Free Will
Pages
| Author | Topic: Free Will |
|---|---|
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 59
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 12:25
Profile
Lots of people say they believe in free will, but what exactly do they mean? Does it mean that my mind is completely non-deterministic...that I have a supernatural self-willed soul that has never ever been influenced by any event in the universe? That the probability that I jump forward would be the same whether I had a nice swimming pool or a lava-filled crater in front of me? :) In that case, one could also wonder how this supernatural self-willed soul could interact enough with the mundane deterministic world enough to control my legs, but that's another issue. Does it mean that there is some seeminlgy random component in our behaviour that will never be accessible to science no matter how much we learn about the human brain? Some people try to hide behind the theories about quantum uncertainty when they talk about free will. Many people are content with the subjective feeling that they could have acted otherwise (in a parallel universe, perhaps?). Frankly, that's about as useful as the crude joke saying "if my grandma had b*lls, she would have been my gandpa". Of course, there's no need to be a dogmatic believer in determinism. Some psychologists claim to have "proven" (any psychologist claiming to have proven anything should make you suspicious) that we have no free will (wow!) by means of an experiment where people were asked to press a button arbitrarily. It showed that the central nervous system had already launched the movement when people became aware of the decision to push the button. Of course, this begs the question exactly how they measured this subjective awareness. [ Tuesday, January 06, 2004 12:29: Message edited by: Alex ] Posts: 950 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00 |
|
Law Bringer
Member # 335
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 12:29
Profile
Homepage
We either have free will, or we don't. If we don't, there's no use worrying about it (not that you can help it). If we do, then we do. Either way, it is impossible to verify and has no impact on life. —Alorael, who isn't sure. If physical laws do not absolutely govern everything in a predictable way (not necessarily predictable to us, just predictable), then we probably have free will, as per the quantum uncertainty. If not, then the universe runs like clockwork. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 2786
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 12:40
Profile
quote:That's essentially my opinion. However, 'free will' in the form of quantum uncertainty isn't really the same as what most people mean when they say 'free will', IMO. -------------------- Working on it... Posts: 18 | Registered: Monday, March 17 2003 08:00 |
|
DELETED Member # 21
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 12:45
Profile
I couldn't help but post this. -------------------- KazeArctica: Oh yes. KazeArctica: Oh YES Posts: 93 | Registered: Sunday, September 30 2001 22:00 |
|
Apprentice
Member # 3809
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 13:01
Profile
I think we all do what we want when we want how we want thus defeating the instated purpose of free will. if that is said then the will we have is each others seeing as how most people follow others anyway. -------------------- Hold fast young one, there is danger all about. He who holds the light of himself within will never shed light on anything, especially the evil minions that roam freely about at night. Posts: 23 | Registered: Sunday, December 21 2003 08:00 |
|
Shake Before Using
Member # 75
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 13:12
Profile
Messiah - That makes, uh, no sense. At least, the first sentence definitely doesn't. Saunders - erk. :P Alorael - I more or less share your viewpoint. Anyway, apparently the decision to do something is made before we realise that we decided to do it, but our brain makes us think that it's the other way around. While this may be true for simple mechanical tasks, it's probably not true for long-term planning, where our response is not based on instinct. Posts: 3234 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00 |
|
Law Bringer
Member # 2984
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 13:28
Profile
Homepage
Uh, you couldn't help but post *what*, Saunders? :confused: -------------------- "And all should cry, Beware, Beware! His Flashing eyes, his Floating hair!" S. T. Coleridge --- "It is as if everyone had lost their sense Consigned themselves to downfall and decadence And a wisp it is they have chosen as their beacon." Reinhard Mey. --- Quote of the Week: "I have a high opinion of myself, which makes up for my total lack of intelligence." Anon. Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |
|
DELETED Member # 21
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 13:31
Profile
^_- May the anime smiley fry all unprotected brains. And I was driven to do it by my biology! -------------------- KazeArctica: Oh yes. KazeArctica: Oh YES Posts: 93 | Registered: Sunday, September 30 2001 22:00 |
|
...b10010b...
Member # 869
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 14:58
Profile
Homepage
I think what Messiah is trying to say is that while we can do what we choose to do, we can only do what we choose to do. Hee hee, choose is a funny-sounding word when you say it enough times. Choose choose choose. Ahem. Anyway, he has a point. Whenever we do something, either we do it for a reason, in which case our reason for our action may as well be considered the cause of it, or we do it for no reason, in which case whether we have free will or not is irrelevant since our choice is of no significance anyway. Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
|
Senile Reptile
Member # 547
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 16:00
Profile
By my own free will, I take leave of Spiderweb for two or three weeks. Have fun, and never stop the insanity! -------------------- Polaris Posts: 1614 | Registered: Wednesday, January 23 2002 08:00 |
|
Warrior
Member # 3252
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 16:00
Profile
There's also the issue of sublimated response, where what we do is influenced by factors we aren't consciously aware of. Not that this has been proven to satisfaction, but it may bear on the idea of absolute free will. In any case, I don't really feel a burning passion to discover if there is, in fact, something like an absolute manifestiation of free will, like some unexplained region of brain activity as was suggested earlier. The illusion of free will, if that's all that this experiance of reality truly is, is enough to satisfy me. -------------------- Learn About The Man Behind the Messiah. Posts: 137 | Registered: Tuesday, July 22 2003 07:00 |
|
Bob's Big Date
Member # 3151
|
written Tuesday, January 6 2004 17:01
Profile
Homepage
I believe in free will, to a degree, but I'm also something of a determinist. It's my opinion that if we did it all over again, a few things might change; they might have chosen somewhere besides Nuremburg for the trials, and they might have hanged Louis XVI, but ultimately, people's actions only have impacts on their own lives. Rare, very rare, like once-in-human-history rare, is the man who can make a choice which has any difference in the long run. And in the end, we've only got a 18-billion-year run anyway, right? How long can humanity really survive, much less our fragile society? I'd be surprised if you could see Stalin's face in a museum in 5000 years, a human face in a museum in 500,000 years, and a museum period in 5,000,000. Humanity is a frail, fragile thing. It'll go on, of course, but we won't recognize it when it does. I think that a more relevant question isn't "Do I have free will?" Whether you do or don't is academic. "Do I matter?" I suppose if you're of the arrogant sort who can't accept that he's in the first, most primitive and disgusting .01% of humanity, you just might. I could hardly aspire to be Eugene Debs, much less Jesus Christ; how am I supposed to be memorable for more than a few dozen years after I'm gone? -------------------- In a word, gay. --Bob the Impaler Posts: 2367 | Registered: Friday, June 27 2003 07:00 |
|
This Side Towards Enemy
Member # 3098
|
written Thursday, January 8 2004 08:41
Profile
Why should I care whether I have free will? Do I have enough to eat? Am I in a safe emotionally stable enviroment? Am I happy? Those are questions that matter. Arguing about the existence of free will is just an excuse to use circular reasoning. -------------------- Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned I'll tell you my story, man Though I wish I'd never been born I'm loose at the seams, I've broken my dreams And my hand it shakes the pen Come on, come on now baby, Let the good times roll again Posts: 961 | Registered: Thursday, June 12 2003 07:00 |
|
Shaper
Member # 22
|
written Thursday, January 8 2004 08:58
Profile
I'm sure I read something somewhere about how consciousness may be created by the semi-quantum nature of our brain. So free will in the form of quantum uncertainity may have very real effects on our free will. Also, with the rise of computing, I fail to see how physical rules can govern everything. Before computers, you could argue that physical rules govern how that penny drops, plotting it's trajectory, etc. etc. However, now we have computers, and unless I'm wrong, if you roll a dice on a computer there is no way of telling what number it will land on. The physical environment has no effect on that function that goes on in the computer. Therefore, barring any significant holes in that theory, I believe that if the physical laws of the universe do not govern a computing calculation, then they cannot hope to govern something as sophisticated as the human brain. -------------------- KazeArctica: "Imagine...wangs everywhere...and tentacles. Nothing but wangs and tentacles! And no pants!" Posts: 2862 | Registered: Tuesday, October 2 2001 07:00 |
|
Shaper
Member # 517
|
written Thursday, January 8 2004 10:32
Profile
Morgan: of course there's a way of telling where the die will land. The computer has a program which runs in a certain way (I think the usual way is to have a function based on the time of day in milliseconds, but slightly more complicated), and provided we know exactly the variables that go into the program, we know what will come out. The most random thing we know is radioactivity-although the total activity of a radioactive source decreases over time, we can't tell when the next emission will be. Of course, that doesn't mean we will never be able to. -E- -------------------- Let them eat cake! Polaris Boards: The System is Up. Perennially. Posts: 2314 | Registered: Tuesday, January 15 2002 08:00 |
|
Shaper
Member # 22
|
written Thursday, January 8 2004 10:49
Profile
*withdraws argument* However, if there *is* any way that true randomness exists in the universe, in a way we can observe, I'd maintain that the human brain is not predictable. -------------------- KazeArctica: "Imagine...wangs everywhere...and tentacles. Nothing but wangs and tentacles! And no pants!" Posts: 2862 | Registered: Tuesday, October 2 2001 07:00 |
|
Master Jeweller
Member # 409
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 02:58
Profile
Homepage
Omlette -> actually it does mean that we'll never be able to. According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (an impotant but little-understood part of modern physics), there are certain things that cannot be known because they ARE undefined. This doesn't mean that our measurement capabilities or equipment are lacking, this means that it's a mathematical impossibility to measure certain things. For instance, the more certain you become of a particle's location, the less can be said about its momentum, and vice versa. If a particle's momentum were exactly known, then it would be absolutely impossible to determine where the particle would be. Radioactive decay follows similar laws. And these things do affect larger-scale objects but because of their probabilistic nature tend to cancel out most of the time. In a precision object such as the human brain, they may well be important. -------------------- Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heilighthum! Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng getheilt, Alle Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt. Pieter Simoons aka Radiant Official Crystal Shard and SubTerra webpage Posts: 798 | Registered: Monday, December 17 2001 08:00 |
|
Nuke and Pave
Member # 24
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 14:03
Profile
Homepage
Radiant gave a good description of the basic source of randomness in the universe. So the question is whether human brain actually uses that randomness, or is fully determentistic. (The fact that randomness exists doesn't mean that it is being used. For example, you'll agree that an eraser doesn't have free will, despite all the quantum randomness in the universe.) We currently don't know enough about underlying processes in the brain to tell if it has parts that are truly random. Neural nets (which are a computer simulation of what people thought at some point neurons acted like) will always give the same output given the same set of inputs. So I guess the question is whether our brain is more random than simple neural nets. -------------------- Be careful with a word, as you would with a sword, For it too has the power to kill. However, well-placed word, unlike a well-placed sword, Can also have the power to heal. Posts: 2649 | Registered: Wednesday, October 3 2001 07:00 |
|
...b10010b...
Member # 869
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 14:26
Profile
Homepage
I find it implausible that quantum uncertainty effects in the brain are significant. After all, quantum uncertainty mostly works on the scale of individual subatomic particles, whereas even a single neuron consists of countless billions of atoms, and we lose neurons every day with no major changes becoming evident. If the brain were that sensitive to small changes it simply couldn't function. [ Friday, January 09, 2004 14:27: Message edited by: Lysenko-chan ] Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
|
Shock Trooper
Member # 3022
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 14:47
Profile
quote:I don't see how this makes sense. You seem to be saying that quantum effects can't be significant, because they will be too significant. How about "just significant enough"? ;) In essence, we don't know. We do know that the brain is pretty chaotic, and may in theory be able to pull up uncertainty through the scales, magnifying small quantum fluctuations. I think some recent research on rat brains found just that... though I can't find the article. Of course, this question will never be answered decisively. Pros can always hide behind the subjective experience, and declare material investigations to be neccessarily limited. Antis can always hide in loopholes in the theories, and hidden variables. [ Friday, January 09, 2004 15:00: Message edited by: FZ ] Posts: 269 | Registered: Saturday, May 24 2003 07:00 |
|
...b10010b...
Member # 869
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 14:54
Profile
Homepage
quote:I'm saying that if the brain were sensitive enough for quantum effects to be significant, something like a minor knock on the head would drastically change your personality. As far as chaos goes, there's evidence that it's not as important as pop science suggests. Most research on chaos theory has been done using mathematical models of complex systems, and it's now being found that much of the chaotic behaviour observed was due to flawed assumptions in the models rather than chaotic behaviour of the actual systems being modelled. Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
|
Shock Trooper
Member # 3022
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 15:13
Profile
quote:I think we need to be aware that there are two levels here. We have the hardware of the brain, the way the neurones are joined to each other, the synapses and so on. Much research suggests that these established pathways decide much of our memories, and personality etc. We then have the software part, the pattern of synchronised electrical impulses that occur when the neurones fire. There isn't room for uncertainty effects in the first, but in the latter, as we have a large number of essentially quantum interactions happening all the time, probabilistic effects can be significant. At a large scale view, your "personality" will be unchanged. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0005025 Articles discussing quantum decoherence in the brain. First says no to quantum effects. The second refutes the first and says yes. Notice the *massive* difference in the results of the two calculations. (8 orders of magnitude!) quote:Well, it depends. Some of the initial hysteria has died down, but the field is definitely significant, especially in finding out about emergence properties and such like. Complexity theory does not attack chaos theory, rather it complements it by tackling the issue from a different direction - complex systems can exhibit simple behaviour. In any case, it is generally accepted that the brain is enormously complex, and so very sensitive and unpredictable. It would be worthwhile to specify some specific cases, so I know what you mean by "flawed assumptions". [ Friday, January 09, 2004 15:20: Message edited by: FZ ] Posts: 269 | Registered: Saturday, May 24 2003 07:00 |
|
...b10010b...
Member # 869
|
written Friday, January 9 2004 16:11
Profile
Homepage
The example I was thinking of specifically was weather prediction. It's my understanding that in the early days of using computers to predict the weather, minor changes to the initial conditions quickly produced radically different results as one extrapolated further ahead (the famous "butterfly effect".) However, newer models which take into account a larger number of climatic factors tend to display much less chaos. (Of course, you could well say that meteorologists still get weather predictions drastically wrong on occasion, but given how limited knowledge of the initial conditions is in this case I'd still say they're doing a pretty good job.) I still fail to see how a random process can mediate what we experience as free will or how it can account for consciousness, especially when at best it probably plays only a minor part in brain function; it seems to me that at most, quantum effects may cause or prevent the firing of a few individual neurons in each impulse. Anyway, you seem as if you know what you're talking about. Are you a neurologist or a physicist? I'm just a lowly biology student and have only just finished my first year at university. Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
|
Warrior
Member # 3694
|
written Saturday, January 10 2004 10:04
Profile
Free will is an illusion. Fate has cruelly trapped us and tricked us into thinking that we have free will. Life is hope, hope is stagnation, stagnation is death, death is life, life is hope. Also life is change, change is new, new is death, death is life, life is change. We are all slaves of our desires. The only thing is that I will be ruled by the fulfilment my desires, especially because everyone else wants to rule me by the frustration of my desires. -------------------- And that was exactly the point of itself. Takes advantage of the easily offended. Posts: 137 | Registered: Monday, November 17 2003 08:00 |
|
Shaper
Member # 22
|
written Saturday, January 10 2004 11:08
Profile
Zeviz: I don't think that having randomness in the universe *proves* that we have free will. I do, however, think that if you can prove that the rigid rules of the universe that science has, and will, come up with do not apply to certain aspects of it then you become one step closer to proving that free will exists. FZ: Lysenko is correct. Quantum uncertainty only exists on a very small scale. As soon as you work with bigger things, uncertainty disappears and is generally replaced with common sense (balls thrown to the left will always land to the left). That said, I'm no scientist, so I don't know whether quantum uncertainty pertains to the free will of our minds. I just see it as an example that the physical laws are not absolute and all-knowing - thus creating a place where free will can come to exist. That's not to say that we have complete free will. We don't - there's some things we have little or no control over, such as our sub-conscious mind and our personalities (it is nigh on impossible for an introvert to become extroverted). [ Saturday, January 10, 2004 11:09: Message edited by: Morgan ] -------------------- KazeArctica: "Imagine...wangs everywhere...and tentacles. Nothing but wangs and tentacles! And no pants!" Posts: 2862 | Registered: Tuesday, October 2 2001 07:00 |