Tonight my Wednesday night group kicked around the old concepts of free will but with the added twist of whether our actions were predetermined. We quickly got over the basic issues of genes, the culture we were born into, our summation of learned personal experiences and the unique situation. All of these affect the way we approach a problem and influence our analysis of it but we generally agreed that none of those things fixed us to any predetermined action. We as individual conscious beings feel we have a choice in our behavior, but it has been shown with brain scans that we actually make up our minds before we realize we have done so. I have called this my Zombie self and can easily observe it in action, because for almost every action I can observe my body starting to do some particular thing before I decide to do it. My conscious self is generally about a second behind my Zombie self.
My Zombie self might also be called my habitual self and it reacts automatically with learned responses which it has learned fit particular situations. Because it feels like our thoughts and actions are coming from within our selves, we believe our conscious self is in control. With years of personal observation in my past, thanks to George Gurdjieff for getting me started on that exercise, it is easy to switch my conscious mode to looking at my manifest behavior. Anyone can do it in an instant, but they usually forget to remember themselves, and instead of observing their actions tend to wallow in personal problems. Wallowing in one’s problems isn’t observing one self, but watching one’s self wallowing in problems is, and watching one’s fingers type out words before the idea has formed is also a form of self observation. We do have the ability to lay out alternate plans for our future behavior and when we have several clear choices it does become possible to have a conscious input into the decision. When we just react because it seems like the right thing to do, it isn’t our conscious self acting but our habitual zombie self.
But is any of this free will? It seems that at the root, we live in a world of pure anarchy, but it is a world where it is to each individual’s best interest to behave with courtesy and kindness to their fellow inhabitant of this Earth. We have a natural genetic inclination to learn to treat each other with respect, like we have the natural ability to learn a spoken language. Humans grow up within a culture that cultivates treating others well because when they don’t treat others well they are themselves shunned and can not form deeper and more pleasurable relationships. We come to every new situation and every new person with this accumulation of learned habits and it serves us well, but a question arises as to what degree is our free will limited by all of this historical baggage? Or is it just the opposite; this baggage serves us well in getting through our lives in what we hope is a very pleasant way. From that perspective we don’t want free will because when we manifest unpredictable behaviors people don’t trust us, then they shun us and thus we modify our behavior to avoid free-will-like actions. It is a human need to cultivate friends, but to demonstrate free will often will alienate people and therefore people learn to avoid it like the plague – which it is.
It is human to avoid pain and free will is a source of pain.
Hi,
Free will is only an illusion. Does me sharing this help you?
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Steve – A simple assertion can insert any grammatically correct words what so ever into the appropriate language slots, but usually it doesn’t help when the concepts are as slippery as free-will and illusion. Generally locking emotion laden concepts into tight verbal boxes obfuscates the idea more than it clarifies it. The scientific method of dialogue has been infinitely more productive at helping people find new and useful things.
I just thought I would start by giving you a straight forward answer to your question… any tight verbal boxes were not of my construct…. No obfuscation from me, freewill is an illusion.
It’s an excellent question, and one I wonder about too. A related question is whether our actions are deterministic. I’m leaning towards thinking they are not deterministic in any meaningful sense because the complexity of the brain is such that even if each underlying chemical reaction was deterministic the brain would probably behave as a chaotic system. Furthermore, the underlying chemical reactions may not always be deterministic either; at least some of them could hinge on quantum mechanical randomness. So is free will an illusion? I think it probably is.
The next 50-100 years will probably see the development of true machine intelligence. It will be very interesting to be able to study free will in these machines where both the exact starting conditions and any modeled quantum mechanical effects will be under our control.
Hi Rob Ray Kurzweil hopes to live long enough to see computer intelligence reach and surpass human intelligence, and he is getting old, so we may not have long to wait. A single isolated computer must now compete with the combined intelligence of the entirety of the on-line human community, and with that advantage we humans may be able to hold on to our human supremacy for a couple of additional years. Or, maybe we can’t, because the intelligent computer could probably access and use that on-line community better than any individual human and so it could surpass us even sooner. These questions of free-will may become even less meaningful when we are being manipulated by Adam Smith like perfectly rational beings. Charles Scamahorn
There are close-up video simulations of chemical reactions where the temperature is varied up and down. When the same batch of elementary particles (mostly easily visible in carbon compounds) are at various temperatures they form quite different molecules. At higher temperatures they all separate into atoms, and at various lower temperatures they coagulate into different molecules. However, over a range of the middle temperatures they don’t form a single fixed type of molecule but a variety of them all jostling together. In the simulation it was easily seen that any given atom and molecule was occasionally changing from one bonded association to another one. Any given atom seemed to have free-will but when it was hit by another atom this first atom changed its energy state and thus changed the molecule it would tend to form at its new temperature.
This seems to be similar to human free-will and our behavior is highly dependent upon the energy of the situations we are immersed within. Perhaps our greatest access to personal free-will is when we are alone and outside of all social situations and can weigh our various options and choose the situation we want to become part of for a time. When we are with the skateboard crowd we will take on those qualities and when we are with our grandmothers crowd we will behave quite differently.