Do we have free will? (originally posted on Science & Society)

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.

"Real-life decisions -- am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that -- aren't decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners," said Haynes.

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision. -http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision​

Just like Libet's results, the readiness potential does not indicate which choice is made and could just as likely be the brain gearing up for a decision or action.

 

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Michio Kaku has written about this in his books, and I have put some thought into this before. But, I don't think that quantum uncertainty really means that there is free will. I think it would only add a random aspect that could influence our decisions. So it still leaves the question of if these random influences only influence our decisions in one way from a random result. So it leaves the question of what exactly do we mean by free will?

Are we just the sum of our experiences, or can we choose to be something greater than that? For me it is hard to say that we are like robots that have one input and then produce one single output for everything that happens to us. (even though some trolls on the net tend to this type of behavior). It is hard to see how someone could think that there is no free will when consciousness itself gives the "illusion" of free will. Sometimes I wonder if these people do not feel this way or under this type of "illusion". But then what if we knew everything that caused certain types of behavior in ourselves that caused us to act in a certain way? If you figured out all of these things and then decided to then do something else other than what is the sum of these experience, then wouldn't you not exercise your own free will? Then again if you did this just because I mentioned it would you have free will in order to take action on going along with that or not?

I don't think that not hitting your hand with a hammer proves you have free will. You know that it would hurt and then not do it because you know of the outcome. Self inflected pain can be very hard to do for some people, and there are psychological barriers people have to try and get past when it would mean the difference in their own survival. I would think you wouldn't be able to prove that you have free will unless you decided to hit yourself with a hammer, and then break your own hand for no reason. You have the power to break your own hand to prove you have free will. But, this would go against your own experience, so you choose not to do it because you know the outcome will be unfortunate so then you really have no choice but to not do it, unless you are clinically insane.

 

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Where is the evidence that quantum mechanical processes definitely disallow free will? Stochastic processes are explicitly those which can have more than one possible outcome from the same influence. This means that only significant collections of results from the same cause are probabilistic, but says absolutely nothing about individual results. Nothing about randomness tells us anything about why or how a specific probabilistic result should happen at any specific iteration, and converging on the mean does not make the individual result deterministic.

 

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If the person could not articulate any reasons for their choice then it would be random, so having reasons does not preclude free will, nor do they necessitate the choice being externally determined.

 

Right, having reasons for actions would be exactly the thing that could show that there is not free will. You could say that everything someone did was because of certain reasons. Then there is really no way to know if someone would actually always do the same thing if the same event happened to them at the same time.

Say a particles decays, and then a scientist then has to run a report on the time of the decay. I have heard Michio Kaku claim that particle decay is completely random and that it could occur at different times, possibly even change events in the past if it decayed at a different time. So then if the particle decayed at a different time then the scientist would then perform different actions and change history. But then what if the particle somehow went back to decaying at exactly the same time as it did before? Wouldn't the scientist then react from it and write the exact same report as he did as when it decayed at that time? You would think that if there was truely free will then he could possibly write a different report if the same event happened at the same time, but I think if the decay happened at the same time then he would just write the exact same report.

 

Our DNA programs us, and so we are like a robot programmed with more code than we can comprehend. If the amount of coding were infinite, then maybe we could have a chance to really be free.

 

I didn't say QM disallows free will, I said references to QM to save free will is grasping at straws. We don't like the idea that we do not have free will, generally. By the way, a stochastic process does not allow for free will any more than a deterministic one does: if choices are truly random how can we proclaim to have any influence over them?

 

Reason is not equivalent to cause. And it is a red herring that the ability to do otherwise necessitates actually doing so under equivalent circumstances. Ability does not necessitate acting on said ability.

So now someone has to lie to demonstrate free will? Again, ability does not necessitate action. You have the ability to defecate, but for some odd reason you manage to refrain from crapping your pants most of the time.

Who said choice was random? If there is a stochastic process within the brain, it is at single synapses. It is absurd to assume that a single synapse is responsible for any choice, and I have yet to see any theory at all about how the coordination of stochastic processes is either determinant or random.

 

Defecating ones self can actually be a difficult thing to do unless you have irritable bowel syndrome. There are mental barriers that would actually prevent someone from doing this at will, and would be demonstratably difficult tool to use to prove that someone actually has free will. A lot of normal people would have difficulty doing this so I don't think it would be a valid experiment. I didn't say someone has to lie to demonstrate free will, the wording of the paper could just be slightly different or something, but it could mean the same thing or they could post the same results.

 

As usual, you completely miss the point in favor of uselessly dissecting a throwaway example. Is this an intentional evasion of "ability does not necessitate action"?

 

You could try giving one that you would actually be willing to hold onto. You say I am not scientific and do not follow logic when your examples are clearly illogical. (and recently more disgusting)

Ability does not necessitate action, we have the choice to not pertake in certain actions. But, that doesn't prove that we have free will, only that we choose to act on certian things and not others, that we have a choice.

 

If we have a choice then we have free will, so this argument is completely incoherent.

 

For the benefit of those of you that want to claim that we have *NO* free will, I'm going to copy/paste the post I made in the silly OPs other thread about the subject. And if you are going to *continue* your baseless claim, then provide an answer to the question I posed herein:

========================================================================================================

Originally Posted by Read-Only
This is a topic that's as old as humankind. And, unfortunately, it pops up here every few months or so. <heavy sigh>

It's been my experience that people who pose it fall into one of two groups (generally, speaking - there are possible exceptions but the two groups cover the vast majority):

1. Those who are naive far beyond belief;
2. Those who don't want to accept responsibility for their own actions. ("I couldn't help but do it, it was predestined/fate/what ever you want to call it.")

And I always pose the same question to both groups: "Do you actually believe it was determined millions of years ago that you would wear *that* exact, specific shirt today?"

 

But there is no way to know if that choice is free will, or if that choice was predetermined. There is no way to distinguish between making a choice and free will, you could just be set in making certain choices. Given the same circumstances you could always make the same choice, then that would mean that you do not actually have free will. But, there are too many variables involved in the human equation, the only way I could see testing this would be time travel. That is the only way you could have exactly the same conditions at two different instances in order to see if you get the same results. If people always reacted the same way from the same exact influence in time then you could determine that we don't actually have free will. People could make the same exact decisions everytime they are effected the exact same way through time. But then, that raises the question if someone could have free will even though they made the same choice in the same exact circumstance.

 

Still completely incoherent, as you seem to be refuting free will while saying "[t]here is no way to distinguish between making a choice and free will", which is exactly what I just said. Free will is defined as the ability to do otherwise, which can be summed under the single word "choice". Without free will, the word "choice" is without meaning. Again, ability to do otherwise does not necessitate doing otherwise in an equivalent situation. That would both be a lack of free will (an inability to do otherwise than otherwise) and an inconsistency of the agent exercising free will. Any real ability to do otherwise assumes a meaningful choice of the agent.

Seems you are trying to redefine choice to beg the question.

 

On the other hand, hard determinism is functionally identical to absolute divine predeterminism. How many determinists are comfortable with that fact?

 

That's nothing more than useless double-talk.

Tell, us - have you never once been in a situation, like choosing what to have for dinner and decided, since you had steak last night (though it was offered again) that you would rather have something different tonight??? If so, you just exercised your free will.

Some of you people are trying very, very hard to create a situation that simply does not exist in the real world instead of looking at it simply and honestly.

 

I don't think anyone would claim that they do not have a choice. The real question or delima here is if that choice would be the only choice that you can make? Or if that choice was predetermined millions of years ago. I think saying having choice means that we in fact have free will would be jumping to conclusions. Choice and free will are two different words and have two different meanings, they can't be interchanged and have exactly the same meaning. The question if we have choice is not even debatable. That is an obvious fact of life. If you replaced the word choice with every instant someone said free will in this forum, it would then be completely incoherent.

 

Not in the least! The freedom of choice IS the exercise of free will! If there was NO free will there would also be NO choice.

 

They are almost completely synonymous.

CHOICE
n.
1. The act of choosing; selection.
2. The power, right, or liberty to choose; option.


FREE WILL
1
: voluntary choice or decision
2
: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention ​

Involuntary choice is meaningless, and no choice at all, so that distinction in the above definition is completely superfluous.

Now you can argue that choice is an illusion, but you cannot make any cogent argument for choice being significantly different from free will.