Steven Pinker describes a biological basis for compatibilist freewill
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- From Steven's lecture on 'From Neurons to Consciousness.' In the Q&A, someone asked him about neuroscientists suggesting that freewill is an illusion.
One of the few psychologists/neuroscientists that is both honest and humble enough to appreciate the extraordinary complexity of the brain and behavior.
So basically redefining free will to be something else. The One True Scotsman fallacy.
Everything he said about our decision making (basically that it has the potential to be really complex and operate on multiple levels) seems to apply to other complex systems such as the weather or the economy? So I guess these systems then also exhibit free will!
Impossible to answer this question. You will never be able to tell if your choice was a matter of free will or not.
Genius.
Ni matter what he says, his simolicity and humbleness im presenting it is heart warming..
“Free will” is when we decide for ourselves what we will do, free of coercion or other undue influence.
“Determinism” asserts that the behavior of objects and forces in our universe provides perfectly reliable cause and effect, and thus, at least in theory, is perfectly predictable.
Because reliable cause and effect is neither coercive nor undue, it poses no threat to free will. A meaningful constraint would be a man holding a gun to our head, forcing us to do his will. But reliable causation is not such a force. It is simply how we operate as we go about being us, doing what we do, and choosing what we choose.
Because our decisions are reliably caused by our own purpose, our own reasons, and our own interests, our deliberate choosing poses no threat to determinism. Choosing is a deterministic process. And this process is authentically performed by us, according to our own purpose, reasons, and interests.
As it turns out, every choice we make for ourselves is both freely chosen and reliably caused. Thus, the concepts of free will and determinism are naturally compatible.
The illusion of conflict is created by a logic error called the “reification fallacy“. This happens when we mistakenly treat the concept of “reliable cause and effect” as if it were an external force controlling our choices, as if it were not actually us, simply being us and doing what we do.
But concepts are not “things” that cause. Only the actual objects themselves, and the forces they naturally exert upon other objects, can cause events to happen.
When empirically observed, we find that we exist in reality as physical objects, living organisms, and an intelligent species. As living organisms, we act purposefully to survive, thrive, and reproduce. As an intelligent species, we act deliberately by imagination, evaluation, and choosing. And, when we act upon our choices, we are forces of nature.
Reliable cause and effect is not an external force. It is us, and the rest of the physical universe, just doing what we do. Those who try to turn it into a boogeyman robbing us of our choices are empirically mistaken.
Blaming is a deterministic tool for modifying behavior. Don't blame blaming on free will. Blame it on determinism.
This is perhaps the most intelligent post I've ever read on these reply boards.
Well done.
You ignore the infinite recursion problem. You do not decide what to will. There is no such thing as an action that is purely internal. And if any of it can be traced to an external influence, and they all can, then there can be no “freedom.”
@@bobreb If I understand you correctly, you're referring to the notion that I cannot be the "true" cause of any effect because I myself have prior causes, so, they would be the true causes rather than me. The only problem with that test is that none of my prior causes can pass it, because every prior cause also has prior causes. You would end up with no "true" causes at all, and the whole causal chain would collapse. So, the logic is invalid.
A list of things that I do not cause, however long it may be, does not eliminate a single item from the list of things that I do cause, such as deciding to fix pancakes instead of eggs this morning.
No prior cause of me can participate in this choice or this action without first becoming an integral part of who and what I am. And then it is again actually me, myself, that is doing the choosing and causing the pancakes.
@@marvinedwards737 I’m sorry, but I fail to see how making pancakes over eggs is your “choice.” In fact, I believe it is not. How do you know what a pancake is? Why do you like pancakes? Those are just two of a countless chain of questions, all of which constitute external factors conditioning the event that took place, which you witnessed, and out of habit - but with no evidence and based exclusively upon your “free-will feeling” - claimed as an act of free will. All of these thousands of external conditions, aspects of history, physiology, etc., that you had no control over, amount to reasons why you “chose” nothing. Your actual experience, if you were develop the ability to follow it closely, was that the “pancake conclusion” literally popped into your head. You merely witnessed it.
The world's most annoying man
Why do those functions differ in their degree of determinism from reflexes? He simply asserts it, doesn't demonstrate it. Hahaha, that's philosophy, folks.
No, that's trying to answer a complex question in a reasonable amount of time. Many involuntary reflexes don't even reach in the brain but rather synapse in the spinal cord. Nonetheless, the spinal cord is still part of the CNS. But he is definitely right about cognition occurring in different levels of the nervous system. The brain stem, for instance handles many automatic responses, such as reacting to physical threats. Fear and aggression are generated by the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is capable of tempering those fear and aggression reactions. You may find Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow" helpful, where he uses the terms System 1 and System 2 for unconscious and conscious cognition.
I don't think compatibilist free will is disputed.
What people intuitively believe is we have options we can select with the same past and laws of nature. There is more to it but that's enough to see free will as ordinarily understood is incompatible with determinism.
Compatibilist free will is absolutely disputed. And free will as "ordinarily understood" is incompatible with determinism.
If you haven't, which I assume from your statements, read Sapolsky's book "Determined".
He's already responded to this, though. i.e. The way people intuitively think of solidity is that it's completely full of stuff. And that's not true. But you won't find many solidity incompatiblists. The meaning of natural language tends to come from examples, not from intuitions or definitions.
@@coachafella: When they said "I don't think compatibilist free will is disputed", I think what they meant was that it's not disputed that what compatiblists call free will exists. If you read their comment again, I think you'll find they agree with your second sentence.
I love this guy
He a smart guy, but he equivocates by redefining "free will" so that he can say it exists.
To quote him:
"Free will exists in the sense that decisions are controlled at multiple levels of the nervous system."
That's not at all what anyone means by free will. All phenomena have causal chains occurring at multiple levels. That is not free will by any definition.
"(Our choices and actions) differ in terms of their degree of determinism."
Really? How so? That's an assertion offered with zero evidence. Where is the chain of causality broken so that somehow uncaused "freedom" gets inserted? You say there's no "magic", but then claim there are degrees of determinism. So degrees of causality. What's the range of causality? From 0 to 100? From 99.99 to 100? What is it that fills the gaps if not "magic"? Randomness is not free will.
"The brain executes decision rules that are not deterministic."
LOL. Where'd you get that rabbit you pulled out of your hat? So there are rules, but they somehow don't get applied via causality? Please explain with evidence to support that conclusion. Even if you claim some decisions are random or are unpredictable, that in no way means they are freely made and somehow are not deterministic.
"Free will is not what we intuitively feel it to be."
Yeah, no kidding, but if you redefine it with some non sequiturs and hand waving you can pretend we do have it. Now we feel better.
The baffling pretzels y'all have to twist into to continue believing in free will
Or solidity.
Obviously you have no clue what metaphysical free Will means. To be, or not to be. That is the question. Free Will is caused by Devine intervention only. From here-and-now you can never reach the beyond. Have you read Kant?
If you are just a moist robot, if your sense of personal identity is in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly set of nerve cells and their associated molecules you are just a biological machines, there is no self who is in control, that is just an illusion created by the chemicals in your brain therefore you control nothing. You just react to the environment and that causes that your nerve cells act in a different in your behavior, your dna , the environment and the laws of physics. There isn´t play for moral responsability, for moral values, for nothing. These people are just trying to make sense of their materialist point of view of reality but is untenable if it is true.
Why is it untenable?