6 ms·

Free will is an illusion, biologist says

28 points by codeodor 17y ago

lukifer 17y ago
Free will is an algorithm, nothing more or less. Input genetics and experience, output decision and behavior. What's more, your beliefs about free will get integrated into the algorithm as well; someone who believes that they are not responsible for their actions will behave quite differently than someone who believes they are capable of choosing. Like many human ideas, free will is a necessary (or at least, useful) illusion.
psawaya 17y ago
It depends on how you define "free will". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
reader5000 17y ago
To determine if I have free will, I shall now attempt to willfully raise my arm. Raises arm. I don't know, that's pretty hard evidence to refute.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  You've probably evolved to avoid asking too many boring existential questions when you could be breeding, instead. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into trivially proving that you have free will.
  - reader5000 17y ago
    You've probably evolved to produce offensive body odors and to fear social interactions with your own species. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into thinking you are good at trivial reading comprehension.
- codahale 17y ago
  And yet the nerve impulses which caused the muscles in your arm to contract left your brain about 500ms before you became aware of deciding to raise your arm. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273) Additionally, the mechanisms which sent that nerve impulse were spinning up for up to 10s before that (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html). The you that lifts your arm and the you which feels like it decided to lift your arm are on different schedules.
greyman 17y ago
In my opinion, any discussion about the "free will" or its non-existence should begin with the precise definition of the term. I observed in the past than people have different notions about what the term comprises, and without that common ground the discussions tends to be fruitless.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  I'll try. "Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.
  - JulianMorrison 17y ago
    The thing that I do that feels like "free will" is use adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff.
    - foldr 17y ago
      Why would that feel like free will? Wouldn't it just feel like using adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff? It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
      - JulianMorrison 17y ago
        Because the choice resulting from problem solving is adaptive and heuristic, I can't run it advance of the evidential state I'm in when I choose. I can't know the evidential state in advance, because the problem/solution space is imperfectly mapped. So it feels like my choices are not determined in advance. (However they're entirely determined at the instant I make them.)
jackfoxy 17y ago
I'm guilty of only scanning the article, so I could have missed something, but I expected from the title "biologist says" to find some empirical evidence. Instead I got just another philosophizing speculative article. You would think the belief in free will, or its absence, becomes a feedback mechanism in human behavior. How many different ways can that seed be planted? Why does the belief/disbelief amplitude vary among individuals? Is the belief/disbelief meme just another meme that's been around a long time, and affects us far less than we believe? I once knew a successful Indian woman who completely believed in fate, which surprised me because with all her energy and drive I thought she was living her life as a free willer.
breck 17y ago
Let's assume free will does not exist. It follows then, that you should theoretically be able to perfectly predict the actions of a human given enough information about their current chemical & physical state. I have never seen evidence of such a machine, so I don't think you can prove it either way. I like to believe whichever theory seems to benefit me most at the time.
- Jach 17y ago
  I volunteer myself as such a machine, though I won't say I can perfectly predict the actions of another human and many others are better than I am. Nevertheless I find I can make pretty good estimates from time to time depending on information. I'm curious about your "I like to believe" stance. Are you saying you'll ignore any evidence for any theory if you don't think the theory benefits you more than another theory, even if your theory has been shown to be wrong?
rms 17y ago
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)
msg 17y ago
If a scientist tells you something doesn't exist, remind them of the problem of induction. If you hold a prior belief that the physical world is all there is (or that physical explanations are the only valid explanations, which the physical sciences take as their starting point), you can come up with endless circular rationalizations of materialism.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  "It doesn't exist" is a shorthand for "There is insufficient evidence for it or against it, and it has minimal explanatory power, and it's not amenable to proof or disproof, so your life will be simpler if you assume it doesn't exist." This, at least, is the attitude that many people have to ghosts, gods, and werewolves.
  - msg 17y ago
    Your argument is still circular. What do you think proof and disproof mean in this context? Why don't you think that materialism suffers from the same flaws? This is why scientists make bad philosophers. They do not acknowledge the boundaries of their philosophy.
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      This is the difference between science and scientism. Science is an extremely powerful and well-proven set of tools for learning about the natural world. Scientism is a crock of baloney.
  - dkimball 17y ago
    I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left for phlogiston?
- ericb 17y ago
  Does something have to be physical to be real? It seems like no to me. What is a "movie" but pixels on a screen flashing in a certain order, or a song but a series of sounds. But these patterns, or forms have predictable effects on the material world--the sound of a fire alarm will change the position of people around it. If these patterns exist apart from the physical world--their implementations in some sense, then why does free will need a physical basis? Couldn't it be a property that exceeds the sum of parts?
bitdiddle 17y ago
My favorite thinking on this comes from Pratt: http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech My favorite line in the paper, cogito ergo sum should be cogito ergo eram :) It's all Chu spaces -- enjoy!
icey 17y ago
Take heart entrepreneurs, John Calvin had this idea almost 500 years ago when he introduced Calvinism. There are no new ideas, just new implementations.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
Free will is a little like Hume's idea of miracles. Which is more likely: that physical entities created from (roughly) deterministic processes would develop free will, or that it would be a valuable evolutionary adaptation for them to think they had free will, and to narrate their lives as if they did?
kevinh 17y ago
Free will doesn't really matter. Only an illusion of free will matters. You give me an illusion of free will, I'm fine with that. But if you take away any perception I have that I'm making choices, I won't like it.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
indrax 17y ago
I love how 'conscious thought' goes into a little circle like it's a solved problem. Same with 'unconscious thought'.
Mc_Big_G 17y ago
I'm not exactly sure how relevant this is the the free will conversation, but it's related and something I think about on a regular basis. When I see a person who grew up in a wonderful environment with presumably good genetics, judge and condemn someone who did not, I wonder how they justify their superiority. It's as if they believe that, if they were that person, they would make better choices and do better things with their life. My question is, if you were that person, with exactly the same genetics and environment, then wouldn't you, by definition, BE that person and live your life in exactly the same way? I suspect their answer would eventually come down to something about a "soul" which, even if it exists, would still be something that you were born with and thus completely out of your control. So, again, I would ask how they deserve their superiority, especially if they don't go for the soul argument. I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority? I'd say it's just luck, but I can see some people using that as an excuse to never do the right thing. "I was born this way so that's how I'm going to be." I could probably argue with myself for hours about this kind of stuff.
- AmaroqWolf 17y ago
  "I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?" I'd personally go with "I deserve it because I was so awesome in this life."
michael_dorfman 17y ago
"Free will" is a philosophical issue, not a biological one. It's somewhat comical that a neurobiologist thinks he has something relevant to say on the subject. Would anyone take seriously an article like "Phagocytosis is a myth, philosopher says"?
- indrax 17y ago
  Yeah, it's not like philosophy should update itself based on science, pfft!
scotty79 17y ago
http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127.jpg http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127....
indrax 17y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/
tierack 17y ago
See also this story of a biologist thinking that even fruit flies have free will: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
True story: I major decision early in my life by flipping a coin. Now whether or not I was programmed by the universe to make that decision that way or not, from the outside there is no way a universal observer could determine what eventual choice I would make. It easily passes the duck test as being free will.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
Determinism = age-old philosophical stance. Nothing new here.
hakunin 17y ago
As programmers we have to understand how we can program something to seem incredibly intelligent. If we had access to time and resources that universe "contributed" to us - we may be able to come up with the type of program that looks, acts, learns, emotionally reacts 100% like a normal human being. Even currently we can get pretty far using image recognition, sound recognition, learning algorithms and fast-lookup data structures. The question of free will is - at which exact point in developing those data structures and algorithms the program gains an illusion of controlling its own actions? Moreover — how can you verify that it did? What the article essentially says is that our brain is nothing but a CPU, programmed over millions of years by natural evolution in a way that it gained all kinds of responses to multitude of various inputs (our 5 senses) in all kinds of combinations, self-improving learning algorithm, and that illusion of consciousness emerged as a by-product of this complex system. Pretty interesting what exact data-structure/algorithm/etc caused this peculiar side effect. It could have something todo with the observation that our brain doesn't need to be whole in order to have consciousness. In different types of physical brain damage, even major ones, a human was able to remain conscious. Same could happen with the other part of brain damaged, which was healthy in another example. So I'm thinking - maybe our the sense of conscoiousness is like a potential difference which makes electrical current flow through the wire - you need to have multiple parts of brain with potential difference to create an illusion of consciousness. This is pretty vague but I like this concept - may be onto something. Consciousness does feel a lot like different parts of brain interacting, or one part /observing/ another and reacting to it just like it'd be reacting to the outside world. Meh.
cianestro 17y ago
I discovered this video a few months ago researching for an essay; it's a great source on this topic. http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=11190 http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=11190

28 points by codeodor 17y ago

Free will is an algorithm, nothing more or less. Input genetics and experience, output decision and behavior. What's more, your beliefs about free will get integrated into the algorithm as well; someone who believes that they are not responsible for their actions will behave quite differently than someone who believes they are capable of choosing. Like many human ideas, free will is a necessary (or at least, useful) illusion.

psawaya 17y ago

It depends on how you define "free will". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

reader5000 17y ago

To determine if I have free will, I shall now attempt to willfully raise my arm. Raises arm. I don't know, that's pretty hard evidence to refute.

byrneseyeview 17y ago
You've probably evolved to avoid asking too many boring existential questions when you could be breeding, instead. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into trivially proving that you have free will.
- reader5000 17y ago
  You've probably evolved to produce offensive body odors and to fear social interactions with your own species. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into thinking you are good at trivial reading comprehension.
codahale 17y ago
And yet the nerve impulses which caused the muscles in your arm to contract left your brain about 500ms before you became aware of deciding to raise your arm. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273) Additionally, the mechanisms which sent that nerve impulse were spinning up for up to 10s before that (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html). The you that lifts your arm and the you which feels like it decided to lift your arm are on different schedules.

greyman 17y ago

In my opinion, any discussion about the "free will" or its non-existence should begin with the precise definition of the term. I observed in the past than people have different notions about what the term comprises, and without that common ground the discussions tends to be fruitless.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
byrneseyeview 17y ago
I'll try. "Free will" is the hypothesis that it is, in principle, impossible to determine the outputs of a brain just by measuring its physical state with perfect accuracy. In other words, if you have two physically identical brains, with physically identical states, these brains can have different outputs.
- JulianMorrison 17y ago
  The thing that I do that feels like "free will" is use adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff.
  - foldr 17y ago
    Why would that feel like free will? Wouldn't it just feel like using adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff? It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
    - JulianMorrison 17y ago
      Because the choice resulting from problem solving is adaptive and heuristic, I can't run it advance of the evidential state I'm in when I choose. I can't know the evidential state in advance, because the problem/solution space is imperfectly mapped. So it feels like my choices are not determined in advance. (However they're entirely determined at the instant I make them.)

jackfoxy 17y ago

I'm guilty of only scanning the article, so I could have missed something, but I expected from the title "biologist says" to find some empirical evidence. Instead I got just another philosophizing speculative article. You would think the belief in free will, or its absence, becomes a feedback mechanism in human behavior. How many different ways can that seed be planted? Why does the belief/disbelief amplitude vary among individuals? Is the belief/disbelief meme just another meme that's been around a long time, and affects us far less than we believe? I once knew a successful Indian woman who completely believed in fate, which surprised me because with all her energy and drive I thought she was living her life as a free willer.

breck 17y ago

Let's assume free will does not exist. It follows then, that you should theoretically be able to perfectly predict the actions of a human given enough information about their current chemical & physical state. I have never seen evidence of such a machine, so I don't think you can prove it either way. I like to believe whichever theory seems to benefit me most at the time.

Jach 17y ago
I volunteer myself as such a machine, though I won't say I can perfectly predict the actions of another human and many others are better than I am. Nevertheless I find I can make pretty good estimates from time to time depending on information. I'm curious about your "I like to believe" stance. Are you saying you'll ignore any evidence for any theory if you don't think the theory benefits you more than another theory, even if your theory has been shown to be wrong?

rms 17y ago

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)

msg 17y ago

If a scientist tells you something doesn't exist, remind them of the problem of induction. If you hold a prior belief that the physical world is all there is (or that physical explanations are the only valid explanations, which the physical sciences take as their starting point), you can come up with endless circular rationalizations of materialism.

byrneseyeview 17y ago
"It doesn't exist" is a shorthand for "There is insufficient evidence for it or against it, and it has minimal explanatory power, and it's not amenable to proof or disproof, so your life will be simpler if you assume it doesn't exist." This, at least, is the attitude that many people have to ghosts, gods, and werewolves.
- msg 17y ago
  Your argument is still circular. What do you think proof and disproof mean in this context? Why don't you think that materialism suffers from the same flaws? This is why scientists make bad philosophers. They do not acknowledge the boundaries of their philosophy.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    This is the difference between science and scientism. Science is an extremely powerful and well-proven set of tools for learning about the natural world. Scientism is a crock of baloney.
- dkimball 17y ago
  I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left for phlogiston?
ericb 17y ago
Does something have to be physical to be real? It seems like no to me. What is a "movie" but pixels on a screen flashing in a certain order, or a song but a series of sounds. But these patterns, or forms have predictable effects on the material world--the sound of a fire alarm will change the position of people around it. If these patterns exist apart from the physical world--their implementations in some sense, then why does free will need a physical basis? Couldn't it be a property that exceeds the sum of parts?

bitdiddle 17y ago

My favorite thinking on this comes from Pratt: http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html#ratmech My favorite line in the paper, cogito ergo sum should be cogito ergo eram :) It's all Chu spaces -- enjoy!

icey 17y ago

Take heart entrepreneurs, John Calvin had this idea almost 500 years ago when he introduced Calvinism. There are no new ideas, just new implementations.

byrneseyeview 17y ago

Free will is a little like Hume's idea of miracles. Which is more likely: that physical entities created from (roughly) deterministic processes would develop free will, or that it would be a valuable evolutionary adaptation for them to think they had free will, and to narrate their lives as if they did?

kevinh 17y ago

Free will doesn't really matter. Only an illusion of free will matters. You give me an illusion of free will, I'm fine with that. But if you take away any perception I have that I'm making choices, I won't like it.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

indrax 17y ago

I love how 'conscious thought' goes into a little circle like it's a solved problem. Same with 'unconscious thought'.

Mc_Big_G 17y ago

I'm not exactly sure how relevant this is the the free will conversation, but it's related and something I think about on a regular basis. When I see a person who grew up in a wonderful environment with presumably good genetics, judge and condemn someone who did not, I wonder how they justify their superiority. It's as if they believe that, if they were that person, they would make better choices and do better things with their life. My question is, if you were that person, with exactly the same genetics and environment, then wouldn't you, by definition, BE that person and live your life in exactly the same way? I suspect their answer would eventually come down to something about a "soul" which, even if it exists, would still be something that you were born with and thus completely out of your control. So, again, I would ask how they deserve their superiority, especially if they don't go for the soul argument. I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority? I'd say it's just luck, but I can see some people using that as an excuse to never do the right thing. "I was born this way so that's how I'm going to be." I could probably argue with myself for hours about this kind of stuff.

AmaroqWolf 17y ago
"I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?" I'd personally go with "I deserve it because I was so awesome in this life."

michael_dorfman 17y ago

"Free will" is a philosophical issue, not a biological one. It's somewhat comical that a neurobiologist thinks he has something relevant to say on the subject. Would anyone take seriously an article like "Phagocytosis is a myth, philosopher says"?

indrax 17y ago
Yeah, it's not like philosophy should update itself based on science, pfft!

scotty79 17y ago

http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127.jpg http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127....

indrax 17y ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/

tierack 17y ago

See also this story of a biologist thinking that even fruit flies have free will: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

True story: I major decision early in my life by flipping a coin. Now whether or not I was programmed by the universe to make that decision that way or not, from the outside there is no way a universal observer could determine what eventual choice I would make. It easily passes the duck test as being free will.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

Determinism = age-old philosophical stance. Nothing new here.

hakunin 17y ago

As programmers we have to understand how we can program something to seem incredibly intelligent. If we had access to time and resources that universe "contributed" to us - we may be able to come up with the type of program that looks, acts, learns, emotionally reacts 100% like a normal human being. Even currently we can get pretty far using image recognition, sound recognition, learning algorithms and fast-lookup data structures. The question of free will is - at which exact point in developing those data structures and algorithms the program gains an illusion of controlling its own actions? Moreover — how can you verify that it did? What the article essentially says is that our brain is nothing but a CPU, programmed over millions of years by natural evolution in a way that it gained all kinds of responses to multitude of various inputs (our 5 senses) in all kinds of combinations, self-improving learning algorithm, and that illusion of consciousness emerged as a by-product of this complex system. Pretty interesting what exact data-structure/algorithm/etc caused this peculiar side effect. It could have something todo with the observation that our brain doesn't need to be whole in order to have consciousness. In different types of physical brain damage, even major ones, a human was able to remain conscious. Same could happen with the other part of brain damaged, which was healthy in another example. So I'm thinking - maybe our the sense of conscoiousness is like a potential difference which makes electrical current flow through the wire - you need to have multiple parts of brain with potential difference to create an illusion of consciousness. This is pretty vague but I like this concept - may be onto something. Consciousness does feel a lot like different parts of brain interacting, or one part /observing/ another and reacting to it just like it'd be reacting to the outside world. Meh.

cianestro 17y ago

I discovered this video a few months ago researching for an essay; it's a great source on this topic. http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=11190 http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=11190