Chris
"How do you explain the experience of “free will” then? "
You'll have noticed that I don't even try to explain it.
"Our experience of free will, of having executive decisional power within our
own selves is a distinct, high fidelity, consistently reproducible, experience
in us"
No determinist would deny that you have 'executive decisional power'. Choices
are being made and it is you making the choices. But what makes you Chris?
I know someone who continually makes poor decisions and gets herself into all
sorts of scrapes and compromising situations. Knowing her we forgive her. Why?
Well when my friends and I get together and discuss her there is a common
theme: Her father was rotten to the core. Her mother wasn't any better. She had
a thoroughly rotten childhood. The decisions she makes now, reflect these facts
about her past. This is the conclusion we always reach. She did 'this' because
'that' happened to her in the past. This I offer is a typical way of speaking
about people and their behavior.
There is an unspoken assumption here which is that had she had a different
past, had her parents been better than they in fact were, she would make
different decisions. Equally then, there is an assumption that people who have
had a past like hers will make similar decisions. This is the language of
determinsm.
Now its most certainly true that this kind of folk-psychology is questionable
with regards to how things actually are. But, here is the crux of the argument:
it certainly does reveal how people feel about how things actually are.
So to review the argument again just make it abundantly clear what I am
arguing, it is this:
1) The way we speak about behavior reveals how we feel about behavior
2) When we speak about behavior we speak as though the past is reflected in the
present.
3) So, we feel that our current behavior is determined by our past.
Somehow, the wool has been pulled over our eyes and we have been asked how come
we have an illusion of free will if everything is determined.
The real question is how come we talk about one another as if behavior is
determined if in fact we feel we have free will?
Chris, at some point in your post you ask this:
"OR Are you maintain that the experience of free will does not itself exist?
(can you argue that?)"
Look again at the very first paragraph in my post to you. You quoted it, so I'm
assuming you read it:
"...I'm arguing that there is no illusion of free will..."
Could I have been any clearer?
All the best
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 21:30:47 -0700
From: meeke...@verizon.net
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/5/2013 8:34 PM, Chris de Morsella
wrote:
From:
everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of chris peck
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 7:30 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: When will a computer pass the Turing
Test?
Hi
Chris
>>
I
also do not “KNOW” whether or not I really do have “free
will”. But if I do not have “free will” evolution has
seen fit to evolve a very expensive – in evolutionary
terms – illusion of “free will... To argue that “free
will”, “self-awareness” etc. are just noise, of no real
value or consequence goes against evolution. Evolution
doesn’t work like that. Unless it can be clearly shown
that these qualia are inevitable by-products of some
other evolutionarily vital brain function”
>>You
haven't really addressed the ideas raised in my post. I'm
not arguing that the illusion of free will has no
consequence I'm arguing that there is no illusion of free
will. And if there is no illusion of free will then there
is no reason to drum up some evolutionary story to justify
it.
How
do you explain the experience of “free will” then?
Our
experience of free will, of having executive decisional
power within our own selves is a distinct, high fidelity,
consistently reproducible, experience in us – I *know*
through direct experience that I experience this in my own
self, and I bet long odds that, even though you deny it,
you also experience the sensation of having free will in
your own everyday life.
I agree with Chris Peck. I don't recognize your "drama of unfolding
experience" at all. I cogitate on decisions and make choices. But
none of that entails feeling "free will".
Hundreds…
thousands maybe, times a day you (or I, or anyone) are
being presented with choices and experiencing the feeling
that we are making decisions – i.e. exercising free will;
we all wrestle with dilemmas in our lives and mull over
decisions. Often in fact the drama of our unfolding
experience of this non-existent free will extends over
considerable durations of time and on occasion can
dominate an entire life span.
The
experience of free will is not a snap shot, instead it
unfolds over spans of time and is experienced as a clearly
ordered series of distinctly related emotions, thoughts,
and deep sensations emerging within our focal sense of
self.
That just sounds like obfuscation to me.
These
temporally arrayed series of distinct feelings, also
include often prolonged virtual reality drama plays (if
free will does not exist) in which we find ourselves
wrestling with difficult choices, followed perhaps by a
clear sensation of converging on a decision, and then an
experience of deciding that feels clear and distinct in
our inner self-aware sense of being.
Such
well rendered dramatic movements all carefully arrayed
into a highly orchestrated sequence is what we experience
as our free will. These are subtle experiences and
producing them and stacking them into a temporal sequence
and then playing them out in a manner that is so perfectly
acted out inside that it is convincingly real in us – in
so far as we experience it (without getting into whether
it is real or not)
I
see two basic options here:
A) If
free will exists (and also of course that we have it) then
we experience the sensation of having free will because
that is our actual nature (however that happened) and is
in the nature of the universe we exist within.
B) If
instead free will does not in fact exist, then explain the
dynamic unfolding drama of our experience of it and do so
without providing any sort of rendering mechanism. The
experience is exquisitely and very carefully synchronized
and is so convincing in us that we perceive ourselves as
“really” having it? You must show how it is a zero cost
side effect of something else that can clearly be shown to
be vital and would necessarily be a pre-cursor to
experiencing free will – for example consciousness
necessarily must exist in the first place in order for
free will to exist.
OR
Are you maintain that the experience of free will does not
itself exist? (can you argue that?)
If
you concede that the experience of free will does in fact
exist in us then you must concede that something produced
that experience, unless you can quite clearly demonstrate
how the experience of free will – an experience that is so
profound in our species and has been a central theme in so
much of our thinking, art, poetry, ideology throughout
history – is a clear side effect of some precedent thing,
such as say intelligent self-awareness.
>>Since
you talk about qualia I take it that you have something
other than the concept of free will in mind. Its an
important distinction because the concept, however
incoherent, clearly does exist. But being an idea has a
history describable by semiotics or memetics, which ever
floats your boat.
Experience
is subjective for the subject! How can a discussion of
free will not involve a subjective view. Our experience
colors our perception of ourselves and of how we
experience ourselves; including our experience of free
will, of being presented with choices and arriving at
decisions. A headache may be described objectively in a
medical text, but headaches are experienced subjectively
and different people experience them in different ways.
Why should it be different for free will? Is it not still
the subject doing the perceiving? Is not free will
something that is inextricably bound up with the notion of
subjectivity? Can you conceive of “free will” without
introducing a subject in which it arises and is
experienced?
>>But
as for a qualitative feel of 'freeness' that goes hand in
hand with the decisions I make; these qualia are
conspicuous by their absence. For sure, when I make day to
day decisions I don't feel under external duress, but that
feeling is understandable because I am not under external
duress. I am also aware that there were alternatives
available to me other than the one I in fact choose, and
in a sense there were, but when asked to explain my choice
the lexicon of determinism comes to the fore. I talk about
the reasons and causes of my choice. I choose salad over
steak because I am worried about being fat. I am worried
about being fat because culture places value upon being
slim. Eating steak will make me fat because my metabolism
is slow. My metabolism is slow because of the genetic hand
I was dealt. Nature and nurture, neither of which I have
control over, conspire to drive my decisions.
Perhaps
you confuse abstractness with absence
Whatever this set of feelings which you denominate a feeling of
'free will', you have done nothing to show that they (like other
feelings) are just how processing data and making a decision feels.
You have not shown that it requires any additional effort or
complexity or energy over and above that necessary to process the
data and make a decision. And so evolution in providing the means
to make decisions favorable to procreation has necessarily also
produced corresponding feelings; just as in providing imaging of EM
waves it has necessarily provided the perception called "seeing".
Brent
>>
Others
on this list have been arguing that we are complex systems
that nevertheless lack the ability to home in on the
neural mechanics of our own decision making and therefore
are unable to witness the choices being determined. Thus
we don't have a feeling of being determined. I disagree
with them. Our choices feel determined, rather than free,
in precisely the way a determinist would recognise.
I
take it you have never wrestled with some difficult
decision in your life. Explain in what way that naturally
arises from a deterministic playing out of a program. The
drama that we sometimes experience when faced with the
need to choose and the often quite prolonged inner
struggles we go through do not feel predetermined to me.
So if they are the illusion has been constructed, and very
carefully so, in my mind at great cost in terms of the
brain activity required in order to render it. This
capacity evolved in us then, it survived selective
pressure. Why? What survival benefit does this confer?
To
argue that it does not exist then fail to provide an
explanation for the sequential ordered dramatic subjective
experience of it is unsatisfactory for me. Either you must
show how these tapestries of interwoven experiences --
call it our “free will” virtual reality drama (soap opera
maybe [grin]) – that is unfolding within our subjective
experience *is the result of something else* that
is precedent and necessary and that would *naturally
produce* the nuanced experience of free will within
our subjective beings.
>>In
other words, there is no illusion of freewill to explain
and in fact when people talk about their behavior they use
language which reflects the determinist's perspective.
And
instead I am saying that either free will does exist or if
not the temporally stacked sequentially and dynamically
unfolding experience of it (we never know ahead of time
how we are going to ultimately decide) needs to be
explained. This experience must either be a carefully
produced drama or it must naturally arise out of something
that is vital to our being and clearly bound up with
self-awareness, conscious intelligence etc.
You
maintain that no illusion is taking place and that free
will does not exist; then provide the mechanism for the
generation of the experience of it?
Cheers
-Chris
All
the best
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