Death of Free Will?

[nimblewill]

I haven’t read this yet but it caught my eye.
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 … ef=opinion

[TotalVictory]

Nice find nimble…
It’s a wonderfully complex topic which of course cannot be easily summarized in this short article. But he does a nice job of covering some of the issues.

The title is a hook to attract readers; he argues that free will is anything but dead!

Here’s an interesting quote:

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

It’s a very interesting topic; one in which interest is on the rise. Also interesting how he dismisses scientists as kind of being in over their heads; incapable of making the kinds of conclusions and suggestions that they do. Best left to the philosophers; like himself!!!

Bobx3

[WE_ARE_ALL_BROTHERS]

It’s a very interesting topic; one in which interest is on the rise. Also interesting how he dismisses scientists as kind of being in over their heads; incapable of making the kinds of conclusions and suggestions that they do. Best left to the philosophers; like himself!

Interesting article. Neuroscience seems to be the common thread in almost all of my faculty’s research at the moment. We think because thought is seated in chemicals, that any meaningful rationality cannot exist and that pre-cognition dictates all of our “choices”. But as he said, I think neuroscientists are over their head (not that I would necessarily be placing that much confidence in philosophers either). I think Chomsky said this very well in one of his discussions (transcribed in ‘Understanding Power’ 2002, pp.219-220). Though he denied any “spiritual property” as a good materialist would, I think his thought here might still appeal to us supernaturalists (and especially those theistic evolutionists here):

It’s not just about humans that scientific insight is very limited – even simple physical things can’t be dealt with either. For instance, there’s a ‘three body problem’ in physics: you can’t really figure out what happens when three bodies are moving, the equations are just too complicated. In fact, a physicist I was talking to recently gave me another example – he said if you take a cup of coffee with cream swirling around in it, presumably all of the natural laws are known, but you can’t solve the equations because they’re just too complex. Alright, that’s not human beings, that’s cream swirling around in a cup of coffee: we can’t figure out what’s going on.

The point is, we may know the laws, but the possibility of applying them, or of solving the equations, or of working out the problems, or of understanding what’s going on, declines very fast when we get past only the very simplest things.

Also, we probably don’t know all the laws – I mean, it’s very unlikely that we really do know the laws, even at the core of science. A physicist will tell you much more about this than I can, but take, say, the matter in the universe: more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is what’s called “dark matter” – and it’s called “dark” because nobody knows what it is. It’s just sort of postulated that it exists, because if you don’t postulate it, everything blows up-so you have to assume that it’s there. And that’s over 90 percent of the matter in the universe: you don’t even know what it is. In fact, a new branch of physics has developed around superconductivity “superconductivity” refers to the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids at ultra-low temperatures], and while I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the claims, what some of the physicists working on it say is that they can now virtually prove (I mean, not quite prove, but come quite close to proving) that in this domain of highly condensed matter, there are principles which are literally not deducible from the known laws of nature: so you can’t reduce the principles of superconductivity to the known laws of nature. And again, that’s talking about really simple things, nothing like a complex organism.

Then when you begin to talk about how organisms develop – well, people say it’s “natural selection,” and that’s not false: undoubtedly Darwin was sort of right. But it could be that natural selection is only a very peripheral part of the development of organisms. So, there’s a channel of physical possibilities that physical laws make available, and within that channel of physical possibilities only certain things can happen – and within the range of those things that can happen, you are going to get effects due to natural selection. But the structure of the channel is totally unknown: I mean, nobody knows what kinds of laws apply to complex organisms, there are just the bare beginnings these days of the studies of self-organizing systems – how systems develop structure and complexity just by virtue of their nature. These things are just barely beginning to be understood – and we’re talking about things way simpler than human beings.

For instance, in neurophysiology, the organism that people study is a little worm called nematodes – and the reason they study nematodes is because they’re tiny, for one thing: they have a thousand cells, a three-day gestation period, three hundred neurons, and the entire wiring diagram of the three hundred neurons is known, so we know exactly how they’re all linked up together. But still, nobody can figure out why the stupid worm does what it does, whatever it does – I don’t know, probably turn left or something. Whatever it does is, so far, unexplained on the basis of a three hundred neuron system, where the entire structure of it is known, and the whole gestation period is completely known. It’s just too complicated, too many things are going on, there are too many chemical interactions. And this is three hundred neurons – its not 10^11 neurons, like in your head. So the difference is just so qualitatively huge that the fall-off in understanding when it comes to human beings is extremely dramatic.