I don’t know which examples you are talking about. That is why I asked.
Above are the bases of the actions that humans take. Not free will.
Free will sounds too vacuous and pointless for its being causes for actions. It is same meaning as saying “unknown reason”, because free will doesn’t stand for anything meaningful.
In what sense is it free, and how does will different from want, desire or like, there is no logical explanations for that.
I am going for a coffee, because I just want one. But I cannot say it is my free will telling me to go and have a coffee.
I agree partly with your idea on panpsychism. It is a type of an ancient religion or shamanism in its origin. It is really odd to see some folks still follow the idea even in this day and age. Why do we call something as sham, when looks or sounds like blatantly fake, lies and untrue?
If you asked me, I would say, it is daft to say cats and dogs are conscious. We don’t say they are conscious. We should say they are awake or alert.
Consciousness is a word for humans for exhibiting their mental ability for interacting with the world and others in intelligible manner along with verbal communication.
So a freely willed act needs to be intended. But you have denied that. You are contradicting yourself.
Again, that is just stating your conclusion as if it was an established fact. It is only true if free will doesn’t exist.
Free will sounds too vacuous and pointless for its being causes for actions. It is same meaning as saying “unknown reason”, because free will doesn’t stand for anything meaningful.
That might be true of most people, but you cannot seriously accuse me of it, because I am specifying exactly what this means. When we make a difficult decision we do not always know exactly why we made it, because the situation is too complicated. We “just know”. We feel it. This is not “for no reason”. It’s not random.
Take Penrose’s example of mathematicians “just knowing” that Godel sentences are true, even though this is not a computable result. Is that “for no reason”? If it was a random guess, then it would produce the correct result.
It is free because we could have chosen otherwise. We do not choose what we desire. We desire all sorts of things we know we shouldn’t have/take.
Free will doesn’t tell you anything. You want the coffee for biological reasons. Your choice about whether or not to actually drink some coffee is a free will choice. And it is not always easy. Some people are addicted to coffee and it damages their lives in various ways. Alcohol is an even better example.
No. I have told you at least ten times that no intention is needed. I am not contradicting myself, because my position has been entirely consistent. You just put words into my mouth and then claimed I contradicted myself. Please do not do that again.
Slipping on a banana cannot have anything to do with free will (unless you did it on purpose for comic effect). I already explained this: free will, as I have defined it, is directly dependent on having an accurate model of reality, with respect to your free will. If you aren’t aware of the banana, then you cannot choose to slip on it. You cannot assign a value to a future where you slip on a banana unless you are aware of the banana. You can only choose between options you are aware of.
Not quite saying free will doesn’t exist. Just saying there seem to be more reasonable grounds for our actions than free will.
Free will exists in the form of words, just like God and immortality. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It exists but it could be irrelevant or meaningless?
It is like saying, we feel God, God is in our minds, we just feel it. Yes, of course you could say that. But it is not giving us the concrete grounds for its existence or meaning.
But we could also say, it is not free. I just liked to have coffee instead of tea or coco drink. For liking something it would be one’s preference rather than freedom which it is based on.
Free sounds like as if something was banned or repressed from doing, but it is released from the obstruction. Or where you have to pay for something to get it, but now you are allowed or offered to be getting it without paying for it.
Most folks just drink whatever they like to without thinking it is free will telling them to do so.
Free will only comes to issue to be excuses, when some folks frame the actions or choices of others to say, you are responsible for your actions based on your own free will, and you better pay for it.
It just sounds empty and vacuous to say it was your free will that you broke your neighbor’s window by throwing a stone. It really doesn’t say much more than you are responsible for the damage, and you must pay for it.
The actual motive for throwing a stone to your neighbor’s window would have been a lot more complicated historical or psychological reasons than a simple free will.
Yes, you said that no intention is needed for free will. But when I asked you whether unintended actions are freely willed, you said no as well. So you are saying that no intention is needed for a freely willed act, but an act without an intention is not freely willed.
OK. Let me try to explain again, because right now you’ve got a very strange notion of free will. You are equating free will with planning ahead. So if I think now that I fancy goose for dinner this Christmas, I’ve filed that away as something called “an intention”, and my subsequent decision to actually purchase a goose (the moment I place the order and click the “buy now” button), is a free will decision only because that previous “intention” had been filed.
That isn’t free will. It’s got nothing to do with free will. The will isn’t free or not based on whether or not we are acting according to some previous plan. It is free if the laws of physics make it possible to have changed our mind at any point up until the moment we click on “buy”. Free will is an act which always takes place in the present. If at the last moment I change my mind and decide I want venison instead, then that too is a free will decision. It doesn’t cease to be free because I previously planned (“intended”) to buy goose.
I am talking about the way consciousness operates, and from the perspective of consciousness it is always NOW. Free will only takes place in the now. It is about making a choice about what to do NOW.
“Making a plan” doesn’t commit you to anything. Free will happens at the instant of commitment – an irreversible decision about which future you prefer.
What “seems reasonable” to one person is not what seems reasonable to others, and “seems reasonable” isn’t enough to base a philosophical conclusion on.
Free will exists in the form of words, just like God and immortality. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It exists but it could be irrelevant or meaningless?
All those things are metaphysical concepts which science and pure reason cannot conclusively establish the existence or non-existence of. The fact that they are words doesn’t tells us anything about whether they refer to anything real or not.
No, this is different. In Penrose’s example of mathematicians being able to “just see” the truth of Godel sentences, nobody disputes the claim that mathematicians can indeed see this. If everybody “feels God” then this too would be a very different example.
There is a better example anyway. It is called “the Frame Problem”, and it has always plagued AI systems. When assessing how to act in real time, AI/robots have no means of knowing what is important and what isn’t. So they end up with an exponential set of questions, and they have no way of knowing which set of questions leads to important information, and which (most of them) are utterly irrelevant. This results in paralysis, or in bad decisions.
While the FP is best known as a practical/engineering problem in AI, it also sets up a fascinating question about why humans, and conscious animals, do not suffer from the same problem. We instinctively know what matters and what doesn’t, and this applies at all moments we are conscious. We do not spend most of our time making pointless calculations about irrelevant things. So what’s the difference? The answer is that our brains are making non-computational value judgements at all times, and we do not know how we do this. Indeed, if we try to think about how we do it, it goes wrong.
We could do, but only if we had already decided that free will isn’t real.
Exactly. Free will is about our actions in the present moment, and we don’t continually think about thinking. We just decide what we want from the menu. I am saying that the metaphysical basis for these decisions are valuations about different possible futures. The act of will is the act of assigning high value to a specific future.
Free will is important for more than one reason. Yes, one of them is to do with morality and law. But it is also relevant to metaphysics and spirituality, and meaning.
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Of course. As is saying it was your arm that is responsible. The entity responsible is YOU…technically your informational self-model (your actual “self”).
But having an intention doesn’t necessarily mean an extensive planning. Having an intention means being committed to performing an act. It can occur on the spot - you walk by a shop window, catch sight of a goose, and suddenly an intention to buy goose appears in your mind and you intentionally go right in and buy it. So, whenever you perform an intentional act, you are driven by an intention to perform the act.
By changing your mind you change your intention. Now your intention is to buy venison.
So I repeat that a freely willed act requires an intention to perform it, because otherwise you can’t have control over the act, like when you unintentionally slip on a banana peel.
“Being committed to performing an act” is something like getting engaged being a commitment to getting married. The only free will involved there was the act of commitment. There is no seperate intention that has to exist before the commitment. You are setting up an infinite regress of intentions which does not exist in the real world.
Libertarian free will is a claim about the metaphysical nature of reality, and the only thing that matters is the choices you are making in the present moment. Whether or not you have previously made a plan or a commitment only matters to other people. What’s the point in making a commitment to yourself? This is all completely irrelevant. What matters is the action you are taking right now, and whether or not you previously considered it, planned it or “made a commitment” does not matter. All that matters is what happens in the “now”, and what we do now is not determined by any previous thoughts we had. It is an ACT, not a thought about future actions.
How many times are you going to repeat the same unsubstantiated assertion?
You invent some ontological thing called “an intention”. There is no scientific or rational justification for believing in it, and it doesn’t matter if you assert it 100 times, it will not become any more true.
QM is empirically probabilistic, meaning random, but with measurable probabilities. Being empirically random, it means that zero information can be gleaned from quantum events. No messages can be sent from elsewhere using the mechanism, and that in particular includes supernatural choice. In particular, humans have no ability to steer a quantum measurement to a particular value, and that ability would be required for LFW.
Thus LFW predicts otherwise: Demonstration of such an ability is required, and doing so would rock the scientific world, requiring a rewrite of over a century of progress.
I am asking for an example of a plant not collapsing a wave function, not a plant not having a brain. For instance, a plant grows toward the light. Sans a wave function collapse, there is no particular direction to grow. I can give similar examples for rocks requiring collapse.
OK, a valid interpretation is that the entire universe really is in superposition, in which case the plant, rock and human just get entangled with the external states, which is functionally the same thing as collapse. Humans would not in any way be special in this regard.
Plant entangled with light to east grows east. Etc. No collapse at all given that interpretation.
Given that interpretation, you need to give an example of going to phase 2, and not just getting entangled with each of the various possible states.
Point is, your view boils down to an assertion of biocentrism (life can do what nothing else can) and geocentrism since apparently Earth is the center of the universe, having evolved decision-making things first. I can’t disprove it, but I also find zero evidence for that.
Yes. Or when you act reflexively. Turn your head and see a baseball coming at your face. If it’s too fast and close, there’s nothing you can do, and you get hit.
If there’s slightly more time, you move reflexively, and your face is safe.
If there’s enough time, you can actually choose an action. There’s time to catch it, or duck, or step aside, etc. And it doesn’t make sense to say you didn’t intend to do whichever you choose and did.
Are you seriously asking what’s the point in doing something intentionally?
But that depends on whether the Born Rule holds at all times, including in situations where it is completely impossible to test whether or not it holds. Parapsychology experiments have been producing small positive results for decades – just enough for the believers to claim a signal (especially since it has happened so many times), but not enough to convince the skeptics, most of whom are 100% certain such things are impossible. This is an empirical stalemate – we are not in a position to draw any firm conclusions from these results.
So we don’t actually know whether or not QM is empirically random. Because of this, I suggest we must retire “supernatural” as a technical term (it was never quite clear what it meant anyway), and replace with:
Naturalism, Praeternaturalism and Hypernaturalism | Two-Phase Cosmology
Naturalism is belief in a causal order in which everything that happens can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature.
Hypernaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are events or processes that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature.
Praeternaturalism is belief in a causal order in which there are no events that require a suspension or breach of the laws of nature, but there can be exceptionally improbable events that aren’t reducible to those laws, and aren’t random either. Praeternatural phenomena could have been entirely the result of natural causality, but aren’t. See Pauli’s Prae-Physics and the Unus Mundus.
No messages can be sent from elsewhere using the mechanism, and that in particular includes supernatural choice.
I agree that praeternatural causality can’t be used to send messages.
In particular, humans have no ability to steer a quantum measurement to a particular value, and that ability would be required for LFW.
How do you know that? It is an open question.
Thus LFW predicts otherwise: Demonstration of such an ability is required, and doing so would rock the scientific world, requiring a rewrite of over a century of progress.
Why should this be empirically testable, apart from the aforementioned PSI experiments? Just because it is untestable doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Science has limits.
In 2PC, “having a brain” and “collapsing wavefunctions” always come together. Animals can collapse wavefunctions because they have brains – the animal has to have a perspective, and care about its own future. This gives enormous selective advantage, which is why animals are at the top of every food chain.
OK, a valid interpretation is that the entire universe really is in superposition, in which case the plant, rock and human just get entangled with the external states, which is functionally the same thing as collapse. Humans would not in any way be special in this regard.
That is just MWI, isn’t it?
I am not sure I understand the question. “Going to phase 2” means something is conscious of a classical world. If you could get rid of all the animals on Earth then phase 2 would cease. There would be no more classical-relativistic reality. The plants can’t continue to exist in Phase 1 on their own.
It is not an “assertion”, because it is the conclusion of a long chain of reasoning, not an assumption being used as a premise. But I am certainly talking about biocentrism – especially consciousness-centrism. Here is a quote from the book, which was sufficiently controversial that i left it out of the wiki. It is the conclusion of Chapter 14, which is about the new cosmology.
The Fermi Paradox (problem #15)
The Fermi paradox has always carried a strange mix of curiosity and dread. The universe is old and wide and full of places where life should have taken hold, and yet every radio dish comes up empty. Under 2PC this becomes painfully clear. The primordial wave function could collapse only once, because collapse is not a repeating physical glitch but a metaphysical resolution of contradiction. When that resolution happened, the universe stopped behaving like a Phase 1 generator of branching possibilities and settled into the single embodied history that could host a coherent subject. Phase 1 had something like the power of an unbounded search, but that power only existed before consciousness appeared. Once a subject emerged and valuations had to be unified, that search space was no longer available. The cosmos we inhabit is the one that made it through the threshold. It is not physically impossible that it could happen again, but it is so extraordinarily improbable that we can effectively rule it out (this is the very same “almost certainly false” that appears in the subtitle of Mind and Cosmos). So the question of where everyone is becomes almost rhetorical. If any separate locus of conscious existence ever did arise, it would almost certainly belong to a metaphysically disconnected branch that we can never encounter from inside this collapse. In the world we can interact with, there is no one else. We are it.
Neogeocentrism
It turns out the old geocentrists weren’t as far off as we like to think. Ever since the shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus, people have assumed that once Earth was removed from the centre of the solar system it must also have lost any special place in the larger cosmos. Later we decided the universe didn’t have a centre at all, and most people accepted that even if they never quite understood what it meant. It felt harmless to believe the universe was everywhere and nowhere at once, so no one worried about it. 2PC changes this in a very simple way. If consciousness emerged only once, and if that emergence is what brought Phase 2 into being, then the point of origin for the embodied cosmos is not a spatial coordinate at all but a locus of subjectivity. Our planet does not sit at some geometric centre, but it is the only location that carries the structures capable of embodiment. Earth is the metaphysical centre of the cosmos.
The fate of ΛCDM
From the perspective of the old paradigm, which is also the perspective of academic cosmology, the claims I have made in this chapter are outrageous. I am expecting them to be ignored, dismissed and ridiculed, in that order. But the reality is that if we change the metaphysical foundation – if we reject physicalism and replace it with the hierarchical neutral monism I have described in this book, then the problems that ΛCDM cannot solve either disappear, or are fundamentally reframed. The truth is that ΛCDM is like a ship holed beneath the waterline, and as fast as cosmologists try to seal the holes, more holes appear. This ship is heading for the bottom. The question is when, rather than whether, it finally sinks. The only thing that has been keeping it afloat is the absence of an empirically adequate paradigm to replace it. Or rather I should say was, because the Two-Phase Cosmology is that paradigm. This will be no ordinary paradigm shift though, because physicalism is going down with ΛCDM, because ΛCDM is the best model that physicalism can support.
No. I meant exactly what I wrote. I am using my words very carefully.