Is Free Will An Illusion?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/is-free-will-an/

by dlnovell • 17 years ago

20 29 17 years ago

darkxanthos2• 17 years ago

I've always been on the fence on this issue due to two concerns I always saw as conflicting until recently: * Causality * Perception of free will

In my mind, it always made sense that I couldn't have free will with causality as then my brain is really just an insanely complex chaotic system that only appears to be random. Allowing for freewill in something like that would appear to warrant the idea of magic.

But then my friend remarked that instead of the universe being driven based on causation why not imagine it all being correlation based? Any scientific experiment really only proves correlation to a mathematical model. Unlike pure math you can't prove a hypothesis using anything nearly as rigorous as induction (since the infinite is out of our reach).

By not taking that extra step of saying science proves causation of certain phenomena and just leaving it at correlation I think ideas such as freewill and the odd uncertainty of quantum mechanics can mesh with our macro level view of the universe.

shrugs I thought it was interesting at least. :)

msluyter2• 17 years ago

What you say here reminds me a bit of Hume. Hume attacked cause and effect by noting that all we ultimately have access to are our perceptions, and that we can never perceive "cause." We may see the hammer flying through the air, then the window shattering, but we don't see any "cause" here. Just event A followed by event B. For Hume, our mind naturally correlates these events, and we call it cause and effect.

Kant then followed by saying that this account was incomplete and that cause and effect are more like a type of lens through which we organize our perceptions, without which, we couldn't make sense of the world.

*Vastly oversimplifying huge swaths of 18th century philosophy here, so don't take this very seriously.

darkxanthos2• 17 years ago

Sounds like some good places to start to learn more. Thanks!

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

If effect necessarily follows cause then yes.

If that is true, then "repeating" the universe would lead to exactly the same outcome. Hence we have no free will.

danielmims4• 17 years ago

Importantly, even if effect doesn't necessarily follow cause (also known as "indeterminism"), free will isn't possible. Hence free will is absolutely impossible, alongside any conditions whatsoever.

unignorant• 17 years ago

"I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will!"

That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly... and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).

presidentender• 17 years ago

That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly... and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).

Quantum mechanics accounts for unpredictability. It doesn't account for free will. Just because you can't predict something accurately doesn't mean it has a choice; think, for instance, of the weather.

lanaer• 17 years ago

Or, if sub-atomic particles can behave truly randomly, then perhaps they might have free will, deciding what to do for themselves, which we can only see as randomness (I do not think this is true, it’s just an interesting thought). Sadly, that does not grant us free will, only randomness.

Basically, we are completely mechanistic above the quantum level. At that level may exist some randomness, but if so, it’s just acting like a random number generator, where the generated numbers are then fed into the deterministic process that is ourselves.

jerf• 17 years ago

Is X An Illusion?

Is "the word Illusion" an Illusion? Does it convey a sense of mystery and secret knowledge where there is none?

When people actually claim something is an illusion, do they actually have a clear idea in their head about what they mean, or are they playing semantic games with flipping back and forth between mistaking the word map for the reality territory and not?

Yes to that second one.

All "X is an Illusion" means is "that definition for X you thought you had? It's not right." Which is a much less, well, stupid way to put it. Of course, it doesn't have the same ability to confer Special Knowledge that the Plebes don't have.

Free will isn't an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Time is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Our sense of self is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. And so on.

Stop it with this damn worthless "illusion" word. Maybe go study General Semantics instead, since all the word does is reify map/territory confusion and basically doom what could otherwise be an interesting debate from the very beginning, and General Semantics has some choice words on that topic.

fburnaby2• 17 years ago

I agree. I think the article has its vocabulary backwards. I like the philosophy that: "if we feel it, then it's real". It's just that "free will" nothing like we originally expected it to be (that is, it's non-magical). We can learn new things about the nature of free will by studying the brain, because that's where such things are created. To say that free will doesn't exist because of this finding isn't too different from saying that desks don't exist because they're really just collections of a bunch of molecules, arranged just so. There is no magical essence called "desk", it's made up of stuff, and we experience that arrangement of stuff accordingly.

See Dennett, (2003): "Freedom Evolves" for a more lucid account. He says the same as is said in the article, but instead re-defines "free will" to fit the reality of these conclusions - a more intellectually satisfying approach, even though it's just a smart readjustment of semantics.

danielmims4• 17 years ago

"If we feel it, then it's real."

The word "real" loses all meaning once we start saying that what we feel -- any old fantasy, delusion, speculation -- is real. We also indulge one of the central fantasies of human reflexive identity -- that we are supernatural -- when we say that what we feel is therefore, ipso facto, real.

As for Dennett, he is a serial question-begger and equivocator on this topic. He doesn't merely change the definition of "free will" in that book. He arbitrarily changes the definition to a trivial one; argues that that new kind of free will is possible; and then reinserts his conclusions into a debate in which the definition has not changed. Hence he has offered absolutely nothing to the issue that we're all talking about -- free will that would allow for culpability, or what I call non-trivial free will. I recommend Peter Van Inwagen and Galen Strawson instead, who offer much more rigorous good-faith arguments about free will.

msluyter2• 17 years ago

I think your redefinition of illusion is problematic:

"Hey, I see an oasis on the horizion... no, wait, it's not actually there. I guess my definition of 'oasis' was wrong."

Typically, when we use the word illusion, we tend to make a couple of basic metaphysical assumptions: 1. There's some reality external to my perception of it, 2. My perceptions can be wrong, and 3. The illusion I'm perceiving doesn't refer to anything externally.

When used in the case of free will, I think we mean something more along the lines of "generated by our own minds," which is not necessarily how people have historically viewed it. Yes, "something is there" as you say, but only in our mind, like dreams, hallucinations, or mirages are only in our minds. So I think "illusion" is a perfectly reasonable word for this self-generated phenomenon.

der_ketzer• 17 years ago

According to the dictionary "Illusion is something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality".

The question here is who produces the decision, for us the "reality" is that we (as persons) take a decision, according to the article the one producing the decision is the subconcious not us (of course we can argue if the subconcious are us or not, but I think that's more a metaphysical/psychological discussion).

So the brain deceives us to think that we are taking the decision which produce a false reality (or impression) and not the brain itself.

So for me the word is used properly. Altough I agree with you, illusion is often not properly used word.

joe_the_user2• 17 years ago

"Clearly I have enormous difficulty accepting that that my conscious experience of choice is false. The very possibility threatens my sense of self;"

Hmm, so let's assume the writer is a non-religious materialist. Logically, why would it be hard to accept the idea that one's brain is what is generating one's decisions? What the heck else would be doing it? Do you need an experiment, even, to take note of this? Does the time at which the brain generates the results even matter?

Given all this, I would say that "Free Will" is an illusion in the sense that the operation of human brain seems to often generate the sensation that some undifferentiated "self" or "I" is what's doing things and when a person is confronted with strong evidence that their brain must be what's ultimately generating their choices (as well as the sensation of "choice"), it's threatening to this "sense of self", a sense that isn't even logically consistent with our other understandings of the world.

joe_the_user2• 17 years ago

It's funny and intuitive for someone to say this but imagine someone saying "I have trouble accepting the fact that my stomach digests food. I thought I digested the food myself. This is threaten to my sense of self". This would be on the same logical level as the above statement, yet it seems ridiculous whereas the statement about "...conscious experience of choice..." seems perfectly reasonable.

roc• 17 years ago

All I'm seeing is that we tend to follow our instinctual reactions. Which isn't really surprising, considering how close we are to when our survival depended almost entirely on making a snap judgment and executing.

karzeem• 17 years ago

> Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.

> All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality…

This is ultimately an issue of definitions, but for me, those two quotes are the main takeaways. You have to decide whether there is such a thing as a self that exists apart from the couple pounds of organic material inside your skull. Science hasn't found hard evidence of such a thing.

If you give that credence (albeit while remembering that absence of evidence != evidence of absence), forget about whether you have free will — the bigger question becomes to what extent "you" exist in the first place. If you're comfortable reducing yourself to your brain (and science would probably suggest that you should be), then it's not a problem; you do have free will, as long as you're willing to define that as having a set of chemical reactions sitting inside your skull, doing their thing.

If you aren't comfortable reducing yourself to your brain, the search for free will and a self gets a lot more stressful.

yannis• 17 years ago

If there is no free will then our will is determined by our DNA. Since our DNA is subject to continuous change via random events, then do we have 'random will' and does that make it 'free will?'

fnid• 17 years ago

This is very in line with the discussion of Free Will in Waking Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U

They mention quantum mechanics and the randomness there may have some impact on free will.

Also, I think the double slit experiment is interesting. If we observe some things with our mind, then the outcome can change. We can ignore things as well. Introspection may enable free will.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?

Is water really wet, or is water really made of non-wet atoms of hydrogen and oxygen over which an illusory wetness is laid?

It's self-defeating to define free will in a way that inherently violates physics, but it's easy to define it in a way that doesn't, but still preserves what we mean intuitively by "free will": If it's possible to perfectly predict (absent actual errors in either mechanism) what a system will do without simulating it, the system doesn't have free will. If it's not possible without simulating the system (and the actions of the system aren't actually random), then it could be said to have free will.

This still leaves the possibility that it will turn out that humans don't have free will, of course, or only have it in certain conditions.

danielmims4• 17 years ago

Unpredictability (or randomness) does not preserve the possibility of free will. One must have control over the process. That's really the basis of why we care about free will in the first place -- control.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I'm not talking about randomness (in fact, I specifically excluded that). Anyway, it's not really meaningful to speak of a process having control over itself -- it is itself.

Free will either is defined in such a way that mind must transcend physics to have it, or it's defined in a way that is meaningful inside the laws of physics. I have nothing to say about the first definition, but given that most here would agree that minds are constrained by physics, any remaining question about free will must refer to whether we can predict the actions of an agent, and since it's obvious that we can if we have a sufficiently detailed simulation of the agent, the only definition in which "free will" is still a useful concept that meshes with our intuitive understanding of self-determination is the one I mention in my earlier comment.