Problem Number One: Define "Free Will."
Apr. 15th, 2008 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsRemember "The Ultimate Test?" It had questions like "Estimate the sociological problems which might accompany the end of the world. Construct an experiment to test your theory," and "There is a red telephone under your desk. Start World War III. Report at length on its social-political effects, if any." That's how I feel about reports like this one: Brain Scanner Shows Your Decisions Before You Make Them
I'm really annoyed by much of the reaction to this article, in which people get outraged over the question of whether or not they have "free will." The article shows that before our "decisions" are obvious to us; before we can speak them, the brain performs some operations to reach that decision.
Well, duh. The brain has an electrochemical component to it. Society of Mind theorists, like myself, believe that "making a decision" is comprised of different brain components all making a bid for conscious recognition, and that the brain manifests tie-breaking by fundamental, axiomatic machinery, appeals not to reason but to emotion. Wants, needs, desires, avoidances are not necessarily rational; they're merely successful manifestations of our survival instinct. (By "survival instinct" I don't mean one great impulse, a fight-or-flight moment that takes us over at times of crises, but the overall smorgasbord of emotions with which evolution has equipped us to be social, familial, cultural agents of succesful reproduction.) It takes time for that machinery to work. To claim that "your brain makes a decision and then delivers it to your consciousness" (as the article does) presupposes that consciousness isn't a process itself, but a thing, a destination, an object.
The article points to a fundamental disconnect between two beliefs that most people have about the ways out minds work: one, that it's a mechanical process amenable to outside physical influences, like being hungry, tired, drunk, drugged, or injured; and two, that it is not a mechanical process but one independent of the machinery in which we are free to make decisions without having to admit that those decisions are shaped by environment.
Most people have only a vague definition of free will, what it is, what it means, and so forth. In cybernetics, a word having very little to do with computers, "control" is when Agent A "wills" Agent B into the state Agent A desires. The assumption is that Agent A is a conscious being, and Agent B may or may not be. By this defintion, we have free will; there is no one "controlling" us. For purposes of socializing (and law), we have free will and must act as if others have it; no other reaction makes sense.
So, this article tells us nothing we didn't already know, at it serves only to muddy waters already desperately murky. Ah, well.
I'm really annoyed by much of the reaction to this article, in which people get outraged over the question of whether or not they have "free will." The article shows that before our "decisions" are obvious to us; before we can speak them, the brain performs some operations to reach that decision.
Well, duh. The brain has an electrochemical component to it. Society of Mind theorists, like myself, believe that "making a decision" is comprised of different brain components all making a bid for conscious recognition, and that the brain manifests tie-breaking by fundamental, axiomatic machinery, appeals not to reason but to emotion. Wants, needs, desires, avoidances are not necessarily rational; they're merely successful manifestations of our survival instinct. (By "survival instinct" I don't mean one great impulse, a fight-or-flight moment that takes us over at times of crises, but the overall smorgasbord of emotions with which evolution has equipped us to be social, familial, cultural agents of succesful reproduction.) It takes time for that machinery to work. To claim that "your brain makes a decision and then delivers it to your consciousness" (as the article does) presupposes that consciousness isn't a process itself, but a thing, a destination, an object.
The article points to a fundamental disconnect between two beliefs that most people have about the ways out minds work: one, that it's a mechanical process amenable to outside physical influences, like being hungry, tired, drunk, drugged, or injured; and two, that it is not a mechanical process but one independent of the machinery in which we are free to make decisions without having to admit that those decisions are shaped by environment.
Most people have only a vague definition of free will, what it is, what it means, and so forth. In cybernetics, a word having very little to do with computers, "control" is when Agent A "wills" Agent B into the state Agent A desires. The assumption is that Agent A is a conscious being, and Agent B may or may not be. By this defintion, we have free will; there is no one "controlling" us. For purposes of socializing (and law), we have free will and must act as if others have it; no other reaction makes sense.
So, this article tells us nothing we didn't already know, at it serves only to muddy waters already desperately murky. Ah, well.
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It's too ill-defined a concept...
Date: 2008-04-15 07:16 pm (UTC)How would I go about devising an experiment to test the hypothesis "Elf has free will", and what outcome would I expect to get if he didn't have "free will" ?
I think the "Society of Mind" model makes the most sense, and is best supported by the evidence we have... and a lot of people are freaked out by the idea that the "I" is, in some sense, illusory, in that we don't each have a monolithic, individual consciousness in each of our skulls, a homunculus which is doing the equivalent of pushing buttons and pulling levers so as to make our bodies do what they do, but rather more of a chorus of non-sentient components, from which consciousness arises as an emergent phenomena, and which often writes a story making the consciousness itself the protagonist, a fiction to explain something that happened due to those non-conscious components.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 08:05 pm (UTC)The novel is available under a CC license at http://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm , as is most of the rest of his fiction. The Rifters trilogy is also quite excellent - biopunk disaster fiction, with an extra helping of psychoses.