Free Will or Not - That is the (or a) question

[spud_meister]

Given that we know so very, very little about the Universe, what makes you think there are "atoms" throughout the Universe?

What does that change about what I said?

 

[medi]

What does that change about what I said?

Please excuse my quoting, next, only that part of that post I was thinking about when I asked you about the possibility of atoms not being out there far away.

Free will exists on the micro level, of human experience, but in the larger picture, we're arrangements of atoms that are subject to purely causal forces. And in that regard, our free will really only extends to the processing and response to external stimuli, we're not in control of the underlying neurological mechanisms, or biomechanical ones that sustain our body.

Well, maybe I better rethink something. A 'no atom' existence might be right under our noses without us knowing. And not "far away".

Anyway, to move on, I thought you were offering that because of the structure of life, as we know it (based upon atom structure) we are not able to have a free will, because we are not in control of the underlying ... (etc. that you wrote).

But if there is something out there that isn't atom based, we might have some freedoms we don't know about?

Maybe something originates from our minds that isn't based upon the atom structure you are citing?

 

[quip]

"What is all this about the will?" I asked. "On the one hand, you say our will isn't free. Then again you say we only need to concentrate our will firmly on some end in order to achieve it. It doesn't make sense. If I'm not master of my own will, then I'm in no position to direct it as I please."

We're generally free to make willful choices, though these choices exist within a vast ocean of influences...many of which exist subconsciously.
These influences include: Genetics, culture, politics, media, sexual orientation, peer pressure, mental/physical health, friends/family, career, economic class, race, gender, marketing/advertising, religion, education, age, marital status.

So, no, those "achievable ends" are not a product of a free nor firm, uninfluenced will.

 

[Metanoia]

."

We're generally free to make willful choices, though these choices exist within a vast ocean of influences...many of which exist subconsciously.
These influences include: Genetics, culture, politics, media, sexual orientation, peer pressure, mental/physical health, friends/family, career, economic class, race, gender, marketing/advertising, religion, education, age, marital status.

Granted these are all influences……but most of them can be dealt with and overcome in some way. Being born into poverty is not a death sentence…..the agent of change is free will…..where does progress and evolution come from without the utilization of free will ?

 

[Metanoia]

Some people choose to be vaccinated…some do not…some live…some die. Some choose to be hunters and gatherers….some choose to starve. Life is the proof of free will…..

 

[quip]

Granted these are all influences……but most of them can be dealt with and overcome in some way. Being born into poverty is not a death sentence…..the agent of change is free will…..where does progress and evolution come from without the utilization of free will ?

I'm not suggesting strict determinism.

Otherwise you're illustrating my point. Just think of the internal and external forces (agents of change) persuading you to progress beyond poverty.

 

[Metanoia]

Sort of boils down to who came first……the chicken or the egg ?

 

[quip]

Sort of boils down to who came first……the chicken or the egg ?

Not sure where you're going here. Care to clarify?

 

[Metanoia]

Not sure where you're going here. Care to clarify?

To speak of internal and external factors is a binary union, that in this case, produces an escape from poverty. Perhaps if I go back to the chicken and the egg for the amusement of trinitarians I could ask why isn’t the rooster mentioned ? The circle of life can have multiple points but they all come together as one.

 

[quip]

To speak of internal and external factors is a binary union, that in this case, produces an escape from poverty. Perhaps if I go back to the chicken and the egg for the amusement of trinitarians I could ask why isn’t the rooster mentioned ? The circle of life can have multiple points but they all come together as one.

Point being that external factors become internalized by way of no conscious discernment. Therefore, the fact that involuntary factors play such a significant role in our decision making implies that our functional will is not as free as initially appearing.

 

[Metanoia]

A good lawyer can plead his client only has limited free will…..thus just barely being at fault…..

 

[quip]

A good lawyer can plead his client only has limited free will…..thus just barely being at fault…..

You're not completely free in the making your choices.... you're likewise not free from the retaliatory (or agreeable) actions of others, borne from your choices.

QED: Nobody commits to their choices within a vacuum.

 

[bythoughts]

Free will should emerge from a larger theory of consciousness that explains the following:

• True, "libertarian free will" that is based neither on a random number generator nor the obfuscation of a decision algorithm.
• True qualia: "really feeling things" in a way that a computer program or daffodil does not.
• Destiny: complex patterns of behavior creating fundamentally new and notable phenomena in history.
• Afterlife: meaningful, enduring outcomes resulting from the free will decisions people make.
• Our theory must proceed according to natural physical laws
• Consciousness must arise spontaneously over the course of evolution
• Consciousness should be responsible for the creation and rational design of the universe.

So, here's the theory.

• To begin with, the notable effects of consciousness are all paranormal phenomena. None of them are readily amenable to current scientific investigation. There is no particle physics to explain when electrons and protons are part of a system that feels qualia or engages in free will.
• All paranormal phenomena, if and when they exist, are manifestations of precognition. Precognition is the direct memory of the immutable future.
• Precognition causes significant paradoxes. (When unrestrained, a traffic accident can occur because you remembered it would). Though humans are evolved to use it, humans are also evolved to suppress it. (Foreknowledge is the flowering of the Dao, and the beginning of folly. The wise man takes the fruit and leaves the flower - Laozi)
• Because of these paradoxes, there are multiple valid histories of the universe occurring (whether deterministically or with high probability) due to the presence of a conscious individual. Free will involves choose what boundary conditions of the universe are imposed - which paradoxical events occur. It is not random and it is not the consequence of previous events.
• The paradoxes tend to be striking. You don't remember boring events, but interesting ones. Outside the short times and narrow spread of consciousness, this makes precognition highly dangerous. But within that context, it helps the human mind to create things never seen before.
• Qualia is the time inverse of free will. Consciousness affects both the past and the future, but neither is absolute. When determined events are contrary to what consciousness would like, its resolve may bend to match the external plot parameters rather than persevering. Because of the low entropy of the past, consciousness more frequently accepts this as an "input" rather than an "output".
• The decisions of consciousness occur in time based on experience, but not our physical spacetime. Free will decisions are made in a perpendicular dimension of time based on adjacent parallel universes. These are our Days of Creation, our new heavens and new earths.
• Precognition is proposed to represent the ability of a human brain to use its elaborate neural networks to detect the imprint of the future on the present. This reflects a progressive increase of neural complexity to make this possible, which could evolve naturally.
• Consciousness occurs in brains, but is not specifically determined by the boundaries of a brain. The cells of a brain may be able to do it independently, and when a paradox occurs, it can affect multiple people, whose actions are determined by what is going to happen. As such it should be viewed as a property of the cosmos rather than of a biological organism, even though biological organisms provide the setting for it to happen.
• The strong anthropic principle accounts for why people have to be in a universe, but the decisions of conscious free will have, in aggregate, great control over the past and future of that universe. As such, the universe is crafted to support the plot development emerging from consciousness. We picture the first human being looked up and collapsed the state-vector (Heisenberg interpretation) so that the stars congealed into their current positions. But past causality is a misguided religious notion. More likely, it is a more powerful consciousness, in the future, which has created the universe, and toward which history inexorably bends.

 

[Metanoia]

Thank you bythoughts…….if nothing less you introduce an underlying complexity that many would prefer to simplify…..

 

[bomberfox]

I cant will the effects of autism away, autism shapes who i am sometimes for the better and others for the worse. I cant control it and i cant simply will myself to be in the state that i am in while on medications.

No amount of training or camps will change this so no i dont have libertarian free will. However, there are aspects of myself that i can freely change. I dont believe in the complete absence of control over my own thoughts.

 

[AConcernedCitizen]

True, "libertarian free will" that is based neither on a random number generator nor the obfuscation of a decision algorithm.

An adaptive ϵ-greedy strategy based on value differences or Bayesian ensembles is neither a random number generator, nor a deterministic algorithm. Humans appear to use some form of adaptive ϵ-greedy strategy as far as I can tell.

True qualia: "really feeling things" in a way that a computer program or daffodil does not.

Why is it required that a computer program not be able to have true qualia?

Destiny: complex patterns of behavior creating fundamentally new and notable phenomena in history.

Whether a phenomena is "notable" or not is entirely subjective. Why would that need to be part of any theory of consciousness anyway?

Afterlife: meaningful, enduring outcomes resulting from the free will decisions people make.

Why would that have to be explained by a theory of consciousness?

Our theory must proceed according to natural physical laws

The evolution of an adaptive e-greedy strategy adheres to natural physical laws.

Consciousness must arise spontaneously over the course of evolution

It can, for any threshold of decision making that determines the presence or absence of consciousness.

Consciousness should be responsible for the creation and rational design of the universe.

No it shouldn't. That's a horrible idea. You will end up with a buggy mess of spaghetti code for your universe if you put consciousness in charge of creating it.

 

[bythoughts]

An adaptive ϵ-greedy strategy based on value differences or Bayesian ensembles is neither a random number generator, nor a deterministic algorithm. Humans appear to use some form of adaptive ϵ-greedy strategy as far as I can tell.

I don't know what that is, but it sounds like its output is a function of its input.

Why is it required that a computer program not be able to have true qualia?

Originally, I thought a doll with a pull string doesn't really love you, no matter what it says. Making it electronic doesn't seem to be a dramatic change in state. A finite state machine, by its nature, proceeds from input (which may be random) to output by an at least hypothetically predictable method.

Whether a phenomena is "notable" or not is entirely subjective. Why would that need to be part of any theory of consciousness anyway?

Countless species of animals have formed complex structures and developed elaborate rituals. To distinguish conscious human thought from these organisms, we ask, what differences do we see? The humans are constantly up to something different, bizarre, unpredictable. Slime mold can solve a maze, but it won't make a tokamak hotter than the sun.

Why would that have to be explained by a theory of consciousness?

Our subjective perception of consciousness seems to be shaped by notions of right, wrong, meaning of life, and a yearning for enduring meaning. These seem like a hint as to its nature.

The evolution of an adaptive e-greedy strategy adheres to natural physical laws.

Conceded. But I don't really understand what it is.

It can, for any threshold of decision making that determines the presence or absence of consciousness.

I didn't quite understand this sentence.

No it shouldn't. That's a horrible idea. You will end up with a buggy mess of spaghetti code for your universe if you put consciousness in charge of creating it.

This is something of a religious issue. You could say this about, say, Noah's Ark, but who knows what anomalies graced earlier revisions of the cosmos? Every creator has to start somewhere. The cosmos is like a great poem or work of literature - it may not have to make scientific sense to be valid. But it does seem to make sense, so if you have consciousness at many points in spacetime that is ready to choose one option over another, all those boundary conditions are consistent with some solution from the beginning of time until its end. The indeterminacy of physics (with Bohmian caveats) seems to allow for conscious choices in one era to be made more or less independently of its past or future.

The closest we can come to understanding Creation may be with the phenomenon of Christian faith healing. To be sure, I haven't observed this, and I know much is charlatanism (caveats below), and any hypothesis I make about it is emphatically not to be trusted, and this is the very least confidence I have in what I've said here, but let's hypothesize anyway. The only physical way to do it that seems plausible, without some kind of telekinesis or such, is that the Christian, with an immense strengthening of will rooted in parallel time, is able to win out against qualia. In other words, change the past by free will rather than be changed by it. This is a simple time inverse and we know time inverse physics works. By exercising a powerful free will to recall that the person ill is actually alright, their past might work out such that they are alright, and all indications to the contrary were explainable by some sort of error or deception. The effective practitioner proves himself to be a charlatan: the person was never ill. But they wouldn't never have been ill if he hadn't chosen that... for some good people, this may be enough. But all the universe is created from this time, or the future, backward; nothing was fixed in stone at the beginning of time.

 

[AConcernedCitizen]

I don't know what that is, but it sounds like its output is a function of its input.

It's output is a nondeterministic function of its input.

It usually behaves predictably, but then will occasionally surprise you, in order to balances the exploitation of the known with exploration of the unknown.

Originally, I thought a doll with a pull string doesn't really love you, no matter what it says. Making it electronic doesn't seem to be a dramatic change in state.

But changing it from a deterministic mechanism that produces the same output from same pull string input every time to an electronic choice-making agent is a dramatic change of state.

Countless species of animals have formed complex structures and developed elaborate rituals. To distinguish conscious human thought from these organisms, we ask, what differences do we see? The humans are constantly up to something different, bizarre, unpredictable. Slime mold can solve a maze, but it won't make a tokamak hotter than the sun.

Is making a tokamak hotter than the sun intrinsically, objectively more "notable" than creating a hexagonal wax lattice to optimize honey storage?

Our subjective perception of consciousness seems to be shaped by notions of right, wrong, meaning of life, and a yearning for enduring meaning. These seem like a hint as to its nature.

Concepts of right and wrong would be good to .explore as part of the framework of consciousness. Not sure what that has to do with the afterlife though.

Right and wrong are terms for behavior we are optimizing for and behavior we are seeking to avoid. They serve as the metric by which to evaluate and adapt behavior through operant conditioning for ourselves and others.

The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42.

Conceded. But I don't really understand what it is.

It is a system by which an agent might decide whether to exploit what it knows, or to explore what it does not.

I didn't quite understand this sentence.

Evolution has selected for systems of increasing complexity for decision-making agents. At whatever point one decides to draw the line betwixt consciousness and the lack thereof, a decision making agent can spontaneously cross that line through evolutionary mechanisms.

 

[AConcernedCitizen]

The closest we can come to understanding Creation may be with the phenomenon of Christian faith healing. To be sure, I haven't observed this, and I know much is charlatanism (caveats below), and any hypothesis I make about it is emphatically not to be trusted, and this is the very least confidence I have in what I've said here, but let's hypothesize anyway. The only physical way to do it that seems plausible, without some kind of telekinesis or such, is that the Christian, with an immense strengthening of will rooted in parallel time, is able to win out against qualia. In other words, change the past by free will rather than be changed by it. This is a simple time inverse and we know time inverse physics works. By exercising a powerful free will to recall that the person ill is actually alright, their past might work out such that they are alright, and all indications to the contrary were explainable by some sort of error or deception. The effective practitioner proves himself to be a charlatan: the person was never ill. But they wouldn't never have been ill if he hadn't chosen that... for some good people, this may be enough. But all the universe is created from this time, or the future, backward; nothing was fixed in stone at the beginning of time.

If it worked that way, then restoring a lost limb with faith healing would be as easy as curing cancer.

How it actually works is called confirmation bias. Out of 100 people who pray for their cancer to go away, 13 of them will have their cancer go into remission even when the doctors were convinced that it was terminal. For those 13 people, it was clearly a miracle. Jesus must still have work for them to do on this earth or whatever.

But the remission rates are the same for Hindus, Muslims, Wiccans, atheists, and everyone else. Cancer remission is an actual thing that actually happens. If it happens to you, you may be inclined to consider it a miracle and attach some religious meaning to it post hoc.

But unlike cancer remission, regrowing a lost arm is not an actual thing. Faith healing doesn't work for lost arms, because faith healing does not work. You can't use your free will to change the past so that in the present you will have a body that never lost its arm. If you lose your arm, its gone, and no amount of "faith healing" will bring it back.