Quote from: aliennaire on Mar 25, 2012, 03:25:22 PM
Quote from: Ballzanya on Mar 24, 2012, 10:36:57 PMSo what I'm arguing, or at least one of the things I'm arguing is that, neither you nor anyone else is in any position to claim that you know that you make decisions based on free will, unrestrained by subconscious factors, biases, prejudices, genetic predispositions, past experiences, and so on, just because you have a "sense" of making choices and being in control of your actions. Which now leads to a sci-fi related question: If artificial intelligence were possible to engineer, who's to say we couldn't make robots that had the sense of being in control of their own actions, although they were ultimately programmed on some level?
I never said our decisions are based on free will, I thought I formulated it quite simply and pellucidly
Quote from: aliennaire on Mar 24, 2012, 09:19:33 PM
It's no way an illusion, free will enables you with the power to choose and agree or oppose, depending on your choice. I'm not talking about situations when you are obliged to act in certain manner due to laws, conventions, habits, etc, I mean you true reaction, which you always have inside yourself.
For the start, didn't you ever had a feeling, that, while you have made some decision, there was something naggingly uncomfortable, screaming totally against that resolution, but you should have kept on going with what you decided, because that move was rational, prestigious or money-promising?
For the second, let me exemplify with a simple instance, what I imply by free will. Imagine yourself put in an empty white room with no doors, nor windows. You don't rememeber who you are, also you have no idea where you're now, you're just a man, standing at the centre of the empty room. And you're told to sit, what will you do?
Um.. subconscious processes causing a person to do something does not count as a decision. To decide, implies you have control of your faculties and are unrestricted in the choices you could possibly make.
Also your little scenario doesn't really make sense. I don't get what you're aiming at with it. But the choices do seem limited even in that hypothetical scenario. Assuming the voice is from another person in the room, or from a loudspeaker in another room you are unaware of and that the person could presumably hear you, you can talk to the person, actually just sit down, or try and leave. However, these "choices" aren't really unrestrained by other factors.
Presuming that the person with no memory in the room wants to live and is in relatively good mental health, the decision to just sit without question and no hesitation seems astronomically unlikely, so its not as if a person really has the option to do that for all intents and purposes. It may be a possible choice, but if 100% of the time anyone in that situation would never do it, then it's moot as a possible option. So we toss that choice out.
We're left with talking to the person, or leaving. But since the person doesn't know where they are, I think they would be inclined to gather as much information from the person who told them to sit as they possibly could. So once again, unless the person was abnormally irrational or clueless, anyone in the same situation would basically have the desire to find out where they are before just mindlessly walking out the door. So we can rule out just sitting, and also just leaving.
So it seems the person in the room without their memory only had one choice, even if it could break down into minor variations on the conversation etc.
Quote from: Deuterium on Mar 24, 2012, 11:54:46 PM
Quote from: Ballzanya on Mar 24, 2012, 11:24:36 PM
Wait a minute. Are you suggesting here that decisions made by our brains subconsciously count as us being in control and thus making a choice, just as much as conscious decision making? To me that seems crazy. It's not just semantics and how you define the concept of free will.
As far as I'm concerned, if I don't consciously decide something, based on the immediate awareness of the possible options and their potential outcomes, then I haven't made a choice. If as one of these famous studies suggests, that the brain already starts sending a signal to start doing something before the person has any sense of desire to do that particular thing, then they have not chosen to do that particular thing.
I think it become both a question of definition, as well as identification/classification. I ask you to consider your dreams. Now, if we don't think too carefully, we tend to dismiss our dreams as more or less random and many times incoherent. But if you really think deeply about some of your dreams, you realize that often there is a narrative. Events often occur in your dreams that surprise you, but are still consistent within that particular dream. What part of your mind is planning how the dream unfolds? I am not talking about when your dreams fragment, or go of the rails. But rather the physical continuity of a relatively lucid dream, itself. If, in your dream, you are being chased by a monster, and suddenly come upon a weapon...it was your subconscious that "thought" to include the weapon. If you choose to pick up the weapon, and fire back at the monster...that is all occuring at a "sub-conscious" level. When dreams are vivid, there is a definite sense that some narrative is being planned and played out. Who is writing that narrative?
Evidently, there is a very real agent that resides deep within our mind, that operates on a sub-conscious level. You certainly are making "decisions" within your dreams...and these occur at the "sub-conscious" level...so how exactly does that differ from a decision you make in an awake, "conscious" state?
A brief word on the previously referenced neuro-studies on Free Will. A major difficulty lies in the fact that the subject must identify (by looking at a clock), when they were first aware that they had made a conscious decision to, say, lift their wrist, or push a button. This requires introspection on the part of the subject, and identification of intentionality. The subject does not give the researcher direct access to the moment they were first aware of their "intention"...but must tell them afterwards. They have to recall the position of the clock.
Another problem is determining if the "readiness potential" (identified by neural signature) is always followed by an action. The subject may show definite neural signs/brain waves indicated they have a readiness potential, but no action results. There is no way for the researcher to discriminate between the measurement of a given readiness potential, and the subjects intentionality to act or not to act.
Finally, as I emphasized previously, it is not at all apparent or evident that "willful" actions and influences on our behavior operate exclusively on a conscious level. The aforementioned studies, however, are based specifically on this assumption. The whole thing falls apart if one allows that the "will" can also operate on unconscious processes...or that our mind may also function with "pre-conscious" intentions.
Well, dreams are fictions created by our brains. Contrary to what some crazy, new-age type whackos might think, we don't leave our body during our sleep, nor can we take control of our dreams, and steer them into a type of "lucid dream" of a fantastic nature(as opposed to the actual concept of dreams that just seem real, which people do have.)
So the subconscious is the ONLY thing at work during dreams in terms of the divide between subconscious and conscious processes at least. Therefore I seem no room to argue any part of a person's dreams can invoke a "will" on their part. The perception of being in control in a dream, which you aren't aware is in fact a dream, is hardly proof of free will. Since unlike reality, we know for sure dreams are illusions.
