Do we have free will or is everything predestined?

it is just perspective and spin

the jews ask...who are you now?
others say...the more things change...............same

my perspective is a core identity accompanied by superficial and mostly transitory changes. the accumulation of brains stuff and memories are simply data to be manipulated as one wishes

i am a father/brother/son/lover/husband/whatnot
all the world is a stage..................

bogus bullshit as far as i am concerned
philosophical ontologies require a little bit more depth imo

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I know I tend to be too long winded, especially for a forum like this, but I want more to be accurate and complete, so with complex subjects posted for many who need a tutorial, I do go to excess for those who know the field. I thank you for taking a second look - most never read it all. I will be happy to back up ideas there or explain what is not clear - just ask.

I am slowly winning converts to my POV.
The accepted: -Perception "Emerges" following many neuronial computational transforms of the sensory input - is not only excessively vague, not supported by the segregation of "characteristics" into different regions of the brain with no known rejoining of them inthe same tissue, but demostrably nonsense as I show three times in the papaer of the link. (Much of know neuroanatomy, such as fact that more nerves come to V1 from the parietal lobes than from the eyes (via the LGN) is a great mystery for accepted cognitive science POV but REQUIRED for my version of perception to work.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

billyt

i believe i can retrieve citations. lemme know which. linkage results in demands for subscriptions so...........

Commentary on "Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry"
Benjamin Libet
Is Free Will Incompatible with Neuroscience?

Sean Spence sets forth some interesting approaches to the issue of free will. His concepts are provocative and his marshalling of related quotations is informative.

However, I shall argue with some of his crucial assumptions, in a way that affects the validity of some of Spence's major conclusions. The latter are that "conscious experience is always temporally postneural activity and thus . . . 'caused' not causal. Our 'control' is a sense which may be lost. . . . Our sense of agency is apparently illusory."

I have, of course, no quarrel with the view that even a fully voluntary act is initiated unconsciously (non-consciously). That condition was in fact demonstrated experimentally by us (Libet et al. 1983) when we found that cerebral neural activity ("readiness potential") precedes the subject's awareness of his/her intention or wish to act by at least 350 msec. This applied to fully self-initiated acts that occurred without "pre-planning" by the subject of when to move. (Incidentally, those finding have been replicated by others--see Keller and Heckhansen, 1990 with commentary thereon by Libet 1992, and Wong et al. 1988).

However, we also found that conscious intention did precede that actual motor act by about 200 msec. That left open the potentiality for the conscious function to control the outcome of the process that was initiated in the brain unconsciously (see Libet 1985). We have all had the experience of consciously suppressing or vetoing the performance of an urge or intention to act. The 200 msec interval provides sufficient time in which the voluntary process could be stopped, before final activation of the motor area about 50 msec before the act. We were able to show that subjects could veto an act in the 100-200 msec interval before the expected time for the action.

Spence dismisses this free will potentiality in the control or veto of a voluntary process. He says: "It is flawed because the 'decision' (in consciousness) to act or not to act is itself the 'result' of preceding neural activity." This argument is based on my own evidence that a period of up to 500 msec of cerebral activity is required to produce a conscious sensory experience (Libet 1993, for review).

But conscious control of a process is not the same as becoming aware of the volitional intent (Libet 1985, 563-564). Control implies the imposing of a change, in this case after the appearance of the awareness of intention to act. Conscious control may not necessarily require the same neural "time-on" feature that precedes the appearance of awareness per se. There is presently [End Page 95] no directly applicable evidence against the appearance of a conscious control function without prior neural processes specific to its initiation.

In short, one cannot cavalierly dismiss the possibility of a conscious free will function on the basis of a belief that such a control function must be itself initiated unconsciously by prior specific neural processes. The argument that conscious free will control is simply a useful delusion must still be regarded as a philosophical belief, not a scientifically demonstrated proposition.

Spence goes on to suggest that "Consciousness is necessary for purposeful (intentional) action but it is not the initiator." But if Spence is consistent in his view that all conscious functions are preceded by specific neural activities that initiate the function, then his putative role for consciousness would have been itself initiated unconsciously. How, then, would consciousness be "performing (purposeful, intentional) actions with subtlety and invention" if it is simply an after-effect of the responsible cerebral process? It would appear that Spence is postulating an active role for consciousness in directing the course of neural activities carrying out purposeful, intentional actions. That is the kind of potentiality I was suggesting must be kept open, but one that Spence dismissed elsewhere as "flawed."

On a technical point: The Grey Walter experiment is cited as evidence for postulated effects of timing, in the "illusion" of self-initiation of an act. However, that experimental result was simply due to the fact that the motor cortex initiates the command to the motoneurones to act, about 50msec before a subject's voluntary motor act appears. The patient could not stop the premature action on the slide carousel because one cannot stop the process when it has already initiated the motor cortex command. I would feel sure that Grey Walter's patients, while startled by the premature action, would recognise that they were not responsible for that result. It is well-known that if the motor cortex is electrically stimulated to produce a movement, the patients report that this was something done to them and was not a voluntary act.

Finally, I would emphasize my point that one may not hold an absolute view that the conscious function can have no causative role simply because it appears not to initiate a willed action.

Benjamin Libet, Professor Emeritus, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143-0444.

References

Keller, L. and H. Heckhausen. 1990. Readiness potentials preceding spontaneous motor acts, voluntary vs. involuntary control. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 76: 351-361.

Libet, B. 1985. Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioural and Brain Science 8: 529-566.

Libet, B. 1992. Voluntary acts and readiness potentials. Electroencephalograph and Clinical Neurophysiology 82: 85-86.

Libet, B. 1993. The neural time factor in conscious and unconscious events. In Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness. Ciba Foundation Symposium 174. Chichester: Wiley, 123-146.

Libet, B. et al. 1983. Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activities (readiness-potential); the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106: 623-642.

Wong P. S, H. Sheverin, W. J. Williams, and R. F. Marshall. 1988. The psychophysiology of voluntary movement. Awareness of the intention to act and the obessional personality. Paper presented at the 25th annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, San Francisco.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

This absolutely has to become a new word!

 

the threat of losing tenure/whatnot can force reasonable men to adopt illegitimate positions. the ensuing controversy is always good and keeps bogus conclusions in the forefront and under discussion. that appears to be spence's mo. provocation. libet in contrast pleasantly surprises. i had bashed earlier... i now find him nuanced and tentative in pronouncements.

there are a bunch of links at science direct critiquing libet's methodologies. if full texts are unavailable, i shall retrieve requested ones

 

Gald you are active in this area. I have not been for more than a dozen years. I have Ph.D. in physics, but lost interest in physics about 25 years ago, about the same time I became interested in cognitive science, how the mind works, and especially as it is a central, but a feasible piece of the puzzle, how visual experience is achieved.

I hope you will get a copy of my APL/Techincal Digest paper (ref 1) of the GFW posted of link here. In it I do several things of (IMHO) considerable significance by explaining how visual experience is achieved. For example, AT THE NEURONAL LEVEL, I explain how the continuous 2D retina image is parsed into objects. - None of the typical high level garbage of Gastalt or more modern psychology. I use the known interactions between adjacent nerves in V1 (I.e. like oriented, adjacent line detector of Huble and Weisel tend to reinforce each others activity and supress activity in the near-by orthoginal line detectors. This leads to the formation of loops with in-phase activity along the main contrast boundaries in the 30 to 5O hz range, which convenently for me was just being reported in the literature when I speculated in print on this parsing mechanism. I then go on to discuss, still at the neuraonal level, how the Gastalt "good continuation" is achieved. etc.)

Sorry about some mis spellings - I am away from home dictionary etc and never am much concerned with that anyway. I forget who said it, but someone observed that if could not spell same word at in five diffenent ways you are not very creative and I am slightly dyslexic.)

Summary: I had/have no professional interest in the cognitive science field and after coming to believe in the validity of my real time simualtion POV of perception bascally lost interest in that field too. My interest are now more centered on economics and managing my 50 or so stocks. But will comment on some of your post:

15 -20 years ago this was called the "epiphenomial consciousness", probably still is.

I cited Libet (but did not remeber his first name) in a post I made within last 10 days. I read many of his papers in the late 1980s and they helped me come to my POV. I also worked for free in a primate lab where Doctor leading it was mainly interested in understanding recovery from automobile accidents. We excised in various temporal orders tiny sections of the motor cortex and/or the associated pre-motor cortex just anterior to it.

Yes, true and closely related is an unconscious process, called "inhibition of return." (E.g. if on a computer screen display of many "x" and one "o" the single "o" will "pop out" at you - be essentially instantously noticed even if there are many "x" (not so for a T among many L or conversely, as in this case the automatic processing in V1 and V2 gives similar information to later stages - both T & L have one horizontal and one vertical line segment and both have four "terminators" and neither has any curves. In contrast, x and o differ greatly in the V1 and V2 analysis for these and other "characteristics" so "pop-out" is automatic in the parallel processing of eary stages of vision.

However, if in the initial frame with the "one o" and many x display there is actually only many x (no o) and you are electronically monitoring where the subject fixates and when he looks elsewhere after that first fixation you then place the o at the location of the first fixation, the o will not "pop out." - I.e. it will not be noticed easily if it is always displayed at the location of the last fixation. Humans and most primates have evolved an unconscious efficiency in searches called the "inhibition of return." This can be demonstrated in several search areas, not just visual search, but it seems to be "unconscious learning" as a young child will repeated return to look for the hidden toy where it was last seen.

I tend to agree withmost of remainedr of your post, including even he following:

Certainly, the fact that we do consciously inhibit some actions we feel "impelled to do" lends support to this POV, but it may be that at earlier level that cancelation was also just the result of natural, physical law processes that came to a differ action decision, later than the processes vavoring some action. In any case, althogh Libet's results do provide a convenient, if inconclusive, argument against GFW, they are not the basis of my doubts about GFW being more than a universal illusion. My doubts are more simple. - the brain rules my body's every action. The brain is a physical object, subject to the laws of chemistry and physics (but not necessarly man's current knowledge of them). Ergo - every action of my body, every thought in my head, etc is a result of these natural laws. That was my POV for many years, until my belief in the "real-time-simulation" with "me" a non material subroutine in it, not a physical body, opened at least a possible escape for this "free will is an illusion, an epiphenom, like consciousness" "scientific" POV.

Nice to see someone here who knows something about all this.

PS I will be trying to visit daughters/ grand children in US between 1/1/08 and 1/13/08. One daughter worked for Delta, in very high position, and accepted their "early out option" which included deep discounts for me for five years that are up at midnight on 1/15/08, so I am trying to take advantage of the ~ $300 RT cost from Brazil one last time. I may not get out as I am "standby" and all planes are heavbily overbook with full fare passengers, but if I do and you PM me with an address, I will send couple of copies of the original paper on visual perception to you once I am in USA.

 

......hence the text
the quotes should be attributed to libet
remedy please

my field was clinical not cognitive
it is with difficulty i comprehend and interest is not that great
i am sorry if i mislead. it was not intentional
i cannot get any clearer tho. it was obvious
you aint a noob

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v003/3.2libet.html

 

my primary m.o against the cognitive scientists is by examining any conceptual errors as to what constitutes consciousness. it is from a philosophical pov i approach this problem........the existence and location of a physical correlate of consciousness

your standard pov was exemplified by cricks attempt to locate the neural correlate of consciousness. he muddled thru by postulating some 40hz oscillations at the neuronal level that gave rise to an awareness of self. it remains just that, a postulation.

 

i am fucked
i have to be nice to billyt for the rest of my pathetic life

 

Without the possibility of free will, many human activities make no sense.
For example If you advised a child not to begin smoking, the child could quite sensibly reply that it was not in their power to make such a decision. Either they would begin smoking, or they would not.


Perhaps we mainly go along in a groove of custom and habit, which is a combination of predestination and acceptance of our lot, but we somehow have the power to make a change in direction.

 

No. Your logic /thoughts are confusing free will (imaginary or real) with predestination. If predestination were true, and it certainly is not if current understanding of quantum mechanics is correct (or even approximately so) then the child's argument you present above would be valid.

Either form of free will (real or just an illusion) has responses to the environment as part of the factors that control the actions. Your instruction to child not to smoke is part of his environment.

The mere admonishment "Don't smoke." may not be the controlling aspect of the child's environment, if for example all his friends are smoking and "smoking" is thought by them to be an indicator that one is no longer just a child; however, if with the admonishment comes also: "if I even find a shred of tobacco in your room or clothes, I will beat you black and blue before chaining you to your bed." that may overcome the peer pressure to smoke.

Many make this same confusion and falsely argue that without free will (being real) there is no basis for laws or punishment. This is your smoking example made very general and still false. The laws and punishment are part of the environment and do influence the actions selected by either form of free will.

Again, no. Many complex activities of very simple creatures, like spiders and ants make a great deal of sense. Few would say they have genuine free will. In both cases much of their behavior is clearly a pattern in which one step in the procedure is the triggers or causes the next. For example, the "trap door" spider lays eggs in a hole and includes some grubs in the hole before closing it up. "Mud-doper" wasps do essentially the same thing. If you interrupt their activity they will not begin again with then next step but restart the whole process over. For example, ignore the perfectly good hole they spent hours digging and dig a new one, etc. This is strong evidence that they are simple automatons.

In fact, everyone I meet may be not only be without free will, but even lack any "self" or consciousness. All posting here (except me) may not even have flesh and blood! All human like activity (except mine) man be exhibited by zombies. ("Zombies" in the sense that is obvious and used in philosphical discussion, especially of the "other minds" problem, not as "up from graves" etc.)

 

Although not nice to speak ill of the dead, I have a much lower opinion of Crick than most do. I agree with you that he was on a fools chase to look for the Neural correlates of consciousness. IMHO the last decade of computational cognitive science is a mistake. (Patricia Churchman, Churchland or something like that and to some extent her husband, Paul, I think it is, have lead the field astray.)

Crick and Watson, both basically stole the helical structure of DNA from a lady (never can remember her name, But SAM has supplied it to me once before, so if she is reading, please do again) who died prior to the Nobel Prize selection date. She did all the hard work, crystalizing the the DNA, taking the X-ray diffraction / scattering pictures, which almost anyone (sure she also) working in the field would recoginze implied a helical structure. She was one to share (as all good scientist should be, but many are not) for the spread of knowledge. So she sent Crick a copy of the X-ray difraction photos and in less than day he and Watson had the details of the helical structure speculated out. They never adequately acknowledged their debt to her. She did all the real work and she had the unique skills to discover the basics structure of DNA.

I also think it highly unlikely that Crick's reason for why we dream (to consolidate menory) is correct, but it is gaining some support. (If you look hard enough for anything in the mental/brain field you can find support for it.)
I doubt this is the reason because, even very simple creatures with central nervous systems sleep and seem to have different forms of sleep, some with neural activity like REM sleep. I do not know why animals sleep, but as sleep is usually on a 24 hour cycle (not necessarily one period or at night) I am inclined to think it has been selected for as it promotes survival. Perhaps some set of simple thing like finding food is easier in day light (or at night if you have big eyes or like bats, good sonar) and/or conversely, not becoming some other creature's food by being still. etc.
With my POV, understanding of what we are the true function of human REM sleep may be to safely "think outside the box." Safely because with movement/ real actions prohibited (except for "sleep walkers") we are not likely to injure ourselves by actually flying out the window to the next building, etc. but can dream this. Dreams are freed from many of the normal constraints of the awake state - i.e. thinking outside the box is facilitated in dreams. I have many times been thinking about some problem as I fall asleep. Typically a problem that is hard and I am making no progress on. Not rarely when I awake the next day I find a new approach to the problem in the first few minutes that I begin to consider it again. Perhaps for humans, that too is why we dreams - i.e. dreams help to solve difficult problems. Again, let me stress, that I do not know why humans dream or sleep, but this is the sort of problem I like to think about while going to sleep.

PS I went back a few pages in this thread trying to find my earlier comments on Lipet's work to correct the spelling of his name and give link to your post with its many references, but neither found my earlier post nad also note that the "edit" function is no longer available.

 

I can see that it is possible to look at the world in such a way, and from a scientific standpoint it is hard to dispute, but if free will is an illusion, then many judgements we make based on its existence are also illusions.

For example, we speak about people being evil rather than an evil.
This assumes that human beings are directly responsible for their own actions
and could have acted differently had they decided to do so.

 

To Gustav:

Although I think looking for the "neural correlates of consciousness" is silly, I do think some knowledge of neuro-anatomy is very useful. If you examine any machine carefully in detail you can learn a lot about how it functions and some about how it can be used. (Why I have done some minor brain surgery on Rhesis monkeys and held a human brain in my hands in additon to much study of it.)

For example, I locate the real time simulation in the parietal section of the brain for many reasons associated with behavior after parietal injury and the fact that the P300 signal is strongest over the parietal cortex etc, but only neuro-anatomy also suggest that location.

The real time simulation must be constantly being checked to make sure is a good simulation of the external world. (P300 is produced when a significant disagreement has occurred due to some external event that can not be anticipated, projected ahead, to compensate for the neural synaptic delays.) As humans are very visual creatures (will ignore any other sense in conflict with the data stream for the eyes) there must be efficient and quick means to track what is happening in the visual cortex (and even earlier in the visual data stream, at the LGN.) Fact that there is a huge set of white fibers connecting parietal tissue to both the LGN and the visual cortex. This is thus required by my real-time-simulation, but the fact that these bundles of fibers even exists is a problem for the conventional "emergent perception" POV. Cognitive scientists are at a total loss (and many even ignorant of the neuro-anatomical facts) to explain why more fibers come to the "visual cortex" for parietal tissue than from the eyes (via the LGN).

Also, the location within the brain of the parietal tissue is also very suggestive for the real time simulation to be implemented in it. The real time simulation needs information for the main sensory cortex ASAP to remain correct. Thus the tactile sensory cortex is just anterior to the parietal tissue. The acoustic, is just lateral to it. The visual is just posterior to the parietal and at least some parts (Hippocampus) known to be critical to memory* are just below the parietal tissue. - A "perfect layout design" for getting the information needed by a parietal real-time simulation as quickly to it as possible with the least possible volume and delays in the "white tissue" (nerve axons).
-----------------
*No one really knows where memory is stored (or how).

 

/eek

such a privilege to talk to you. i will make the time to respond to everything.
the post is here..http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1675178&postcount=62
the edit expiration is bogus

 

Anybody done any research on where in the brain "cause and effect" are located ?

It's an interesting and very valuable illusion, but the source of it remains mysterious AFAIK.

 

chris
the point here is that we are constrained by physical systems be it the body or universe. actions will always be limited by those constraints. we cannot will ourselves to fly tho we most certainly imagine we can. our biologies present us with a range of behaviors or dispositions within which we are allowed choices. that is what constitutes a realistic definition of free will.
while we may have notions of the dualities of mind and body, the fact remains we are very much entangled or in some symbiotic fashion dependent on this biological system for every known expression or conceptualization of self.

i will not be so rash to imagine this to be a static condition. we are a work in progress, yet evolving and masters of our destiny. i do not see any contradiction here

lets eyeball a snippet of libet....

..That left open the potentiality for the conscious function to control the outcome of the process that was initiated in the brain unconsciously (see Libet 1985). We have all had the experience of consciously suppressing or vetoing the performance of an urge or intention to act. The 200 msec interval provides sufficient time in which the voluntary process could be stopped, before final activation of the motor area about 50 msec before the act. We were able to show that subjects could veto an act in the 100-200 msec interval before the expected time for the action. (libet)

it is a conceptual mystery to me how intentionality can be preceded by the corresponding neuronal activity. yet leaving that aside for the moment, you will notice libet indicate that we can veto the activity being initialized by a conscious decision. who or what makes this decision. what is the framework within which it is made? more neronal activity? i suspect then i am back to square one so perhaps more pondering is in order

/imo

 

Name of woman who discovered the basic structure of DNA.
Rosalind Franklin.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-3/p42.html


But none of them would have got anywhere without the techniques pioneered by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Crowfoot_Hodgkin

who did eventually win a Nobel prize.

 

Thanks, especially for the "Dorothy extra." At Cornell as an undergraduate in a special 5 year experimental "Engineering Physics" program I and a partner did two x-ray experiments. I was dominate in the one that doubly scattered x-rays off of carbon blocks and explored the polarization of them this can achieve. Partner led the X-ray crystallography scattering experiment. He got a wonderful "Laue diagram" which except for possible mis spelling is the name of the large film with symmetric pattern of dots (different intensity) that correspond to the various planes within the crystal form which "Bragg reflection" (sort like mirror reflections with many mirrors at different angles) occurs. I did none of the math work using the locations of these spots and the scattering angles they implied, and their relative intensities to infer the crystal lattice structure. It was a "bitch" of an effort and it was a relatively simple crystal.

Reason I tell this and thank you strongly for the link to Dorothy is that at Cornell, back then, her name was never mentioned! I did not know of her! What a talented Lady! And in that Era. She deserves to be as well known as Madam Curie. When you think about it, women have really advanced physic and biology often without getting the credit they deserve.

 

Unexpected that two women should be so prominent in a field where brilliance and an almost obsessive attention to detail over months and years are equally important. Today we see this as the forte of the clever but dysfunctional male. Maybe they found a niche here in an activity that many male scientists did not want to enter. Heres John Kendrew working on myoglobin.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Watson and Crick are certainly bums for not giving her the credit she deserved. They took years of her painstaking work, and had a "brainwave" the following day. I'll give them credit for two thirds of the work, and that's just me being generous

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Unfortunately the Nobel prize does not cater for posthumous awards. It should.

I think that my post , #123, raises an important point.
That whether free will exists or not, the framework within which we function assumes that it does.