Let’s suppose there really is a Ghost in the Machine – a “little man” (“homunculus”) who “looks out” through our eyes, and “listens in” through our ears (interestingly, those are the two senses most usually ascribed to the floating Ghost in NDE accounts). Or, if you prefer, a Soul.
And let’s further suppose that it is reasonable to posit that the Ghost/Soul is inessential to human day-to day function, merely to conscious experience and/or “free will”; that it is at least possible hypothetically to imagine a soulless simulacrum of a person who behaved exactly as a person would, but was in fact a mere automaton, without conscious experience – without qualia.
Thirdly, let’s suppose that there there are only a handful of these Souls in the world, and the rest of the things that look and behave like human beings are Ghostless automatons – soulless simulacra. But, as in an infernal game of Mafia, none of us know which are the Simulacra, and which are the true Humans – because there is no way of telling from the outside – from an apparent person’s behaviour or social interactions, or cognitive capacities – which is which.
And finally, let’s suppose that souls can migrate at will, from body to body.
Let’s say one of these Souls starts the morning in Lizzie’s body, experiencing being Lizzie, and remembering all Lizzie’s dreams, thinking Lizzie’s thoughts, feeling Lizzie’s need to go pee, imagining all Lizzie’s plans for the day, hearing Lizzie’s alarm clock, seeing Lizzie’s watch, noting that the sky is a normal blue between the clouds through the skylight.
Somewhere an empty simulacrum of Barry Arrington is still asleep (even automatons “sleep” while their brains do what brains have to do to do what brains have to do). But as the day wears on, the Soul in Lizzie’s body decides to go for a wander. It leaves Lizzie to get on with stuff, as her body is perfectly capable of doing, she just won’t be “experiencing” what she does (and, conceivably, she might make some choices that she wouldn’t otherwise make, but she’s an extremely well-designed automaton, with broadly altruistic defaults for her decision-trees).
The Soul sees that Barry is about to wake up as the sun rises over Colorado, and so decides to spend a few hours in Barry’s body. And thus experiences being Barry waking up, probably needing a pee as well, making Barry’s plans, checking Barry’s watch, remembering what Barry did yesterday (because even though Barry’s body was entirely empty of soul yesterday, of course Barry’s brain has all the requisite neural settings for the Soul to experience the full Monty of remembering being Barry yesterday, and what Barry planned to do today, even though at the time, Barry experienced none of this. The Soul also notices the sky is its usual colour, which Barry, like Lizzie calls “blue”.
Aha. But is the Soul’s experience of Barry’s “blue” the same as the Soul’s experience of Lizzie’s “blue”? Well, the Soul has no way to tell, because even though the Soul was in Lizzie’s body that very morning, experiencing Lizzie’s “blue”, the Soul cannot remember Lizzie’s “blue” now it is in Barry’s body, because if it could, Barry’s experience would not simply be of “blue” but of “oh, that’s interesting, my blue is different to Lizzie’s blue”. And we know that not only does Barry not know what Lizzie’s blue is like when Barry experiences blue (because “blue” is an ineffable quale, right?), he doesn’t even know whether “blue” sky was even visible from Lizzie’s bedroom when Lizzie woke up that morning. Indeed, being in 40 watt Nottingham, it often isn’t.
Now the Soul decides to see how Lizzie is getting on. Back east, over the Atlantic it flits, just in time for Lizzie getting on her bike home from work. Immediately the Soul accesses Lizzie’s day, and ponders the problems she has been wrestling with, and which, as so often, get partly solved on the bike ride home. The Soul enjoys this part. But of course it has no way of comparing this pleasure with the pleasure it took in Barry’s American breakfast which it had also enjoyed, because that experience – those qualia – are not part of Lizzie’s experience. Lizzie has no clue what Barry had for breakfast.
Now the Soul decides to race Lizzie home and take up temporary residence in the body of Patrick, Lizzie’s son, who is becoming an excellent vegetarian cook, and is currently preparing a delicious sweet-potato and peanut butter curry. The Soul immediately experiences Patrick’s thoughts, his memory of calling Lizzie a short while earlier to check that she is about to arrive home, and indeed, his imagining of what Lizzie is anticipating coming home to, as she pedals along the riverbank in the dusk. Soul zips back to Lizzie and encounters something really very similar – although it cannot directly compare the experiences – and also experiences Lizzie’s imaginings of Patrick stirring the sweet potato stew, and adjusting the curry powder to the intensity that he prefers (but she does not).
As Baloo said to Mowgli: Am I giving you a clue?
The point I am trying to make is that the uniqueness of subjective experience is as defined as much by what we don’t know as by what we do. “Consciousness” is mysterious because it is unique. The fact that we can say things like “I’m lucky I didn’t live in the days before anaesthesia” indicates a powerful intuition that there is an “I” who might have done, and thus an equally powerful sense that there is an “I” who was simply lucky enough to have landed in the body of a post-anaesthesia person. And yet it takes only a very simple thought experiment, I suggest, to realise that this mysterious uniqueness is – or at least could be – a simple artefact of our necessarily limited PoV. And a simple step, I suggest, to consider that actually a ghostless automaton – a soulless simulacrum is – an incoherent concept. If my putative Soul, who flits from body to body, is capable not only of experiencing the present of any body in which it is currently resident, but that body’s past and anticipated future, but incapable of simultaneously experiencing anything except the present, past, and anticipated future of that body, then it becomes a redundant concept. All we need to do is to postulate that consciousness consists of having accessible a body of knowledge only accessible to that organism by simple dint of that organism being limited in space and time to a single trajectory. And if that knowledge is available to the automaton – as it clearly is – then we have no need to posit an additional Souly-thing to experience it.
What we do need to posit, however, is some kind of looping neural architecture that enables the organism to model the world as consisting of objects and agents, and to model itself- the modeler – as one of those agents. Once you have done that, consciousness is not only possible to a material organism, but inescapable. And of course looping neural architecture is exactly what we observe.
I suggest that the truth is hiding in plain sight: we are conscious because when we are unconscious we can’t function. Unless the function we need to perform at the time is to let a surgeon remove some part of us, under which circumstances I’m happy to let an anaesthetist render me unconscious.
Well, no, unless you want to say that every output from your computer is “computed by physics”. Sure, in a sense it is (nothing that your computer does can’t be explained by physics) but the physics only computes your tax bill and posts your posts online because it’s organised into a computer! So saying we are “just” biological automatons is unnecessarily dismissive. Biological automatons are awesome – they compute things – decide things – that the same physics, not organised into a biological human being, simply cannot.
It is you who are being “reductionist” here!
You’ve forgotten the organisation of the physics! That’s a heck of a lot “more”!
I didn’t avoid it. I agreed. What I dispute is that that has any bearing on whether or not we can be sensibly said to be autonomous.
Here is a nice piece by Dennett, fortunately for me, typed out by someone else online so I don’t have to type it out myself (it’s from Freedom Evolves):
In other words, Dennett proposes (and I concur) that when we talk about “free will” it is more sensible to think of it in terms of adjacency of possible worlds in which we might have something differently, than of an otherwise identical world in which we could.
The latter, although appealing (and it appealed to me for 50 years) doesn’t actually offer any freedom-worth-having, it seems to me, merely uninformed unpredictability.
Are you a mind reader, KN? If not, you do not know what I think. You only know what I write here, and from there on it’s nothing but inferences on your part, correct or incorrect.
Yes, I am a mind-reader, but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m attributing to you those views that, if you held them, would make the most sense of what you write here. That’s how the game is played.
William,
Hence your ability to change beliefs without those beliefs having to depend on evidence or experience (material causation) I suppose.
What I don’t understand is that at one point you claim to have been an atheist. At that time were your decisions limited by material causation then?
It would be absurd if that were the case, of course. It’s either one or the other in your scheme.
Yet the problem I see is that if you can’t tell the difference between the two states then your idea is literally pointless. It may be X, it may be Y but the universe is exactly the same either way and so it’s a distinction without a difference.
Unless, of course, you can demonstrate this freedom from material causation in a scientific way? Until then it’s just a delusion you’ve convinced yourself of, I think. Yet more tedious philosophical navel gazing.
Exactly so. If William does not like it then William can clarify. Except of course that William has already said that he’s not a expert in physics, maths, biology etc. So he won’t clarify as he can’t and it really is billiard balls bouncing off each other as far as he’s concerned (how could it be otherwise that you can “replay” the universe over again and things be exactly the same?).
No, I realise that. After all, my own position resembled yours until really very recently 🙂
And my argument is that in that case the distinction between a “biological automaton” and a being with CFW is a distinction-without-a-difference. If it walks like a duck….
Sure. In fact one of the games I play with myself is to say: suppose time is not a “flow” of anything, merely the name we give to causal order. I am experiencing myself as aged 61 right now, not because I have “reached” 61, but because *this* is what being 61 feels like! In some alternative universe I may be 72, or 3, or unborn, or long dead. That doesn’t mean that I am not free to cause things – it just means that I don’t yet know what I will cause when I’m 62! What I do know is that what happens after I hit 62 depends on what I do now. I don’t see (or tbh, no longer see) that it makes any difference to my status as a causal agent at 61 that there may be no “future” in which I am 62, simply a “result”.
Nothing more – and nothing less 🙂 A product of not just amorphous “physics”, but an extraordinary arrangement of matter that gives rise to that computation! I find that awesome! (Far more awesome than the idea that we are simply mud marinaded in ghost).
Aha. I don’t think so. Again, I think we have a distinction-without-a-difference.
But maybe for another thread?
William,
You say at UD:
Could you demonstrate how you are able to deviate from material computation?
As a non-materialist you presumably believe that you can deviate from the material computation. Please give an example!
Or explain how we can use that to determine which type of universe we live in!
Without getting mired in philosophy, free choice requires seeing alternatives. (which is why I don’t rebel instantly against William’s contention that some people are freer than others.) One must perceive possible futures and the possibility of choosing. this is a matter of intelligence and the lack of strong coercive pressures. This is why the law assigns accountability according to the amount of freedom experienced by a person.
But being able to see alternative futures and having the ability to choose does not solve the conundrum. suppose the choice is between fish and steak for dinner. Suppose both are equally accessible. I am free to choose, but am I free to choose the chooser? Am I free to like one more than the other and free to reverse my preference?
Suppose instead of steak and fish, the choice is sexual preference. Am I free to modify what I like and dislike. Suppose I am. Am I free to change the part of me that wants to change? What is it in me that wants and desires and prefers, and can I change that? What is it that would be doing the changing, and why would it want to change?
I see this as an intractable problem, completely devoid of anything that can be productively discussed.
Me neither. It’s why I like Hofstader’s Hunekers 🙂 I think freedom is on a continuum, like consciousness, although there may be non-linearities.
I don’t think it’s intractable as long as we are able to think in loops. I like Dennett’s formulation:
Although being a positive sort of person I turn it round as something like:
“The larger you make yourself the more causes you internalise”. As Dennett also says, accepting moral responsibility is a self-forming act (SFA) – the wider you draw the boundaries of the self, the more moral responsibility you accept. You only escape moral responsibility at the price of a diminished self.
I think this is the $64,000 question. If freedom something more than the degrees-of-freedom of a complex decision-making “automaton” what is that more? What makes that extra dose of freedom different from noise, and how does it work? What does it push? What does it add?
“So, yes, if there is some alternative universe that will replay this one at some future, or past time, or even in some parallel time now, I will do the same things, think the same thoughts etc.”
Then Lizzie you believe that universe is determined, their wasn´t any chance that the universe could be different. The initial conditions of the universe I´m writing this now.
Well, as far as I know we don’t live in a deterministic universe, so no. I think there are lots of ways it could have been different. I think part of the problem is that familiar words and phrases like “could have been” can’t be easily applied on the scale of possibilities represented by the universe. But they work fine for what they were coined for – we make choices between alternate possibilities. We aren’t struck immobile by the thought that what we do is predetermined – or, if we are, then I guess that was predetermined too! It just gets silly. We choose therefore we are choosers. We have choice, therefore we have freedom. We have moral choices therefore we have moral responsibility.
Being an “automaton” alters none of that.
All it does is allow a label to be placed on those who, other then the label, are no different from the person placing the label.
Yet that label allows people to be grouped into “them” and “us” as has been done over and over again.
Then the views of the labeled can be dismissed on the basis they are coming from a person with a particular label.
Or worse.
Being an automaton would make no difference for assigning moral or legal accountability, because, if we are automatons, we are a kind of automation that learns from consequences.
But you are contradicting your self, if you are chosing you can chose different things, if always, everytime the conditions are the same, you chose the same, you are not chosing. You are reacting to the conditions. And if humans only can react to conditions all the matter, that we know that has no possibility to chose, react to conditions. Then given the initial conditions we get always the same universe.
You cannot say you can chose when in the same conditions you do the same. How do you know you are chosing?
As Coyne tinhk is better live with the illusion of free will and moral responsability, that is why. And that is what you are doing.
Blas,
How do you know you are chosing?
I´m not saying that given the same conditions always I will do the same thing.
It makes no difference whether we are philosophically or theologically free. We are, by observation, entities that modify our behavior as a result of consequences.
So it is appropriate to apply consequences and accountability in all cases.
Oh, but wait, Dr. Liddle. Even if we are biological automatons, what we believe to be true of ourselves and the world, and what we are (our model of “self”) indeed makes a difference because it is an intrinsic and influential aspect of our computing process and affects all our decisions.
So, it cannot be a “distinction without a difference”, even if we are biological automatons, because that distinction will indeed generate a computational difference in our lives going forward.
Another example: there may be no observable or experience-able difference between being one physical entity among many in a shared exterior universe, and being a brain in a vat experiencing a very detailed and orderly delusion, but which one of those you believe will affect how you act in the world in a cascade effect.
So, it is indeed very important whether one believes they are a computational result of material interactions OR a libertarian free agent that can superimpose it’s will over that computing process, wouldn’t you say?
Also by observation it is easy to evade consequences and accountability.
Anyway, the point is that Lizzie has to admit she has no way to show Coyne is wrong.
It is never possible to avoid consequences. Getting away with it is a consequence, and people learn from it.
I was speaking of something entirely different, and that is whether it makes sense to hold people accountable in their behavior is determined.
I’m arguing that it always makes sense to hold agents accountable.
um, I’m lost. I was saying that the distinction between biological being + CFW and biological being with CW is “without a difference. But sure, what we believe to be true makes a difference to “the computation”. Of course it does! That was sort of my point – what we call “I” does make a difference. It’s just not an Added Something – it’s part of the computation itself.
Well certainly what you believe affects the way you are. But I think the brain-in-a-vat is as much of a red herring as the identical-universe. There is a good reason why there are no brains-in-vats, and a universe in which there could be is not the one we are concerned with. We are what we are because we are whole organisms interacting with the world, and making decisions within it.
Yes. But I don’t think those are the only choices anyway. I believe I am a free agent, and that certainly affects the choices I make, I just don’t think that my freedom depends on some causeless-cause, I think it is a result of my ability as an intelligent biological organism to consider a vast amount of information, and to simulate (imagine) various possible outcomes of various possible courses of action and weigh them up against various goals of varying value.
As Dennett would put it – my self-efficacy depends on where I draw the bounds of the self. I draw them wide. I have that choice 🙂
There are brains- in- a- vat, people with spine cord problems that are kept alive in machines, that only feel their head.
Consciussnes and CFW do not needs “whole” organisms to work.
petrushka,
I’m arguing that it always makes sense to hold agents accountable … no matter the accountability is an illusion.
But the belief that we are such automatons could, in fact, have quite an impact on how we assign moral or legal accountability. How could it not? We cannot determine factually **if** we are automatons, but what we can determine is if we believe we are automatons or if we believe we have libertarian free will, and those two different beliefs can’t help but have different impacts on our processing and behavior.
Agents that learn from experience are changed by experience. Therefore it is useful and productive to hold them accountable.
In agents that learn, causation effectively flows backward.
If you are “training” a robot , what difference does it make whether it is free or deterministic? It’s behavior is modified by consequences.
For example?
Repeating that do not change the point is discussion, we pretend to chose and pretend to be accountable that is what lizzie do not admits.
At this actual conditions I could replay to you or shut down the computer and go home. I chose the first, but also in the same conditions if it happens aagain I do not know what of the options I´ll chose.
Why is it “pretending”, Blas? What is “pretending” about it? What would be different if it were not “pretending”?
I’m off for a couple of days, guys (going to Milan!), might not be able to check in. Not trying to avoid any awkward questions 🙂
How do you know you would not just choose the same option, for exactly the same reasons you “chose” it the first time?
This is what your self-imposed ignorance of science gets you, William; and it is a shameful reflection of your unwillingness to learn anything.
You are mindlessly reciting the sectarian ID/creationist mantra that demonizes “materialists.” “Materialists” is another code word for “atheist” or anyone else that doesn’t accept certain sectarian dogmas.
It is the refusal to connect with reality and learn that turns people into automatons. You continue to recycle the same misconceptions over and over and over; and that is not a healthy state of mind.
Since that is what you have seem to have become, clutch you rosary to you chest and repeat the following at least 100 times per day for the next ten years.
1. Materialism does NOT equal determinism.
2. The physics and chemistry of the nervous system does NOT equal determinism.
nullasalus@UD,
Bitter much null?
It’s amazing how simple and flat their appreciation of how complex reality is. Everything is so simple, there is no need to look beyond what is immediately obvious, what happens outside your local patch of space cannot possible have any impact in your bit of space.
Yes, feedback loops are “magic”. Odd how the people who actually do appeal to “magic” accuse others of doing so.
Mistaken about what null? What alternative are you offering regarding the issues under discussion as I don’t see anything on the table from you, or are petulant rants all you’ve got on offer?
LinktoUD
But before I go, one little message for gpuccio, who has responded at UD to WJM’s response thread to this one there (boy this is silly!)
Well, of course, I beg to differ 🙂 You have rather assumed your conclusion, there, gpuccio 🙂 Personally, I don’t find “libertarian free will” makes any sense, although I did once, until it dawned on me that if will is totally free, it is necessarily uninformed. A fair coin is free to fall heads or tails, but it doesn’t will anything. If it willed something it wouldn’t be free to fall heads or tails.
WJM hasn’t convinced me otherwise yet that the concept is coherent.
Though I guess he yet may, nullasalus, because, contrary to your assumption, the strapline of this blog applies to all who post here.
Including you, if you would like to pay a visit, but also including me.
Sheesh.
oops, missed the bit about smileys.
Oh well, I just smile a lot. I guess the universe makes me do it.
*growl*
That’s our null. He’s probably glad that Lizzie is extra ecclesiam.
And yet I joined that ecclesiam in good faith. But eventually, reluctantly, considered the possibility that I was mistaken..
If you read my answer you will reaize that I do not know.
Because you say I “chose” and you didn´t. You did what the conditions led you to do. That is pretending to have chosen.
That is pretending to have free will in order to be accountabe for your actions and abe to have a moral.
If we are not pretending and we are realy free then we are accountable then an objective m moraliti is possible.
If we are only pretending, and we know that arre pretending, then we are no more accountable if we can escape the consequences of what we do.
Gpuccio’s reaction to compatibilism is interesting. Why such strong emotions?
Perhaps he is concerned that it is an attack on moral responsibility or even personal identity? But compatibilism is the view that determinism plus random is compatible with both (the clue is in the name!).
Perhaps he thinks it is a frustratingly daft opinion to hold. But many people who are much cleverer than either of us have been compatabilists. You would think that was sufficient reason to at least respect the view.
I think maybe the most plausible explanation is the Gpuccio and others think that compatibilists are being dishonest. That deep inside we compatibilists know our own free will is not determined or random and that we are ignoring that “obvious” truth to save our materialist view of the world.
This is wrong and is based on a confusion. I think we all can tell when we make a decision that is based on free will as opposed to say an involuntary action like blinking or an instant reaction like emergency braking in a car. Compatibilists know what free will feels like. But that is quite different from knowing that it is not the result of either determinism or random elements. In fact I don’t even know what it means to say something is neither determined or random and if there is a mysterious additional property how would I know it applied to my freely taken decisions?
Blas,
In Lizzie’s absence (I hope she won’t mind). Compatibilism is the claim that choosing is compatible with doing what the conditions led you to do. To assert that it cannot be a real choice if you are “just doing what the conditions led you to do” is just another way of saying “compatibilism is wrong” without presenting any reasons. There is nothing in the definition of the word “choose” that entails choosing cannot simply be the result of prior conditions. You have not presented any argument or evidence that choosing cannot be the result prior conditions. You have just asserted it.
On the other hand there are plenty of reasons to suppose that choosing can simply be the result of prior conditions. Here are three of them:
1) Animals and people do masses of unconscious actions such as sweating and breathing that are unarguably the result of prior conditions. There are other things such as braking in an emergency that are borderline between conscious and unconscious actions. What is it about conscious deliberative choices that makes them different?
2) Prior conditions certainly have massive influences on choices. If turning left leads me to walk into a stream of fast-moving traffic and turning right takes me down a pleasant country lane then these two prior conditions are certainly influencing my choice. I might decide to turn left but who is to say this is not the result of a random element in my brain or another neglected prior condition – perhaps a memory trace or even a malfunction in the brain mechanism.
3) How do you know that your choices are not the result of prior conditions? Suppose you make a series of choices and then a super neurosurgeon reveals they have been observing and predicting those choices and can point to the specific neurological events that caused you to make those choices. Are they no longer choices because of that discovery? How do you know that could not happen?
This is a silly discussion.
The problem is not whether we can make free choices, but rather what is the “we” that makes the choice.
At any time we are choosing, we are weighing motives and expectations. What is it that makes us have motives? Can we change our inner motives, and if we can, what is the “we” that is changing them, and why? Can we change the we that is changing the we?
This is just another recursive homunculus. Homunculi all the way down.
I think probably you do not understand my point. Chosing means that you have at least two possible options and you select one or the other.
Lizzie said that if were possible to repeat the same conditions when she made each one of all of their choices she would do always the same thing she already did.
Then there are no options there, given the condition Lizzie would do always the same thing, so the other option is not possible it is not an option, and the process is not choosing.
When Lizzie says he is choosing between chocolate or vanilla icecream she really is computing all the data she has and her brain make she ask for chocolate.
One way to understand the severe reaction some folks – particularly anti-science, conservatively religious types – have to compatibilism is that such folks are stuck with a perspective that materialism means that humans are computers. As such, our every action and thought would be the product of a specific program. Even accepting that the program can be modified on a daily/hourly/minute-by-minute basis based upon experience, they still cannot conceive of programming any more advanced than what runs on your phone or laptop. Seriously – their entire concept of materialism boils down to Human OS 2.0 and in such a scenario, there can be no such thing as freely choosing mustard or catsup that isn’t predetermined within the program.
In many ways, it’s the Weasel latching/”the goals are smuggled in” ignorance all over again.
I think I understand the points being made. I’ve been thinking about them for at least 55 years. I have no political or theological interest in how the argument goes. It has no impact on how society works or how the legal system works.
In short, the argument has no utility.
I understand that utility is not TRUTH, and some people are obsessed with TRUTH. So be it.
The thought experiment regarding whether the universe would run the same way given exactly the same starting conditions is tautological. Assuming cause and effect are real.
But suppose there is a non-material cause, a cause outside the universe. Lets call it thought.
All you have done is start down the road of infinite regress. Is the thinker free? What would that mean? Does the thinker have motives? Why? Can the thinker choose his motives? Is there a chooser inside the thinker? And if so, why does the chooser choose?
They do not understand the concept of learning. they do not understand how a learning system works. They do not understand how a system can be modified by consequences and how this changes the perspective of causation.
This can form the basis of an operational definition of free will. One that can be researched.
You cannot know that. Human societies always had a majority of people that beleived they have free will and are accountable for their choices. Legal system of human societies are made on that believe. Maybe in the future, if scientist can change the way of thinking of the majority of our societies we can test your supposition.
It should, at least from the personal perspective.
That are good questions for a philosophical blog.
A quibble:
The most important potential aspect of free will is not choosing, but creating. Just watched the second Star Trek movie, the one with the unwinnable training exercise. Kirk admits winning by hacking the program.
Choosing among alternatives is fairly easy to analyze. Creating alternatives is more difficult to analyze, but it is what living things do. Even plants, believe it or not.
When you argue for a magic man behind the mask, a non-material chooser, you are abandoning the opportunity to understand how creativity works. It could be very interesting, and it’s a shame that ID proponents voluntarily choose not to think.