So if, as the man said, you can't get there from here, how did we all get here from there?

Or, subtitled, Free Will Doesn't Come Cheap

But hopefully we've come to the point where we understand that whether or not the universe be unfailingly deterministic in nature, we and all other organisms are programmed to assume that actions are necessary to fulfill whatever has or has not yet been determined as to their consequences.

Yet there remain those who would argue that regardless of nature's initial programming, biological entities may themselves be programmed to be less than free in their responses - most if not all actions being chosen for them by the confluence of their genetically determined responsiveness and the circumstances that require them. Which would seem to come down to questions of the relative degree of freedom that organisms are under the illusion they are able to operate from. Seems a bit silly when looked at that way, but there it seems to be.

So I choose to forge ahead with some of the inference I've drawn from this mishmash of willfulness or willful-less in any case. And to re-use some of the commentary I had occasion to make elsewhere on the cybernet in response to some of this silliness.

Part of the confusion here is reflected in one respectable writer's comment that people may associate free will with randomness because they think (or want) free actions to be unpredictable. But he added that unpredictability does not require indeterminism - deterministic events can be “random” in the sense that they are not explicable in terms of predictable patterns of events.

But in my view this is just more philosobabble, because it's not about people wanting their actions to be unpredictable, it's about people worrying that their actions aren't predictable by virtue of their own choice! We want to know we have the freedom to predict with some accuracy. We want in other words the right to determine to at least some degree the nature of our own futures, if only for our own protection. And the other side of this coin is that we want the freedom to make such actions unpredictable by others if we so choose to exercise that form of will. And not only do we want nature to have given us that right, we want the freedom to use it in comparative abundance. And it may just be this "wantedness" that has effectively driven the evolution of our intelligence, or all forms of intelligence for that matter.

I responded publicly to other writings, such as some regarding "self-theories in the construction of free-will." These proposed that differences in our dealings with responsibility for our acts were essentially between the "fixed" traits of entity theorists (who tend to respond to difficulty by relinquishing agency) and "malleable" or dynamic traits of incremental theorists (who tend to react by reasserting their agency).

About which I wrote that some of the so-called fixed traits may only be "fixed" with regard to the upper levels of abstractive reasoning available. Which will then affect the self-confidence required to assert power over events that those with lesser abilities may not develop.

All of this based as well on heritable personality behaviors that (fixed or otherwise) reflect strategic approaches to anticipated events on a dominance hierarchy scale - and that also mesh with a continuum scale of competition versus cooperative strategic preferences (or partially heritable skill sets).

Well it was a response on my part that seemed like a good idea at the time.

I went on to say that rather than self-theorists, perhaps they could simply be referred to as self-strategists. Because behavioral traits can be at once both fixed and malleable - the differences in degree involving a variety of determinant circumstances.

And these same writers also talk about the traits stemming from theoretical beliefs, rather than vice versa. The beliefs in turn often self-chosen, relative to free will and deterministic conceptions.

But I'd argue the reverse: that the "theories" in question are more likely determined and or generated by the initial extent of flexibility in the individual array of heritable traits.

And if (as they might still argue) there's cognitive construction of belief involved independent from this element of causation, I'd argue that a prominent factor in this would be the effect of the cultural environment in which one's otherwise internal strategies were operative.

In other words a deterministically religious society develops a range of predictive behaviors consistently different from those found in a society that stresses freedom of thought and action, yet the individual dominance hierarchy strategies can still prevail.

Further, while it has seemed that our instinctive analytical functions are predicated on nature being essentially deterministic in its purposes, I'd argue that our predictive apparatus works from the premise that nature's purposes are more determinate and decisive. In other words the cognitive concept of predetermination (that has to have been a more recent construct) was not likely a mechanical element of life's initial predictive mechanisms.

Accordingly on one forum I wrote as follows:

"We unconsciously assume that nature has a plan, as well as that nature's actions are not only intentional but can be at times directed toward us in particular - and that these intentions in general are evidence of the particular plan that nature has made or has had made for it. So it's not that we feel events are predetermined so much as we feel events are part of nature's planning.

The difference here is this - that we feel ourselves as part of this process, in which we are expected to react to nature's probes in ways that will then allow or even require nature to revise its plans for us (either collectively or as individuals) accordingly."

So that with respect to our approaches to the "free will" problem, the differences seem to lie in the various ways we have learned to interpret nature's apparent (yet ultimately illusory) intentions. And thus to someone who felt that "lesser" animals didn't concern themselves with determinative forces in choosing their actions, I responded as follows:

"Yes, but to the extent that any animal can be said to have a rational component to its cognitive system, its emotional brain will turn to that component for "predictive" assistance - and to the extent that "rational" analysis turns to the functional culture from which it derives its 'learning,' the determinative nature of that culture will have an effect on the emotions. And these emotions, as the final arbiter of choice and action, will in some sense have taken the measure of its "freedom" into account.

And there are different varieties of "determinative" algorithms operating in any biological system that direct interaction among individual entities as a "cultural" force. Quorum sensing for example is to some extent "taught" by the particular bacterial culture extant to its group survival."

Asked for clarification of the "yes, but" proviso, I posted:

"Basically I'm arguing that the freedom each individual or group of individuals has to make decisions, consciously or just through some primordial sense of awareness, is limited by the scope of optional choices available to it through both its heritable strategies and those learned through the immediacy of its experiences.

So when I said "but," that was in reference to what I regard as fact that all life forms have considerations that equate to "freedom of will" to take action built into their functional apparatus, whether they can in any sense conceive of the nature of choice and freedom or not. And this is not limited to what we regard as brained animals. Some or perhaps most single celled organisms have no discernible "brain" area, yet calculate, learn and choose - such learning as a group being necessary for acquiring resistance to antibiotics as one example. (And I also subscribe to the theory that all life forms react as if nature's forces were potentially aimed at them, the purposes for which the organism had fashioned its programming to be wary of.)"

I might add that all of these organisms, including ourselves, tend to operate as if they are a part of whatever plan nature is operating from at that moment. However, it's likely only the humans that contemplate whether we can willfully change the plan counter to whatever "will" we conceive to be the extension of some natural purpose."

And that's how on this day I got from there to here, burning all bridges in my wake.

Pair of Dice Lost?

There were discussions at two sites recently concerning decision making in the brain and how the results might help us in answering the philosophical question of the existence or non-existence of free will.

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/04/unconscious_brain_activity_shapes_our_decisions.php

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=273

My comment on the first site and repeated on the other was as follows:

There’s no reason to assume we don’t have free will just because we aren’t conscious of the decision making process. There’s still a decision process that our brains are just as free, or not free, to make one way or the other (assuming they were at all free to make decisions to begin with). The ability to consciously choose what information to look at, that then becomes part of the basis for making unconscious inferences, is where the nexus of the free will dilemma sits. Are those conscious choices predetermined, or at least an inevitable consequence of physical laws governing cause and effect? That’s the real question, and there has so far been no reliable answer except that on balance we can expect to be better off by acting as if we have free will, regardless of our philosophies.

Comments on both sites inevitably turned to the themes dealt with in these philosophies - determinism, pre-determinism, non-determinism, inevitability, dualism, the supernatural (et cetera). I also referenced an article on the following site indicating physicists still could not agree on whether nature is inherently random or only appears that way:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726485.700-quantum-randomness-may-not-be-random.html

In no way do I intend to dig into any of these areas in this post, except to note I had also pointed to some aspects of these concepts directly related to any free will hypotheses:

Both dualism and determinism allow for the supernatural.
Free will and the uncertainty principle ultimately, in my view, don’t.
Because supernatural concepts will invariably posit an omniscient or omnipotent presence in nature.

One can agree or disagree, but for purposes of this post, I'm going to assume the above are correct (despite some odd quibbling that omniscience can give itself limits). And also assume we cannot be 100% sure that the universe is either determinate or indeterminate - even though we can be closer to sure it was not predetermined than that it was.

And I'm going to propose my own framework for the unraveling of this great "free will" conundrum. And it is not at all the same as, for example, the proposal by Daniel Dennett that “determination is not the same as causation, that knowing that a system is deterministic tells you nothing about the interesting causation - or lack of causation - among the events that transpire within it,” - thus making a distinction between determined and inevitable, although I can agree with that proposition. (Nor did I get any initial input from the John Searles of this world - the need to behave as if our wills were free has been with me since before most of these others were born.)

Here, in sum, is my proposition:

What we most likely have is a universe of non-determinant and non-predictable inevitability.

Why I propose that the above will lead us closer to an understanding of what has seemed an unresolvable paradox from any perspective will be a subject of subsequent posts. And I don't doubt that others can have made a similar proposal somewhere, but if so, I haven't found one and am not knowingly copying someone else's concept. Certainly my reasons will be my own as much as any of our thoughts are independent of their prior influences.

And will those reasons be as good as I may have deluded myself into believing they are? Can I really depend on a certain facility to unmask the obvious? Stay tuned.

Fast forward to some notes I made elsewhere relevant (I hope) to the above questions:

My view of the key to the free will versus inevitability paradox:
Even if the future was inevitable (and the uncertainly principle would argue otherwise), that "inevitability" could only be known in retrospect. And this only means that whatever could have been avoided, and resulted in a different "inevitability," was not avoided. But also this present state of being was doubtless the result of some things that were in fact avoided that would have otherwise led to a different "inevitability."

(People such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett would perhaps call this consistent with the views of a compatiblist. And looking at some of the material about him will no doubt inspire me to think of aspects of my proposed dissertation that I might not have otherwise - but that's the whole idea and legitimate purpose of any research of other's opinions.)

So the concept of inevitability does not in itself require that there is no free will - yet also does not eliminate the possibility that free will is nevertheless an illusion. It simply, in my view at least, affirms the necessity and the wisdom of continuing to act as if we do have that type of choice.

And in any case we are ultimately concerned with predictability, and in that endeavor we have to factor in a certain amount of probability as to cause and consequence and a certain understanding that our choices are constrained by the same limiting factors.

The Devil Made Me Do It

Excerpts from comments recently made by Jesse Bering, 
Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queens University, Belfast, in an Edge symposium:

"Psychologists now know that human beings intuitively reason as though natural categories exist for an intelligently designed purpose. Clouds don't just exist, say kindergartners, they're there for raining." Also, "a mind designed by nature cannot be changed fundamentally."

Because a purposeful nature suggests a planned nature, and that suggests a controlled nature, such an instinctive surmise seems relevant to the ever stewing debate concerning determinism versus free will - with perhaps a dash of compatibilism thrown in and stirred by agents of the supernatural.

But eschewing the supernatural, we may still believe that the laws of cause and effect make events inevitable even if not predestined by intent or purpose. Yet in reality, we must act as if consequences are not inevitable and choices are necessary - even if made for us long ago by circumstance.

And we must act as if we can somehow determine or postpone our fate, while at the same time instinctively turning to "fate" as an explanation for any failure of those actions.

And some of us with religious beliefs must nevertheless act as if our gods have no real control over our actions - even if we believe that one or more of those gods are the cause of an inevitable or predestined fate.

And (obviously) this is because our innate calculating mechanisms force us to make choices, regardless of any philosophical or other belief that such choices were not ours to make. So it would seem my missionary father was right - that our gods do help those who help themselves.

And it occurs to me there was no real point to this post, but I was forced to write it anyway.