Free Will

There is no you, only the brain creating a temporary model of a self that has the illusion of permanence, coherence, and will. It is inaccurate to say that "you" equal a brain, because a brain can contain many different "you"s, both in disorders like dissociative identity disorder and during normal functioning over a lifespan, and can operate without using a self model, meaning without a "you", as in somnambulism and blackouts. I quote again, " "As a neuroscientist, you've got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn't have done otherwise; there's no 'I' which can say 'I want to do otherwise'."

FireFish said:

As long as the entire functioning of that brain is aware of itself as a being while making its choices, the person is makes his choices. It is one and the same thing.

This is a tautology and begs the question. The brain does things, a "you" does not make choices. There are no choices to make and there is no one to make them.

^This.

jute said:

There is no you, only the brain creating a temporary model of a self that has the illusion of permanence, coherence, and will.

Interesting ideas. But ultimately what is "you" if not your brain?

fraggle said:

But ultimately what is "you" if not your brain?

Nothing. The question is well-worded: if "you" does not equal your brain, it doesn't equal anything - it doesn't exist. There is only the self model, created/modified/discarded by the brain as a heuristic.

This article by Thomas Metzinger explains far better, but the best answer to your question is either to read his book Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity or the layperson's reduction The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Being No One, consisting of 700 pages of closely-argued neurophilosophy, is a hard sell but it the best option, and well worth your time if this topic interests you.

termrork said:

@Quasar

Not sure where you want to go but unfortunately the gravitational force only never becomes zero at infinity is if you take the time to infinity. If you move one particle in a direction, the second particle will see this movement through gravitational force after a given time, not instantly. This at least is our current knowledge, that you cannot send information faster than the speed of light.

Right, but you've only limited the scope to area of the universe that can be considered "time-like connected". You're still receiving gravitational radiation from the most distant objects in the universe that they emitted at the earliest time it was possible for it to reach you.

jute said:

This is a tautology and begs the question. The brain does things, a "you" does not make choices. There are no choices to make and there is no one to make them.

You are what your brain is doing. The choices it makes are the choices you make. Referring to yourself as a the mental aspect of the brain or the entire being with body and brain does not change the fact that Its you. You the brain. As long as one does not understand that last bit and always bashes the "there is no you" it feels as if one is missing the point. both need an underlying limited systems making it possible, programmng in a sense. change the program and the "you" changes.

And no matter how you look at it, all those theories which you adhere to are practically just a Philosophy. There is no you as it is only the brain, or, you are the brain and are comparable to a fictional self conscious live running process on a computer knowingly making its choices. Both are a philosophy and both are possible.

If you would not have free will and where not conscious as a brain then one would have never even be able to realize that you where writing in this topic. You simply would have done it without ever knowing why, without ever knowing you did it.

Also note ;
people with a brain that loses its live running conscious self are passed out or in some cases in a coma. They would die in a lot of cases too. Its interconnected.It also raises questions about animals like dogs and anything with a big brain.

@ Quasar

ok now we agree with that. But I still do not understand what you want to say or to ask. If you specify your question more I will try to answer it.

termrork said:

What I meant in daily life is that the interaction of your brain and the environment trigger for sure random inputs. [...] So my question is if we take a life from a random person, how much is random and how much is determined?

That's a very interesting point, and one that I didn't pick up on when I read your first post. I had another question in mind that I was more eager to answer.

How much of our environment is determined and how much is random? I'm not going to take a stand on this one. One extreme position you could take is that all of humanity was on a fixed deterministic path until the first experiment was run that demonstrated a quantum mechanical phenomenon; this was the first time that a quantum event definitively influenced a human's behaviour. That's a delicious thought - that through human ingenuity we've steered off of the the linear path towards our ultimate destiny, and now we're exploring a branching web of infinite possible outcomes instead. Personally, I doubt that's the case. When a stray gamma photon induces a genetic mutation in an organism, that isn't a purely deterministic event, is it? I'm sure there are other, better examples of how quantum mechanics have always changed the world.

Quasar said:

In the theory of gravitation, the force of gravity between two objects drops off exponentially with distance but on a curve which only approaches, and never reaches, zero as distance increases toward infinity.

I think theories of cosmic inflation change this somewhat. As space continues to stretch between galaxies that are already moving apart nearly at the speed of light, eventually those galaxies get completely isolated from each other. Information transmitted from one galaxy will simply never reach the other, and that includes gravitational influence. The "observable universe" is expected to shrink as the outermost galaxies exit the sphere of what we're able to observe.

If you take the sum of the gravitational forces exerted by the unfathomable totality of everything in the universe, that total force is still much weaker than the "strong" and "weak" forces that particles exert on their neighbours.

I still like your point. Every atom in our bodies is constrained by forces emitted from quadrillions of others.

FireFish said:

You are what your brain is doing. The choices it makes are the choices you make.

And no matter how you look at it, all those theories which you adhere to are practically just a Philosophy. There is no you as it is only the brain, or, you are the brain and are comparable to a fictional self conscious live running process on a computer knowingly making its choices. Both are a philosophy and both are possible.

If you would not have free will and where not conscious as a brain then one would have never even be able to realize that you where writing in this topic. You simply would have done it without ever knowing why, without ever knowing you did it.

Also note ;
people with a brain that loses its live running conscious self are passed out or in some cases in a coma. They would die in a lot of cases too. Its interconnected.It also raises questions about animals like dogs and anything with a big brain.

This is simply not the case: the brain is perfectly capable of acting without a "live-running conscious self" (which is what people mean by "you-ness"/identity/ego). This is the very definition of somnambulism, as I've mentioned before in this thread. In this case, "you" are not what your brain is doing; "you" are not even involved in what your brain is doing. "You" are not making any "choices" because "you" are not activated by the brain during somnambulism. There is no clearer example possible of a brain acting without consciousness.

Alien hand syndrome, which causes people's hands/arms to act "autonomously", not under conscious control, is an example of the brain acting outside of the cognitive availability of a "live-running conscious self". I mentioned alien hand syndrome in a response to you earlier in this thread. In this case, your brain is doing "you", but that is not all it is doing, and the other things it is doing are completely separated from and cognitively unavailable to "you". These are scientific, not philosophical, examples of unconscious, self-less action by the brain: action without a "you", action taken with the self tool deactivated or only partially activated. With alien hand syndrome, "you" are not making "choices" to move your hand: it moves according to the brain, not according to "you" and often quite contrary to what "you" "choose" (sometimes to the point that patients find one hand fighting off the other in a manner reminiscent of the possessed hand in Evil Dead 2!)

"You" are not your brain or everything your brain does, "you" are a heuristic tool the brain sometimes activates. At most, "you" are one thing that your brain does sometimes. The brain can do multiple "you"s just as well, as in people with dissociative identity disorder, whose brains seamlessly switch between differently-adapted "self" tools in different circumstances, applying different "selves" to the circumstances to which they are best suited. Like somnambulism and alien hand syndrome, I have already mentioned dissociative identity disorder in this thread.

Whatever the merits of something being "practically just a philosophy", I have raised several examples of well-known, scientifically-studied phenomena that run contrary to your arguments, and you have seemingly neither acknowledged them nor raised any actual scientific evidence to support your own position. I am uninterested in spending more time on such a discussion. If you want to consider the evidence, try reading some of the links in this thread, or simply read the Wikipedia entries for consciousness and sense of agency. If anyone reading this has the time and interest, this lecture is illuminating:

FireFish said:

You are what your brain is doing.

Honestly this seems like an argument over semantics. You're arguing over different definitions of the word "you". One definition is the one you're providing; jute is clearly working with a more subtle definition of the term, where "you" refers to one specific process within the mind:

jute said:

"You" are not your brain or everything your brain does, "you" are a heuristic tool the brain sometimes activates. At most, "you" are one thing that your brain does sometimes.

You could probably make a good argument for either.

jute said:

"You" are not your brain or everything your brain does, "you" are a heuristic tool the brain sometimes activates. At most, "you" are one thing that your brain does sometimes.

How is the distinction made between an action or decision that belongs to "you" or one of multiple "yous", and actions/decisions/thought processes that are simply the brain?

Wait this isn't a thread about the movie

SYS said:

How is the distinction made between an action or decision that belongs to "you" or one of multiple "yous", and actions/decisions/thought processes that are simply the brain?

In somnambulism (which includes not only walking while asleep but cooking, driving, working, talking, and occasionally committing homicide) the person is not having a conscious experience (the heart of the sense of selfhood), no memories are generated, no sense of agency is felt (because nothing is felt, because no one is conscious to feel anything). In alien hand syndrome, sufferers are emphatic that they are not doing what parts of their bodies are doing:

On postoperative day 11, she was noted by nursing staff to have left-sided weakness and difficulty walking. According to her family, she had complained of loss of control of her left hand for the previous 3 days, as if the hand were performing on its own. She awoke several times with her left hand choking her, and while she was awake, her left hand would unbutton her gown, crush cups on her tray, and fight with the right hand while she was answering the phone. To keep her left hand from doing mischief, she would subdue it with the right hand. She described this unpleasant situation as if someone “from the moon” were controlling her hand. (From Metzinger's Being No One)

A person whose hand is attempting to strangle them is likely to protest the idea that the self is everything the brain does! The brain does things, sometimes accompanied by a sense of self and agency - the first-person conscious experience we call selfhood, "you-ness", consciousness, ego, identity, etc. - but sometimes not. In any case all actions are the brain's, none "belong" to a nonexistent "you". "You" are merely part of a conceptualizing process used by the brain. This is a complex topic that others are better suited to explain, so I am going to dump another explanatory link and then escape: http://phantomself.org/metzinger-on-the-unreality-of-the-self/

SavageCorona said:

Wait this isn't a thread about the movie

I've already made that joke. Sadly, it wasn't funny then either. I think we both need better material.

jute said:

In somnambulism (which includes not only walking while asleep but cooking, driving, working, talking, and occasionally committing homicide) the person is not having a conscious experience (the heart of the sense of selfhood), no memories are generated, no sense of agency is felt (because nothing is felt, because no one is conscious to feel anything). In alien hand syndrome, sufferers are emphatic that they are not doing what parts of their bodies are doing:

A person whose hand is attempting to strangle them is likely to protest the idea that the self is everything the brain does! The brain does things, sometimes accompanied by a sense of self and agency - the first-person conscious experience we call selfhood, "you-ness", consciousness, ego, identity, etc. - but sometimes not. In any case all actions are the brain's, none "belong" to a nonexistent "you". "You" are merely part of a conceptualizing process used by the brain. This is a complex topic that others are better suited to explain, so I am going to dump another explanatory link and then escape: http://phantomself.org/metzinger-on-the-unreality-of-the-self/

Quite fascinating. I appreciate the elaboration. Back to the idea of life being deterministic - I considered that if an AI were programmed with a "free will" algorithm / subroutine it would be deterministic. The AI is coded, and the human brain is to an extent.... I think that's enough for me ponder after a long work day.

SYS said:

Quite fascinating. I appreciate the elaboration. Back to the idea of life being deterministic - I considered that if an AI were programmed with a "free will" algorithm / subroutine it would be deterministic. The AI is coded, and the human brain is to an extent.... I think that's enough for me ponder after a long work day.

Though some people have come to believe we need more than purely deterministic programming to have true strong AI. It's only a hypothesis as it can't be tested at the current time, really. Though it is worth noting that our current most advanced "weak" AIs all use statistical approaches and evolved neural networks, both of which have some major differences from strict deterministic programming.

Regarding AI: from a teleofunctional perspective, the sense of agency/free will had to confer some sort of adaptive advantage for humans and whatever other species possess it, but it's impossible to know, and interesting to ponder, whether or not it would confer an advantage to an AI (or an extraterrestrial) developing in radically different circumstances.

Looking at determinism from a totally different angle, as I understand it Einstein posited a "block universe", with time as a fourth dimension, in which the events we perceive as future events are fixed inside the block just like what we perceive as past events. This view is called eternalism. I find this view aesthetically satisfying but I don't know much about it, or about physics in general.

jute said:

[...] but I don't know much about it, or about physics in general.

if you have any questions about physics, feel free to ask.