[ravenide]

“Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument I hear parroted everywhere and it drives me bonkers.

Ok, say quantum mechanics is at play and your cells don’t behave deterministically. Is that randomness somehow your free will? Are you willfully collapsing wave functions or whatever?

The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control. The concept of “you” is just a high-level abstraction, a shorthand, that falls apart as soon as you dig into the details of what’s going on (as all abstractions do).

[smcphile]

> “Quantum mechanics disproves determinism and therefore disproves free-will-skepticism” is an asinine argument ...

I agree, it doesn't disprove determinism. If someone argues that it does, they're mistaken.

> The real reason free will doesn’t exist is not to do with determinism, but the fact that you don’t exist. You’re a collection of cells that, regardless of whether they behave deterministically or randomly, are out of your control.

I don't believe the assertions you're making here have been proved either.

I'm not an expert by any means, I've just another layman who's been following the "mind body problem" for a while from the peanut gallery.

I tend to agree with David Chalmers's arguments that there's a "hard problem of consciousness".

I know that other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, don't agree that this hard problem exists. I've read some of Dennett's books, but I'm not convinced that he's right on this point. I wasn't convinced by "Consciousness Explained", for example.

So, to sum up, I don't believe anyone really knows yet how mind and consciousness work, it's too early to say.

[ravenide]

The problem I have with relating consciousness to free will is that consciousness seems to me to be about experiencing your thoughts, not controlling or exerting them. Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power. Imagine a machine that could control your neurons and manipulate your thoughts. I imagine you’d still experience those thoughts as a conscious person, and even experience the feeling of ‘having’ those thoughts, even though the thoughts are being selected for you.

My view is that the universe is a big movie. Consciousness is just a lens through which you get to watch the movie. But the movie script is already written, or being generated by mechanisms out of your control. You just get the immersive experience of the “feeling” of being one of the characters, including the feeling of making each decision—which are being/have been made for you.

[simondw]

On the other hand, the fact that we're talking about subjective experience means that one of these must be true:

1) it doesn't exist, but our brains are thinking and talking about it

2) it exists, but it's overdetermined: it just so happens that your brain starts thinking and talking about it while it also exists

3) it exists as a phenomenon in the physical world, able to affect other physical things

[smcphile]

> Sentience has a subjective quality to it, but it’s not clear it has any power.

As I said, I don’t know. I agree it’s not clear.

The first book I read on the subject, many years ago, was “Body and Mind”, by Keith Campbell. The book outlines various positions taken on the mind problem. I still have the book. Your position appears to be a version of epiphenominalism.

I found the book helpful as a short overview of the subject. For example, in chapter two the book describes the mind-body problem as four propositions that form an inconsistent tetrad. Any three are mutually consistent and can all be true. But any three together imply that the fourth is false.

The four propositions are: (1) The human body is a material thing. (2) The human mind is a spiritual thing. (3) Mind and body interact. (4) Spirit and matter do not interact.

The author describes a “spiritual object” as “one that does not have all the qualities of matter; it lacks at least some of: mass, volume, velocity, solidity”. (Some qualities of matter are allowed, just not all.)

[Emma_Goldman]

I am very suspicious of the ordinary formulation of the 'hard problem of consciousness'.

What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? Usually when people distinguish the two in order to suggest that the first is 'easy' and the second 'hard', they beg the question and build their conclusion into their premise.

If you assume from the beginning that the first is subject to the normal canons of empirical investigation as to how the physical world operates, and the second isn't, then of course they will appear as 'easy' and 'hard'. But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.

Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.

[smcphile]

> Too much is made of the idea of 'objective facts' and 'subjective experience'. It causes so much linguistic confusion.

I disagree on this point. When we think of matter, in terms of physics or chemistry, we think of matter as having certain qualities, such as mass, volume, velocity, etc. However subjective experience doesn’t seem, at least on the surface, to share those qualities.

Can the existence of subjective experience be explained using only the qualities currently associated with matter, as understood in today’s physics? It doesn’t seem so.

So it seems to me that the fact that subjective experience exists is a hint that our current models are incomplete and need revising.

How exactly do they need revising? No idea whatsoever.

[raxxorrax]

I agree that the qualifier of hard and easy is arbitrary, but think there are at least as much premises build into qualifiers like free or will for that matter.

If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer.

> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device

Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed.

But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion?

> subjective experience

Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.

[smcphile]

> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device in in the course of evolution and so that it is, really, understandable through the empirical investigation of the empirical world.

What I don’t understand here is how consciousness can both 1) have survival value and thus be passed on through evolution and 2) be an epiphenomenon that has no influence whatsoever on the physical world.

I suppose both statements could be true, but only if a very non-intuitive definition of consciousness is used, and that seems to me to be also begging the question.

Update: fixed a typo

[Emma_Goldman]

I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one. If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.

All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question. It is obviously the case that a converse statement could beg the question in the opposite direction. I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.

[smcphile]

> I don't know if that is a helpful way of constructing the issue; it certainly isn't a neutral one.

Reading what I wrote again, I agree that it could have been expressed better. Sorry about that.

> If you are a physicalist (which I'm not) consciousness is not an epiphenomenon with no influence on the physical world, but a component of the physical world which takes part in and influences the physical world.

Ok. If I try to look at it from the physicalist's point of view, I have trouble understanding how the subjective side of consciousness is explained. It seems to me to be just ignored or waved away.

Why couldn't the functions of consciousness in influencing the world exist without subjectively experienced consciousness? What evolutionary value does this subjectively experienced consciousness have (as seen from a physicalist point of view)?

> All I am arguing this that the normal formulation of the hard problem of consciousness begs the question.

You're not necessarily wrong, it depends on what exactly is meant by begging the question.

What you wrote was:

> What is the relevant quality being distinguished between the description or explanation of the physical processes that correlate to certain mental states and behaviours, on the one hand, and the description and explanation of the conscious first-person experience of phenomenal states, on the other? <

Intuitively it seems to me that there is a difference of quality, even if I'm incapable of describing exactly what that difference is. I can't even imagine how one would go about explaining the difference in quality to the satisfaction of everyone.

This doesn't bother me too much though, because, put perhaps too briefly, philosophy is not science and logical arguments are not mathematical logic.

However, I can also see how someone could see not answering your question as begging the question.

> I am myself agnostic on the question of consciousness because we have so little knowledge of the issue. A lot of philosophy in this area is interesting, and fun to think about, but more often than not it is speculative and linguistic in character.

My way of thinking is perhaps not so different.

I think of philosophy as being constrained by science, in that you don't want philosophy to contradict well established scientific facts, but as being otherwise freer than science to explore how the world might work. I also think of philosophy as having a role in dealing with questions that are largely outside the domain of science (beauty, ethics, etc.), but which can still sometimes be informed by science.

[taneq]

Totally agree that "you" is an emergent phenomenon rather than some atomic entity. Is this where we start debating the meaning of 'free will'? Because most discussions usually miss that step, rendering the rest of the conversation kinda pointless.

[naasking]

So by that argument, cars don't exist either. Ontologically, this is true. The ontology of physics contains neither cars or free will.

So when someone points to a car and says, "that's a car", what are they doing if not pointing at a car?

If you can answer this question sensibly, then it should be straightforward to also understand what a victim means when they point to an accuser and says, "they attacked me of their own free will".

Free will is just as real as cars. Which is to say either you reject the existence of both, or you reject neither.

[ravenide]

> Free will is just as real as cars.

This is true. They're both abstractions. I think the important property we ought to care about is how easily each abstraction breaks down, in the sense of leading to an untrue belief.

Calling a car a car is mostly pretty safe. Although a car is just a shorthand for a bunch of atoms, no one is going to use that fact to take issue with me saying that a car hit me at 40 mph.

Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will. But where the fact that cars are just a bunch of atoms is mostly uninteresting, here the fact that 'you' are just a collection of cells is of tremendous relevance, because your 'choices' are themselves just cellular activity. If you try to use the free-will abstraction to claim people 'could have' acted differently, the details underlying your abstraction will start to give you trouble.

Actually, the car abstraction has edge cases too. If you bolt something onto a car, is it still part of the car? What if that thing was what hit me? What if it was someone else who bolted it on? In these cases, what a car 'is' comes under needed scrutiny as well.

[naasking]

> Free will is ontologically like the car, but breaks down faster. It implies one could have chosen differently than one did. That's the whole reason people care about free will.

The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will. I think people recognise that no matter what, we need some ability to assign blame when someone is responsible for causing some harm.

When and how this responsibility is assigned is exactly the function served by free will.

Notice how there is no reference here to being able to do otherwise. That's an assumption you have carried into this debate without justification, and Frankfurt demonstrated that this assumption is actually false.

[ravenide]

> The Frankfurt cases debunked the full principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), so I disagree that PAP is why people care about free will.

I didn’t know about Frankfurt or PAP. Thanks for telling me!

As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

I guess I don’t agree that because something is proven false, people will stop caring about it and wanting it to be true.

I think one way out of the blame problem is to recognize that blame being an abstraction (I’m becoming a broken record) doesn’t make it less useful or meaningful. Assigning someone the blame as a killer still gives us the knowledge to act (e.g. separating them from society). But recognizing that ultimately everyone is a victim of fate in one way or another allows us to simultaneously have compassion for the people we’re locking up.

[vidarh]

> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

Because the notion that they don't instinctively feels wrong. It feels like they are choosing, and so it is emotionally difficult to even question how that choice would have worked in a way that gives them agency.

And if they actually think about it, people tend to quickly get a strong impulsive understanding that this would destroy a lot of their world views, such as e.g. as you point out, assigning blame, and we're deeply emotionally invested in believing we can blame people and assign responsibility for all kinds of things.

A lot of people also whether they say so or not are deeply invested in variants of the just world hypothesis, and that just falls apart if people had no alternate possibilities, and so reasonably no blame.

So many attitudes are tied to the assumption that we can discuss fairness and blame and responsibility on the basis of our view of how a person chooses to act. Take away responsibility for those choices, and we need to re-evaluate everything.

I don't think free will is a reasonable belief, by the way. I keep asking people who believe in it to define it in ways that does not just boil down to a veneer or obfuscation of determinism, and in ~30 years of asking countless people that question I've only ever gotten exasperated attempts at avoiding a definition, or attempts at evading the question by claiming dualism, which then leads to exasperation when I ask the same question again, because it remains just as relevant.

Otherwise exceedingly smart people can be reduced to going in circles with logical flaw after logical flaw over this.

[naasking]

> As far as why people care about free will, I dunno, almost everyone I meet insists free will exists, and when I ask why, they insist that they have a choice, and then I say “but you could only have made one choice,” and at this point most of them become absolutely incandescent with disagreement.

Sure, it's frustrating knowing something intuitively without being able to articulate why it makes sense!

If you want to make sense of free will and see evidence that lay people actually accept Compatibilism in which free will is compatible with determinism, I suggest my post elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476919

[adjkant]

The way you are using the object and the name can also apply to humans within a deterministic world though along with the parent argument.

When I say a car, I am using it as shorthand to say "this collection of atoms". Same goes in your example of the attacker. But, you added a very interesting phrase at the end with "of their own free will". I've addressed this in other posts, but basically, what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses, but is still very much a relevant idea to the situation and the practical world.

The "you don't exist" in the parent argument is not being used to say the person does not exist in the physical world or with a collective name for the atoms, it simply is highlighting that such a level of complex formal free will doesn't appear to be possible. It's begging the question of the definition of free will.

[naasking]

> what you mean with free will there has nothing to do with the formalized free will the article discusses

There is no accepted formalization of free will, that's why it's still a topic of hot debate in philosophy. When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility. Some people additionally assert some metaphysical baggage from religions or what not, but that's irrelevant to the real question of free will.

So I reject your premise that the article's conception, or really anyone's conception, of free will is "canonical" in any meaningful way, and so I also reject your claim that "formal free will doesn't appear to be possible".

[adjkant]

> When people say that free will exists, they're saying that there is coherent notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility.

My top level post very much says the same thing, I agree.

However, that definition has little to nothing to do with randomness or determinism is very much a mystery to me. When I say "formalized" free will here, I understand that there's much debate on definition, as I exactly said in the post about begging the question of definition. However, the content of these and other free will arguments show that the one many approach is not the one you just supplied. I think both definitions have importance, but the existence of each has different implications.

You seem to have the issue opposite of many formalized philosophers - getting stuck on definition, but on the "practical" one. We're in agreement on that one but using different words. But you're writing off the importance of the "formal", or at least the one this writing implies.

[naasking]

Most philosophers are actually Compatibilists [1], along similiar lines to what I've been writing. I have no issue with determinism as it's compatible with free will in my view.

[1] Around 60% Compatibilist, https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

[adjkant]

I'm familiar with compatibilism of course. By your definition of free will I would also be considered a compatibilist to you. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that the different definition of free will (the more stringent / nearly logically impossible one you are writing) still has value in discussion because philosophers argue for it (including some of those compatibilists I'm sure) and that definition has meaning in relation to determinism and the resulting ethics of how we use agency/choice/your definition of free will. You can't erase other conceptions of free will because you believe in one, and I've tried to capture that with the "formal" and "practical" labels, admittedly needing work.

I think we're both on the same page on the definitional problem of free will, but I don't see how/why you are minimizing all other definitions.

[nicky0]

There is no underlying concept of "free will" just as there is no underlying concept of "a car". They are just names we give to things that appear to be.

Within the experience of consciousness there is a sense of free will. The mind takes ownership of whatever it perceives, and works it into a story, in which itself is the protagonist. So for practical purposes we all behave as if we have free will. It's all just part of the universal dance.

[ajuc]

That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc.

If we define free will as just an abstraction over some behaviours then nobody's going to argue. But then determinism, quantum mechanics, soul, consciousness and intelligence is irrelevant. You can then speak of free will of a bacteria or a Roomba just as well.

[naasking]

> That kind of free will isn't controversial, but it's also not what people mean when they debate determinism, free will, consciousness, etc.

I disagree:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...

[vidarh]

People may have compatibilist intuitions, but start digging into what they they think past their initial intuitions and you tend to get completely different responses. Most people never think about what free will implies, and so their intuitions are fairly uncorrelated with what they'll insist on if you start questioning them about details in my experience.

[ajuc]

Ask them if their roomba has free will.

[naasking]

Their roomba doesn't have thoughts, beliefs, intentions or the ability to learn in any meaningful way.

Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.

[ajuc]

What's a thought and why should it matter for free will?

What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do?

When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it?

In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans.

We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition.

> Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury.

I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all.

Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime.

[CuriouslyC]

Note here that you're using the word random, when in science the phenomena are unpredictable.

"You" as a stable, persistent entity does not exist, but you as a momentary observer, with the ability to exert will to guide the evolution of the universe sure seems to.

Which hypothesis fits Occam's Razor better: that the same pattern of observation and response occurs at all scales in the universe, with the only variable being the complexity, or that there are two different processes, one of which takes over only at one very specific scale? If we don't have free will, if we're just dumb machines, why would we even be conscious in the first place? IMO it's far too big a thing to just be a random side effect.

[Emma_Goldman]

What do you mean it's 'too big of a thing' to be explicable within the framework of the physical universe? That does not sound like a sensible intuition to fix on. For most of history life was thought of as too big of a thing to be explicable in terms of the physical universe, and philosophers appealed to the divine and extra-physical vitalism, but we now know that life really is susceptible to physical explanation.

As for your question as to why humans or other sentient beings would be conscious if they belonged to the physical universe, the answer is obvious: for the same reason that we and other animals possess all other attributes, because of its functional value in enhancing our survival fitness as a species. Perhaps high level information-processing requires consciousness, or consciousness is a byproduct of some or all high level information-processing with organic matter.

I should say I'm agnostic about consciousness because I think we know next to nothing about it.

[zelphirkalt]

Yeah that argument, that chaos = free will is usually made by people, who never studied any philosophy or read much about determinism (which one exactly?). I read that aaall the time and it's also annoying to me.

[CuriouslyC]

chaos = free will is a bit of a strawman. Physics being non-deterministic does open the door to the universe exerting "will" though, and choice is just as good an explanation for the variance as randomness.