You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Interesting Guardian long read today:
the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion
Our experience of "free will" is a post hoc psychological phenomenon we use to make sense of the world. In reality we are just a bunch on genes and neurons. Experiments have shown that parts of our brain involved in decision making fire in our head before we are consciously aware of the decision being made.
It poses all sort of moral quandaries.
Consider the case of Charles Whitman. Just after midnight on 1 August 1966, Whitman – an outgoing and apparently stable 25-year-old former US Marine – drove to his mother’s apartment in Austin, Texas, where he stabbed her to death. He returned home, where he killed his wife in the same manner. Later that day, he took an assortment of weapons to the top of a high building on the campus of the University of Texas, where he began shooting randomly for about an hour and a half. By the time Whitman was killed by police, 12 more people were dead, and one more died of his injuries years afterwards – a spree that remains the US’s 10th worst mass shooting.
Within hours of the massacre, the authorities discovered a note that Whitman had typed the night before. “I don’t quite understand what compels me to type this letter,” he wrote. “Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts [which] constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks … After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.” Following the first two murders, he added a coda: “Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.” An autopsy was performed, revealing the presence of a substantial brain tumour, pressing on Whitman’s amygdala, the part of the brain governing “fight or flight” responses to fear.
The conclusion being the a healthy Whitman wouldn't have murdered anyone and this previously normal individual became abnormal due to his brain being physically changed by an illness.
But what if you are born with an "abnormal" brain? Can you be held truly responsible for your actions?
Are anyone's decisions their own, or are they simply a chain of cause and effect of nature and nurture throughout their life up to that point?
I'd like to think this is all wrong, free will exists and I have agency in this world. But, then if free will is an illusion my brain uses to make sense of the world then I was bound to say that!
I don't know, maybe after reading this article we can all "choose" to be a bit more understanding of what we perceive as faults in others.
And posting on the forum is an illusion too it seems 🙂
space time have done some vids on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JCRDaa3ehk&ab_channel=PBSSpaceTime
If free will is an illusion/the universe is clockwork* then "moral quandries" cease to be - because stuff is going to happen anyway and you don't have to feel bad about it, questioned why it happened or care about the consequences - as there's nothing you could do about it.
Of course, if free will is illusory, you're going to feel bad anyway. So carry on.
*doesn't look like it is. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it anyway.
So, you're extrapolating from one extreme case, of a rare medical condition, and drawing the conclusion that an unproven hypothesis in that one case applies to a whole species.......
Even by STW standards that's a bit of a stretch...
wait, I'm still processing the idea that the universe may in fact be 2D not 3D. I don't think I can cope with this as well.
where did the other one go?
didn't some clever sausage work out that we needed about 14 dimensions to properly describe some of those difficult physics things?
Experiments have shown that parts of our brain involved in decision making fire in our head before we are consciously aware of the decision being made.
This is age old, and true. But the understanding of it is incomplete... that you may 'decide' something before you are aware that have reasoned your way through the decision making process doesn't meant that you don't have freewill... it could well mean that our internal narrative is explaining our decision to us after we have made it. What it really throws up is the lack of understanding as regards what consciousness is, and whether the language element of our reasoning is formed post rather than pre the decision making process that it represents. Do we have our conscious language based thoughts prepared post rationalisation ready to share them with follow humans? Or do they happen concurrently, but one takes longer to process than the other (makes sense if you you're falling from a tree... why delay the processing that leads to the branch grab, just because of the elapsed time it takes to describe that decision making process to yourself)?
So, you’re extrapolating from one extreme case, of a rare medical condition, and drawing the conclusion that an unproven hypothesis in that one case applies to a whole species…….
Even by STW standards that’s a bit of a stretch…
No I'm sharing an interesting article i found online (which you haven't read) in the hope others might find it interesting.
Your response is like a meta STW standard 🙂
@Klunk, watched the first video and it was very good thanks for sharing.
...that it feels like free will, is sufficient comfort - even though it isn't.
I felt compelled to post here, don't know why.
I knew you were going to say that
I enjoyed reading this, apart from the author's very brief dismissal of why he isn't convinced by the theory. Sam Harris explains it well on his podcast. I've given up trying to explain to people why I believe it.
That free will is an illusion, is still no excuse for not using the forum search.
I read that, and I was thinking, quantum effects are not predefined (the article agrees). So here's a thought experiment - say I had a device that spat out numbers between 1 - 99 based on a quantum effect (e.g. thermal noise on a processor). I could then go out and shoot anyone of that age.
Wouldn't that defeat the prefined nature of things? This would be free will as it isn't defined by previous events (being based on something truly random), and presumably the impacts of my shooting people would disrupt the chain of events from the big bang to me killing that person, and also all subsequent events as that person could have influenced them, should I not have shot him?
Not having a pre-defined path of events isn’t the same as not having free-will. If there were no living beings, there would be no free will… but it wouldn’t mean that all events in the universe could only pan out in one pattern.
I take it this is an American study ?. Where people aren't responsible for their own actions 😕 At least when it comes to pleading not guilty in a court case.
" The devil made me do it "
Sam Harris explains it well on his podcast
Isn't free will all about a dolphin? 🤔
👍 +1 for Sam Harris on this subject and on a slightly different tangent his wife's book on consciousness is a fascinating read as well.
Scott Aaronson, Eric Weinstein, Max Tegmark Sir Roger Penrose Nick Bostrom and many many other rabbit holes to disappear down if you like this kind of topic - I do.
Isn't Laplace's Demon undermined by quantum mechanics? The random element makes "extrapolating out along the endless chain of causes" impossible, doesn't it?
My very rudimentary understanding is the answer to that question is we just don't know and if it is yes (though we can't really measure true randomness as it then wouldn't be random) - it then tells us the universe is random.🤷♂️
Quantum, innit.
The conclusion being the a healthy Whitman wouldn’t have murdered anyone and this previously normal individual became abnormal due to his brain being physically changed by an illness.
What it doesn't explain is why he was able to make a coherent decision to write a letter (and an addendum to that letter), acknowledging some overwhelming irrational thoughts and that his actions were a tragedy but wasn't able to use the same clarity of thought to walk into a hospital or police station and say "I am likely to kill someone". So whilst I can accept that the tumour was a factor in his behaviour, I'm not buying that it removed ALL free will.
If however we have no free will, then it's no our choice to believe if we have free will or not, so it would be pointless to waste the time arguing whether we did or did not have it.
Accepting freewill as an 'illusion' doesn't absolved people of responsibility, it allows for greater understanding of deterministic factors. If somebody is a danger to society - they are a danger to society and we protect ourselves from those that wish to do harm. But it can allow for a greater and better understanding of our behaviour and in my eyes more compassion and empathy. We all fall foul of judging peoples behaviour on a daily basis yet we hardly stop to reflect what is the cause of that behaviour that so annoys us and what is causing us to behave in the way that might be of annoyance to others.
We will never really prove determinism and as been stated it conflicts with our understanding of the universe on a quantum level but we can use it to be more understanding and compassionate of each other - and god knows we if there's every a time we need it's now.
This is standard undergraduate philosophy stuff - there's no real answer, it's just a good way to prompt a discussion about what we mean by free will and moral or legal responsibility. It doesn't really matter whether we really have free will, as long as we have the illusion of it. We understand that there are different possible futures and that we can take different actions that will put us on the path to one of those and close off others, and we also understand that some choices are morally or legally better or worse. Whether our "choices" are real or an illusion is irrelevant, we are still responsible for our actions. That's why I had to apologize for eating the entire dish of lasagne last week, even though I have no willpower to resist eating any cheese dish that anyone is foolish enough to leave in the fridge.
I think when discussing free will there is the need to separate out the abstract argument about determinism vs those cases, as in the tumour, where there is a clear physical change to someone.
One is never going to be satisfactorily proven whereas the latter can be usefully investigated and in some cases things can be changed to try and lessen the likelihood of it occurring to people.
CTE for example has been getting a lot of attention in the US in particular where their "football" players are highly likely to suffer from it. The symptoms include poor judgement and lack of impulse control. So someone suffering from it may carry out actions they wouldnt have done when healthy.
We do already, in theory, have the framework to deal with this in the legal system. Hence why we have the secure mental hospitals where people can be sent.