I obviously have enormous respect for Michio Kaku for his massive contribution to science. However, for some reason unknown when people become publicists, most of them tend to express their ideas about everything including the disciplines they don’t have any speciality in! And because of their big names the idea is normally taken too seriously! One example of that is this. Here Dr Kaku explains that according to Newtonian mechanics the state of physical systems is evolving deterministically and hence no room for freewill. But now we know that due to (standard) quantum mechanics the universe is in fact evolving non-deterministically and hence we have freewill!
No wait… What?!! How did we jump into the problem of freewill? Even if we assume Compatibilism is impossible, still I don’t see the connection from the non-determinism to freewill!
I guess what most of the people think of freewill, when they say it, is that a decision maker object has freewill if there are actually several choices (coming from non-determinism) and they could be chosen on the basis of something which is not external to the decision maker’s personal identity. The problem of freewill mainly relies on the resolution of the latter, which is independent of the determinism of the underlying physics. So if you’re a non-compatibilist, you may claim that if the world evolves deterministically, no-one can have freewill. But the converse doesn’t hold, i.e. you can’t claim to have freewill just because the world is indeterministic.
Besides there are scientific problems with that claim as well. For instance according to the current state of cognitive neuroscience, decision making is a macroscopic process which is mainly based on the activity of orbitofrontal cortex and some other parts of your brain. Hence to be able to find someone guilty (in case of non-compatibilism) the *macroscopic* model of your physics has to be non-deterministic, not the microscopic one. Lets clear this up with an example: According to the International Football Association, “a goal is scored when the whole of the ball passes over the goal line, between the goalposts and under the cross bar.” So in a football match the referee checks whether the *macroscopic position state of the ball* has crossed the line or not! If you find a referee who doesn’t accept the goal, calming that according to quantum physics there is a non-zero probability of finding particles, belonging to the ball, outside the goal you’ll call him silly! I think the same should hold for the problem of freewill. Unless the neuroscientists tell us that our decisions are in fact based on the collapse of the wavefunction of a quantumly behaving objects!
I’ve seen a lot of big names sitting down and thinking hardly about problems of philosophy and failing so badly. This one is a vivid example! You can hardly find bigger names than the participants of this panel discussion. But yet they’re discussing some philosophical problems that I would say they could ask any undergraduate philosopher! I mean, we should think about it once for ever. If philosophy is important for us we should do it properly, and if it’s not important we should leave it alone!
June 15, 2011 at 10:59 am |
“If philosophy is important for us we should do it properly, and if it’s not important we should leave it alone!”
like !!!
thanks for the post. made me sit down and do some wiki-ing…
November 13, 2011 at 7:24 pm |
And what do you think ? We have free will or not ?
November 13, 2011 at 7:41 pm |
Like I said, if your notion of freewill requires that the agent behaves differently under an idealised identical conditions, then we don’t have freewill. But my argument (which is a mixture of Pragmatism and Semantic Anti-Realism) is that this idealised situation is unknowable and you can’t state any *facts* about that. Hence as much as it’s our department, we do have freewill and luckily, we can feel it. And it’s a consequence of the complexity of the system.
November 13, 2011 at 8:09 pm |
That system, as complex as it may be, still behaves according to some natural laws. Those laws tell us what to do. We don’t tell those laws what to do.
Also, there are experiments that show that our brain makes the decisions seconds before we become aware of them.
November 14, 2011 at 4:56 pm |
>> That system, as complex as it may be, still behaves according to some natural laws.
So, what you saying (and I confirmed in my last comment), is that the agent (being the human in this case) will behave the same way, if the initial conditions are ideally the same. This only mean we don’t have libertarian freewill. To me (and other compatibilists) this is irrelevant. For the reason that this kind of freewill is counter-factual. If you’re actually interested in what I’m saying I can expand this.
>> Also, there are experiments that show that our brain makes the decisions seconds before we become aware of them.
Now it’s better. Because in this case, we can get rid of counter-factuality using those experiements. Nevertheless, the experiments you are refering to, do not contain complex decision makings. For instance they can predict that whether you’re planing to lift you right or left hand. But they can’t predict, say, what you will be thinking about in a few seconds later or what you’re gonna say! For some reasons, which are beyond the scope of this comment, I believe (I may be wrong, because it’s not based on any proven theory) that this unknowability isn’t a matter of technology, as much as uncertainty relations aren’t. Of course I don’t want to connect these two phenomena together, but this is just an analogy.
Until the day one can perform an experiment that predicts what is a human being going to say in a few minutes in advance, I shall remain in my compatibilits position.
November 15, 2011 at 4:37 pm |
I don’t know if I can express myself well enough in English so that I can give you a feel for why we don’t have free will, but I will try.
1) First of all, you have to take into account that the brain is made purely of normal atoms. This is a very important framework. So, it’s not some kind of magic thing that contains some magic soul which may have free will. The brain is not an isolated system, but it receives information from the surrounding world, and it proccesses that information.
Let’s take some example. Someone tells you to rise either your left hand, or your right hand. What is happening in the first place is that this information reaches your brain. The signal then travels between specialised parts of the brain and based on the structures that are already in the brain, the response will be the lifting of one of the hands. If you have free will, where in this proccess of electrons travelling back and forth in your brain, the free will appears ? What is this free will ? How can this free will interact with normal matter, and transmits signal to one of your hand to be lifted ?
2) Most of our experiences are just illusions. This is another important framework that allows you to see that we don’t have free will. Why do we see with our eyes and not with our ears ? Why the electromagnetic radiation reaching our eyes is interpreted by the brain as image ? Why we don’t hear the light ? Why the mechanical perturbation of air molecules is interpreted by the brain as sound ? Why we don’t see the sound ? And so on. I’m telling you these things now, so that you start and have a feel of the kind of illusions we are subjected to.
You move your hand in complex ways and feels so natural. But if the nerve that is connecting the hand to the brain is damaged, all of a sudden, all of those movements taken for granted, stop to exist. You think you like physics and don’t like painting (for example). But if you suffer a brain damage, you may find that you like painting and don’t like physics. And these new feeling will seem so natural to you, and you will ask yourself how it was possible that once you liked physics, when now physics is so boring.
In the light of these things, who are you ? Do you think you are a specific, well defined soul, embodied in your body ? I don’t think so. You are what your brain is. That brain works based on the laws of physics and it creates you, the illusions that you are you, and you act as you wish.
-There is a part of your brain that interprets electromagnetic radiation and creates the feeling of images. But you will not understang anything from the images that you are seeing, unless there is another part of your brain that makes you understand them.
-The is a part of your brain that interprets the movement of air molecules and creates the feeling of sounds. Of course, there is another part of your brain that make sens of those sounds.
-There are lots of other brain parts, each having specific functions. All these togheter create a coherent sense of the world. And by sensing it, you appear. You are just the phenomenon of understanding the world. Just as NaCl is the phenomenon of electric attraction of unlike charges in ionised atoms, you are just the phenomenon of sensing the world in a very complex way.
If you need some more explanations, I am happy to give them to you. I got to the ideea of not having free will, after probably a year of thinking about it, so I am not expecting you to get to the same ideea, only by reading one post. But at least, I am giving you something to think about.
November 15, 2011 at 4:44 pm |
>> This only mean we don’t have libertarian freewill. To me (and other compatibilists) this is irrelevant. For the reason that this kind of freewill is counter-factual. If you’re actually interested in what I’m saying I can expand this.
Yes, please expand this.
November 17, 2011 at 6:02 pm |
Oh, you really didn’t have to type that much! I think it would be easier if you grab me some time in the physics building and I can describe it in details.
However, for the time being, let me clear a few issues: My proposal for freewill does not require any super-natural being (the soul as it may be in your mind). Also it doesn’t assume that anything is beyond the electrochemical processes in your brain. The premises rely on the following concepts:
1) From semantic anti-realism: there are no facts about intrinsically unknowables/ unjustifiable. (an older version this premise, which people are often more comfortable with could be found in the first proposition of the Tractatus by Wittgenstein)
2) For now the behaviour (which is our subject of study for the decision on freewill) is unjustified (and is probably intrinsically unjustifiable)
(1) + (2) requires that there is no facts about statements which reject freewill on the basis of physicality of body.
If you’re interested in knowing more about semantic anti-realism, you can borrow this book from the library:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Reality-Lines-ebook/dp/B000RKTYNC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1321552771&sr=8-2
and read this article: http://philpapers.org/rec/HUDFAA
Or just grab me when I’m free to have a chat about it.
Believe me, it’s not the first time I’m writing about freewill. And if you read my previous entries on freewill you’ll learn that I used not to believe in freewill before (just like you!).
December 24, 2011 at 12:12 am |
We had a really fantastic breakfast, and I†m so sad that we didn†t think to take any pictures of it.
January 3, 2012 at 8:38 am |
Whether it s the control or the pain or just the bare red asses, there s something about spanking that men and women alike are drawn to.