A Free Will Challenge

[Margaret McGhee]

Fred, I can't seem to get the forum search function to do my bidding but if I did fail to answer your first posting of this Monty Hall proposition, I'll do it now.

My proposition has nothing to do with probabality or statistics. I am proposing that a contestant can only choose the door that she feels the best about from the alternatives available - that is, the net emotional force she experiences at the moment of the decision will determine the decision. I am saying that she can make no other choice but that.

I am not saying that persons will not have reservations. Many decisions we make in life are a pick between two bad choices. But in every case we choose the one that feels the least bad (best). We have no other way to make choices. Neither does any other animal.

Whichever door the contestant chooses will be the one they feel best about - regardless of any intellectual calculations they make (or don't make). If the contestant is smart about odds they may change their pick after Monty takes away one choice - but it will be because they now feel that that is the best choice. How could it be otherwise?

In every case, if they feel better about the other door after Monty eliminates one - they will choose it, otherwise they won't.

You have not offered an example that violates this proposition. Therefore, if we are only free to choose the options in life that feel best to us from the alternatives at the moment we make the choice, we have no free will (as I think you are describing it).

Can you offer an example that violates this? As I see it the Monty Hall example affirms my proposition.

Or, can you explain how an animal can make such a choice? If an animal makes a choice, that means (by definition) that it was made according the net best feelings available from the options.

I would further propose that an animal that had a mutation that produced a choice mechanism that allowed it to make choices other than the one they predict will provide the best feelings for them, that mutation would soon dissappear from the gene pool. An animal that had a mutation that provided a better ability to predict the best feelings from the options would have greater survival abilty. IMO - that's why humans have occupied every available niche over the last 50,000 years and displaced thousands of other species.

BTW - all decisions are survival decisions.

Margaret

[ToddStark]

Hi Fred,

These are massively complex and sophisticated issues if we take them really seriously. It seems downright bizarre to call it "equivocation" to withhold judgment on something that we cannot possibly be certain about and have no compelling reason to pretend certainty about. It is as if you think you have a moral imperative to take a stance against computational functionalism, and you can't imagine why I don't feel the same moral imperative to argue for it. I'm very puzzled by this.

That a mind is layers of physics and biochemicals and neurons and computation just seems to me like a great scientific strategy, and a perfectly plausible assumption, if you believe as I do based on experimental psychology data (such as that reviewed by Dan Wegner) that it is entirely possible that some of our intuitions about our own consciousness are partly deceptive.

Originally Posted by Fred H.

Penrose clearly shows us that the truth of Godel’s incompleteness (and the Turing halting problem) confirms that human consciousness is the result of something more than algorithms—just as quantum behavior/process of protons and electrons, say in atoms, confirms that quantum processes are something more than the result of Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, something more than a miniature solar system. So it doesn’t matter whether you “agree” or not, one simply goes where the available evidence/truth takes us..

Clearly, we seem to have some tension over how much of this is opinion or speculation, and how much is "following the truth," but other than that I understand your viewpoint and appreciate it.

It seems to me that the main substantive difference here between the various reasonable "functionalist" (in the very broadest sense which includes Block and Penrose) positions seems to be how far we think computation and neurology can take us in understanding the mind. I hope that anyone can see that in at least trivial "weak" sense, the brain does take in information and do something with it that can be imagined to involve rules.

Penrose, Block, Chalmers, and almost everyone involved in studying consciousness all agree that it actually takes us pretty far beyond that "weak" sense of information processing, but they disagree just how far. That the brain processes information and does computation in some sense is not really in question, except perhaps for those who are radical behaviorists or cartesian dualists (which are different arguments entirely).

Outside of those exceptions, the folks who argue against strict computational functionalism pretty much stand on the same ground, it seems to me, saying that at some point computation fails to answer some "hard problem" such as qualia or some aspect of choice. That's where we tend to look for quantum effects, non-computational processes, and so on.

And in general, we do not yet have good experiments or tools for investigating these "hard problems" yet. So I think this is where reasonable people can still disagree about just which line is "following the truth" and not be equivocating at all.

Originally Posted by Fred H.

It does seem that we kind of agree that “some sort of free will is true,” although I find your “compatibilism”—“that some sort of "free will" is true and that physical determinism is also true”— to be little more than equivocation at best, or cognitive dissonance at worse. Regarding your view that “physical determinism is also true,” I’m inclined to agree except that human “free will” would somehow, ultimately, have to trump such determinism to some extent.

I really do have empathy for your agnosticism regarding some of these complex issues Todd, and indeed agnosticism may well be the judicious view. But I wish you’d be a little more upfront about it—besides irritating me, your equivocations cause people like Tom to mistakenly believe that that you, he, and the other “atheists” have actually reached some sort of meaningful consensus.

I really think people tend to identify with a group more based on opposition to a perceived common enemy than on how similarly they really think.

There are significant differences even among physicalists and functionalists of different types, and certainly "atheists" do not have a single consensus on most philosophical and scientific issues. But when we face political ideological movements like "intelligent design" we do see our common need to oppose it with some sort of rough consensus about how science should be conducted and why theology is a different kind of inquiry.

It seems to me that the evangelical Christians like Jon Wells and Phil Johnson who started the ID movement found pretty much the same thing, that Christians have many different views about the details of biology and evolution, but they perceived that they they shared a common need to "defeat Darwinism." So a moleclular biologist like Mike Behe and Young Earth types who think biology should be based on the Noachian Flood end up on the same discussion panels on the same side.

It seems to me that we often work to build a social consensus from a number of different viewpoints in order to engage in politics and warfare and other things that depend on prosociality.

I think that is the main impetus toward conformity of belief that makes people uncomfortable with moderation and intelligent reflection or even hostile toward it.

I'm sorry it irritates you, but I think it is important that we think and reflect on the evidence when thinking and reflection are called for, and the philosophy and science of mind call for thinking and reflection because not only does the evidence not lead to a single model, but if guys like Penrose, Block, and Chalmers are right, we may not even asking the right questions yet.

kind regards,

Todd

[ToddStark]

Fred:

But I wish you’d be a little more upfront about it—besides irritating me, your equivocations cause people like Tom to mistakenly believe that that you, he, and the other “atheists” have actually reached some sort of meaningful consensus.

Tom:

Ha, that's hilarious because I was saying the same thing to Todd; he's encouraging you to see a difference between his views and mine. As I've said, if his 'free will' is also available to machines (as well as lower animals) then he and I don't differ in the slightest, much to your discomfort. We have reached a very meaningful consensus.

The viewpoint I take pretty much defines free will (in the sense I think of it) as a decision process, and so producing it becomes an engineering problem. If we produce a computer that makes decisions behaviorally identical to a human being, does it have free will in the same sense? I have no idea, because there might be more than one way to solve the engineering problem. Evolution on earth provided one particular solution for human nervous systems.

To answer Fred's objection, I think that even if non-computational processes are important to the human mind as Penrose suggests ... if nature can engineer a brain to exploit them then in principle, we can create a machine to exploit them as well. So I don't see that even computation is an ultimate limit to what we can do with machines. It is just our best current model.

I don't think it makes sense to say that current computers or other life forms we know of have free will in the same sense we do, because they cannot take the same sorts of things into consideration in their decisions, their brains are not capable of formulating and comparing goals, expectations, and alternatives in the same way as we do in our decision making.

So I agree with Tom that machines can have agency and potentially free will, and that animals at least have a form of agency, but I also agree with Fred that human free will is distinctly different from current machines or known other animals.

Fred:

See Todd? Your equivocations have resulted in Tom’s cognitive dissonance—while Tom insists that he has “proof that there is no Free Will,” and while you alternatively declare that “some sort of free will is true and that physical determinism is also true,” Tom nevertheless concludes that you and he “have reached a very meaningful consensus.” Please Todd, gently explain to Tom that what he perceives as the nice warm feeling of consensus is really nothing more than your release into his swimming pool.

Funny line!

Tom and I agree more than we disagree, that the world is deterministic and causally closed and that the philosophers strong sense of free will is unsupportable, but I think he stops short of compatibilism between determinism and the sort of free will I envision humans to actually have.

I don't know if this is because he thinks determinism is more constraining than I do, or if he thinks free will is too inappropriate a way to think of human agency.

In either case, for me this is an entirely expected difference of opinion. Nearly all materialists have a hard time with compatibilism. It rests on a very counter-intuitive argument and I understand that it comes off as equivocation. However in my opinion it is not equivocal at all. It is a different way of thinking about different causal models, their relationship, and their limits.

In essence, it really just says that physical determinism per se isn't neccessarily as constraining on our choices as we imagine it to be, nor is our capacity for choice mysteriously independently of physical causation. Our decisions can be more or less coerced, but they can also be based on goals, preferences, expectations, and dispositions that are themselves a result of physical causes, but have a much less directly coercive effect on choice. Our genes do lead us to make choices in particular ways, but they also provide the machinery for making decisions that take history and goals into consideration.

People can be capable of making decisions based on real goals and real knowledge of the world and real preferences and disposiitions, and yet none of this need be outside of physical causes. It seems to me that as far as we can tell, such a decision process depends on physical causation, rather than being free of it. I believe that a meaningfully "free" decision making engine can be designed and function entirely within (and from) physical causation.

I guess our difficulty imagining this is mostly a matter of our reliance on our understanding of machines that aren't very free, and possibly an exaggerated sense of the importance of human-like phenomenal consciousness in decision making.

I didn't agree with the compatibilist argument either, until I got really deeply into Dennett's and Wegner's arguments and saw how much sense they made with what I'd learned about selective attention from hypnosis and perception research.

kind regards,

Todd

[ToddStark]

It feels a bit like you've stacked the deck here by presenting your own model of what is going on in the mind, defining the mind to work that way, and then asking for a counter-example and claiming victory if none is available. I think I agree with you in the end, but I don't like the argument.

I'm going to try to break the argument down into my own terms rather than accept the challenge as posed. Tell me whether it still makes the same point.

If I understand the general gist of this argument, it is essentially that:

1. human decision making depends crucially upon processes outside our awareness ("emotional inputs")

2. Free will is a function of our awareness (or somehow depends upon "intellect" presumably dependent upon awareness). That is, free will is something carried out by the conscious "I" which is somehow acting on the physical world to do something.

3. since we make our decisions largely outside of awareness, and free will must come from awareness, we cannot have free will

4. Unless you can find a counter-example that shows this decision model to be wrong.

I'm fine with #1. And if I accept your implied definition of free will in #2, then I agree on #3 as well. #4 is extraneous because we are both assuming that the model is correct rather than supporting it, so obviously counter-examples are irrelevant. How would one know that a decision was being made in accordance with this model, or not, anyway?

As for #2, if you define free will to be some property of the conscious "I" that imagines itself in control, then I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any such thing controlling us when we look closely at it. The philosopher's traditional sense of free will is probably untenable, I think. Under experimental conditions it can be shown that our sense of control and decision making is different from the actual processes by which our brain exercises control and makes decisions.

If you also define free will as the sense that we have control, or the sense that we could have decided otherwise, then clearly we do have it subjectively. So in that sense, we have an illusion of free will.

However I think the definition is bad. I think we have a real form of free will which is the capacity to make decisions based on things like expectations, dispositions, and being able to imagine alternatives and act on them. None of this definition requires the conscious "I" to be the sole or primary source of free will.

Tor Norretranders has a book called "The User Illusion" that does an engaging job exploring various ways in which the "I" is different from the self that is actually doing the decision making.

kind regards,

Todd

[Margaret McGhee]

To all: I think these questions are so difficult because they are the product of our intellect which creates narratives to logically explain things (and also satisfy emotional needs that depend on those explanations).

IMO the problem is that the only kind of knowledge (knowing) that is important to any organism is emotional knowing. That is the knowing that we base our decisions on. Intellectual knowing can only affect us if we attach some emotional value to it (like knowing that it is dangerous to cross a busy freeway on foot, for example).

The rest (like this discussion) is a mental game in that it has no real consequence for our survival (except in very indirect ways). And so we are free to imagine whatever narratives appeal to us. I believe that whatever any of us says is subject to that trap. Me too!

We are the emotions that stir within us and direct our decisions and behaviors. Our narratives are just an artifact of our consciousness. But since that's all we are ever much aware of - we can blame them for all sorts of behavior - rather than our underlying emotions that will demand final satisfaction.

I just think that acknowledging that makes the game more realistic

Margaret

[Fred H.]

MM: BTW - all decisions are survival decisions.

Oh sure, like when one chooses to commit suicide . . . Margaret, Margaret.

[Margaret McGhee]

Todd, Thanks for taking the time to try to understand me. I am sure that any problem you have with that is mostly due to my inability to state it clearly enough. You've given me a good starting point though, to make myself clearer:

1. human decision making depends crucially upon processes outside our awareness ("emotional inputs")

Yes, except I'd go further and say that when any organism makes a decision - it does so according to a built-in mechanism that evolution has provided that allows it to predict the outcome (in emotional terms). With some organisms it is a simple chemical response to light, for example. With others the decision can result from the complex workings of a CNS - but the goal is the same, to make decisions that optimize the predicted survival result.

2. Free will is a function of our awareness (or somehow depends upon "intellect" presumably dependent upon awareness). That is, free will is something carried out by the conscious "I" which is somehow acting on the physical world to do something.

First sentence, agreed. Second: I'd rather say that free will is an illusion created by the conscious "I" which likes to believe it is acting on the physical world to do something.

3. since we make our decisions largely outside of awareness, and free will must come from awareness, we cannot have free will

Yes. The important part is that decisons occur as the result of emotional negotiations that occur whether we are aware of them or not. Usually, for non-trivial decisions, our conceptualization adds valuable emotional inputs to the process. That's why we can make better decisions than (hairy) apes in complex situations.

4. Unless you can find a counter-example that shows this decision model to be wrong.

Yes, you are right that I am basing my conclusion of free will on my understanding of this decision-making model. The question presented is "Do we have free will?" - as I think Fred defines it. When I consider the question I can only see it in terms that make sense to me - according to my mental model as I've described it.

Anticipating that it would meet objections, I started this thread with the title "A Free Will Challenge" to offer others the chance to refute the model upon which I base my disbelief in Fred's free will. So far, I don't think anyone has.

Margaret

[Margaret McGhee]

There are many examples of committing suicide for survival reasons - reasons that assure the spread of one's DNA to future generations. All organisms die. We evolved to ensure the survival of our DNA. Although our ego may disagree, we functionally promote our own survival only for that purpose.

Until the last hundred years and only in developed countries, just deciding to become pregnant could be seen as close to suicide for many women. Much of Western religion and social morality was created to thwart a woman's choice not to committ suicide in that way - or at least to make the choice as to with whom and when she would take that chance.

Men in battle often committ suicide - as many did in the Civil War marching fully exposed into withering enemy fire - or as in the Battle of Gallipoli in WWI when Australian troops were ordered to attack entrenched Turkish machine guns and many hundreds died following those incompetently stupid orders. Then there are the Kamikaze pilots of WWII and the Palestinian suicide bombers of today.

But suicide also results from the breakdown of the emotional computer inside us that compels us to make decisions that benefit our survival.

I'd just call that the result of a broken decision-making computer. I'm not sure I understand JB's theory of emergent networks - but that theory seems to justify those suicides, at least in eusocial terms that would eliminate those defective decision-making genes from the pool.

Margaret

[Margaret McGhee]

I said: I'd just call that the result of a broken decision-making computer. I'm not sure I understand JB's theory of emergent networks - but that theory seems to justify those suicides, at least in eusocial terms that would eliminate those defective decision-making genes from the pool.

I think this makes a very strong argument in favor of my emotional decision-making computer theory.

The organisms that survive best are the ones that evolve the best decision-making mechanism - appropriate for their genotype and environment. That means that they evolve the most accurate means of predicting outcomes of their decisions in terms of their survival (their DNA survival).

For all vertebrates this is an emotional weighing and summing process IMO. We humans do that very well because we can conceptualize which offers us more alternatives and (sometimes) even objectively logical alternatives. But only the emotional weight of those concepts can take part in our decisions. If we don't have more confidence in a seeming logical option then we won't choose it in favor of dispositional or instinctual options.

But, if that mechanism breaks, we are programmed by evolution to make self-destructive decisions at best - to make suicidal decisions at worst. In either case, reducing the likelihood that any (more) of our DNA will get passed to future generations.

Margaret

[Fred H.]

MM: But, if that mechanism breaks, we are programmed by evolution to make self-destructive decisions at best - to make suicidal decisions at worst. In either case, reducing the likelihood that any (more) of our DNA will get passed to future generations.

Sure, that must explain the self-destructiveness of various forms of feminism wherein women choose to not become pregnant, and of the West’s nonreligious and so-called liberal elites and their declining birthrates, all of which results in a kind of suicide, at least for their particular gene pools. Hell Margaret, if indeed we’ve been “programmed by evolution to make self-destructive decisions ” like you say, and it’s going to result in less atheists and feminists, then I suppose I’m all for it.