The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/

by Bluestein • 5 years ago

65 254 5 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Bluestein2• 5 years ago

"Many people believe that evidence for a lack of free will was found when, in the 1980s, scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that seemed to show that the brain “registers” the decision to make movements before a person consciously decides to move. In Libet’s experiments, participants were asked to perform a simple task such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist. Sitting in front of a timer, they were asked to note the moment at which they were consciously aware of the decision to move, while EEG electrodes attached to their head monitored their brain activity."

dang• 5 years ago

If curious see also

twodave11• 5 years ago

This sort of debate always struck me as nonsense. If our actions are not derived of our own free will, but just exist as a small part of nature, then if you follow that thread far enough you’ll understand that all reason and truth would also be invalid, being just the effect to some coincidental cause. This incidentally would render theories about the subject of free will invalid as well.

Thus if there is no free will there is no way for us to know it.

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

Suppose an all powerful god controls everything that happens to us. Could not such a God give us the knowledge that we have no free will?

peterburkimsher2• 5 years ago

Suppose God is infinite, and we are finite. If free will is finite, then we have free will, and have knowledge of good and evil. Yet it also means we can never know God's will, which is infinite.

Does infinity mean an unchanging concrete block? No! Recursion and fractals are infinite. There may yet be a perfect, infinite pattern that this world is designed to follow.

Would it be possible to know the whole pattern? No. But could we know enough to fit into that? Yes. And I think that it requires the surrender of self-will, which is usually deterministic.

In earthquakes, bridges (nicely rational, rectangular shapes) often crack (with fractal tree-shaped fractures). It is for our own good to surrender to a greater design than our own finite understanding.

twodave11• 5 years ago

Yes, in my opinion the only way for reason and free will to exist are if some supernatural being were to grant it to us. That said, in order to truly have knowledge of anything we must first be able to assert free will. Otherwise even this God figure's interference in our natural lives may just be interpreted as an outside stimulus that we're dutifully responding to according to the laws of nature.

wruza4• 5 years ago

I’m interested in topic. Can you please expand a little or point to a book/idea that does? The “reason and truth” part specifically. Why truth would be invalid if there exist only complex finite automata? Can’t complex enough entities reason about this system while being a part of it, coincidentally being able to do that without contradiction?

Thorrez• 5 years ago

Does it make sense for an automaton to say "I will search for truth. I am searching for truth. I have found truth." when that automaton has been preprogrammed to say that and had no choice in the matter?

Here's a version of this argument: https://youtu.be/BsAEj6UsrI0?t=297

twodave11• 5 years ago

I speak of reason and truth as human constructs. If we cannot be sure that we have free will, then, while truth exists in abundance, we have no ability to validate it. I say this all a bit tongue in cheek because I absolutely believe that we have free will. And in any case, to suggest otherwise to me would seem like a cop-out for the consequences of my own decisions.

The first 3-4 chapters of the book Miracles by C.S. Lewis cover this topic pretty well in my opinion, even if you're not spiritual-minded.

cardanome2• 5 years ago

A deterministic machine is still able to react based on external stimulus and able to reason about the world and itself.

And we don't even need to go the full determinism route to disprove free will. What can free will be other than an illusion? Am I really deciding to be hungry, to want companionship, and so on? Am I simply doing what needs to be done to fulfill my needs while my brain is inventing reasons? What am I other that environmental factor, genetics, and maybe random noise? Nothing.

Objective truth and reality exists independent of any person having a free will or not.

alisonkisk2• 5 years ago

Relativity theories say that objective truth only exists globally/abstractly, and cannot shared between observers.

smeej7• 5 years ago

You may not decide to be hungry, but regardless of your hunger, you can choose not to eat.

Incidentally I think that's also what separates us from other animals. Animals can't fast, for example. If the instinct is present, the animal acts on it. We don't have to. In fact, if it mattered enough to me, I could starve myself to death.

netizen-9368245• 5 years ago

The brain is a deterministic system. We understand the dynamics of deterministic systems from the study of physics, so what is free will in terms of a system with an already decided outcome?

kanzenryu2• 5 years ago

Quantum Physics has perfectly random outcomes

kbelder• 5 years ago

Possibly it's a chaotic deterministic system, which means it can't be precisely predicted by any means short of a full simulation.

twodave11• 5 years ago

If you really believed that you wouldn't say things like "we understand". Because if you really believe there's no free will then all human understanding is a sham.

benibela2• 5 years ago

I said that in a philosophy exam in school, and got a D- for it

twodave11• 5 years ago

There are probably more reasons you may have gotten a D- for it--I'd think a fair professor would have allowed such an argument assuming it was well-thought-out. There are of course plenty of professors (especially in philosophy) who give out grades based on how thoroughly they feel their egos have been stroked. Shame on them. Grades based on sycophancy are no different than any other kind of corruption.

anothernewdude• 5 years ago

Free will is almost axiomatic.

WhompingWindows3• 5 years ago

You claim this "thread" leads to all reason and truth being invalid, which is overreaching, to put it plainly. How do you reckon that all mathematics, the periodic table of elements, the planetary bodies in our solar system, are suddenly invalidated because humans weren't deciding to study them, but were merely following natural behavioral patterns? If we don't have free will, does that invalidate all aliens' civilizations study of universal laws too?

In my view, humans are curious creatures whose natural inclination to study their surroundings led them to discover scientific truths, which exist on a higher plane than our mere thought. Combine this with societal support of scientific activity, and we have a burst of discovery of truth and reason which was hitherto un-revealed to us. Our "free will" and "decision" has nothing to do with 2+2=4 or that Mars is red due to rusty iron, these are simply factual scientific observations which have stood the test of time in science: no theories have invalidated them.

So, our free will is not necessary for the physical laws of the universe to exist. They existed before us and will exist after us. So where do we lose all reason and truth by being merely curious, as opposed to having a homunculous man in our heads telling us what to do at each moment?

Look into meditation practice if you still believe in the switchboard operator pulling all the strings in your mind. I challenge you to find free will in yourself, find something you're actually genuinely choosing. Can you explain why free will allows the random thoughts that crop up in your mind constantly? Those random thoughts dictate our behaviors, the actions of humans; but where are they from? They're random nervous firings that our physical body, physical tongue, physical fingers, are all acting upon, there is no "switchboard operator" choosing anything at any time.

twodave11• 5 years ago

I didn't intend to imply that truth would not exist--rather that we'd have no way to validate it, truth and reason being human concepts. If we invalidate our own faculties (I don't see any other way to categorize not having free will) then while there absolutely still is truth out there, we are hopelessly incapable of validating any of it.

twodave11• 5 years ago

Also I thought by calling this whole debate nonsense I would be seen to believe that free will must exist. It's simply not derived from some haphazard biological coincidence, in my opinion.

RcouF1uZ4gsC4• 5 years ago

I find attempts to disprove free will incredibly boring. If there is no free will, then everything the investigators wrote and did is the result of some deterministic (or random) process which doesn’t have anything to do with logic or evidence and whether or not people accept the conclusion is also independent of reason and logic.

Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence.

By arguing against free will, you are cutting off the branch on which argument itself depends on.

ThalesX2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure I understand this counter argument. Surely we can rationalize in a deterministic universe without having free will to make independent decisions based on objective rationalizations.

What about understanding the clock structure? Does that limit my ability to reason about time? Or about digital clocks? Or to be upset at someone for not showing up when I was expecting them to.

RcouF1uZ4gsC4• 5 years ago

What do you mean by “rationalize”?

What is the difference between rational and irrational in a deterministic universe?

dvt2• 5 years ago

Without at least the illusion of free will, there cannot be any discussion or argument, as that presupposes free will and an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence.

I don't think this follows, as logic (i.e. the "rules" of argument) aren't predicated on any notion of free will. You can still have good arguments, bad arguments, right arguments, and wrong arguments, in a perfectly deterministic universe.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

The key issue probably is that determinism and lack of free will complicate the question of "what's the point of doing anything?", but complications like that are not really an argument for or against free will; we can't assume that life has to have a specific point and use that to justify statements about the nature of reality, it's the opposite way around.

Free will and an illusion of free will are distinct concepts, IMHO there's a consensus that we do have an illusion of free will and that there are some practical benefits for having such an illusion - but again, that's not necessarily an argument relevant to a discussion of whether free will actually exists.

Furthermore, lack of free will does not imply a lack of an ability to change one’s mind in response to evidence, quite the contrary, it implies that you changing your mind is not just an arbitrary choice but is going to happen (or not) depending on the evidence you receive and how (and from whom) you receive it; it only means that, given your previous state and all your observations, the outcome (changing the mind) is predictable and isn't arbitrary. Perhaps it's influenced by some small seemingly random factors that are hard or impossible to observe and analyse (creating the illusion of choice or requiring to model the whole system as hard-to-predictable "black box") - for example, we obviously can't access all the exact details of our own brain state - but it's not determined by some "out of system" choice that's somehow distinct from what the brain does as a physical, deterministic "machine".

jsmith45• 5 years ago

Yeah. The main reason I feel a need to believe in free will, is because if I assume a perfectly deterministic world, how do one defeat the following question:

Why is it worth putting any effort in? In a perfectly deterministic world whatever will happen will happen. Me deciding to just not try won't change anything, since me doing so was predetermined in the first place.

That argument is pretty trivially defeated by believing the concept of free will. (Even if this belief is false). And yeah, I know the previous argument is deeply flawed, but giving a satisfactory counter argument not based on free will is tricky at best.

This ties deeply to the concept of illusion of free will. If you can conclusively and convincingly prove that there is no free will, you can lose some of the benefits of the illusion of free will.

For example, if hypothetically one were to prove that the world is fully deterministic, and no free will exists, then it opens a bunch of other philosophical questions. Is it right (moral) to punish people who commit crimes?

If the person were pre-ordained to commit the crime, and could never have actually prevented themselves from doing it, can they really be blamed? Obviously, if somebody has a faulty brain that makes them more likely to commit crimes (and has shown this, by committing said crimes), then locking them up to protect everyone else might be reasonable. Trying to rehabilitate them (i.e. change the inputs of their deterministic though process, such that they would not do the same in a similar situation in the future) is also reasonable. And perhaps punishments as a deterrent mechanism might still be valid.

But I really have to question if it is actually moral/ethical to punish somebody for something if they truly had no choice in the matter. It seems as society we feel the answer might be no, as we choose not to punish people who are incapable of understanding that what they did was wrong (like young children, or those deemed legally incompetent/insane). This is generally also true of animals, which are usually not punished for doing something we deem as "wrong", but instead are often relocated, or killed (not as punishment, but to prevent further danger, since giving an animal life without parole to protect people is not deemed viable).

This is only one of a whole list of philosophical questions we would want to revisit if we truly knew free will does not exist.

I go with a deterministic universe above because it simplifies the arguments. A non-deterministic universe in theory could have some of the same difficulties, but it is harder to formulate the relevant arguments.

cortesoft5• 5 years ago

The idea that this experiment would disprove free will seems to rely on thinking that the 'conscious' mind is somehow separate from your physical brain, and free will is the act of your non-physical consciousness telling your body to move.

This seems like nonsense to me. Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts. Of course they are present before you are conscious of your decision to move, because they ARE your consciousness.

Free will does not mean it has to be separate from your physics brain.

RcouF1uZ4gsC4• 5 years ago

This article seems kind of like noting that a web server returns a response to the caller before logging it.

cortesoft5• 5 years ago

I would say it is more like “we noticed the data was present in memory before the server started sending its response”

rory• 5 years ago

I think some _would_ define free will as necessarily separate from physical processes in the brain. Absent the existence some kind of magical soul-like concept, the free will debate in general seems like more of a semantic argument than a real philosophical one.

netizen-9368245• 5 years ago

That may be true, but I think our current conception of free will necessitates some sort of nondeterministic mechanism. Our brains, being physical systems, appear to be entirely deterministic.

chordalkeyboard17• 5 years ago

I think physical systems are probabilistic rather than deterministic.

plutonorm• 5 years ago

Why does determinism preclude free will? If I am the physical processes that occur in my brain, then my decisions are rooted in those processes. Even if those processes are deterministic and there was only ever one outcome for my decisions, I can still say that I have free will because it was the very unfolding of those deterministic processes which led me to me to expressing my free will. There is only a clash between free will and determinism when you imagine that your consciousness is in some vague sense separate from the physical world.

cortesoft5• 5 years ago

Why does a brain being a physical system necessitate it being deterministic?

It seems like the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the more things seem to be probabilistic than deterministic.

The physical brain being probabilistic fits perfectly with the idea of free will.

mcswell5• 5 years ago

"Your brain waves are the not caused by thoughts, they ARE your thoughts." How can you know that? How do you know that your mind isn't somewhere else (in some sense of "where"), and transmitting signals to your brain, which simply acts as a receiver? I don't say this is true, I'm just asking how you would empirically or experimentally distinguish that situation from the notion that your brain makes up your thoughts.

joefourier4• 5 years ago

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will? Apart from the legalistic definition - the ability to make decisions without being coerced by third parties or external factors - any other meaning seems to require dualism, the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept.

It seems it is just a nebulous, ill-defined concept used to soothe discomfort with the idea that people's decisions are caused by physical processes, governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe.

B1FF_PSUVM2• 5 years ago

I think there's quite a bit of historical philosophical, and theological, debate on the topic.

Boils down to "there is an immutable, foreordained destiny" vs. "each actor chooses freely and history is the sum of those vectors".

chordalkeyboard17• 5 years ago

This needle is threaded by contemplation of what it means for someone to “choose.” If one freely chooses whatever one wants, then one has free will but one will always choose their desires.

maest• 5 years ago

I don't think you can define free-will in the absence of a definition for causality, and I have yet to see that.

benibela2• 5 years ago

Judea Pearl won a Turing award for a definition of causality

chordalkeyboard17• 5 years ago

I am also of the opinion that the concept is either incoherent or meaningless.

coldtea9• 5 years ago

Are you really "of the opinion", or you were just made to write that as an automaton, due to a deterministic causual chain of events?

In which case, you don't really have an opinion, any more than the way a dead frog jerks his legs when we apply electricity.

peterburkimsher2• 5 years ago

The late John H Conway deduced a consistency proof that if people have free will, so do elementary particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

He discusses it more in the following lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmx2tpcdKZY&feature=youtu.be...

Free will doesn't mean "I can do anything." I'm not good at singing, so I can't ever be a famous rock star. Free will is to make a choice between a finite number of options (will) without that choice being influenced by external factors (free).

I thought about this a lot last year, shortly after Conway died, and I think that it's possible to prove that free will is finite, the universe is finite, and therefore we have free will.

"If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clu...

MIP* = RE https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...

"Prior to the new work, mathematicians had wondered whether they could get away with approximating infinite-dimensional matrices by using large finite-dimensional ones instead. Now, because the Connes embedding conjecture is false, they know they can’t."

Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers.

Therefore: - Assuming that the universe is finite

-> Infinity cannot be approximated with finite numbers (MIP* = RE)

-> Numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits

-> The future can never be perfectly preordained (Gisin)

-> Free will exists (Conway)

This is not a proof that free will exists! But I think this is a consistency proof that free will is finite.

chr12• 5 years ago

If numbers cannot have infinite strings of digits, then the future can never be perfectly preordained.

Why? A simple cellular automaton like Rule 30 doesn't use any infinite data but it's future is perfectly preordained.

But being preordained doesn't mean that there can't be free will. Because having the initial state, and being able to predict later state are very different. Even simplest cellular automata are computationally irreducible, meaning that there is no shortcut, and the only way to find out their future states is to run the full computation.

So if physics can be described by finite computation, and all the future states can be obtained from initial state, the only way to obtain them would be running the whole simulation, which would be equivalent to people in that simulation living and making their choices themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30

pdonis3• 5 years ago

The definition of "free will" in this proof is not the same as the one being discussed here. The kind of "free will" that Conway's proof talks about could be exercised by an automated device that randomly chose measurement settings based on some unpredictable quantum event.

nathias• 5 years ago

contingency is necessary but not sufficient for free will, Conway's definition is philosophically weak as it equivocates 'choice' and therefore the whole issue. The definition of choice includes not only possible options but also a selection mechanism, where for particles/random there is no selection mechanism (contingency)

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

It's the same as intelligence or pornograph: you can't measure or really define it, you just know it when you see it.

Aka, it's not within the realm of science and people should stop pretending it is.

Trasmatta2• 5 years ago

I never really liked that quote because of course you can define pornography. Just because it exists on a spectrum and there are grey areas doesn't mean you can't define it. That's the case for just about everything.

analog313• 5 years ago

I wonder if the notion of free will owes itself to theology, notably the question of God's responsibility for evil, and similar puzzles.

Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

coldtea9• 5 years ago

Do you "wonder", or were you just mechanistically made to write this sentence, due to a deterministic chain of events?

Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

Well, it's also a solution for the empirical experience we all share, that we're not just automata, but that we e.g. weight decisions, and so on.

gwd2• 5 years ago

Maybe philosophical free will is a solution in search of a non-theological problem.

I don't think it's a theological problem; I think it's the way we think about things every day.

Consider four situations:

1. You walk into the kitchen and a pan which you'd placed on top of the fridge at a precarious angle falls on your head.

2. You walk into the kitchen, and your spouse, who honestly thinks you're a burglar who has broken into the house, hits you on the head with a pan. When they realizes it's you, they apologize.

3. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, grab a pan, and smack you in the head with it.

4. You're standing in the kitchen, having an argument with your spouse. They get very angry, and you see their eyes briefly flit to the pan; but instead they calm themselves down and refrain from hitting you with it.

Although the injury to your body may be the same in cases 1-3, our attitudes towards these things are completely different. In the case of #1, the pan indeed had no choice but to fall on your head; it cannot be blamed in the least. In the case of #2, a human being did it, but they had a good justification for it. In the case of #3, we say your spouse is at fault and blame them. In the case of #4, we recognize that your spouse resisted the temptation to hit you, and honor them for their restraint (or at least say they were doing what they should have).

And if that was you whose eyes flitted over to the pan, you are aware of a struggle, and of making a choice to lash out or show restraint.

But if the universe is a combination of determinism and randomness, then what's the actual difference between #1 and #3? All of them are physical processes which, given the circumstances, really couldn't have been any different.

In other words, free will is not some arcane theological concept: a description both of our daily experience of making moral choices ourselves, and our expectations and attitudes towards others.

finghin5• 5 years ago

I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger).

Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology.

Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).

joefourier4• 5 years ago

I can define a decision: the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options. The process can be conscious, unconscious or a computer programme.

Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one.

If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.

PixyMisa3• 5 years ago

Nebulous means "hard to define" or "lacking a clear definition".

feanaro4• 5 years ago

Your post exemplifies why it is hard to define and discuss. You implicitly take on one particular definition of free will (though you leave it unstated) and then discuss it as if it is the only obvious thing one could consider when they say the words "free will". While this is a perfectly useful notion that you are targeting, it simply omits some other important aspects which people care to discuss.

A more nuanced discussion with strangers which actually asks them questions about e.g. physical determinism will reveal that such strangers often do, in fact, hold some rather suspicious and unlikely beliefs about the role physical determinism plays in their lives.

mannykannot2• 5 years ago

I agree with you on this issue, and I suspect education is at least partly responsible for the 'definitions first' approach.

When teaching a topic in math, it is usual to start with definitions, and this is often also the case with science, but that is not how progress is made: more typically, the definitions follow from learning more about what starts as a vague or speculative concept, or was not even imagined before the studying was done (entropy, for example).

Philosophy is not immune to the problem; it is not that uncommon for me to find an author basing an argument on an ontology or a metaphysical claim that I suspect could be, at some future time, empirically refuted, or where some thing is "in a sense" like something else, without establishing that the sense in which they are similar is relevant (for example, there is a sense in which learning how to ride a bicycle is like learning how to perform addition, but it would take more than this sense to conclude that riding a bicycle is, to any useful degree, just a matter of learning a set of propositions.)

As you say, definitions can be used to avoid an issue, and while I agree with Dennett on many things, I feel that he and his fellow compatibilists are doing this with free will, which I consider to be the true 'hard problem' of consciousness.

andagainagain3• 5 years ago

I'll take "will" to be a given. There is something that is capable of thinking, and the thoughts it has are will. A decision, then, is when that entity has a thought that has intention.

I think it becomes nebulous by adding "free" to the equation, because it's not defined in relation to something specifically. Free from what? How would you differentiate it from a decision that's not "free" in this sense?

Free from thoughts? Free from gods? Free from memory? Free from circumstances? To differentiate it from "non-free will", we have to define what we actually care about, and then use it only with that scope.

username90• 5 years ago

If someone else can predict what decisions you will make with 100% accuracy can it still be free will? Some argue it can't, they like to believe that their mind is a unique snowflake that can never be reproduced, anything else means they don't have free will.

taneq6• 5 years ago

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will?

No, never! We must just argue endlessly whether we do or don't have it.

coldtea9• 5 years ago

Well, if we don't have it, then it's not up to us to chose between providing a definition or merely arguing about having it or not...

voxl2• 5 years ago

Given any decision, you have t amount of time to consider how to decide it. Suppose everything the same, if you were given `t + k` time but with no other external input, could you choose something different?

If you could, you have free will (internal inputs _only_ can augment your decision).

Trasmatta2• 5 years ago

There's no such thing as just internal inputs though, because those inputs are there because of external factors from the past. They're permanently entangled. If the universe is deterministic, the results of that experiment were always going to happen.

joefourier4• 5 years ago

By that definition, chess engines would have free will, as they would be able to search a through larger amount of possible moves given the extra time and thus find another move.

The problem with that definition is that time itself is an external input of sorts. Therefore, everything is not the same since you have +k time. Your definition would also apply to many trivial decision processes, e.g. a computer programme that randomly switches between each possibility and picks the one it ends on when the allotted time has elapsed. I doubt that programme would be considered to have any will at all, let alone free will.

mcswell5• 5 years ago

"...the existence of some external force that can affect the brain and make decisions with some magical non-causal mechanism, which is to me a rather illogical concept."

I can see why you wouldn't believe this, but why do you think it is illogical? Consider the contrast between a tape recorder + tape, vs. a radio. In the one, the sounds that come out of the speaker are purely internally produced (considering the tape to be part of the recorder). In the other, the sounds coming out originate from a radio station somewhere else, perhaps thousands of miles away, and to which the radio receiver is tuned. Why couldn't a brain be like this: it is a receiver for signals sent from a mind somewhere else, and specifically tuned to that mind.

Perhaps someone will say Occam's Razor. Ok, but if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter. But that of course is wrong, which shows that Occam does not necessarily lead to the correct answer.

At any rate, I don't mean to get into a discussion of whether the brain + mind work like this, I just want to suggest that it's not at all illogical.

pdonis3• 5 years ago

if you apply OR to the brain and the mind, then you ought to be able to apply it to the radio receiver and transmitter

Only if you fail to take the obvious step of looking for the external influence--and finding it in the case of the radio receiver, but not in the case of the brain.

Occam's Razor doesn't say the simplest explanation always wins. It only says the simplest explanation that covers all the facts wins. That means you can't apply it until you have all the facts.

pdonis3• 5 years ago

The legalistic definition pretty much is the definition used by philosophers who are physicalists (such as Dennett). Basically, the question is not whether physical processes determine what you do; of course they do. The question is, which physical processes? The ones that are going on in your brain, that we label with words like "perception", "cognition", "decision", etc? Or other processes, like the process of someone holding a gun to your head?

The only real difference I can see between the legalistic definition and the philosopher's definition is that the legalistic definition of "coercion" is broader. For example, I mentioned someone holding a gun to your head just now. Legally this would be coercion and wouldn't count as a free decision on your part. But to a physicalist philosopher, this might still count as a case of free will on your part--just free will based on a highly constrained set of acceptable choices given the circumstances. But that's a fine distinction that doesn't change the basic point.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Can someone actually provide a definition of free will?

Can someone provide a definition of a "individual"? Aren't we all just a big soup of atoms, where the boundary between two individuals is made arbitrarily based on convenience? Perhaps we should solve this problem first before we start talking about free will. Because when viewed like this, a bunch of atoms could have more than one free will.

byecomputer• 5 years ago

Yeah, but we're a bunch of unionized atoms. They all vote on what I should do and then I execute their will by going in the kitchen and making spaghetti or whatever.

WhompingWindows3• 5 years ago

I'll provide some definitions, from Oxford:

individual: "single; separate"; "of or for a particular person"; "a single human being as distinct from a group, class, or family"

free will: "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion"

From these definitions, we must question whether a single human, Homo Sapiens, can possibly act at their own discretion, without fate or necessity as the cause.

The history of studying free-will is extremely lengthy, everything non-biological that can be said has likely been said. We've been blessed by modern science to have a lot more understanding of organisms and neurology, so we know the "inner workings" better than Descartes or Locke or any of the old Christian theorists.

karaterobot• 5 years ago

The thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact moment they were created. That's what seems unbelievable to me. Maybe I don't get what determinism is?

simiones2• 5 years ago

Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0].

An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past".

At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you?

Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon?

Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will.

[0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.

Viliam12342• 5 years ago

Determinism together with quantum "many worlds hypothesis" implies that the world is in a superposition of vast amounts of states. Some of them contain the Lego movie (different versions of), most of them don't. The initial conditions of the universe lead to this superposition.

So even if it was inevitable from the beginning of the universe that the Lego movie will exist in some states, you (your version in this state of universe) can still be surprised to see that the Lego movie exists here.

andagainagain3• 5 years ago

it's not just illogical, it's an infinite regress. It's purposely adding in an extra layer that by definition can't be discounted. So if you disprove one layer of free will, you still have an infinite number of possible ways you still have (or don't have) free will at yet deeper levels.

mcguire9• 5 years ago

This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand. An observer using fMRI or somesuch notes that they observe neural activity before you report making the decision, and they can even predict where and how you are going to move from observations of neural behavior.

If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? Of course neural activity precedes you being conscious of making a decision and taking an action---that is the mechanism by which you make a decision and take the action. What does it have to do with free will? Not very much, if anything. It only becomes a problem if you are a dualist and believe any conscious, free-will-iferous activity must come from an a-material, imperceptible "soul".

RcouF1uZ4gsC4• 5 years ago

I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs software.

If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is software.

A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. Of course, if all you have access to is brain electrical measurements, you see no distinction. However, if you look inside yourself with introspection, you will see a richness of ideas, thoughts, motivations that actually drive the physical brain.

esperent• 5 years ago

A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes.

I don't think so (although there are multiple definitions of "dualist").

In the software/hardware analogy, the software still exists, physically. It's described directly in electrical impulses going though the hardware. For dualists, the soul is strictly non-physical.

pjc50• 5 years ago

The question of interest is are these two separate things (dualism), or the same thing seen at different scales? The Earth is beautiful when seen from space: you can see entire oceans. That doesn't mean that the ocean isn't made out of water molecules or that we must impute some special non-physical "oceanness" to it.

pessimizer4• 5 years ago

Introspection is an untrustworthy self-narrative. Repeating a bunch of language that you've been told describes why people behave as they do is indistinguishable from the introspection you describe. GPT-3 could definitely do it convincingly.

edit: I'd recommend Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions about introspection and consciousness http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

GoblinSlayer8• 5 years ago

Hardware + software is a physicalist view. Dualist view is material hardware + astral hardware, ironically they don't quite believe in software.

Bluestein2• 5 years ago

"free-will-iferous". (New fav word :)

dvt2• 5 years ago

how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

It's not, though. Dualism has been a dying breed for at least a century now. Academics like Chalmers are rare outliers.

finghin5• 5 years ago

The commenter's point isn't that philosophers generally endorse dualism, it's that even those who claim to be monist materialists, etc. tend to possess latently dualist assumptions or conceptions of what consciousness is. Chalmers in particular pokes at this issues and challenges physicalists to either totally reimagine their understanding of the mind (cf. Dennett among others), which is mired in semantic and other difficulties, or perish.

Moreover, dualism is certainly no longer dying (or dead)—this is confirmed both by reading the literature and surveying departments. It's certainly not as unusual as it once was.

AgentME2• 5 years ago

I think a lot of people get mixed up by the idea that "physics determines your actions", as if that's contradictory to "you determine your actions". I love the way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p... puts it, that "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

ajnin• 5 years ago

I think there is a bit of circular reasoning here. If by "physics" we mean the way the universe works, then of course we are "within physics", and we determine our actions in exactly the same way as the rock falls to the ground : because this is the laws of physics that those things happen. The actual distinction is what people attribute to the term "physics" itself. For some it is exhaustive and it encompasses everything that exists, but for others it is not and they allow "something else" to intervene. At which point we're well within the realm of theological arguments.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

"you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

But, it doesn't. The reason dualism and free-will are so deeply tied up is because “you are within physics” does not provide a means by which “you” can be the root cause of anything; if you are merely within physics, then you are simply a product of material causes and can only be (to the extent physics is deterministic) a fully-externally-determined phenomenon between the original cause and other fully-determined phenomena.

GoblinSlayer8• 5 years ago

It's based on another meme that the laws of physics are a restriction of behavior rather than construction of behavior. And that's why they are thought to conflict with unrestricted behavior.

deeeeplearning7• 5 years ago

If you believe you determine your actions in a literal sense you are saying you believe in magic because there is no mechanism that could make this possible in a deterministic universe.

taneq6• 5 years ago

Exactly! All of the "YOU don't actually choose to move your hand, it's THIS PART OF YOUR BRAIN" stuff makes no sense. What do you think 'you' are if not your brain plus your body?

smeej7• 5 years ago

Or for that matter, what existence do you imagine "you" have apart from your body?

Even the distinction between brain and body is artificial. Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. The whole unity is "you."

feanaro4• 5 years ago

The "you" is not simply your body. It is also the entirety of that body's physical interactions with the rest of the universe.

WhompingWindows3• 5 years ago

There is no "you" or "self", that's the illusion. The "self" which exercises "free will", that's just another psychologically constructed phenomenon, just like thoughts and ideas and images. If "you" choose to move your hand, it's really just the environment, your senses, and your brain dictating that movement, your sense of self is there as a feeling. Meditation reveals that this is not necessary, this sense of self can be dispelled if you simply investigate it with focused attention.

The above example is not a good one, it's a bit of a straw man actually. The better one is this: pick a film and think of it in your mind...which did you select? Monsters Inc? Animal House? There is no "you" selecting these films, its just your memory module skimming through films you've heard of and seen, then some "preference" circuit is acting to decide which film to "pick" for this exercise.

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

But who is making the decision, is it "you", or is it the fabric of the Universe itself, the quarks, which is making the "decision" for you?

mcguire9• 5 years ago

Yes, in a sense. :-)

I'm making the decision, because it is difficult to assign the decision to any small group of things at a lower level. The quarks are part of that process, but are just doing quark things.

red75prime5• 5 years ago

If you are a materialist, how is this surprising?

It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?

mcguire9• 5 years ago

If you boil water, you see an amount of water changing state from a liquid to a gas, not individual molecules simply gaining momentum.

Balgair• 5 years ago

Aside: fMRI is under quite the firestorm lately for use as a tool of mental processing. It's a great tool for head trauma or other medical diagnostics. But for interpreting the brain's activity, it's not what it's been billed as. The now classic issue is the 'Dead Salmon' experiments in 2009 out of Dartmouth. That paper was a lightening rod and the arguments are yet to die down; the field is in flux (pardon the pun).

https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-th...

mcguire9• 5 years ago

Yes, I was hesitant about that, but I was operating under the assumptions of the described experiments. :-)

laszlokorte2• 5 years ago

I guess free will just means that making a decision is a chaotic process that can broadly be influenced from the outside but in the end can not be preditected up to the moment the result is observed. This then in turn is observed as in that the decision was not completely determined by an outside signal so it is concluded that it must have been free.

rslonik• 5 years ago

How one can prove a choice? Once you acted on this or that you simply cannot go back in time and choose something else.

If you cannot change what you choose, there was never a choice. There was only one path (previously defined OR randomly defined), the one that you “chose”.

“I’ve could chose different” is only fiction at this point.

Choice would be so hard to describe. All animals have can choose? (what brain function makes choice available for a being?) Are we “special” animals? (even worse)

Free will is an ilusion and I think believing otherwise is like believing in god. An attempt to justify our lives.

But yes, the experiment in question seems totally flawed.

wruza4• 5 years ago

If you try the experiment yourself—and you can do it right now, just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist—you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision.

One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:

it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision

That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.

Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.

sasavilic• 5 years ago

Here is nice video from Dr Jordan Peterson about free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpqoQ-zGxBM

cardiffspaceman• 5 years ago

The word "freedom" doesn't appear in this discussion, so I'll ask: what does "freedom" mean if you don't have "free will"?

At random (not really, it was near the box as I typed):

mcquire>You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand.

Was that person free to move or not move their hand?

I decide to emigrate to New Zealand because they seem to run their country sanely. But is that a free choice or did I undertake this without a real choice to do otherwise?

dstroot• 5 years ago

1. There is a processing delay whereby sensed data reaches the brain and the brain interprets it and creates “reality”. Thus your brain projects the future and is actually telling you what reality might be x msec in the future. This may relate to an experiment like this. 2. There is a view that way back when we very early in development (think early life) that if you ate things around you and they moved perhaps you would be more successful if you interpolate your position and their position/trajectory and thus could move towards them to consume them. Scale that idea up and perhaps it’s what led to a consciousness and a sense of “I”. If “I” move towards “you” I can eat you. This line of thought actually links consciousness and free will.

feanaro4• 5 years ago

They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clear conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.

The only thing this shows, IMO, is the mental gymnastics human are willing to go through in order to keep a feel-good notion that it is, in fact, some you that makes the decision. Since you are the entirety of your physical being, which extends via physical interactions into the rest of the universe (and thus has a very fuzzy border), of course there is some fuzzy, handwavey definition of "you" which could be said to have "made" the decision.

That doesn't bring us any closer to having the kind of agency people have traditionally ascribed to the term "free will".

montenegrohugo• 5 years ago

To me it seems like we should separate the notion of being conscious with the notion of having free will. Everyone is conscious and knows this; it is trivially easy to prove (at least for one self. I don't know if all you guys reading this are [1]).

However, how do we know if we have free will? Assuming we can even land on a common definition of free will, how do we prove it? I think the "intuitive" notion people seem to have of free will is that they themselves have agency on their own actions. Important here is the distinction most people seem to draw between themselves as decision-makers and themselves as action-takers. They do not see this as the same. Action-taking happens in meatspace, but decision-making is thought to be more nebulous and ethereal. If the suggestion is made that decision-making might be solely a result of a multitude of factors in meatspace (genetics, upbringing, mood, etc...), then that suggestion is emphatically rejected by many (if not most).

However, decision-making cannot be free from meatspace, because then it cannot be anything more than based on chance. I wrote about this in length a while ago here [2], but the basic concept is that if there is no causation, then the alternative can only be randomness. Which is deeply unsatisfying to everyone. Einstein's dice quote comes to mind (even if it was on a completely different topic).

Libet's flawed experiment is not really relevant to the conversation. Whether free will exists or not, it is more an experiment on the nature of consciousness than free will, and thus cannot really offer any meaningful answers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

[2] https://www.hugomontenegro.com/blog/the-absurdity-of-free-wi...

fungiblecog• 5 years ago

I’m not sure why free will is considered such a mystery. In a completely deterministic universe my actions are determined unambiguously by a) the current state of my brain and b) the inputs I receive from my senses. Asking if I could do something other that what I actually chose to do makes no sense.

On the other hand, if I later find myself in a near identical situation I may choose a different action as a result of my brain now having a different state (that’s what learning is)

The opposite of determinism isn’t “free will” it’s random behaviour and who wants their decisions to be random?

amelius2• 5 years ago

Well, in a view similar to the many-worlds interpretation, your decisions may be random, but your observation of those decisions follows the path of your choosing.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

There are two issues not mentioned which I think are most important.

First, accuracy was bad. 60% or less. Barely better than a flipped coin, quite possibly just a null result or simply bad statistics (cherry picking data, retrospective search for a positive result).

Second, there is what you say you are testing with a study and the test you actually do. You have three things, the subject deciding to move, the subject having a brain activity pattern, and the subject interpreting the time on a clock.

For the same data collected you could write a different paper on the accuracy of a person’s visual preception of time when compared to their making a conscious choice to move. No connection at all with the free will business, just how well a person can report two separate mental phenomena in time.

kranner4• 5 years ago

As McGilchrist puts it, Libet’s apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me.'" Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)?

I think I associate the idea of "free will" with conscious thought and conscious decision-making. But it really feels as if most of my decisions come out of the unconscious part of my mind, in which case they might as well have come from an external source. All the conscious part of my mind seems to do is to make up ad hoc justifications. Sure, my unconscious mind is still 'me'; so the decisions are somehow 'mine'; but what difference does it make? It doesn't seem very free in the end.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Right, it disproves the very precisely defined concept of "will" (/s , sorry, my brain forced me to say it)

ineedasername• 5 years ago

The author is a theist who wrote a book called Spiritual Science. He might be coming by his opinions here with significant bias that takes a non-materialist viewpoint for granted at some fundamental level.

I agree that Libet's experiment is far from sufficient to conclude the lack of free will. However, a valid criticism of Libet is itself far from sufficient to prove that we do have free will.

deeeeplearning7• 5 years ago

The type of free will that people subjectively think they have is so called "Libertarian Free Will" and it's basically universally understood by the majority of philosophers that this does not exist.

andagainagain3• 5 years ago

"Free Will" is a nebulous concept, so of course nothing can disprove it.

The question I always ask with this is "free from what?". Not freedom to do something... that's not how freedom works. freedom is generally defined from the lack of control. So freedom from what?

From someone else controlling your will? Sure, we have that mostly - though we can definitely screw with people's minds. I can't make you think something. But I can, say, get you drunk and change your decision making ability. Teh yes/no question is trivial as soon as the definition is specific enough.

From literally any connection to your memory? Of course we don't have that because we know we use memories to make decisions. Again, the question becomes trivial.

Why is this still treated as hard? I'm sure it's because people are attaching vague definitions based on emotional wants. I want to be free! of what? just free!

amazingman• 5 years ago

Free Will is a positive claim, so the proof requirement runs the other way.

The Libet experiment doesn't disprove free will (2019)

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