Free Will
A friend of mine posted a piece from This American Life on Free Will. It's an interesting piece, but it mostly just lays out the conventional argument against free will, that is, that humans are mechanistic reactors to sets of stimuli. What follows is my reaction to the piece.
A bunch of things bother me about the piece. And my shortest response is that the question might not be valid.
The opening reference to physics, gravity and quantum dynamics as some kind of indication that everything is mechanistically known is misleading. Both Einsteinian gravity and quantum dynamics are well understood and fantastically accurate by themselves. But they (so far) cannot be combined. So one or both of them is essentially limited. On top of this our understanding of how a seemly deterministic macro order emerges from an essentially non-deterministic micro order, is, I think, under developed.
The suggestion that all the stuff your brain does is just neurons firing is true and completely misleading. It suggests that it is known that how consciousness emerges from this firing is also mechanistic\deterministic. As far as I can tell, no one actually knows this.
That all said, I do think humans are largely mechanistic. We have to be. Almost all of the decisions we make are based on sensory stimuli, emotion, and a complex integration of past experience. You have to do this most of the time. It would take forever to get anything done otherwise. That Tide example was rather misleading.
I do think there is some evidence for free will. Mechanistic response suggests that for the same inputs you get the same result *every time*. This seems to be clearly false. I recall going to the same restaurant for lunch every day for a couple years. Same guy, same restaurant, same set of choices, same lady behind the counter, same everything. And yet I made different choices. Another example: I write a blog (that no one reads, it helps me to get the stuff in my head out of my head). When I write pieces on this blog I write them out fully and very frequently substantially rewrite them. Same inputs, different outputs.
There are a couple reasons I don't like the question. As a practical matter you have to behave as though you do have free will, so in some sense it does not matter if you do or don't.
And the dichotomy bothers me. I don't have a good rationale for this. It seems like we're asking the wrong question. The question assumes the cleavage point is in a certain location. That's just not clear to me. It's like asking about the mind\body duality assumes there is one, when that just isn't clear.
Suppose your brain has a built in randomizer. Some mechanism (quantum?) that flips a coin in case of ties. So in this case do you have free will or not? It's not deterministic anymore, but it also doesn't seem consciously controlled. So, as I said, I don't like the question.
A bunch of things bother me about the piece. And my shortest response is that the question might not be valid.
The opening reference to physics, gravity and quantum dynamics as some kind of indication that everything is mechanistically known is misleading. Both Einsteinian gravity and quantum dynamics are well understood and fantastically accurate by themselves. But they (so far) cannot be combined. So one or both of them is essentially limited. On top of this our understanding of how a seemly deterministic macro order emerges from an essentially non-deterministic micro order, is, I think, under developed.
The suggestion that all the stuff your brain does is just neurons firing is true and completely misleading. It suggests that it is known that how consciousness emerges from this firing is also mechanistic\deterministic. As far as I can tell, no one actually knows this.
That all said, I do think humans are largely mechanistic. We have to be. Almost all of the decisions we make are based on sensory stimuli, emotion, and a complex integration of past experience. You have to do this most of the time. It would take forever to get anything done otherwise. That Tide example was rather misleading.
I do think there is some evidence for free will. Mechanistic response suggests that for the same inputs you get the same result *every time*. This seems to be clearly false. I recall going to the same restaurant for lunch every day for a couple years. Same guy, same restaurant, same set of choices, same lady behind the counter, same everything. And yet I made different choices. Another example: I write a blog (that no one reads, it helps me to get the stuff in my head out of my head). When I write pieces on this blog I write them out fully and very frequently substantially rewrite them. Same inputs, different outputs.
There are a couple reasons I don't like the question. As a practical matter you have to behave as though you do have free will, so in some sense it does not matter if you do or don't.
And the dichotomy bothers me. I don't have a good rationale for this. It seems like we're asking the wrong question. The question assumes the cleavage point is in a certain location. That's just not clear to me. It's like asking about the mind\body duality assumes there is one, when that just isn't clear.
Suppose your brain has a built in randomizer. Some mechanism (quantum?) that flips a coin in case of ties. So in this case do you have free will or not? It's not deterministic anymore, but it also doesn't seem consciously controlled. So, as I said, I don't like the question.
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