Does Neuroscience Challenge the Existence of Free Will?

[nismaratwork]

I think you are seeking too simple a view of dysfunction. I would say the normal brain is more like a minestrone soup and there are a lot of ingredients that could be under-represented or over-represented and so unbalance the flavour.

But there is a very simple model of why "faulty" genes persist stabily in gene pools - the standard sickle cell anaemia model. So a little bit of "dysfunction" may be part of the essential variety. We could ask how genes produce gay brains too. That seems even more of a challenge to simple minded genetics.

Dyslexia, discalculia. People who are unco. Who actually ends up representing normal?

Brain development would in fact to seem to have an alarming number of degrees of freedom. So it is probably a good thing that our physical and social worlds enforce such strong constraints on our actions. Between them, they create much greater actual conformity than would otherwise exist.

A lot of the things you describe are really modern mental diseases. What was just borderline odd in the highly constrained life of previous ages can flower into full glorious psychopathy given the freedoms of the modern era.

Psychopaths, sure, but that's at least in part why I mentioned that in a less socially organized group "sociopath" is reduced to a collection of other disorders, at least in diagnosis. Schizophrenia however is no advantage in a more primative society... far from it... yet it also persists, not growing in numbers, not shrinking, not bound by gender or race or region.

I don't claim to find a "normal", which is why I define it simply as "not having ASPD or Schizophrenia" for the sake of this discussion. Sociopaths are also, much to the dismay of popular views, not necessarily built for a harsher world... poor impulse control and a lack of planning, mixed with no empathy is not great for survival in a group. It MAY be useful in passing along genetics for a time, but with its roots in Conduct Disorder, you'd expect such people to be killed by even a small group.

A few would certainly become the Genghis Kahns of history, and the Vlad Tepes', but that is the exception to the sociopathic rule. It is true that I'm simplifying dysfunction here, but this is philosophy not neurology and I'm trying to adopt only a stance that survive in the former. I'm not finding as easy as I'd hoped... or easy at all, but then, I am learning.

What I'd point out in the case of a sociopath is that social constraints which we both agree are so valuable, don't even register most of the time. Schizophrenia I'd be willing to cede as a 'late onset' illness that allows for reproduction, but then you'd expect more variation in the overall occurance.

@Ferris_bg: Arguably, as much as Lievo an Apeiron are snarling at each other, yours is the only post that would certainly be worth a warning at least.

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, no offense, I really enjoy reading your posts, but you don't see how flawed sometimes your position is and what is more important, you take for granted that your position is the absolute truth. Please let us know if you are from the future, because ignoring other comments and refusing to even consider other positions is not at all philosophy.

If there are flaws in my position, perhaps you should highlight them. All I have done is argue things through by stating a position, providing sources, and replying to points made in reply. The complaint with Leivo is that he just says I'm wrong with nothing to back it up.

And what other positions am I not considering? Like reductionism? If I am arguing against anything then of course I am in the middle of considering it.

Perhaps it is just the friction you object to? If so, I apologise. If Leivo had played polite and fair, then that is certainly what he would have got in return.

 

[Ferris_bg]

And what other positions am I not considering?

The position that the non-reductive physicalism theories imply epiphenomenalism (I tried to explain that as best as I can https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3182518&postcount=141".

 

[apeiron]

Given the way supervenience has been conflated with weak emergentism in this discussion, it is worth reminding that there are other views.

There is nothing inherent in supervenience that requires higher level
states to be epiphenomenal, incapable of bringing anything about in their own
right. In some cases, it might be the higher-level states, and not the lower-level ones, which are causally responsible – there might, that is, be downward causation, even though there is determination from the bottom up. Which higher-level states a thing has will be determined by the lower-level states it has. But the causal powers of the lower-level states themselves are not sufficient to explain the result. In this sense, the higher-level states have genuinely new, emergent causal powers that are not reducible to the lower-level ones, even though they supervene upon them. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emergentists such as John Stuart Mill and C. Lloyd Morgan argued that this was in fact the way that chemistry was related to physics

This is from a nice paper discussing Aristotle's approach to the mind.

http://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/faculty/caston/aristotles-psychology.pdf

 

[apeiron]

The position that the non-reductive physicalism theories imply epiphenomenalism (I tried to explain that as best as I can https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3182518&postcount=141".

Your lake analogy does not represent what I mean by a system where global constraints are in interaction with local constructive action.

You would have to be saying something more along the lines that throwing balls create the lake, and the existence of the lack comes to constrain your throwing of the ball so that it creates a still more definite lake.

You are starting off by imagining disconnected things (throwing and lakes) and thus you wire in a dualism. I argue the opposite - interaction from the start, which begins vaguely organised and develops to be a crisply systemic state of affairs.

I don't think Kim's arguments are at all solid or conclusive.

But I would agree that freewill or any notion of downward causality is a problem for materialistic ontologies. ie: reductionist ones.

What I have argued repeatedly is that systems causality is a physicalist ontology which recognises both material and formal cause, both effective and final cause.

So it is "dualistic" in the sense that substance and form are take as equally fundamental, but then not dualistic as it is an interactive ontology, where each is causing the other, and likewise a process or developmental ontology, as the whole develops (everything emerges, because local degrees of freedom and global organising constraints are each developing each other).

 

[Ferris_bg]

Most of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Non-reductive_physicalism" for example claim the mental does not exist, but that's not logically consistent).

I don't think Kim's arguments are at all solid or conclusive.

Why so? What's wrong with his argument?

 

[apeiron]

What I'd point out in the case of a sociopath is that social constraints which we both agree are so valuable, don't even register most of the time. Schizophrenia I'd be willing to cede as a 'late onset' illness that allows for reproduction, but then you'd expect more variation in the overall occurance.

I'm not sure where you are going with this line of thought.

If it is why genes for certain brain disorders are maintained at a steady level in the gene pool, that is a murky topic. Worth its own thread, but not relevant to the OP nor really a question of philosophy (just perhaps with some implications for philosophy).

So far as neural correlates of freewill go, my point was that freewill is largely a socially constructucted notion that serves the purpose of creating a layer of self-regulating constraint at the level of individual psychology. Animals just act autonomously, directly. We learn to have consciences and to act as a constant social guardian over our "selfish" urges.

As society has evolved, the demand for individual self-regulation has only increased. (This is the "paradox" of systems causality - downward constraint sharpens local identity...it actually achieves something, produces something that was not there before so crisply).

So given natural brain variability (which we evolved for a hunter-gather lifestyle), more and more people might be expected to fall outside what has become an ever narrower norm in terms of self-regulation. Take hyperactivity as a classic example.

And our treatment of those falling outside the norm reveals the fact of top down constraint. We are individually all as free as can be in the Western liberal laisser faire postmodern life. Completely free to be what we want to be, act like we want to act. Until the point where suddenly we are not. And get sectioned under the mental health act, committed to the dementia ward, doped up with strong drugs, etc.

If we can't constrain ourselves within narrow bounds (cynically you would describe that as being productive consumers in a consumer society), then we discover the second kind of more forcible constraints that society has in store.

 

[apeiron]

Why so? What's wrong with his argument?

It fails to address the systems model of causality.

(Edit: Well, I should add that what Kim actually argues, and what people think he argues, can be two different things...and even he has shifted his position over time. So I prefer to begin with thinkers like Pattee and Rosen who I agree clearly with, rather than have to spend time disentangling bits where Kim is pretty much right, and where he rather obscures what matters.)

 

[apeiron]

Most of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Non-reductive_physicalism" for example claim the mental does not exist, but that's not logically consistent).

But you can see from that wiki definition that I am not claiming a non-reductive physicalism. Instead, the systems approach could be called doubly reductionist I guess. Which is why it seems vaguely dualistic (it is in fact triadic).

So local causation (events, efficient causes, locales, atoms, etc) reduce upwards to global contraints. They are what they are because of global constraints. And equally, global constraints (laws, forms, boundary conditions) reduce to local causes.

The whole is reducible to its parts, and the parts are also reducible to the whole.

Now if you can show me where Kim addresses this notion, then fine. Otherwise I will stick to the sources that do discuss it.

 

[nismaratwork]

I'm not sure where you are going with this line of thought.

If it is why genes for certain brain disorders are maintained at a steady level in the gene pool, that is a murky topic. Worth its own thread, but not relevant to the OP nor really a question of philosophy (just perhaps with some implications for philosophy).

This is more where I'm going... maybe I should make a thread. Sorry for the inadvertant hiijack, but it seemed to be a possible window into the issues you've raised. In and of itself, as you say, it's murky enough that I'm not sure how I'd START such a thread.

So far as neural correlates of freewill go, my point was that freewill is largely a socially constructucted notion that serves the purpose of creating a layer of self-regulating constraint at the level of individual psychology. Animals just act autonomously, directly. We learn to have consciences and to act as a constant social guardian over our "selfish" urges.

Here's where I'm hooked again... a psychopath is still human, but they have no guardian for their selfish urges. Are they less free, more free, or is it totally irrelevant? I think that it's less freewill inherent in a lack of contraints from our evolved and social conscionce, and I find that interesting.

As society has evolved, the demand for individual self-regulation has only increased. (This is the "paradox" of systems causality - downward constraint sharpens local identity...it actually achieves something, produces something that was not there before so crisply).

So given natural brain variability (which we evolved for a hunter-gather lifestyle), more and more people might be expected to fall outside what has become an ever narrower norm in terms of self-regulation. Take hyperactivity as a classic example.

So far I'm with you, and the existing body of knowledge in psychology would tend to agree AFAIK.

And our treatment of those falling outside the norm reveals the fact of top down constraint. We are individually all as free as can be in the Western liberal laisser faire postmodern life. Completely free to be what we want to be, act like we want to act. Until the point where suddenly we are not. And get sectioned under the mental health act, committed to the dementia ward, doped up with strong drugs, etc.

If we can't constrain ourselves within narrow bounds (cynically you would describe that as being productive consumers in a consumer society), then we discover the second kind of more forcible constraints that society has in store.

This is why I chose two mental illnesses which are absolutely unique, and universal, but I'm not sure how to properly apply it as a lens into the issues raised here. Unfortunately, I'm more familiar with the physical and medical impliations... the philosophical formalism is something I'm learning here on the fly. In fact, much of what I've learned beyond the basics has been from links in this forum. If I seem to wander, it's not intentional, and I welcome the correction from you or anyone else.

 

[Ferris_bg]

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/109/218". And if you ask these guys, do people have free will, they will surely say "yes". The problem is, the frog stays a frog, no matter how many times you kiss it. Unless of course it's not in your imagination, but that's another story.

 

[apeiron]

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/109/218". And if you ask these guys, do people have free will, they will surely say "yes". The problem is, the frog stays a frog, no matter how many times you kiss it. Unless of course it's not in your imagination, but that's another story.

I didn't really follow anything you said there - even whether you are generally expressing agreement or disagreement with the papers you linked to. Can you explain the nature of your objections, if it is objections you are making?

Anyway, the first paper does give a reasonable account of the social history of a systems approach to biology...

Overwhelmingly, theoretical biologists are anti-reductionists. In one way or another they all argue that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that it is necessary to overcome the assumptions of traditional science to make sense of life. However, such work is marginal to mainstream biology which has been far more influenced by the reductionism of the molecular biologists and socio-biologists (Francis Crick, James Watson, Jacques Monod, W.D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins) and those who have modeled cognition on artificial intelligence. As Rosen noted: ‘The question “What is life?” is not often asked in biology, precisely because the machine metaphor already answers it: “Life is a machine.” Indeed, to suggest otherwise is regarded as unscientific and viewed with the greatest hostility as an attempt to take biology back to metaphysics."

And the second has a more explicit statement on freewill than you seem to be suggesting...

The tendency over the last several hundred years, perhaps since Newton, is to try to capture all of the world, the external world, everything that science pertains to, in one principle-one way of grasping reality. And that leads directly to the concept we call the "machine". So nature is a big machine, an organism is a machine, mechanism is the goal and the end of science, and mechanism itself can be embodied in one principle or one set of principles. They're the principles of Newton, the principles of Descartes, or they're principles of mathematics... There are many attractive features, which flow from the idea of the machine. One of them is the idea of objectivity. You want to explain nature in a way in which individual consciousness, or "will", has no part. That's what it means to say that nature is "objective". If you ask most people what they understand by objectivity, that's what they will tell you. Consciousness, or will, or volition, all of the things which are characteristically human, play no part. As I say, that has been attractive and that has set up the ideal. And that is partly why the Cartesian ideal of the machine was so nice; because it's inherently objective. If something can be done by a machine, then it clearly doesn't involve will, doesn't involve subjectivity or consciousness or anything like that. And that has animated most of epistemology for the last 300 years. Part of the attractiveness of mathematics was that it embodies this kind of objectivity, even though mathematics exists only in the mind. Well, anyway, complex systems are not like that. If you try to compress a complex system into that kind of mold, you'll miss it completely.

 

[nismaratwork]

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/109/218". And if you ask these guys, do people have free will, they will surely say "yes". The problem is, the frog stays a frog, no matter how many times you kiss it. Unless of course it's not in your imagination, but that's another story.

If bio-naturalism is the same thing as bio-materialism, then I think it's little more than an aesthetic view of how you'd like to view these issues, with the assumption of more evidence than exists. Beyond that, your argument is... I don't know what the heck it is, but it's not agreeing with bio-materialism which assumes a much more unified view of consciousness than currently exists.

How can you form an aesthetic preference about an as-yet unverified property of something that hasn't been formulated?

 

[Ferris_bg]

Can you explain the nature of your objections, if it is objections you are making?

Now if you can show me where Kim addresses this notion, then fine. Otherwise I will stick to the sources that do discuss it.

Kim's argument is exactly pointed at such kind of theories like those of Rosen and Pattee (non-reductive physicalism theories). And my frog metaphor was pointed at the way one describes something. No matter what different kind of words you use, it's still the same old story.

I accept if you think Kim's argument is not sound. There is no way for me to change your views. You should know that once one take a side, one is not objective about it anymore (his position is under the referent power of the side he has taken). So even if I created some kind of doubt in you, I am happy about it. I myself would prefer functionalism over reductionism if I should be forced with such kind of choice, but that doesn't change my judgment about the illusion of free will in both theories.

 

[nismaratwork]

Kim's argument is exactly pointed at such kind of theories like those of Rosen and Pattee (non-reductive physicalism theories). And my frog metaphor was pointed at the way one describes something. No matter what different kind of words you use, it's still the same old story.

I accept if you think Kim's argument is not sound. There is no way for me to change your views. You should know that once one take a side, one is not objective about it anymore (his position is under the referent power of the side he has taken). So even if I created some kind of doubt in you, I am happy about it. I myself would prefer functionalism over reductionism if I should be forced with such kind of choice, but that doesn't change my judgment about the illusion of free will in both theories.

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is so clearly premature that I'd have to ask you support it with more than you have so far.

 

[Ferris_bg]

The conclusion that free will is an illusion is so clearly premature that I'd have to ask you support it with more than you have so far.

I have already done that in my previous comments in this thread, if you checked them out and read the given sources and still something doesn't sound clear, I would try to explain it. Please comment the parts that sound unclear.

Biological naturalism: Consciousness is a higher level function of the human brain's physical capabilities. More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism" .

 

[nismaratwork]

I have already done that in my previous comments in this thread, if you checked them out and read the given sources and still something doesn't sound clear, I would try to explain it. Please comment the parts that sound unclear.

Biological naturalism: Consciousness is a higher level function of the human brain's physical capabilities. More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism" .

This entails that the brain has the right causal powers to produce intentionality. However, Searle's biological naturalism does not entail that brains and only brains can cause consciousness. Searle is careful to point out that while it appears to be the case that certain brain functions are sufficient for producing conscious states, our current state of neurobiological knowledge prevents us from concluding that they are necessary for producing consciousness. In his own words:

"The fact that brain processes cause consciousness does not imply that only brains can be conscious. The brain is a biological machine, and we might build an artificial machine that was conscious; just as the heart is a machine, and we have built artificial hearts. Because we do not know exactly how the brain does it we are not yet in a position to know how to do it artificially." (Biological Naturalism, 2004)

I don't find this helpful at all... it seems to be the Penrose Hypothesis without even the flimsy foundation of microtubules. I'm not seeing support for your statements in articles that fail even to meet the standards of Wikipedia.

I'm sorry, protests aside, this sounds like messy dualism.

 

[Ferris_bg]

I'm not seeing support for your statements in articles that fail even to meet the standards of Wikipedia.

I haven't posted this link to support my statement, I have posted it because you asked what that mean. And I think the article can give you some basic info.

If you address future posts or questions to me about my previous posts, I'll edit this post with the answers, so be sure to check it out.

 

[apeiron]

Kim's argument is exactly pointed at such kind of theories like those of Rosen and Pattee (non-reductive physicalism theories).

But Kim's argument against emergentism does not cover the systems approach as taken by Pattee, Rosen, Salthe and others. Or at least I have never seen that anywhere. So if you can provide a reference.

Kim's whole analysis is flawed once you reject the idea of "mental states" as a meaningful ontological construct. You can talk about consciousness being a single thing with a moment to moment state in a loose way, but this does not bear up under analysis.

Consciousness is a spatiotemporally complex process (the standard process philosophy position as well as standard psychophysics). So the notion of instantaneous states is just wrong on this view.

And yes, there is a limit to a physicalist account when it comes to "qualia" like the redness of red. But this is a common garden variety of epistemic failure I would argue. For a model to be able to predict something, it must also be able to predict what it is not. To take a path, there must be represented some alternative paths. And when it gets down to the level of explaining red, we just run out of imaginable alternatives (like fubble, or blech).

So consciousness is irreduciable to a succession of states because it is spatiotemporally complex - organised across space and time. And qualia are irreducible in the limit because they become explanatory singularities. Models explain alternative fates and chop fine enough, you reach a pragmatic limit to prediction and measurement. But is this a failure of modelling, or a failure of subjectivity - you cannot imagine alternatives to the primary colours you see, the distinct scents you smell?

So there is that general failure of Kim's approach. Systems thinking is not even dealing in states that map. That is the way reductionism works. The systems approach deals in hierarchical spatiotemporal scale where fleeting local events are constrained within longrun global contexts.

A second issue is that the systems logic is interactive. So - using Kim's terminology for sake of argument - the P facts may determine the M facts, but the M facts are also determining the P facts. The local events may construct the global longrun state of constraint. But that global longrun state of constraint is equally shaping the identity of those local events.

This is why I urged a consideration of selective attention and neural receptive fields. A global state of memory and expectation acts as the context that acts downwards to shape up the kinds of things that local neurons can even say at that moment. Their repertoire of responses, their degrees of freedom, become constrained and so sharpened.

So Kim is dealing with "non-reductive physicalism" which claims that P => M. But the systems view is that P <=> M. And M cannot be consider a state at the same scale as P. So it is more like (P1, P2, P3...) <=> M. And then M is not "mental" as the mental state would be the emergent property of all of the system. So it would be (P <=> M) ---> Mind.

The general template for the systems view would thus be L <=> G, of whole systems emerge due to the interaction of local and global causality.

Then we can get into the more particular models of systems advanced by Pattee and Rosen.

So Pattee says D <=> S, or rate dependent dynamics is in interaction with rate independent semiotics. And D <=> S ---> Bios, or this is a general systems description of living and mindful systems, dissipative structures with non-holonomic constraints.

So three issues that Kim needs to tackle to be talking about the systems view.
1) The validity of mental "states" as a construct.
2) An interactive causality where "mental facts" also determine the "physical facts".
3) The claim that mind emerges "at the top" rather than the mind emerging "as a whole".

 

[Ken G]

Thanks for explaining further. It seems an interesting line of thought. I'm not familiar with operator formalism. Is it the same as bra-ket and complex number magic?

That's the flavor used in quantum mechanics, I don't mean anything so intricate or specific. Just the generic idea that the process of analyzing anything is a process of "operating", or mapping. It's the basis of the "map is not the territory" thinking, the need to distinguish the image space of our thoughts from the inverse-image space we are attempting to analyze with those thoughts.

And then your argument about the evolution operator connected to how passing light through two polarising filters "resets" the indeterminancy each time rather than constraining it additively as a reductionist thinker might expect?

Yes, the important thing about distinguishing an image space from the inverse-image space is that the evolution seen in the image space does not have to map backward onto the evolution in the inverse-image space. The algebra that maps forward onto its image can have mysterious elements, like imaginary wave functions and superposition states, that have no corresponding appearance in the image space. The projection is fundamentally non-invertible, so our contact with the inverse-image is tenuous, not "crisp". The emergence of crispness is not a mapping from the physical world into itself, it is a mapping from something else into how we think about the physical world.

Kind of like Einstein's unopenable watch, except that it's more than we just can't see what's in the watch, it's that we can't even assert the watch is made of components that we can understand separately from a watch. What is a wave function when it isn't being used in quantum mechanics? What is a mind when it isn't forming perceptions? These are not components we can analyze independently, and wonder how they are interacting inside the watch-- they are the models that meet some set of goals, and they only do what they do within some regime of global contraints that partly defines them.

Another way to express this is, saying "the whole is not the sum of its parts" may not go far enough, it may need to be extended to saying "the inverse-image of the image space where our analysis lives is not everything that is creating the reality we are analyzing." The inversion isn't crisp, so what is "really there" might not be either-- crispness is an output of reality, not an input to reality.

 

[apeiron]

Yes, the important thing about distinguishing an image space from the inverse-image space is that the evolution seen in the image space does not have to map backward onto the evolution in the inverse-image space.

I get you. And I agree. Are you basing this view on any sources in particular?

To me, this is the basic Peircean argument based on a logic of vagueness. And Prigogine makes the same essential case in the End of Certainty. As does Salthe in his Development and Evolution.

So our reductionist models (based on statements of local symmetry) create the impression that time is simply reversible. The current state predicts all future states deterministically, and also retrodicts all prior states. The block universe view of reality. The inverse view works equally well.

But a developmental ontology says real novelty and surprise occurs in some fashion. Our current map of the situation cannot capture all the information. So although we might feel there is a discrete series of events that got us to where we are, history cannot in fact be run backwards. We don't have the "hidden variables" that would allow us to recover those prior events in deterministic fashion.

The question then is what is the source of this uncertainty and unpredictability? Are there just hidden variables (discrete local infomation that we simply have not measured, but which in the god's eye view exists to ensure determinism). Or is nature inherently spontaneous in some way that defies complete measurement?

Well even if that is so, it would still seem that that spontaneity (for example, the probablistic collapse of a wavefunction into some discrete outcome) is still localisable as an event in time. But then what came before is a blur. So this would be a reason why the view backwards becomes indeterminate.

In complex systems - the kind with evolving rather than fixed global constraints - this would then be a second kind of blurring of the view. If the view based on states of the system can only capture the local information, and not see the global information - the story of how global constraints are changing - then that introduces a second kind of unpredictability into the story. You can't run the global state of the system backwards (or forwards) unless you have been recording that information properly.

In the short term, projections based on local state information can be used to predict the next state, and the state after that. But eventually the global constraints have changed in some way and prediction errors start to mount up. As Prigogine argues, the future becomes vague and approximate, not deterministic, because you cannot see global change from localised measurements.

Having said all this, I think the local QM errors and the lack of information about evolving global constraints are just two sides of the same coin.

As for example in Cranmer's transactional intepretation of QM, the future does constrain the past. How things will be, acts backwards to determine the events that arose to make them so. There is strong downward constraint from the global to the local scale.

So take the quantum eraser experiment. Things that happen in the future of an emission event - like some fool experimenter fiddling around with the flight path open to a photon - act backwards to constrain the probabilities for that "spontaneous" event. Top-down constraint (the total shape of the path of the event as it exists in the history of the universe) acts downwards to constrain what actually happens at the universe's locations.

Accepting Cranmer's approach is accepting strong downwards causation at the deepest level of reality. The alternative is some locality-preserving ontology like many worlds where every history just happens and there are no developing constraints.

[edit: sorry, that may have got confusing. What I was saying that there would be both a genuine local indeterminacy in QM spontaneity, and also a global lack of determination due to failure to measure global scale variables.

So the lack of an inverse image would be due both to a local ontic indeterminacy, and a global epistemological indeterminacy. But a systems view of causality - as implied in a transactional interpretation - can at least fix the history of a particular event in a fashion that is fully reversible within the timescope of that event.]

 

[Ken G]

I get you. And I agree. Are you basing this view on any sources in particular?

No, just my own amalgamation of different insights from all over, including some in this very thread.

But a developmental ontology says real novelty and surprise occurs in some fashion. Our current map of the situation cannot capture all the information. So although we might feel there is a discrete series of events that got us to where we are, history cannot in fact be run backwards. We don't have the "hidden variables" that would allow us to recover those prior events in deterministic fashion.

Yes, I think time is an interesting entry point to find weaknesses in reductionist thinking. There are so many holes in that ontology that one can start worming one's way in almost anywhere. The paradox of "hidden variables", a la Bohm, is particularly enlightening-- how badly must we want to imagine that the universe is deterministic to postulate the existence of a "hidden" determinism? Does that not violate the whole point of determinism as a scientific tool?

The question then is what is the source of this uncertainty and unpredictability? Are there just hidden variables (discrete local infomation that we simply have not measured, but which in the god's eye view exists to ensure determinism). Or is nature inherently spontaneous in some way that defies complete measurement?

Well even if that is so, it would still seem that that spontaneity (for example, the probablistic collapse of a wavefunction into some discrete outcome) is still localisable as an event in time. But then what came before is a blur. So this would be a reason why the view backwards becomes indeterminate.

Right, you get what I'm saying above about evolution. When we imagine the universe evolves from specific state to specific state, then evolution is a kind of mapping of reality into itself, nothing is being fundamentally altered there (nothing "surprising" as you put it), just some details being moved around. But when temporal evolution is recognized as a mode of thought rather than something reality actually does, we can see that evolution is an operation of sorts, which maps into an image space from something different. It's like watching a movie-- we don't see the frames of the movie, we see the movie, which is something different-- we see a flow of dialog and action, not takes and cuts and scripts and directors intervening. Those are not just "hidden variables" in a movie, they are what the movie really is, which is something quite different from how we experience it in the theatre.

In fact, I have to chuckle even at the phrase "hidden variables." If the universe goes to all the trouble to hide its variables from us, then the whole concept of a "variable" would seem to be rather missing the point. Why should that which is hidden from us follow the same basic paradigm as that which is not? Why should the "science of what is hidden" look just like the science of what is apparent, only below our radar? Extrapolated ontologies is basically the mode of thinking of children, and it often produces rather humorous outcomes.

In the short term, projections based on local state information can be used to predict the next state, and the state after that. But eventually the global constraints have changed in some way and prediction errors start to mount up. As Prigogine argues, the future becomes vague and approximate, not deterministic, because you cannot see global change from localised measurements.

Indeed I would argue that is just one interesting and important way that the future becomes vague-- it also does it when one applies purely reductionist approaches to chaotic systems, or to quantum systems. The "butterfly effect" is a quaint name for an attribute of a mathematical model-- in the image plane of our experience, butterflies don't actually "change" the weather, the claim mistakes the map for the territory in such a clearly absurd way, it's remarkable how tightly many scientists seem to claim to that idea.

Having said all this, I think the local QM errors and the lack of information about evolving global constraints are just two sides of the same coin.

A coin with many sides, and they all say the same thing-- there is no more absurd premise in the history of philosophy than the one that says the universe is fundamentally understandable, once the intellect of a biological organism gets off on the right path. It's amazing we do as well as we do, but one amazing truth does not make logical a preposterous extrapolation.

As for example in Cranmer's transactional intepretation of QM, the future does constrain the past. How things will be, acts backwards to determine the events that arose to make them so. There is strong downward constraint from the global to the local scale.

The way I would put it is, the direction of that connection is arbitrary. We tend to frame time as if it "marches forward", because that is how we process the information we get, giving us the idea that a cause leads to an effect. However, one can just as easily argue that effects produce causes-- the fact that something occurs necessitates all that comes before it. A huge universe necessitates the need for a smaller one to expand into it, and the chain never encounters the singularity any more than dividing by two over and over will ever get you to zero. The fact that you are here necessitates that your parents lived their lives, etc. It's all in how we process the information, there's no logical requirement for a cause to determine an effect because the concept is really just about linking information.

Accepting Cranmer's approach is accepting strong downwards causation at the deepest level of reality.

It sounds a bit like the anthropic principle taken to the extreme-- not just the parameters of our universe, but it's entire history, has occurred so that this moment could come into being. And this moment exists because it must lead to what comes next. It's a kind of backwards-determinism-- the future is not strictly predictable but it has already happened anyway. Does anyone ever wonder if the past is determined because we can infer what had to have happened to get us here?

This reminds me of a point I've made in the past about physics-- physics never predicts the future, because one cannot test the future and physics is a testable science. So what physics really does is predict events in the past earlier in the time stream than the events themselves, that's what it is demonstrably successful at. Any other statement is philosophy inspired by this fact about physics. Perhaps all that is happening is that some events necessitate their own predictability, and we've had the direction of determinism wrong all this time. (In one Arthur story I read, Merlin lived his life backward in time-- maybe Merlin was the one living forward. But I digress.)

[edit: sorry, that may have got confusing. What I was saying that there would be both a genuine local indeterminacy in QM spontaneity, and also a global lack of determination due to failure to measure global scale variables.

So the lack of an inverse image would be due both to a local ontic indeterminacy, and a global epistemological indeterminacy. But a systems view of causality - as implied in a transactional interpretation - can at least fix the history of a particular event in a fashion that is fully reversible within the timescope of that event.]

Ultimately I think we have an amazingly complex problem on our hands, that we have no hope at all of ever fully comprehending, but we can accomplish some fairly simple predictive goals with reductionist thinking, and some more profound ones require more systems-level thinking, and the really tough ones are just plain out of reach and always will be.

 

[Ferris_bg]

But Kim's argument against emergentism does not cover the systems approach as taken by Pattee, Rosen, Salthe and others. Or at least I have never seen that anywhere. So if you can provide a reference. (...)

So Kim is dealing with "non-reductive physicalism" which claims that P => M. But the systems view is that P <=> M. And M cannot be consider a state at the same scale as P. (...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Non-reductive_physicalism" except epiphenomenalism commit to these three claims:

NRP can be characterized by a commitment to three claims, roughly:

Physicalism: Everything is physical – all objects, properties, and events are the sort that can be exhaustively described and/or explained by the natural sciences.
Mental Realism: Some mental types are genuine properties.
Antireductionism: Mental and physical types are not identical.

Physicalism implies a single physical substance, mental realism implies physical to mental and mental to physical causal interaction (P <=> M) and antireductionism implies multiple realizability. So you see the "systems view" falls exactly in this category, as it embraces all the above three claims.

Now the argument from Kim shows that the realization physicalists must sacrifice one of these three claims in order for their theories to be logically consistent:

They could (a) deny the causal status of mental types; that is, they could reject Mental Realism and deny that mental types are genuine properties. Alternatively, they could (b) reject Physicalism; that is, they could endorse the causal status of mental types, but deny their causal status derives from the causal status of their physical realizers. Or finally, they could (c) endorse Mental Realism and Physicalism, and reject Antireductionism.

And because they can not (c) sacrifice antireductionism, their only choices are to (a) embrace epiphenomenalism or (b) accept dualism.

I can accept if one rejects the argument from Kim, which I presented in my previous posts. The argument has received a lot of criticism through the years, but at the same time most of the philosophers who don't defend any form of physicalism think that it's sound.

If one wants to reject the argument, one must reject some of the rules it is based on:

The Supervenience Argument incorporates three central assumptions. The first one specifies that the physical world is causally closed:
Closure: If a physical event has a cause at t, then it has a physical cause at t. (Kim 2005: 15)

The second one stipulates that mental properties supervene upon physical properties:
Supervenience: If any system s instantiates a mental property M at t, there necessarily exists a physical property P such that s instantiates P at t, and necessarily anything instantiating P at any time instantiates M at that time.

And the third is an exclusion principle expressing the prohibition of systematic overdetermination:
Exclusion: If an event e has a sufficient cause c at t, no event at t distinct from c can be a cause of e (unless this is a genuine case of causal overdetermination).

According to Kim, if we further assume that mental properties are neither reducible to not identifiable with physical properties, what results is a set of propositions inconsistent with the causal relevance of mental properties:
The problem of mental causation: Causal efficacy of mental properties is inconsistent with the joint acceptance of the following four claims: (i) physical causal closure, (ii) causal exclusion, (iii) mind–body supervenience, and (iv) mental/ physical property dualism—the view that mental properties are irreducible to physical properties.

The reasoning behind this contention is as follows. Suppose we wish to identify a mental property instance, M, as the cause of a subsequent physical property instance, P. By Supervenience we know that there must be some physical property instance upon which M supervenes and by Closure we know that if P has a cause at a time t, it has a physical cause at t. Let us suppose that P has a cause at t and that the physical cause of P (at t) is P0, and let us assume that P0 is the physical property instance upon which M supervenes. By Exclusion we know that P has no cause other than P0 unless this is a case of genuine causal overdetermination, which, we will assume, it is not. From this it follows that M is the cause of P only if M = P. But given that no mental property is identical with or reducible to any physical property, it follows that the putative mental cause, M, is not in reality a cause of P. Since there is nothing special about M, P, or P0, the argument generalizes to show that instances of irreducible mental properties do not have physical effects, so that nonreductive physicalism entails epiphenomenalism: ‘That then is the supervenience argument against mental causation, or Descartes’s revenge against the physicalists’ (Kim 1998: 46).

I personally don't exclude the possibility the mental to be somehow reported by the physical as I stated https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3197352&postcount=250" (possibility for violating exclusion). Thus there will be mental causation, but there won't be any kind of free will, because of the supervenience condition, which won't allow for any unique type of downward causation (you will have exactly the same mental causation in two identical systems). There is no problem of course to reject the supervenience condition or deny the causal closure principle, but you will be a dualist then.

 

[nismaratwork]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Non-reductive_physicalism" except epiphenomenalism commit to these three claims:


Physicalism implies a single physical substance, mental realism implies physical to mental and mental to physical causal interaction (P <=> M) and antireductionism implies multiple realizability. So you see the "systems view" falls exactly in this category, as it embraces all the above three claims.

Now the argument from Kim shows that the realization physicalists must sacrifice one of these three claims in order for their theories to be logically consistent:


And because they can not (c) sacrifice antireductionism, their only choices are to (a) embrace epiphenomenalism or (b) accept dualism.

I can accept if one rejects the argument from Kim, which I presented in my previous posts. The argument has received a lot of criticism through the years, but at the same time most of the philosophers who don't defend any form of physicalism think that it's sound.

If one wants to reject the argument, one must reject some of the rules it is based on:


I personally don't exclude the possibility the mental to be somehow reported by the physical as I stated https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3197352&postcount=250" (possibility for violating exclusion). Thus there will be mental causation, but there won't be any kind of free will, because of the supervenience condition, which won't allow for any unique type of downward causation (you will have exactly the same mental causation in two identical systems). There is no problem of course to reject the supervenience condition or deny the causal closure principle, but you will be a dualist then.

Sorry to boil this down, but essentially you're a slightly modified modern animist?

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi nismaratwork,

Sorry to boil this down, but essentially you're a slightly modified modern animist?

Just thought I'd intervene here. Ferris is correctly pointing out what mainstream scientific views hold to be true. Further, that there is a fundamental inconsistancy between those views. Certainly that doesn't make anyone an animist, though I'll let Ferris talk for him/her self.

 

[nismaratwork]

Hi nismaratwork,

Just thought I'd intervene here. Ferris is correctly pointing out what mainstream scientific views hold to be true. Further, that there is a fundamental inconsistancy between those views. Certainly that doesn't make anyone an animist, though I'll let Ferris talk for him/her self.

In what way is he pointing out a mainstream view? He appears to be arguing for thinking rocks, but if you have some other view I'm listening raptly. Perhaps it's just the garbled nature of his posts, a point I have to agree with apeiron on?

Maybe you can tell me what those views are, and how they differ from, "my best thinking is done in my toes!"

 

[Pythagorean]

Animism and panpsychism are misunderstood. Te point is no that trees and rocks ar like humans, but that humans, like rocks and trees, are just a collection of interacting particles.

If you want to explain consciousness rationally, you have to find what is fundamentally different about consciousess and nonconsciousness. I still have no idea on that..

 

[Ken G]

Ferris is correctly pointing out what mainstream scientific views hold to be true. Further, that there is a fundamental inconsistancy between those views.

This is an interesting statement, can you paraphrase for me just what these views are, and what is the inconsistency? The case hasn't clicked for me yet.

 

[Ken G]

Animism and panpsychism are misunderstood. Te point is no that trees and rocks ar like humans, but that humans, like rocks and trees, are just a collection of interacting particles.

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.

 

[nismaratwork]

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.

 

[apeiron]

NRP can be characterized by a commitment to three claims, roughly:

Physicalism: Everything is physical – all objects, properties, and events are the sort that can be exhaustively described and/or explained by the natural sciences.
Mental Realism: Some mental types are genuine properties.
Antireductionism: Mental and physical types are not identical.

The systems view I have outlined would say...

1) Yes, everything is physical. There is nothing supernatural going on. Causal closure is claimed.

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.

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.

That is what I mentioned regarding pansemiosis and the search for the minimal definition of a system.

So you can see that systems thinking does not fit the tag of non-reductive physicalism.

I have never seen where Kim tackles the system view as I would understand it. Again, if you can point to a place, that would be useful. But the arguments you are raising do not cover the systems view.

 

[Ferris_bg]

Sorry to boil this down, but essentially you're a slightly modified modern animist?

No, I am neither animist, nor defending or rejecting any form of panpsychism. I can't understand the origin of your question, because in my previous posts I don't speak about panpsychism at all.

The sum-up of all my posts in this thread until now is that I defend the position that you can NOT have free will in any materialistic theory of mind. My position is entirely objective because I am not sided with any form of physicalism thus defending its dominance over the other.

I am sorry that the language in my posts involves many philosophical concepts, but I already warned about that in my https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3182518&postcount=141". So if you just found out what some of these concepts mean, don't classify the nature of my posts (kapish nismaratwork?).

 

[nismaratwork]

No, I am neither animist, nor defending or rejecting any form of panpsychism. I can't understand the origin of your question, because in my previous posts I don't speak about panpsychism at all.

The sum-up of all my posts in this thread until now is that I defend the position that you can NOT have free will in any materialistic theory of mind. My position is entirely objective because I am not sided with any form of physicalism thus defending its dominance over the other.

I am sorry that the language in my posts involves many philosophical concepts, but I already warned about that in my https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3182518&postcount=141". So if you just found out what some of these concepts mean, don't classify the nature of my posts (kapish nismaratwork?).

Kapish sounds like a a poorly spelled Hungarian name, you're reaching for "capiche".

Anyway, I just guessed based on your points, since you argue against free will in materialism, but you're also against dualism. Kim's argument seems geared towards panpsychism, so at some point I had to try and decode your... argument.

In your case, no, I don't find the terminology baffling, in that regard I was thinking of Apeiron, alt, and Ken G... sorry.
edit: Or should I say, "verständlich?"

 

[Ken G]

What I don't understand is, why is there any reason at all to "commit" to physicalism? Do I "commit" to a hammer when I'm building a house? Do I "commit" to driving a car when I commute to work? No, depending on the goals I have at the moment, I may use a staple gun instead, or I may take the bus. To me, "committing" to a position in philosophy is nothing more than adopting a mindset to see where it leads. Anyone is welcome to adopt the physicalist mindset to see where it gets them, but why anyone would want to enter into a belief system which required that is beyond me. Belief systems are mental crutches, they have no place in science, and I hardly see why philosophy needs them either. They are basically the reason that old ideas don't die until their proponents do.

 

[apeiron]

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

I agree. We would only commit to physicalism (of any variety) as epistemology. To construct models, we do need to start with some definite axioms. And so we "commit" on the basis that "if this were true, then this is what would seem to follow". Beyond that, we are talking religious faith indeed.