Posted by alexandra_k on December 17, 2004, at 5:39:22
In reply to Re: Free will conundrum explored » alexandra_k, posted by Mark H. on December 10, 2004, at 20:28:57
Hey. I'm sorry I have taken so long to reply to your post. I thought about it a lot, but then some stuff went down for me.. You may want to print this out cause it's very long. Feel free to ignore as much of it as you want, to ask another question, and / or to tell me more about Buddhism :-)
> I need to confess that I don’t understand the basic paradox: “So IF having free will means that one could have done otherwise, THEN it follows that we have no free will.” How is that so? I sense that you’re on to something important, but it seems circular and impenetrable to me at the moment.Lets say that I am walking along a line in a caf eyeing up a piece of cake and a peach (example stolen from Nagel "What Does it all Mean"). Now:
FREEZE TIME (and let it be called t1)
If determinism is correct then one could use that frozen instant to calculate everything that will happen in the universe forever and ever into the future (according to Laplace's vision) - oh, if we didn't have these tiny finite minds, that is. The future is fixed just like the past is fixed. Ironically we would be able to use t1 to make perfect predictions of the course that the future must take, but not the past. Indefinately many pasts could be consistant with producing t1. This is becasue different causes can have the same effect.Okay, that time stuff was a bit of a digression. But: given the state of the universe at t1 what happens at t2, t3, t4, etc etc is determined and fixed. Move foward an instant to t2 and here we have initiation of action which scientists can measure. At this point we have just started moving for the chocolate cake. Move foward another instant to t3 and you have the 'conscious experience' of making a choice for chocolate cake rather than fruit.
So: the way things are at t1 completely determine the way things are at t2. And t2 occurs before t3. So given all that it seems that:
1) We cannot believe that the state of the world at t1 determines the state of the world at t2, and that given the state of the world at t1 we could have done otherwise at t2. If free will requires that, then we cannot have free will.
2) We also cannot believe that given the state of the universe at t2 it is our 'conscious experience of choice' that causes the action. This has been falsified empirically and thus we cannot have that kind of free will.(I have simplified things rather a lot by ignoring quantum indeterminacies. It is very controversial whether an indeterminacy at the sub-atomic level leads to indeterminacy at the atomic level anyway. But whether it does or does not, whether god 'plays dice' or not, there is no hope for free will in indeterminacies. Whether my actions are determined by determistic or probabilistic laws there is still no room for 'could have done otherwise' free will. It would hardly help the ordinary notion of free will if my beliefs and desires at t1 didn't determine my action at t2. The everyday notion of free will is incoherant.)
You might be thinking 'well a full description of the state of the universe at t1 will include my beliefs and desires which determine what I do at t2. IF my beliefs and desires had been different (if, for example I desired fruit more than chocolate) THEN I would have acted differently at t2. Thats a very good response. It is just that given the way the universe actually was at t1 (given the beliefs and desires that you actually had) you could not have done otherwise. Had your beliefs and desires been otherwise then the description of t1 would have been different.
Sometimes it is hard to figure whether you are missing something or if it is that you understand it fine but are worried about further points. Sometimes students go nuts saying they don't understand and it turns out that they get it fine, they just think they must be missing it because they do not understand how someone could be crazy enough to believe that. I have that at the moment over the reality of possible worlds. (Possible worlds are real, apparantly. Not actual, but real nonetheless just causally isolated from ours. So they cannot even cause us to believe in them! What sort of crazyness is this!!??)
> The idea of a higher/lower order of beliefs makes sense to me, in much the same way as the three ego states of Transactional AnalysisHey, thats interesting I never thought of it like that. I guess they are just different postulated 'structure of minds' postulated in order to explain internal conflict (and lots more too no doubt).
> What is consciousness? How is it different from awareness?
Sometimes the two terms are used interchangably. Sometimes (even scientists) use each term in an idiosyncratic way according to their own operationalised definiton (if you are lucky) and sometimes they change their mind over what they mean by the term through the course of the paper. It lets you draw grander conclusions than you are entitled to, though I suppose it is inadvertant really. The short answer is that many people consider that there can be 'unconscious awareness'. Implicit knowledge (know how) can fall into this category. Or when you are driving and are so wrapped up in your thoughts that you aren't conscious of driving through a large chunk of town. You are 'unconcious' of your surroundings, but you are aware of them on some level so as to stop at lights and not hit anything.
Who is it that is experiencing these states? Where is my “self” located?
Now thats a philosophical question! Descartes attempted to doubt all of his beliefs that could possibly be doubted so as to find out whether any of his beliefs might be immune from doubt. He thought these beliefs that were immune from doubt (the indubitable beliefs) may be able to secure the foundation of human knowledge if it could be shown that most of the ordinary beliefs that we consider to be knowledge could be deduced from these indubitable 'bedrock' propositions. In this way he hoped to secure human knowledge from sceptical worries forever.
Now if he had attempted to doubt all his beliefs one at a time then he would have died before completion. But Descartes, being a smart fellow divided the whole of human knowledge up into two kinds:
1) A-Posteriori beliefs - beliefs about the external world (empirical or scientific knowledge). How can you know you are not dreaming right now? Or to put a more modern spin on the situation how do you know that you are not a brain being kept alive by evil scientists who are feeding you computer simulations of an external world - how do you know you are not in the matrix? This is dream doubt.
2) A-priori beliefs (beliefs that do not require experience such as logic or math). How can you be sure that an evil genius is not interfearing with your reasoning / thought processes so that you are led to error each time you attempt a deduction, proof, or counting of suff etc? You cannot and this is the evil genius / demon argument.WARNING: Don't get too caught up in Cartesian Sceptism. Doing so has led to many a first year (including myself) to go crazy.
Then what he found was that no matter how much he doubted everything there was one thing that was immune to either the evil genius or the dream doubt. The more he doubted, the more he realised that he was doubting. Because doubting is a form of thinking it followed that the more he doubted everything the more sure he became of his existance as a thinking (doubting) thing.
From that we get 'cogito ergo sum' which is usually translated as 'I think therefore I am'. This is a terrible translation, however. By 'cogito' Descartes had more in mind than thinking, he included perception, or any conscious cognitive process, but the real issues with the translation are that:
1) The 'therefore' sounds like he is trying to do a deduction. But it doesn't work as a deduction becasue the evil genius argument shows that deductions are dubitable.
2) WHO IS THE I HE HAS SHOWN TO EXIST???Now it is possible that you were created right NOW and that all your 'memories' were simply implanted into your mind. So he has not shown a thinking thing to persist through time. He has also not shown that there is a thing, a haver of thoughts. So he hasn't proven the existence of a self, or an I - all he is really entitled to is 'thinking (cognition) is going on'.
The location (even the existence) of the self is controversial. I like my own account, but anyway :-)
Dennett considers the neuroscientists search for the self / mind in the brain. You go up the optic nerve, round and round the cortex, and leave on the firing of a motor neuron. On these travels through the brain where is the self, the mind, or the place where it all comes together? Many neuroscientist has concluded: there is no self. But I think, rather, how is neuroscience supposed to help us with the nature / existence of the self?How does studying the hardware help us with the nature / existence of the computer program?
The self must surely be supported by physical processes, but that is not to say that it is a thing in the brain. One way of looking at it (currently in favor) is that the brain is the neural 'hardware' or 'wetware' and the self or the mind is like a high level program realised or implemented on the brain. You can study programming fairly much independently of hardware, and likewise you can study mind or self fairly much independently from neurology.This allows for the possibility of genuinely intelligent robotic creatures with mental states as real as ours. Or to get even more fancy, it allows for the possibility that we may be able to capture someones 'self' as a program, and implement them on a different physical system (e.g., a robot) after they are dead. But then why wait till then, and will the real slim shady please stand up? There are lots of crazy thought experiments on the nature of the self and the notion of personal identity, especially continuity through time. Even ones relationship to ones counterparts (real people on these other possible worlds).
> the direct experience of timeless awareness. Seems like it might be right up your alley.
If I had to pick an established religion I would be a Buddhist. Meditation is great. Every bit as vivid as LSD if you do it for long enough!
Anyways, ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!!!!!!
Have a great weekend
poster:alexandra_k
thread:424323
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041217/msgs/430673.html