The illusion of Free Will

Sam Harris goes on to say:

It is safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of this notion is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms). Thus the idea of free will emerges from a felt experience. It is, however, very easy to lose sight of this psychological truth once we begin talking philosophy.
In the philosophical literature, one finds three main approaches to the problem: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Both determinism and libertarianism hold that if our behavior is fully determined by background causes, free will is an illusion. (For this reason they are both referred to as “incompatibilist” views.) Determinists believe that we live in such a world, while libertarians (no relation to the political philosophy that goes by this name) imagine that human agency must magically rise above the plane of physical causation. Libertarians sometimes invoke a metaphysical entity, such as a soul, as the vehicle for our freely acting wills. Compatibilists, however, claim that determinists and libertarians are both confused and that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism.


Today, the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist— because we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true. Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions— and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware. However, the “free will” that compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they have.


Compatibilists generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. If you want a second scoop of ice cream and no one is forcing you to eat it, then eating a second scoop is fully demonstrative of your freedom of will. The truth, however, is that people claim greater autonomy than this. Our moral intuitions and sense of personal agency are anchored to a felt sense that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions. When deciding whom to marry or which book to read, we do not feel compelled by prior events over which we have no control.
The freedom that we presume for ourselves and readily attribute to others is felt to slip the influence of impersonal background causes. And the moment we see that such causes are fully effective— as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would reveal— we can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang our conventional notions of personal responsibility. 5 What does it mean to say that rapists and murderers commit their crimes of their own free will? If this statement means anything, it must be that they could have behaved differently— not on the basis of random influences over which they have no control, but because they, as conscious agents, were free to think and act in other ways. To say that they were free not to rape and murder is to say that they could have resisted the impulse to do so (or could have avoided feeling such an impulse altogether)— with the universe, including their brains, in precisely the same state it was in at the moment they committed their crimes. Assuming that violent criminals have such freedom, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims themselves. The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.

Fascinating thread, ExSexy. I tend to agree with Harris on free will. Everything we do and choose is because of something from our past. Overcoming these forces are what some philosophies call "Enlightenment". I'm not there yet, and there are far fewer there than claim to be.

I like this. Stimulates the larger brain. Again, Thanks, ExSexy!

Fascinating thread, ExSexy. I tend to agree with Harris on free will. Everything we do and choose is because of something from our past. Overcoming these forces are what some philosophies call "Enlightenment". I'm not there yet, and there are far fewer there than claim to be.

I like this. Stimulates the larger brain. Again, Thanks, ExSexy! Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

LOL

Glad you like it. The book Free Will is short and easy to read and he makes his points very quickly. He talks in his book about the neuroscientists and neurologists who have a machine that during brain surgery could predict what the person would do if given choices (like say click red or blue on a page) up to 17 seconds before the person them self even knew what their choice would be. I find that amazing.. kind of like mind reading..so his question is how is it a choice if your brain has already picked it before you are even conscious or aware of the choice that you might pick? Where is the free will in that?

Uh, do I have to choose to read the book, or has the choice been made for me? Dammit! What should I do?!

Well, my IQ is normal enough to have enough sense not to click on a 78 minute link on a SHMB.

Give us the Readers Digest Version.

Well, my IQ is normal enough to have enough sense not to click on a 78 minute link on a SHMB.

Give us the Readers Digest Version. Originally Posted by Jackie S

I think I typed quite a bit Jackie from the book scroll up. And if you are legitimately interested in the subject you can always go to Amazon.com and they give you the ability to read some of the book (you don't even have to purchase it). It took me less than an hour.. actually about 30 minutes to read the entire book. It is very short and to the point.

For those who are interested in the talk that Sam Harris gave the video is excellent.

LOL

Glad you like it. The book Free Will is short and easy to read and he makes his points very quickly. He talks in his book about the neuroscientists and neurologists who have a machine that during brain surgery could predict what the person would do if given choices (like say click red or blue on a page) up to 17 seconds before the person them self even knew what their choice would be. I find that amazing.. kind of like mind reading..so his question is how is it a choice if your brain has already picked it before you are even conscious or aware of the choice that you might pick? Where is the free will in that? Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

I'm not sure if I have free will or not. I stumbled across the concept of determinism in college and have been interested in the issue of free will vs determinism ever since.

I've always thought that if Man has no spirit, no soul then we are completely physical and the brain is basically a computer. If our brains are just computers, there can be no free will.

I think COG may have hit on the critical issue when he equated enlightenment with having true free will. If we are able to function at the level of pure consciousness and free ourselves from programming aquired from our environment, then we operate at the level of the soul. I think I'm probably a few thousand incarnations away from that.

It seems to me that the issue of free will is critical theologically and in terms of our legal system. If we don't have free will, then we can't differentiate between good actions and evil actions. We can't say that Adolf Hitler was a bad person and Mother Teresa was a good person since neither was acting freely.

Our legal system convicts and punishes based on actions that are freely taken. If a person commits a crime and the action is not freely taken; if he is forced to do the crime, then our system finds him not guilty. Patty Hearst was found not guilty of robbing a bank because of Stokholm Syndrome. Her lawyer successfully argued that her free will was taken away because of the psychological trauma she experienced.

If we concede that no one is free, we can't abandon all standards and codes of behavior. Even if we are not truly free, we have to have a legal system that treats us as if we were, with allowances made for the most extreme cases such as psychosis or acting under duress.

Interesting that you mention this. He talks about in his book and also on the video say for example a murderer who has for analogy purposes killed several people. Of course he gets caught and thrown in prison and is treated with all the deserving contempt and inhumane treatment we would feel we could treat that person who has committed such a heinous act. Now if say for example they find out the murderer had a tumor on the brain that hit areas of reason, compassion, impluse etc and lead him to do what he did then would we say that the murderer chose of his free will to do what he did given such revelations? No we wouldn't and normally we treat the man with surgery or what ever is necessary to remove the tumor that caused him to act in such a way.

He goes on further to say and I will cut and paste here;

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds? Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes— perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment— what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this. The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false. But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us— and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

I download my books to my tablet/computer/and my smart phone. But you may really enjoy reading this book Joe if your interested. It is an easy short read.

Interesting that you mention this. He talks about in his book and also on the video say for example a murderer who has for analogy purposes killed several people. Of course he gets caught and thrown in prison and is treated with all the deserving contempt and inhumane treatment we would feel we could treat that person who has committed such a heinous act. Now if say for example they find out the murderer had a tumor on the brain that hit areas of reason, compassion, impluse etc and lead him to do what he did then would we say that the murderer chose of his free will to do what he did given such revelations? No we wouldn't and normally we treat the man with surgery or what ever is necessary to remove the tumor that caused him to act in such a way.

He goes on further to say and I will cut and paste here;

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds? Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes— perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment— what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this. The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false. But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us— and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write. Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

I saw a Stanley Kubrick movie long ago called "A Clockwork Orange" that dealt with the concept of free will. The main character in the movie was a criminal that had been arrested and was treated with behavior modification. As a result of the treatment he became law abiding but his actions were no longer free. As I recall, they somehow reversed the treatment and restored his free will, and he returned to being a criminal.

The film maker apparently believed that society is better served by allowing it's citizens to act freely even if they misbehave; if you take away a person's free will, you take his humanity.

The movie was based on a book by Anthony Burgess. The meaning of the title, "A Clockwork Orange" is the idea of someone being a living thing and a robot at the same time. Without freewill, we are just clockwork oranges.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jYOqu4b9BY

I saw a Stanley Kubrick movie long ago called "A Clockwork Orange" that dealt with the concept of free will. The main character in the movie was a criminal that had been arrested and was treated with behavior modification. As a result of the treatment he became law abiding but his actions were no longer free. As I recall, they somehow reversed the treatment and restored his free will, and he returned to being a criminal.

The film maker apparently believed that society is better served by allowing it's citizens to act freely even if they misbehave; if you take away a person's free will, you take his humanity.

The movie was based on a book by Anthony Burgess. The meaning of the title, "A Clockwork Orange" is the idea of someone being a living thing and a robot at the same time. Without freewill, we are just clockwork oranges.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jYOqu4b9BY Originally Posted by joe bloe

Clockwork Orange! Such a classic movie. But the question remains did the offender really have free will even if they did undo the behavior modification? With or without the drugs they gave him did he really have free will to begin with is the question. Now that is not to say there aren't consequences for bad behavior. There always will be because we live in a world of cause and effect and that entails consequences.

Quote: The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature— and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.

But even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does.

If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control. This is obviously true in all cases where a person wishes he could feel or behave differently than he does: Think of the millions of committed Christians whose souls happen to be gay, prone to obesity, or bored by prayer. However, free will is no more evident when a person does exactly what, in retrospect, he wishes he had done. The soul that allows you to stay on your diet is just as mysterious as the one that tempts you to eat cherry pie for breakfast. There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, whereas an involuntary action isn’t. Needless to say, this difference is reflected at the level of the brain. And what a person consciously intends to do says a lot about him. It makes sense to treat a man who enjoys murdering children differently from one who accidentally hit and killed a child with his car— because the conscious intentions of the former give us a lot of information about how he is likely to behave in the future. But where intentions themselves come from, and what determines their character in every instance, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.
Of course, this insight does not make social and political freedom any less important. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was. Having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. But the idea that we, as conscious beings, are deeply responsible for the character of our mental lives and subsequent behavior is simply impossible to map onto reality. Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom— for what would influence the influences? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Clockwork Orange! Such a classic movie. But the question remains did the offender really have free will even if they did undo the behavior modification? With or without the drugs they gave him did he really have free will to begin with is the question. Now that is not to say there aren't consequences for bad behavior. There always will be because we live in a world of cause and effect and that entails consequences. Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

It's amusing to argue the point pro and con. I'm pretty much agnostic on the question of free will. It's not like anyone is ever going to settle the debate.

I do think that we may soon (within the next twenty years) have computers with self awareness, like Hal in another Stanley Kubrick movie "2001; A Space Odyssey". When that day comes, our belief that humans are special because of the nature of our intelligence will be challenged.

If a computer can have artificially generated intelligence comparable to human intelligence, will they have free will? At some point, if they are self aware, and have free will and their intelligence exceeds human intelligence, will they be more "human" than us?

We humans set our selves above the rest of the animal kingdom largely because of our superior intelligence. Will computers consider themselves superior to humans and consequently not be obligated to treat us humanely or should I say "computerly".

Of course the issue of what will happen when computers can actually think has been a favorite of science fiction writers for several decades. Very soon it will be a real issue we'll have to deal with and not science fiction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus

It's amusing to argue the point pro and con. I'm pretty much agnostic on the question of free will. It's not like anyone is ever going to settle the debate.

I do think that we may soon (within the next twenty years) have computers with self awareness, like Hal in another Stanley Kubrick movie "2001; A Space Odyssey". When that day comes, our belief that humans are special because of the nature of our intelligence will be challenged.

If a computer can have artificially generated intelligence comparable to human intelligence, will they have free will? At some point, if they are self aware, and have free will and their intelligence exceeds human intelligence, will they be more "human" than us?

We humans set our selves above the rest of the animal kingdom largely because of our superior intelligence. Will computers consider themselves superior to humans and consequently not be obligated to treat us humanely or should I say "computerly".

Of course the issue of what will happen when computers can actually think has been a favorite of science fiction writers for several decades. Very soon it will be a real issue we'll have to deal with and not science fiction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus Originally Posted by joe bloe

Ohhhhh that reminds me of another movie.. remember The Demon Seed? That was an awesome movie. I remember wanting a computer house just like the one in the movie!

Ohhhhh that reminds me of another movie.. remember The Demon Seed? That was an awesome movie. I remember wanting a computer house just like the one in the movie! Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

I'm not sure I saw that one. Once upon a time, long long ago, I saw a movie called "Twisted Nerve". It was an extremely low budget horror movie.

The movie opened with a quote that is on point with the question of free will.

“No puppetmaster pulls the strings on high, But a twisted nerve, a ganglion gone awry, Predestinates the sinner or the saint.”

I remember thinking that the quote may be true, that some seemingly minor physical imperfection could change a person's nature, that maybe free will is an illusion.