Comments on: Two Thoughts on Searle at Google

By: m65

m65 — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:51:45 +0000

good read thanks for the share. i really like the way the article is written and also the design of the website

By: hexag1

hexag1 — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:00:29 +0000

I think that this whole discussion of free will is confused and misguided.
Daniel Dennett provides a far more satisfying answer than Searle: Consciousness exists, it just isn’t quit what we thought it was. Likewise, free will exists, it just isn’t what we thought it was.
Think about a rainbow.
Do rainbows exist? Yes.
Are they translucent multicolored rings floating in the atmosphere? No: They are an optical illusion, created by sunlight refracting through water droplets, with different colors reaching your retina from different positions in the atmosphere, arranged in concentric rings directly opposite the sun. Rainbows exist on your retina, and nowhere else.
Do mirages exist? Yes.
Are they shimmering puddles of water, strangely surviving evaporation from a road surface on a hot, sunny day? No: they too are an optical illusion.
Does consciousness exist? Yes.
Is it a magical shine of subjectivity, conferred on human brains by quantum strangeness or some other mysterious phenomena? No: Consciousness is a very useful fiction, created by the hardware and software of the brain to give us a ‘center of narrative gravity’ around which our brain can arrange its various contents and faculties, this giving it a coherent picture for decision making (awareness of one’s social status and history etc…)
Does Free Will exist? Yes.
Is it an ‘gappy’ feature of cognition, caused by a break from deterministic physical processes, which thereby confers moral responsibility for one’s actions? No: it is simply the ability to know and justify one’s reasons for a given action. No special physics required.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8em8t93Nn7g&feature=related

By: Jed Harris

Jed Harris — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:07:00 +0000

Current theories of the evolutionary benefit of consciousness claim it is a means for resolving conflicts so you can carry out unified action — see the work of Ezequiel Morsella for details and references. For example in mammoth hunting you might experience a rather severe conflict between flight (”I’ll be trampled!”) and fight (”I’ll be a victorious mammoth hunter!”). But half fighting and half fleeing is likely to produce the worst of both. Consciousness exists to produce unified action in face of these conflicts.

Of course in the moment the mammoth charges you shouldn’t be pondering choices, that would interfere. But in the preparation you may have butterflies in your stomach and “fear faced with resolution” — you may not know yourself whether in the moment you will fight or flee. You can be truly ignorant of your own future actions.

That ignorance produces the “gappy feeling” that Searle and Sanchez mention. The gap is real and is the root of our folk intuitions about free will. We truly do not know (cannot predict) our own choice in the moment, but we also will often need to commit ourselves to that choice to succeed. So we will have to “jump the gap” and wholeheartedly either flee or fight when the time comes.

Naturalistically, then, free will exists — it is the process by which we jump the gap to a commitment. This is not a spandrel but a key function of consciousness. The mouse cowering behind thin cover, waiting to bolt for safety the moment the cat’s gaze is averted, lives or dies by how it resolves that conflict. We need the ability to jump that gap in the right way at the right moment, just as we need other functions of our brain.

Metaphysically, the argument from determinism seems to me a red herring. Free will is real because the subject’s ignorance, need to commit, and neurological effects of the resulting gap are real. Whether the outcome is determined (in, as Jerry Kaltenhauser points out, an entirely hypothetical sense) has nothing to do with the situation.

But this analysis does suggest that free will cannot usefully be considered a property of the world independent of us. It probably should be seen as a relational property between subjects and situations. The subjects need not be human or even mammalian, but they must have functionally similar ways of jumping the gap between ignorance and commitment. Color is similarly subjective — it is entirely real, functionally important, but it exists only in the relationship between a color-capable visual system and a physical scene.

By: Jerry Kaltenhauser

Jerry Kaltenhauser — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:28:37 +0000

We have many laws of nature stated in deterministic form, but no one has ever been able to exhibit a system which is deterministic. In other words, no system follows our predictions. Until we see such a thing, why would we think our actions or thoughts are determined? Our laws and explanations are at best nature simplified, not nature as she is.

By: Gaute

Gaute — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 19:44:09 +0000

Humans as a group behave better if we treat them as if they have a free will. So we should keep it as a truth even in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. When it comes to hunting mammoth, my experience is that most of my friends do it the same way as they fathers did it.

By: George Copeland

George Copeland — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:57:12 +0000

Great article and many great comments. I believe the real answer to this discussion is too complex to be comprehended, perhaps infinitely complex. I find value in trying to imagine that free will exists and also does not exist at the exact same time–that seems to be the closest I can get my mind to actually approaching an understanding of the complexity of the issue.

By: Andy Smith

Andy Smith — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:38:02 +0000

Yes, “we” are our desires. And to transcend desires means to identify with another “we”.

By: Drew

Drew — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:11:21 +0000

Again, I’m not sure it even makes sense to talk about being free from your desires. They’re you. Sorting out which ones are most important is a process… and that process is also you.

Talking about being free from yourself is not wrong or right, true or untrue, it’s just incoherent.

By: Andy Smith

Andy Smith — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:48:39 +0000

“Nothing about our internal experience or practice of decisionmaking requires us to accept, even tentatively, ambitious metaphysical theses.”

What is ambitious about accepting that we have no free will? We must do everything we do either for some reason(s), or for no reason. If for no reason (which never is actually the case, but I’m trying to cover all bases), it’s simply a random act, and no evidence for free will. If for reasons, the reasons are the cause of the act.

There is no need to postulate free will. It explains nothing except a feeling that some people have–those individuals, apparently, who are very much unaware of themselves, who haven’t really observed themselves very persistently or thoroughly. I am very much aware that I don’t act freely, certainly not in responding in this forum, nor in anything else I do in my everyday life. When I’m hungry, I eat; when I’m thirsty, I drink; when in certain social situations, I act quite predictably. I’m driven by desires, in even the tiniest acts. If I try to struggle against those desires, to alter my behavior, it’s because of some other desire that compels me to do so. Everywhere I look, I find some desire driving me to do whatever I do.

Far from being a source of depression or apathy, awareness that we are slaves to our desires drives us to transcend them. Even this process does not occur by our free choice, but it can lead to freedom from desire. Don’t ask me to explain it further, because it takes us well beyond philosophy–for those who dare to challenge its limits.

By: Drew

Drew — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:56:45 +0000

Julian: that last sentence is a great summation!

I’d still like people who claim that “Free Will” is a coherent concept to simply explain the mechanistic difference it plays in the process of making a decision. What’s that process like with FW, and what’s it like without it? What changes?

I indeed feel like _I_ am making choices when they are presented to me.

But I don’t see where in the previous sentence there is any hint that I am somehow also necessarily divorced from and free from myself in order to do so. I don’t really even understand how that, mechanistically, would work. If I was, how would they be “my” choices anyway? How would I be responsible for MY choices if who I was, as opposed to who some random person was, wasn’t the sole or at least primary determinant?