Does Physics disprove the existence of free will?

Not as I understand it. Your actual decision making rests mainly on subconscious processes.

Fight or flight response is wholly subconscious. It's still part of the subconscious "response" mechanism.

https://www.psychologistworld.com/stress/fight-or-flight-response

Ever been in the passenger seat and pressed your foot on the floor to brake the car when it gets too close to another or is approaching an intersection at high speed and the light changes to red? There is not even a pedal, yet you act as if there was a real brake. Does one choose to press an imaginary brake pedal?

Perhaps this may clarify. Empathic responses are a result of observation, but they are wholly subconscious spontaneous chemical response phenomena (aka, mirror responses). You do not decide to cry when watching a horrible scene, or to get sexually aroused when watching porno. You cannot control the chemistry.

Your autoreflexes always beat your "considered opinion", IMO.....

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So does walking. So?

One can choose to not press it. Both those actions are within one's abilities, simultaneously, and either can be chosen.

 

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I can only repeat what I posted in the hope you may actually address it...

Perhaps. But it is the YOU that decides what is the more satisfying is it not?
And if it is the YOU then the freedom to choose rests with the YOU and not with the light.
How the causality of the light affects YOU is up to the YOU.

and add...
"and YOUR subconscious and YOUR reflexes which are conditioned by YOUR life long training and learning which YOU undertake as YOU."

 

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It is not. It causes nothing except some chemical reactions in the retina, which are not the means of stopping or not stopping.
In fact, if the driver is distracted and the red light is not consciously perceived, their decision might be completely different regardless of the chemical reactions in the retina - the light would not even inform the decision, let alone cause it.

Tautological. And irrelevant. And directly in conflict with any causality attributed to the light.

There is no observed compulsion, or means of compulsion, available to a light bulb changing color hundreds of feet away.

Your motives and perceptions and so forth affect your decision, and you have the ability to override or dismiss whatever information is coming in. Hold that thought.

Compelled by what? Not the coin.

My choices are made from a much wider range of alternatives, and according to much more complex criteria - including higher logical levels of consideration - than any ant's.

 

No you cannot make a simultaneous decision to walk and run at the same time. Only one action will be taken and that is a compulsory choice.

The expression, "on second thought" might appear to be a FW choice, but it really isn't. It's just that after taking an action our subconscious decision making of what action take has changed, but did not exist at the time you did make the original apparently FW conscious decision.

 

That is a contradiction, which proves my point, IMO.

Sunlight is not causal to great harm? Getting caught running a red light gets you an expensive ticket. You would consciously choose to take that risk?

Nor is the dog crossing on the next block.
The point is what is your state of mind at the immediate moment you must take action.

What would you call an observed compulsion? A man with a gun telling you to hand over your money or else? Symbolically, the gun is no different than the red TRAFFIC light. You still have the FW to refuse the robber then or are you being compelled?
What if he ties you up, then you are not able to take physical action at all, do you still have freedom of action? What if he threatens to tie you up and then take your money. FW to refuse?

(1) Indeed, your perceptions affect your decision, but they are subconscious processes.
(2) No you don't.
(3) You cannot hold a thought!

The flip determines who gets the ball, you have no choice in the matter. The coin flip decides for you. It takes preferential choice away from either party, which is fair.

I agree that my choices are influenced by a much wide range of experiences, memories buried in the brain which subconsciously influence your conscious thought processes. Ants have the same abilities from half a billion years of programmed evilutionary experience.

But let's test to see if you are able to make a free decision on these optical illusions.
Note, both answers are correct. The test lies in your ability to "change your perspective".
Some people can, I can. But that does only mean I am able to best guess both correct answers.


And this uncanny illusion which is impossible for your brain to solve at all. Your subconscious perception will not allow you to see the right shade. You have absolutely no control over the illusion.

 

I'll try.

No, that's the illusion. You are free to like either or both chocolate and/or vanilla. But when you like chocolate ice cream, you cannot consciously change your mind to like vanilla better.

In the case of TRAFFIC lights the choice to stop has been made for you, long before you came to the intersection, by the programmer of the light timing in accordance with traffic flow and in many instances dependent on the light a block away which is timed to yield a green light if you drive at a certain legal speed, so that you are able to hit green at every intersection.

Absolutely, but that does not allow you FW will in your actual decision. Pressing a non-existent brake pedal in the face of danger is illustrative of a subconscious auto-motor response.

It always comes down to the actual "choice" you make. It is always compelled, by one subconsciously causal mental reason or another. If not you'd end up in stasis, not knowing what to choose.

 

The current state of the closed system in question.

And even using this notion of what information is, in a strictly deterministic universe if we know the input to the system then we can know the output. And if we know that output then we know the next output.
E.g. If we set up a deterministic system of adding 1 to the input, and the output being the next input, we know that if we start with an input of 1 then we know exactly what the output is after a certain number of iterations. We don't need to perceive the occurrence of 99 becoming 100 to know that this will transpire within such a system. The information that it will is inhernt in the system itself.
So in a strictly deterministic system, the changing of the state of the traffic lights is established already, by any previous state. Everything is already inherent within the system. It just needs time to play out for it to actually occur.

Theres no denying anything. If the universe is strictly deterministic then there is no freedom other than the appearance or feeling of it. If we wish to define "free" so that it starts with that feeling as being what "free" means then great, we have a different notion of what "free" means and we will reach different conclusions.

Not at all. But the findings are actually irrelevant to the question of whether our free will is genuinely free or not. All it does is highlight the proecess of the will in action, and no one is denying the existence of such a process. The question is whether it is actually free or not.
Let's say that a choice (X or Y) is made based on the value of three variables, A, B and C, but you are only aware of two (A and B). You then proceed to demonstrate that no matter what the variables A and B are, the output can be either X or Y. And this can be evidenced and demonstrated in lab conditions.
But what if the actual result, that you think is freely chosen, has been determined precisely by the relationship between A, B, and C? Because you aren't aware of C you can at best say that the choice appears free with respect to A and B. With C in the mix there is no actual choice.
So it is with the traffic light. This is one input you are aware of, and with regard that input you can appear to act with freedom, either stopping or not. But you simply aren't aware of the other inputs that, in a deterministic universe, have determined your output.

I have no confusions, iceaura.

If anything I am saying, and have said previously, that all inputs to the system are the cause. In a simplistic system you will have a single input. In a complex one you have far more, exponentially so. With regard something as complex as the human brain, it is uncountably vast. Yet we would only be consciously aware of a few.

No, it is not the bedrock at all. The bedrock is the relationship between input and output of a system. I'm sure you want to think it is something else, but that is clearly leading to your own confusion in the matter. I'm happy not to use the word "cause" at all if it resolves your confusion.

Wow, there's another rabbit hole. But yes, time exists. That doesn't stop something being already determined, though.

People exist. What we call decisions are manifestations of processes that exist as much as any process can be said to exist. And I am focussing here one the strictly deterministic universe, where future actions are already determined, even if we aren't, or can't be, consciously aware of that.

No you won't. For example, in the simple system of traffic light (input) and stop/not stop (output) this is indeterministic: regardless of the colour of the signal from the traffic light we can either stop or not stop.
Yes, I know the traffic light is not the only input to the system that leads to the output, but this simplistic system shows how if we only consider such simple scenarios we can get apparent indeterminism. But that is because we are not considering a closed system. Once you do, the output of that system is, in a strictly deterministic system, known by the inputs alone, even before you go through the actual process. If you know what the inputs are going to be then you know what the output will be.
But if you only consider elements of an open system then you can get the appearance of an indeterminism.

I'm not really calling even atoms as fundamental, but they are at least on the path there from the otherwise meta-scale. It's why I don't really talk about causes but rather inputs, and I look at the state of the system as being the input, with the next state as being the output, as previously explained.

But we are only consciously aware of a few isolated inputs to a complex system, and as a result we become consciously aware of the system behaving in an indeterministic manner (same input can lead to different outputs). We refer to this apparent ability to make alternative choices from those few inputs as our will being "free". But it is only "free" with respect to those inputs that we are aware of.

 

And is the illusion also determined or not?
It has been determined that we are to believe that our freewill is an illusion because we fail to grasp that the so called illusion is also determined to be an illusion.... ( chuckles at the absurdity)

 

Illusions are not determined, they are subjectively and erroneously perceived as real. The illusion determines your state of mind. Honestly, were you able to perceive the two squares on the chessboard as exactly the same shade? There is your illusion.
But Determinism applies to the mind's functional processes as it does to everything in the universe. We are not exempt.

In Bohmian Mechanics the universe is perfectly deterministic because it negates the particle/wave duality and thus the uncertainty factor, which theoretically would allow for choice.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

 

In fairness to the opposing view, I ran across this informative article

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cultural-animal/200902/just-exactly-what-is-determinism

Both viewpoints are discussed in depth in the article and may add to this conversation.

 

So?

What, exactly, is the entity being compelled; what is doing the compelling; in what sense if any is there a choice, and what is making it?
Try to be specific.

So you agree that the person's state of mind is the decisive, i.e. "causal", factor. The person's mind makes the decision, and can decide to stop or go.

- - -

You keep saying that, but you have been provided with laboratory verified counterexamples.
You have also, so far, avoided dealing with the common illusory nature of all mental events in your setup.

They are critical to establishing the degree of freedom available. They establish beyond reasonable doubt, for example, that a person approaching a traffic light has the ability to decide whether to stop or go, and can make that decision depending on the color of the light.

But the deciding system - the driver - although deterministic by presumption, has not decided yet, and its state includes the ability to make at least two different decisions depending on events yet to come.

How is that not deterministic? The decision will be made on some criteria, after all, and everything involved including the decision is a physical event one can record on laboratory machinery. The entire scene proceeds according to natural law and chains of causation, if restarted identically it will play out identically every time.
Same inputs -> same outputs: that's one of your versions of deterministic setup.

"We" do not become aware of any system acting in an indeterminate manner. That's something only you imagine, in this discussion. I do not.

And what system is that? I cannot tell - the system making a decision here, that I can see, is the driver of the car. That system is open - it takes in information continually, right up to the decision event's effect on the will.
Prediction: You will have a very difficult time defining a closed system for this event, short of the entire universe.

So the relationship between input and output is not cause and effect, in your deterministic setup.
I'll keep that in mind, and scratch your previous posts.
Is it still bottom up, or are we now discussing dreams, memories, etc, as inputs and outputs independent of substrate?

 

I keep saying it, and I keep explaining why your supposed counter examples are nothing of the sort. They demonstrate a process, they show that if we consider only a few inputs then we can arrive at different outputs each time. But unless you can look at every input the examples are irrelevant, for reasons already given.

I have repeatedly explained why mental events are not illusory, at least not in the same way as I refer to the free nature of free will being illusory. Again: mental events do not appear to operate contrary to the underlying physics.

And your example is unequivocally not addressing the same inputs each time. Until you can do that, any such example you want to offer is going to fail to be relevant.

Yet in a strictly deterministic universe the decision is fixed, it could be established at any preceding time (given knowledge of the entire system, an initial state, and sufficient computational ability - none of which is practically possible). There is nothing the driver could do about it. They are not free.

One of the results of a strictly deterministic universe is that everything is ultimately predictable. At time t=X the state of the universe determines the state of the universe at every moment thereafter. If a decision is to be made at t=X+100 then the result could theoretically be established at t=X.
This all comes out of the notion of the same inputs always giving the same output. If state A is the input and leads to state B due to some deterministic laws, then we can plug the resultant state B into the computer and arrive at state C, state D etc.

But you do, by your very language and the examples you give, when you say that there can be different outputs from consideration of the same inputs. This is indeterminism. If you look at traffic lights and that is the input and you genuinely can either stop or not then the system (you, car, traffic light) is an indeterministic one, by definition.
Now, if you know that the universe is strictly deterministic (being the scenario under consideration) then the apparent indeterminacy of the system must be due to not being aware of all factors within the system. I.e. It is an open system and not closed.

The closed system would be anything that could theoretically interact with the person during the time frame from initial state under consideration and the decision being made. So if the decision is to be made 1 minute in the future then the closed system for that decision would be everything within 1 light-minute. 30 seconds later it would be everything within 30 light-seconds, decreasing at one light-second per second until the moment of decision itself.

I have not said that. Please don't put words in my mouth. Cause and effect covers more than just the case of strict determinism. It covers indeterministic scenarios as well. Since we are considering the strict determinism case I consider the nature of the relationship between input and output as core, not the fact that there simply is a relationship.

I'm sure you'll ignore anything you want.

I have never claimed to consider it bottom up. Again, please don't put words in my mouth. I have said previously that I consider it holistic, treating the whole state of the system at one moment as the input, and the whole state of the system at the next moment as the output. This is neither bottom-up nor to top-down.

 

My viewpoint is not discussed in that article. Nothing about plausibility or feelings is included in my viewpoint.

 

They say the exact opposite.

Irrelevant. Nobody has claimed otherwise.

You have in fact denied that, while repeating conclusions based on it. And we have now repeated that exchange three times at least.

Yes. We are in agreement.

So the universe, as noted, is the smallest closed system involved.

I claimed the exact opposite, explicitly and clearly and while pointing that out to you as a key feature of the examples.
I claim that the deciding system has the ability to choose between present alternatives, based on information it will receive and many other future inputs. As the driver approaches the light, they are able to stop or go - the driver makes that decision, and carries it out as an act of will.

The deciding system is indeed open, as explicitly noted above. There is no indeterminacy involved, apparent or otherwise - if the decision event is rerun, identically, the decision (a physical event, after all) will be identical. Same inputs -> same outputs.

Yes, you have.

 

The article addresses the two main prevailing arguments regarding Determinism, not how we feel about FW. It discusses Determinism in some depth.
However from a secondary linked posit;

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cultural-animal/200902/just-exactly-what-is-determinism[/quote]

 

Really, do you consider each step you take?

As driver you do have the ability to press the brake at any time. As passenger, you do not have the ability to brake by pressing an empty floor space on the passenger side.
But the specific scenario I cited compels you, as passenger, to try and press a non-existent brake pedal.
IOW, your reflex action was subconsciously compelled. You had NO choice in the matter.
Directly thereafter, when you realized you were doing it, but not before you performed the action.

 

Trust and instinct , together , motivates the passenger to press the imaginary brake peddle.

 

It does not discuss one of the viewpoints here, namely mine, which has nothing to do with psychology directly.
It also fails to deal with such posters here as Sarkus - like this:

Sarkus, you may note above, is not happy to be assigned a belief in inevitable causality.
And I object to being assigned a disbelief in inevitable causality, as well as argue that it does not conflict with a properly formulated and confusion-free notion of freedom of will.
And the absurdity of it depends on the nature of the "causality" assumed - more naive conceptions of causality do produce absurdity if employed like that. One must be careful.

And very little in that article addresses the main implication of the central feature of the example above: that a driver approaching a traffic light has the ability to stop and ability to go and the ability to decide between them based on the color of the light at the time of decision.

As I pointed out - No.
But I do consider some of them. And I consider them based on an expectation of information I do not yet possess, sometimes. I postpone decision between perfectly available alternatives.

I have been in that situation, and chosen to not press the imaginary pedal despite the urging of my habits and reflexes. Others, I imagine, have done the same.
What exactly are you trying to argue?

 

I was speaking from experience and even as I always have had very fast responses, I have never been able to not press that imaginary pedal. I have traveled by car a great part of my professional life and perhaps it is just instinct that makes me do it, but that is the point of the argument.

Frankly (and with respect), I doubt that you have ever been able to resist the impulse before you made the attempt, unless perhaps you have not spent much time "on the road". Perhaps you have never been in that situation where your internal alarm system compelled you into instant action.

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Most of my travel companions have experienced the same autoresponse, which is why I am fairly certain of being correct on this particular scenario.

p.s. I live in No Idaho and we often get "black ice" which is a deadly road condition.