Free will is an illusion, biologist says

http://www.physorg.com/news186830615.html

by codeodor • 16 years ago

28 61 16 years ago

greyman• 16 years ago

In my opinion, any discussion about the "free will" or its non-existence should begin with the precise definition of the term. I observed in the past than people have different notions about what the term comprises, and without that common ground the discussions tends to be fruitless.

byrneseyeview5• 16 years ago

I'll try.

"Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.

JulianMorrison5• 16 years ago

The thing that I do that feels like "free will" is use adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff.

joss824• 16 years ago

Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents perfectly accurate measure of "physical state".

So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.

But those differences would have nothing to do with human will. They would be random, or, more precisely, non-deterministic (per definition, as you can't measure them). So, having a non-deterministic free will is like having no free will at all.

Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)

foldr9• 16 years ago

I think a better definition would be "the thing that makes people responsible for their choices." The really hard problem of free will is explaining how on earth people could be responsible for their actions if these actions aren't freely chosen. (Or of explaining what it means for something to be freely chosen if they are indeed freely chosen.) The issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is a complete red herring, IMHO. A belief in free will is not just a belief in non-determinism, or a rejection of physicalism.

rms• 16 years ago

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)

msg2• 16 years ago

If a scientist tells you something doesn't exist, remind them of the problem of induction.

If you hold a prior belief that the physical world is all there is (or that physical explanations are the only valid explanations, which the physical sciences take as their starting point), you can come up with endless circular rationalizations of materialism.

byrneseyeview5• 16 years ago

"It doesn't exist" is a shorthand for "There is insufficient evidence for it or against it, and it has minimal explanatory power, and it's not amenable to proof or disproof, so your life will be simpler if you assume it doesn't exist."

This, at least, is the attitude that many people have to ghosts, gods, and werewolves.

msg2• 16 years ago

Your argument is still circular. What do you think proof and disproof mean in this context? Why don't you think that materialism suffers from the same flaws?

This is why scientists make bad philosophers. They do not acknowledge the boundaries of their philosophy.

dkimball• 16 years ago

I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left for phlogiston?

ericb• 16 years ago

Does something have to be physical to be real? It seems like no to me. What is a "movie" but pixels on a screen flashing in a certain order, or a song but a series of sounds. But these patterns, or forms have predictable effects on the material world--the sound of a fire alarm will change the position of people around it. If these patterns exist apart from the physical world--their implementations in some sense, then why does free will need a physical basis? Couldn't it be a property that exceeds the sum of parts?

bitdiddle• 16 years ago

My favorite thinking on this comes from Pratt:

http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech

My favorite line in the paper, cogito ergo sum should be cogito ergo eram :)

It's all Chu spaces -- enjoy!

lukifer• 16 years ago

Free will is an algorithm, nothing more or less. Input genetics and experience, output decision and behavior.

What's more, your beliefs about free will get integrated into the algorithm as well; someone who believes that they are not responsible for their actions will behave quite differently than someone who believes they are capable of choosing. Like many human ideas, free will is a necessary (or at least, useful) illusion.

psawaya• 16 years ago

It depends on how you define "free will".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

reader50002• 16 years ago

To determine if I have free will, I shall now attempt to willfully raise my arm. Raises arm. I don't know, that's pretty hard evidence to refute.

byrneseyeview5• 16 years ago

You've probably evolved to avoid asking too many boring existential questions when you could be breeding, instead. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into trivially proving that you have free will.

reader50002• 16 years ago

You've probably evolved to produce offensive body odors and to fear social interactions with your own species. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into thinking you are good at trivial reading comprehension.

codahale• 16 years ago

And yet the nerve impulses which caused the muscles in your arm to contract left your brain about 500ms before you became aware of deciding to raise your arm. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273) Additionally, the mechanisms which sent that nerve impulse were spinning up for up to 10s before that (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html).

The you that lifts your arm and the you which feels like it decided to lift your arm are on different schedules.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

I'm guilty of only scanning the article, so I could have missed something, but I expected from the title "biologist says" to find some empirical evidence. Instead I got just another philosophizing speculative article.

You would think the belief in free will, or its absence, becomes a feedback mechanism in human behavior. How many different ways can that seed be planted? Why does the belief/disbelief amplitude vary among individuals? Is the belief/disbelief meme just another meme that's been around a long time, and affects us far less than we believe? I once knew a successful Indian woman who completely believed in fate, which surprised me because with all her energy and drive I thought she was living her life as a free willer.

breck• 16 years ago

Let's assume free will does not exist. It follows then, that you should theoretically be able to perfectly predict the actions of a human given enough information about their current chemical & physical state.

I have never seen evidence of such a machine, so I don't think you can prove it either way. I like to believe whichever theory seems to benefit me most at the time.

Jach• 16 years ago

I volunteer myself as such a machine, though I won't say I can perfectly predict the actions of another human and many others are better than I am. Nevertheless I find I can make pretty good estimates from time to time depending on information.

I'm curious about your "I like to believe" stance. Are you saying you'll ignore any evidence for any theory if you don't think the theory benefits you more than another theory, even if your theory has been shown to be wrong?

icey• 16 years ago

Take heart entrepreneurs, John Calvin had this idea almost 500 years ago when he introduced Calvinism.

There are no new ideas, just new implementations.

byrneseyeview5• 16 years ago

Free will is a little like Hume's idea of miracles. Which is more likely: that physical entities created from (roughly) deterministic processes would develop free will, or that it would be a valuable evolutionary adaptation for them to think they had free will, and to narrate their lives as if they did?

kevinh• 16 years ago

Free will doesn't really matter. Only an illusion of free will matters. You give me an illusion of free will, I'm fine with that. But if you take away any perception I have that I'm making choices, I won't like it.

indrax3• 16 years ago

I love how 'conscious thought' goes into a little circle like it's a solved problem. Same with 'unconscious thought'.

Mc_Big_G• 16 years ago

I'm not exactly sure how relevant this is the the free will conversation, but it's related and something I think about on a regular basis.

When I see a person who grew up in a wonderful environment with presumably good genetics, judge and condemn someone who did not, I wonder how they justify their superiority. It's as if they believe that, if they were that person, they would make better choices and do better things with their life. My question is, if you were that person, with exactly the same genetics and environment, then wouldn't you, by definition, BE that person and live your life in exactly the same way?

I suspect their answer would eventually come down to something about a "soul" which, even if it exists, would still be something that you were born with and thus completely out of your control. So, again, I would ask how they deserve their superiority, especially if they don't go for the soul argument.

I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?

I'd say it's just luck, but I can see some people using that as an excuse to never do the right thing. "I was born this way so that's how I'm going to be." I could probably argue with myself for hours about this kind of stuff.

AmaroqWolf• 16 years ago

"I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?"

I'd personally go with "I deserve it because I was so awesome in this life."

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

"Free will" is a philosophical issue, not a biological one. It's somewhat comical that a neurobiologist thinks he has something relevant to say on the subject.

Would anyone take seriously an article like "Phagocytosis is a myth, philosopher says"?

indrax3• 16 years ago

Yeah, it's not like philosophy should update itself based on science, pfft!

scotty79• 16 years ago

http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127....

indrax3• 16 years ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/

tierack• 16 years ago

See also this story of a biologist thinking that even fruit flies have free will: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

True story: I major decision early in my life by flipping a coin.

Now whether or not I was programmed by the universe to make that decision that way or not, from the outside there is no way a universal observer could determine what eventual choice I would make. It easily passes the duck test as being free will.

pw0ncakes2• 16 years ago

Determinism = age-old philosophical stance. Nothing new here.

hakunin• 16 years ago

As programmers we have to understand how we can program something to seem incredibly intelligent. If we had access to time and resources that universe "contributed" to us - we may be able to come up with the type of program that looks, acts, learns, emotionally reacts 100% like a normal human being. Even currently we can get pretty far using image recognition, sound recognition, learning algorithms and fast-lookup data structures. The question of free will is - at which exact point in developing those data structures and algorithms the program gains an illusion of controlling its own actions? Moreover — how can you verify that it did?

What the article essentially says is that our brain is nothing but a CPU, programmed over millions of years by natural evolution in a way that it gained all kinds of responses to multitude of various inputs (our 5 senses) in all kinds of combinations, self-improving learning algorithm, and that illusion of consciousness emerged as a by-product of this complex system. Pretty interesting what exact data-structure/algorithm/etc caused this peculiar side effect.

It could have something todo with the observation that our brain doesn't need to be whole in order to have consciousness. In different types of physical brain damage, even major ones, a human was able to remain conscious. Same could happen with the other part of brain damaged, which was healthy in another example. So I'm thinking - maybe our the sense of conscoiousness is like a potential difference which makes electrical current flow through the wire - you need to have multiple parts of brain with potential difference to create an illusion of consciousness. This is pretty vague but I like this concept - may be onto something. Consciousness does feel a lot like different parts of brain interacting, or one part /observing/ another and reacting to it just like it'd be reacting to the outside world.

Meh.

cianestro• 16 years ago

I discovered this video a few months ago researching for an essay; it's a great source on this topic.

http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=11190

Free will is an illusion, biologist says

Related Stories