Asymmetrical Information

As they say in "The Princess Bride," I don't think that word means what you think it means.

The experiment has nothing do do with free will, which is usually contrasted with determinism, not with physical disability.

Actually, plenty of philosophers ('compatibilists') think free will is perfectly compatible with determinism.

The next time you want to test whether people can walk, break their legs, and then ask them to walk to the corner store.

I mean: I believe in hormones, in mental illness that has a physical cause, in Phineas Gage. And I believe that those who do not have mental illnesses or brain damage mostly do, in fact, have something that I could call free will.

People would do well to remember that Adams is a cartoonist and comic writer.

Maybe the surgeon could ask the patient to levitate and shoot lasers out of his eyes as well.

Perhaps Scott Adams was, uhm, 'celebrating Christmas early' when he wrote that.

Probably not, but that would make for an entire Pandora's Box worth of irony, and I like irony.

Adams would seem to believe I can prove there's no such thing as internal combustion by pouring sugar in his gas tank.

Experiments have shown that motor activity associated with movement preceeds conscious awareness of the intent to move. However the conscious mind has the capacity to prevent action, based on conscious thought. This leaves a lot of neuroscientists talking about "free will" vs. "free won't."

http://dericbownds.net/2006/07/free-will-free-wont-or-neither.html

Of course, throwing this back to the cerebral cortex begs the question of whether 'free will' is really synonymous with conscious thought and if so how should we interpret the conscious mind giving feedback to and altering the subconscious mind.

Adams is saying that, since the brain is subject to the same laws of physics as everything else, the various interaction between our neurons are as predictable and inescapable as everything else in the universe. In Adams's view, it's all a matter of cause and effect.

The reductio ad absurdum of Adams's theory is that, at the very instant following the Big Bang, careful analysis of every property of every bit of matter and energy would have allowed a scientist to predict that I would be writing this post, just as I am writing at the moment, down to last typo. It was, after all, just cause and effect. (To be fair, Adams's theory still works even if you don't go that far back -- actually, it probably works even if you allow for quite a lot of randomness in how the universe works.)

People would do well to remember that Adams is a cartoonist and comic writer.

Adams would do particularly well to remember it.

actually, it probably works even if you allow for quite a lot of randomness in how the universe works.

The notion of a mechanistic universe was mostly destroyed by the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, which described matter as a sort of probability cloud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Determinism.2C_quantum_mechanics_and_classical_physics

The Bohm interpretation seeks to describe a post-QM deterministic universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation

Cisco

even if you allow for quite a lot of randomness in how the universe works

Because initial conditions tend to have a huge effect on final outcomes, even a tiny bit of randomness could make accurate predcitions impossible. (The so-called 'butterfly effect')http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Or maybe I've misunderstood what you were saying.

Randomness is not important to his point about free will. If you want to argue to him that your actions are fundamentally random (and therefore not under your control), he will accept that as easily as that your actions are completely determined by a previous state (and therefore not under your control). You have a bit of an argument to make between "my brain fires at random" to "and therefore I can control what I want/think/do."

Of course, if you take Hume's interpretation of free will, this is not an issue.

"The reductio ad absurdum of Adams's theory is that, at the very instant following the Big Bang, careful analysis of every property of every bit of matter and energy would have allowed a scientist to predict that I would be writing this post, just as I am writing at the moment, down to last typo.'

Scientists are a long way from being able to perform that kind of prediction, but the Christian God would certainly have the necessary powers. I mean, whatever initial Big Bang started this universe, a Christian couldn't deny that God would have known what the outcome would be. So why didn't he tweak that initial Boom and avoid the rather pointless (if you assume humans were the goal) First Extinction?

Ah, yes, a mystery. That always works. "A miracle occurs." How often does one accept in a grant proposal or risk analysis session?

Adam's belief is that we have no free will as we are "wet robots", programmed like other robots. One of his examples is that obese people are programmed to eat more than others, therefore we should not criticise obese people for being obese.

But the human mind is not programmed like a computer is programmed, i.e. someone sat down and created the program. In that case you can say that the computer did not decide, the programmer did, so the computer does not posses free will.

But the human mind is a hugely complex mismash of genetics and experience and random interactions (including quantum effects), so that it is literally impossible to recreate the impulses that created a decision. How is this different from free will? The mismash produced a decision (it was not random)and the decision was not predictable even by the mismash before the mismash made the decision. What else is meant by free will?

To take the obese person example, it is rational to criticise the obese person for eating too much as it is a decision made by the persons mismash and what you are doing is trying to add another factor into the persons mismash's next decision. (Yes I am aware that there are many causes of obesity)

Isn't Scott Adams the one who "willed" himself to speak again?

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/good_news_day.html

So why didn't he tweak that initial Boom and avoid the rather pointless (if you assume humans were the goal) First Extinction?

Presumably because He had reasons neither of us is aware of -- which would render incorrect your use of the word "pointless" -- for said first extinction.

@Shelby: A *wildly successful* cartoonist and writer of things like #1 best sellers. Not Adam's book, but a good anecdote from this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Our-Fathers-Lessons-Daughters/dp/1400064805

ends with "That's one dumb ass lawyer.", said by a plumber.

@Cisco: The good news about capturing the state of the big bang and then figuring out what would happen later is that it would pretty much require a universe, and it would seem very real. Physics and information theory are all tangled up.

@Ryan: The Butterfly Effect is popular, but overblown; a good analogy from the linked article is that the ball still ends up at the bottom of the hill; the path can differ, but the larger effect(it rolls down) dominates. The rhino sneezes, but the breeze doesn't really notice.

The whole debate presupposes that it isn't interesting to live life as a prisoner of fate, anxiously awaiting what is going to happen next. I disagree, I am quite interested in finding out what I will do next. As far as the Economist article linked from the Adam's blog post, it isn't that worrisome that we might not have free will, it is easy enough to coach our definition of freedom with ideas about minimizing external influences, which still requires all sorts of limits on what other people can do to you and your surroundings. Minimal determinism, or local determinism, if you like.

Just to be clear, I don't agree with Adams's theory. I'm rationally ignorant on the subject of free will. But I do agree with what Zubon said. And with what Max said.

John, Emily H., and Jim Henley, you rock.

Your response to this type of argument is why I stopped reading Adams' website. The smugness he displays while making these shallow little bubble-bursting thought experiments is off-putting.

And, as you three ably and eloquently demonstrated, each is easily dealt with in one sentence or less.

even a tiny bit of randomness could make accurate predcitions impossible.

But there are situations where micro-level randomness gets beaten down to predictability at the macro-level. Take phase transitions, for example, or chemical reactions. You can perfectly well model them so that adjacent molecules have some random percentage chance to form a bond with each other, and that percentage chance changes with temperature. The mathematical properties of percolation guarantee that at some temperature there will be an instantenous shift between one phase and the next-- the probability of essentially all molecules being connected by a chain of bonds suddenly goes from zero to one, even though the probability of any one bond appearing changes by only an infinitesimal amount.

So while the Butterfly effect may appear in some situations, there are also very important mathematical cases which cause randomness to be resolved into something more deterministic, in a case like the Komogorov zero-one law. Anything involving percolation, for instance.

I hope Jane was citing this because it's so silly, not because she thinks it's a good argument.

Free will has nothing to do with the mechanical and electrical connections of the body. To argue as such is to wildly miss the basic meaning of free will.

You have a bit of an argument to make between "my brain fires at random" to "and therefore I can control what I want/think/do."

While people's decisions might be confined within certain parameters much more than they'd like to believe, it isn't really possible to prove or disprove 'free will.' If your experiment confines itself to materialistic assumptions, you'll get a materialistic answer regardless of the results of the experiement. While we can certainly improve our ability to understand and predict how the human mind works, I'm arguing for a certain degree of agnosticism.

Max - The Butterfly Effect is popular, but overblown

I'm fine with any example. I was just using the most popular one, for the sake of consistency.

John Thacker - I agree. There are attractors in chaotic systems. I didn't want to dip my hands into all of chaos theory, which I'm probably not fit to properly cover anyways. I just wanted to dispute the notion that the universe, and therefore awareness, is deterministic.

If your experiment confines itself to materialistic assumptions, you'll get a materialistic answer regardless of the results of the experiement.

If by materialistic assumptions you mean measurable and quantifiable, yes, you'll get quantifiable results.

If you want to make completely unfalsifiable metaphysical arguments, we may as well not be having this discussion.

Maybe the surgeon could ask the patient to levitate and shoot lasers out of his eyes as well.

That would surely be more interesting if the patient did it .... ;)

Of course the real implication from Adam's statements is that he deserves no credit for Dilbert or other endeavors -- after all, he had no choice, so it is more than fair that he not be paid for them.

But we can't help ourselves, so he gets paid anyway.

Don't conflate materialism and determinism.

There are deterministic interpretations of QM.

If QM means human action isn't deterministic, it also means computers and chains of dominoes aren't deterministic -- so QM indeterminism doesn't by itself make for free will.

May I recommend compatibilism?

Adams is funny, but I think his argument is like the joke about the scientist and the frog. He taught the frog to jump on command, then started cutting off legs one at a time. After the fourth limb was removed, the scientist concluded that the frog had finally lost its sense of hearing.

(There are so many holes in his argument that it cannot be taken other than as a joke.)

Do people who comment on economic matters without any appropriate education sound this dumb to those who do have such education? Oh, sure, it's funny, but funny in the way that people who talk about selling each unit at a loss and making it up on volume are when you aren't quite sure if they're in on the joke or not.

I think he's serious, not joking. I had a long email exchange with him years ago about his "alternative" theory of gravity. He asserted that his theory couldn't be disproved; I pointed out several easy tests, all of which were actually ocurring at that moment. He claimed that he didn't understand me (he wasn't trying) and that "a 'proof' that can't be communicated is by definition not a proof."

A funny guy, but not, I think, as intellectually honest as he could be.

I think Daniel Dennett most correctly understands the question and answers it about as well as we are able.

van Inwagen's work on the subject is also worth one's time.

Rob_Lyman, I don't mean to threadjack, and I'm not going to contest your response; this is just out of curiosity. I'm familiar with Adams's "alternative" gravity theory. Could you tell me what your several easy tests were?

I'm assuming that this is Scott Adams' variant of the old joke about a scientist experimenting on a frog:

The scientist places the frog in an enclosed area and shouts "JUMP!" He observes the reaction and writes on his notepad: "Frog with two hind legs jumps ten feet upon hearing me shout 'JUMP!'"

The scientist then cuts off the frog's left hind leg and places it back in the enclosure before shouting "JUMP!" again. He again observes the reaction and writes: "Frog with one hind leg jumps five feet upon hearing me shout 'JUMP!'"

The scientist next cuts off the frog's right hind leg, places it back into the enclosure, and shouts "JUMP!" again. The frog doesn't move. The scientist shouts "JUMP!" a second time, and again the frog doesn't move. The scientist nods thoughtfully and writes: "Frog with no hind legs is deaf."

I agree with the commenters who argue that it doesn't make sense to deny free-will just because there is a component of determinism in the process. Even if we are just like complex computers with processes for decision-making, that doesn't necessarily negate the possibility of free-will. I don't think the condition for free-will needs to be complete randomness. That is almost more an argument for a soul.

One relevant consideration is whether or not a computer will ever be capable of free will. On that question, I would have to argue yes. In my opinion, the existence of programming does not negate free will--rather, it is the type of programming that is important. If it is a program that allows the computer (or person) to make independent decisions based on individual learning and subjective considerations of fact, that is free will. Programming that can be reduced to a simple if-then statement is not. One way to think about it is this: is there a programming methodology that would allow two computers with the same ORIGINAL programming to arrive at two different results in a decision-making process? If the programming is based on learning and individual considerations of truth, as well as a self-programming process, then I would say this is entirely possible. And I would probably consider that free will, even though it results from a deterministic process.

Woodstock: In what way is it free will, if it's all strictly deterministic? Different data producing different results (and different data causing different self-changing-code to be generated) doesn't make computers have free will, after all.

(Me, I think the whole thing's a waste to argue about, in that we have the experience of free will even if we do not, in fact, have it. And further, we can't not experience our ongoing life as "free will" at the most basic level (even if individual actions can be constrained by external forces, of course - being in prison doesn't make you lack free will, just free action).

Given that, it doesn't matter if there is in actuality free will or not, even if we can agree on a definition of the terms such that we could have a meaningful discussion about whether or not a computer could have it, and how we could tell if it did.

This is roughly Strawsonian Compatibilism.)

I'm compelled to post on this thread, but have the free will not to say anything of use. Hope This Helps.

ellipsis,

Naturally you would have posted that since you:
don't get enough sleep
like pizza
and think gas prices are too high

Gerald Ford Remembered for His 'Calm and Steady' Hand

Sigivald, your rhetorical question "In what way is it free will, if it's all strictly deterministic?" has force only if you assume that compatibilism is false. So you're just begging the question.

Person:

I don't know what Rob's tests were, but the one that occurred to me was that if the alternate theory were true, objects couldn't orbit due to gravity.

Consider, a planet with a moon "North" of the planet it's orbiting. The moon is travelling "East". Since gravity never accelerates things (they just expand), the center of the moon will always remain to the "North" of the center of the planet. Of course, what we see is the moon orbiting the planet, occasionally being "South" of it.

Dave: In a sense, that's my point. Until we define "free will" such that we're all talking about the same thing using those words, we can't even meaningfully discuss it.

I don't so much "assume compatibilism is false" as require that the discussion of it be made, including compatibilism's claims about what "free will" means - which aren't exactly the same as what non-philosophy-of-will people mean by the term.

(Thus also my digression about the answer not even really mattering for existential reasons. Compatibilism's truth or falsehood don't even actually matter, as I've put it - though one could also say, as I did, that I'm being a Strawsonian compatibilist by doing it in that way.)

Philosophers get really angry at scientists blaming everything to the big blub gooyie stuff we call brain. They have been working on the soul, the I and perception for many years... but this is besides the point. Wouldn't the free will come into play say if the surgeon asked do you WISH to speak, not that whether you can or not. On the same line of argument you can't ask a blind person to see and think they are not free. Freedom is a very complicated matter ...

Philosophers get really angry at scientists blaming everything to the big blub gooyie stuff we call brain. They have been working on the soul, the I and perception for many years... but this is besides the point. Wouldn't the free will come into play say if the surgeon asked do you WISH to speak, not that whether you can or not. On the same line of argument you can't ask a blind person to see and think they are not free. Freedom is a very complicated matter ...

Person, Orbit:

Mr. Adams rejects the orbit argument against his theory of gravity on the grounds that his theory "doesn't have to explain everything." This would be one of the reasons I consider him intellectually dishonest.

My tests are two: first, examine the gravity on the near side of the moon. It is easily shown that if the Earth is expanding, it will strike the surface of the moon in very short order unless the moon is accelerated away. This, in turn, means that anything on the surface of the moon should be rapidly flung towards the Earth. As I recall (it has been a number of years), Mr. Adams replied with 1) I don't understand your math (basic arithmatic with one squared number) and 2) My theory doens't have to explain everything.

My second test was to examine the difference in growth rates of a relatively dense metal ball and a lightweight one made of balsa or plastic. The rates are easily computed (and Adelburger of the Univ. of WA has shown that gravity operates the same down to milimeter distances using small steel balls) and it can be shown that they will diverge quickly enough to be easily measured by laser interferometry. At the time I was working in a lab with a Fabry-Perot interferometer that could approximate this test; the results were negative.

As an aside, Adelburger's experiment would not have worked if Adams' theory were true, but the explanation is more involved.

Adams again claimed not to understand me (how hard is it to understand: a heavy ball has more gravity, it must expand faster than a light one of the same diameter, and you can measure the difference), and declared "an proof that can't be communicated is by definition not a proof."

That would be the second reason I found him intellectually dishonest.

Test of free will: After threatening to play a taped compilation of Jimmy Carter speeches, ask a surgeon to undertake a test of free will while performing brain surgery. If the surgeon refuses, she has free will.

Rob_Lyman and Orbit: Thank you.

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