pubs
In essence, to suggest that there’s free will is to suggest that there’s objectively more to us than the matter and energy we’re built out of. As special and wonderful and complex as our systems are, I don’t really see much basis for the conclusion that we’re somehow removed from the causal framework that involves and guides all the other masses in the universe. All our matter and all our energy comes from somewhere. True, it’s gotten to be where it is through a set of reasons so complex as to be untraceable; still, unless you start throwing in something mystical that elevates us above the material plane, that’s pretty much all we’ve got to work with.
That said, there’s not much we can do about the situation, mind, body we’re handed other than the best we can. As it turns out we’ve been wired to be generally curious, self-checking entities with the capacity to make decisions based on a complex web of personal biology, experience, reason, and current circumstances. That we’re wired this way for a reason, and that to an extent our choices would seem to be inevitable based on the infinitely complex circumstances behind them, shouldn’t be taken as damning or directive, as those circumstances are so complex and so much of them is outside our conscious control that really for practical purposes “free will” is as good a sketch as any. It’s that abstraction that makes us people, rather than a bunch of polygons depicting gritty reality.
Lack of control over lack of control doesn’t exactly equal self-control. I guess it’s close enough for practical purposes, though.
EDIT:
Not necessarily. There are plenty of philosophies of free will that are based off of the inherent randomness of quantum mechanical shit. I don’t know how valid they are, and while it is most likely the case, I don’t think it’s completely safe to say that the laws of the universe would prohibit free will from existing (seeing as how we do not, you know, fully understand the laws of the universe).
That’s an interesting point: subatomic wacky shit.
I don’t see where that really ties into human psychology, though, where all our decisions do have some basis, conscious or not. I don’t know if anyone’s capable of acting completely randomly. Even flipping a coin and following its result is a deliberate decision. Hell, it’s more deliberate than a lot of decisions we make.
Though the subatomic wacky shit might well play some role in the mechanics of consciousness; getting this stuff running at all. That’s a pretty strange phenomenon itself.
Personally, having studied subatomic wacky shit for a long long time, I have a low opinion of the various attempts to tie free will and/or consciousness to quantum phenomena. Sure, quantum mechanics means that brains probably aren’t entirely deterministic; but how much does that really get you? A lot of things are nondeterministic in the same way, and a random event isn’t the kind of thing I think of as the essence of free will.
I’ve wired up things in school physics labs that were, in essence, quantum-mechanical truly random event generators. I remember one experiment in which a digital counter was counting up particle detection events of some sort, and realizing that whether the last digit was odd or even at any given time was about as quantumly random a thing as could be. Suppose I started making decisions based on whether that digit was even or odd. Nobody going by the known laws of physics could possibly predict what I was going to do. Would I feel as if I were exercising free will? Maybe somebody would, but I don’t really think so.
The attempts to claim that there is something quantumly special about brains usually involve a lot of unwarranted extra assumptions. Henry Stapp pointed out that there’s some molecule involved in human neurons–I think it’s a gate that lets ions through the cell membrane, or something–that can be in a superposition of “gate open” and “gate closed” states. He thinks that this is the place where the nonmaterial mind reaches in and tweaks the brain matter. But he doesn’t propose any quantum mechanism for how the mind really works–he just starts with an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which conscious minds are necessary for wavefunction collapse, and then says, see, you need a mind perceiving things in order for the neuron to really fire or not fire. It’s no more sophisticated than Descartes saying your soul drives your meat through your pineal gland.
Also, my experience is that people insisting that quantum mechanics is essential to the workings of consciousness, or that consciousness has a special role in quantum mechanics, are very, very often angling toward some sort of paranormal psi-power stupidity. It’s not always the case, but it’s enough to raise a red flag for me.
I don’t know enough about quantum computing to really talk about the subject, but I do know that, yeah, there’s some really neat wacky stuff you can set up. Stuff where, instead of slogging through each possibility in order as you would with conventional computing, instead of even checking every possibility simultaneously, you get to the answer in BETTER time than that. Somehow. Actually, I’m probably forgetting some key part of the story.
Anyway, point is, I haven’t seen anything that suggests our brains are set up this way. I wouldn’t be surprised if subatomic wacky shit (SWS) helps give us the processing power we need for self-awareness and conscious thought, but is there really justification that it gives us… some extra potential to tap into, beyond what macro-level physics suggests? I mean, even if we don’t understand how it works, isn’t the idea that it’s still mechanical? Unless the theory is that subatomic gnomes are kicking the electrons around according to a greater design, that is.
It just doesn’t seem to me like the introduction of SWS changes much. Unless the electrons are running into Descartes’s animal spirits, it… doesn’t give free will a housing outside the physical universe. On the other hand, even if my conscious mind isn’t completely on top of things, as a whole I have a kind of free will that other living things don’t. That’s a tricky avenue — I want to separate myself from an ant, or even a tree, in that I have wants and needs to fulfill while they act in an obvious, mechanical way. But what makes my need-fulfillment by means of ordering Chinese food fundamentally different than a tree growing tall to catch more sunlight? My actions are more complex, but is there a fundamental difference, or is it just a matter of scale?
Hm. Does that make sense?
I’ve heard it said that God doesn’t need to be an absolute, or infinite — he can finite, but with powers of such incomprehensibly large magnitudes that the difference between that and infinity would be unnoticeable to us (but significant to mathematicians!)
Similarly, as you already said, the complexity of the human mind and the behaviour it generates is great enough that the question of true free will is of value only to philosophers; given current technology, one must make the pragmatic decision that it effectively exists.
Bender: “So, do you know what I’m gonna do before I do it?”
God: “Yes.”
Bender: “What if I do something different?”
God: “Then I don’t know that.”
a random event isn’t the kind of thing I think of as the essence of free will
Yeah, that’s what was primarily bugging me about this suggestion as well. After pondering it since, I’ve not found a pleasing way to resolve it; much of what I wound up doing was playing with semantics.
The closest I got was maybe a sort of vague uncertainty thrown into the otherwise-deterministic decisionmaking process that would contrast with the natural determinism in such a way as to formulate something… else. A fickle determinism, of sorts, that might closely resemble what one might recognize as free will. Again, though, that’s… kind of messy.
Maybe my soul just hasn’t been driving enough meat lately.
Such is Pongism.
Yeah. It does. I’m a little leery of the micro/macro connections myself. As you say, even if it comes that consciousness is somehow related — which I really don’t know anything about; better discuss this with Mr. McIrvin, above — that doesn’t say anything about what you actually do with your consciousness, which is the issue at hand here.
I think it is basically just an issue of complexity. Technology and magic, you know.
Cute kid, by the way.
thanks!
Roger Penrose has tried hard to figure out some way that the brain could be doing quantum computing (I think his proposal involves microtubules), but to my mind it’s not very convincing.
Similarly, the literature on artificial intelligence is littered with a million arguments about whether there’s anything philosophically incoherent about the idea that a human mind could be modeled by a program running on a general purpose computer, when ultimately the important thing could just be that if you use a computer of standard modern-day architecture (as opposed to some more physicalistic brain-analog), a mind-simulation would run so slowly that it would never get any thinking done in a reasonable time.
it’s worthwhile to note that the tensions between ‘random’ and ‘free’ are the kind of stuff that scientific philosophers (and philosophical scientists) have been all up about since the beginning of real thermodynamics in the mid-19th century; and most of the thermodynamic approaches consider randomness not ‘without a determinate order or cause’ but ‘without a perceivable determinate order or cause’; i mean, physics *do* dictate which side that dice roll comes up, but it’s based off of such minutely variant energy states that it’s impractical even in the realm of theoretical math to try and calculate.
the deal being that even in hardcore physics, we realize that we’re dealing with such an extraordinary quantity that it becomes a new kind of quality.
not that i’ve thought about this a bunch or anything.
Yes, and then supposing you did have the computing power, the same sort of pragmatic approach leads you to the Turing test and all its variations.