Okis

???

OK, I'm ready. Now where's the joke? The anticipation's killing me.

OK, I'm ready. Now where's the joke? The anticipation's killing me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I thought that it was clearly spelling it out.

For your benefit:

“Since Libet’s finding started to filter out,
there were speculations about our free will.

What, my free will is useless – I’ll give it up!
take it my friend and tell me what to do.

Now, how could I – give up something I did/do not have.” — Damir Ibrisimovic

Hope that your anticipation is now elevated...

Enjoy the day,

https://vibrantbliss.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/critique-of-libet-on-free-will/https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/a-neuroscience-finding-on-free-will.html

As one might expect with something as complex as the brain, the issue is not as clear cut as some would propose. The free will vs determinism debate can continue. Admittedly "Free" might not be the right adjective for "will".

Free will is like a dance. We acquired the dance movements and simply dance in the tune of music.

Acquired means that we internalised (made habitual) the new sequence of new moves, feelings and thoughts. In the beginning, we perform haltingly until movements became habitual. And then we dance…

Over time we learned many dances and now we simply intend dance moves. Unfortunately, we became lazy and stopped learning new dances. We still can choose between old dances to perform – but our free will is weakened then.

Unfortunately, the joke presents the clear-cut picture of our free will.

Unfortunately, because it was my favourite past time. And now new discussions are waste of time.

Your argument to the contrary is vague and without any weight.

Enjoy the day,

Hope that your anticipation is now elevated...

Enjoy the day, — Damir Ibrisimovic

I'm enjoying the day, along with my elevated level of anticipation.

Dear all,

The Joke topic is not receiving more comments. I guess that the existence of our free will is now accepted. So, I'll close the topic.

If you have additional comments, please do not hesitate...

Hearty, :cool:

I guess that the existence of our free will is now accepted. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Do you think that anyone ever seriously doubted the existence of free will? And people like Libet, aren't they just trying to understand free will rather than to prove that there is no such thing?

And people like Libet, aren't they just trying to understand free will rather than to prove that there is no such thing? — Metaphysician Undercover

Back in 2011, many scientists (and laiks) believed that we do not have free will - and arguments were hotly debated...

Unfortunately, Dr Benjamin Libet believed that we only have free will in cancelling our urges. He was also unsure about "mysterious what" triggers Readiness Potential. I believe that he would agree that he missed some critical evidence provided by scenarios of my joke...

Even Hawkings tried to add a back in time trigger (See "The Big and Small and Human Mind") But, his proposal was absurd and dismissed. In the end, we do not need for a quantum leap back in time...

Hearty,:cool:

Unfortunately, Dr Benjamin Libet believed that we only have free will in cancelling our urges. He was also unsure about "mysterious what" triggers Readiness Potential. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Aren't these the two essential aspects of free will.. First, we need to cancel our urges so that our actions are not merely reflections of, or "caused by", reactions to our surroundings. That's will power. Second, while will power is suppressing all urges, it needs to maintain the capacity to freely trigger, when necessary, a selected action. What more is necessary, and why the "back in time" assumption?

I think the apparent paradoxes disappear if one stops believing in the "ghost in the machine" and all its variants.

The "I" that's choosing is the entire rational animal, including all its internal brain workings, unconscious deliberations, etc. It remains true that "I chose to raise my hand" regardless of whether the machinery went into motion before the conscious part of the rational animal became aware of the choice, because "I" refers to the total rational, social animal, not to some etherial inner observer, puppet-string puller, etc.

But admittedly the illusion of in inner "I" is very difficult to get rid of - it takes Buddhists, for example, several years of serious meditation :)

The "I" that's choosing is the entire rational animal — gurugeorge

I disagree. We are not entirely rational animals...

For the rest, let's examine the scenarios needed to explain free will:

• Lift a hand on external cue (given by your friend in a cafe).
• Lift a hand on internal cue (as you speak about lifting a hand).
• Lift a hand without a cue (researched by Dr Benjamin Libet).
• Execute an entirely new dance move.

The first three scenarios (joke) are about intended habitual moves. Dr Benjamin Libet researched only the third scenario - that the reason why his/other's interpretation of the test results was faulty...

The fourth scenario is about learning nonhabitual move that is turning nonhabitual move into habitual.

... it takes Buddhists, for example, several years of serious meditation :) — gurugeorge

I do not know in detail about Buddhists' meditation but it fits nicely with the fourth scenario of learning new thoughts, feelings and actions...

I will need a bit more to change my mind. Please, elaborate more using this four scenarios. :)

Hearty, :cool:

Aren't these the two essential aspects of free will... — Metaphysician Undercover

Please, see my previous reply to gurugeorge with four scenarios for free will...

That's will power. — Metaphysician Undercover

You intuit the fourth scenario.

The "back in time" was a ridiculous attempt to enable "free will" in the third scenario only. You can skip that...

I think that we need a little bit more to agree... :)

Hearty, :cool:

I do not know in detail about Buddhists' meditation but it fits nicely with the fourth scenario of learning new thoughts, feelings and actions... — Damir Ibrisimovic

In all 4 scenarios, the boundary of the "I" is the total physical animal; its own awareness of itself, its internal modeling of itself, is secondary, and it doesn't matter if that happens some time after the brain machinery has worked to produce whatever action it produces.

The Buddhist (and also general "non-dual" - as it's called - Asian philosophical) idea is that we are accustomed to thinking of "I" as an internal receiver of impressions, perceptions, experiences, etc., conceived of either as a sort of notional point on which all experiences impinge (by analogy with artistic perspective - which not coincidentally was being developed in a big way in the West roundabout the same time that modern philosophy and science developed) or as a kind of aware, awake "capacity" or "space" (this is the metaphor that's more usually favoured in the East).

If you reflect on your everyday experience, it normally seems as if the true "I" is something behind the eyes, looking out at the world through them, sort of prisoner inside the head in some sense, or inside the body, along for the ride. In Christianity, something like this idea is meant by the "soul," the thing that's notionally free in terms of the classical free-will debates.

This is an illusion, and we all have it (or most of us do, most of the time). A large part of the purpose of Eastern meditational systems is to either knock the illusion out of commission (considered a lesser result, because it's usually temporary) or to get into a position where you may still have the illusion, but you don't take it seriously, you don't habitually live from it (considered the greater result, usually called "enlightenment").

The Libet experiments only pose a problem if you believe that the "I" is something like this "soul," this "ghost in the machine" If no such thing exists, then the various timings of what goes on within the skin bag are of little importance to the question of free will, the cash-value of which is really more in the libertarian or political sense: one's will is free when it is not coerced - that is to say, this human animal, and all the workings within its skin bag, is the active entity, the entity whose will can be free or not, and either subject to coercion or not (one may also consider freedom from various kinds of internal incoherences too, which have an effect somewhat analogous to external coercion, in that they also limit one's potential to act).

To put all this another way, when one says "I" one may, on the one hand, be referring to one's sense of oneself as the "ghost," but on the other hand, one may be referring to oneself as the human animal that one is. In the former case, there is no free will, because the entity in question simply doesn't exist (to either have free will or not) and all the puzzles arising from that are nugatory. If the latter sense, then all ordinary talk about free-will makes perfectly ordinary, intelligible sense, even taking into account findings like Libet's.

In all 4 scenarios, the boundary of the "I" is the total physical animal; its own awareness of itself, its internal modeling of itself, is secondary, and it doesn't matter if that happens some time after the brain machinery has worked to produce whatever action it produces. — gurugeorge

Tentatively agree. I would also add well-documented cases of feral children. A feral child exhibits animal-like behaviour. However, even then there is an "I" hidden in our genome. :)

We can also assume that "I" is hidden within every unicellular organism. Social like behaviour, for example, was exhibited by yeast cells. When there is not enough food - cells start to die to provide themselves as food-packets for the rest of the colony. An "altruism" at the cellular level...

Humble pea also demonstrates identity awareness. When a single plant is split in two - each half grows independently roots in competition with another half.

In general, identity seems to be an attribute of life in general. And that means that four scenarios can be applied to all life-forms...

The Libet experiments only pose a problem if you believe that the "I" is something like this "soul," this "ghost in the machine" — gurugeorge

Libet's experiments covered only the third scenario. And that was a problem...

Hearty, :cool:

The Libet experiments only pose a problem if you believe that the "I" is something like this "soul," this "ghost in the machine... " — gurugeorge

I believe that I identified the core of our disagreements - "soul"; the "ghost in the machine". You are assuming something like Descartes' dualism...

Descartes assumed that only humans have a soul enabling choices. The rest of living organisms behave like machines driven by the tick-tock of causes and effects...

Rest assured that I'm not in favour of dualism either... :)

Yeast and humble pea - also demonstrate identity in their own way. I can only reaffirm that identity is a basic attribute of life in general...

Hearty, :cool:

We can also assume that "I" is hidden within every unicellular organism. Social like behaviour, for example, was exhibited by yeast cells. When there is not enough food - cells start to die to provide themselves as food-packets for the rest of the colony. An "altruism" at the cellular level... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I dunno, I think the "I" is more of a complex thing than you can get at that level, although I'd agree there is directedness and teleology even at that simple level. But for the "I" you need not just those, but also the capacity for self-reflection, I think - some kind of internal self-and-world-modeling capability.

You are assuming something like Descartes' dualism... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I don't assume it, it's a tacit premise in most discussions about Free Will with a capital "F" and "W," since it's the supposed bearer of free will. Although formerly it would have been cast in more plainly religious terms (spiritual and material, etc.), not in terms of Cartesian dualism.

And it's perennially tempting, because everyone has that illusion of being something inside the head peeping out, something mysteriously extra, something over and above the human animal that they are.

From the angle of "determinism," it's quite unproblematic to conceive of a deterministic robot having free will in a deterministic universe. Regardless of the fact that both the robot and the universe are deterministic, the robot's deterministic computing machinery would still have to make decisions and choices on scant information (because it lacks full Laplacian omniscience) and the level at which free will operates would mean simply that its choices were not forced by something external to the deterministic robot-bundle. And we are such robots, only we are "moist robots" as Scott Adams put it, robots made of squishy biochemical machinery instead of silicon and steel.

The puzzles about free-will only appear when the "soul" thing (however else it's conceived) is conceived of as not being causally concatenated with the rest of the universe. It seems paradoxical, but it's not: the very fact that we are deterministic machines thoroughly embedded in a deterministic universe (if it is a fact) is what allows us to have the kind of free will that we do have, the kind of free will that's (as Dennett says) worth wanting. (If the universe isn't fully deterministic, it doesn't affect this argument much - clearly it's deterministic enough in most respects.)

I dunno, I think the "I" is more of a complex thing than you can get at that level ... — gurugeorge

I think that we agree that the kernel of identity is present at the unicellular level. It is also present in plants - although the form of identity seems very strange compared with human. I would reiterate that identity is a basic atribute for life in general...

From the angle of "determinism," it's quite unproblematic to conceive of a deterministic robot having free will in a deterministic universe. — gurugeorge

Is that a new disagreement? :)

I disagree with your picture of a robot with programmed free will in the deterministic universe. (The deterministic universe is originally Descartes' picture.) I have another picture of the universe - agent-driven universe. In this universe, an agent (with an "I") has various degrees of freedom (Free Will)...

I guess that we will difficult path to an agreement here. I suggest the complex adaptive system theory to bridge this chasm. (I do not trust Wikipedia, but it might be helpful as an introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system ...)

Hearty, :cool:

There are two links to yeast's altruism:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/altruism-selfishness-evolution-mathematics-princeton-bath-university-a7148471.html ;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140606/ ;

Hearty, :cool:

I guess that we will difficult path to an agreement here. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Yeah, I think your position is too Panpsychist for my tastes :) As I said, I'm willing to admit that there's a kind of directedness and teleology baked into nature, but that's not yet identity, which requires an internal modeling capacity, which requires a level of computing sophistication simple organisms just don't have.

That is why I'm talking about the kernel of identity.

Essentially, every living unit needs to have at least a kernel of a description of its world and itself within it. That is required for an organism to navigate through its world...

At each higher level, there are new complexities added...

Complex Adaptive Systems is not panpsychism. The theory is well modelled and simulated...

Enjoy the day, :cool:

Here are four links on identity of pea and one argument pro and con:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2745.2003.00795.x ;
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00425-013-1910-4 ;
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050811104308.htm ;
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/11/3863 ;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4222137/ ;

And here is an attempt to interpret data in a different way:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173758 ;

However, the last link does not explain how plants distinguish between self and non-self. It also does not take into account that a single plant was drafted into two separated plants with identical genome...

And there is more... :)

Hearty, :cool:

... an internal modeling capacity, which requires a level of computing sophistication simple organisms just don't have. — gurugeorge

As I said, an organism needs at least a description of its world and itself within it required to successfully navigate in its world. The description can be rudimentary. Please note that even smallest unicellular organisms have a very complex genome...

Enjoy the day, :cool:

The description can be rudimentary. Please note that even smallest unicellular organisms have a very complex genome... — Damir Ibrisimovic

Yes, I understand, that's the allowance I was making for directedness and teleology. There must indeed be some kind of rudimentary, "blind" computation of boundaries, etc. But the point I was making was that you don't get identity in the sense we're talking about, where free will comes into the picture, without the capacity for self-reflection. The organism may "know" about boundaries, in the sense that they're automatically computed and taken account of in its peregrinations, but it doesn't know in the way that we know, it isn't modelling itself to the degree that it actually has a sense of its own identity.

But the point I was making was that you don't get identity in the sense we're talking about, — gurugeorge

I was under the impression we agreed that human identity is indeed more complex than yeast's. The only thing we need now - is to weed out deterministic terminology. There are no cause and effect driven robots and computations.

Hearty, :cool:

The only thing we need now - is to weed out deterministic terminology. There are no cause and effect driven robots and computations. — Damir Ibrisimovic

I don't see how you can get away from talk about cause/effect and determinism, especially if agency talk can be broken down into deterministic talk. On the other hand, it might be possible to cast deterministic talk in terms of agency talk, but that strikes me as analogous to preferring to calculate the orbits of the planets from a geocentric point of view: theoretically, you could do it, but why?

The joke presupposes exactly what is at issue. One cannot give away something they've never had. Poor language use doesn't make a good argument. Talking in terms of giving away free will is talking about giving up on the idea or giving up the belief in free will.

I don't see how you can get away from talk about cause/effect and determinism, especially if agency talk can be broken down into deterministic talk. — gurugeorge

Descartes considered the universe as a gigantic "clock" - devised and put in motion by God. The tick-tock of the "clock" were causes and effects. (The clock was back then the most complex automata.)

Shortly after we had automata of all kinds - like The Duck and automatic looms using punch-cards... After we have the first adding/subtracting machines and later the first conceptual computer...

The agents in Complex Adaptive System theory - are not like cause & effect. They are rather in interplay with other agents within the web of agents...

You are partly correct that the agency can be simulated within cause & effect driven - deterministic machine. The simulation is based upon the iteration of N unidirectional steps. The reason is simple - we do not have the hardware. There are suggestions for agent ↔ agent hardware, but we must wait...

Hearty, :cool:

Talking in terms of giving away free will is talking about the idea or the belief in free will. — creativesoul

The scenarios of the joke are simple enough to test it in a cafe with a friend. Since we can assume that enough people tested the scenarios from 22 May 2011 - we can start to talk about it as a theory...

Hearty, :cool: