2006-01-07: Free Will

[Robert]

Our first chat session of the new year! This chat will be held this coming Saturday, January 7th, at 3:00pm Central Standard Time (CST) or GMT-6.

The topic is ...

Free Will
What made me do it?

This is an intriging topic for me and many others by some of the posts I've read. Certainly it seems as though we have free will, but is this an illusion? If it is not an illusion then how is free will possible.

From Wikipedia -- Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves.

Areas of Discussion
Determinism - Our present is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior events that preceded it. There are no miracles, no random events, only causes and their effects.

Indeterminism - The contradictory belief to determinism: There are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs.

Compatibilism - This theory holds that free will and determinism are compatible. This variation of this view is offered by philosopher Daniel Dennet.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice definition of free will that should be reviewed.

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Future Chat
These chat sessions are usually scheduled every other Saturday at 3pm (CST). They are usually moderated with a chat transcript available for later review.

We'll meet in Flash Chatroom. Hope to see you there!

[dipayankar]

Good Topic Robert. I will be there. What I was thinking is perhaps this is the basic irony in life. Quantum mechanics startes you should have free will whereas Special Theory of Relativity states that you should not. Hope to find an answer to such questions in the chat.

[David Maes]

You can take this from me; free will is an illusion.

[Mike 5]

This is interesting for me personally because the system I long to derail, that fails to fall apart under empirical testing, ie. The Human Design System, says NO CHOICE. In Human Design, all is binary mechanics -consciousness as well as material form - through the ripples in heavy light, reality is merely illusionary turbulence in a flowing sea of neutrinos.

No Choice is a strong and unpalatable message and idea. Very few people really really grasp this, for in my view, to truly say there is NO CHOICE and experience this in your life, and still be alive, as if in a dream you are witnessing only, that is a spiritual awakening in the Mechanics of a godless universal clockwork. Which is the unspoken goal of Human Design perhaps.

So I have considered and reconsidered No Choice quite deeply and experientially, and I know many many many people who refused this dogma, others who think they live it but delude themselves, a couple who live truly NO CHOICE. I have had several moments of kundalini wowee personal bliss in the possible delusion of No Choice - a dangerous spooky scary isolated bliss, where there is no murder, no life nor death, there is no hate and no love, and all seems to be a plasticine cartoon of immense beauty but zero substance. yes, Human Design was developed on the wrong drugs... but is it true, and are we better off taking the blue pill as it were...

Um I am so forgetful as in disconnected to any sense of space and time, no need, for me, for all I know I'll be on a plane somewhere warm and wonderful on Satruday. So I would appreciate random emails from whoever remembers to inform me a) what day it is today and b) how many sleeps before the chat and c) do I need some software or to be naked or wear something smart d) what was my name again e) WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE!

Oh the utter rubber clad bliss of no choice, can you fasten my ankles a little tighter, and further apart, if that would be your pleasure, and your free will, Miss Dominatrix...

Robert can Robot Girl come too, what was her name, you know the zexy temptress in your hard drive... She must be a real expert on this subject?

[AntonioLao]

If I get a ride to the library I might be able to participate in this chat.
There seems to be a relationship between determinism and order, while there is a relationship between indeterminism and chaos. Our free will is then the choice of a direction toward more organization (peace) or toward more disorganization (wars). However, in a complex adaptive system wars and peace always coexist.

[David Maes]

In a deterministic way I would say free will is more like chemical brainreactions.

I think free will is more a product of the unconsciousness.

Just doubting whether free unwillingness is the product of the unconsciousness as well.(But personally I believe free unwillingness is the product of the unconsciousness also).

Question...

Imagen that a bee (which has the ability to remember a human face for example) gets a blow from a human. It wants to stab the human; so maybe it uses its ability of remembering the humans face. The readiness potential to stab (which is in the brain of the bee) might be there I believe maybe about 0.5 seconds before the stabbing itselfs happens (I mean, if it's like this with humans). (If stabbing is an arbitrary motion and not an autonomous one; cause I don't know much about bees.) But the actual decision of stabbing would happen in the brain of the bee almost simultaneous. When is the moment that the bee recognizes the humans face?

(Just a laymans curiosity...

What's the moment of the readiness potential for an arbitrary motion of a fly during winter, when you compare it with the time of the same potential during summer??

[Mike 5]

There seems to be a relationship between determinism and order, while there is a relationship between indeterminism and chaos. Our free will is then the choice of a direction toward more organization (peace) or toward more disorganization (wars). However, in a complex adaptive system wars and peace always coexist.

We seem to have struck a golden topic - does this normally happen that people start the debate here? Perhaps we have no choice

Antonio - I do not think this can be resolved by any God's eye view. By this I mean that it is one thing to imagine some alien film crew making a documentary of the human race and then wondering about the mechanics and observed behaviour. But from this outside view, you can know NOTHING about the CHOICE or will, is this not obvious? From a God's eye view or alien film crew we surely would all look like so many ants in a nest.

So do ants in a nest have free will? Do ants in a nest have choice? It seems to me that the very perspective of academic discussion, outside and remote in some stillness beyond our world, the alien film crew return and edit their story, but there is NO WAY to talk of free will or choice. Do dolphins have a choice or do we train them to perform for us? There is no real meaning from this external camera angle

So the dynamic of the question - and free will is a question of dynamics - forces us into the first person. We have to look into our own personal experience, however subjective and unscientific that may seem at first. The only possible place to resolve this question is MY experience in MY life and then to perhaps ask YOUR experience within YOUR life, and so on. But choice can only be known as EXPERIENCE, not as logic viewed by the fool on the hill as it were. What if the ants all took off their masks and said, yeah they were just acting in a play? Surreal thought, but you get my point, there is truly no way to "know" from the outside, it is an inside question only.

Now, I cannot say I have ever met anyone who from birth thought there is no such thing as free will. It is an intellectual puzzle that some people solve AGAINST the apparently obvious fact that we all FEEL we have free will.

However the same logic ultimately can be applied. To simplify, I will introduce an artifice. For a moment, imagine that all reality occurs 8 seconds before you cognise it. Or 3 months. Clearly if there was such a delay, then whatever you observe already happened.

So we have a rough model of how to imagine a world without any free will, just as an approximation. So my question is the following: HOW could we be sure, totally beyond doubt, that this is not actually the case? Is it possible that our mind is what I have called elsewhere on this forum an "I" machine, that simply and MECHANICALLY attributes a flavour that "I" did that, "I" knew that, here "I" am, making my free choice, "now"... In fact, our mind could be subtitles on a flim that just goes by, why not? Yes, the very mechanical way that we are forced to have this sense of "I" and this sense of yes "I" chose that, this is almost suspicious by it's relentlessness. The more closely you observe your own mind, the more automatically it just does what it always has done. The only possible way to prove there is free will is the freely be without it and then compare, and that is simply not available to us. Suspicious, in a way... but I am deliberately using reverse logic perhaps to stimulate fertile arguments, maybe.

Can anyone of us will themselves into a clear and sure denial of free will? Well, there are specific tricks and techniques, I know them and enjoy them, but they rarely last. The nearest experience of No Choice is too obvious - dreaming! There is a distinct lack of personal choice, relatively speaking, in your nightmares... Another is extreme sado masochism, or master slave relationships, I have spoken to such people, seen the TV documentaries and I feel I see what that is, but still, it's a choice. Pol Pot was quite another thing, or the Spanish Inquisition, I can see this is truly a complex topic, perhaps the central topic from which all else hinges.

ROBERT - and everyone else - THANK YOU For this excellent opportunity to enjoy the sheer bliss of thinking - I am floating in inner space here... I simply don't want to resolve this, it is so juicy just losing myself in the labyrinth.

...to be continued ...

[David Maes]

What about this...

You're driving a car using a route you've done already lots of times. You're listening to the radio while it's playing. You're very concentrated on what's being said on the radio. Suddenly you arrive at the place of destination. You don't remember anything about the red lights you stopped for, or the decisions you might have taken, or the many times you had to stop...
You were so concentrated on the radio "you" just "weren't there".

What's conscious and what's unconscious?

Also... what's objective and what's subjective? There seems to be a gap between the subjective and the objective.

[Mr. Nobody]

Spacetime or a view from the "outside" does not have a reality. It is a tool to explain General Relativity. Reality lives within, in between the stars with us, as Quantum Mechanics. The concept of the "spacetime loaf" has helped us envision the flexibility of the spacial canvas and how it is connected to a time arrow, but we need to let go of it, if we want to unify GR and QM.
By letting go the outside view, the impossible angle that does not exist, you will come to the conclusion that nothing is pre-determined. Time does not exist as a static entity. If nothing is pre-determined than free will is not an illusion.
Free will means cognitive decisions with derivable motivations, but without true cause. I chose to write this and no law in the universe can trace the intent of my writings. There are solely a product of my interlect and proof of my existence as autonom. However, we do interact and live in accordance to rules that formed to serve the next higher order, the society. Societies possess a consciousness and live as more than the sum of their parts not unlike the conglomeration of your cells that make the You. Societies compete, unite and wage wars until one day, one uniform culture will emerge (the internet)
Indeterminism exists as the random fluctuations of energy fields, they exit that fog and step onto our stage of reality and are exposed to competition, a war of attrition to serve the struggle against entropy as they evolved to form the structures we see.

[AntonioLao]

forces us into the first person

When the ancient philosopher Socrates took the poison or the pre-existentialist Nietzsche's self-induced mental collapse, were they all exercising their free will?