Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[ipecac]

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.

There is little if any good evidence for your view (which is why you put weight on 'simplicity', as if that should carry any weight); we should then consider whether your position leads to metaphysical disaster.

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

Simplicity is not an argument nor evidence. Occam's razor is at best a heuristic (one of many) for picking the true position from many alternative hypotheses.

You're misusing it terribly.

[T-hawk]

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.

I'm genuinely interested in the context of seeking scientific evidence. A study could show that the same particles can lead to different outcomes in a way that is most fundamentally attributable to free will. I am not sure how to construct such a study, particularly within the limits of experimental reality. But it is possible that dualism* could be true in a way that could be experimentally shown, and perhaps even in an objective enough way to get past the "our perceptions are fooling ourselves" threshold. I think it won't ever but I don't eliminate the possibility.

*I say dualism here since I still think it's the only alternative to materialism. I understand your "higher-order phenomena" argument but I still think it's isomorphic to dualism. It's equivalent to say either that the particles aggregate to everything or that everything subdivides to the particles; but either way you can only get free will if you have something nonparticle exerting causal influence.

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).

Ipecac gave the same answer, that sometimes the choice wins and sometimes the chemicals win. That argument is rational and supportable, if more demanding of evidence than the simpler materialism argument; but experimental evidence continues to find more examples of the chemicals winning, and the most straightforward conclusion is to think that the chemicals simply go all the way.

[Bacchus]

I'm genuinely interested in the context of seeking scientific evidence. A study could show that the same particles can lead to different outcomes in a way that is most fundamentally attributable to free will.

Do you think there is scientific evidence for evolution by natural selection? Could what people refer to as 'free will' actually be something like evolution — an aggregate (within your ontology) phenomenon that can be meaningfully investigated macroscopically, and that can be usefully assigned causal power? Would you say the phrase "dolphins and sharks share phenotypical characteristics despite very divergent genotypes because of convergent evolution" is in some way justified, meaningful or correct? Couldn't the phrase "I'm typing this because of free will" have the same kind of meaning — the kind that does not preclude your ontology? If evolution can be 'just particles' in the final analysis and at the same time a valid scientific concept, why can't free will?

You seem very hung up on the proposition that the existence of free will would necessarily prove your ontology wrong. That to me seems very weird — if you encounter people talking about X, especially if X doesn't even have a clear definition, wouldn't the first approach be to see how X can be accommodated within your ontology, rather than defining X in such a way that X could only exist if you are entirely wrong about the nature of reality as a whole?

I'm obviously unable to get this point across in the many ways that I have tried, but free will isn't really necessarily contradictory with determinism and even less with materialism. There is an entire major branch of thinking, compatibilism, that argues just that. There are problems with compatibilism of course, but you haven't been raising these problems so much as just avoiding even the possibility of such a stance. In you specific ontology, for example, even if you deny causal power to anything but particles, surely there are still statements about aggregates which can be justifiably considered more or less correct? For example, Darwinian evolution is a better description of biological realities than Lamarckian? Maybe the criteria is not correctness, but say usefulness -- but at the end of the day you don't assert that all statements about aggregate phenomena are equally misguided, do you? If there are any grounds at all which you admit as valid for differentiating between statements about macroscopic objects, surely it's those grounds on which claims about free will should be evaluated in the first place?

[Huinesoron]

You seem very hung up on the proposition that the existence of free will would necessarily prove your ontology wrong. That to me seems very weird — if you encounter people talking about X, especially if X doesn't even have a clear definition, wouldn't the first approach be to see how X can be accommodated within your ontology, rather than defining X in such a way that X could only exist if you are entirely wrong about the nature of reality as a whole?

I think this gets to the heart of the question, in a way. I would actually agree with the assertion I think T-hawk is making, that:

• Everything is made of particles, their energy states, and the forces between them (though precisely what a 'particle' is depends on your model, and not everything about them can currently be measured); large-scale phenomena are emergent behaviour from these, rather than indicating some influence beyond the material.
  

(In other words: while different collections of atoms can form an object referred to as 'a planet', and while these planets can all be treated identically in, for instance, gravitational interaction, that doesn't mean there's a Platonic ideal of Planet that they're all aspiring to.)

But there is also the moderately indisputable fact that:

• Human beings have the interior experience of free will, including the belief that they are able to make decisions and influence their own actions; they, and most other animals, also act in a manner that suggests they are deliberately controlling their actions, rather than being driven by deterministic chemical processes.
  

The question then becomes: what is that experience? Does it actually have some form of control over the body? If so, how? (And how does this tie into the whole quantum mechanics concept of wave-function collapse and the role of the observer?) If not, why has the evolutionary process pushed so hard for us to squander resources on a whole layer of illusion, when a non-conscious 'human' could be deterministically driven to do exactly the same thing for less energy output?

(Or, in other words: why does thinking you can think make you better at making more humans?)

hS

[darrelljs]

I found this article pretty interesting.

Darrell

[TheHumanHydra]

I found this article pretty interesting.

Darrell

Good find. The original article he links to and the editorial piece below this one (scroll down) are even more interesting.

[ipecac]

It's the same principle, the progression of physical processes, that the physical laws of the vacuum before the Big Bang included an eventuality that gave rise to the matter.  I know that's kicking the can down the road, where did those laws come from, but that's no different than "who created God", and still simpler without the need to posit anything nonphysical or otherwise supernatural.  

Aren't the laws of physics non-physical?

If you have the view that the laws of physics drive or govern all behaviour, then there you go, you have something non-physical that affects the physical world.

[ipecac]

Argument for the existence of the non-physical:

If the laws of physics exist, then there exists something non-physical, as they are non-physical, they are not particles.

[Bacchus]

Everything is made of particles, their energy states, and the forces between them (though precisely what a 'particle' is depends on your model, and not everything about them can currently be measured); large-scale phenomena are emergent behaviour from these, rather than indicating some influence beyond the material.

There are actually three independent statements here, and it's really worth prising them out:

-- Everything is made of particles, their energy states, and the forces between them (I take this to be a special case of a statement along the lines of "The entirety of the actual world can be described through some physics, if we are lucky the current one". We of course know that the latter isn't the case, at the moment even the entirety of physics can't be described through a physics, we need at least two, one for general relativity, and one for all the other physical forces. Some future physics may have no particles at all, but fields, general relativity style, so in all our discussion here were using 'particles' really as a placeholder for 'fundamental objects of a physical ontology')

-- Large-scale phenomena are emergent behavior from these (This appears a straightforward extension of the above, but it isn't. It first postulates that there are large-scale phenomena, so already the premise that the entirety of the world is well-described by a narrow physical model is thrown away, the assertion then draws an arrow of definition from physical behaviors to all these other ones in the hope of collapsing them back to physics. But why that direction? Why not both ways, the other way, or indeed no way at all? A set of Standard Model equations certainly has nothing to say about whether some quarks add up to 'carbon' or the other way around, because carbon isn't a part of the Standard Model ontology. In an attempt to reduce the world to physics you've had to step out of physics, and make some metaphysical calls, but these need to be separately justified)

-- Rather than indicating some influence beyond the material (The unspoken assumption is that we only have two options: either the arrow of definition runs one way, from physics 'upward', or something immaterial has to be brought in. But that's just a non-sequitur. I can accept that the material is all there is, and have no position whatsoever on whether all the well-studied properties of carbon and its reactions are ultimately reducible to a set of properly parametrized Feynman diagrams. Maybe they are, but just as likely we'll find that they aren't. Overall, the achievements of chemical physics, which aims to do just that, have been... modest. I can even assert that it's combustion that entails particular movements of particles, not the other way around. For me personally, I would say that combustion is movement of particles and movement of particles is combustion, and these are just two human-made ways to look at a single fact. There are no two separate things that could possibly 'emerge' from one another, there is a single piece of material reality we happen to be looking at, and we come up with different interpretive tools depending on what the purpose at hand is. Where does 'some influence beyond the material' appear in this view?)

I wanted to distinguish the three because subscribing to the first does not entail subscription to the second and especially the third. But even the first has plenty of problems. "Do objects of mathematics and geometry exist" is the obvious one, from which immediately follows -- do empirical relationships, arrangements, patterns or regularities of any kind? If they don't, whichever physics you've chosen to identify the fundamentals of reality is an illusion, but if they do, we either we need to admit a different mode of existence than a particle-based one, or start coming up with things like 'exponentions' -- particles which transmit an exponential relationship between two other types of particles.

[TheHumanHydra]

Everything is made of particles, their energy states, and the forces between them (though precisely what a 'particle' is depends on your model, and not everything about them can currently be measured); large-scale phenomena are emergent behaviour from these, rather than indicating some influence beyond the material.

There are actually three independent statements here, and it's really worth prising them out:

-- Everything is made of particles, their energy states, and the forces between them (I take this to be a special case of a statement along the lines of "The entirety of the actual world can be described through some physics, if we are lucky the current one". We of course know that the latter isn't the case, at the moment even the entirety of physics can't be described through a physics, we need at least two, one for general relativity, and one for all the other physical forces. Some future physics may have no particles at all, but fields, general relativity style, so in all our discussion here were using 'particles' really as a placeholder for 'fundamental objects of a physical ontology')

-- Large-scale phenomena are emergent behavior from these (This appears a straightforward extension of the above, but it isn't. It first postulates that there are large-scale phenomena, so already the premise that the entirety of the world is well-described by a narrow physical model is thrown away, the assertion then draws an arrow of definition from physical behaviors to all these other ones in the hope of collapsing them back to physics. But why that direction? Why not both ways, the other way, or indeed no way at all? A set of Standard Model equations certainly has nothing to say about whether some quarks add up to 'carbon' or the other way around, because carbon isn't a part of the Standard Model ontology. In an attempt to reduce the world to physics you've had to step out of physics, and make some metaphysical calls, but these need to be separately justified)

-- Rather than indicating some influence beyond the material (The unspoken assumption is that we only have two options: either the arrow of definition runs one way, from physics 'upward', or something immaterial has to be brought in. But that's just a non-sequitur. I can accept that the material is all there is, and have no position whatsoever on whether all the well-studied properties of carbon and its reactions are ultimately reducible to a set of properly parametrized Feynman diagrams. Maybe they are, but just as likely we'll find that they aren't. Overall, the achievements of chemical physics, which aims to do just that, have been... modest. I can even assert that it's combustion that entails particular movements of particles, not the other way around. For me personally, I would say that combustion is movement of particles and movement of particles is combustion, and these are just two human-made ways to look at a single fact. There are no two separate things that could possibly 'emerge' from one another, there is a single piece of material reality we happen to be looking at, and we come up with different interpretive tools depending on what the purpose at hand is. Where does 'some influence beyond the material' appear in this view?)

I wanted to distinguish the three because subscribing to the first does not entail subscription to the second and especially the third. But even the first has plenty of problems. "Do objects of mathematics and geometry exist" is the obvious one, from which immediately follows -- do empirical relationships, arrangements, patterns or regularities of any kind? If they don't, whichever physics you've chosen to identify the fundamentals of reality is an illusion, but if they do, we either we need to admit a different mode of existence than a particle-based one, or start coming up with things like 'exponentions' -- particles which transmit an exponential relationship between two other types of particles.

Bacchus, thanks for your replies and clarifications earlier. Right now I'm struggling on a comprehension level with this post. I understand your first paragraph. I think I get the gist of the second but don't understand why it's compelling (isn't the answer to 'why?' just, 'we observe that physics affects everything/most things/many things, we don't observe that anything affects physics [I think], so we assume that nothing affects anything other than physics'?). For the third, is there a qualitative difference between what you say you believe personally and what T-hawk is saying, or only a semantic one? Like, is there a difference between saying, 'the heart pumps blood' and, 'particle A (46.0172, 112.001, 6783.39), particle B (09485.198719, 09384.9935, 1093757.19787), particle C (10983.39857, ...) [those are coordinates. This is an abstraction]'? I would argue that the former is equally true (and maybe the point of contention is that T-hawk doesn't [?]), just less complete/detailed, but surely they're the same concept. Maybe I've just completely fallen off the train of the argument. 

Finally, in your last paragraph, why do empirical relationships require a non-particle mode of existence? Surely they are just concepts that describe particles (i.e., including particle behaviour), not 'real' ~objects 'composed', as it were, of something other than the material. Or are you saying that 'relationship' is a non-abstraction, in some sense concrete, and has some sort of supraphysical basis?

Edit -- sorry, that's not supposed to come across as critical. It's more that I'm struggling to keep up.