According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

Reading the post again, I think I need to reiterate that "free" in terms of "not may, but shall", in terms of "has multiple degrees of freedom available to the heuristic of selection", and in terms of "inside/outside" quality are all completely different usages.

If someone is claiming any of these aren't real somehow, it is up to them to make sure they keep these concepts distinct and shown their work.

For @Janice Rael, this is one of the discussions I was referencing, with respect to identifying generalized structures that are imminently emergent from nature, things which reflects something "deeper in nature than mere names we give them"; these are terms of math associating with the structure of counting things and how counting relates to other sorts of sequential processes.

Contrast this with such other arguments as to whether a hotdog is a sandwich, which is based on the social construct of whether a "sandwich" requires at minimum two topological entities or three. Both such "sandwich-like" constructions have some way of defining them, but which definition belongs to "sandwich" is entirely arbitrary for the time being (although I am on team "hotdog is a sandwich", and assign it to the field of geometric interaction rather than pure topology).

 

[Copernicus]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

Antichris, you snipped this out of context and made it look like I was saying this. In the original context, I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists. Here is the entire paragraph with your snippet in boldface:

"Hard determinists are non-libertarian incompatibilists. That is, they simply deny free will, whereas libertarian incompatibilists deny causal determinism in connection with agents. I think that @DBT is arguing most of the time that compatibilists are really libertarian incompatibilists, but they just don't know it. At least that is the impression I get from what I read in this thread. Compatibilists claim to be determinists, but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it."

In point of fact, I am a compatibilist, and I claim to be a determinist. You should know this from reading my previous posts in this thread. Since several people liked your post, they then accepted your misleading snippet as a claim that I was supporting DBT rather than merely trying to represent his argument from his perspective as I understood it. You owe me an apology.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

This snippet is not just from the same quote above (in orange), but it is from the same sentence. Again, you isolate it from the context and portray it as something I believe rather than my continued characterization of what hard determinists believe. The assumption that you erroneously attribute to me is not an assumption that I start out with. In the context of that paragraph, it was an assumption I was attributing to hard determinists. That is why it looks like what DBT has been saying!!!! You then completely ignored the following paragraph, which stated my actual compatibilist view of free will. Here it is again, for your edification:

"As I've said before, Patricia Churchland struck the right note when she said it is all about degrees of control. Compulsion is about losing freedom of control, and it is under compulsion of that sort that one's will is thwarted or compelled. I haven't read enough of Churchland to understand how she might go about defining free will, and I'm not sure that she ever does. However, languages have an enormous range of expressions to describe events and causation, many of which have to do with how much control an agent has over an action. For example, English has causal verbs like cause, make, force, let, permit, allow, help, enable, prevent, etc. The verb cause is the most neutral in terms of control, but all of the others express varying degrees of control. The concept of control is important in the definition of free will, because it is the basis that human beings use to define standards of responsible behavior. Philosophers talk about "moral responsibility", but I would broaden that to refer to any kind of responsible role in a causal chain of events. Our will is free to the extent that it allows us to satisfy our desires and goals, but it gets complicated when one realizes that individuals have all sorts of conflicting desires and goals. How we prioritize them is important when it comes to assigning a role of agentive responsibility in a causal chain."


Just to repeat. I am a compatibilist, and I have repeatedly taken a position that rejects DBT's hard determinism. You have made it look like I take the opposite position by selectively snipping and replying to a single sentence embedded in a paragraph that lays out how a hard determinist views compatibilism in a post that was responding not to you, but to pood.

 

[Copernicus]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

You are replying to Antichris's post, which completely misrepresented my position on compatibilism. See my previous reply to him.

 

[The AntiChris]

I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists.

Apologies. Having reread your post I can see now that was what you must have intended.

In my defense it was a longish and quite dense post and I made the mistake of skim-reading and that single sentence popped out at me.

 

[Copernicus]

I was representing the way a hard determinist incompatibilist like DBT perceives compatibilists.

Apologies. Having reread your post I can see now that was what you must have intended.

In my defense it was a longish and quite dense post and I made the mistake of skim-reading and that single sentence popped out at me.

No problems, then. Apology accepted. I can be very wordy, unfortunately.

 

[Jarhyn]

Compatibilists claim to be determinists

This sounds very much like DBT's attitude to compatibilists. It implies, rather uncharitably, that compatibilists may not be entirely honest when they "claim" to be determinists.

but the concept of free will must inherently clash with determinism, no matter how hard compatibilists try to define themselves out from under it.

This is straightforwardly wrong.

You, like DBT, start out with the assumption that any conception of 'free will' must necessarily entail a will that is not entirely the product of deterministic influences - this is a common conception but not one that is accepted universally and not compatibilism as it has been defended on this forum (see Marvin Edwards' excellent thread: Compatibilism: What's that About?).

Quite true. I do my work of defining a will as an algorithm: a series of heuristics and other contingent structures that defines, over a wide range of preconditions (possibly even an infinite or even complete set of preconditions) how the system will decide a future state.

When I say this, this future state can in fact be anywhere, either inside or outside of the system, though usually it does involve changing the outside via a change on the inside.

Freedoms in this paradigm are simply the various mappings of pre-condition to post-condition.

"Free will" however, is a misnomer. This is because a "free will" is not addressing generalized wills' degrees of freedom, but rather that a specific will, "the will that ones wills are the product of autonomous operations", is free.

I discuss this in the compatibilism thread and I would heavily lean on the discussion I made there.

I think the "factorio example" is best here, but it will potentially be obscure for people not familiar with such logistics games -- something I find ironic since I use games to explore metaphysics and philosophy as a branch of game theory, and I think anyone can learn more about group and set theory by examining applications of groups and sets in rich ways.

In the factorio example, you have a "belt", and this belt has two "sides", and if you load something onto the left side of the belt vs the right side of the belt, it stays there. If you were to be making products from two different places, two completely different belt lines feeding in, you could track where it came from simply by looking at which side of the belt it is on.

Instead of imagining these products as something simple, like bits of metal, as in the game, you can instead apply this concept of logistic provenance to something like "wills".

Now imagine the system itself manufactures wills from these wills, that it's wills all the way down, that wills from outside come from the "left side" contributor to the systems input belt, and wills from inside get fed back in on the "right side".

The system can easily and promptly identify a REAL property, the "left/right-ness on the belt" of a will as whether it is "coercive" or "free", and we see these words actually map to where they came from, based on locality... At least in the system of the example.

In maintaining a system's directives within its autonomous function (often merely the directive to continue to exist and "hoard" itself), this exercise has value and meaning, because it allows prioritization of wills that more directly align with such directives.

The system may even have a process of examining "left sided" wills and pulling them rightward, a process you could consider suitably analogous to (possibly identical to) "internalization", the system's claiming of an external will as its own.

Of course this abstraction is only so useful, but it serves as a proof that regulatory control over wills makes sense in a deterministic system.

As a result, people confuse this "special will to prefer one side of the belt" as per the metaphor, as if it were something applying the words more generally.

Clearly we can have a will that biases the system towards autonomous action.

In other applications or usages of the utterance "free will" instead we are asking "is the contingent mechanism such that it not-may-but-SHALL activate unto a post-condition", and these are easy to conflate since most people don't acknowledge this distinction. Instead it might be better to only specifically address such a question pedantically as "is the will free" rather than "do they have free will", and maintaining "free will" to discuss the origination points of wills and whether they are internalized -- the metaphorical "left-ness on the belt"

Of course I discussed this all ad nauseum in the other compatibilism threads, and I don't think there are really any more "elementary" proofs to the correctness of the math I use here.

You are replying to Antichris's post, which completely misrepresented my position on compatibilism. See my previous reply to him.

This doesn't change the fact that AntiChris was right about what he said, even if not about the need to say it, nor did I say anything incorrect on the subject either.

 

[Copernicus]

This doesn't change the fact that AntiChris was right about what he said, even if not about the need to say it, nor did I say anything incorrect on the subject either.

What you said about the post was not my concern. It was the fact that you "liked" and also reposted a misreading of my position on compatibilism. We've had enough interaction before that you had more reason to realize that than Antichris did. In any case, I'm satisfied that the matter was cleared up.

 

[steve_bank]

Let me think...yes I've got it now!

I am conscious because I have consciousness. End of debate.

I an aware because I have awareness!

Awareness is the state of being aware! Being aware is the result of having awareness!

I missed my calling, I should have been a philosopher.