were playing that in the kitchen. The kitchen connected to the dining room which connected to the living room which connected to the den which came back to the kitchen through another door. As we were playing, she suddenly stopped then turned and ran out through the door to the dining room. I could hear where she was running and realized right away that she was going to attack through the other door. Sure enough she did.
I found that quite an astonishing level of planning; I'd guess at the level of a five year old child or older. She did many other remarkably intelligent things. I wonder how certain people would account for them.
The debate about free will has a fundamental flaw, and that is that things are as they are regardless of which side "wins".
The central point of determinism is that things move because they are moved; everything has a prior cause.
Contrast this with a key observation of intelligent beings -- that they move or behave in anticipation of events. Combine this with the observed fact that the future is not predictable, and you have an operational definition of free will. The specific mechanism doesn't matter. The intelligent being could be embodied in a computer program, provided it is sufficiently complex.
There are a number of potential sources of sufficient complexity -- chaos, complexity, quantum indeterminancy. All of these are attempts to describe and quantify a key feature of our reality -- that the future is unpredictable in ways that really matter to our personal well being and survival.
But brains are engineered to make the best of this, for the species if not always for the individual. Brains attempt to predict the future, and in doing so, their behavior is determined by causes that cannot be determined -- a neat little paradox, but one that can be studied, described and quantified. In short, a phenomenon available to science, rather than a mystical, neverending subject of bull session.
Being blunt, does this mean that a person without language can be defined as not having any of these? Or that a computer program that writes love poems with a Mad-lib algorithm does?
I think we judge the sentience of a being by the complexity of its behavior, and I see nearly all of these things in cats and dogs.
Again, I'm going to assert that the key test of free will is how an individual copes with the future.
The physics profession will always bow to the evidence. They acknowledge and revere that things are as they are and they do the hard work of experimental verification. The profession has integrity.
Free Will is so self-evident to me that there is no argument as to actuality. Did you see me take a sip of my coffee? I willed it. End of discussion. But that Free Will is always, at the human level, constrained by the laws of physics and by our physicality. I can live with that.
Because we cannot satifactorily explain what something is or how it came to be does not detract from the fact that it is. I refer specifically to consciousness and Free Will. I respect the evidence.
I suggest that it is our immersion in Materialistic cause-and-effect cultural thinking for well over a century that explains why we don't understand. It is a mindset, a prejudice, that is a work. Our incapacity to understand state vector collapse says nothing about reality, which speaks for itself. Certain brave souls, Penrose and Walker among them, are working on it.
This is far too vague, js. How is it key? The future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex in its possibilities. What test does it give us?
In philosophy, free will pretty much has to be taken as an axiom. It can't really be proven, but it's got to be assumed to exist. Without free will, we wouldn't be free to reject illogical conclusions. Would we be rejecting them only because we were predetermined to do so? If so, the whole enterprise of reason would be a futility, and without free will we would be so programmed that we wouldn't be able to know the difference. To cut through this unresolvable thicket, so that we can continue thinking with confidence that we are more than mere calculators reaching pre-determined results, it's essential to posit free will as an axiom. Thus, free will is a "genuine" axiom, embraced out of absolute necessity, and not for an isolated arbitrary purpose (such as "axiomatically" accepting the existence of the Olympian gods in order to practice the Hellenic religion).
This is far too vague, js. How is it key? The future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex in its possibilities. What test does it give us?
I plead guilty to much of this, but only in degree, not in principle.
If you think for a moment about classical physics, the key concept was cause and effect, and cause always preceded effect. Living things turn this on its head. The behavior of living things is determined by the anticipated consequences. Reflexes and tropisms are generally analyzed as belonging to the classical view of cause and effect, but when you get to brains -- particularly brains with a significant sized temporal lobe -- you get more complex kinds of anticipation. This is the realm of psychology, admittedly a fuzzy science.
When you say "the future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex" you are saying it is unpredictable in detail. But it is not entirely unpredictable. Every living thing must anticipate future events and consequences or die. Plants must anticapate seasonal changes, animals must find food and water. Animal species with simple, reflexive, brains place very little value on the individual life. As you work your way up the scale of brain size, there is more importance attached to the survival of the individual, and more means to enable this survival.
If you think about your personal life and what it means to have free will, I believe you will say you have the ability to make choices. But what does this mean? For me it means analyzing the current situation in terms of things that are possible to do and the anticipated consequences. There are lots of interesting things about this analysis, starting with the fact that there is no "list" of possible things to do. The list would have to be infinite and include things that have never been done before by myself or anyone else. Consider Star Trek's Captain Kirk's solution to the unsolvable training exercise -- cheat.
Secondly, the list of anticipated consequences is also infinite and unknowable. When you feel yourself engaging in free will you are feeling yourself solving an unsolvable problem, predicting the future.
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