Does Neuroscience Challenge the Existence of Free Will?

[Ferris_bg]

2) But mental realism? No. The mental is not accepted as a category of property.

Systems can exhibit mindfulness as a form of organisation, as a capacity for adaptive change, as a particular kind of process. But it is not a property that an object possesses.

Mental realism means that the mental is not epiphenomenal (it can have causal powers). So if you want to have free will you need to have mental causation.

3) Antireductionism? So again no. Except in the modelling sense that subjective experience and objective description are clearly different POV. But objectively speaking, the systems view says all systems reduce to systems.

Antireductionism does not mean that the systems can't be reduced to systems, but that the mental states are not reducible to physical states. The mental types and physical types are correlated one-many, not one-one (P = M), thus there is a subjective account.

What I don't understand is, why is there any reason at all to "commit" to physicalism?

No reason at all, thread is about free will, so I wanted to share that committing to physicalism denies free will.

 

[nismaratwork]

Mental realism means that the mental is not epiphenomenal (it can have causal powers). So if you want to have free will you need to have mental causation.


Antireductionism does not mean that the systems can't be reduced to systems, but that the mental states are not reducible to physical states. The mental types and physical types are correlated one-many, not one-one (P = M), thus there is a subjective account.

No reason at all, thread is about free will, so I wanted to share that committing to physicalism denies free will.

No reason except that reason...

Ooooook. Well, let me join the chorus of disagreement with that bolded statement (bolding mine).

 

[apeiron]

Mental realism means that the mental is not epiphenomenal (it can have causal powers). So if you want to have free will you need to have mental causation.

But it is not "the mental" which has causal power in my view. What I have said is that there is both upwards and downwards causal action - and of distinctly different types. So one is locally constructive action, the other is downwardly constraining.

The subtlities of this are just not recognised in the emergentist and supervenience arguments that you and Q Goest have been citing.

Nowhere have I argued that freewill = mental causation. The whole point of the systems approach is to deflate terms like freewill and mental.

Antireductionism does not mean that the systems can't be reduced to systems, but that the mental states are not reducible to physical states. The mental types and physical types are correlated one-many, not one-one (P = M), thus there is a subjective account.

Again, it is your choice to believe that physical and mental might be proper terms to assign to different levels of a system's causal hierarchy. I am just telling you it is not. That is not the argument I have advanced, so it is not one that I have to defend.

As I say, there is a disconnect between Kim's argument and anything I might be talking about. Kim is in the class of counter-positions that are "not even wrong" here.

No reason at all, thread is about free will, so I wanted to share that committing to physicalism denies free will.

And I agree, but for very different reasons. To the degree that freewill is conflated with a dualistic mental realm (even one that is "physically emergent" or "panpsychically reducible") it is not connecting with a systems view.

Systems science has tried to create its own parallel constructs that are like freewill, but without being the kind of mental state causation you are so troubled by. Terms like autonomy, ascendancy, autopoeisis have been coined. Some like ascendancy have been framed in terms of actual measurements and so can be the basis of scientific modelling.

You are arguing with ghosts here as the systems view just isn't connected to a presumed dualism between the physical and the mental that then has to be overcome somehow.

It works the other way round. Instead of presuming dualism (and so making the mission to heal the divide), it presumes that there is no essential division. And so what has to be explained is how the apparent division arose. How did rocks and atoms become the mindless? How equally did humans also become so mindful?

 

[Ken G]

No reason at all, thread is about free will, so I wanted to share that committing to physicalism denies free will.

I'm not pointing that comment at you, it is really pointed at the general way philosophy is communicated. It is in vogue for philosophers to "declare their convictions" to assist in understanding their points, so they are always "committing" to various viewpoints, but frankly I don't really think it's such a good idea, beyond simply saying "this is the avenue I am currently most interested in exploring." That would be a useful declaration, without the stultification.

 

[Ken G]

Instead of presuming dualism (and so making the mission to heal the divide), it presumes that there is no essential division. And so what has to be explained is how the apparent division arose. How did rocks and atoms become the mindless? How equally did humans also become so mindful?

I agree this is a useful way to frame the issue. I'm just saying that one question we know in advance that physicalism will never answer is whether or not reality really is physical. Making that assertion should not even be a goal of physicalism, similarly to how mathematicians don't ask if the parallel postulate is true or not, they ask what ramifications it has in realms where it is true. Thus the question is not, is everything physical, the question is, what is physical-- and in particular, is free will. Even that isn't precise enough, because free will actually means different things when projected onto a physicalist perspective than onto some other perspective, so the real question is, what can we learn about the projection of free will onto physicalism, and do we learn more about that projection from a systems or a reductive standpoint? Maybe we just learn different things about it from those standpoints.

 

[Pythagorean]

This is an interesting angle to use, but note that saying humans are fundamentally like rocks is one thing, and saying that the reason they are fundamentally like rocks is that they are both "made of" particles is something very different. I would say that neither claim is particularly clear-- the first claim rests on what what means by "being like", and the second rests on what one means by "being made of." I have no idea what either of those phrases would mean to an animist or anyone else, but I suspect that 10 different meanings spawn 10 different philosophies, some totally different.

That the conscious experience really doesn't change much about what we are, objectively. Our behavior isn't short on deterministic models. It's only through delusion that we find each other conscious. Many people thought and still think animals or colored people aren't conscious. It's all about similarity. The more similar something is to you, the more likely you'll allow it to have your "subjective" qualities.

I don't pretend to have any idea how consciousness arises, but what we do, how we evolved, and our matter/energy/information structure (as complicated as it is) doesn't seem to depend on consciousness. So a rock... and let's take a second:

A rock is complicated information structure too. It's not just sitting there. It has thermoydnamic energy surging through it, phonons colliding, light barraging it.

So a rock, like humans has a complex structure of input output relationship with the universe, both in terms of matter (sediment and ware) and energy (thermal) and a complex internal structure that defines those input outputs and can change also change (nonholonomically) as a function of its interactions with the universe (thereby changing how it handles input-outputs).

Now, let's step it up a little bit to something closer to humans, like a Grey-Scott chemical species reaction. They act very much like neurons, actually. They have a stable point, but if you perturb them sufficiently, they go through excitation and if you then drive them with constant energy, they will actually oscillate. Dynamically, the Grey Scott model has a lot of similarities with neurons. If we come up with complicated topological structures of a network of Grey-Scott reactions, we can have some very interesting behavior indeed.

Now consider a complicated milieu of proteins, alkalis, acids, etc involved in similar chemical species reactions. Earth, the sun, the moon... all drive these reactions to their rhythms. Somehow, maybe all over, maybe only in particular place, I don't know... but somehow, the molecular reaction network, with all it's synchronized damping and driving, developed a memory system (a physical memory system, not like the abstract human memory, but the same fundamental physical principles are necessary: state representation, compression, and storage). They would, perhaps billions of years later, be called "genes".

In some bewildering tangle of matter, energy, and information (i.e. geometry: how everything compares to everything else) a entropy pump has been created, powered by the sun, regulated by planetary motion. The entropy pump generates lots of entropy. It's like a refrigerator. It's keeping it's insides cool (lower entropy), but at the cost of additional energy, which is converted to work, which produces even more entropy than is being pumped out (a Maxwellian Demon).

From here, the information structure of the system can only get more complicated and discover higher degrees of freedom as long as the environment remains stable enough for the phenomena to persist.

Of course, the information structure is not contained, it's not isolated. It's a small part of the information structure of the whole universe. Like the rock, it exchanges matter and energy and information with the universe. It has much more complicated information structures than the rock (namely that it's an entropy pump, which IS special I agree, but biological systems aren't the only entropy pumps) but in terms of behavior, there is nothing at all fundamentally different about it.

That we have conscious experience doesn't imply at all to me that we have free will (willpower we do have, but the notion of free will is becoming harder to define for those who struggle to cling to it). What's the alternative to a deterministic model? It would require magic, a soul, interacting with the brain. We don't need that. We have the general story covered from stimulus to response in terms of all the physical interactions that go on.

Not the center of the universe, not going to live forever in an after life, not a soul, just a very confused chunk of universe.

 

[Ken G]

That the conscious experience really doesn't change much about what we are, objectively.

OK, that is a more clear meaning to take. But that also makes it easier to identify and test its implicit assumptions. I would claim that this sentence is internally inconsistent-- because there is no such thing as what is "objective" without "conscious experience." This is demonstrably true-- any definition of objectivity is inevitably going to have to refer to conscious experience at some point. That's the fundamental Catch-22 of physicalist thinking, it is basically an error in language.

It's only through delusion that we find each other conscious.

But again we have language problems. In addition to the demonstrable fact that all attempts to distinguish what is a delusion from what isn't is going to have to reference conscious experience (and then go on to test the self-consistency of that experience, something you simply cannot do in a universe of rocks), we have the even more basic fact that any standard definition of "delusion", when applied to "consciousness", encounters problems. Most basically, a delusion is an impression that is not shared by sane people, so your statement would need to claim that finding each other conscious is not something that sane people do. I would argue just the opposite-- I'd worry much more about the sanity of someone who does not find themselves to be conscious.

So perhaps the word "illusion" comes closer to your meaning that "delusion"-- at least an illusion is something that sane people can share, like a mirage. But again the language has problems-- the reason a lake in the desert is an illusion is that it is inconsistent with all our other experiences relating to deserts. What other experiences (conscious experiences, mind you) do we have that is inconsistent with the concept of consciousness? Again the Catch-22.

Many people thought and still think animals or colored people aren't conscious. It's all about similarity. The more similar something is to you, the more likely you'll allow it to have your "subjective" qualities.

I agree that this is the basis we use to extend our concept of consciousness from ourselves to others, but such an extension is rational and sane. So consciousness must begin with ourselves-- if we have it, then extending it is natural. Thus, in discussing the real vs. illusory elements of consciousness, there is no need to look any farther than our own experience of it. Indeed, were we the only human on the planet, we might have a paucity of test subjects, but our inquiry into consciousness could still be fundamentally the same.

I don't pretend to have any idea how consciousness arises, but what we do, how we evolved, and our matter/energy/information structure (as complicated as it is) doesn't seem to depend on consciousness.

I don't either, in fact, I would say we cannot even tell if consciousness "arises" at all, or if it pre-exists the mind that experiences it. It is common to use language that says consciousness "emerges" due to physical brain function, but no one would say that a planetary nebula "emerges" due to the physical functioning of a telescope. If we have ten working telescopes that look at that nebula, they all see more or less the same thing, and if we have ten working human brains, they are all conscious in more or less the same way. So by what basis can we claim that consciousness "emerges" from the brain? We don't know that at all.

In some bewildering tangle of matter, energy, and information (i.e. geometry: how everything compares to everything else) a entropy pump has been created, powered by the sun, regulated by planetary motion. The entropy pump generates lots of entropy. It's like a refrigerator. It's keeping it's insides cool (lower entropy), but at the cost of additional energy, which is converted to work, which produces even more entropy than is being pumped out (a Maxwellian Demon).

Yes, that is a reasonable description of what is going on. But note I could also use language to describe what is going on in a telescope, and I could describe the evolution of the eye in exactly the same terms you used to discuss the evolution of a brain. Yet what the eye sees does not "emerge" from the eye, so where is the basis that consciousness emerges from the brain? Placing consciousness in an evolutionary context still does not tell us that it is something physical, or that it emerges from the action of something physical. That's pure assumption-- it's a first step down the path of adopting a belief system, and is to be regarded with extreme caution because we must never mistake a search for ramifications of a postulate with the truth of that postulate.

Of course, the information structure is not contained, it's not isolated. It's a small part of the information structure of the whole universe.

Here the language again is in danger of falling into certain traps. We often hear language that suggests "information" is something physical. But it's not-- information is an abstract output of high-level processing. So brains don't "contain" information, and they are not "made of" information, but rather, it is our process of understanding brains (and everything else) that refers to information.

That we have conscious experience doesn't imply at all to me that we have free will (willpower we do have, but the notion of free will is becoming harder to define for those who struggle to cling to it).

Yes, we can distinguish free will and consciousness, but many of the same issues come up.

We have the general story covered from stimulus to response in terms of all the physical interactions that go on.

But when the story forces us to conclude that everyone is having delusions, we may have a problem in our story.

 

[pftest]

Panpsychism! That's what I was looking for... aka animism minus the soul.

Really, the difference is the same as a drawing of an bird, and a bird in flight. That both are made of similar stuff is not a puzzle as to why the paper doesn't fly, mate, sing, and eat.

We are all "made of stars" *thanks Moby*, but that doesn't mean we're about to fuse hydrogen.

The evidence we have is that we're different if for no other reason than complexity, and there is no need to distribute cognition to the toes and rocks.

Exactly, the only difference is the complexity. That means there are less complex versions of everything about us, including consciousness. Unfortunately this flies in the face of the idea that consciousness is absent when a system is not complex enough (for example non-brains).

 

[nismaratwork]

Exactly, the only difference is the complexity. That means there are less complex versions of everything about us, including consciousness. Unfortunately this flies in the face of the idea that consciousness is absent when a system is not complex enough (for example non-brains).

That's not at all what I meant; there is also the issue of emergent properties such as sending signals through chemical or electrical means that are absent in a rock. I was trying to draw the comparison that just because say, we have Hydrogen in us, doesn't mean we're ever going to fuse it into helium. We lack major elements of MORE Hydrogen, the effects that as as a result of gravity, and heat.

Panpsychism strikes me as the ultimate in reductionism; much as the assumption was once made that a protein was a protein... well look, how it encodes/folds is rather more the issue!

It's not always a matter of complexity, it can just be a matter of potential within the bounds our complexity provides. A rock is not a stupid human, and a human is not a thinking rock, anymore than some vast intelligence beyond humanity would be a "really bright" human.

 

[JDStupi]

So Ken G, am I to assume you disagree with the intentionality thesis? Namely that all consciousness is consciousness of something or is directed towards something?
I simply do not see what it would mean to say that

I would say we cannot even tell if consciousness "arises" at all, or if it pre-exists the mind that experiences it

What is a conception of consciousness devoid of its relation to mind? The language you used seems to betray some view of consciousness as some substance, some "it". That we all tap into in our own way. Of course, it may be argued that the question "What is x devoid of its relation to mind?" Can be asked for any x, and indeed this is true. However, for various reasons certain hypotheses or "Models" are more accurate then others, and the idea that consciousness is a "thing" that we tap into seems devoid of meaning. At least with something such as physical substances we can draw (not saying I agree) Lockean esque distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" characteristics of something. The primary being those "invariances" which will find themselves being expressed in any relation to the object. What would be the invariances or primary characteristics of some diffuse "consciousness" that is not connected to any individual?
What happens when we go to sleep? Does the substance hide? What happens when somebody takes drugs? Though you may say that the brain does not necessarily create consciousness, nor does it necessarily not. As such, I find the evidence that certain changes in the functioning of certain brain regions have similar effects on the consciousness of most, mixed with mental disorders and sleep/death to be more convincing.
I can appreciate the general epistemological way at which you approach things, always pointing out how we can not be quite so certain of the physicalist ontology we are all largely "brought up with" due to its necessarily being forumlated and confirmed/refuted through experience, but I do not even see what it could mean to take a subjective notion like consciousness and treat it as some property-less substance.

Oh, and out of curiosity

We often hear language that suggests "information" is something physical. But it's not

Do you accept the idea that all information must necessarily be physically implemented? Or do you see this as attatched to the general physicalist thesis and so discard it?

 

[Pythagorean]

there is no such thing as what is "objective" without "conscious experience." This is demonstrably true-- any definition of objectivity is inevitably going to have to refer to conscious experience at some point. That's the fundamental Catch-22 of physicalist thinking, it is basically an error in language.

You'll have to be more explicit about the contradiction. In my view (weak emergence, I think is the label that fits me) "objective" and "subjective" are both emergent properties: representations that follow from the tendency of organic systems to generalize stimuli for a coherent world view. I don't really believe that things are stored in a binary system: either objective or subjective. Some information is more subjective, some information is less subjective.

In the course of the history of man, phenomena that are subjective have found objective measures. How somebody feels about something can be a direct insight into their history with that thing and how it affected there dopaminergic system.

But again we have language problems. In addition to the demonstrable fact that all attempts to distinguish what is a delusion from what isn't is going to have to reference conscious experience (and then go on to test the self-consistency of that experience, something you simply cannot do in a universe of rocks), we have the even more basic fact that any standard definition of "delusion", when applied to "consciousness", encounters problems. Most basically, a delusion is an impression that is not shared by sane people, so your statement would need to claim that finding each other conscious is not something that sane people do. I would argue just the opposite-- I'd worry much more about the sanity of someone who does not find themselves to be conscious.

It's important to clear up the semantics, I agree. Since you're practicing deconstructionism on my post, you might have missed the message. There's no need to fixate on the word "delusion". I just meant we instinctually believe each other to be conscious before we ever develop rational thinking.

But again the language has problems-- the reason a lake in the desert is an illusion is that it is inconsistent with all our other experiences relating to deserts. What other experiences (conscious experiences, mind you) do we have that is inconsistent with the concept of consciousness? Again the Catch-22.

I don't get your point, I guess. I don't find anything inconsistent with consciousness. I find consciousness a very interesting emergent property that I'd like to know more about the mechanisms of. And I'm satisfied by my studies in systems biology.

I agree that this is the basis we use to extend our concept of consciousness from ourselves to others, but such an extension is rational and sane.

I don't agree that it's rational or sane to think that colored people aren't conscious just because they're skin color is different. With rocks, we have no idea. But if a theory comes up that implies panpsychism, there's no previous successful theory that requires that panpsychism be false. So judging the theory on whether it allows panpsychism or not is egocentric.

And furthermore, the point isn't that rocks are conscious. It's that any matter is capable of consciousness if it becomes the right system in terms of its dynamics (information, energy, mass transfer). Rather than matter gathering around a "soul". Emergent properties emerge.

So consciousness must begin with ourselves-- if we have it, then extending it is natural.

There's no place consciousness must begin. Is this a prevalent view?

So by what basis can we claim that consciousness "emerges" from the brain? We don't know that at all.

Who claimed that? Consciousness emerges as an interface between two complex systems (though, the boundary that divides them into to systems is my own creation, as with the boundary that divides them from the rest of the universe). The systems are often labeled "internal" and "external" and are generally defined by the epidermal layer of an organism.

All the cells play together. The brain is the most efficient information handler, but it's not the only information handler. The system emerges from more than just neurons. You take away glial cells at the start, for instance, and the system will never evolve to be conscious. Likewise if you take stimuli away from the organism from the start, it will never develop consciousness.

I am breathing the universe.

But note I could also use language to describe what is going on in a telescope, and I could describe the evolution of the eye in exactly the same terms you used to discuss the evolution of a brain. Yet what the eye sees does not "emerge" from the eye, so where is the basis that consciousness emerges from the brain?

I'm not sure I follow...

Here the language again is in danger of falling into certain traps. We often hear language that suggests "information" is something physical. But it's not-- information is an abstract output of high-level processing. So brains don't "contain" information, and they are not "made of" information, but rather, it is our process of understanding brains (and everything else) that refers to information.

You could use that pedantic argument for mass and energy, then...

Information is physical. You can't talk about a system just by talking about it's mass and energy. You have to talk about it's configuration in spacetime. This is what information is. And it's very interesting and productive to think about things this way:

Without unique geometrical configurations in time and space, there wouldn't be near the permutaitons available to each system and the dynamics would be rather boring and it wouldn't be a complex system, worthy of being published in Physics Review E:

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v53/i3/p2957_1

or Nature magazine:

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n12/full/nphys1821.html

 

[Ken G]

Hello JDStupi, welcome to the conversation!

So Ken G, am I to assume you disagree with the intentionality thesis? Namely that all consciousness is consciousness of something or is directed towards something?

It's not that I disagree with it, I just don't see why we should adopt it as true. We should simply ask what are the implications of that possibility.

What is a conception of consciousness devoid of its relation to mind?

I guess that depends on what you mean by "mind." Judging from my remarks that you are responding to, it sounds like you are equating the mind with the brain. Often, we think of the brain as the physicalist elements of the seat of consciousness, so as soon as we invoke brain language, we are invoking a physicalist perspective. So if you are indeed equating brain and mind, then your question becomes, what is a conception of consciousness devoid of its relation to a physicalist description of the brain? And that is, what I would say, the $64,000 question right there. What do we learn about consciousness (or free will) by taking a physicalist perspective, and what do we lose by doing that?

The language you used seems to betray some view of consciousness as some substance, some "it". That we all tap into in our own way.

I have not asserted a claim that this is true about consciousness, I have only pointed out that we have no idea that this is not true about consciousness. So we should not adopt language that suggests we know it is not true, or even that we have any evidence it is not true, because we don't. We only have a choice to frame it differently, made by us, for various reasons that we should not lose contact with.

However, for various reasons certain hypotheses or "Models" are more accurate then others, and the idea that consciousness is a "thing" that we tap into seems devoid of meaning. At least with something such as physical substances we can draw (not saying I agree) Lockean esque distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" characteristics of something.

So if one cannot draw Lockean distinctions, the sole alternative is absence of meaning? Is there any other logical argument here that it is devoid of meaning to think of consciousness as something that has an existence separate from the physical action of the brain that interacts with it in some poorly understood way? Maybe we are just a whole lot better at thinking in terms of physical models, and consciousness is not beholden to this particular skill of ours. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail-- that is the flaw of positivism when used as an assertion of truth.

What would be the invariances or primary characteristics of some diffuse "consciousness" that is not connected to any individual?

That depends on how you imagine the "connection" you are talking about. What are the primary characteristics of a planetary nebula that are not connected with human perception? There are none, so just what is the "connection" between us and planetary nebulae?

What is demonstrable is that memories and opinions and personalities are directly linked to individuals, all the things that go into our identity. But anyone who counts consciousness as being among the unique elements of their identity, must count themselves the only conscious being. Instead, we generally treat consciousness as part of our shared experience as humans, and rightly so-- that would seem the default expectation.

What happens when we go to sleep? Does the substance hide?

What happens to the Moon when you are not looking at it, does it "hide"? No, you don't see it because you are not looking at it, there's no requirement for it to "go" or "hide." I'm not claiming this perspective is necessarily the correct one, I'm saying there is zero evidence it is any less valid or useful, and it might even be argued it is a more natural default option.

For example, what evidence do we have the planetary nebulae "emerge" from our telescopes when we focus on them? Why do we think they are still there when we are not looking at them? There is nothing about planetary nebulae that would allow us to create an experiment that comes out A if planetary nebulae emerge from the action of building a telescope or B if they are already there, it is purely a mental convenience that we choose the latter interpretation. Ironically, most take the opposite stance when it comes to consciousness, and for no better reason. If that is not so, what is the better reason?

As such, I find the evidence that certain changes in the functioning of certain brain regions have similar effects on the consciousness of most, mixed with mental disorders and sleep/death to be more convincing.

What has that got to do with it? There are things I can do to a telescope that will have inevitable effects on the image of a planetary nebula. If I defocus the telescope, the image will be blurry. So this is evidence that the planetary nebula emerges from the telescope?

I can appreciate the general epistemological way at which you approach things, always pointing out how we can not be quite so certain of the physicalist ontology we are all largely "brought up with" due to its necessarily being forumlated and confirmed/refuted through experience, but I do not even see what it could mean to take a subjective notion like consciousness and treat it as some property-less substance.

It is not necessary to treat it as property-less to not treat it as physical. Here your argument seems to rest on the assumption that all properties are physical properties. That is a standard step in positivist arguments-- they generally begin by assuming what they will later claim is their evidence for making the assumption. "Consciousness" is a word, and so like all language, all it does is make contact with our shared experience. That's it, that's all words ever do. So if consciousness has shared properties, then it is not propertyless. None of that has anything to do with physicalist assumptions, they are something quite different.

Do you accept the idea that all information must necessarily be physically implemented? Or do you see this as attatched to the general physicalist thesis and so discard it?

I would say that anyone who would claim that all information must necessarily be physically implemented accepts the onus of proof that this statement is correct. It does not fall to me to falsify it-- I see no evidence to support it. Indeed, it looks like reverse logic-- physicalist models are what we construct from information, not the other way around.

 

[Ken G]

You'll have to be more explicit about the contradiction. In my view (weak emergence, I think is the label that fits me) "objective" and "subjective" are both emergent properties: representations that follow from the tendency of organic systems to generalize stimuli for a coherent world view.

I'm fine with the idea that subjective and objective are types of representations that follow from how we generalize stimula to create a coherent world view. If that is all you mean by "emergence", then sure, they emerge. But if that is all we mean by emergence, then a planetary nebula emerges from a person looking into a telescope, because the reason we talk about planetary nebulae is our tendency to generalize stimula (from telescopes) for a coherent world view. I don't think that's really what you mean by weak emergence.

What I'm saying here is that free will and consciousness are not known to "emerge" as a result of the action of a physical system, any more than a planetary nebula is known to emerge from the action of a telescope. Instead, we have an interaction going on, and some of the aspects of that interaction can be framed in physicalist language (the neural correlates), and some cannot (the actual experience of it). We have no idea that one part of this interaction emerges from the other, and we really have no reason to assert that it does-- the study of the interaction will look more or less the same either way, the only difference is we are less likely to take a wrong turn if we don't pretend to know something that we don't actually know to be true. Think about how much easier it would have been to understand quantum mechanics had we learned that lesson better!

I don't really believe that things are stored in a binary system: either objective or subjective. Some information is more subjective, some information is less subjective.

Yes, that must be true-- subjective and objective are just poles of a continuum of types of experience, a continuum of generating that coherent world view you speak of.

It's important to clear up the semantics, I agree. Since you're practicing deconstructionism on my post, you might have missed the message. There's no need to fixate on the word "delusion". I just meant we instinctually believe each other to be conscious before we ever develop rational thinking.

Yet words are very important, because they are all we have. We want to know what we mean when we talk about free will, so we must pick our way carefully through the words. Ultimately, it is probably impossible to be careful enough to avoid falling into incoherency or circularity, but we can try our best.

I don't get your point, I guess. I don't find anything inconsistent with consciousness. I find consciousness a very interesting emergent property that I'd like to know more about the mechanisms of. And I'm satisfied by my studies in systems biology.

There's no problem with being satisfied with an approach to understanding consciousness. What I objected to is the claim that consciousness emerges from the action of a physical system, unless one defines "emerges" to be completely generic of everything that any system does, and one treats the modifier "physical" as if it was completely redundant. That's my challenge to physicalists-- tell me why, in your philosophy, the phrase "physical system" is not completely redundant. And if it is completely redundant, why don't you conclude that you are simply assuming what you believe to be true? The difference between an assumption and a belief rests on the appearance of something other than complete redundancy.

I don't agree that it's rational or sane to think that colored people aren't conscious just because they're skin color is different.

I believe you have taken the opposite of my meaning-- I said that whatever we decide for ourselves, in regard to whether or not we have consciousness or free will, is natural to extrapolate to others, in the absence of good reason not to.

But if a theory comes up that implies panpsychism, there's no previous successful theory that requires that panpsychism be false.

This is the kind of point I'm making. We must not adopt claims on truth that could be false without a single one of our experiments coming out differently. The claim that consciousness is "generated by" or "emerges from" physical systems is just such a claim-- what experiment that has been done has to be wrong if the physical systems are only interacting with consciousness in some currently poorly understood way, rather than generating it? A camera generates a photograph, but not what is depicted in the photograph. Consciousness is what is being depicted by our language about it, it is not being created by the way we think about it.

And furthermore, the point isn't that rocks are conscious. It's that any matter is capable of consciousness if it becomes the right system in terms of its dynamics (information, energy, mass transfer). Rather than matter gathering around a "soul".

That is one of those claims we do not have evidence to support, we have no idea what the matter is doing, because both matter, and consciousness, are concepts that we are manipulating, and we have no idea how those concepts connect to each other other than what limited correlates we can subject to scientific investigation.

Emergent properties emerge.

And that exposes the fundamental circularity in the claim.

Consciousness emerges as an interface between two complex systems (though, the boundary that divides them into to systems is my own creation, as with the boundary that divides them from the rest of the universe).

Not just that boundary, but every single word you used in that sentence is your creation. That's how language works. So you are contradicting yourself, because you are saying you have a model that is true, and then you are admitting that the model is an idealization made by your mind. It certainly cannot be both-- to avoid the contradiction, you would have to say that you are choosing to model consciousness as that interface. I've no objection to choosing to impose physicalist models and see what they can tell us, my objection was claiming that we somehow have evidence that consciousness actually emerges from the action of physical systems. That is simply mistaking an assumption for a conclusion, an error that crops up over and over in positivism.

I'm not sure I follow...

The point there was that being able to trace a continuum of systems that we model in physicalist language, and correlate that continuum with levels of consciousness, is in no way evidence that consciousness is generated by those physical systems. The analogy of the telescope exposes the logical flaw in claiming that evidence.

You could use that pedantic argument for mass and energy, then...

And it would be just as correct. Being correct does not make something pedantic.

Information is physical. You can't talk about a system just by talking about it's mass and energy. You have to talk about it's configuration in spacetime. This is what information is.

So you say that information is physical, and then you say it is about a configuration in spacetime. A configuration in spacetime is not something physical, it is something mathematical. So now we have that mathematics is physical too? This is exactly the circular reasoning that permeates physicalism-- everything has to be physical by assumption, ergo, everything is physical.

No, if everything is physical, then "physical" doesn't mean anything. Meaning must stem from contrast-- a category means something if it establishes a difference between what falls under the category and what doesn't. Physicalism cannot have it both ways-- either "physical" is a completely meaningless word, or else it is not true that everything is

Without unique geometrical configurations in time and space, there wouldn't be near the permutaitons available to each system and the dynamics would be rather boring and it wouldn't be a complex system, worthy of being published in Physics Review E:

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v53/i3/p2957_1

or Nature magazine:

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n12/full/nphys1821.html

I certainly never said we cannot do science, or mathematics. We do both, and get lots of insights (fascinating papers, by the way). Yet mathematics is not physical, it is an abstract means of manipulating information. Energy isn't physical either, it is a word, corresponding to a formula, that can be interfaced in a useful way with physicalist language without actually being physical (note, for example, that any constant energy can be added to the potential energy of a system with no physical consequences at all, so energy is demonstrably something different from what is physical.) Hence the information is also not physical. We can imagine, if we choose, that the information stems from a physical system, but it makes more sense to simply assert that whatever the information stems from, we will attempt to model in a physical way. "Physical" is a word that talks about constraints on a model, nothing more.

 

[pftest]

That's not at all what I meant; there is also the issue of emergent properties such as sending signals through chemical or electrical means that are absent in a rock. I was trying to draw the comparison that just because say, we have Hydrogen in us, doesn't mean we're ever going to fuse it into helium. We lack major elements of MORE Hydrogen, the effects that as as a result of gravity, and heat.

Panpsychism strikes me as the ultimate in reductionism; much as the assumption was once made that a protein was a protein... well look, how it encodes/folds is rather more the issue!

It's not always a matter of complexity, it can just be a matter of potential within the bounds our complexity provides. A rock is not a stupid human, and a human is not a thinking rock, anymore than some vast intelligence beyond humanity would be a "really bright" human.

My reply is here https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3206396#post3206396
It's about emergence so it fits better in that topic than in this free will one.

 

[Pythagorean]

Being correct does not make something pedantic.

Your blanket response is pretty much, "you can't prove that", and a vague notion of "solipsism could be true". Which is 100% accurate and 100% useless. It's something that's already understood that we move forward from. It's pedantic because it's not productive. You're not making any thought progress with me.

Emergence is not so circularly defined just because I didn't extrapolate in the sentence you quoted, I just assumed you knew what emergence was. Should I even bother to elucidate on the scientific formalism? You seem not to really appreciate the same division of reality that I do, so why don't you tell me about yours instead?

Why don't you tell me something productive?

 

[Ferris_bg]

Pythagorean, I don't think the idealistic viewpoint that Ken G explained is useless. You don't know if mind emerges from matter or matter from mind. In fact the both terms are not defined at all, they depend on our still primitive understanding of the world. So one must always assume all the possibilities, because the "productiveness" depend on all of them. Thats what Ken G wanted to say with his/her questions, what do we learn from this and this standpoint.

As for the information, let's not focus on its configuration in spacetime, but rather on its origin. Is it again a psychological property just like weak emergence, can information be created without depending on sentience?

 

[Ken G]

Your blanket response is pretty much, "you can't prove that", and a vague notion of "solipsism could be true".

Correction, that is what you heard. What I was actually telling you is that you are making claims you cannot support. What "use" have you demonstrated from your claims? Science does not require those claims in order to be useful, science is not a belief system nor does it need physicalist philosophy.

You do not seem not to really appreciate the same division of reality that I do, so why don't you tell me about yours instead?

You don't have a "division" of reality at all, that's the point. All you have is a belief system that you cannot even support. Basically, you have made a claim that has no use, and are objecting to my pointing that out on the basis that my pointing it out has no use. Ferris_bg has it right.

 

[nismaratwork]

My reply is here https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3206396#post3206396
It's about emergence so it fits better in that topic than in this free will one.

Good point, responded! Seems like a fun thread too, I'll stick around it.

Ken G, Pythagorean... easy guys, you're both smart and thoughtful, and have been and can do better than these last couple of posts.

Believe it or not, it's actually quite useful for amateurs like me to read your arguments, but not your spats.

 

[Ken G]

As for the information, let's not focus on its configuration in spacetime, but rather on its origin. Is it again a psychological property just like weak emergence, can information be created without depending on sentience?

That's an important question, and I would say that what is demonstrable is that it does. Maintaining the inverse requires, at least, some evidence.

 

[nismaratwork]

An ant can create novel and unique chemical trails encoding information without a HINT of sentience, I'm not seeing the hook here.

 

[Ken G]

The hook lies in the question of, according to whom is the ant trail encoding information? Does the ant think there is information there? Is an ant an information broker of some kind, or is it just following a program of some kind (the information content of that program being, of course, something that the ant also does not see nor has any use to see)? The deep question here is, to what extent are our minds responsible for how we think, and how we use mental constructs like information and energy. I wouldn't even claim a relation like sentience --> information, or information --> sentience, but rather that the only place where they appear (in our minds), they appear together.

 

[nismaratwork]

The hook lies in the question of, according to whom is the ant trail encoding information? Does the ant think there is information there? Is an ant an information broker of some kind, or is it just following a program of some kind (the information content of that program being, of course, something that the ant also does not see nor has any use to see)? The deep question here is, to what extent are our minds responsible for how we think, and how we use mental constructs like information and energy. I wouldn't even claim a relation like sentience --> information, or information --> sentience, but rather that the only place where they appear (in our minds), they appear together.

Regardless of its awareness or instruction-set, the ant encodes information that not ONLY other ants can follow, which an alien intelligence COULD in theory also benefit from. The ant is producing new information through exploration, sans sentience or anything LIKE sentience. Despite that, it's a universal kind of organized information that other beings on the same thermodynamic arrow can understand given the right tools.

A rock is information, but cannot create new information, cannot explore information, it just IS. Life allows information to spread and change, accumulate and organize; a rock is a stable structure, however it resonates or reacts in a piezoelectric fashion.

Information is universal, but how that information is manipulated, created, changed, and interpreted is the realm of the living. Complexity isn't even the issue as arguably a planet is far more complex than an ant, yet the planet is a dissipative system... it's just a chunk of the universe slowly cooling.

 

[Ken G]

Regardless of its awareness or instruction-set, the ant encodes information that not ONLY other ants can follow, which an alien intelligence COULD in theory also benefit from.

My point is, it is you who have labeled that as information, it is your brain that is gaining the benefit from the label. The ant doesn't need it, or use it, or even want it. Information means nothing to what an ant is doing, it means something to your attempts to analyze what the ant is doing. You are responsible for information, the ant is responsible for a chemical trail. (And we don't need to get into what a chemical trail is, and the responsibilities there.)

The ant is producing new information through exploration, sans sentience or anything LIKE sentience.

No, the ant is doing no such thing. It is quite demonstrable what the ant is doing, and it isn't that. Where that language originates is in your mind's efforts to categorize, organize, and understand, what the ant is doing. Someone with a very different way of thinking about ants might not have any idea what you are talking about or why you would want to analyze it that way, and the ant wouldn't have any idea what either one of you are talking about.

A rock is information, but cannot create new information, cannot explore information, it just IS. Life allows information to spread and change, accumulate and organize; a rock is a stable structure, however it resonates or reacts in a piezoelectric fashion.

Yes, when we think about life, and our concept of information, this is what we find. It's all about our relationship with our own concepts, and what they do for us. Us.

Information is universal, but how that information is manipulated, created, changed, and interpreted is the realm of the living.

The universality of information is that all minds that work like ours universally find value in the concept. That's a limited form of "universality", but it is the one used in science. The only one we can use, but it's not the one many people imagine when they lose track of their own involvement.

Complexity isn't even the issue as arguably a planet is far more complex than an ant, yet the planet is a dissipative system... it's just a chunk of the universe slowly cooling.

Yes, I agree here-- we don't even know how to "rate complexity" in a way that tells us when you get life. Random bits contain more information than does language, so something about communication requires that we suitably limit the information, rather than conveying it willy nilly. Something like that must also be true for life.

 

[nismaratwork]

My point is, it is you who have labeled that as information, it is your brain that is gaining the benefit from the label. The ant doesn't need it, or use it, or even want it. Information means nothing to what an ant is doing, it means something to your attempts to analyze what the ant is doing. You are responsible for information, the ant is responsible for a chemical trail. (And we don't need to get into what a chemical trail is, and the responsibilities there.)

I'm thinking of information in terms of Information, as in physics; the ant IS information, whether I'm there to watch it or not. Granted that last bit is a function of my not believing in wavefunction collapse, but there it is. Other animals such as an ant-eater are not just attracted by such trails, but use them to track the home of the ants. In short, it is universally available information, and as real as anything.

No, the ant is doing no such thing. It is quite demonstrable what the ant is doing, and it isn't that. Where that language originates is in your mind's efforts to categorize, organize, and understand, what the ant is doing. Someone with a very different way of thinking about ants might not have any idea what you are talking about or why you would want to analyze it that way, and the ant wouldn't have any idea what either one of you are talking about.

The ant(s) form a trail to and from food sources, establish dead ends, and all of that is useful to them, and some other animals. Indipendant of my observation, the information exists, then dissipates over time adding to the total entropy of the 'system'. Even if nobody knows what an ant is, even if ants are gone, those trails still encode additional information about the habits of the colony, food sources, and inter-ant communication.

You don't need to even be sentient to use that information (see anteater again).

Yes, when we think about life, and our concept of information, this is what we find. It's all about our relationship with our own concepts, and what they do for us. Us. The universality of information is that all minds that work like ours universally find value in the concept. That's a limited form of "universality", but it is the one used in science. The only one we can use, but it's not the one many people imagine when they lose track of their own involvement.

Again, I mean information as in "Information Paradox", not the semi-solopsistic view. Minds with vastly different natures COULD access the ant's information until it fully dissipates, whether or not they do or exist in that fashion is another matter. Human minds are not required for that to be meaningful information about paths.

Yes, I agree here-- we don't even know how to "rate complexity" in a way that tells us when you get life. Random bits contain more information than does language, so something about communication requires suitable limiting information, rather than conveying it willy nilly. Something like that must also be true for life.

Here I think we converge on apeiron's points about downward constraints... it's part of squeezing the signal out of the noise. Random bits, like the human Genome without context is chaos, but the difference is that ruly random bits could just be called 'waste heat', and the genome is a totally different animals.

 

[Ken G]

I'm thinking of information in terms of Information, as in physics; the ant IS information, whether I'm there to watch it or not.

Correction, you can analyze the ant as being information, whether you are there or not, except that you need to be there to analyze anything. This is all inescapably true, it comes simply from keeping careful track of what the words mean. And recognizing it makes both quantum mechanics, and relativity, make a lot more sense, but those are two additional threads.

Other animals such as an ant-eater are not just attracted by such trails, but use them to track the home of the ants. In short, it is universally available information, and as real as anything.

Again, the truth here is that your analysis of the situation can be framed in terms of universally available information. If an anteater is just following a program of some kind, there is no information there for the anteater, any more than an electron uses information to fall toward a proton. Information is a mental construct, that is demonstrably true using any definition of information you like.

You don't need to even be sentient to use that information (see anteater again).

You are the one who are saying that information is being used there, the anteater says no such thing. You are also sentient. Coincidence?

Here I think we converge on apeiron's points about downward constraints... it's part of squeezing the signal out of the noise. Random bits, like the human Genome without context is chaos, but the difference is that ruly random bits could just be called 'waste heat', and the genome is a totally different animals.

Yes, our analysis about information is similar here, what differs is our claims about what information is.

 

[nismaratwork]

Correction, you can analyze the ant as being information, whether you are there or not, except that you need to be there to analyze anything. This is all inescapably true, it comes simply from keeping careful track of what the words mean. And recognizing it makes both quantum mechanics, and relativity, make a lot more sense, but those are two additional threads.
Again, the truth here is that your analysis of the situation can be framed in terms of universally available information. If an anteater is just following a program of some kind, there is no information there for the anteater, any more than an electron uses information to fall toward a proton. Information is a mental construct, that is demonstrably true using any definition of information you like.

You are the one who are saying that information is being used there, the anteater says no such thing. You are also sentient. Coincidence?
Yes, our analysis about information is similar here, what differs is our claims about what information is.

Your view seems solipsist, or an generally extreme Copenhagen Interpretation... I don't believe that we have to be present for something to exist. We need to be present for that information to be meaningful to us, but it exists whether or not we're there. The anteater, unlike the electron, is not simply a smear of probability, it's a macroscopic object which, without the information from the ants would not exist. They existed before we were there to observe them, and will (hopefully) continue when we're gone.

That the next ant in order can glean, even by genetic program, and reinforce the information of the trail is enough frankly, but the exploitation of that information by the anteater is a nail in that coffin to me. Remember, the anteater isn't merely attracted to the trail, it eats along it, back to the nest/bivouac/hill/etc. Unlike an electron it's following a defined path, even if it's instinctual, and if it's not hungry it can still recognize the path-information of the ant.

We can do the same, so could in theory, an alien intelligence. That to me argues for an objective reality about the specific information encoded by the ants, independent of us.

 

[Ferris_bg]

You both are right, because your definitions of information are not identical. In fact everything boils down to whether information is a property of matter or not. If you want we can move to a new thread discussing that, because we moved away from the main topic.

 

[Pythagorean]

Ken G,

there's plenty of experimental evidence that suggests mind arises from brain:

labotomies, pharmaceuticals, recreational drugs, neuropsychology experiments...

But if you're a solipsist, this discussion is not really worth having, since I'm just a figment of your imagination.

 

[Ken G]

You both are right, because your definitions of information are not identical. In fact everything boils down to whether information is a property of matter or not. If you want we can move to a new thread discussing that, because we moved away from the main topic.

Yes I agree, that's really a different thread. In a thread like that, I'd bring up observer effects in quantum mechanics, and the role of the observer in relativity, to show that physical information doesn't mean much of anything until you have an intelligent observer who is processing that information. A key point is that the intelligent observer can be hypothetical-- but that just means some other intelligent observer, who is real, is imagining a hypothetical intelligent observer, as part of the real observer's analysis of the situation.

 

[Pythagorean]

observers don't have to be living things in QM...

 

[Ken G]

Ken G,

there's plenty of experimental evidence that suggests mind arises from brain:

labotomies, pharmaceuticals, recreational drugs, neuropsychology experiments...

Not a single one of those is evidence of your claim, they are all examples of what I am talking about-- interactions between what we call mind and what we call brains that we have not the least idea the structure of the connection. I covered that already, around what you can do to telescopes to make planetary nebula look different.

But if you're a solipsist, this discussion is not really worth having, since I'm just a figment of your imagination.

A lot of people don't understand the point of solipsism. In constructive usage, solipsism is nothing but the core principle of all science-- that knowledge is provisional, and that skepticism is our primary tool for obtaining more knowledge. A lot of people don't understand that. If you restrict solipsism to meaning a claim that nothing is real except the mind, then note that at no point have I ever made that claim. Instead, I have noted the undeniable truth that everything we know comes through the filter of our minds, and to ignore that is just living in denial.

 

[Pythagorean]

I understand it, but it's not a productive place to do science from. Do you know what I mean? Our belief that brain provides consciousness has been useful in troubleshooting consciousness. Ignoring the brain all together was the tradition psych approach. And that's fine: I often pretend an ensemble of QM particles is something called a "ball". Simplifying assumptions help us understand things more deeply even though they're technically lies.

 

[Ken G]

observers don't have to be living things in QM...

Again, yes they do. However, they can use the device of imagining hypothetical observers, as part of their analysis. Note that everything in quantum mechanics that is an observable is something that makes sense to you and I.

 

[Ken G]

I understand it, but it's not a productive place to do science from. Do you know what I mean?

I do know what you mean, but I also know that you are misconstruing what I mean. Let me give you a concrete example, Einstein and quantum mechanics. Einstein made the classic mistake of thinking that he knew something that he did not in fact know-- he thought that he knew that reality exhibited local realism (in which every object "carries with it" all the information needed to determine how the object will behave in any situation, even if the information is purely statistical). So he developed the EPR paradox to show why quantum mechanics had to be wrong. Unfortunately, experiments showed that quantum mechanics was right, and reality did not exhibit local realism. In any time period earlier than the last 100 years, if anyone had said "but how do you know that reality exhibits local realism", that person would have been branded a solipsist for being skeptical about something that everyone already knew was true, for all practical purposes. They would have said the person was nitpicking, making formally correct but useless in practice observations. But not in the last 100 years, then that person's insight would have been viewed as an entry point to multiple-particle quantum systems.

Our belief that brain provides consciousness has been useful in troubleshooting consciousness.

A thousand times no. Our "belief" in anything is completely irrelevant to scientific discovery, there is simply no step in the scientific method that says "now believe your hypothesis." Belief systems have nothing to do with good science, and history is rather clear on that. They only get in the way of good science occasionally, but when they do, they are stultifying.

Simplifying assumptions help us understand things more deeply even though they're technically lies.

Yes, that is absolutely true, but we never need to believe our simplifying assumptions, we only need to believe that the assumptions could help us reach some goal or other. That's what motivates making assumptions, not the belief that they are true, or the belief that alternative assumptions cannot have their own value.

 

[nismaratwork]

Yes I agree, that's really a different thread. In a thread like that, I'd bring up observer effects in quantum mechanics, and the role of the observer in relativity, to show that physical information doesn't mean much of anything until you have an intelligent observer who is processing that information. A key point is that the intelligent observer can be hypothetical-- but that just means some other intelligent observer, who is real, is imagining a hypothetical intelligent observer, as part of the real observer's analysis of the situation.

That is not what is meant by an observer in QM; a photon interacting with a system is permutation enough. Solipsism is fine, but you still need to keep your physics facts in order; observer as in "intelligent observer" is only ever used in "Interpretations" of QM, not the formalism, or information theory. Hawking Radiation appears to violate unitarity, as it causes a loss of certain information relating to what "went in", regardless of whether people or ants or gods are around to see.

If your argument is based in intelligent observation, that's really just a flavour of Solipsism, and while I can't say you're wrong, there's nothing to discuss.