Bruno,
Thanks for your reply. Are your papers on your web site?
William
On Mar 13, 2010, at 10:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi William,
OK I found it on the net:
http://www.socialbehavior.uzh.ch/teaching/semsocialneurosciencespring09/Haynes_NatNeurosci_2008_ext.pdf
But my comment will consist in repeating what I am always saying
about free will or free decision.
The existence of free acts has nothing to do with the fact that such
acts are determined, in advance or not.
The article, relatively to what I try to convey preaches the chore.
Given that free will is a high level self-referential ability, it
would be astonishing that the brain has not a lot of work to do, and
this including the transformation of the will into act.
Given that mechanism is my working hypothesis, the will cannot, in
no direct ways, influence any of my parts, say, at my substitution
level. "I" am emerging from billions of amoebas (neuronal cells)
which got the cables (axon), and without using drugs, I cannot
interfere deliberately on this or that specific neurons.
Also, I don't know if you have read my papers, but I do not attach
consciousness to a working brain, only to an abstract person, which
lives really in Platonia, and uses "only" its local brain to
manifest itself relatively to me with some high probability. But the
consciousness itself is attached to infinities of computations
(existing through elementary arithmetic, or combinators, etc.).
I mean, how, in the mechanist frame, a complex decision, like those
based on the free will, could be done without the brain doing a vast
set of relevant computations. That it can take 10 seconds is almost
astonishing of brevity.
In my life, the most "free-will" type of decision seems for asking
years of brain processing :)
It is not astonishing that for local quick decision we are deluded
on their exact relative timing, but then we are deluded on time in
general.
Such kind "attack" on "free-will" criticizes just a sort of magical
conception of the will. Not the one based explicitly on mechanist
hypotheses. It is like the book by atheists saying that God does not
exist, and then refers only to a notion of God, about which it is
well known that scientific (modest, interrogative) reflexion has
been banished since centuries.
The position I take on free will is called compatibilism in the
literature. It is just self-determinacy, with "self" mainly defined
by recursion equations in computer science (+ intensional nuances).
Self-determinacy takes computational time, that is normal. You may
elaborate if you feel I am missing something.
Bruno
On 13 Mar 2010, at 18:19, L.W. Sterritt wrote:
Bruno,
Would you comment on C.S.Soon et al, "Unconscious determinants of
free decisions in the human brain," Nature Neuroscience, 11, 543 -
545 (2008) ? In this paper, the "split second" becomes 10
seconds. Sorry if this has been addressed before in this list.
William
On Mar 13, 2010, at 3:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 12 Mar 2010, at 21:53, m.a. wrote:
I agree with you that quantum indeterminacy
doesn't affect (free) will: "Quantum mechanics is local and
deterministic, and explains why it seems indeterministic to the
99,9999...% of the observers." (3/12/2010 7:58 AM), which is why
I feel that your use of the words "ability" and "develop" when
you say: "the ability of a person to develop personal goals and
to satisfy them in absence of coercion" (above) can as easily
refer to completely determined processes which introspection
identfies as voluntary a split second afterwards ... as it can
anything else. m.a.
Are you thinking to Libet's experiences?
Anyway, if Libet's experiences has been repeated and confirmed
(which is quite plausible). It would demolish only a pseudo-mystic
conception of free-will where a 'substantial soul' would somehow
influence the brain, or why not, directly the arms, ... or the
spoon.
Some materialist used Mechanism, not to for formulating or
solving, the mind body problem, but for eliminating the mind and
its attributes. Mental things does not really exists, only matter.
And so no free will, nor even consciousness for the most extremists.
The general mistake here (imo) consists in believing that reducing
higher order epistemological notion to lower order notions
eliminates the importance or the existence of the higher order
notions. Or more generally, that representing an unknown field in
a known field, eliminates the unknown field. It may eliminate it
from the primitive ontology, but this does not mean it is
eliminate from the appearances or from the experiences.
If that was true a materialist eliminativist would never take a
pain killer.
And if we are (apparently material) machine, then, if we are
digital machine, we are immaterial or abstract, or higher order,
machine or number. The whole coupling consciousness/realties
emerge, and thus is reduced, to the additive and multiplicative
structure of numbers. This does not make disappear neither
consciousness, nor the first person (singular and plural) material
perception of matter.
Free will is just very hard to define. It needs consciousness, it
implies a partial control of the self with respect to its most
probable "macro-histories" (macro = above its comp substitution
level).
George Orwell said that freedom is the right to say that 2+2 = 4.
I would say that free will is the will to say that 2+2 = 4.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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