Free will is an illusion....?

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Hype
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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#201 Post by Hype » Mon Jul 30, 2012 7:59 am

mockbee wrote:Image


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:love:



I miss my little guy............. :cona:
:lol: :pat:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#202 Post by Pure Method » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:17 am

Sorry, I've been camping this past weekend and missed much of the developments in this thread. Catching up this morning (now afternoon) has been a real pleasure (actually, Artemis, I was briefly in your neighborhood, Spedina and Eglinton, a couple blocks from Casa Loma :lol: dropping off a friend - I would have reached out but we were literally only there for 45 minutes. Ate at a place called mashu mashu. very middle of the road falafel. FYC [where c = curiosity] I was camping in Algonquin Park).

anyway, I have a question about consciousness (*may I add that I like Hype's understanding of the term and believe it applies here) and chemicals. I have previously (perhaps in another thread) mentioned a book by Catharine Malabou What Should We Do With Our Brains? http://www.amazon.com/Should-Brain-Pers ... ne+malabou

The book is written very engagingly, though I must admit that I have only read selections for class.

Proceeding to my query: in that review of Dr. Harris' book, the reviewer explicitly states that "it's all chemicals" in reference to choice, consciousness, free will and the like. BUT CLEARLY, we have been arguing how circumstance, environment, and thus, culture have a massive effect on the brain's development, and more obviously from an outsider's perspective, the pattern of thought employed by an individual. So, as Malabou argues, some neuroscience has an emphasis on a determinist understanding of the development of consciousness - though, since we (as a society, not as individuals) have the ability to change massively influential factors through voting (theoretically) and policy (say, eliminating housing projects and promoting true mixed use/income development) - consciousness is malleable. Primer, fin, query: Is our consciousness malleable? If our environment greatly affects the way we think and act, then must we accept that patterns of thought and deed are not, in fact, set in stone, but open to possible amendment?


P.S. I have greatly oversimplified Malabou's work here to serve my own purposes.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#203 Post by Artemis » Mon Jul 30, 2012 9:47 am

Pure Method wrote:(actually, Artemis, I was briefly in your neighborhood, Spedina and Eglinton, a couple blocks from Casa Loma :lol: dropping off a friend - I would have reached out but we were literally only there for 45 minutes. Ate at a place called mashu mashu. very middle of the road falafel. FYC [where c = curiosity] I was camping in Algonquin Park).
wow you were close to my place. i am about a 15 minute walk from there, or 5 minutes in the car if that. in the future, i would suggest King Falafel on Bathurst, right by Eglinton. It's not very nice inside but the food is fantastic! It's run by some Moroccan ladies. Really good shwarma and to die for baklava.it's done a little bit differently in the form of a roll instead of the typical triangle/diamond shape.

hope you had fun camping. i heard algonquin is really dry this year - no fires allowed. :wave:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#204 Post by Pure Method » Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:12 am

Artemis wrote:
wow you were close to my place. i am about a 15 minute walk from there, or 5 minutes in the car if that. in the future, i would suggest King Falafel on Bathurst, right by Eglinton. It's not very nice inside but the food is fantastic! It's run by some Moroccan ladies. Really good shwarma and to die for baklava.it's done a little bit differently in the form of a roll instead of the typical triangle/diamond shape.

hope you had fun camping. i heard algonquin is really dry this year - no fires allowed. :wave:

yeah, I love it up there. A lot of the eastern access points were closed due to active forest fires. we saw a bunch of planes flying around, checking for fires and the like. Still beautiful! And I got to visit my old summer camp, which was/is always neat. :thumb:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#205 Post by Hype » Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:16 am

Pure Method wrote:Proceeding to my query: in that review of Dr. Harris' book, the reviewer explicitly states that "it's all chemicals" in reference to choice, consciousness, free will and the like. BUT CLEARLY, we have been arguing how circumstance, environment, and thus, culture have a massive effect on the brain's development, and more obviously from an outsider's perspective, the pattern of thought employed by an individual.
I don't understand the 'but' you employ at the start of your second sentence. Do you take 'it's all chemicals' and environmental/cultural effects to be distinct? Why? To me they are one and the same thing conceived on a larger or smaller scale. The presence of lead in the environment of a fetus born before unleaded gasoline was mandatory just *is* the cause of the chemical reality inside the skull. So what?

Okay, you go on to try to say what...
So, as Malabou argues, some neuroscience has an emphasis on a determinist understanding of the development of consciousness
No. It all does. All science is deterministic, in the sense that it seeks explanation via mechanism. Without mechanism, science has nothing. Any purported neuroscience that doesn't seek a mechanism for consciousness is not doing neuroscience but engaging in speculative nonsense.
though, since we (as a society, not as individuals) have the ability to change massively influential factors through voting (theoretically) and policy (say, eliminating housing projects and promoting true mixed use/income development) - consciousness is malleable.
It's malleable even if we don't do those things. It's malleable with medication and physical activity too. I don't see how this matters.
Is our consciousness malleable? If our environment greatly affects the way we think and act, then must we accept that patterns of thought and deed are not, in fact, set in stone, but open to possible amendment?
Yes, our consciousnesses are malleable. (Why were you speaking in first-person plural there?)

Of course patterns of thought and deed are not, in fact, set in stone. Who the hell said they were? Certainly not neuroscientists. I think you've confused determinism with fatalism. I think I said earlier in the thread that people do that a lot and that they shouldn't. (I also say explicitly "Determinism is not fatalism." in a paper of mine you just recently read...)

So yes, patterns of thought and deed are open to possible amendment, but not necessarily just through changes in the macro-environment. Sometimes there need to be micro-changes (via medication, surgery, or intense and very specific practice.)

What were you trying to get at here?

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#206 Post by Pure Method » Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:21 am

Thanks for the response, Hype. I wasn't necessarily trying to argue against anything you said, per se, and clearly I somewhat bungled the meaning of determinism (think I'm clear on it now, things are determined as in, there is a logical explanatory reason for their being). I just wanted it out in the open in this conversation, that though insane people like Holmes and the like exist, and though for some, no positive change may be achieved/achievable, all is not lost. There's a tremendous amount of possibility in the mind - or something to that effect, was my intended point.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#207 Post by Hype » Mon Jul 30, 2012 12:19 pm

Pure Method wrote:Thanks for the response, Hype. I wasn't necessarily trying to argue against anything you said, per se, and clearly I somewhat bungled the meaning of determinism (think I'm clear on it now, things are determined as in, there is a logical explanatory reason for their being). I just wanted it out in the open in this conversation, that though insane people like Holmes and the like exist, and though for some, no positive change may be achieved/achievable, all is not lost. There's a tremendous amount of possibility in the mind - or something to that effect, was my intended point.
We largely agree, it just appeared that you took there to be a dilemma between a fatalistic outlook if there's no free will (we're doomed to be killers, or stupid, or whatever) and some sort of neat trick we can pull with culture where we can exorcise ourselves from cruel fate by changing environments, even if biology can't change. The problem I saw there, aside from the conflation of fatalism and determinism (which I'm glad to see you now see) is also that it seems to retain a kind of explanatory and causal dualism (on the one hand, social causes/explanations; on the other, chemical) -- and this is also highly problematic. Once you introduce any kind of stark distinction like that, you either commit to arbitrariness (and thus inexplicability) or to some sort of non-arbitrary difference in kind, which would prevent cross-talk between the two domains. Either result is troubling.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#208 Post by Pure Method » Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:02 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:
Pure Method wrote:Thanks for the response, Hype. I wasn't necessarily trying to argue against anything you said, per se, and clearly I somewhat bungled the meaning of determinism (think I'm clear on it now, things are determined as in, there is a logical explanatory reason for their being). I just wanted it out in the open in this conversation, that though insane people like Holmes and the like exist, and though for some, no positive change may be achieved/achievable, all is not lost. There's a tremendous amount of possibility in the mind - or something to that effect, was my intended point.
We largely agree, it just appeared that you took there to be a dilemma between a fatalistic outlook if there's no free will (we're doomed to be killers, or stupid, or whatever) and some sort of neat trick we can pull with culture where we can exorcise ourselves from cruel fate by changing environments, even if biology can't change. The problem I saw there, aside from the conflation of fatalism and determinism (which I'm glad to see you now see) is also that it seems to retain a kind of explanatory and causal dualism (on the one hand, social causes/explanations; on the other, chemical) -- and this is also highly problematic. Once you introduce any kind of stark distinction like that, you either commit to arbitrariness (and thus inexplicability) or to some sort of non-arbitrary difference in kind, which would prevent cross-talk between the two domains. Either result is troubling.

Okay, I think I see what you'r saying. Rather than divide explanations into subcategories such as social class versus chemical processes in an individual's brain, it is better to simply speak of "causes" -the exact kind, locality, etc. being irrelevant.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#209 Post by Hype » Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:33 pm

Pure Method wrote:
Adurentibus Spina wrote:
Pure Method wrote:Thanks for the response, Hype. I wasn't necessarily trying to argue against anything you said, per se, and clearly I somewhat bungled the meaning of determinism (think I'm clear on it now, things are determined as in, there is a logical explanatory reason for their being). I just wanted it out in the open in this conversation, that though insane people like Holmes and the like exist, and though for some, no positive change may be achieved/achievable, all is not lost. There's a tremendous amount of possibility in the mind - or something to that effect, was my intended point.
We largely agree, it just appeared that you took there to be a dilemma between a fatalistic outlook if there's no free will (we're doomed to be killers, or stupid, or whatever) and some sort of neat trick we can pull with culture where we can exorcise ourselves from cruel fate by changing environments, even if biology can't change. The problem I saw there, aside from the conflation of fatalism and determinism (which I'm glad to see you now see) is also that it seems to retain a kind of explanatory and causal dualism (on the one hand, social causes/explanations; on the other, chemical) -- and this is also highly problematic. Once you introduce any kind of stark distinction like that, you either commit to arbitrariness (and thus inexplicability) or to some sort of non-arbitrary difference in kind, which would prevent cross-talk between the two domains. Either result is troubling.

Okay, I think I see what you'r saying. Rather than divide explanations into subcategories such as social class versus chemical processes in an individual's brain, it is better to simply speak of "causes" -the exact kind, locality, etc. being irrelevant.
It depends on what you want to do with the information... it's helpful to know that no amount of AA "environment-jiggering" (that is what the 12 steps are, after all) will help the 80% of alcoholics AA doesn't appear to help (nor the 20% it does appear to help, but whose numbers are exactly the same as the percentage of folks who manage to stay sober without AA).

It's helpful to know that your child has severe chemical imbalances causing an attention disorder, and that although trying to come up with social solutions may provide some slight help, the case is severe enough to warrant medical attention.

Rather than focusing on the inner/outer cause distinction, which yeah, I contend isn't relevant, it makes more sense to me to look at which causes are the most salient in a given case, and what sort of response such causes warrant.

This would also help go a long way to removing class-, gender-, and race-/ethnicity- based discrimination, since instead of blanket-associating a person's behaviours or capacities with some irrelevant social cue (as James Watson famously did a few years back when he claimed that it's obvious that there's a genetic component to racial IQ discrepancies) we can just focus on the causes independently.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#210 Post by mockbee » Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:57 am

Helloooooooooo. Yup I did it. Here we are, over the hump of 2019. It's back and the topic is hotter than ever!


Anyways. I just read The Atlantic article about the "debunking" of the Libet studies. And now there is a major new reasearch program put together by Uri Maoz, focused specifically on the neurological factors of "free will", bringing neurologists and philosophers together to work collaboratively on topics.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... al/597736/

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03 ... m=Facebook


Hype, in your opinion is this groundbreaking/legit?

Also, why are there not waaaaay more people, from academic perspective, interested in this???????

Funny story in the Science article, if the shrimp boat they were on in Sweden sank, so would the field of neuro-philosophy....or should they be checking their vanity?





:wave:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#211 Post by Hype » Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:00 am

As of right now, my view of the scientific accounts is that they mean something different from what the philosophers mean, but sometimes wave their hands over that equivocation and try to claim they've proved something stronger than what the science actually shows.

Basically, the new studies just show us more about how human neurological control mechanisms work. They don't show that human beings have the power to choose equally between two logically possible but incompatible options. The latter is usually what is meant by 'free will' or 'free decision', by philosophers who work on this. But it seems that neurologists mean something like: free will is being able to control oneself in circumstances where people who can't control themselves do A, but people who can do something else, B.

There was a book a few years ago that I thought was particularly bad, called "How Brains Make Up Their Minds" by Walter Freeman, a neuroscientist, who tried to argue that in his years of experience, humans have free will, and philosophers must be wrong. But every argument in that book showed only that the scientific evidence shows us how humans can make reasoned decisions, not that the way we make those decisions is somehow able to extricate us from the causal order of nature.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#212 Post by mockbee » Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:48 am

:cool:

Interesting. I see. I think you haven't budged on this point since last discussion 7 yeats ago. I respect that.

Do you think philosophers should be cooperating in these studies, or do you see them as pawns?
Do your mentors/respected academics agree with your view, that neueroscience should not be used to prove or disprove the idea of free will?

Is "presence of Free Will" the correct terminology to be used here to describing the crux of what you are personally working on, or is this a tangent?

Sorry for all the Qs, this os really interesting to me and I think you have brought much clarity to the subject. Also, yiu may feel yiu have covered some/all of this before but reiterations always help.

And finally, how have you beem doing? :tiphat:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#213 Post by Matz » Sat Sep 14, 2019 7:58 am

this thread really changed quite a few things for the good for me, pretty cool

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#214 Post by Pure Method » Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:23 pm

A little embarrassed to read my questions/arguments from way back when (I was not a coherent writer), but wow! hype, thanks for being so generous with your time. :tiphat:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#215 Post by Hype » Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:10 pm

Pure Method wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:23 pm
A little embarrassed to read my questions/arguments from way back when (I was not a coherent writer), but wow! hype, thanks for being so generous with your time. :tiphat:
Your post just made me go back and re-read the thread, and now I'm a little bit embarassed about how I handled LJF. I might have been drunk for some of those posts, but I'd handle things very differently now. I think posting on these boards all those years may actually have been one of the things that helped me learn how to better communicate difficult ideas to different kinds of people.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#216 Post by Hype » Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:27 pm

mockbee wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:48 am
:cool:

Interesting. I see. I think you haven't budged on this point since last discussion 7 yeats ago. I respect that.

Do you think philosophers should be cooperating in these studies, or do you see them as pawns?
Do your mentors/respected academics agree with your view, that neueroscience should not be used to prove or disprove the idea of free will?

Is "presence of Free Will" the correct terminology to be used here to describing the crux of what you are personally working on, or is this a tangent?

Sorry for all the Qs, this os really interesting to me and I think you have brought much clarity to the subject. Also, yiu may feel yiu have covered some/all of this before but reiterations always help.

And finally, how have you beem doing? :tiphat:
Yeah, I still hold basically the same view about free will that I did then. One thing that did change, maybe, is that I think we need to say more about the fatalistic / nihilistic upshot of all of this. This is what LJF was pressing -- and it's what many philosophers have worried about. If there's no free will, then there seems to be no responsibility, and indeed no point in trying to do anything. Meaning in life is very important. This (relationship between causal necessity and purpose in life) is something that I ended up concluding in my dissertation research, and which my post-doctoral research is now partially focused on.

I think collaborative interdisciplinary work is a great idea. I don't think any academic who puts together a research proposal and receives funding for a project like this, or who joins the team, is going to be merely a pawn.

I also think that since neuroscience is the science of the brain, that's where we should look for explanations of the mechanisms by which beings with brains function. If neuroscientists want to call some subset of brain function 'free will', then great, they can do that, and I'm sure they're talking about something useful and real and fascinating. What little I've read of that stuff includes studies of lesions in the prefrontal cortex affecting impulse control (in things like addiction) and cases of split brain patients whose hemispheres have conflicting desires. Stuff like that is all very intriguing. I love Oliver Sacks' work, for example.

Interestingly, there have been surveys of what philosophers think. Here's the most recent one:

https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

Code: Select all

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
Accept or lean toward: compatibilism	550 / 931 (59.1%)
Other	139 / 931 (14.9%)
Accept or lean toward: libertarianism	128 / 931 (13.7%)
Accept or lean toward: no free will	114 / 931 (12.2%)
So, it seems that most professional philosophers are compatibilists of some kind. This makes sense, since compatibilism is a broader category than libertarianism or determinism. A compatibilist is someone who thinks that free will is compatible with determinism. This doesn't mean that that person thinks the universe is deterministic or that we have free will. I might be a compatibilist in the logical sense, but still think that the universe isn't deterministic and so it doesn't matter.

Still, I think most of my colleagues are some kind of compatibilist. But the ones who have spent a lot of time around me discussing stuff like this usually end up closer to my view than they were before. :lol: To directly answer your specific question: I think most philosophers think that scientists should be careful about overstepping the boundaries of their disciplines, and this may be one of those cases where it's not clear where the line is. But, since careers are on the line, I think we're all going to say something like: okay, let's work on interdisciplinary work, but our disciplines are distinct!

Right now I'm working on a few related things, but I think I can comfortably say: most of my work involves the relationship between causal necessity and human action and, sometimes, how this relates to political and moral concepts. Most recently I've been trying to work out something useful to say about populism and other sorts of periodic political uprisings that seem to come out of nowhere and involve a lot of emotional content. I won't say more about this here because I've said too much already.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#217 Post by mockbee » Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:44 pm

Pure Method wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:23 pm
A little embarrassed to read my questions/arguments from way back when (I was not a coherent writer), but wow! hype, thanks for being so generous with your time. :tiphat:
You shouldn't be embarrassed, you were what late teens, early twenties?
This is heavy stuff, still blows my mind. :noclue:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#218 Post by mockbee » Sun Sep 15, 2019 3:18 am

:rockon: @ Hype

Thank you for your response. Its perfect. Tons to digest and ponder and words to break down. Perusing some of Oliver Sacks work, very interesting....

Meaning in life is very important......yes yes yes. Always striving for meaning.........

Understood on the saying too much.... :wink:

Thank you for saying so much anyways.... :thumb:

:tiphat:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#219 Post by SR » Sun Sep 15, 2019 7:20 am

Yes, this is important. To non academics who are intensely curious, the nihilistic result of determinism seems like the logical sum. Science, to the layman does too....more so

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#220 Post by Matz » Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 am

Hype wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:27 pm
If there's no free will, then there seems to be no responsibility, and indeed no point in trying to do anything. Meaning in life is very important.
I don't see why having no free will and finding meaning in the things you do can't go hand in hand.
I also think that since neuroscience is the science of the brain, that's where we should look for explanations of the mechanisms by which beings with brains function.
I think neuroscience is the "science" of guessing. We know nothing about the brain, the stuff we "know" can't be proven. I don't think we'll ever understand it. Anyone see any breakthroughs when it comes to Alzheimers, Parkinson, psychiatric illnesses etc? No. There has been none, we don't know how to treat any of that stuff. Forget it, it's too difficult.

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#221 Post by Hype » Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:19 am

Matz wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 am
Hype wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:27 pm
If there's no free will, then there seems to be no responsibility, and indeed no point in trying to do anything. Meaning in life is very important.
I don't see why having no free will and finding meaning in the things you do can't go hand in hand.
I also think that since neuroscience is the science of the brain, that's where we should look for explanations of the mechanisms by which beings with brains function.
I think neuroscience is the "science" of guessing. We know nothing about the brain, the stuff we "know" can't be proven. I don't think we'll ever understand it. Anyone see any breakthroughs when it comes to Alzheimers, Parkinson, psychiatric illnesses etc? No. There has been none, we don't know how to treat any of that stuff. Forget it, it's too difficult.
These are good thoughts.

I agree with your first point. Of course most of us actually do have meaning in our lives. That's why we care about things and do things and keep going and undergo suffering and so forth. For many people, religion (or family tradition, or family more generally) is the main source of purpose. For others it might be knowledge (science), or art, or humanitarian work. There are probably as many sources of meaning as there are people (maybe more). There are also people who lose (or have never had) hope and purpose. Many of these people are at risk of suicide or doing very dangerous or bad things. Some people are born into incredibly wretched circumstances, and many of them find hope and a way to continue, but some don't. We might think of those who are susceptible to terrorism or violent religiosity as particularly nihilistic people -- they latch onto extreme views as a source of meaning, perhaps because ordinary sources of meaning aren't cutting it, or aren't available.

So, I don't think the question of whether lack of free will and meaning are compatible in the broadest sense is that interesting. The answer seems to be obviously yes. But some philosophers (including Dan Dennett, as I wrote years ago), are worried about what would happen if we tell most people that they don't have free will. There seems to be something important about seeing your life as your own, and as determined by the choices you make in a way that is in some sense "of your own making" and "up to you", rather than already determined by the physics of the universe. This is what Nietzsche writes about in a lot of his work on nihilism: if God is dead, then Christian morality should go with it too, and then we're left with no source of purpose and no clear overwhelming reason to check our behaviour. His answer is the existentialist one: make our own meaning, make our own morality, etc., so that we don't wallow in self-absorbed nihilism. But I think this can't quite work. This view relies (as Sartre argues) on seeing one's self as free to make oneself. If we have no free will, then we are not absolutely free to make ourselves. The extent to which we can find meaning and purpose in life depends on how our lives have gone, and who we are, and what our brains are like. Some people are attracted to tradition and religion and family, or sports, or art, or intellectual pursuits. But it's not clear that everyone can do this.

The harder problems seem to me to arise when we think about how to change people's minds about what matters most. Moral and political views are very important, even for people who don't consider themselves political. Socially, huge amounts of harm are done when people find meaning in hateful ideology or destructive impulses. Governments, NGOs, priests, parents, teachers, social workers, etc., are all concerned with trying to prevent and solve social ills, and aid victims of bad actions. If there is no free will, then it starts to look very difficult to actually change anything, since if something changes, it had to change, and if it doesn't change, it couldn't, regardless of what we want. What we need to try to understand is what to do with benevolent desires in a deterministic world, where we might see how things will necessarily go (and either see that we will succeed, or see that we can't succeed), or can't see how things will go (and so be unable to know for sure how they will go). The latter seems to be the best hope for doing things we think are important, regardless of how the universe is determined to go. But this would mean it's better to be ignorant about the future? That can't be right. It can't be that ignorance about the future is the source of motivation for people to try to do good things in the world. Surely the better we understand things, the better chance we have of making them go best. This seems right, and yet in many cases the better we understand a situation, the more we realize that there is nothing we can do. And what should we do then? Nothing? Doesn't this seem nihilistic?

**************************
On the question of neuroscience: I agree that there is very little well understood about the human brain. But it's not true that we don't understand anything about it, and it's not true that we're just guessing. Just because there haven't been any "breakthroughs" in certain specific neurological conditions, by your estimation, doesn't mean we don't understand aspects of those conditions very well. We know, for instance, that L-dopa helps Parkinson's patients retain some mobility, for some time, but unfortunately L-dopa doesn't work forever. The lack of a better treatment doesn't mean we're just guessing, it just means that it's really difficult. It's interesting that your last sentence suggests the inverse of your first one: in the first, you admit that free will doesn't necessarily mean we can't have meaning in life; in the second, you seem to suggest that our seemingly intractable ignorance about the brain makes it pointless to continue to try to understand it -- in your words: 'it's too difficult'. But is that right? Why?

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#222 Post by Matz » Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:25 am

Hype wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:19 am
Matz wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:24 am
Hype wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 3:27 pm
If there's no free will, then there seems to be no responsibility, and indeed no point in trying to do anything. Meaning in life is very important.
I don't see why having no free will and finding meaning in the things you do can't go hand in hand.
I also think that since neuroscience is the science of the brain, that's where we should look for explanations of the mechanisms by which beings with brains function.
I think neuroscience is the "science" of guessing. We know nothing about the brain, the stuff we "know" can't be proven. I don't think we'll ever understand it. Anyone see any breakthroughs when it comes to Alzheimers, Parkinson, psychiatric illnesses etc? No. There has been none, we don't know how to treat any of that stuff. Forget it, it's too difficult.
These are good thoughts.

I agree with your first point. Of course most of us actually do have meaning in our lives. That's why we care about things and do things and keep going and undergo suffering and so forth. For many people, religion (or family tradition, or family more generally) is the main source of purpose. For others it might be knowledge (science), or art, or humanitarian work. There are probably as many sources of meaning as there are people (maybe more). There are also people who lose (or have never had) hope and purpose. Many of these people are at risk of suicide or doing very dangerous or bad things. Some people are born into incredibly wretched circumstances, and many of them find hope and a way to continue, but some don't. We might think of those who are susceptible to terrorism or violent religiosity as particularly nihilistic people -- they latch onto extreme views as a source of meaning, perhaps because ordinary sources of meaning aren't cutting it, or aren't available.

So, I don't think the question of whether lack of free will and meaning are compatible in the broadest sense is that interesting. The answer seems to be obviously yes. But some philosophers (including Dan Dennett, as I wrote years ago), are worried about what would happen if we tell most people that they don't have free will. There seems to be something important about seeing your life as your own, and as determined by the choices you make in a way that is in some sense "of your own making" and "up to you", rather than already determined by the physics of the universe. This is what Nietzsche writes about in a lot of his work on nihilism: if God is dead, then Christian morality should go with it too, and then we're left with no source of purpose and no clear overwhelming reason to check our behaviour. His answer is the existentialist one: make our own meaning, make our own morality, etc., so that we don't wallow in self-absorbed nihilism. But I think this can't quite work. This view relies (as Sartre argues) on seeing one's self as free to make oneself. If we have no free will, then we are not absolutely free to make ourselves. The extent to which we can find meaning and purpose in life depends on how our lives have gone, and who we are, and what our brains are like. Some people are attracted to tradition and religion and family, or sports, or art, or intellectual pursuits. But it's not clear that everyone can do this.

The harder problems seem to me to arise when we think about how to change people's minds about what matters most. Moral and political views are very important, even for people who don't consider themselves political. Socially, huge amounts of harm are done when people find meaning in hateful ideology or destructive impulses. Governments, NGOs, priests, parents, teachers, social workers, etc., are all concerned with trying to prevent and solve social ills, and aid victims of bad actions. If there is no free will, then it starts to look very difficult to actually change anything, since if something changes, it had to change, and if it doesn't change, it couldn't, regardless of what we want. What we need to try to understand is what to do with benevolent desires in a deterministic world, where we might see how things will necessarily go (and either see that we will succeed, or see that we can't succeed), or can't see how things will go (and so be unable to know for sure how they will go). The latter seems to be the best hope for doing things we think are important, regardless of how the universe is determined to go. But this would mean it's better to be ignorant about the future? That can't be right. It can't be that ignorance about the future is the source of motivation for people to try to do good things in the world. Surely the better we understand things, the better chance we have of making them go best. This seems right, and yet in many cases the better we understand a situation, the more we realize that there is nothing we can do. And what should we do then? Nothing? Doesn't this seem nihilistic?
Yes, it seems nihilistic.

**************************

On the question of neuroscience: I agree that there is very little well understood about the human brain. But it's not true that we don't understand anything about it, and it's not true that we're just guessing. Just because there haven't been any "breakthroughs" in certain specific neurological conditions, by your estimation, doesn't mean we don't understand aspects of those conditions very well. We know, for instance, that L-dopa helps Parkinson's patients retain some mobility, for some time, but unfortunately L-dopa doesn't work forever. The lack of a better treatment doesn't mean we're just guessing, it just means that it's really difficult. It's interesting that your last sentence suggests the inverse of your first one: in the first, you admit that free will doesn't necessarily mean we can't have meaning in life; in the second, you seem to suggest that our seemingly intractable ignorance about the brain makes it pointless to continue to try to understand it -- in your words: 'it's too difficult'. But is that right? Why?

I was taking things to the extreme when I wrote that I think we should shut down the research. We shouldn't shut down the research completely, somebody should try to understand the brain otherwise we're certainly not going to get anywhere of course, but I'm glad its' not me. I think neuroscience is mainly guess work, these scientists think they know way, way more than they actually do. Maybe its a good thing if we never get anywhere close to understanding the brain, because if we did understand it really well, it would of course open several very scary cans of worms but at the same time it would suck if we're never going to be able to treat the before-mentioned diseases.

But being a neuroscientist must be a very frustrating job because how do you ever begin to understand just the basics? You can't see a thought, or a memory or an illness like depression, so what do you do? Look at MRI scans all day long? ”Our test person is smiling and says he's happy, and look! The part of the brain next to the amygdala is active. That's probably the center for happiness”. Come on, that's not science.

The L-dopa could be just a placebo effect like you, probably, see with lots of people taking antidepressants. Unless over 90% of the people taking it get better, then there's probably something to it.

But when all that's said I don't see a conflict when I write that I think that having no free will and having meaning in ones life can go hand in hand and write that neuroscientists should shut down research (like I said, it shouldn't be taken completely literally) because they probably waste their time. If I think a person is doing something stupid it's ok for me to point it out and think that we can have no free will and have meaning in our lives at the same time.

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mockbee
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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#223 Post by mockbee » Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:22 pm

Matz wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:25 am

But when all that's said I don't see a conflict when I write that I think that having no free will and having meaning in ones life can go hand in hand and write that neuroscientists should shut down research (like I said, it shouldn't be taken completely literally) because they probably waste their time. If I think a person is doing something stupid it's ok for me to point it out and think that we can have no free will and have meaning in our lives at the same time.
Matz, you can think whatever you want, but it is "a conflict."

I think you are completely disregarding the elemental function of striving. Without the intent to strive, there is nothing. :noclue:

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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#224 Post by Hype » Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:13 pm

It's a bit of a side-track, but I don't have time to indulge the bigger issues at the moment:
The L-dopa could be just a placebo effect like you, probably, see with lots of people taking antidepressants. Unless over 90% of the people taking it get better, then there's probably something to it.
Your point has a general plausibility because of how causal attributions work in medicine, but in this case it's absolutely false. The mechanism of action for the molecule is well understood, and its clinical effect is profound. I also want to suggest being a bit more careful making off the cuff statistical claims like your last sentence. That's not how clinical significance is determined, and it would be a bit absurd if it were, since "get better" is not even necessarily the point of a drug, and is a vague description. Medical research of this sort generally requires clear concepts like measurable reduction of some level of some protein or hormone or whatever.

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Matz
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Re: Free will is an illusion....?

#225 Post by Matz » Thu Sep 19, 2019 9:52 pm

mockbee wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:22 pm
Matz wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:25 am

But when all that's said I don't see a conflict when I write that I think that having no free will and having meaning in ones life can go hand in hand and write that neuroscientists should shut down research (like I said, it shouldn't be taken completely literally) because they probably waste their time. If I think a person is doing something stupid it's ok for me to point it out and think that we can have no free will and have meaning in our lives at the same time.
Matz, you can think whatever you want, but it is "a conflict."

I think you are completely disregarding the elemental function of striving. Without the intent to strive, there is nothing. :noclue:
You're probably right. I'm out of my depth here, the only philosophy book I own is Philosophy for dummies, and I haven't even read all of it, you two better handle this free will stuff. I'll go back to commenting on Dave's hair and stuff

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