The Science of Free Will

[Tonington]

Can anyone imagine any form of scientific evidence that could explain how authentic free will is possible?

Suicide? The fact that someone can choose when to end their life, that's pretty much free will.

The definition matters in this case. I'll use this one from willdurant.com:

[SIZE=-1]the partial freedom of the agent, in acts of conscious choice, from the determining compulsion of heredity, environment and circumstance.[/SIZE]

As to scientific evidence, a simple experiment illustrating rational control over actions and decisions. Lets suppose you have two boxes in front of you, and another individual. In this experiment five gummy bears are placed in one box, and two in the other. When asked which you want, the researcher gives that choice to the other individual. After a few trials, you'll probably realize what is going on, and choose the less desirable option, knowing that in fact you will be given the desirable option when you choose the box with only two gummy bears first.

 

[s_lone]

Suicide? The fact that someone can choose when to end their life, that's pretty much free will.

The definition matters in this case. I'll use this one from willdurant.com:

[SIZE=-1]the partial freedom of the agent, in acts of conscious choice, from the determining compulsion of heredity, environment and circumstance.[/SIZE]

As to scientific evidence, a simple experiment illustrating rational control over actions and decisions. Lets suppose you have two boxes in front of you, and another individual. In this experiment five gummy bears are placed in one box, and two in the other. When asked which you want, the researcher gives that choice to the other individual. After a few trials, you'll probably realize what is going on, and choose the less desirable option, knowing that in fact you will be given the desirable option when you choose the box with only two gummy bears first.

Maybe you see something to the experiment that I don't... I don't see how it escapes the idea that in the end, it's just brain-wiring reacting according to a fixed set of laws... What the experiment shows is that the brain can recognize patterns... Does it show that we make authentic choices that overcome the mechanical determination of matter?

 

[karrie]

While I think that suicide would be the closest example so far Tonington, I'm not convinced that it's not just a part of the risk/reward reactions which govern typical behavior.

When I decided to kill myself, it would have been the ultimate reward. Just the idea of it made me so blissfully happy. And I can definitely say that it was a chemical drive, not a free will decision to end it. Once I got clean of the meds, that urge disappeared.

 

[lone wolf]

I am because I don't have to be.

Woof!

 

[talloola]

under heavy torture a person can finally be killed, but in that process, in many cases,
the torturer can never break his will to think in a way that he or she wants, that, to me
is free will, nothing can make that disappear.

 

[karrie]

a wonderful example talloola.

 

[Tonington]

Maybe you see something to the experiment that I don't... I don't see how it escapes the idea that in the end, it's just brain-wiring reacting according to a fixed set of laws... What the experiment shows is that the brain can recognize patterns... Does it show that we make authentic choices that overcome the mechanical determination of matter?

I don't see why free will has to be divorced from the wiring of our brain. You could certainly argue that free will is a side effect of that wiring, but evidence of that wiring doesn't mean the choice isn't free. To even participate in the study would be proof of free will. Is there any reason to believe that recognizing patterns and making choices based on that cognition wouldn't be an aspect of free will? It's free will because the outcome is dependent on choice.

Does a fish choose to become sexually mature, and choose to return to it's native spawning grounds? Or is that simply a function of environment, and instinct?

Certainly humans also show free will one decides the time is right to have a child. That choice may be predicated by finance, or career stability, or even urgency due to the ticking biological clock.

 

[s_lone]

I don't see why free will has to be divorced from the wiring of our brain. You could certainly argue that free will is a side effect of that wiring, but evidence of that wiring doesn't mean the choice isn't free. To even participate in the study would be proof of free will. Is there any reason to believe that recognizing patterns and making choices based on that cognition wouldn't be an aspect of free will? It's free will because the outcome is dependent on choice.

Does a fish choose to become sexually mature, and choose to return to it's native spawning grounds? Or is that simply a function of environment, and instinct?

Certainly humans also show free will one decides the time is right to have a child. That choice may be predicated by finance, or career stability, or even urgency due to the ticking biological clock.

Don't get me wrong... I'm anything but a cold materialist... I believe in free will, especially from a human point of view.

But maybe I didn't insist enough on the exact nature of my original post... My interogation is scientific and very technical.

What I want to know is HOW free will can be possible within a physical-concrete-material context. Where exactly in the brain is there a phenomenon going on that is inherently INDEPENDANT of material interactions to have the capacity to control their outcome? Would this phenomenon necessarily have to happen at the level of quantum physics where there seems to be some form of fundamental indeterminacy?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

What I want to know is HOW free will can be possible within a physical-concrete-material context. Where exactly in the brain is there a phenomenon going on that is inherently INDEPENDANT of material interactions to have the capacity to control their outcome? Would this phenomenon necessarily have to happen at the level of quantum physics where there seems to be a fundamental indeterminacy?

I've wondered about that kind of thing too. As far as we know, there are no quantum effects involved in how the brain functions, all the objects involved are macroscopic objects too large for quantum effects to be important. I'd go back to the first sentence, about the "physical-concrete-material context." Maybe we're wrong to think that's the context. I'm a long way from having thought this through, but even classical physics may not be deterministic in the way most people think it is. There is no exact solution, for instance, for a gravitational interaction involving more than two objects, all you can get are approximations to whatever level of accuracy you need. An equation that accurately describes all the known perturbations in the moon's orbit would fill a large book, and it's still just an approximation. A pretty good one, mind you, better than anyone's ever likely to need for any practical purpose, but that doesn't answer the philosophical question, is it possible even in principle to be exact? A classical (ie. pre-quantum theory) physicist once claimed that if you knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a particular moment, with sufficient calculating power you could predict the entire future in exact detail. We know now that he was wrong, simply because it's impossible to know the exact position and momentum of even one particle, but he may have been wrong even in the pre-quantum context of his understanding. We can't even solve it for three particles, we can even prove that there's no exact solution, which tends to suggest to me there's a fundamental unknowability at the heart of things, quite separate from quantum indeterminacy.

 

[karrie]

I was just reading, twenty minutes ago, about the Pythagorean school of thought, that math exists only in theory. That attempting to apply that theory to the real world is next to impossible in many instances, due to the imprecise, unmeasurable nature of reality.

I've wondered about that kind of thing too. As far as we know, there are no quantum effects involved in how the brain functions, all the objects involved are macroscopic objects too large for quantum effects to be important. I'd go back to the first sentence, about the "physical-concrete-material context." Maybe we're wrong to think that's the context. I'm a long way from having thought this through, but even classical physics may not be deterministic in the way most people think it is. There is no exact solution, for instance, for a gravitational interaction involving more than two objects, all you can get are approximations to whatever level of accuracy you need. An equation that accurately describes all the known perturbations in the moon's orbit would fill a large book, and it's still just an approximation. A pretty good one, mind you, better than anyone's ever likely to need for any practical purpose, but that doesn't answer the philosophical question, is it possible even in principle to be exact? A classical (ie. pre-quantum theory) physicist once claimed that if you knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a particular moment, with sufficient calculating power you could predict the entire future in exact detail. We know now that he was wrong, simply because it's impossible to know the exact position and momentum of even one particle, but he may have been wrong even in the pre-quantum context of his understanding. We can't even solve it for three particles, we can even prove that there's no exact solution, which tends to suggest to me there's a fundamental unknowability at the heart of things, quite separate from quantum indeterminacy.

 

[s_lone]

I've wondered about that kind of thing too. As far as we know, there are no quantum effects involved in how the brain functions, all the objects involved are macroscopic objects too large for quantum effects to be important.

So if I refer to my original post... I asked if anyone could imagine any type of scientific evidence that would show that free will in all it authenticity is real... Is it possible to think about a hypothesis (testable or not) in which quantum effects were indeed involved in how the brain functions?

For example... Let's say we have an immaterial soul... (You'll have to bare with me for the sake of the exercise... This is pure speculation... ). Imagine there is one single atom in the brain (let's say an atom of krypton!) to which the immaterial soul has access to... That atom is actually the only link between the brain and the soul... The soul has the power to influence the quantum field of this atom, which could then trigger a whole series of effects that can have an impact on the rest of the brain by some sort of chain reaction.

I understand this is pure and wild speculation that would have its place more in science-fiction than real science... But perhaps some more seriously scientific minds could come up with relatively scientific scenarios that would explain free will...?

 

[Tonington]

What I want to know is HOW free will can be possible within a physical-concrete-material context. Where exactly in the brain is there a phenomenon going on that is inherently INDEPENDANT of material interactions to have the capacity to control their outcome? Would this phenomenon necessarily have to happen at the level of quantum physics where there seems to be some form of fundamental indeterminacy?

Hmmm. Those are interesting questions. I think in any case it's probably multiple questions. Like what, where, when, how in the brain...

Related to what Dex said, perhaps there is a possible corollary to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in this case.

Maybe some people have better functioning brains when it comes to free will, at least as far as determination for one particular course of action or another is concerned. I think particularly of the probabilities for alcoholism when raised in a family with alcoholic family members.

Or maybe it could explain why some people are more impressionable, like susceptibility to suggestibility.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Yes, the Pythagoreans might have been on to something, though I think they went a little overboard. They were horrified by the notion of irrational numbers, for instance, that is, quantities that can't be expressed as a ratio of two integers, and tried to keep their existence a secret. No less an intellect than Albert Einstein once wrote, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." A very Pythagorean sentiment.

I'm inclined to think that science is not where we're going to find an answer to s_lone's question about the reality (or otherwise) of free will, it doesn't appear to be amenable to science's methods. Frankly I doubt we can come up with a precise enough definition of free will to make empirical tests of it possible. It's simple enough to describe it as the ability to make an uncoerced choice between two or more options, but presumably some process happened that led to the choice, it wasn't just quantum randomness. I can see how a discussion along those lines would rapidly lead to an infinite regress of possible causes and effects that ends up with determinism somewhere and the conclusion that there cannot be free will.

While I was pondering the difference between things that are knowable in principle and knowable in practice after my previous post, I got to thinking about chess games and computability. Chess is a finite game, which means in principle it is entirely calculable. It's possible to make a list of all possible chess games and at any point in a game look up the best move to make, with no thought or knowledge of the game at all. How many possible chess games are there? I made some simplifying assumptions and did a little arithmetic. Suppose an average chess game lasts about 50 moves and at any point in a game there are about 20 possible moves for each player. If we set a computer to calculate all possible move sequences after one player's opening move, it would have to go through about 20^50 of them to decide how best to respond. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, about 4.3x 10^17 seconds. Simple division tells us that computer would have had to consider around 2.3x10^47 board configurations per second to be ready to respond now to an opening move made when the universe was born. Since there are 20 possible opening moves, the number of possible chess games is 20 times more than that, about 4.6x10^48. Clearly, while such calculations may indeed be possible in principle (assume a quantum computer the size of the universe... ) they are way beyond being feasible and there's no prospect that they ever will be feasible.

A distinction between something that's knowable in principle and knowable in practice seems a little lame in the context of numbers like that. Maybe the indeterminacy we seem close to agreeing lies at the heart of free will is really just a reflection of the staggeringly, incalculably huge number of possible events there are.

 

[karrie]

A distinction between something that's knowable in principle and knowable in practice seems a little lame in the context of numbers like that. Maybe the indeterminacy we seem close to agreeing lies at the heart of free will is really just a reflection of the staggeringly, incalculably huge number of possible events there are.

I don't know Dex. Sometimes our actions are so easily predicted by others, and our reasons so easily discerned, that I question if the number of possible events and choices in our lives is as large as we perceive. Either that, or we are much more powerful predictive computers than we realize when it comes to others.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I don't know either, I'm just speculating, but I didn't mean just the events and choices in our lives, I was thinking more on the scale of all the possible events that can be going on in our brains at the same time. Nobody really knows how that works, but there's a lot of activity in there all the time, so I feel free to speculate wildly.

 

[karrie]

I don't know either, I'm just speculating, but I didn't mean just the events and choices in our lives, I was thinking more on the scale of all the possible events that can be going on in our brains at the same time. Nobody really knows how that works, but there's a lot of activity in there all the time, so I feel free to speculate wildly.

Either it's a tiny fraction of the activity going on, or it's way more than we expect. I feel comfortable wildly speculating at either end of the spectrum. lol.

 

[gopher]

I don't have a clue!

Exactly --- because there is no such thing!

 

[s_lone]

Exactly --- because there is no such thing!

How do you know?

 

[gopher]

How do you know?

Because it cannot be proven!;-)

 

[s_lone]

How do you know?

Because it cannot be proven!;-)

That's not a basis to make ultimate affirmations on. Absence of proof is not the proof of absence.