The illusion of Free Will

[philosopher]

Free Will is an illusion. So says all science.

It won't be logical either, if we did have free will.
What is free will? What constitutes "Free"? If you make a decision, you made some thoughts behind it. But thoughts are generated from something else. Like environment. And chemical and electrical signals in the brain.

So why do people keep saying we have free will, when we don't?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 08181.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -illusion/

Both Richard Dawkings and Stephen Hawkings opposed free will:

https://www.richarddawkins.net/2016/05/ ... free-will/

http://threeillusions.com/stephen-hawking-on-free-will/

"Do people have free will? If we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop? Do blue-green algae or bacteria have free will, or is their behavior automatic and within the realm of scientific law? Is it only multicelled organisms that have free will, or only mammals? We might think that a chimpanzee is exercising free will when it chooses to chomp on a banana, or a cat when it rips up your sofa, but what about the roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans—a simple creature made of only 959 cells? It probably never thinks, “That was damn tasty bacteria I got to dine on back there,” yet it too has a definite preference in food and will either settle for an unattractive meal or go foraging for something better, depending on recent experience. Is that the exercise of free will?
Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion."

Quote by Stephen Hawking.

[henry quirk]

This topic has been tackled muliple times in-forum...I'm thinkin' nuthin' will be offered by my side (free will is real) or your side (free will is not real) that hasn't been foisted up before.

But -- what the hell -- I'll play (for a little while, anyway).

#

"So why do people keep saying we have free will, when we don't?"

If you're right and free will is an illusion, a fiction, not real, then what choice do these folks (I'm one of 'em) have?

In another thread, you declare Life is like a movie, it is pre-determined. If this is true then I have no choice (I believe I am a free will cuz that's the way I have to be) and you have no choice (you believe you are a toaster cuz that's the way you have to be).

If you're right: it's as simple as that.

If I'm right, well: that's a mule of a different color.

[jayjacobus]

The past gives people a context for the present and an expectation for the future.

Determinism maintains that the past determines the present and that seems to be true of the physical universe but humans and animals are in the present and can stop what they were doing and do something else not limked to their last action.

Humans and animals interpret the present in relation to the past and to their wishes. Their wishes are in the future not the past. Interpretation and wishes determine what a human does.

Humans do not act deterministically. Is their interpretation pre-programmed? There is no evidence of that. The proximate cause of all action is cognition. If the ultimate cause is preprogramming, that is a cause without evidence.

Free will for me.

[Judaka]

In order to deny free will, you have to deny the causation between conscious thought and action. That if I write in a diary, I will perform X action at X time on X date, set an alarm and then do that action at that time - no you say, there's no correlation between your will and your action. What kind of logic is that?

Rather than "free will or no free will", a more interesting and sensible approach would be to ask "To what degree, are our thoughts conditioned by the mind?" and this is an extremely interesting subject. I think most people are ignorant of just how much who they are, what they do and think is actually controlled by our biology and subconscious and the ramifications of such things are rarely explored.

However to reject any degree of free will is more than stupid, it's ludicrous.

[Immanuel Can]

Free Will is an illusion. So says all science.

No, actually. "Science" says nothing on that particular subject. Moreover, scientific method would still work just dandy in a free-will universe. Materialist Determinism says "free will is an illusion." That's a metaphysical, not a scientific postulate.

But it doesn't matter, if you're right...because none of us can believe you...or refuse to believe you, if we do. It's all predetermined, remember?

So if you believe that, why are you arguing?

[philosopher]

This topic has been tackled muliple times in-forum...I'm thinkin' nuthin' will be offered by my side (free will is real) or your side (free will is not real) that hasn't been foisted up before.

But -- what the hell -- I'll play (for a little while, anyway).

#

"So why do people keep saying we have free will, when we don't?"

If you're right and free will is an illusion, a fiction, not real, then what choice do these folks (I'm one of 'em) have?

In another thread, you declare Life is like a movie, it is pre-determined. If this is true then I have no choice (I believe I am a free will cuz that's the way I have to be) and you have no choice (you believe you are a toaster cuz that's the way you have to be).

If you're right: it's as simple as that.

If I'm right, well: that's a mule of a different color.

Actually it is a misunderstanding that the lack of free will leaves you without a choice. You do have choice. And you do have a will to either make that choice or not making that choice.

It is just that the will itself is not free. Something, in-fact a lot of stuff is influencing your choice. This choice-influencing stuff is out of your control, and hence you are not free.

A choice is made of many different elements. From the environment to your genes.

Now, the crucial part to understand this is, it all comes down to signals being processed in your brain. It means when you are making a choice, it is YOUR choice. It just happens to be, that "you" are not free. You could not make any different choice, because when all the elements of a decision are summed up, everything in the entire universe is made by cause and effect, meaning the universe is deterministic. Meaning, in laymans terms, the universe is as it is, and it could have been no different. It just "is". You are part of the history in-the-making, but your decisions are caused by something external - like another history, which all the histories summed in total makes the history of the entire universe.

You might think of your consciousness as being "you". Well, it is, but consciousness is influenced by a lot of other elements. Neurons communicating making your thoughts and finally your decisions, are all communicating through actions that are already pre-determined through history - a history of the entire universe. One atom bumping into another atom, causing that atom to cause a chain-reaction etc.
That is how cause-and-effect works.

Really, it is down to simple physics.

[philosopher]

The past gives people a context for the present and an expectation for the future.

Determinism maintains that the past determines the present and that seems to be true of the physical universe but humans and animals are in the present and can stop what they were doing and do something else not limked to their last action.

Humans and animals interpret the present in relation to the past and to their wishes. Their wishes are in the future not the past. Interpretation and wishes determine what a human does.

Humans do not act deterministically. Is their interpretation pre-programmed? There is no evidence of that. The proximate cause of all action is cognition. If the ultimate cause is preprogramming, that is a cause without evidence.

Free will for me.

I'm curious. Did ANY of you guys actually read the articles provided in the links?

Try this for starters, which answers your questions:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 08181.html

Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options after the decision is made.

The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe that they had taken a decision using free will – even though that was impossible.

...

In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, of Yale University, the test subjects were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.

The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.

Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.

The scientists suggest that the findings show that the test subjects’ minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle – even if they hadn’t actually had time to do so.

[philosopher]

Here is a another article, it is hard science:

More recently, studying the activity of the frontal and parietal cortex, other neuroscientists of the group coordinated by Soon et al. (2008, 2013) have managed to detect the “rise” of a behavioral or abstract choice/decision (to move either the right finger or the left one; to perform a mathematical operation or another with two numbers) a few seconds before the subject becomes aware of it. An unconscious brain process has already “decided” what to do when the subject still does not know what she would choose and thinks she still has the power to decide. More precisely, Soon et al. (2008) studied “free decisions” between many behavioral options using the multivariate pattern classification analysis (MVPA) which, combined with fMRI, allows one to identify specific contents of cognitive processes. “A pattern classifier, usually adopted from machine learning, can be trained on exemplars of neural patterns acquired when participants make different decisions and can learn to distinguish between these. If the activation patterns contain information about the decisions, the trained classifier can then successfully predict decision outcomes from independent data” (Bode et al., 2014).

You can read the entire research paper here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887467/

[Walker]

There is no way that anyone would choose to do some of the stuff that people do.

[jayjacobus]

The past gives people a context for the present and an expectation for the future.

Determinism maintains that the past determines the present and that seems to be true of the physical universe but humans and animals are in the present and can stop what they were doing and do something else not limked to their last action.

Humans and animals interpret the present in relation to the past and to their wishes. Their wishes are in the future not the past. Interpretation and wishes determine what a human does.

Humans do not act deterministically. Is their interpretation pre-programmed? There is no evidence of that. The proximate cause of all action is cognition. If the ultimate cause is preprogramming, that is a cause without evidence.

Free will for me.

I'm curious. Did ANY of you guys actually read the articles provided in the links?

Try this for starters, which answers your questions:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 08181.html

Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options after the decision is made.

The idea was tested out by tricking subjects into believing that they had made a choice before the consequences of that choice could actually be seen. In the test, people were made to believe that they had taken a decision using free will – even though that was impossible.

...

In one of the studies undertaken by Adam Bear and Paul Bloom, of Yale University, the test subjects were shown five white circles on a computer monitor. They were told to choose one of the circles before one of them lit up red.

The participants were then asked to describe whether they’d picked the correct circle, another one, or if they hadn’t had time to actually pick one.

Statistically, people should have picked the right circle about one out of every five times. But they reported getting it right much more than 20 per cent of the time, going over 30 per cent if the circle turned red very quickly.

The scientists suggest that the findings show that the test subjects’ minds were swapping around the order of events, so that it appeared that they had chosen the right circle – even if they hadn’t actually had time to do so.

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences? Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us. Physics has no direct control over our actions and indirectly physics is influence, not control.

[philosopher]

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences. Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us particularly when the influences change.

Everything that happens - from the alarm sounding to the thoughts of brains, is all caused by physics, chain-reactions, cause and effect.

[jayjacobus]

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences. Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us particularly when the influences change.

Everything that happens - from the alarm sounding to the thoughts of brains, is all caused by physics, chain-reactions, cause and effect.

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences. Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us particularly when the influences change.

Everything that happens - from the alarm sounding to the thoughts of brains, is all caused by physics, chain-reactions, cause and effect.

Not for me. You're calling influences, direct control? That doesn't make sense.

[jayjacobus]

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences. Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us particularly when the influences change.

Everything that happens - from the alarm sounding to the thoughts of brains, is all caused by physics, chain-reactions, cause and effect.

People control themselves in the present. If they decide to go to the store, they decide in the present. If they are going to the store five minutes later, they still want to go to the store. If they stop at the post office, they want to stop at the post office. Are there influences. Of course. If a fire alarm sounds, they will react appropriately but the fire alarm does not decide what they do.

If a person is manipulated by a games player, the person will react to the game in an appropriate way. The tester knows how to manipulate people to get the reaction he wants. But first he must convince the person to play the game.

We don't live in a dark room without any influences. But most of the time the influences are not from a manipulator.

But the influences are not physics controlling us particularly when the influences change.

Everything that happens - from the alarm sounding to the thoughts of brains, is all caused by physics, chain-reactions, cause and effect.

Not for me. You're calling influences, direct control? That doesn't make sense.

Perhaps you are using cause to mean motivation while I think you are saying cause as in make something happen. Motivation applies to humans. Make something happen is physics.

[henry quirk]

Are you really gonna do this?

You know how this is gonna turn out.

Why bother?

[Immanuel Can]

Are you really gonna do this?

You know how this is gonna turn out.

Why bother?

No. Not doing it. Just pointing out the absurdity of having a debate to change the minds of people who, allegedly, cannot possibly do other than they do...presumably, including their belief patterns.

Now I'm going to do something more useful, like shampooing my cat.