In 1983 Benjamin Libet found that brain activity predicts your movements before you are aware of deciding to move. The result has been reproduced many times, and it has been used ever since to argue that free will is an illusion. Three new papers say the measurements were fine but the interpretation was not. Let’s take a look.
Sources:
Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what we are about to do
Undermining Free Will Belief Increases Forgiveness of Self and Others
👉 ((btw www.base-search.net is a great search engine for scientific papers))
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There are those who think that
Life has nothing left to chance
A host of holy horrors
To direct our aimless dance
A planet of playthings
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
The stars aren’t aligned
Or the gods are malign
Blame is better to give than receive
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears, and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free willStatistically, you’re a guy.
Not going to make evaluation of the statements made in the video. They may or may not have merit. But Sabine Hossenfelder is a bad messenger. With a history of false, unsupported and bigoted statements.
Trying to discredit free will is giving a pass to people who choose to exploit or abuse others. They absolutely could have done otherwise, they just chose not to.
You’re arguing against a stance that no one is making. Nobody is suggesting that no free will implies freedom from consequences. There is no stronger indicator of future behaviour than past behaviour. A violent person doesn’t get a free pass just because he’s not ultimately responsible for his behaviour in the same way as we don’t let a grizzly bear freely wander around a neighbourhood. The bear gets shot because it’s dangerous, not because it’s morally flawed.
But, like, logically you still don’t have free will, since either what you do is the product of a prior cause, or it’s random. Neither is you choosing it. And “compatibilist free will” just defines a free choice as one your brain makes internally, but your brain is still a thing in the physical universe, so it still is either deterministic or random
Believing you have free will is much more important than actually having free will.
You can act as if you are responsible for your actions, whilst knowing that you are not
And vice versa. (see govt.)
😭
First of all check: 40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity
For almost three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been one of the main tools in brain research. Yet a new study published in the renowned journal Nature Neuroscience fundamentally challenges the way fMRI data have so far been interpreted with regard to neuronal activity.
Second: lighting the engine of a car doesn’t “pre-determin” that the car will move on, is just one of the many steps who could eventually allow the car to move. It is not “buffering”.
Check the video and the papers for a more clear explanation.
The problem of free will goes much deeper than that, and none of what you said really applies. Your brain exists in the universe, and follows the laws of the universe, and physics are either deterministic or they’re random. Interactions at the macro scale often follow deterministic behaviors. (Think billiard balls and such.) But then when you get down to the quantum scale, the results are truly random. Hell, the three-body problem is another situation that’s truly random.
So where is the room for free will? It’s obvious that your behaviors are based on things happening in your brain, and the things happening in your brain are just chemical reactions. Chemical reactions either do prescribed things or random things. How can your mind influence them?
Here’s another philosophical angle. It comes from a classic philosorapter meme. “If you act based on yur values, but you don’t choose your values, do you really have free will?”
If you think about it, you never really choose your values. You feel them in your chest. They can change over time based on your lived experience, but no one sits down and says, “I’m going to choose be a social democrat”. You might slowly come to the realization that it’s the correct way to be, but you can’t choose that any more than you can choose to be heterosexual or choose to enjoy eating smoked salmon. You have to feel it first. You don’t choose your feelings. They’re reactions to stimulus. Even fighting your impulses in order to do somethingelse is itself driven by feelings.
The beauty of the brain (and all neural networks) is the strange loops and feedback mechanisms that allow you to analyze information. And some day, all of a sudden you realize your values were wrong and you change and grow, but there was no point where it was a choice.
Every action you take is dictated by impulses that you can’t control. The impulse to eat, to fuck, to get out of the rain, or whatever. None of it is a choice. If you think it is, you can wind back the train of thought every time to find that it comes down to inherent values and impulses. Neither of which you choose.
Here’s an example. Someone’s having a really bad time and they’re homeless maybe and addicted to drugs, and then someone comes along and says, “Just quit the drugs, and get a job and stop being homeless. I did it. So can you!” All that means is that that person at one point found the gumption to go through withdrawal and get their life back on track. But the thing is, they didn’t choose to have the gumption. They just… had it. Or they had help. Either way, there was no choice involved.
For me, this conclusion that we don’t have free will doesn’t impact my persnal life very much. It doesn’t mean I can suddenly do whatever I want and blame my lack of free will. I do exactly what I was going to do anyway, based on my values and impilses. But it does help me forgive people who seem like they’re total assholes. You know, criminals and such. When you can accept that people act based on impulses which they really can’t control, then you can be more forgiving, and learn to love people as the flawed humans they are. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not Christian, but that’s the kind of love and acceptance that Jesus taught, and I believe it only comes if you abandon the idea of free will.
And the best way to help someone be better is talk to them, which affects how they think and gives them new perspectives. The only way anyone can change is to receive new input that changes their behavioral loops.
This is why I don’t think any kind of criminal justice system should impose punitive sentences. If you need to sequester someone from society to protect others, then fine, but that sequestration shouldn’t specifically be punishment, and I can’t stand it when people make rape jokes about prison.
And why even bother being a better person if no one has free will and nothing really matters? Well, people have minds and feel pain, and I happen to value not causing people pain.
Then again, I’m also (internally) an asshole when people drive aggressively around me. I can’t count how many times I’ve yelled out loud, “I hope you die in a fire!” when someone does a particularly dangerous maneuver and puts everyone else on the road at risk. That’s not very forgiving of me. But I’m a flawed human just like everyone else, acting based on my impulses. ☹️
Brain is a physical thing. Self-awareness and consciousness are not. Still, thinking about yourself you can’t deny that you have those. But an observation like that is not very materialistic or scientific which is why this creates a conundrum that doesn’t have any good solution and why people argue about it for centuries, maybe even millennia.
As long as the universe is evolving through cause&effect, ‘free’ will can’t exist. It doesn’t even matter if we imagine ‘random quantum wu’, or ‘Cosmic Consciousness’ we can’t control anyway, and would still influence ‘our’ choices by causality anyway. None of these studies remove causality from physics, and they profoundly AND childishly miss what the ‘free will’ debate is all about. We are organisms that evolved in an environment, all our genes are accumulated environment, and so environment is what triggers all behaviour in the end. Nature/nurture is all about environment…
The ‘free will’ question is shortly: ‘could you have done otherwise’, and no, you cant dismiss or change causality and invent a new fundamental universal ‘free will’ force that you can suddenly invoke with zero causality or energy costs, coming from nowhere at all - but still magically ‘controlled’ by you. You are an cosmic billiard ball - we all are, and we owe it to each other to create the environment that triggers the best in us - not fighting and blaming like cavemen would.
‘Being aware of what we are about to do’ follows exactly from causality as much as everything else in the universe. The Title of the study alone shows they didn’t grasp the problem at all. The only way to not be a part of causality is to remove your self from this universe. Good luck ideological/religious believers.
Religious thinking people like theist and Capitalists NEED ‘free will’ to defend all the harmful outcomes of their archaic beliefsystem, to be able to point to someone and say “My belief-system is not evil, and you the individual could just have done X - so you must be evil/lazy, and deserves to be punished/homeless” etc. They simply disregard causality/reality to protect their belief system and to hate/harm others that threaten that belief. They have been coping for as long as intelligent people have pointed out the obvious problem…
So, these studies never calculate the enormous amount of atrocities - throughout our entire evolution - caused by dumb humans believing all actions came from the individual. Revenge? check!, de-humanisation? Check! Jailing/killing ? Check ! Leaving ‘lazy’ people on the street bc they ‘could just have done X’? check ! Worshipping lucky/psychopathic ass-wipes that are in power ? check ! Religious shaming/punishment ? check ! You-name-the-atrocity ? check ! Always the same… Oh, and they never look at what belief-systems are mostly dependent on the belief…
The nonsense non-scientific belief in magical ‘free will’ is easily the most harmful belief humanity have ever had - and fair enough, also easily the hardest to recognise and dismiss until we have thought it through without emotions and archaic theistic/non-theistic belief-systems in mind…
But hey, there are always some right-wing ideologues (=anti-science belief-system), that are willing to pay for ‘proof’ of personal/individual responsibility instead of the responsibility of the environment, the culture, and their particular belief-systems, the ideology currently represented by eternal economic war - free unfair fight for your life against everyone else, forever.
These ridiculous coping studies will always show up and always misrepresent the issue. They have for many many years, and they never prove anything other than, that the archaic ‘individualist’ Capitalist and theistic belief-system still exists, and that they keep misunderstanding/misrepresenting the issue.
Everyone is free to do whatever they want but nobody is free to choose their wants. We do things for two reasons: either you want to or you have to. There’s no freedom in either.
When I say I don’t believe in free will, what I mean is that I don’t think you could’ve done otherwise. You were hungry so you grabbed a Snickers bar on the checkout line. Now we go back in time to the moment right before you made the decision - could you choose otherwise? I don’t think you could. Whatever compelled you to pick the Snickers the first time will cause you to do so every time. All else being equal - how could you have done otherwise?
I can choose to do a thing that I neither want nor have to do. I can also choose to not do a thing that I want or need to do. Can I prove that to you though? Does my desire to be contrarian countermand my free will? It very well might.
I can rewind a video and watch it again. That is no different from your time travel example. I don’t think we can convincingly argue either way if a quantum field collapse will always happen the same way, even if we were to start save-scumming reality. I kind of hope we will never be able to.
None of this precludes me from having free will in the present. I don’t even think I need quantum dice contently rolling around in my consciousness. Even if I am completely deterministic, I can still make choices. My brain is a comremovedtional device made of meat. I can only have so much faith in what a choice even means, but I sure think I know one when I see one.
You didn’t pick your desire to be contrarian and you couldn’t choose not to be.
Rewinding a video is a bad example in two ways: it does not rewind the universe to the exact same state it was before and secondly, the video still plays out exactly the same every single time - just like I said.
My argument was that you could not have done otherwise. I never claimed that choices aren’t being made. They are - based on things that are outside of your control. You don’t author them. In fact the whole concept of “I” is just another side of the same coin. There is no “self” sitting somewhere there behind one’s face, looking out into the world and authoring decisions. It’s all brain chemistry, brain is made of matter and matter obeys the laws of physics. There isn’t anything separate that’s standing outside of that, free from the influences of cause and effect.
It feels like freedom because the action aligns with your desires. You do X because you want to do X or you do Y because you don’t want what follows if you don’t do Y. To claim you could do something you don’t want to or don’t have to is an impossible claim. You can punch a wall and hurt your hand to try and make a point but that’s still an action motivated by wanting.
