From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website
Higher level processes in the brain “reach down” to the lower level process. The macro-brain and the micro-brain somehow in tandem. But we still don’t have a full grasp of how these interactions unfold insofar as “I” become more or less the commander-in-chief. And as often as not when descriptions of this is brought down to earth they revolve around what unfolds only in the either/or world.
To wit:
But how do we go about determining beyond all possible doubt if our mental interpretations are merely, as of yet, not fully understood manifestations of physics wholly in sync with the material laws of matter?
Yet this basically crunch time for all who take an interest in grappling with their own choices. But: Given the mind-boggling nature of interaction between the billions and billions of bits of matter all the way down to the “ions and signaling molecules and synapses”, who but the neuroscientists themselves have access to anything that could lead only to the least uninformed leap of faith here.
And then the fact that, depending of the context in which the terrible accident above occurs, there may be those who do not feel “sympathy, fear or guilt” at all. For whatever personal reasons they may actually take satisfaction from it. And feel positive emotional and psychological states. Or see the whole thing as just “entertainment”.
The part where, free will or not, there’s no way to pin down how one ought to react to it.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
Unless of course someone – everyone – loses it only because nature, in unfolding only as it must, compels this to be the one and the only reality. But how exactly would philosophers or theologians come to know this if they can’t be entirely certain that what they came to know was as a result of being able to freely choose to know something else.
It still comes down to what the “hard guys” tell us based on the conclusions they come to utilizing all of the tools available to them through the “scientific method”.
But!
You know the rest.
Yet here even Kant falls back on the “transcending font”: his own “deduced” Creator. And, for most in the “Christian tradition”, this Creator is said to be omniscient. He knows all but somehow He does not know what we will freely choose. Because, if He did kn ow, how then would we truly be free to choose it?
And we are still back to assuming that the things we think up in regard to God and religion and ethics are examples of what we actually have no way in which to confirm beyond the assumptions themselves. Somehow, viscerally, intuitively, we just know these things.
And that’s before we get to the part where the behaviors we link “freedom and goodness” to are determined and then demonstrated to be ours and not theirs.
There you go. A leap of faith to free will. Just the thought that next week’s election here in America was “fated” going back to whatever brought into existence matter and the laws that govern it is simply beyond our grasp. Perhaps literally. It’s just that some are able – compelled or not – to shrug it off and to nestle comfortably in their own set of assumptions about “I”. Not to mention all of us who go about the business of living our lives from day to day not giving a single thought to these complex “philosophical” conundrums.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
Bolder is one thing, pinning down that there is absolutely no doubt that you are reading this only because you were never really free to choose not to read it, another matter all together.
In fact, how do we untangle ourselves from the conundrum itself? You’re a neuroscientist or someone able to do research on the brains of dead people. You’re poking around and performing all of these experiments. But what constitutes the part – that eureka! moment – when it finally becomes clear that it is only because you freely chose to do what you could have freely chosen not to do.
It’s like the human consciousness equivalent of figuring out why the universe is something and why it is this something. Or whether existence has always been around or actually started given a particular set of conditions.
Then, for some, cue God. Or some manifestation of the universe which they believe is “out there” able at least to provide an explanation. Meanwhile God or No God we continue to be stuck in antinomies…going around and around in circles trying to sort out – scientifically, philosophically, spiritually – what exactly it means to be dependent on our “biological inheritance”.
Wholly dependent? Compatibly dependent? Or “free at last!”?
The either/or world rendition of “conflicting goods”. Both sides can make reasonable arguments that the other side can deflect but never entirely make go away.
Look, Kid, iambiguous didn’t say that. Stephen Cave did when he created a title for his article.
And, unlike you and James S. Saint, who actually take pride in having freely chosen to post the didactic [pedantic] objectivist dogmas that you and he pedaled/pedal here, I flat out admit that I have no capacity to demonstrate my own autonomy.
Look, Kid, there’s no way in hell that I’d expect someone of your ilk to grasp the points that someone of my ilk is making here.
Just suffice it to say that if you’re lucky you really don’t have any choice but to post what you do. And, if I’m lucky, I am compelled by the laws of nature to read your crap.
It’s quite simple. If freedom doesn’t exist in any way shape or form; it’s logically impossible to hypothetically suppose it.
This means that freedom necessarily exists in some way, shape or form. That form may not be appreciated right now (Not what we want it to be) by us in the way we want it to be, but it does exist.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
Uh-oh?
Right, like this settles it. Consider: if, out of the blue, I type, “the green hornet on Maple street stole the only copy of the document definitively establishing the Christian God as in fact the Devil”, was that only as a result of whatever set into motion the laws of matter going back to…where and when exactly?
Then it ever and always comes down to how far this can be taken. Up to and including everything we think, feel, say and do? After all, look at all of those who are afflicted with brain tumors that don’t become murderers and pedophiles. And what becomes particularly unnerving for most is the idea that they are themselves murderers and pedophiles…but it’s all beyond their control. Unless of course you think it is all in your control and you murder someone or rape a child and someone comes along and tells you that you aren’t really responsible because there is no way you could have not murdered someone or raped a child.
Clearly, this gets all tangled up in what we think we know and what we’d like to to believe is so given a particular set of circumstances.
We hold that, “the universe is deterministic and free will is a non-starter”, and then ask if we should be a bit more mindful of luck, as though anything that we are mindful of here is not also embedded inherently, necessarily in a wholly determined universe!!
Look, I’ll admit I’m just not thinking this through correctly, but if “I” is derived from a mind that is derived from a brain that is no less matter wholly in sync with the immutable laws of matter, being mindful about anything is only what we were ever able to be mindful of.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
Of course the difficulty here revolves around conducting an experiment embedded in a demonstration in which all of these steps are explained in the manner in which, say, we explain the functions of a human heart:
[b]"* Pumping oxygenated blood to the other body parts.
Pumping hormones and other vital substances to different parts of the body.
Receiving deoxygenated blood and carrying metabolic waste products from the body and pumping it to the lungs for oxygenation.
Maintaining blood pressure. the human heart functions"[/b]
How do we do the same with the human brain such that in the end we are able to demonstrate that the demonstration itself is or is not only as it every could have been. With the heart it’s like explaining the functions of an automobile engine. With the brain it’s like explaining the capacity of the brain to explain itself.
Or, rather, to the extent that [compelled or otherwise] my own explanation here is actually reasonable. And what can then be the comfort embedded in the conclusion that if it is not I cannot really be held responsible for getting it wrong. Not if I was never able not to get it wrong.
This is clearly as good a description as any of where we are stuck. And, of course, we would seem to have no definitive capacity to disentangle ourselves from the conflicting sets of assumptions in order to know in, say, a comprehensive epistemological sense which assessment is the right one.
I merely muddy the waters all the more by introducing my own set of assumptions: that even given some measure of autonomy “I” in the is/ought world is embedded in and derived from all manner of variables that are are beyond our understanding and control. “I” is largely an existential contraption rooted subjectively in dasein. And that in turn it seems reasonable to construe “I” here as “fractured and fragmented” such that any particular individual’s value judgments are, at least in some sense, “illusory” even given free will.
Even if the brain builds up a charge before it makes an internal action,
doesn’t mean we have no free will.
That is a crappy argument / idea.
The subconscious and the conscious are always doing their thing.
I’m not saying we’re absolutely “free”.
I’m saying we make choices. No matter what someone else says.
I think the point above is that those who have considerably more expertise regarding the functioning brain are considerably more skeptical of that. Let’s hear your own less crappy argument/idea. And the evidence that you have collected in conducting your own experiments to back it up.
I certainly agree there is no evidence available that I am aware of that settles it once and for all.
And the fact that we do make choices seems clear enough. That’s what peacegirl kept coming back to. The “choice”/choice antinomy.
Also, in my own dreams, I clearly do seem to make choices too. In them there is no doubt of my autonomy.
As for making the assumption that we are not absolutely free if we are in fact free I noted this:
The part whereby I always challenge the objectivists here to go in order to explore their own sense of identity in regard to their spiritual, moral, political and esthetic values.
Free will does exist. It is defined and deduced into existence by the assumptions of people like this. No actual experimental or experiential evidence provided…they just know that it does.
Now of course all we need to do is to pin down which human behaviors are more in sync with those millions of years of natural selection on the biological level. In regard to race and gender and sexual preferences. In regard to the masters and the slaves.
Not sure? Ask them.
Then arcane intellectual contraptions like this:
But: does he take this down out of the clouds and note how “for all practical purposes” it is applicable to the life that he lives, to the behaviors that he chooses in making that distinction between genes and memes in regard to conflicting goods in a particular set of circumstances?
Well, if he ever has, please link me to it.
Here, in my view, we get closer to the part that is of most importance to the Ubermen. It is one thing to become a master and not a slave when there was never any possibility of this not being your fate in a wholly determined universe. Even to the extent that you feel pride, you were never able not to.
No, for the Ubermen here at KT, it is of vital importance to assume that they are the masters because despite thousands of years in which societal memes have succeeded in feminizing most men, they chose to remain what all white Anglo-Saxon heterosexual men really are…naturally.
Here is as close as satyr will come to bringing free will “down to earth”:
Again the initial assumption being that women are in fact able to choose of their own free will to dress and to have sex in a particular way.
He offers no definitive scientific, empirical, material evidence in which to adduce this. He simply thinks it is so and that makes it so.
And it must be so for him, otherwise he is not free to judge these behaviors as either more or less in sync with nature’s way in regard to gender.
The fact that throughout the course of human history and given countless unique and different cultural contexts and individual experiences, individual women have thought about the clothes they wear and the sex they pursue in vastly different ways, is moot. There is but one natural behavior [as he assesses it] and women are either wholly in sync with it or are not.
As though this objectivist mentality doesn’t tell us far more about him and his clique/claque than the women themselves.
Instead, his point is actually aimed more in the other direction. In other words, that he embraces what he believes in his head to be true about free will because this allows him to pat himself on the back for having made all of the rational judgments and choices that, wholly in sync with nature, enable him to freely feel contempt for all of those who refuse to think about it exactly as he does.
As for this…
…how is it not just another abstruse intellectual contraption that tells us nothing about the world of actual human interactions.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
Here again however those on both sides of the debate will use this [however true it actually is] to bolster their own claims. The advocates of free will scoff that this is just further proof of how so many refuse to shoulder the responsibility for their own behaviors. Beyond blaming society for all the shit that comes their way, they can even blame their own brains. Either way, they certainly do not deserve to be punished for the things they do. Then it’s just a matter of how much wiggle room they are willing to allow for some autonomy. Like for example regarding all of the good things that they do.
Then there are those who really do believe science and “popular opinion” confirms that it’s all “beyond my control”. Some are even willing to go so far as to include the good that things they do too. The important thing though is that the punishment not be too severe. At least for those here who are in turn willing to accept that in meting out punishment not everything is compelled by nature.
On the other hand, there are still plenty of folks around hell bent on assuming that Donald Trump, Joe Biden and their followers are fully and wholly responsible for flushing American down the toilet.
Whether the belief in determinism spreads or not the actual gap between what is believed and what is able to be established as autonomous belief still remains the crucial unknown. It’s like the belief in God and the actual existence of God. Or the belief in the matrix and the actual existence of the matrix. Or the belief in a conspiracy and the actual conspiracy itself. Only with determinism the gap can’t possibly be more fundamental. It’s not about what is believed but the nature of belief itself.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic
First of all, let’s step back.
Here’s a man writing an article on free will in The Atlantic Magazine. A magazine that I subscribe to. He seems to be convinced that we really don’t have free will. The science, he notes, seems rather certain about it. So somehow billions of years ago a Big Bang resulted in stars exploding…producing all of the heavier elements that somehow configured into living matter that somehow configured into self-conscious thinking matter that created the internet that allows us to communicate about determinism here and now. And all of this is entirely embedded in “immutable laws of matter” such that none of it could never have not happened.
Don’t even pretend to think you know if this is true. Well, unless, of course, one way or the other you can demonstrate that it either is or is not.
Does this?
See the problem? If in fact human autonomy is entirely an illusion wholly subsumed in the only possible reality there can ever be given the immutable laws of matter, it makes no difference what any of them [any of us] think, feel, say or do…they [we] were never able not to think, feel, say and do them.
Same thing:
Or, again, is this all me? Is a point being made here that I keep missing? And how on earth do I go about determining if I am missing it because I am free not to miss it or if I was never able to not miss it until one day I am in fact free not to miss it, get it, and my whole frame of mind here changes.
