Great article, both clear and honest. I was following you in everything, except perhaps the very end:
> Dodging these questions by explaining them away—saying that free will and consciousness are just an illusion—would be intellectually dishonest. We have these sensations, and we should be asking how exactly they correspond to physical reality.
I disagree here. You have set to explore the possibility that consciousness and free will are NOT illusions arising from deterministic processes, but exploring this possibility doesn’t immediately make it so. Conversely, it doesn’t make the opposing effort intellectually dishonest, right? Just a different starting point, rather.
It’s like, upon seeing a magic “trick”, say, a rabbit getting out of an empty hat, one audience member would say “this is an illusion, the rabbit was somehow in the hat before or put there while I got distracted” and another member would say “Sure, but let’s assume rabbits COULD appear inside empty hats, how would that work?” I feel like Sam Harris is the first person and you’re the other one, and I don’t think either is intellectually dishonest.
> saying that free will and consciousness are just an illusion
is primarily with the word "just".
To some degree, I actually agree that these things are illusions! Illusions/hallucinations are things that are only _subjectively_ true/existent. They can only be seen by one person, knowledge of them can't be shared or confirmed by others, etc etc.
I don't like the word "illusion" because it implies unreality, triviality, etc. The core content of the word (using the definitions above) is correct, but its negative associations are misleading.
Harris, Dennett, etc want to say "it's an just illusion" and drop the subject, because there's nothing more you can say about it. But that's dishonest--there's a heck of a lot more you can say about it, if you're willing to leave the comfort of a purely rationalist/scientific ontology.
This was clear and engaging writing on a topic that can become really esoteric really fast. You have a knack for taking dense, multi-faceted, topics and presenting them in a way that is accessible but not patronizingly simplistic. I really enjoyed it.
Metaphysical questions like free will vs determinism are fun, and I suppose are important on a very fundamental level, but as a pragmatist I resolve the dilemma by asking myself: "will taking a position on this change what's required of me? No? OK, I'll carry on as if I have free will." If we accept that things are determined, well... what do we with that knowledge? Knowing that the future is determined gives no insight into the future itself, so we must act as if we have free will in either case. You could see this as dodging the question, but to me it's an answer.
Yeah I like the pragmatic approach. But I'd argue there are some practical effects from believing either way.
E.g. there's an argument from the "free will doesn't exist" side that adopting their point of view leads to more compassion for criminals, and could lead to a less horrific prison system. And personally, when I feel myself starting to think "free will doesn't exist", I'm more inclined to indulge my inclination to drink/scroll/etc rather than taking responsibility for my actions.
Good point, there are real effects downstream of strong belief in either free will or determinism. I'll re-formulate my pragmatist position to account for that:
Reality may be determined, but we cannot precisely predict future states of individuals. If I want to realize a specific future state or outcome, then I must act as if I have the agency to make it happen. Corollary: nothing gets done by doing nothing. For someone paralyzed or depressed by the belief that everything is determined and nothing matters, this may be the remedy that gets them out of bed. Justice is done by holding individuals accountable for their actions, but we can temper our appetite for vindictive sentencing with an understanding that environments influence behaviour. Inasmuch as there is ideal Truth, I cannot reliably access it. I must therefore be satisfied with useful truth.
Jan 9, 2023·edited Jan 9, 2023Liked by Max Goodbird
This feels like the right way of approaching the problem - playing around with causal definition and seeing what lines up with our intuition.
The thing about 'constraining future actions' is that it doesn't seem like it relates so much to willpower. For example, i might resolve to quit drinking, but then keep on drinking, causing suffering in my life and work and contributing to an escalating cycle. This is totally 'restricting future actions', but i don't think most people would identify it as being an exercise of willpower.
I think for a lot of people, the importance of the 'free will' concept is precisely in the difference between 'constraining future action so that i stop drinking' vs. 'constraining future action so that i continue drinking'. I have a longer piece to write up on this, but i think where most people who believe in free will would get on board is if you said something like, "free will is when a person's actions are more constrained by their desired course of action when evaluated rationally, outside of a situation, rather than by whatever they've been doing or by their passions in that moment."
If there were a 'magic notebook' such that, whatever you write as your plan for the next day in that book, it will happen, i think most people would really want that notebook. Even if that notebook can _only_ control my personal actions, that's still a phenomenal kind of technology. I think of people who believe in free will as prosessing, in effect, a primitive form of that notebook. They believe, in a sense, that their actions are caused more by their own long-term values, rather than by their passions or instincts in the moment. People who don't believe in free will don't have this "causal hook" where a feedback loop between "present values" and "future actions" can grow.
The post i plan to write on this will of course link to your bit about causal diagrams not being DAG's. This is, i think, the rub: some people hear 'free will' and imagine a "magic node" upstream of the "my actions node." People who don't believe in free will draw the upstream nodes as being things like 'my body, my emotional state at time T', and then 'my actions at time T+1' as being directly caused by the upstream nodes. This is where your point is crucial: how you shape that dag is going to influence your behavior; if you believe your values are causally upstream of your actions, and you gather evidence for this proposition, your belief in it strengthens and it thereby becomes more true.
I have managed to accomplish _something_ like this, with the caveat that the contents of the book can't be arbitrary; i can't set goals that i don't think i'll accomplish because my desire to maintain self confidence makes that neigh impossible for me to do: if i think a goal is unrealistic, i can't help but see the likely consequences and thereby avoid writing it down.
The intuition about 'total severance from the past' seems... i'm not sure what to make of that. It seems like a separate question. I don't know how much most people care about the question, "are the words i am writing anything i can really control or are they merely a byproduct of chemicals zapping each other." I think most people really, really want that book, though.
TBH that book would terrify me. I'd probably use it very sparingly. I'd hate to write "I will run 10 miles tomorrow" and then wake up sick. I'd end up writing things like "I will run 10 miles tomorrow if I feel up for it", which kinda defeats the purpose.
However, trying to find free will in physics is a lost cause. There will always be causation. The only issue is whether the cause is predictible or random, and free will would not exist either way. We risk making actually meaningful concepts meaningless if we subject them to a scientific lense in search for a material basis (morality, meaning, desert, free will, etc.)
Instead of asking how our sensations map onto reality, we should accept that our sensations simply are what we call reality. If I see a cup on the table, then there IS a cup on the table, regardless of whether or not the cup on the table exists in a mind-independent objective reality. The same is true of free will. Because I feel free, I am free, regardless of any free will physics.
You're right that trying to reduce subjectivity to mere physics is a lost cause. As you point out, physical knowledge is derived from sensations! There's something weirdly circular going on.
But I think you're making the opposite mistake: saying that objectivity should be reduced to subjectivity. If I understand you correctly, you're saying: sensation is all there is, and objective reality is just a composite of sensations.
> If I see a cup on the table, then there IS a cup on the table
This is true in some sense, and false in another. If you see a cup on the table, then *the sight of the cup* exists. But "the cup exists" is shorthand for an intersubjective truth--we can only really say the cup exists if multiple people (preferably most or all people) see the cup. It's important and useful to distinguish between a hallucination of a cup versus a cup that everyone can see.
That is what I am saying. What we call objective reality can be thought of as "shared subjectivity." We can never "know" the true mind-independent reality, but this shouldn't matter to us. What matters is the measurable, testable, understandable world of shared experience.
The mental and platonic world certainly exist in the Penrose trinity, but we should be agnostic on the physical one.
I'll be wriitng a post about this in the future and I'd appreciate your thoughts on that as well.
Hello, I just subscribed to your pages! I love topics like these and wish to support other writers as I am just beginning to write like this myself. Thank you for sharing.
Does quantum mechanics really tell us that randomness exists? Or, are we simply not yet fully comprehending the dynamics at play that appear to be random to us as novice observers? The latter just seems more likely given our relationship with science over the centuries.
But I think this is OK: I don't think we need randomness to exist to have free will. I think apparent randomness via system dynamics is a close enough approximation that we can still keep the idea of free will around.
In this mental model, free will is only constrained by the system the free will exists within. So, it's not entirely free, but, really, what is?
> Does quantum mechanics really tell us that randomness exists? Or, are we simply not yet fully comprehending the dynamics at play that appear to be random to us as novice observers?
Quantum mechanics specifically rules out the presence of a "local hidden variable" that determines the outcome of a measurement.
If we do away with locality, we can recover the idea of determinism. But locality--the idea that any causes need to be spatially "next to" their effects--is a pretty core tenet of physics.
It's always possible that God or some unknowable force _outside_ the observable universe has the relevant information.
While I am certainly treading out of my depth here, I thought the whole notion of quantum entanglement tells us that our 3-dimensional views of "locality" in traditional physics don't apply as we think they would in quantum mechanics.
If I'm getting this right, and this is correct, then ruling out a "local hidden variable" might not be enough to rule out all variables.
I guess I'm having a hard time giving up the notion that system dynamics are inescapable.
TBH I'm a bit out of my depth as well. I'm no Physics PhD, but I've taken some graduate-level courses. And as they say: if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't.
The weird non-local behavior of QM ("spooky action at a distance") is exactly the thing at hand. You entangle two electrons and separate them. Both have a 50/50 chance of being spin-up vs spin-down, but they always show up the same. Somehow the one "knows" what the other is going to do, even though they've been separated by miles.
One way out of this is to say "well, maybe when we entangled them, they both agreed: when we get measured, we're going to say spin-up", and that this information is somehow encoded in both electrons. But Bell's theorem (which is kinda complicated) proved that no: they're both still undecided until you measure them.
The fact that they still turn up the same does violate our naive intuition for locality, the idea that "physical processes occurring at one place should have no immediate effect on the elements of reality at another location." But it doesn't violate local *causality*--i.e. you can't transmit information via this weird non-local process.
The two main ways of preserving determinism are Superdeterminism [1] and Many Worlds [2]
I created a "to do" app for myself that is entirely about injecting randomness. I enter into the app a list of all my non-core-focus tasks, like "clear one email from my inbox". Then I let the algorithm pick the next one for me to do. It has some nice features like task history, stats, and weightings. Huge productivity booster for me.
I am not fond of the argument that because we experience the sensation of a thing, it holds some fundamental truth. I think that the sensation of decision making is indeed an outcome of the narratives that we have developed to communicate about the unfolding of the present.
As a kind of reasonableness test, I would consider the idea presented above that consciousness could collapse the wave function. We know that these uncertainties that exist are on the subatomic level. If consciousness exists where we think it does, somewhere closer to the level of the neural pathway, it would be almost preposterous to suggest that relatively macro assemblages of matter are able to orchestrate a “decided” collapsing of wave functions at the subatomic level. What mechanic could facilitate this?
I think what’s more reasonable is that what feels (again, in large part or perhaps totally because of the social narratives we tell ourselves and each other) like decision making is a gestalt of tipping points being reached as a result of probabilities we can know but not determine, all playing out on the relatively more macro level.
I don’t think this makes things either random or determined. There are both stochastic processes, and there are real and fundamental constraints. We are all brief and beautiful clusters in time and space of that process playing out, and indeed we are quite perplexing outcomes of it in our complexity and interactions which lead to the development of communication, narratives of ‘experience’, ‘sensation’, ‘will’ and so on. It’s quite lovely, poetic even.
> As a kind of reasonableness test, I would consider the idea presented above that consciousness could collapse the wave function. We know that these uncertainties that exist are on the subatomic level. If consciousness exists where we think it does, somewhere closer to the level of the neural pathway, it would be almost preposterous to suggest that relatively macro assemblages of matter are able to orchestrate a “decided” collapsing of wave functions at the subatomic level. What mechanic could facilitate this?
> I am not fond of the argument that because we experience the sensation of a thing, it holds some fundamental truth.
To be clear: I'm not saying that the experience constitutes a "fundamental" truth--only that it constitutes a truth. There's clearly something there, even if the physical reality underlying it is very different from the experience itself. See the convo w/ The Contractualist for more.
If we use this logic then while dreaming, i am actually not dreaming, since i do not feel like it is a dream.
Why not simply accept the logical truth that free will is one of the many illusions that we are subject to? In fact hinduism and buddhism both require overcoming this free will illusion as a first step toward enlightenment. After that first step, those two religions radically diverge.
Curious what logic you’re using on that dream inference.
I don’t actually have a problem with characterizing free will as an illusion, in the sense that it could be *purely* perception. But the word illusion has connotations of “unreal” and “unimportant”, and I don’t think that follows. The sensation of free will has a very real effect on our sense of well being, regardless of what’s going on under the hood.
(Btw I looked into your work with the Pygmies—amazing stuff!)
So, the sense of free will has some importance if you want to live. In the same way, the sense of reality of the dream is important to keep if you want to keep dreaming.
"I’m surprised1 at how seriously some people take this argument. As The Contractualist points out, we have a clear sensation of free will. Denying its existence is like denying the existence of the color yellow. “It’s an illusion!” you say. “It’s just electromagnetic waves vibrating at 520 THz!” And yet I plainly see yellow."
It's already agree that yellow is a sensation/appearance, so you can
't dismiss it by saying it's "just" a sensation or appearance. It isn't agreed that free will is a sensation , so the same trick doesn't work. Free will is supposed to be a capacity or ability.
Having said that, there is a problem with the argument from physics: false dichotomy.
Great article, both clear and honest. I was following you in everything, except perhaps the very end:
> Dodging these questions by explaining them away—saying that free will and consciousness are just an illusion—would be intellectually dishonest. We have these sensations, and we should be asking how exactly they correspond to physical reality.
I disagree here. You have set to explore the possibility that consciousness and free will are NOT illusions arising from deterministic processes, but exploring this possibility doesn’t immediately make it so. Conversely, it doesn’t make the opposing effort intellectually dishonest, right? Just a different starting point, rather.
It’s like, upon seeing a magic “trick”, say, a rabbit getting out of an empty hat, one audience member would say “this is an illusion, the rabbit was somehow in the hat before or put there while I got distracted” and another member would say “Sure, but let’s assume rabbits COULD appear inside empty hats, how would that work?” I feel like Sam Harris is the first person and you’re the other one, and I don’t think either is intellectually dishonest.
Or did I miss why Harris is wrong?
Thanks! My problem with the phrase
> saying that free will and consciousness are just an illusion
is primarily with the word "just".
To some degree, I actually agree that these things are illusions! Illusions/hallucinations are things that are only _subjectively_ true/existent. They can only be seen by one person, knowledge of them can't be shared or confirmed by others, etc etc.
I don't like the word "illusion" because it implies unreality, triviality, etc. The core content of the word (using the definitions above) is correct, but its negative associations are misleading.
Harris, Dennett, etc want to say "it's an just illusion" and drop the subject, because there's nothing more you can say about it. But that's dishonest--there's a heck of a lot more you can say about it, if you're willing to leave the comfort of a purely rationalist/scientific ontology.
Ah, I see. So perhaps a better word is that you find this position "intellectually lazy", more so than dishonest?
Yeah "lazy" is definitely a better word!
This was clear and engaging writing on a topic that can become really esoteric really fast. You have a knack for taking dense, multi-faceted, topics and presenting them in a way that is accessible but not patronizingly simplistic. I really enjoyed it.
Metaphysical questions like free will vs determinism are fun, and I suppose are important on a very fundamental level, but as a pragmatist I resolve the dilemma by asking myself: "will taking a position on this change what's required of me? No? OK, I'll carry on as if I have free will." If we accept that things are determined, well... what do we with that knowledge? Knowing that the future is determined gives no insight into the future itself, so we must act as if we have free will in either case. You could see this as dodging the question, but to me it's an answer.
Thanks!
Yeah I like the pragmatic approach. But I'd argue there are some practical effects from believing either way.
E.g. there's an argument from the "free will doesn't exist" side that adopting their point of view leads to more compassion for criminals, and could lead to a less horrific prison system. And personally, when I feel myself starting to think "free will doesn't exist", I'm more inclined to indulge my inclination to drink/scroll/etc rather than taking responsibility for my actions.
Good point, there are real effects downstream of strong belief in either free will or determinism. I'll re-formulate my pragmatist position to account for that:
Reality may be determined, but we cannot precisely predict future states of individuals. If I want to realize a specific future state or outcome, then I must act as if I have the agency to make it happen. Corollary: nothing gets done by doing nothing. For someone paralyzed or depressed by the belief that everything is determined and nothing matters, this may be the remedy that gets them out of bed. Justice is done by holding individuals accountable for their actions, but we can temper our appetite for vindictive sentencing with an understanding that environments influence behaviour. Inasmuch as there is ideal Truth, I cannot reliably access it. I must therefore be satisfied with useful truth.
This feels like the right way of approaching the problem - playing around with causal definition and seeing what lines up with our intuition.
The thing about 'constraining future actions' is that it doesn't seem like it relates so much to willpower. For example, i might resolve to quit drinking, but then keep on drinking, causing suffering in my life and work and contributing to an escalating cycle. This is totally 'restricting future actions', but i don't think most people would identify it as being an exercise of willpower.
I think for a lot of people, the importance of the 'free will' concept is precisely in the difference between 'constraining future action so that i stop drinking' vs. 'constraining future action so that i continue drinking'. I have a longer piece to write up on this, but i think where most people who believe in free will would get on board is if you said something like, "free will is when a person's actions are more constrained by their desired course of action when evaluated rationally, outside of a situation, rather than by whatever they've been doing or by their passions in that moment."
If there were a 'magic notebook' such that, whatever you write as your plan for the next day in that book, it will happen, i think most people would really want that notebook. Even if that notebook can _only_ control my personal actions, that's still a phenomenal kind of technology. I think of people who believe in free will as prosessing, in effect, a primitive form of that notebook. They believe, in a sense, that their actions are caused more by their own long-term values, rather than by their passions or instincts in the moment. People who don't believe in free will don't have this "causal hook" where a feedback loop between "present values" and "future actions" can grow.
The post i plan to write on this will of course link to your bit about causal diagrams not being DAG's. This is, i think, the rub: some people hear 'free will' and imagine a "magic node" upstream of the "my actions node." People who don't believe in free will draw the upstream nodes as being things like 'my body, my emotional state at time T', and then 'my actions at time T+1' as being directly caused by the upstream nodes. This is where your point is crucial: how you shape that dag is going to influence your behavior; if you believe your values are causally upstream of your actions, and you gather evidence for this proposition, your belief in it strengthens and it thereby becomes more true.
I have managed to accomplish _something_ like this, with the caveat that the contents of the book can't be arbitrary; i can't set goals that i don't think i'll accomplish because my desire to maintain self confidence makes that neigh impossible for me to do: if i think a goal is unrealistic, i can't help but see the likely consequences and thereby avoid writing it down.
The intuition about 'total severance from the past' seems... i'm not sure what to make of that. It seems like a separate question. I don't know how much most people care about the question, "are the words i am writing anything i can really control or are they merely a byproduct of chemicals zapping each other." I think most people really, really want that book, though.
Interesting thoughts!
TBH that book would terrify me. I'd probably use it very sparingly. I'd hate to write "I will run 10 miles tomorrow" and then wake up sick. I'd end up writing things like "I will run 10 miles tomorrow if I feel up for it", which kinda defeats the purpose.
You might enjoy this story if you haven't read it: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
Great piece and thank you for the reference!
However, trying to find free will in physics is a lost cause. There will always be causation. The only issue is whether the cause is predictible or random, and free will would not exist either way. We risk making actually meaningful concepts meaningless if we subject them to a scientific lense in search for a material basis (morality, meaning, desert, free will, etc.)
Instead of asking how our sensations map onto reality, we should accept that our sensations simply are what we call reality. If I see a cup on the table, then there IS a cup on the table, regardless of whether or not the cup on the table exists in a mind-independent objective reality. The same is true of free will. Because I feel free, I am free, regardless of any free will physics.
I half agree here.
You're right that trying to reduce subjectivity to mere physics is a lost cause. As you point out, physical knowledge is derived from sensations! There's something weirdly circular going on.
But I think you're making the opposite mistake: saying that objectivity should be reduced to subjectivity. If I understand you correctly, you're saying: sensation is all there is, and objective reality is just a composite of sensations.
> If I see a cup on the table, then there IS a cup on the table
This is true in some sense, and false in another. If you see a cup on the table, then *the sight of the cup* exists. But "the cup exists" is shorthand for an intersubjective truth--we can only really say the cup exists if multiple people (preferably most or all people) see the cup. It's important and useful to distinguish between a hallucination of a cup versus a cup that everyone can see.
My opinions here are derived heavily from what I like to call the Penrose Trinity: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2019/11/12/an-eternal-triangle/
That is what I am saying. What we call objective reality can be thought of as "shared subjectivity." We can never "know" the true mind-independent reality, but this shouldn't matter to us. What matters is the measurable, testable, understandable world of shared experience.
The mental and platonic world certainly exist in the Penrose trinity, but we should be agnostic on the physical one.
I'll be wriitng a post about this in the future and I'd appreciate your thoughts on that as well.
Interesting!
I think your view coheres well with Schrödinger's, which I've written about before [1]. But he takes it pretty far.
Looking forward to seeing what you write!
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schrodinger-believed#%C2%A7my-view-of-the-world
I didn't realize Schrödinger was an idealist and appreciated Schopenhauer. Thanks for this!
Hello, I just subscribed to your pages! I love topics like these and wish to support other writers as I am just beginning to write like this myself. Thank you for sharing.
Looking forward to seeing what you write!
Does quantum mechanics really tell us that randomness exists? Or, are we simply not yet fully comprehending the dynamics at play that appear to be random to us as novice observers? The latter just seems more likely given our relationship with science over the centuries.
But I think this is OK: I don't think we need randomness to exist to have free will. I think apparent randomness via system dynamics is a close enough approximation that we can still keep the idea of free will around.
In this mental model, free will is only constrained by the system the free will exists within. So, it's not entirely free, but, really, what is?
> Does quantum mechanics really tell us that randomness exists? Or, are we simply not yet fully comprehending the dynamics at play that appear to be random to us as novice observers?
Quantum mechanics specifically rules out the presence of a "local hidden variable" that determines the outcome of a measurement.
If we do away with locality, we can recover the idea of determinism. But locality--the idea that any causes need to be spatially "next to" their effects--is a pretty core tenet of physics.
It's always possible that God or some unknowable force _outside_ the observable universe has the relevant information.
While I am certainly treading out of my depth here, I thought the whole notion of quantum entanglement tells us that our 3-dimensional views of "locality" in traditional physics don't apply as we think they would in quantum mechanics.
If I'm getting this right, and this is correct, then ruling out a "local hidden variable" might not be enough to rule out all variables.
I guess I'm having a hard time giving up the notion that system dynamics are inescapable.
TBH I'm a bit out of my depth as well. I'm no Physics PhD, but I've taken some graduate-level courses. And as they say: if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't.
The weird non-local behavior of QM ("spooky action at a distance") is exactly the thing at hand. You entangle two electrons and separate them. Both have a 50/50 chance of being spin-up vs spin-down, but they always show up the same. Somehow the one "knows" what the other is going to do, even though they've been separated by miles.
One way out of this is to say "well, maybe when we entangled them, they both agreed: when we get measured, we're going to say spin-up", and that this information is somehow encoded in both electrons. But Bell's theorem (which is kinda complicated) proved that no: they're both still undecided until you measure them.
The fact that they still turn up the same does violate our naive intuition for locality, the idea that "physical processes occurring at one place should have no immediate effect on the elements of reality at another location." But it doesn't violate local *causality*--i.e. you can't transmit information via this weird non-local process.
The two main ways of preserving determinism are Superdeterminism [1] and Many Worlds [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4
I created a "to do" app for myself that is entirely about injecting randomness. I enter into the app a list of all my non-core-focus tasks, like "clear one email from my inbox". Then I let the algorithm pick the next one for me to do. It has some nice features like task history, stats, and weightings. Huge productivity booster for me.
I am not fond of the argument that because we experience the sensation of a thing, it holds some fundamental truth. I think that the sensation of decision making is indeed an outcome of the narratives that we have developed to communicate about the unfolding of the present.
As a kind of reasonableness test, I would consider the idea presented above that consciousness could collapse the wave function. We know that these uncertainties that exist are on the subatomic level. If consciousness exists where we think it does, somewhere closer to the level of the neural pathway, it would be almost preposterous to suggest that relatively macro assemblages of matter are able to orchestrate a “decided” collapsing of wave functions at the subatomic level. What mechanic could facilitate this?
I think what’s more reasonable is that what feels (again, in large part or perhaps totally because of the social narratives we tell ourselves and each other) like decision making is a gestalt of tipping points being reached as a result of probabilities we can know but not determine, all playing out on the relatively more macro level.
I don’t think this makes things either random or determined. There are both stochastic processes, and there are real and fundamental constraints. We are all brief and beautiful clusters in time and space of that process playing out, and indeed we are quite perplexing outcomes of it in our complexity and interactions which lead to the development of communication, narratives of ‘experience’, ‘sensation’, ‘will’ and so on. It’s quite lovely, poetic even.
> As a kind of reasonableness test, I would consider the idea presented above that consciousness could collapse the wave function. We know that these uncertainties that exist are on the subatomic level. If consciousness exists where we think it does, somewhere closer to the level of the neural pathway, it would be almost preposterous to suggest that relatively macro assemblages of matter are able to orchestrate a “decided” collapsing of wave functions at the subatomic level. What mechanic could facilitate this?
Penrose and Hameroff have a theory here. I don't really know enough about it to endorse it though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
> I am not fond of the argument that because we experience the sensation of a thing, it holds some fundamental truth.
To be clear: I'm not saying that the experience constitutes a "fundamental" truth--only that it constitutes a truth. There's clearly something there, even if the physical reality underlying it is very different from the experience itself. See the convo w/ The Contractualist for more.
If we use this logic then while dreaming, i am actually not dreaming, since i do not feel like it is a dream.
Why not simply accept the logical truth that free will is one of the many illusions that we are subject to? In fact hinduism and buddhism both require overcoming this free will illusion as a first step toward enlightenment. After that first step, those two religions radically diverge.
Curious what logic you’re using on that dream inference.
I don’t actually have a problem with characterizing free will as an illusion, in the sense that it could be *purely* perception. But the word illusion has connotations of “unreal” and “unimportant”, and I don’t think that follows. The sensation of free will has a very real effect on our sense of well being, regardless of what’s going on under the hood.
(Btw I looked into your work with the Pygmies—amazing stuff!)
Thanks!
So, the sense of free will has some importance if you want to live. In the same way, the sense of reality of the dream is important to keep if you want to keep dreaming.
"I’m surprised1 at how seriously some people take this argument. As The Contractualist points out, we have a clear sensation of free will. Denying its existence is like denying the existence of the color yellow. “It’s an illusion!” you say. “It’s just electromagnetic waves vibrating at 520 THz!” And yet I plainly see yellow."
It's already agree that yellow is a sensation/appearance, so you can
't dismiss it by saying it's "just" a sensation or appearance. It isn't agreed that free will is a sensation , so the same trick doesn't work. Free will is supposed to be a capacity or ability.
Having said that, there is a problem with the argument from physics: false dichotomy.