Debate: Free will?

I regret that I missed the beginning of the last lecture, but I gathered that Professor Ramachandran was saying that free will is disproved because it can be shown that the brain is gearing up for a deliberate action a considerable time before a person is consciously aware of starting to carry out the action.

However, have experiments (e.g. biofeedback) not shown that a person can deliberately influence brain and body functions which are normally deemed autonomous or unconscious? If so, can we not conclude that free will is actually greater than is otherwise apparent, in that we can exercise it unconsciously? So the result of the former experiment could show that the person is deliberately, unconsciously, deciding whether and when to decide consciously, couldn't it?

By the way, whilst not (to my knowledge!) being schizophrenic, not only can I tickle the sole of one of my feet, I cannot touch it without doing so, which makes things quite difficult when trying to wash it!

Vivien Pomfrey, BSc (Hons) (Open), Dip. Nat. Sci. (Open), current Open University Masters student in medical science

Re: Free Will, does it matter. Whether or not we have free will in the sense I indicated in my earlier post to this discussion (cyboman 24-Apr-2003 09:23
)...i.e., in the sense that we are the "first causes" or "initiating agents" of our actions, does matter.

Discussions about "Free Will" in these terms should be considered separate from ones on "human freedom." More than one philosopher has defined freedom or liberty as the ability to do what one wants to do or in doing what one desires to do. This is the conception of human freedom so important to political and social theorist. . We can certainly admit that human freedom exists in that sense, and uphold it as a value, without going into how one comes to want what one desires or is able to do what one wants to do.

But we must admit, I think, that we cannot resolve the discussion (to give just one example) of whether or not freedom is avalue of utmost importance before all others...than human happiness, or an orderly, well-planned, "survivable" society, for instance, as it is to libertarians like F.A. Hayek of Road to Serfdom fame ...unless in the process we try to decide whether people are autonomous or not, and if not, what are the true causes of our actions. (Voltaire hinted at this when he wrote in his discussion of liberty in Le Philosophe Ignorant" (1766) "...but I can't help wanting what I do want.")

Samuel Johnson affirmed free will completely "in character," by exclaiming,"We have free will and there's an end on't." He could be so dogmatic and final because we always feel free, unless we are under coercion or under some "inner" overt compulsion like a drug addiction, so we are likely to agree to such a dogmatic "truth." It does not follow from this, however, that we need to invent an additional faculty called the "will"--- an additional piece of "metaphysical lumber"-- in order to account for how we are able to act "freely" when not coerced or compelled.

In fact philosphers eventually did devise the will as a faculty, but Plato in his Republic had no concept of the will in our modern sense, but still set up an essential standard for human freedom, that is, a person is free if his/her intellect has mastery over that person's appetite or passions.

I mention all this because I did not in my previous post mean to deny this kind of freedom as fact or a value. Many people when one does take a "hard determinist" position on free will react as if one was denying " human freedom" as a value and a fact as well.

A Neo-Kantian philosopher of the early twentieth century, Hans Vaihinger, in his Philosophy of the "As If" argued that to be human is to live in a world of "social fictions." (His notion of "social fiction" may have originated in Bentham's notion of a "legal fiction.") Fictions in this sense are simply ideas that we hold that do not fit the facts at all, but that we hold for reasons of "survival value."

Vaihinger's Fictionalism holds that people live in a fictional social world because our fictions have utility for individuals and the group...they help us to adapt. Discussing "free will" in a purely functional fashion...in terms of how we "work" as human beings, and concluding that all the causes of what we do originate, if they can be said to have a starting point at all, outside us, never within us...suggests that if we are not truly free in the conventional sense, then our everyday social life is a "fictional" one every time respond to another person (or our own selves) as the sole "starter" of whatever action of that person concerns us at the moment.

So "free will" matters in every human context, from early childhood education, to schooling, to works of art, government , law and economics....every field of human endeavor, in the sense that we should want to be aware in just what way our interpretations of people and our practices in dealing with them...getting desirable results from them..."fit the actual facts" , or are "social fictions" -- illusions -- we hold just because they are useful to us.

Wether free will is an illusion or not makes a world of difference because we will not be so disconcerted by bad results we so often get from other people or ourselves if we reflect that we can scarcely expect to get any other kind with "techniques" founded on fictions, not facts.

free will does exist i would say, but it is something that is learned and not not inherently natural like all assume.
free will is achieved when a person has complete mastery of one self.
although that notion may seem near impossible, that doesent mean its beyond any of us.
most people go about their everyday lives not really knowing why they do what they do or what is the purpose of their actions.
we feel love because it is there, we desire a good night out because it feels enjoyable for some reason and we cant give up smoking because its just too hard...etc...etc!
but what if you decided to negate all of these emotions that run about our minds? what if you made a decision to simply fight all of your own natural instincts?
granted, nobody actually does this because what would be the point! but again, thats not to say it cant happen.
as human beings, no matter how hard it may be, we can always keep our own emotions and desires in check by simply thinking about it!

(back to smoking)... for example, i can simply decide not to pick up that cigarette that my body and mind is telling me i so desperately want, just by simply thinking about it. but surely a thing without free thought would immeditely pick up the cigarette as soon as the feeling entered its head! wouldnt it would be a slave to its qwn desires?
and yes, (of course we are) but again, thats only because we dont know why we do what we do or because we simply cant be bothered with the hassle of battling our instincts all the time.

so my point is, (hopefully! lol ) free will can be learned by understanding your own functions and raising above them!
the functions that govern us are set in stone, but our own ability to understand isnt. so we will always be one better than that we have been handed down, if you will.

Free will is very real.
I, the soul am the driver of the vehicle which is the body. The mind, nature and intellect are all aspects of the soul.

What I choose to do is entirely up to me, and along with that is the responsability that I have to also accept the results to my actions. The seed of action is the initial thought. According to my values, so my thoughts and then my actions.

The soul carries within it like a microchip of all of my actions, which are recorded within it.

Therefore, whatever action I take, will have an equal and opposite return back to me. This is the ancient law of Karma, as I sow so I will reap.

This, I feel is the answer to the question of free will. Yes it exhists, but what is the price?

If by Free Will we mean human beings as the self-causing, initiating agents of their actions, there is no room whatsoever for free will in a strictly scientific account of human action.

T. H. Huxley in his Science and Morals (1886)
Collected Essays IX produced the classic modern refutation of free will from the post-Darwinian standpoint. The full essay, along with all of Huxley's writings are available on the website of the U.S. Clark Univesity. Just key his name and essays into a search engine. This essay is at http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/S-M.html

Briefly in this essay, Huxley refutes free will as a digression in the process of defending himself from an attack on a clergyman. He notes that for humans to be the initiating agents of their actions, those actions would have to have unczused causes. But, notes Huxley, wittily quoting Aquinas and St. Augustine in the orginal Latin, only God actions can be uncaused.....Man is not a God.

In this essay, Huxley wrote:

"Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is improperly called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself?which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine."

The argument has modern validity, and is more than just an essayist's rhetorical ploy. In the modern scientific conception, a "cause" is an "independent" variable and an "effect" is a "dependent variable." There is simply no way of making sense of any action of any organism, human or otherwise, without considering actions to be "dependent" variables.

An intellectual child of Huxley, the American psychologist J. R. Kantor, called his early version of behaviorsim "organismic psychology" -- he was pointing to the fact that there is no way of making scientific sense of human nature unless we consider human beings as organisms, doing what organisms do..interacting with a world. The priority of action is always on the side of that world...that environment...nothing starts within the organism...at least in the modern scientific conception. Almost by simple deduction from the only fruitful form of human knowledge, scienctific inquiry, free will must be an illusion.

But Huxley, not having the benefit of the next the next hundred years of experimental science, seems to contradict this very positon in another essay, http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/DesDis.html
On Descartes' "Discourse Touching the Method of Using One's Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth" (1870)
Collected Essays

Here is what he wrote in part (the first sentence of the next paragraph is very famous and shows up in many books of quotations.)

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close [193] with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me. But when the Materialists stray beyond the borders of their path and begin to talk about there being nothing else in the universe but Matter and Force and Necessary Laws, and all the rest of their "grenadiers," I decline to follow them.

In other words, T.H. Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, has a crush on Rene...Rene Descartes.

Free will has the endorsement of the Catholic Church and has had it for hundreds of years. The Church's defender of that position, Aquinas, Huxley claims he admires for the quality of his intellect...and in our time many philosophers are rediscovering this.

But another theologian of the 20 the Century, Reinhold Niebuhr in his 1941-43 "Nature and Destiny of Man" claims (vol 1, page 61 that "autonomous" (self-caused) man is a pure cultural invention made possible by Christian theology and especially Renaissance thought. "Autonomous man" in whose illusory world we all live, was indispensible, he claims in order that there could be a Liberal cultural tradtion in the West.

[Message from Fiona (Moderator) on 26-Apr-2003 12:44 The BBC and the Open University are not responsible for the content of any external websites.]

So many of the stratergies used when teaching our children - especially in schools - focuses on directing the conscious mind that we assume is under the control of their 'free will'.

Yet much of our learning seems to take place on a subconscious level. So from a practical point of view, when training teachers shouldn't we put more emphasis on addressing the subconscious mind through neuro-behavioural pathways of learning?

Except when coerced or imprisoned or when in the grips of a neurotic disorder, we experience freedom to chose at any moment what we will attend to or do next. Is the experience real or an illusion? Through research and reflection, I believe that one can establish that the answer to this question hinges on what or who we perceive ourselves to be. Who am I? If I know the answer to that, then I can know what I want and what I can do to get it. If not blocked from action in the pursuit of what I want, I can experience freedom. Even if blocked, I can flow like water around obstacles to some extent before feeling totally "overdetermined." If my actions are capricious and not determined by my identity/personality as built from genes, personal experience and culture, then I could not be any more free than the possessed or a zombie. We have to be determined by at least our Selves to be free.

[Edited by: Fiona (moderator) on 31-Mar-03 22:46]

I believe that we do have free will. Whether or not the thoughts that come into our minds are random or not most people have a sense of what is right and wrong. Therefore the fact that we can chose if and how to act on thoughts and ideas demonstrates our free will.

I believe free will is indeed an illusion, and agree that the only version of ‘free’ that one could imagine is actually randomness. That might be at the quantum level, but could equally be along the lines “Heads I do this, tails I do that”.

So why do we suffer the illusion? I suspect that it may have something to do with speed of operation. When we use a computer to perform the sort of calculation a pocket calculator might do, the answer appears in a flash; we say “It has calculated it.” However, when we give the computer something meaty to get on with, where the result is some time coming, we anthropomorphise and say “It is thinking”. Of course it is carrying out precisely the same sorts of operations in each case. When it is our own brain that performs the computations we are always aware of the passage of time, since the monitoring equipment is made of the same stuff as the areas doing the decision making, so runs at the same speed. That self-awareness, I believe, gives the sense of freedom.

As to whether free will exists or not I don't see how we can possibly know. If our brains work in a mechanistic Newtonian fashion then clearly we don't have any choice as every thought and action is predetermined.
If our brains function in a quantum fashion where outcomes are inherently unpredictable then we still don't have free will, we just have random decisions that are actually not our choice. In fact I don't see where free-will could possibly come from.
Having said that I don't think it actually matters even if we don't have it, as we have the illusion that we do.
If we accept that we don't have free will then we would lose moral accountability for our actions and it would be no more reasonable to arrest someone for murder than it would be to arrest the ground for having an earthquake.
Of course we could still imprison people for commiting crimes as the State wouldn't have any free will either !