So, people generally seem very sure that they have free will. But ask yourself this:

What makes your actions happen. Your thoughts?
Ok, what makes your thoughts happen?

Uh oh. See, I can't actually make the decision to have a given thought. They just pop into my head. I don't choose them. And it's my thoughts that control my actions. So do I really have free will?

Somebody want to save me here? I really want to have free will.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

That is a fun and tough question... your actions and reactions are a result of conditioning, so your free will is tenuous at best.

Locke was right...

FREE WILLY, FREE WILLY!!!

IceNine said:

So are you thinking of, essentially, a conditioned neurological response to a familiar pattern of stimuli? And our perception of that is thoughts 'popping' into our heads (consciousness)?

How do you avoid the physicalist problem of physics determining every aspect of our neurobiology (and, presumably, conscious experience)?

Doves,
Mel!ssa

I thoughts stem from our inviorment but,we have the power to coose what are actions be

enviorment sorry but,u knew what I meant

tackam said:

Damn... why did you have to catch me on a busy day at work?!!!

I think that we have freewill, but our choices and decisions are based out of conditioning... we can choose to do something completely outside of our conditioning, but we most commonly follow patterns of behavior based on years of learning.

I will get into this more deeply when I get time...

Busy days suck...

IceNine said:

Work? It's a holiday! That sucks. It's ok, take your time.

So the thing is, I get your explanation. But it's not quite getting at my worry. It doesn't seem that our actual experience of our thought process supports the idea of free will. I'm making a very simple claim: I don't choose the thougths that come in to my head. This worries me. Though I didn't CHOOSE to be worried. . .

Doves,
Mel!ssa

SexLovely said:

Oh, sure you do, in that context. You are able to decide whether to obey them or not. I'm asking a different sort of question: do you choose your thoughts?

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Lots of thoughts come and go in brains. We choose which ones we enjoy or care to spend enegry on. We don't entertain EVERY thought that comes through. Although, I see what you mean...Because the thoughts just come, its not something that is created by us...

tackam said:

I too am very busy at work today!

The quick answer, made especially well by Douglas Hofstadter, is that feedback loops are non-deterministic. And the brain is littered with feedback loops.

violett said:

Right, you see the problem then. And you say we choose what to spend energy on, but you would think that your choice comes in the form of a thought, and why was it that thought rather than another? If you didn't choose which choice to make, it wasn't much of a choice!

My oh my.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

hmmm. Very complex. I need to address this when I am at home, and actually CAN think lol

I go tah dinnah without my fatha's permission..

Oh there's no doubt that the majority of your brain activitity is automatic. And then there's your values--you can't really kill your best friend, even if you think you have free will about it because your values won't permit it to happen, so you're not really free there. But it terms of what you choose to focus your attention on, the big voltage loop in the brain creates your waking "free will" as a sort of emergent property.

teller said:

Oh, fine, I have a chunk of free time for once and the org philosophers are all busy with this thing you call "work"! Well. It's very sad. Perhaps I'll go read the paper and come back in a little while, give y'all some time.

A quick google search has not illuminated Hofstadter's position for me. Perhaps when you get a moment you can say something more. I can certainly imagine describing the brain in terms of feedback loops, but what makes them non-deterministic?

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

That will take some time, but I will eventually post, even if it takes a new thread!

Another quick answer is emergent properties--your mind more than the sum of your neurons. Neurons are stupid and deterministic individually, just as ant art. But the whole brain, like the whole ant colony, does amazing things that the individual ants (or neurons) are incapable of realizing on their own. And so the emergent organization begins to influence the determinstic components, thus overriding their determinism in a sense.

Hofstadter's most important work on the subject was in Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind's I.

teller said:

Well, presumably we choose our values, or COULD choose different ones.

The concept of 'emergent properties' has always seemed a bit vague and fishy to me.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Emergent properties ARE vague and fishy...

teller said:

Oooohhh, that guy. Yeah, those books are very high on my "read these right now you ignorant fool" list. I probably won't get around to them for a few weeks, though. . .gotta drag myself throught the rest of this quarter in school first.

Emergent properties are rather metaphysically perplexing. . .starts to sound like fancy dualism. You know?

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

There's lots of examples out there...the stock market, for example, is horribly indeterministic because every's watching it's output and making decisions based on it and feeding it new input with their buys/sells. No one can predict what it will do on a given day unless there is a really important news item that sets an obvious direction.

There was also a computer experiment involving cellular automata...simple blocks (pixels) with simple rules regarding what do to next based on what pixels were nearby. Over time, what resulted was a lot of unexpected "life" as objects appeared and persisted, and ate other blocks, and evolved a sort of simple locomotion. Really freaky shit.

I think the ant-colony does it best, though. The ant colony is the organism that intelligently seeks out food. The individual ant is a dumb cell, following a freakishly simple set of rules.

IceNine said:

I agree with you on this one. Such as the racist-like attitudes of many people. Even those who do not consider themselves racists.

Look at what is happening with the Islamic world. Even though there were only a few Islamic people involved in the 9/11 attacks, thousands of peace-loving Islamic people have suffered because of the image portayed by the media. I live in a town with many Somolie refugees. Many of the women do not want to come out in public because of their attire and the strange looks they get when they do.

And how many of you would marry someone from another race? How many say, I have a black friend or a white friend but would never marry one even though you are hopelessly in love with that person? And look at how people perceive Black Americans, as a race of people only capable of entertainment and sports. When in reality we are a race of people who have survived horrors unspeakable. Does anyone ever give us credit for that? Think about it. Hell we had to raise holy hell just to get a fuckin holiday in honor of a man who brought some validity to this nation. Why is that. Was he not deserving of it?


These are just a couple of examples. However, I believe everyone of us has the capacity to obtain our God given right to free will, just as he's given us the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These are not just the words of our founding fathers. It has been what has driven mankind to all parts and every corner of the world. They just put down on paper what people already know and feel. We just have to open up our minds and let free will take over. As long as our minds are shut up by our own idiosyncracies and we ALLOW the idiosyncracies of those who are in a position to do so feed us bullshit, then free will remain elusive and we shall always remain slaves.

teller said:

Did you see the movie "American Perfekt" (and that's perfect spelled with a "k"). It was a satire about a well known, high paid psychiatrist who couldn't make a decision of his own free will. He made all his decisions with the flip of a coin. He murdered one lady and tried to murder another, but the other lady tricked him with a two headed coin and he set her free. Sounds strangely like the thinking of the American public at large. Unable to make a decision based on their own free will, and constantly manipulated with the coin-headed of American politics and greedy conglomerates.

teller said:

Yeaaahhh. . .but nobody is claiming that the ant colony has consciousness floating around above the ant hill. Can orderly behavior emerge from very simple rules? Yeah, and I agree it is interesting and freaky. But order is not sufficient for consciousness, and consciousness isn't necessary for order.

Did I miss your point? I'm afraid I might have.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. The ant-hill possesses a rudimentary consciousness because it steers the entire colony toward that which the individual ant is totally unaware, namely the food it wants. The consciousness is not "floating" above the ant-hill except in an abstract sort of sense.

Depends what you define "free will" as being. Your thoughts exist because of the the neural activity in your brain. Whether you can claim credit for those thoughts yourself, or whatever you prefer to give the credit to the individual synaptic links or even individual molecules doesn't really matter. Take credit for all the good ideas, and blame Nature for all the bad ones.

Being firmly in the "strong AI" camp myself, I can say that what we perceive as thought processes are probably just the side effect of neurons firing at synapses etc. Most/all of the important thought patterns we need to survive and to live are already pre-learned before we are born. So apply whatever value you wish to "free will" but frankly I think it is overrated

Regardless of that though, we certainly do have morality, ethics, and the ability to choose right from wrong. I can choose my own actions, based on the neural model that exists in my head that has evolved throughout my life and developed according to my environment and stimuli.

Laypersons (that is, non computer scientists) with an interest in AI and the various theories of sentience and consciousness could do worse than have a read of Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" - it's written in very simple terms and reads like a "pop science" manual - very readible. For the more techy / mathematically minded among us I suggest starting with Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" which is the Bible for AI really.

You can argue free-will down at the philosocphical level, or you can watch the consequences of your position at the policital level and then deduce whether you made a wrong turn in your thinking. Without free-will, there tends to be an avoidance of responsibility. With free-will, you're forced to think in terms of owning your actions.

The real trick, and I can't prove this right this moment, is that if you don't think you have free will, you don't. And if you do think you have free will, you do. Either premise is fed into the conscious feedback loop and the latter loops up REAL WELL while as the former does not. Think carefully about what this means.

teller said:

Mmmm. So consciousness is a faculty. A faculty 'made of' what? Neurochemistry? But consciousness is not the same as neurochemistry; things happen in our brains all the time without creating conscious experiences. So what is the consciousness part?

I'm not sure I agree that the ant hill has any sort of consciuosness. Don't see any particular evidence of that. However, it's hard to SAY without knowing what we're talking about, isn't it?

I spent two quarters in Phil of Mind thinking there must be some solution to this. Seeing that my prof had spent 40 years on it and still hadn't really gotten anywhere, along with his peers, I gave up and went back to working on ethics.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. If the ant colony didn't have it some respect, it would never find food!

Also, struggling for 40 years is sometimes indicative of having the wrong premises. Quantum physicists got nowhere for decades until Carver Mead came along and fixed it for them...oh wait, wrong thread!