Peter Tse - Big Questions in Free Will
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2024
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Free will is a perennial conundrum. The ‘Big Questions in Free Will’ project brought together scientists, philosophers and theologians in a novel interdisciplinary initiative to develop new data and catalyze innovative ways of thinking. Here are the concluding thoughts of some of the participants. Has progress been made?
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Peter Ulric Tse is an American cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College. He directs the NSF EPSCoR Attention Consortium.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
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Wonderful discussion! It is interesting to consider, I think, that both instincts and habits can be classified as (set) readiness potentials, since everyone would agree, I presume, that if all actions follow from set readiness potentials, that consciousness has no role. But then, in relation to readiness potentials, consciousness and whatever form of free will there may be, can only play one role: refinement/modification of existing readiness potentials. Wm. James accordingly introduced his discussion of conscious agency following his analysis of instinctual reflexes and habits in The Principles of Psychology. And, accordingly again, the role that he gave consciousness is to develop the will, which means, in context, the refinement/modification of instincts and habits.
Interestingly again, if free will means acting in accord with one's preferences--and to say that doing otherwise, all things considered, is compatible with free will would seem strange to say the least--then James' account of free agency accords with his account of the development of the will: It is conscious preference in response to experiences--much like the thumbs up and down icons under this video--that informs the development of will in his account.
Love these videos!
There is no one consciousness that is generated by neocortex, there are many interconnected parts. The one that makes the decision is not the same that realizes it. I also hypothesize that that because the parts are just competing for the best decision before it will be selected and fixated. Anybody is thinking about many different things at ones, it's just the best thoughts get to the final destination.
1. Does readiness potential mean SatkaryaVada (presence of potential/ cause for action to manifest)? If so, why change the original nomenclature?
2. While prompting the hypnotised subject, does the hypnotist say, " now squeeze the ball!"' ... Or " sqeeze the ball only if you want to! " ?
might subjectivity from future become consciousness / awareness in present?
might readiness potential have something to do with future? unconscious free will?
what does the research say that readiness potential is? readiness potential has a role in causation of motor acts at least second and half before?
conscious awareness of internal processes of brain?
Who knows what the machine is detecting it's not like it telling you what its detecting. It could just be detecting that the will to do something comes before the actual act.
We all live in one huge living consciousness. The light (sun) earth, water, and air plays a robust role in your life. You can't attack it with force such as running. It must be done in a gradual symbiotic relationship between the 3 major muscles doing their part. Words must be disallowed at all cost.
To deliberate for years about whom to marry may still not be a proof that free will is part of the final decision to choose this person or that person because once the decision has been made, too many people realise, after some time, short or long time, that the choice was fated, it felt like being manipulated by a kind of cosmic grand designer rather than by one's free will, if by free will, we mean that we're in charge of our future.
What's the relation between consciousness and "experiences"..??
Experience is a part of consciousness; the other parts are memory and binding. Consciousness is believed to be the result of the binding processes of the cerebral cortex.
physical brain can anticipate actions without conscious awareness? maybe have a sense of or from future?
There's some whispering 7:35
5:35 the trail of causation has to, at some point, consider the role of abstraction in relation to physical interactions...
I think that very much depends on what we mean by abstraction. Mostly I think abstraction is a way of talking about descriptions of things, but it's used in many different ways.
you are right, abstraction in the case of signal tracing is a bit confusing but it's not much different than the purpose of sending a drone to deliver mail... i.e. you as a third party observe the drone leaving the post office and stoping at your neighbor's house every once in a while... you are already exposed to postal services and that might not pose a problem to you, but if let say your 5 year old son or daughter (or even an ai system under development) asks you why is the drone always droping packages to the neighbor's house and never in your house... how will you explain the process only by pointing at the physical parts...
@@r2c3 OK, that works, we can talk about levels of abstraction in the sense of levels of generalisation of descriptions. The phenomena involved in package delivery, that is the post office depot, the house, the drones, the packages. Then there's the need of the people living there for the things in the packages. Then the economic system that enables them to afford these things, and how revenue funds the postal service. Sure.
However these are all levels of description. The fact that we can describe what is happening in the world in infinitely many different ways and levels of generalisation doesn't have any effect on the facts of what is actually happening in the drone, in the post office, in the brain of our neighbour ordering the packages.
ok, so we at keast agree that abstractions are not physical objects...
@@r2c3 Sorry, no. They are descriptions, and descriptions like all forms of information are arrangements or structures of physical objects.
Still: can a single cause produce two or more possible effects that a mechanism of “choice” in the brain can choose between? To me, that is the essence of the question of free will.
Yes, we have been writing heuristics for the generation and evaluation of new heuristics since the 1970s.
(0:35) *PT: **_"A lot of this is kind of premature; we don't even know what the readiness potential really is ..."_* ... Yet so many people POUNCE on this like it's the Holy Grail of Hard Determinism. People are so dedicated to their core beliefs (theism or atheism) that they will quickly align themselves to anything that moves the _direction arrow_ toward what they personally believe.
Humans make free-willed decisions because that what we exist to do! The universe had been dealing with "pool-ball-type physics" for ten billion years and "predator and prey" for another four, ... so it was time for an upgrade.
Humans use "free will" to assign *value* to everything the universe has produced, and there's no other way to assess that value without a human's free will to render that type of judgment.
There is a *dramatic difference* between basic Newtonian physics and human intellect. ... Only *one* of the two can render a value judgment.
>Humans make free-willed decisions because that what we exist to do!
So it's our pre-ordained destiny, fulfilling some arcane prophecy laid down in ancient times according to the will of Existence?
I read the bible at an impressionable age too, but it seems to have had a much bigger effect on you than it did me.
*"So it's our pre-ordained destiny, fulfilling some arcane prophecy laid down in ancient times according to the will of Existence?"*
... No, ... Anteaters exist to eat ants, bees exist to cross-pollinate, and humans exist to render value judgments. It's all part of a naturally sophisticated orchestration that is constantly evolving into higher complexity.
*"I read the bible at an impressionable age too, but it seems to have had a much bigger effect on you than it did me."*
... All I do is pull from the highest and lowest-ranking endpoints in each spectrum via consensus.
When juxtaposed with all other religions, I find Christianity to be at the highest endpoint on the "religion spectrum" via consensus. Christianity took theism's proposition of an untouchable, all-powerful God and found a way to add to it (self-sacrifice). That is what could be seen as an "emergent property" in religion.
Jesus Christ has had more of an influential impact on human civilization than any other human. ... I can either ignore that out of personal bias regarding "religion," or accept it and incorporate that into my ToE.
*BTW:* You have done the same. You have taken all possible ways to evaluate existence and determined that "Physicalism" occupies the highest point on the spectrum. I have also explored Physicalism, but it seems to have had a much bigger effect on you than it did me.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC If i was going to pick a high point for religion, I think it would be Buddhism. What with the trinity, Pauline revisionism, and just the general butchering of the actual beliefs in Judaism it's supposed to be based on Christianity is a theological dumpster fire.
You might like Buddhism, it regards itself as the Middle Way between asceticism and hedonism.
@@simonhibbs887 *"If i was going to pick a high point for religion, I think it would be Buddhism. What with the trinity, Pauline revisionism, and just the general butchering of the actual beliefs in Judaism it's supposed to be based on Christianity is a theological dumpster fire."*
... Buddhism is tantamount to a CZcams "self-help video." It posits a continuous reincarnation of human life until you reach a state of Nirvana, to which nobody I have ever known has met that criterium. And as you might remember from my book, Buddhism doesn't test the *upper limits* of conceivability like theism's God does. That's what "Existence" is after: the highest and lowest endpoints on every spectrum.
After 14 billion years, "Existence" is organizing its garage and boxing up all the stuff that's no longer relevant (i.e., producing new information).
In comparison to Christianity, Buddhism is like little Suzie's middle school painting juxtaposed with Michealangelo's Sistine Chapel.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC >until you reach a state of Nirvana, to which nobody I have ever known has met that criterium
As against all the angels, devils and saints you're acquainted with? Christianity's universe is a schoolyard with a head master and good kids and bad kids that go to detention. Better be good, and by good I of course mean be a suck-up.
Meanwhile Buddhism is about a constant process of advancement of non-material beings, which nevertheless manifest in the physical, developing in sophistication towards a realisation of transcendent Existence, sorry I mean Buddha Nature. It actually maps on to your view of a plan for cosmic development pretty well, particularly Theravāda Buddhism.
Anyway, not particularly relevant as neither of us are Christian or Buddhist. I do think some Buddhist meditative practices can definitely have value though, whereas I don't think Christianity has anything of practical value to me.
But consciousness isn't causal of anything, its an emergent property. Well, IMO anyway.
We dont consciously decide to do something and then do it, its all part of the same action in terms of neurons firing in a sequence that ultimately leads to firing nerves to activate muscle (for example). Or sometimes instinct (ie not conscious) caused the neurons to fire causing muscle action and then consciousness catches up when it sees what's happened. So...
Sometimes we might fire those neurons leading to muscle activation as a separate neural activity to the consciousness firings and that would be "instinctive" movement.
Sometimes we may have to go through a thought process before the neurons activating muscle are fired and that would be something like "if the red light lights up push the button, if the green light lights up, dont push the button.
Sometimes the line between instinct and thought is blurred like "if the light lights up, push the button" is a closer to instinctive activity.
My 2c
You think consciousness emerges from brains but effects nothing. If so then:
1/why did consciousness evolve into existence? Why weren't conscious beings outcompeted by unconscious automatons? Wouldn't an emotionless robot be a more efficient hunter?
2/If consciousness effects nothing then why do negative emotions such as anxiety or depression effect our behaviour?
Expanded Awareness a.k.a. Global Brain Awareness a.k.a. Intuition can explain the "readiness potential" and partly explain the "free will".... And Robert Kuhn - the burden of proof has to apply to ALL of theoretical science and not just what on you pick and chose based on your beliefs.
Peter Tse is trying so hard to find free will in a deterministic universe, but what if the universe isn't deterministic? We can demonstrate reliable causation and use it for all of our technology, but there is no empirical evidence for anything like determinism, and without determinism, there is no problem with free will.
There is also an issue with what constitutes conscious and unconscious mental processes. You may not consciously know at all times what is happening in your unconscious, but it is for sure that your unconscious knows exactly what you are thinking and experiencing at any particular time. There is no reason to assume that it is a useful distinction at all.
I don't think that would help either. If we talk of a generic device, this could be in principle determined by laws or completely random. I don't see any room left for a middle position or something foggy called "free". My point is that either something has rules (the fact that we are able to know them is another story) therefore is deterministic or it is completely random, therefore no one can even in principle predict its actions. But even if decisions were based on some random process that wouldn't fit the definition of free. This is how I think about it, maybe it's too simple, but I cannot see other positions.
I'm not sure what you mean by determinism that isn't reliable causation. Determinism is the claim that future states are a result of prior states. In that sense the success of QM and relativity at accurately predicting future states from prior states is pretty compelling. Of course QM is a stochastic theory so it is indeterministic in that sense, but that's not a sense that is relevant to the question of free will in the libertarian account because they reject randomness as freedom.
It's actually plausible we might need to give up on a strict temporally ordered determinism in quantum mechanics, there are hints in QFT that there may be a limited form of backward causation that can occur. However as with unpredictability in QM measurements, its not clear that would be relevant to libertarian ideas about freedom.
No evidence for determinism? If I kick a bowling ball, it hurts. That’s evidence enough
@@francescodefilippo190 The outcome of any particular event is not "determined" by laws. In the first place, there are no "laws" of nature. The things we call laws are statements of regularities in nature. That's it.
Secondly, in order for a thing to be "determined" there must be a preferred outcome. Atoms and molecules are passive objects and will react according to their nature depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. Macro objects set up the circumstances and the particles are perfectly happy to go along with any configuration, no matter what the outcome.
Determinism is not a thing, and once you understand this, there is no reason not to accept that whatever an active object like a person does is "free" in the sense that there is nothing to control or force it to do any particular action.
@@dr_shrinker What you illustrated with your example was a human level understanding of cause and effect. If I do an experiment over and over, I will always get the same result. This demonstrates that we live in a universe that features reliable causation. What evidence do you have that the parts control the whole, or that the past controls the present since these are the tenets of determinism?
Episodes where free will is questioned should be turned off immediately, because in order to question free will, you already need free will. Denial of free will is the cutting edge of the absurd.
Why would deterministic beings be unable to question if they have free will? You just seem like you don't understand the debate or what's at stake. Asking questions can be done entirely deterministically, as we now see with Large Language Models every single day.
You have found your own inner being, and now that being can direct you. That being is infinitely stronger and wiser than thyself. The 'you' on the periphery is a weakling; the 'you' at the center is infinitely potent. The 'you' on the periphery is just a worldly thing; the 'you' at the center is God himself.
But first, find the witness. Jesus has said, "First seek ye the kingdom of God. Then all else will follow." Don't bother about other things. First find out the innermost core of the kingdom of God. Then you need not worry about anything; all else will follow.
Osho , from the book..'Thee new alchemy to turn you on '
Free Will with God, or no Free Will without God? What do you prefer? Pick a side, they are both false ideas, so it doesn't really matter to me. Just because you are conscious you believe that consciousness is a thing. Not exactly barking at the wrong tree, something even more pointless, looking for a unicorn.
Turiya, rendered in English as consciousness; poor denomination. Turiya is a "substance" that the 3 other states depend on: wakeful state, dream state, and deep sleep state, the 4th being Turiya. This is what human consciousness depends on. Because turiya is rendered in English as consciousness, I think of it as light, which has a type of intelligence, is formless, immutable, impervious,.. you can't reduce it, but you can come to the realization by via negativa....you negate even the mind; you don't designate terms or qualities to it, defining it, circumscribing it, limiting it, because that's not what it is.
These free will researchers remind me of medieval christian philosophers, diving deep into useless conjecture, wasting endless years and producing redundant literature.
Know what's sad: the term science is a loaded term today. It's only a method for inquiry. Seeking the ultimate realizations isn't going to earn one funding and resources. Today's "science" orders and Demands results! Where there's no results, there will be no further funding. And many persons today believe science means results. This arised only from the fact that where there are no material results, there will be no funds. But no, persons today say science is all about results. And they're clueless as to how this definition of science occured. Such persons are sophist frauds.
What is your opinion of Kenneth Wheeler?