A Logical Proof of Free Will ?

[Yoink]

I made no such implication - as well you know.

I merely repeated your own characterisation of the event, using your own owrds, that the person reported having no idea of why the hand went up, rather than some other direction.

I don't know how many time I have to repeat that!

Robin, you used "my own words" once. The other times you used your paraphrase. Your paraphrase distorted my point.

[Yoink]

yy2bggggs, would you do me a favor and address the specific example I've given you so many times by now.

How, in your view, does the "planning complex" that is our brain arrive at the particular decision when and in what direction to move our hand when someone says to us "hold your hand in front of your face and at any time within the next 10 seconds, move the hand either up or down."

Describe (obviously schematically) the deterministic process that you imagine to be running behind the "solid wall" that leads to, say, the hand moving up at the 5.4 second mark rather than down at the 3.2 second mark. It would be good, too, if it would describe why repeated runs of this experiment produce constantly changing outcomes in the same subject.

Just to make clear that I'm not trying to frame some trick question here, what I want to know is whether you can come up with an account which successfully leaves all of this behind your "solid wall."

I suspect that in the end we're just quibbling over the meaning of "illusion."

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

So the statement (which one, in fact, hears daily--in some form or other) is not "I don't know why this happened, it must have been free will" but rather, "I don't know why I did that--I just decided to for no reason at all."
No reason at all, as in a random decision?

~~ Paul

[yy2bggggs]

yy2bggggs, would you do me a favor and address the specific example I've given you so many times by now.
I'll try... I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to get at, and obviously, I don't have complete knowledge of this, so all I can do is rant about what I know.

So piecing together, you seem to want, from this:
How, in your view, does the "planning complex" that is our brain arrive at the particular decision when and in what direction to move our hand when someone says to us "hold your hand in front of your face and at any time within the next 10 seconds, move the hand either up or down."

Describe (obviously schematically) the deterministic process that you imagine to be running behind the "solid wall" that leads to, say, the hand moving up at the 5.4 second mark rather than down at the 3.2 second mark. It would be good, too, if it would describe why repeated runs of this experiment produce constantly changing outcomes in the same subject.
For me to do this:
Account for particular timings of impulse of decision
Account for reasons for particular decisions
Account for the variability with repeated runs of the same trial

Given this, it helps to start at the beginning, and in this case, the beginning happens before the problem was posed to me. Naturally, while I'm awake, my mind wanders from place to place, as this flood of sensations (both internal and external) trigger thoughts, which trigger integrations, some of which are novel to me (not at all unlike the checkers program searching the decision tree, except that here it's the thing that's happening in "idle"), and some of the novel things may actually prove interesting enough that they give me ideas for later--others simply serve as starting points to trigger other thoughts, or are so boring, they become "dead ends" that lead to other things that "pop into my head" starting new chains of thoughts.

The reason to start before the problem is to make it perfectly clear that this is the mental landscape--the environment--into which the challenge is introduced in the first place. As challenges go, this isn't a particularly difficult one to "solve", because it's the same kind of things we do all of the time--in fact, we are almost certainly not likely to judge this as a "challenge" in the first place.

Now it's probably also crucial to point out that the planning complex per se isn't the only thing involved in planning--it's merely the (to use a more standard term) the global workspace where information is shared between a number of modules. A portion of what goes on in the process of planning occurs in some of these modules in such a way that the information is simply not conveyed to this complex. The defining factor from a subjective point of view of whether or not something is inside of this planning complex is whether or not the information is available for you to consider, and do "whatever" with ("whatever"-ness literally implies that it's within the interconnected network of modules--you could even think of one possible thing to accomplish as being the "internal goal" of simply mulling it over).

What you're talking about specifically in this case, however, is things that you do not sense affecting the decision--these are merely things that are outside of the interconnected information sharing network--the planning complex per se. It actually "feels like" something for such things to occur, and we have terms for it--it "popped into my head", it "suddenly occurred to me", it "was a sudden flash of insight", and so forth. Basically, some process--equally "teleological" to and compatible with the things the planning complex does (that it, it works with these goal based behavioral "axioms", and is able to correctly "convey" this to the network), shoves these things into our planning complex.

There's no particular mental sensation that these things are uncaused--there is, however, because they originate from the "side" of certain modules not exposed to the information sharing network requisite for it, a lack of sensation of how they originate--we simply don't sense it, because it's a product of something simply not connected to the thing required for us to sense it.

To account for why it's different every time is trivial. First off, we start off in a chaotically different state and, not knowing or sensing what we don't know or sense, it's not terribly difficult to imagine that the specific reasons for the specific selections when it doesn't matter may have to do with trivial things such as which notion of a plan of action got developed first, or strongest, which could easily depend on things such as the "nearest involved neuron to an impulse". Second, one of the most relevant inputs into how we should go about performing this challenge is our memory that we developed of how we did it the last time (and it turns out this is actually a pretty big factor when humans actually try to generate randomness, though I think I'd be forced to show papers for this one, as I don't think I can argue for it from a subjective point of view). So it doesn't have to be genuinely random to be different--there's enough genuine entropy (and pseudo-entropy) within the system as it is.

All of this is perfectly consistent with these modules being deterministic, without ever invoking the theory that the thing I'm sensing is actually in error about something.

[Yoink]

I'll try... I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to get at, and obviously, I don't have complete knowledge of this, so all I can do is rant about what I know.

So piecing together, you seem to want, from this:


For me to do this:

Account for particular timings of impulse of decision
Account for reasons for particular decisions
Account for the variability with repeated runs of the same trial

Given this, it helps to start at the beginning, and in this case, the beginning happens before the problem was posed to me. Naturally, while I'm awake, my mind wanders from place to place, as this flood of sensations (both internal and external) trigger thoughts, which trigger integrations, some of which are novel to me (not at all unlike the checkers program searching the decision tree, except that here it's the thing that's happening in "idle"), and some of the novel things may actually prove interesting enough that they give me ideas for later--others simply serve as starting points to trigger other thoughts, or are so boring, they become "dead ends" that lead to other things that "pop into my head" starting new chains of thoughts.

The reason to start before the problem is to make it perfectly clear that this is the mental landscape--the environment--into which the challenge is introduced in the first place. As challenges go, this isn't a particularly difficult one to "solve", because it's the same kind of things we do all of the time--in fact, we are almost certainly not likely to judge this as a "challenge" in the first place.

Now it's probably also crucial to point out that the planning complex per se isn't the only thing involved in planning--it's merely the (to use a more standard term) the global workspace where information is shared between a number of modules. A portion of what goes on in the process of planning occurs in some of these modules in such a way that the information is simply not conveyed to this complex. The defining factor from a subjective point of view of whether or not something is inside of this planning complex is whether or not the information is available for you to consider, and do "whatever" with ("whatever"-ness literally implies that it's within the interconnected network of modules--you could even think of one possible thing to accomplish as being the "internal goal" of simply mulling it over).

What you're talking about specifically in this case, however, is things that you do not sense affecting the decision--these are merely things that are outside of the interconnected information sharing network--the planning complex per se. It actually "feels like" something for such things to occur, and we have terms for it--it "popped into my head", it "suddenly occurred to me", it "was a sudden flash of insight", and so forth. Basically, some process--equally "teleological" to and compatible with the things the planning complex does (that it, it works with these goal based behavioral "axioms", and is able to correctly "convey" this to the network), shoves these things into our planning complex.

There's no particular mental sensation that these things are uncaused--there is, however, because they originate from the "side" of certain modules not exposed to the information sharing network requisite for it, a lack of sensation of how they originate--we simply don't sense it, because it's a product of something simply not connected to the thing required for us to sense it.

To account for why it's different every time is trivial. First off, we start off in a chaotically different state and, not knowing or sensing what we don't know or sense, it's not terribly difficult to imagine that the specific reasons for the specific selections when it doesn't matter may have to do with trivial things such as which notion of a plan of action got developed first, or strongest, which could easily depend on things such as the "nearest involved neuron to an impulse". Second, one of the most relevant inputs into how we should go about performing this challenge is our memory that we developed of how we did it the last time (and it turns out this is actually a pretty big factor when humans actually try to generate randomness, though I think I'd be forced to show papers for this one, as I don't think I can argue for it from a subjective point of view). So it doesn't have to be genuinely random to be different--there's enough genuine entropy (and pseudo-entropy) within the system as it is.

All of this is perfectly consistent with these modules being deterministic, without ever invoking the theory that the thing I'm sensing is actually in error about something.

1/ Well, thanks for this, but I'm afraid you wandered away from the point. You got back into arguing the "determinism" question and forgot to actually provide a model of how the decision gets arrived at. I suspect it's quite difficult to model within the framework you sketched earlier, but I would be interested to see how you'd do so.

2/ On the Solid Wall/Empty Cup front, I think I've come up with a pretty good example that shows the limitations of that distinction.

Say you attend a magic show in which the magician performs a "levitation" trick. He waves his hands over the body of his beautiful assistant and the body rises three feet into the air; he waves his hands again and the body floats gently back down.

Now, ask everybody in the room "did you witness an illusion of levitation" and the universal answer would be "yes." I think you'd have to agree that it would be a pretty forced definition of the word "illusion" that would exclude this trick.

Unfortunately, it would also be your definition of the word. Because, after all, the "uncausedness" (at least with respect to mundane physical causes) of the levitation is not "witnessed." Nothing the people at the show saw was in any way incompatible with mundane causality (in fact they saw exactly what you would expect to see when a body is lifted by whatever mundane method the magician is actually using); it's just that the 'real' causes were hidden behind the Solid Wall of the magician's misdirection and clever lighting etc.

This is why I've been saying that you're just quibbling over the definition of the word "illusion" (and why I think you are wrong to keep trying to box me into the position of saying that perceived incompatibility means real or logical incompatibility; the audience for the magic show says "the illusion of levitation was perfect" even as it says "of course there must be some mundane explanation for it").

3/ Finally, there is a particular model of "unfree will" which has been in the back of my mind throughout this discussion which might explain a certain amount of "talking past each other" in this argument. That is the model that suggests that the moment of conscious decision actually trails the moment at which the body is determined in its course of action.

If this finding (which, as you know, many experiments have tentatively confirmed) holds up and becomes our fundamental model of conscious "willing" would you agree in that case that "free will" was simply an illusion?

It strikes me that your argument is premised upon a pretty "optimistic" version of free will. You believe in a model in which the brain consciously "decides" to do something and the body's actions follow on (deterministically) from that moment of "decision." But if you were persuaded by experimental data that the moment of conscious "decision" is, in fact, a mere epiphenomenon--a piece of mental theater that provides us with a reassuring but essentially meaningless feeling of "control"--that at no point are our conscious deliberations actually determinative, would you then agree that "free will" as we consciously understand it is a mere illusion?

[Yoink]

No reason at all, as in a random decision?

~~ Paul

I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a correspondence with people living on another planet.

Are you seriously arguing that it's a novel idea for you that someone might say, in response to the question "why did you pick that one?", something like "no reason, I just had to make a decision so I chose arbitrarily."

We make decisions all the time for which we can give no determining rationale. I used the pale green cup for my morning smoothie this morning rather than the pale pink one which was beside it and which I use just as often. I have no idea at all why I chose the pink one rather than the green one. Tomorrow the green one will be nearest the front of the cupboard, so I will know why I choose the green one tomorrow. But today the pink and the green were equally close to hand, they were equally functional, I don't have a preference for the color of either, nor a preference for the feeling of the lip. On another occasion when they are both there and arranged in exactly the same way I will almost certainly pick the pink one rather than the green one.

I was presented with a choice. I had no reason at all to go for one over the other, but because it would have been wasteful to get down twice as many cups as I needed, I simply had to make a free and unconditioned choice. So I did so--without wasting a moment's time on it. I would contend that such choices occur thousands of times every day. Oddly enough, they don't cause the brain to freeze in despair as it says "but, but, there's no clear optimal course! I have to choose arbitrarily!"

[dlorde]

I was presented with a choice. I had no reason at all to go for one over the other, but because it would have been wasteful to get down twice as many cups as I needed, I simply had to make a free and unconditioned choice. So I did so--without wasting a moment's time on it. I would contend that such choices occur thousands of times every day. Oddly enough, they don't cause the brain to freeze in despair as it says "but, but, there's no clear optimal course! I have to choose arbitrarily!"
The fact that you were not consciously aware of the reason for your choice doesn't mean that there was no reason. There may have been no preference strong enough at that time for you to be consciously aware of, or perhaps your consciousness was not maintaining any significant preferences, but a selection was made - I suggest that it was whichever option in your subconscious evaluations happened to have the 'highest profile' at the point the decision was required - it was most probably a trivial reason, which is perhaps why you were not consciously aware of it.

In my experience of these situations (and I am notoriously indecisive), my conscious awareness generally decides I have no significant preference (which may in all honesty be true, but is sometimes false because I just feel that, rationally, I should have no preference) and so it (I) attempts to avoid responsibility for the decision, delegating to, or abdicating in favour of, some internal process. I find myself waiting for some decision to pop into my awareness, but I actually have to express it for it to appear, and then I often do get some awareness of the reason behind it, but, having decided the decision must be 'arbitrary', I generally suppress it and/or introspect no further. Either way, I consciously rationalise that 'delegating' to some deeper process may give a 'truer' decision (more in tune with my inner desires), and at the same time, I absolve myself of conscious responsibility for a poor decision. It is a false absolution, of course, but it works at the time.

[Yoink]

The fact that you were not consciously aware of the reason for your choice doesn't mean that there was no reason. There may have been no preference strong enough at that time for you to be consciously aware of, or perhaps your consciousness was not maintaining any significant preferences, but a selection was made - I suggest that it was whichever option in your subconscious evaluations happened to have the 'highest profile' at the point the decision was required - it was most probably a trivial reason, which is perhaps why you were not consciously aware of it.

In my experience of these situations (and I am notoriously indecisive), my conscious awareness generally decides I have no significant preference (which may in all honesty be true, but is sometimes false because I just feel that, rationally, I should have no preference) and so it (I) attempts to avoid responsibility for the decision, delegating to, or abdicating in favour of, some internal process. I find myself waiting for some decision to pop into my awareness, but I actually have to express it for it to appear, and then I often do get some awareness of the reason behind it, but, having decided the decision must be 'arbitrary', I generally suppress it and/or introspect no further. Either way, I consciously rationalise that 'delegating' to some deeper process may give a 'truer' decision (more in tune with my inner desires), and at the same time, I absolve myself of conscious responsibility for a poor decision. It is a false absolution, of course, but it works at the time.

This is all obviously true. I'm talking about our subjective interpretation of what happened and not the "actual facts." It is, of course, possible (indeed probable) that in reality some deterministic process was at work that lead inexorably to me selecting green rather than pink. The point is, though, that that process is utterly inaccessible to my conscious introspection. I'm arguing for the point of view that we have, at the very least, an illusion of free will, and that one of the types of situations where we feel most fully that the will is "free" (however much that feeling may be an illusion) is when we make a choice for which we can provide (and can discover) no reasons.

That such reasons in all probability do, in fact, exist is neither here nor there in reference to my argument.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Are you seriously arguing that it's a novel idea for you that someone might say, in response to the question "why did you pick that one?", something like "no reason, I just had to make a decision so I chose arbitrarily."
Oh, they might say that, but I have no idea what they mean. How did they make this arbitrary decision?


I was presented with a choice. I had no reason at all to go for one over the other, but because it would have been wasteful to get down twice as many cups as I needed, I simply had to make a free and unconditioned choice. So I did so--without wasting a moment's time on it. I would contend that such choices occur thousands of times every day. Oddly enough, they don't cause the brain to freeze in despair as it says "but, but, there's no clear optimal course! I have to choose arbitrarily!"
Who said it would freeze? I'm just trying to understand whether you think you're describing a form of free will, a random decision, or a predetermined but not understood decision.


This is all obviously true. I'm talking about our subjective interpretation of what happened and not the "actual facts." It is, of course, possible (indeed probable) that in reality some deterministic process was at work that lead inexorably to me selecting green rather than pink. The point is, though, that that process is utterly inaccessible to my conscious introspection. I'm arguing for the point of view that we have, at the very least, an illusion of free will, and that one of the types of situations where we feel most fully that the will is "free" (however much that feeling may be an illusion) is when we make a choice for which we can provide (and can discover) no reasons.
Okay, this helps. However, I have to disagree with your feeling. When I make a decision whose origin I don't understand, I mostly certainly do not feel that it is a free decision. It's supposed to be my free will after all, so if I didn't witness myself making a decision, it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with me.

~~ Paul

[Yoink]

Oh, they might say that, but I have no idea what they mean. How did they make this arbitrary decision?


Who said it would freeze? I'm just trying to understand whether you think you're describing a form of free will, a random decision, or a predetermined but not understood decision.


Okay, this helps. However, I have to disagree with your feeling. When I make a decision whose origin I don't understand, I mostly certainly do not feel that it is a free decision. It's supposed to be my free will after all, so if I didn't witness myself making a decision, it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with me.

~~ Paul

So you've never, not once in your whole life, been in the situation of having to choose between options and having no conscious, rational basis for the choice you make? Every single time you consciously choose something you feel that you could lay out an explicit rational case for why you chose the way your did?

Well, that may be true, but it certainly makes you unlike the vast majority of homo sapiens sapiens.

[yy2bggggs]

1/ Well, thanks for this, but I'm afraid you wandered away from the point. You got back into arguing the "determinism" question and forgot to actually provide a model of how the decision gets arrived at. I suspect it's quite difficult to model within the framework you sketched earlier, but I would be interested to see how you'd do so.
Sure... because the whole question, as I see it, is how to reconcile the subjective view with determinism, I'm forced to only describe things from this view. But...
2/ On the Solid Wall/Empty Cup front, I think I've come up with a pretty good example that shows the limitations of that distinction.

Say you attend a magic show in which the magician performs a "levitation" trick. He waves his hands over the body of his beautiful assistant and the body rises three feet into the air; he waves his hands again and the body floats gently back down.

Now, ask everybody in the room "did you witness an illusion of levitation" and the universal answer would be "yes." I think you'd have to agree that it would be a pretty forced definition of the word "illusion" that would exclude this trick.

Unfortunately, it would also be your definition of the word. Because, after all, the "uncausedness" (at least with respect to mundane physical causes) of the levitation is not "witnessed."

Nothing the people at the show saw was in any way incompatible with mundane causality (in fact they saw exactly what you would expect to see when a body is lifted by whatever mundane method the magician is actually using); it's just that the 'real' causes were hidden behind the Solid Wall of the magician's misdirection and clever lighting etc.
Ah, magic... here are a few views:
Wikipedia explains magic as "the practice of consciousness manipulation and/or autosuggestion to achieve a desired result".
Etymologically, magic [etymoline] (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=magic) traces meanings to the "art of influencing events and producing marvels"
In hacker lingo, magic (2) (http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic.html) is "characteristic of something that works but you don't know how"
...so given these senses of the word "magic", again, in terms of sensation per se, your analogy here is almost so applicable that it's not even an analogy at all.

So, the analogy may actually be too apt for your own good. After all, what exactly is the illusory phenomenon here, but that the magician is causing his beautiful assistant to levitate by merely willing her to do so (wiki, etymonline) by some means unknown to you (esr)? This being almost an exact analogy to the situation where we merely will ourselves to do something by some means unknown to us, it seems contrived for you to suddenly make causality be represented by apparent mundane physical causality and non-causality by apparent non-mundane physical causality in order to make the point that we actively sense non-causality. It would appear to me that the proper analogy is simply the straightforward one--the magician is there, we don't see the cause, the magician appears to be willing the levitation--why not simply discuss whether or not what he appears to be doing is uncaused, at face value?

Furthermore, this seems to be a case of "proof by analogy" of a principle for which a counterexample was already given--that principle being that if you do not sense the cause behind something, then that something should seem uncaused. The counterexample was that I sense my heart beating, but do not sense the cause behind that, but I also do not sense that my heartbeat is uncaused.
(and why I think you are wrong to keep trying to box me into the position
...that you actually hold...
of saying that perceived incompatibility means real or logical incompatibility
That whole phrase is wrong. Compatibilism and Incompatibilism are technical terms--they have nothing to do with this:
the audience for the magic show says "the illusion of levitation was perfect" even as it says "of course there must be some mundane explanation for it").
...which is a broken analogy. The fact that the audience says that the levitation was an illusion because there was a mundane explanation means that the audience believes that actual levitation is incompatible with mundane explanations.

You believe that actual free will is incompatible with determinism, for some sort of "actual free will" that you simply call free will. This sort of free will--this incompatabilist free will--is something you claim that we have an illusion of. It is that that I'm arguing against, and though no doubt I'll have to explain this again in the next post, I happen to be amused enough to keep this going.
3/ Finally, there is a particular model of "unfree will" which has been in the back of my mind throughout this discussion which might explain a certain amount of "talking past each other" in this argument. That is the model that suggests that the moment of conscious decision actually trails the moment at which the body is determined in its course of action. If this finding (which, as you know, many experiments have tentatively confirmed) holds up and becomes our fundamental model of conscious "willing" would you agree in that case that "free will" was simply an illusion?
First off, you would have to define both "moment of conscious decision" and "moment at which the body is determined in its course of action", which are ill-defined in my model, and I don't believe you can point me to any experiment that successfully defines either of them--in fact, I don't think the notion is even coherent ("conscious decision" certainly doesn't sound like a thing happening at a "moment" to me). Second, I don't think the order is as critical as you make it out to be--such confuses who we are with what we are aware of. But more to the point, this isn't the point anyway.

The point I was making was that the incompatiblist notion of free will--that "uncaused causy thingy"--is not something you have an illusion of--see above--because there's no such thing as a "sense of being uncaused".
It strikes me that your argument is premised upon a pretty "optimistic" version of free will.
Which would have nothing to do with anything.
You believe in a model in which the brain consciously "decides" to do something and the body's actions follow on (deterministically) from that moment of "decision."
Didn't I just explain how that wasn't the case? The brain decides to do something, you become aware of it, and your body follows through with it. There's no specified order this has to happen in, except that the commitment to a particular option (aka decision) must preceed the body following through (strictly it doesn't have to, and sometimes it actually does slip, but when you try to do two different things at once you'll notice it very quickly).
But if you were persuaded by experimental data that the moment of conscious "decision" is, in fact, a mere epiphenomenon--a piece of mental theater that provides us with a reassuring but essentially meaningless feeling of "control"--that at no point are our conscious deliberations actually determinative, would you then agree that "free will" as we consciously understand it is a mere illusion?
Why yes, tautologies are true.

[H'ethetheth]

I didn't read everything yet, but I didn't see this mentioned. (apologies if it was or if I didn't understand it when it was)

If we assume for the sake of argument that determinism is true, there is no way to agree with premise 2 (What should be done, can be done): Seeing how we can only do what we actually turn out doing, how can we be sure this necessarily coincides with what should be done?
I.e. this premise is already an implicit rejection of determinism; finding that it leads to a contradiction with determinism is less than surprising.


Carry on :popcorn1

[Yoink]

Sure... because the whole question, as I see it, is how to reconcile the subjective view with determinism, I'm forced to only describe things from this view. But...

So you're incapable of coming up with any explanation of some "behind the Solid Wall" process by which a decision is arrived at in this instance? I find that rather odd.


Ah, magic... here are a few views:

Wikipedia explains magic as "the practice of consciousness manipulation and/or autosuggestion to achieve a desired result".
Etymologically, magic [etymoline] (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=magic) traces meanings to the "art of influencing events and producing marvels"
In hacker lingo, magic (2) (http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic.html) is "characteristic of something that works but you don't know how"
...so given these senses of the word "magic", again, in terms of sensation per se, your analogy here is almost so applicable that it's not even an analogy at all.

So, the analogy may actually be too apt for your own good. After all, what exactly is the illusory phenomenon here, but that the magician is causing his beautiful assistant to levitate by merely willing her to do so (wiki, etymonline) by some means unknown to you (esr)? This being almost an exact analogy to the situation where we merely will ourselves to do something by some means unknown to us, it seems contrived for you to suddenly make causality be represented by apparent mundane physical causality and non-causality by apparent non-mundane physical causality in order to make the point that we actively sense non-causality. It would appear to me that the proper analogy is simply the straightforward one--the magician is there, we don't see the cause, the magician appears to be willing the levitation--why not simply discuss whether or not what he appears to be doing is uncaused, at face value?

Furthermore, this seems to be a case of "proof by analogy" of a principle for which a counterexample was already given--that principle being that if you do not sense the cause behind something, then that something should seem uncaused. The counterexample was that I sense my heart beating, but do not sense the cause behind that, but I also do not sense that my heartbeat is uncaused.

None of this seems to address my point. You seem, in fact, to be doing exactly what I predicted--you're saying "well, this doesn't work with my argument, so I'll just pretend that this phenomenon, which every competent speaker of English will happily call an 'illusion' is not really an illusion."

By the way, I think there's been a confusion running through this argument which I should have addressed earlier that centers on the word "sense." You talk above of "sensing" non-causality as if we had some sixth sense capable of doing such a thing. This is a confusion which I think I contributed to by using the word "feel" which I was using in the loosest possible ordinary-language way (i.e., "we feel that our choice is unconstrained..."), but which you seem to have interpreted as meaning "we sense in the same way that we sense heat or color that our choice is unconstrained..." Of course "uncausedness" cannot be "sensed" in the way that "red" is "sensed." So in that sense "uncausedness" cannot be an Empty Cup to causedness's Cup-with-Contents.

But here is where the Empty Cup model falls apart (as it does so spectacularly in the case of the levitation trick). The problem you have is that there is "Cup-with-Content" for causedness. There is no situation in which we "sense" causedness. Ever since Hume we've known that "causedness" is always an inference from constant conjunction coupled with sequentiality.

What causes the "illusion" of levitation in the magic trick is simply that there's nothing available for us to infer "causedness" from--so we infer "uncausedness" (or, at least, unphysicalcausedness). If we happened to glimpse a glint from a monofilament wire we would infer physical "causedness"--but we would not be "sensing" causedness in that instant any more than we "sensed" uncausedness in the first. In both cases we would be making an "inference" to arrive at a judgment (a "feeling" about what is going on).

Now, my sole contention is that our "feeling" about the way our will "works" could be illusory. We "feel" that our actions are unconstrained by prior determinants and infer (except, apparently, for the robots from planet X who frequent the JREF forum ;)) from the available data that our ability to decide is absolute and arbitrary.

...that you actually hold...

Sigh.

That whole phrase is wrong. Compatibilism and Incompatibilism are technical terms--they have nothing to do with this:

Just because they have technical meanings does not mean you are incapable of reading a sentence that uses them in their everyday dictionary senses.

...which is a broken analogy. The fact that the audience says that the levitation was an illusion because there was a mundane explanation means that the audience believes that actual levitation is incompatible with mundane explanations.

You phrase that incorrectly. The audience believes that "actual levitation" would appear exactly the way it appeared in the trick that they just saw. In other words, they hold themselves to have been subject to an "illusion" of "actual levitation." They infer--from what they know of the world--that what they saw was "merely" illusory--just as I infer from what I take to be the probable structure of the universe that what I "feel" about my free will is "merely" illusory. There's no break in the analogy at all.

You believe that actual free will is incompatible with determinism, for some sort of "actual free will" that you simply call free will.

No, I believe that what I feel about my free will is incompatible with determinism. Just as I believe that what I feel I am seeing at a magic show (i.e., the obvious explanation of the phenomena I experience) is incompatible with what I know of the way the world really works.

This sort of free will--this incompatabilist free will--is something you claim that we have an illusion of. It is that that I'm arguing against, and though no doubt I'll have to explain this again in the next post, I happen to be amused enough to keep this going.

So if you do 'keep going' I really wish you'd offer a model of how the decision making process operates in cases where there is no possible "best outcome."

First off, you would have to define both "moment of conscious decision" and "moment at which the body is determined in its course of action", which are ill-defined in my model, and I don't believe you can point me to any experiment that successfully defines either of them--in fact, I don't think the notion is even coherent ("conscious decision" certainly doesn't sound like a thing happening at a "moment" to me). Second, I don't think the order is as critical as you make it out to be--such confuses who we are with what we are aware of. But more to the point, this isn't the point anyway.

Just googled the exact phrase "moment of decision"--roughly 6 million hits. If it doesn't feel like a "moment" to you that may be a robot from planet X thing. It "feels" like a moment to almost everyone else. One second we are undecided, the next a decision has been made.

I think it's amusing that you say that order isn't critical. "Order" is one of the only bits of "sense" data we have from which to infer causality. Unless you're coming up with some theory of backwards causation on the fly, "order" is everything.

Now, none of the experiments that have been performed are determinative yet, of course--but it's not hard to imagine that this is something that might some day be proven conclusively.

It seems to me simply self-evident that free will as we understand it naively to operate would be an illusion if all conscious deliberation and the conscious sense of a "moment of decision" at which the choice were made were, in fact, subsequent to the actual process of determining our future course of action.

The point I was making was that the incompatiblist notion of free will--that "uncaused causy thingy"--is not something you have an illusion of--see above--because there's no such thing as a "sense of being uncaused".

Nor, in the way that you are using the word "sense" is there a "sense of being caused." So that's neither here nor there.

Which would have nothing to do with anything.

Didn't I just explain how that wasn't the case? The brain decides to do something, you become aware of it, and your body follows through with it. There's no specified order this has to happen in, except that the commitment to a particular option (aka decision) must preceed the body following through (strictly it doesn't have to, and sometimes it actually does slip, but when you try to do two different things at once you'll notice it very quickly).

The "no specified order" claim here just seems bizarre. How could you possibly maintain that our natural understanding of the operation of the will is not illusory if the conscious moment of "decision" is, in fact, nothing but an empty piece of mental theater which could be excised from the process without altering the action of the body?

Why yes, tautologies are true.

And with this you seem to concede my entire argument; it's possible that our conception of the operation of the will is entirely illusory, because it's possible that everything we feel about the operation of the will is purely a mental theater that in no way contributes to the actual operation or determination of the body's actions.

So, thanks for agreeing with me, I guess.

[yy2bggggs]

Post #188:
Can I truly and freely decide whether or not to lift my arm (say) at a given moment or would an all-knowing demon who was fed every single piece of information about my mental and physical state prior to the moment of lifting be able to predict exactly what I was going to do.
Post #189:
What does this demon have to do with whether or not you are the one who made the decision?
Post #190:
If the demon can predict which way I will "decide" before I am aware of having made the decision then it seems fairly self-evidently the case that my conscous sensation of being able to freely and arbitrarily decide whether or not to lift my limbs at any given moment is illusory.

So in post #190, you claim that you have a conscious sensation of something. Whatever this thing is, if determinism is true, then this conscious sensation that you have is an illusion.

My argument was, and is, that whatever kind of thing you could accuse of being an illusion in post #190 is certainly not coming from your conscious sensations, and that if you believe that things appear this way, it's because you're mistaken about something.
So you're incapable of coming up with any explanation of some "behind the Solid Wall" process by which a decision is arrived at in this instance? I find that rather odd.
Of course you do, because you have yet to catch up with the thing you said in post #190 that I'm disagreeing with. But in post #190, this thing--whatever it is--that you claim to consciously sense and to be an illusion, is something that I'm claiming you don't consciously sense.
None of this seems to address my point. You seem, in fact, to be doing exactly what I predicted--you're saying "well, this doesn't work with my argument, so I'll just pretend that this phenomenon, which every competent speaker of English will happily call an 'illusion' is not really an illusion."You've committed quite a few logical fallacies in that statement.
By the way, I think there's been a confusion running through this argument which I should have addressed earlier that centers on the word "sense."Yes, that would be post #190.
You talk above of "sensing" non-causality as if we had some sixth sense capable of doing such a thing. This is a confusion which I think I contributed to by using the word "feel" which I was using in the loosest possible ordinary-language way (i.e., "we feel that our choice is unconstrained..."), but which you seem to have interpreted as meaning "we sense in the same way that we sense heat or color that our choice is unconstrained..." Of course "uncausedness" cannot be "sensed" in the way that "red" is "sensed." So in that sense "uncausedness" cannot be an Empty Cup to causedness's Cup-with-Contents.
"Unconstrained" and "uncaused" are the same thing. And no, you introduced this in the very post #190 that started this particular discussion.
But here is where the Empty Cup model falls apart (as it does so spectacularly in the case of the levitation trick). The problem you have is that there is "Cup-with-Content" for causedness. There is no situation in which we "sense" causedness. Ever since Hume we've known that "causedness" is always an inference from constant conjunction coupled with sequentiality.No, we sense causation. Your principle leads to an absurdity, since it could apply to all sensations. It's not just the emptiness of cups that falls away when you exclude the inferred from the sensations--it's also sight, smell, taste, touch, balance, proprioception, etc--all of these are inferred.
What causes the "illusion" of levitation in the magic trick is simply that there's nothing available for us to infer "causedness" from--so we infer "uncausedness" (or, at least, unphysicalcausedness).Are you ignoring my objection?

We are here, the magician is here. We seem to control our actions, the magician seems to control levitation. Our control seems to be due to our will, the magician seems to levitate using his will.

Here is my objection. Why do you need to suddenly switch and bait as such? {We don't seem to be causal ourselves... just as the magician doesn't seem to be causal in a physical sense }

I mean, apple is to apple tree as orange is to orange tree. Wednesday is to Thursday as Chi is to Delta. Right? It's the same thing, only easier. Not sensing particular causes behind intent is to sensing no cause as not sensing particular causes behind intent is to _____.

The answer is "sensing no cause".

The contorted answer you offer is "sensing no physical cause".

It just doesn't fit! It's forced! Everything about the magician is a near exact analogy, but when it comes to the very thing that's supposed to demonstrate the very point you use, in this very example that you brought up, suddenly you have to reach for an out of the blue non-analogous entity just to be able to reach your conclusion.

What's the point of the entire analogy if it defeats your point without pounding in a non-analogous mapping back to it? It certainly doesn't demonstrate the truth of your position that you have to qualify this just to make it fit, especially when the straightforward analogy simply does not fit!
Now, my sole contention is that our "feeling" about the way our will "works" could be illusory.
It can only be illusory if it genuinely is something we sense. Otherwise, it's just a mistaken notion. The thing you are saying is sensed is something you are claiming isn't compatible with determinism--in particular, it's "that we don't cause things", and this is a modal mistake, because it's not an Empty Cup sensation.

My analogies aren't falling over, you are.
We "feel" that our actions are unconstrained by prior determinants and infer (except, apparently, for the robots from planet X who frequent the JREF forum ;)) from the available data that our ability to decide is absolute and arbitrary.I'm not the only compatibilist in the world, you know.
Just because they have technical meanings does not mean you are incapable of reading a sentence that uses them in their everyday dictionary senses.
This is backwards. In post #255, you say this:
(and why I think you are wrong to keep trying to box me into the position of saying that perceived incompatibility means real or logical incompatibility;
...actually does represent my view, apparently expressed in #242, but you were misreading it. There, I asked you why Y doesn't allow for X, but you think I'm asking why Y doesn't allow for the sensation of X, as expressed in post #246, and for some reason every time I correct you on this point, you somehow think I'm misunderstanding what you are saying.

In post #247, I told you that it was not your anti-determinism, but your incompatiblism, which is at issue. That's when the term incompatibilism got introduced here. And guess what? I meant it in the technical sense! The fact that you didn't mean it in the technical sense in your last post doesn't have anything to do with the highlighted phrase in post #255, above, being a severe misrepresentation of the question I'm asking you in post #246.

So, why exactly does X conflict with Y?
No, I believe that what I feel about my free will is incompatible with determinism.Exactly. And that makes you an incompatibilist--per the technical term, and per my accusations dating all the way back to post #190, ever since which you've been having this silly notion that I was pegging you as this, that, or the other that you weren't, but which post #190 makes it painfully obvious that you actually are. I've been disagreeing that you feel it in any immutable sense of the word requisite to call it an illusion ever since post #198.

And as a compatibilist who doesn't hold this mistaken notion, I "should" know, unless somehow there actually are two different kinds of people and I am missing a flawed sense, which I would hold as a legitimate possibility, except that I've never found an incompatibilist who didn't hold the notion that control per se implies indeterminism.
So if you do 'keep going' I really wish you'd offer a model of how the decision making process operates in cases where there is no possible "best outcome."I'd be happy to, but later. I'm having a hard enough time trying to get you to focus on the thing I am actually taking issue with as it is. The only point in exposing a teaser of compatiblist free will is to demonstrate that us compatibilists actually do exist. If you note, I wasn't the only compatibilist to actually speak up! (I'm just the noisiest and most annoying, such that once I get started rambling the rest go on and do more interesting things).
Just googled the exact phrase "moment of decision"--roughly 6 million hits. If it doesn't feel like a "moment" to you that may be a robot from planet X thing. It "feels" like a moment to almost everyone else. One second we are undecided, the next a decision has been made.
This is an argumentum ad populam, and furthermore, you are, possibly without knowing it, handwaving. Here is what you wrote in post #255:
3/ Finally, there is a particular model of "unfree will" which has been in the back of my mind throughout this discussion which might explain a certain amount of "talking past each other" in this argument. That is the model that suggests that the moment of conscious decision actually trails the moment at which the body is determined in its course of action.
You even have the word conscious here italicized--furthermore, you go out of your way to emphasize the importance that this be conscious. If you pay attention to my objection, I'm objecting to there being such a thing as a moment of conscious decision.

The problem is that you want to define a moment where the decision is conscious, but consciousness is not a momentary phenomenon. We don't even sense that it is--if you imagine that time just froze, could you be capable of imagining being "in the middle of a particular thought"?

Breaking it apart another way, awareness per se cannot actually decide something--awareness is, subjectively, a passive kind of thing, yet deciding is an active kind of thing, and you can't "aware" up a decision. So what has to happen in order for a decision that you make to be something you are aware of? Your model suggests that in order for you to have control, you must be made aware of the decision before the decision actually happens, but even so--how would that work? And what would your passive awareness-ness do to the decision?

Decide it? Well, there are two problems. First, you already have the "decision" going to become "aware" before it "happens", and second, your "awareness-ness" is a passive thing anyway--if your "awareness-ness" decides the decision, that would simply be the decision in the first place, wouldn't it? There's an incoherent "chicken-and-egg" scenario here with two pieces of yourself.
I think it's amusing that you say that order isn't critical. "Order" is one of the only bits of "sense" data we have from which to infer causality. Unless you're coming up with some theory of backwards causation on the fly, "order" is everything.
It's not the causality that's the problem--it's your attempt to imagine yourself as a single "spot" inside your head. You are, I surmise, thinking along those lines--that we only cause things if it's first brought attention to the "spot", and then, the "spot" (and the entire spot!) makes a decision on it, and then, the "spot" causes things to happen. But you don't even sense yourself as being a spot.
Now, none of the experiments that have been performed are determinative yet, of course--but it's not hard to imagine that this is something that might some day be proven conclusively.
It'd be better to base your theories on what actually has been determined, don't you think?
It seems to me simply self-evident that free will as we understand it naively to operate would be an illusion if all conscious deliberation and the conscious sense of a "moment of decision" at which the choice were made were, in fact, subsequent to the actual process of determining our future course of action.
Let me offer you a different view. You aren't a spot somewhere in your head--you're an entire complex entity--all of these particular little things you can do are separate things that collaborate into being you. You're are, legitimately, psychically reducible into simpler pieces just as sure as that, and in an isomorphic way to, you are neurally reducible. Awareness is a piece of what you are, but not all of you, and most certainly you aren't what you are aware of. Your "conscious" mind consists of the teleological pieces which you know are there, and here, I'm using the term "know" in a slightly technical sense invoking epistemology (that is, that you have theories of your self--recursively, represented in this teleological virtual framework, and certain of those theories are justifiable, true, and causally influenced by the things that make them true). Awareness, however, is a process whereby multiple aspects of yourself--which are not in a spot, but distributed throughout your brain--obtain information about things. The "things" that go on in your head consist of these "teleologically useful" chunks of representation.

So if "you" believe yourself to like chocolate, and you actually do have a preference for consuming chocolate, and your belief is actually somehow the causal result of your preference to each chocolate, and your body reaches for a bowl of chocolate ice cream next to vanilla, and it's because the preference you had for consuming chocolate per se influenced your body to select the chocolate, then what room is there to claim that you didn't actually reach for chocolate because you liked chocolate? Even if, in this scenario, the thing that recognized that there was chocolate initiated the reaching for the chocolate some several scores of milliseconds before "hey, there's chocolate!" actually starts propogating throughout the network? In other words, in what manner that actually makes sense can you say that this wasn't the result of your preference for chocolate, but instead, must have been the result of some thing that happened to reach for chocolate?

And keep in mind that grabbing a bowl of chocolate ice cream is an insanely complicated kind of thing to do in the first place, most easily described as an interactive system that can actually accomplish the goal, on the level of modeling that a particular lump of matter is "chocolate ice cream", that this particular complex dance of behaviors moves an arm towards and grabs a bowl without tipping it over, etc, etc... i.e., even if this were a "mindless process", it is still best described as a purposeful one, working with the same levels of categorizations that you seem to work with in the first place, and successfully picking up, and partaking, chocolate ice cream, in a bowl, without even tipping it over! All of this would have to be not you in a meaningful sense.

Now really... in this light... does the sequence of events in which you perform this insanely complicated task (try programming a robot to pick up chocolate ice cream if you're so tempted to rule this out as a simple thing) really matter?

Or, say you were walking around a mall, and suddenly a noise breaks out of the void. Some piece of your brain recognizes that this noise is a voice, and recognizes that the voice matches that of a close friend you haven't seen in a while. Some other piece recognizes that this is your name being called. Some other piece starts to initiate the muscle movements for a smile, and another halts the walk and begins the act of turning around. Only after all of this, does the "hey, that's my close friend that I haven't seen in a long time" actually make it into the shared network, where you can formulate thoughts about it and, say, begin to hold it in your mind, start to speak about it, think of what you want to say to the friend, or whatever.

Would you then say that you didn't recognize your friend? That you didn't smile, stop, and turn around because you weren't happy to hear the voice of a close friend call your name, simply because the awareness happened after the initiation of the events?

This isn't about whether or not you are the one that caused the events--and whether, as a consequence, some "you spot" in your head has to become aware of the event first, then act on it. This is about whether or not you are some silly spot in your head at all, or whether "you" are a complex distributed entity in itself, with each little divisible aspect of "you-ness" happening separately.
Nor, in the way that you are using the word "sense" is there a "sense of being caused." So that's neither here nor there.What about the sense which is immutable in the requisite sense such that you maintain an illusion of it even in the face of disbelief in it, as you do in post #190? After all, that--in particular, what you said in post #190--is what I've been calling you out on all this time.
The "no specified order" claim here just seems bizarre. How could you possibly maintain that our natural understanding of the operation of the will is not illusory if the conscious moment of "decision" is, in fact, nothing but an empty piece of mental theater which could be excised from the process without altering the action of the body?
It's bizarre only because you insist on putting the "I" at a single spot and giving it all of your subjective duties, and this "I" in the single spot must either have the entirety of your subjective capabilities, or not exist. In other words, you're somewhat of a psychic holist, as opposed to my psychic reductionist view. I don't think this "I spot" is even physically realizable, in the sense that we shouldn't exist at all if we were such an indivisible "holistic I" (doing anything--from sitting there having all of the perspectives flow and "deciding things", to simply sitting there and being "epiphenomenal").
And with this you seem to concede my entire argument; it's possible that our conception of the operation of the will is entirely illusory, because it's possible that everything we feel about the operation of the will is purely a mental theater that in no way contributes to the actual operation or determination of the body's actions.
No, this only demonstrates that you don't know the argument has been about all this time:
If the demon can predict which way I will "decide" before I am aware of having made the decision then it seems fairly self-evidently the case that my conscous sensation of being able to freely and arbitrarily decide whether or not to lift my limbs at any given moment is illusory.
Meaning, that the thing we sense would not be the case, yet we would still sense it, if a demon could predict which way you decide something before you do. Which entails that you specifically sense that demons cannot do this, which I vehemently disagree with.

You do not specifically sense that demons can't do this. You don't even sense how you do! You merely have a notion of how the thing that you sense must work, if it were to actually hold, where said notion cannot be true if determinism were true. And that notion is mistaken. In other words, you believe that if determinism is true, what you sense is an illusion, only because it's implied by your mistaken notion--not what you sense.

[yy2bggggs]

Correction:
"The thing you are saying is sensed is something you are claiming isn't compatible with determinism--in particular, it's "that we don't cause things", and this is a modal mistake, because it's not an Empty Cup sensation."
...should read:
it's that we aren't caused to cause things.

[dlorde]

I'm arguing for the point of view that we have, at the very least, an illusion of free will, and that one of the types of situations where we feel most fully that the will is "free" (however much that feeling may be an illusion) is when we make a choice for which we can provide (and can discover) no reasons.
I would (on a personal level) disagree with you that we feel most 'free' in our exercise of choice when we make such 'arbitrary' choices. I don't feel free at all in that situation, I feel a hapless arbitrariness... OTOH I feel most free when I feel I'm acting against what I perceive to be contrary external influences - that feels to me a true exercise of free will.

I think this kind of difference has generated/permeated much of this thread - it seems to be grounded as much on semantic differences as anything else. I'm not convinced you guys agree on the meaning of 'free', 'will', 'free will', 'illusion', etc., in this context, yet you try to argue as if you do.