I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.

God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee

I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.

  • Steve2 [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I think free will is perfectly compatible with determinism.

    Hofstadter had this good analogy. Imagine you laid out a series of many, many dominos. These dominos form the equivalent of "and" or "nand" gates of whatever arbitrary complexity you'd like. With this you're able to input a binary string of 8 digits, say, and knock over whichever rows of dominos in the input section you'd like. The dominos flop over enter a few adders, square root functions, enter a bus to hold as memory (all with as many dominos as you deem necessary), and at the end the dominos flop over if the inputted number is prime or they don't flop over if they're not - now, why if you inputted 11011111 (223) did the last domino fall? It's realistic and valid to say, the last domino fell because 13 is prime - and reductive and useless to say, because another domino hit it. That's the equivalent of saying we are merely stimuli and responses. If you don't like dominos, imagine the same with a calculator or whatever. Why do the pixels in the screen light up in a NO when I inputted 221 in thus program? The most useful answer is "because 221 is not prime" and not to start delving into quintillions of electrons' wave functions in the silicon.

    The other really interesting thing about being physical beings with consciousness is that it doesn't seem to really matter what happens at the physical level of molecules or atoms - we run the same. If you had heard a particularily moving piece of music for the first time at 8 years old you'd be the same person if you had heard that same music with 1 second delay (really choose 0.5 sec or 0.01 sec the point stands) - even though the air molecules that careened into your ear lobes were not the same! Consciousness and free will seem to be robust and float above these very base material laws of physics.

    That doesn't mean you can will yourself to be full when your economic system is not providing food, but it does mean you have a choice with how you will react to that as an individual - will you steal, will you beg, will you work with your neighbors, will you so on and so on. I like to think of it as a "volition cone" where the point is the current moment and it widens in some imaginary "action/possibility space" according to some function that essentially describes your class. You are free to act within your future volition cone but cannot escape outside of it short of revolution.

    • Ideology [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I actually like referring to Catherine Malabou for this. She was a neuroscientist and in What Should We Do With Our Brain? she makes the case that assuming human psychology is deterministic is actually liberalism. It seeds the people who think in deterministic terms to be inactive because choosing to act is unrealistic. Her view is that neuroplasticity is actually a dialectical process:

      Humans make their own brains, and they do not know that they do so. Our brain is a work, and we do not know it. Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. The reason for this is that most of the time flexibility superimposes it-self on plasticity, even in the midst of scientific discourses that take themselves to be describing it entirely ‘‘objectively.’’ The mistake in certain cognitivist discourses, for in-stance, is not that they reduce the mental to the neuronal or the mind to a biological entity. I am myself entirely materialist, and such affirmations do not shock me at all. The error is in thinking that neuronal man is simply a neuronal given and not also a political and ideological construction (including of the ‘‘neuronal’’ itself). One notes that many descriptions of plasticity are in fact unconscious justifications of a flexibility without limits. Sometimes it seems as though in nervous systems, from the aplysia to the human, a faculty is deployed—a faculty described precisely in terms of synaptic plasticity—to fold, to render oneself docile vis-a-vis one’s environment, in a word, to adapt to everything, to be ready for all adjustments. It is as though, under the pretext of describing synaptic plasticity, we were really looking to show that flexibility is inscribed in the brain, as though we knew more about what we could stand than about what we could create. That said, securing a true plasticity of the brain means insisting on knowing what it can do and not simply what it can tolerate. By the verb to do or to make [faire] we don’t mean just ‘‘doing’’ math or piano but making its history, becoming the subject of its history, grasping the connection between the role of genetic nondeterminism at work in the constitution of the brain and the possibility of a social and political nondeterminism, in a word, a new freedom, which is to say: a new meaning of history.

      @Frank

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I'm sorry but this sounds like it's talking about neuroplasticity rather than the concept of free will. And I just mistaken in what is generally meant by free will?

        • Ideology [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It's a long ass book but I guess I can try to paraphrase. However, it will lose a lot of the nuance and philosophical justification: the concept of free will Malabou is putting forward is that it's a dialectical process. The world presents you with environmental change as a thesis, your body's tendency toward homeostasis presents you with an antithesis, and through making a decision and taking action you apply synthesis.

          A lot of neuroscientists talking about choice focus on the act of attention because it's more easily measurable than intention. If multiple stimuli enter an animal's brain simultaneously, this creates a very noisy (random or pseudorandom) situation in which the brain is forced to act as a modulator to the signals it's receiving. Usually what happens is that it isolates a specific stimulus to focus on, thus taking a bunch of branching action potentials and directing them down one pathway like a lightning strike after one of its multiple leaders makes contact with the ground. This is why you can understand the voice of the person speaking to you even when you're in a crowded room surrounded by loud talkers.

          Which stimulus an animal focuses on can be based on many factors like habit, history, or randomness. If I sedate you and put you in a blank white room with identical cookies set equidistantly all around you, obviously you didn't choose to be in this blank room, but if you pick a cookie at random it will have technically been your choice, because isolating all other possible factors only leaves your brain to go for one at random. With no external stimuli standing out, you are left with just the signal generated by you.

          But Catherine Malabou's thesis essentially includes another option: you can also break functional fixedness and destroy the white box and sue me for sedating you and putting you in a box. In this way we can connect theories of attention, choice, and neuroplasticity (in the way it's reacting to a new situation) with struggle and revolution. If you were simply a passive actor, then a third option might not have been conceivable.

          Yes, there are many material factors of history affecting your decision, but ultimately you will reach a point where either a new synaptic connection will be made or a signal will be suppressed, and I'm not sure that's something that we can 100% consistently model even with a neuron-by-neuron brain simulator (many phds are still trying, but free choice and consciousness still elude them). Not even behaviorists could account for all the statistical noise in animal responses, only trendlines.

          I also think that if our minds were totally susceptible to deterministic functions, we'd be more easily influenced by cybernetic regimens or such regimens would be better designed. Instead we're all here talking about communism even though it's not presently in our best interests.