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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2018 - 04:43pm PT
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re: agency
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://youtu.be/Ve9kWX_KXus
Note agency, the can-do power that essentially means/translates to functionality and freedom, is manifest in both these mechanistic organisms.
It's rules all the way down. Or is it turtles? Rules set constraints/limits but also determine branches and branchpoints, choices, agency, competence... and last but not least... freedom.
Next year for Atlas, the Boston Marathon; the year after perhaps a solo free send of Astroman?
(1) I love the sound Spot Mini makes when it walks.
(2) Remember, "the map is not the territory." lol
(3) Imagine a pack (a herd, a swarm, a murder, a gaggle) of these.
(4) Spot-Mini's got agency!
What's it mean to have an unruly will? (cf: free will) What degree ruly? What degree free? What degree unruly? To what degree did Charles Witman (Texas Tower shooter) have an unruly will? or a ruly will? a free will?
...
Another example of AMAZING control...
Control engineering, amazing! Intelligent class!!
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/17345308/united-launch-alliance-vulcan-centaur-upper-stage-engine-aerojet-rocketdyne
Control, baby! Competence, too! And freedom!!
https://youtu.be/rQEqKZ7CJlk?t=17m45s
Elon Musk is happy today.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Topic Author's Reply - May 25, 2018 - 08:28am PT
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Excerpt from the Harris Damasio Waking Up book club dialog...
Harris: There's a few [audience questions] on free will. Where do you come down on free will in your work?
Damasio: Hm. That's something you don't... [Laughter]
Harris: I've said everything I'm ever going to say on free will - I just want to put you on record.
Damasio: Right, okay. [Laughter] So, there is free will and there is not free will. It's both. That's something you cannot answer by saying there is no free will or there is free will.
Harris: Although many have tried.
Damasio: Many have tried.
The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Culture
Antonio Damasio
May, 2018
https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Order-Things-Feeling-Cultures/dp/0307908755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527261903&sr=8-1&keywords=antonio+damasio+the+strange+order+of+things
free will
compatibilism
re agency (can-do power), control
Damasio: Why is there no free will? Because we have absolutely nothing to say on how we are put together and how we run. We come along for the ride. All the controls of our life systems, all the controls of our biology, all the controls of the biology of others - the world in which we have been placed - we have very little or no control over how it operates. We have been gaining some degree of control precisely because we have developed feeling and consciousness and because we have great imagination and so we can invent all sorts of things around us that give us a little bit of control but that control in the end is not about the entirety of our being.
Damasio: If we decide that free will does not exist, I think we're going to be in a great big pickle because then we lose the incentive for optimizing our actions and for doing things that would be better for others. And of course we've been talking about how we want the culture to go better and to save us from the worries we have today. It's difficult to operate, to do those things, if we deny, if we say free will is zero, all of this is being controlled.
Damasio: I don't mind, by the way, calling it an illusion. But it's a very useful illusion. So I certainly had some kind of free will when I accepted your invitation and I'm here talking to you, and I decided that I was going to be here. And you likewise by having me here. You change the mode of operation and you have to accept that there are some things under some degree of control.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 25, 2018 - 09:38am PT
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Why is there no free will? Because we have absolutely nothing to say on how we are put together and how we run. We come along for the ride.
A car has no free will, because it has absolutely nothing to say on how it is put together and how it runs.
But then it blows a tire and causes a big wreck. Wait. It can't accurately be said that "it blows a tire," as in "the car blew its tire." Properly speaking, "a tire blew," and "the car" had nothing to do with it.
So, there is something fundamentally wrong with the above criteria: It doesn't contemplate agency/intention. The difference between events and actions (agency) is intention. The very fact that we can ask a person, "Why did you do that?" yet we don't ask the same of entities that we know don't have intention, indicates that we intuitively recognize the distinction between events and actions, between entities that CHOOSE and those that in-principle cannot.
Thus, if we're going to abandon intention (because it's too hard to explain), we're going to have to systematically clean up our language and abandon all "Why did you do that?" sorts of questions.
Compatiblism is not an answer nor an account. It just pushes the question back another level. Either intention needs a robust account (in terms of genuine freedom), or it should be abandoned as an illusion, and our language should reflect our commitment to the facts.
That's going to be a really, really hard "illusion" to abandon, because then we have to systematically talk of people like cars or even rocks that happen to tumble down-slope. No more actions; only events. But obviously, something very important is lost in such an account.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 25, 2018 - 10:59am PT
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"The Big Bell Test provides an answer, albeit of a conditional variety. The answer is this: if humans have free will, then some physical events have no cause."
From a link on the other thread.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 25, 2018 - 12:19pm PT
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if humans have free will, then some physical events have no cause.
I'm not convinced that that's correct. An alternative is that beings with genuine agency are "first causes" and able to introduce new causal chains (that then may be entirely physical). Presuming that that "first cause" is itself necessarily physical begs some important questions, it seems to me.
I agree that there will be no account of free-will in purely physicalist terms. But we could use a modus tollens inference as follows:
1) If physicalism is true, then there is no free will.
2) We know that we have free will.
3) Therefore, physicalism is false (it is an inadequate account of all the phenomena).
If you don't like (2), that's fine; you then just need to produce a robust error-theory of why we DO "know" that we have free will and that our entire language revolves around the presumption of it.
Again, as I said, then you'll have to RADICALLY "clean up" our language! (Remember that logical positivism is dead.)
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WBraun
climber
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May 25, 2018 - 02:04pm PT
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Don't murder, rape, or torture robots
Can't be done.
They have no soul ....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 25, 2018 - 09:01pm PT
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what is physicalism?
"Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical. "
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
the paper on Bell's Theorem test is here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04431.pdf
and it is all about the physical... though perhaps not the "classical" physics you might be familiar with, rather quantum physics
A Bell test, which challenges the philosophical worldview of local realism1 against experimental observations, is a randomized trial requiring spatially-distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection, and unpredictable measurement settings2,3 . While technology can perfect the first two of these4–7, and while technological randomness sources8,9 enable “device-independent” protocols based on Bell inequality violation10,11, challenging local realism using physical randomizers inevitably makes assumptions about the same physics one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness of physical setting choices and argued that human “free will” could rigorously be used to assure unpredictability in Bell tests12. Here we report a suite of local realism tests using human choices, avoiding such assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited ≈ 100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable bits while also illustrating Bell test methodology13. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to twelve laboratories on five continents, in which 13 experiments tested local realism using photons5,6 , single atoms7 , atomic ensembles14 , and superconducting devices15. Over a 12-hour period on the 30th of November 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained flow of over 1000 bits/s to the experiments, which used different human-generated bits to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realist positions in bi-partite and tri-partite16 scenarios. Project outcomes include closing of the freedom-of-choice loophole17, gamification18 of statistical and quantum non-locality concepts, new methods for quantum-secured communications, a very large dataset of human-generated randomness, and networking techniques for global participation in experimental science.
Tests of Bell's Theorem apparently make your step 1) above false.
"1) If physicalism is true, then there is no free will."
Physicalism can be true and there can be free will.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 25, 2018 - 10:30pm PT
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^^^ That's great!
Most scientifically-minded folks flatly assert that physicalism implies absolute causation, which implies no free will. I was trying to be charitable to that crowd with the first premise.
I'm loving your post, because I don't have an ax to grind.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 26, 2018 - 12:42am PT
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Tests of Bell's Theorem apparently make your step 1) above false. "1) If physicalism is true, then there is no free will."
Now that I've actually read through enough of the paper to be clear on this point, I don't believe that you are interpreting the test correctly.
The test presupposed human free will and used it not to indicate anything about free will itself but to instead introduce a high (enough) degree of randomness into the test, thereby closing the "freedom of choice loophole." The test was about disproving a particular species of realism, not about free will, and the test says nothing about whether human free will is a function of or result of physicalism.
Even the phrase "freedom of choice loophole" means something different from what would benefit the conclusion you drew. I quote from the study authors: "The freedom-of-choice loophole (i.e., the possibility that the settings are not chosen independently from the properties of the particle pair) has been widely neglected and has not been addressed by any experiment to date."
It has often been speculated that quantum theory (in some, as yet undisclosed, way) could provide a groundwork for free will. But this test doesn't indicate anything about that, because the order of relation is the opposite of that speculation.
The speculation needs: randomness > freedom.
The experiment presumed: freedom > randomness.
And randomness is not the sort of "freedom" that grounds agency as we know it anyway.
Thus, from what I can see, the test says nothing about the relation between physicalism and free will. In fact, Bell himself conceivably made my point about human freedom possibly acting in the role of "first cause" as follows: "Assuming no faster-than-light communication,
such experiments can prove the conditional relation: if human
will is free, there are physical events with no causes."
If not my point, then Bell was instead begging the question for a physicalist interpretation of free choice. If that's indeed what your conclusion is smuggling in, then I'm noting that fact now.
I quote from the authors again: "Thus, both physically and mathematically, Bell’s theorem and hence the validity of all Bell inequalities rely critically on the joint assumption of local realism and freedom of choice." Notice the key phrase: "assumption of... freedom of choice." The study neither "proves" freedom of choice nor that such freedom is grounded in or a result of the physical. (Of course, as noted in the "soul" thread, empirical results cannot act as proofs, so all this talk of "proof" is just sloppy.)
Physicalism can be true and there can be free will.
Perhaps, but that isn't indicated, much less "proved" by the study in question, since that's not what the study was about, even if an empirical study could "prove" anything.
In fact, Bell's assertion grounds another modus tollens inference, the very one typically employed by physicalists/determinists:
1) If human will is free, there are physical events with no causes.
2) All physical events are caused.
3) Therefore, the human will is not free (or, there is no human free will).
That is the typical argument that physicalists have traditionally and almost universally made: Absolute physical causation, which implies that humans beings (being all and only physical entities) are not free but are instead determined.
And so we're back to the first premise of my earlier argument: If physicalism is true, then there is no free will. The test you reference does not seem to me to even address this premise, much less disprove it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 26, 2018 - 12:57am PT
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I'm not sure if I am a physicalist/philosopher, I am a physicalist/scientist and I suppose there is a difference, the biggest one being that as we learn more science in regard to quantum mechanics and its foundations, the domain of what we know expands.
this often renders old arguments moot.
the possibility that the quantum mechanical foundations might lead to the seemingly strange statement that there are things that happen without causes and are physical.
in the particular test, correlations in the random input from the humans could have been detected in the test, that is what the subject of the test is, a search for "hidden variables" that would determine the outcome of the quantum mechanical systems.
in humans, the existence of "hidden variables" would make their behavior "predictable" to some extent, which was not observed, that is, their "random" input to the experiment was actually random.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 26, 2018 - 02:01am PT
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^^^ Good points, imo.
I'm not clear, though, that randomness equates to (or is even loosely correlated with) human free will in the sense that agency requires.
Again, of course, we could abandon the whole notion of agency. But that would take some significant reworking of our language, not to mention our self-perceptions.
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WBraun
climber
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May 26, 2018 - 06:58am PT
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The bottom line.
Every person has the independent freedom to choose, free will.
It doesn't take billions of dollars large hadron collider to understand this simple fact.
What makes it so difficult for the gross materialists is their foolish staunch made up belief they are the material body and ultimately suffer permanent death.
Sometimes the choice leads to so-called death against the wishes of the person's own self-preservation.
But one will reborn and the knowledge behind that will take unlimited pages of WOT that you will never see an end too ........
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 26, 2018 - 11:25pm PT
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a little bit of hunting turns up the idea of setting the Bell experiment inputs "...at the whim of experimenters..." a phrase that Bell used in the chapter 7, "The theory of local beables" collected in Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics. (For such a slim volume it seems to have had an outsized influence!).
Section 8
"It has been assumed that the settings of instruments are in some sense free variables - say at the whim of the experimenters - or in any case not determined by the overlap of the backward light cones. Indeed, without such freedom I would not know how to formulate any idea of local causality, even the modest human one."
In chapter 12 he responds to criticisms,
"Here I would entertain the hypothesis that experimenters have free will. But according to CHS [Clauser, Horne and Shimony, Dialectica 39 (1985)] it would not be permissible for me to justify the assumption of free variables 'by relying on a metaphysics which has not been proved and which may well be false.' Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position! But it seems to me that in this matter I am just pursuing my profession of theoretical physics...
...A respectable class of theories, including contemporary quantum theory as it is practised, have 'free' 'external' variables in addition to those internal to and conditioned by the theory. These variables are typically external fields or sources. They are invoked to represent experimental conditions. They also provide a point of leverage for 'free willed experimenters', if reference to such hypothetical metaphysical entities is permitted. I am inclined to pay particular attention to theories of this kind, which seem to me most simply related to our everyday way of looking at the world.
Of course there is an infamous ambiguity here, about just what and where the free elements are. The fields of the Stern-Gerlach magnets could be treated as external. Or such fields and magnets could be included in the quantum mechanical system, with external agents acting only on external knobs and switches. Or the external agents could be located in the brain of the experimenter. In the latter case setting the instrument is not itself a free variable. It is only more or less closely correlated with one, depending on how accurately the experimenter effects his intention. As she puts out her hand to the knob, her hand may shake, and may shake in a way influenced by the variable v [the variable v is the subject of the measurement of correlations in the 'Bell experiment']. Remember, however, that the disagreement between locality [Bell should have said 'local realism'] and quantum mechanics is large - up to a factor of √2 in a certain sense. So some hand trembling can be tolerated without much change in the conclusion. Quantification of this would require careful epsilonics."
Turning this around, the fact that the paper linked above observed Bell inequalities provides an inference on the degree of free will exercised by the experimenters, who were the game players in this case, in setting the knobs.
Bell experiments have been used to generate random numbers, see, e.g.
Random Numbers Certified by Bell’s Theorem
S. Pironio, et al., Nature 464.7291 (2010): 1021.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 26, 2018 - 11:37pm PT
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in the paper's conclusion:
"The results also show empirically that human agency is incompatible with causal determinism, a question formerly accessible only by metaphysics."
and from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
"Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case."
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 27, 2018 - 12:20pm PT
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So, Ed, at this stage, I think that it's important to get clear about how "in earnest" you are regarding what you post:
"The results also show empirically that human agency is incompatible with causal determinism, a question formerly accessible only by metaphysics."
and from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
"Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case."
I see two options here, and before I invest the time to argue in earnest myself, I want to know which of the two it is for you:
1) You yourself believe in what these Bell-type experiments have "shown" about human agency, and you are quoting passages to explicate what you yourself believe.
2) You refuse to commit, and you just post such things to yank my chain and enjoy some (probably minimal) entertainment at seeing how hard I'll try to refute the conclusions, always knowing that you can just pop off with yet another "example" and start the process all over again, without ever acknowledging that I have demonstrated my points.
If (2), I have no time for this. I've been responding in the past assuming that (1), but you've recently led me to question whether that charity is warranted.
So, at this point, I'm going to expect commitments from you in order to proceed. You know what mine are, because I've argued in earnest. I expect you to do the same.
Otherwise, I'm going to state flatly that you're just "arguing" like a Jehovah's Witness, and we know that there's no point in trying to argue with them, as they just keep sliding around between subjects, then looping back to earlier, debunked claims without ever acknowledging ANY of the debunking that has earlier taken place.
So, to proceed, you should be able to commit regarding two primary claims/relations that you repeatedly reference in these Bell-type experiments.
First,
The relation between randomness and human free will (HFW) can have one of three "directions," and I want to know which you think it is.
A) Randomness > HFW.
B) HFW > randomness.
C) HFW <> randomness.
Of course, plain-text fails us in using proper symbols, so I'll summarize the options in plain English:
A) Randomness is a sufficient condition for HFW.
B) HFW is a sufficient condition for randomness.
C) HFW is both a necessary and sufficient condition for randomness, and vice versa.
If you don't believe that the above is a fair and adequate summation, then please explain. It's clear to me from my own reading about these Bell-type experiments that Bell and Bell-type experimenters are not appealing to more "exotic" metaphysical machinery, such as supervenience. So, I'm confident that the typical sense of "implies" is sufficient for our purposes. If you don't agree, then please explain.
Second,
I believe that a charitable summation of your(?) argument in your past two posts is this:
1) Philosophers have been unable to account for the relation between determinism and HFW.
2) Scientists employing Bell-type experiments have been able to "show" that determinism is incompatible with HFW.
3) Per (1) and (2) above, scientists have been able to "show" something that philosophers have been unable to "show."
4) Therefore, empirical science is a more productive enterprise than philosophy, even on those subjects that have traditionally been strictly philosophical subjects.
It's fitting to explicitly express that conclusion in this particular thread, since HFCS has been one of the most vocal proponents of a whole spree of conclusions that themselves rest on something like the above argument. You, Ed, have "alluded to" most of these correlative conclusions as well, so I want to know if you'll here publicly commit to the above argument and the spree of correlative conclusions that supposedly emerge from it.
* While philosophers have spent centuries chasing their tails, scientists have spent those same centuries producing substantive results, even regarding subjects about which it has been presumed that only philosophers could ever produce answers.
* Philosophy has not "progressed" in anything like the sense that science has "progressed." So, philosophy in the modern scientific age is a dead-end, because only science offers the prospect of genuine progress.
* Subjects that have been widely considered as strictly within the realm of philosophy really are not, and science will make any progress that is in principle possible on these very subjects.
And, regarding me personally, which has been the repeated subject of HFCS (and, again, to which you have "alluded"):
* Jensen is anchored in a bronze-age religion that distorts his thinking on all subjects.
* Jensen is steeped in tail-chasing philosophy that distorts his thinking on all subjects.
* Jensen's "philosophy" is itself anchored in a particular, centuries-old philosophical view that fails to explicate and that has been debunked by (science, other philosophies, etc.; you fill in the blank).
So, Ed, are you arguing in earnest? If so, then let's hear some clarity about the above points. Then I'll be happy to deductively demonstrate the actual implications of your actual perspectives.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 27, 2018 - 01:02pm PT
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Faintly paralleling Bergson vs Einstein. Go for it.
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WBraun
climber
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May 27, 2018 - 01:05pm PT
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Humans don't always seem very good about taking care of each other. Could a group of AI robots do it better?
Humans do an excellent job of taking care of each other.
It's when they fall down into gross material and animal consciousness that leads to all the problems ......
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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May 27, 2018 - 01:10pm PT
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Faintly paralleling Bergson vs Einstein. Go for it.
Pretty faint indeed. LOL
I'm not even a "faint" stand-in for Bergson. But, yes, philosophical clarity invariably reveals scientific smuggling.
That is precisely the case with Bell-type experiments as well. But, hopefully, we'll get to that.
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