Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[T-hawk]

There is a fully materialist counter-argument to your position, and it's not that you can't follow through the movement of particles and figure out where they will end up, the counter-argument is that the will is a real phenomenon that has causal power

I grasp your argument now, that materialism can be defined top-down just as well as bottom-up. I don't disagree, but it makes no difference. These statements still sidestep my question. Can one, given sufficient information, project the movement of particles directed by what you call higher-order phenomena in a brain? If one can, then what causal power did the will have if it was all projectable by the particles? I don't see how you can get causal power from a will except by going into dualism, to render the question moot by establishing that sufficient information can't exist because the will can't be observed.

There is no 'stopping point' because there is no starting point. A choice can't be 'half-conscious'. Conscious choice is a particular faculty we have -- either it operates, or it doesn't.

So where in the following course does conscious choice operate? Here's a realistic relatable scenario. You decide that you want to lose weight. But you find yourself eating that cookie anyway. The next day you take an appetite-suppressant drug, and this time resist eating that cookie. How can you define those different choices as each being conscious without it being determinism from the chemistry of the drug? It is demonstrably true that chemical changes result in different macroscopic observable behavior in humans. It is the simpler position to conclude that all behavior is the chemicals rather than carving out exceptions that some actions are conscious decisions or subconscious or muscle memory or whatever.

Proof that we have the faculty at all? Well, it's immediately observed from first-person experience.

This is the easy argument that everyone is making and considers obvious - that we are consciousnesses because we think we observe that we are. I don't buy that. A computer program could go 10 PRINT "I have free will." That doesn't make it true. We're all particle programs printing that out. Humans are demonstrably capable of believing things contrary to reality in any number of ways and this one is no different. Humans will demonstrably act in predictable ways that they will claim are conscious choice.

A sufficiently sophisticated program on appropriate hardware could state that it has free will indistinguishably from how a human does, and operate such that its sensitivity to inputs and produced outputs (such as spoken language) are also indistinguishable from that of a human. Would you call that behavior conscious faculty? (Serious question, I'm not assuming the answer either way.)

[Bacchus]

So I will play devil's advocate and claim that there is no evidence of any metaphysical aspect to the mind.

Minor terminological point: through the efforts of some very down-to-earth philosophers and popularizers of science, the word 'metaphysical' came to mean something akin to 'supernatural', 'spiritual', characteristically in a phrase 'metaphysical nonsense'. It's not a very useful definition of the word, and not what metaphysics has ever meant to people who actually cared about metaphysics. 'Only particles and their movements are real', for example, is a metaphysical assertion, a classical one, going back to Democritus at least. Anything properly speaking metaphysical is that which deals with the nature of reality and existence, its also commonly called ontology these days, partly because of the systematic besmirching of the historical name of the discipline.

[T-hawk]

In terms of definitions, 'free will' is a clunky and awful historical term. For one, it seems to presume that there is something like 'unfree will', but no-one stops to think what that would entail. It's also not at all clear what the will is supposed to be free from. Actually, this is one of the ways T-Hawk says a trap for himself -- he wants the will to be 'free' of particles, but if everything that exists can be interpreted as a collection of particles and energies, then the only way for the will to be 'free' is not to exist at all. Particles constitute just what a thing is, and you can't meaningfully demand anything to be free of itself.

I agree that the term isn't great, which is why I've been trying to frame the discussion with a definition for it. And that isn't a trap, it's exactly what I do claim, the will doesn't exist at all, and as you say neither actions nor choices really exist as such. Yes, particles constitute what a thing is. And fundamentality is indeed the basis of that, particles act in defined ways for which there is no subdivision. Despite trying to use dismissive language, you stated my position well here.

[Bacchus]

So again, envious of T-Hawk, he is a realist about particles, and an instrumentalist about everything else, and is comfortable with that. When I raise doubts its only because I'd wish I had the same conviction.

Is faith en vogue now in Proper Thought?

I wouldn't know, I chose a job and forum posts over a philosophy faculty. But I think you mischaracterize the state of philosophy, it's nowhere near as one-dimensional as you purport it to be. Even in the heyday of logical positivism, even if you take just the anglophone faculties, it hasn't been what you make of it. Unless by Proper Thought you mean something like what Dawkins writes, but why would you focus on something like that at all.

[ipecac]

I wouldn't know, I chose a job and forum posts over a philosophy faculty. But I think you mischaracterize the state of philosophy, it's nowhere near as one-dimensional as you purport it to be. Even in the heyday of logical positivism, even if you take just the anglophone faculties, it hasn't been what you make of it.

I wasn't denoting philosophy in general by it. I considered using 'Goodthink', but I'm not sure the other resonances it has helps.

Certainly, there have naturally been lots of reactions to the attack on the transcendental, but that is dissent against Proper Thought.

[Bacchus]

It seems you are bringing some larger-scale battle to this thread, which I have no motivation to even make sense of. It's like when Nicolae rails against fascists -- but at least that's what the politics thread is for.

[ipecac]

It seems you are bringing some larger-scale battle to this thread

Just poking fun at Proper Thought; people take it too seriously.

[Bacchus]

I agree that the term isn't great, which is why I've been trying to frame the discussion with a definition for it. And that isn't a trap, it's exactly what I do claim, the will doesn't exist at all, and as you say neither actions nor choices really exist as such. Yes, particles constitute what a thing is. And fundamentality is indeed the basis of that, particles act in defined ways for which there is no subdivision. Despite trying to use dismissive language, you stated my position well here.

It's a trap in the sense that you define free will in such a way that your ontology excludes free will from existence by that very definition. If you are genuinely interested in the question of free will, that's a trap, because your terms if accepted end any discussion before it starts. Which is why I've been mostly discussing ontology with you, not free will specifically.

On the question of how a higher-order phenomenon can have causal import I have to direct you to my earlier posts, thats exactly the question I was trying to answer there. I think they might read differently to you now.

On the practicalities of differentiating between 'chemical Influence' and 'conscious choice' I will answer a little later. Actually again, earlier posts outline important preliminaries -- the point here is not to isolate choice from chemicals, but to show that there are causally distinct pathways, one of which amounts to making choices, whilst the others don't. All of these pathways have a chemical substrate, but in some cases that substrate has prominent causal import, whilst in others it's the choice that has prominent causal import (whilst the chemical substrate could be replaced by something of equivalent functionality).

[T-hawk]

Yes, circularity is a big trap here.

That sort of ontology is a "narrow circle" as Chesterton put it - constricted, closed, narrow-minded. Everything spiritual or transcendental is ruled out almost axiomatically, by definition.

First, I want to point out how self-undermining T-Hawk's position is metaphysically. At best, it's a disastrous 'I, a mindless bag of cells aka T-Hawk, am compelled by chemicals to make this arguments.

None of these are arguments, just dismissals. That the position leads to conclusions that you find uncomfortable or call disastrous is not evidence. The narrowness of the position is its strength. No position can justify its own first principle logically. I posit that the simplicity of materialism constitutes not indisputable but stronger self-support than any other hypothesis. That's not at all scientific proof and I never said so, but I do hold that both that and the studies on free will linked upthread constitute evidence.

In short, you can't always do what you want because your body is in a physical and chemical world, and sometimes things get in the way, or even hijack your body to respond in a different way. This doesn't mean that there isn't something that wills.

This is a reasonable argument, that will can exist but can't manifest if enough chemicals get in the way. That's actually what Bacchus was searching for to define "unfree will". Once again the counterargument rests on simplicity: it's more straightforward to conclude that it's all chemicals, than that under some conditions sometimes will can outweigh chemicals and sometimes not.

[ipecac]

I was thinking about your last point -- it's a good one! I think we need to define free will.

I have a rigorous definition in mind - which I so take for granted as obvious that I neglected to actually state it.

Assume one can have complete and exact knowledge of the state of every elementary particle in a brain and all matter and forces that it could interact with, and enough computational power to calculate the result of their chemical interactions to any arbitrary period of time.  Given that, can the computational simulation accurately project what actions that brain will take?

If you say no, then that constitutes free will, that the brain or consciousness can influence matter in a way that is not deterministically caused by the particles; that's what defines a decision.  

There is some amount of freedom [from physical law] in this definition, yes. Others have invoked the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for freedom in this context too.

But what is 'will'?