Does Neuroscience Obviate Free Will?

[OkRad]

HI--

Have any of you all considered the debate re: Free Will vs Determinism? Example: Robert Sapolsky says there is zero free will. His evidence is very convincing. However, Dan Dennet says yes, we have a tiny little scrap of it.

There are many other scientists who also consider this now. A whopping 25% of all we know in neuroscience has come about in the last year or two.....light speed.

Sam Harris, Dawkins, Dennet, Sapolsky, et al. are a few.......

If you have considered this from a neuroscience/science perspective, I would love to know what you think.

Please no opinions that are just based on anecdotal or emotional experience. Please try to keep science at the core unless you have a compelling argument against science in favour or another discipline.

 

[Crossbreed]

Watch the development of AI.
It will hit a glass ceiling.

 

[Wolfsage]

Watch the development of AI.
It will hit a glass ceiling.

Called Skynet.

 

[Wolfsage]

Free Will exists. I've done enough research and living to know.

 

[SDRSpark]

Interestingly, Nikola Tesla has suggested that we do not have free will, as well.

Someone wrote an in depth article about it for their PhD. I just found it, and have only skimmed it, but it appears to be well researched. Here it is (PDF link): https://escholarship.org/content/qt...7923a0538bc4cc59b09ed0e3f51099ce.pdf?t=nvfo39

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Quantum mechanics is the strongest argument to support the existance of free will.it destroys determinism

 

[Tom]

You mean it was all fake? I'm crushed.

 

[Nervous Rex]

Paraphrasing a quote I heard: "Philosophers will argue until they're blue in the face about what is real and what is free will - but they always collect their paychecks on Friday."

Even those who don't believe in free will still make hundreds of decisions every day based on the assumption that they have free will.

 

[Trophonius]

Discussions in free will are eternal because the very concept at stake is poorly defined. What is "free will"?

 

[SimonSays]

What is doing the choosing if not you?

We can be influenced. Fooled. Manipulated. Conditioned. Indoctrinated. All have a bearing on the choices we make. These things interfere with free will but that doesn't mean we don't have it.

The more conscious and aware we are, the more we live in the present moment, the more we exercise free will. We have to know who we are in order to know what we can truly choose. Otherwise we are simply following our conditioning, where we just think we have free will.

 

[SimonSays]

If consciousness comes out of the brain, we have to consider the idea of free will from a specific direction.
Whereas if the brain is a receiver/interpreter of consciousness, that is a whole other possibility entirely.

This moment is all there is. What exactly is this moment? We are only aware of a small amount of what is contained within this moment. As consciousness is vaster then we are aware of, we are always playing 'catch up' with ourselves. A part of us has already decided what needs to happen long before we experience the moment of decision.

 

[Judge]

Please try to keep science at the core unless you have a compelling argument against science in favour or another discipline.

Another discipline? That's easy. Political science.

There was always the much older philosophical argument between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. An interpretation of the nature of man (Hobbes) versus the interpretation of man's inalienable rights (Locke).

Concepts like "free will" and "inalienable rights" are essentially just lofty platitudes. That control of the body politic remains somewhat capricious, based largely on the nature of man, which can reflect anything from generosity to overt oppression. Where the mere exercise of free will likely carries consequences of some sort.

And to date, how many of us are willing to assert that we live in a "generous" body politic?

- Uh huh.

 

[Nervous Rex]

Trying to argue that "there is no free will" is a losing proposition. Sure, you can believe there is no free will, but why bother trying to convince someone else, if they can't choose whether to believe you or not?

 

[Judge]

Trying to argue that "there is no free will" is a losing proposition. Sure, you can believe there is no free will, but why bother trying to convince someone else, if they can't choose whether to believe you or not?

Free will certainly exists. However when one exists within a body politic, the needs and whims of the state always come first. Which tend to reflect the nature of man rather than any recognition of free will, individuality or inalienable rights.

One trumps the other with unending regularity.

No question that Hans and Sophie Scholl clearly exercised their sense of free will. As a consequence, the state separated their heads from their bodies for their disobedience.

That all said, who does one think scientific communities are more reliably aligned with? The state and special interests or the people?

-Uh huh.

 

[Rahere]

HI--

Have any of you all considered the debate re: Free Will vs Determinism? Example: Robert Sapolsky says there is zero free will. His evidence is very convincing. However, Dan Dennet says yes, we have a tiny little scrap of it.

There are many other scientists who also consider this now. A whopping 25% of all we know in neuroscience has come about in the last year or two.....light speed.

Sam Harris, Dawkins, Dennet, Sapolsky, et al. are a few.......

If you have considered this from a neuroscience/science perspective, I would love to know what you think.

Please no opinions that are just based on anecdotal or emotional experience. Please try to keep science at the core unless you have a compelling argument against science in favour or another discipline.

HI--

Have any of you all considered the debate re: Free Will vs Determinism? Example: Robert Sapolsky says there is zero free will. His evidence is very convincing. However, Dan Dennet says yes, we have a tiny little scrap of it.

There are many other scientists who also consider this now. A whopping 25% of all we know in neuroscience has come about in the last year or two.....light speed.

Sam Harris, Dawkins, Dennet, Sapolsky, et al. are a few.......

If you have considered this from a neuroscience/science perspective, I would love to know what you think.

Please no opinions that are just based on anecdotal or emotional experience. Please try to keep science at the core unless you have a compelling argument against science in favour or another discipline.

I'm a seer medium, tried and tested. That means I don't have complete free will. But I'm not continuously hassled by the Boss trying to micro-manage. At the same time it means the Koestler Institute have got nowhere trying to make the paranormal jump through hoops called reproducibility, empiricism, and even Heisenberg determinism.
The fault's within science. Mathematics has shown itself a bounded subject. Therefore it, and any other domain defining itself thereby as a lemma (which includes logic), has a boundary, and a boundary has two sides in an ontological system. You're defining the quantitive, what about the qualitative? I'll have a pound of love, a litre of hate, and three orgasms, please. I'm defining the hardcore as cynics, therefore, knowing the quantity of everything and the quality of nothing.
If you want a laugh, look at the roots of scientific empiricism in Jan van Helmont's 1618 experiment. It's the wildest write-up ever. But that is where it was born, the subversion of his previous paracelsian 4-element belief. And you know what? I'm making headway with the possibility he wasn't barking in his write-up. I'm leaving the best for you to discover yourselves, what the experiment actually was.

 

[Rahere]

Let's tackle it on a pure Neuroscience front, the paper Wendy d'Andrea presented last May at the Boston Trauma Research Foundation's annual conference, in which she demonstrated crossover interoception between both members of a couple where one - and it didn't matter which - carries childhood trauma. BOTH are aware of how each other felt in their bodies. And so were adjusting their behaviour accordingly, meaning they were co-dependant, and that's not freewill.

 

[Rahere]

Another reality. I'm on the London Underground one evening Christmas time, a drunk's making a nuisance of himself. I'm hyperperceptive, master-level Reiki, so my meridians stretch way beyond me. I'm quietly thinking, "Go to sleep", quite hard in his direction, and he obviously gets the message. He whips round, snaps, "You're trying to get me to go to sleep. No I wo..." and promptly did, collapsing into an empty seat behind. This is simple 3rd-sector medicine.

 

[Fino]

Another discipline would be Christianity. The Bible states that nothing can thwart God's plans. Is that a statement against free will or is it too general of a statement?

 

[SusanLR]

Jainism holds hard the determinism that there is no free will because God controls everything.
Science that holds to determinism says our reactions are only from genetic codes or external
events.

That would make us like the robot which is controlled by another source and can reacte only by it's
programming to external events.
I don't believe this is proved by neuroscience. It only proves what the organism is made of on the
chemical and molecular level which may explain why certain actions are in response to those
elements and how they are working.

But, how can it prove what free will really is when we don't know what we really are?

 

[Rahere]

Another discipline would be Christianity. The Bible states that nothing can thwart God's plans. Is that a statement against free will or is it too general of a statement?

Back in the mid 80s, I became aware I was to present myself very precisely at a particular point and time, no questions asked. Constant reminders, all sorts of angles. Dug out when the time was near. And the calling was right, I astonished a congregation, with the exact and immediate answer to their prayer.
That had consequences, of course. I got home from work the next Wednesday, put my bag down, the doorbell went, the churchwardens, "You're coming with us, sunshine."
Round the corner, past Stuart Copeland's dad's place (rehearsal in the garage, Message in a Bottle) to the nextdoor house, the home of the Principal of the Church Army Seminary. The Church Army's the Church of England's social needs outreach. Anyway, a bog-standard prayer/bible study group's going on, except it's packed. We find some space at the back, the usual Aunt Agatha's chilblains finish, the Principal's Message - is different. "I know what I'm going to talk about, but I'm not going to tell you. One of you will." Indignant splutters all round, I realise I've gone and done it proper this time, but with the confidence of knowing the rather odd appointment had been right the previous Sunday, I passed the question upwards in a quick Lord's Prayer, which also cleared my channels, before dropping into deep meditation, making myself tiny and out of the way.
Folks, don't copy this. It was Intended, plans which came out over the next 20 years had been laid long before my parents met, some a hundred years earlier. Jeremiah 1 level. What happened was something spoke throiugh me, which was not from me. The Principal wrote it down, then as I was returning to presence, revealed he'd hidden the text earlier and kept it under watch. Nobody'd gone near it, but the texts matched.
That was the start of a long period of learning how to handle interventions. And doing so. They're not frequent, sometimes five years between, but they are unmistakable. They grew in impact too, until, walking home with the completion of Gandhi's work in my pocket, full of praise and astonishment, I realised I'd been built stepwise to cope - and that the next one, after dealing in world history, had to be the biggie. I was right, the Roman ArchiAssociation of the Eucharist imploded, and the exegetic research was astonishing.

So my answer is, we get as much freewill as possible, and that means, mostly, complete as far as you're concerned. Some bigger frameworks are built you live within, and they raise some constraints. NTs also constrain themselves by social norms.