There is an argument that free will doesn’t exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
We are particles governed by physical laws, so no
Local causality doesn’t imply unbroken universal causality. In fact, the idea everything is a purely deterministic projection of some initial state is far weirder than the idea that stochastic actions can influence a partially deterministic state.
Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation’s border. It’s pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don’t mean anything to the universe.
It’s dangerous to tell people that they have no free will.
Those who do not want to think critically will just convince themselves that the world is falling apart and that they can’t do anything about it because it’s all predetermined any way.
Others take advantage of the idea of a predetermined future as a license to do whatever they please. Any terrible thing they do is not a problem to them because their actions were already predetermined, they couldn’t help it because they were destined to do these things … at least that is what they tell everyone.
I believe there is a middle ground … our biology, our environment, our genetics and the universe as a whole runs like a mechanical clock with predetermined movements … but we are provided with enough options at every movement or critical point to determine our future.
We will never be able to change how our universe works but we can choose how we can exist in that universe.
Is the opposite of dangerous. Being informed helps people make better decisions, and on a macro scale it helps society progress by not basing the collecting decisions on erroneous or untruths ideologies. The example you gave is theoretically possible and it may have happened once a century but, the reality is that people that does not believe the religious belief of free-will, do not behave like that.
I have no choice but to believe in it.
You could become convinced your perception of it is an illusion and not reality as it actually is, then you would have no choice not to believe it.
If it looks like free will and quacks like free will, then it probably is free will.
Just based on my observations of my life, I seem to have the ability to choose to do or not do things, and that’s good enough for me. Is my choice just part of the infinite universe’s fixed progression through time and I would have done what I did regardless? Are there infinite parallel universes where parallel versions of me exist that have collectively made every choice I can possibly make? Don’t care. I feel like I have free will and IMO that’s what’s most relevant to my life in this universe.
If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don’t believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I’ve never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.
I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.
How would perceived irrationality be counter to a deterministic universe? It just maybe seems irrational without all of the information, but is still perfectly part of the causal chain.
See, now we’re getting into parts that we can’t prove. My argument is that it is irrational. Your argument is that it merely seems that way. There is no reconciling our positions.
So you’re saying it is possible then? That was my only hangup. I don’t have a position on whether we have free will (leaning towards not) for the exact reason we can’t prove it.
But your whim wouldn’t really be random. It may seem random to you but there would be a reason behind it. How did you find out about the random place? You would’ve had to of come to the decision that you wanted something different somehow
This implies that every action must have a reason behind it, which I frankly find a laughable concept. Human beings are irrational creatures; our actions don’t require a reason. We have the ability to choose chaos. Unless your argument is that the cells in my stomach have the ability to know what kind of food they want and can unconsciously pass that information to my brain, there’s no reason for me to decide at 8:00 PM tonight “Hey, I want to eat Pakistani food.”
In fact, I could choose an invalid choice! Say I chose Pakistani. I would logically need to find a Pakistani restaurant to order from. What if they all closed at 8? What if I didn’t have a Pakistani restaurant near me? I may make a decision that ultimately, I cannot act upon, and then I would have to introduce some constraints to my decision making process. The decisions that follow would have a reason, but the initial whim doesn’t require one.
How did you hear about pakistani food? Where did you hear about Pakistan recently enough to recall it? Was it food related or not? If you look deep enough, yes sometimes unconsciously, we make these decisions that seem random but they are not. In a real scenario, not one just made up for the sake of debate, theres gonna be underlying reasons for your “random” choice. You could even try your darndest to be random and choose the first thing that comes to mind but you are still digging for things that it ties to “that would be unlikely therefore random” when in reality its just a word or concept you’ve unconsciously defined as unusual or different. I don’t think there is a human element or ability to choose chaos like you think there is. It just appears that way because thats the only way we are capable of perceiving it
Then we must agree to disagree, because there really isn’t any further to debate. My argument is that human beings are irrational and capable of making irrational decisions. Your argument is that irrationality is merely a pretense, and that there must be a confluence of factors that caused these things to happen. I think trying to constantly find a reason when one doesn’t need to exist is a path to madness, and that is why I believe in free will.
I can respect that. Good closure to a discussion!
What about randomness? Most people would say to be random is not to have free will.
This depends, because there are two different kinds of randomness. A lot of the “randomness” that people encounter is actually based upon something, and our theoretical entity with access to perfect information could predict the outcome of that randomness perfectly. I’m thinking of stuff like computer randomness, number generation, games of chance, that sort of thing.
However, true random absolutely exists; in the words of Terry Pratchett “Things just happen, what the hell.” You see it with mutations in nature; ordinarily healthy cells can spontaneously change without directed input. It is unpredictable, even for our theoretical entity.
Or like quantum systems, in the interpretations that prevent alternate universes. The first kind is called “pseudorandomness” in mathematics.
Usually, when people say free will they don’t just mean that their decisions are random, though.
As I hear it described, it doesn’t even make logical sense. A thing is either random, or deterministic. People talk about decisions being motivated by something, but also somehow independent of all exterior things.
People will come back that that lets you off the hook for your misdeeds, but that’s only the case if you believe in retribution for it’s own sake. A version of incapacitation and rehabilitation could make sense against something as devoid of “free will” as a bridge or building, and deterrence only needs the target to be capable of strategy.
To answer the question a slightly different way, in light of the post text: How random the universe is will come down to fundamental physics. The simplest way of interpreting the current state of the art is that the universe is deterministic but branching.
Free will is real and it’s an illusion at the same time.
Our actions are reactions. And we are very limited in our execution of will by the most basic physical boundaries. For example I cannot fly, no matter how much I will it to be so.
We have free will to control the actions of the biological apparatus which is our body, to an extent, though even those are limited by circumstances and consequences.
Overall we have limited free will, or free will “lite”
Yes but I need to define free will, I define it as the freedom to make a choice. We don’t control who our parents are, we don’t control what country we live in, we don’t control how others interact with us but we can control what choices we make.
We can chose option A-B-C…
I believe that we should treat most people as if they have free will but I don’t exactly believe in the idealistic notion of free will. I believe we can make choices, but I believe our choices are limited and shaped by our experiences.
No, we don’t have free will. HOWEVER, I don’t think that arguement will hold up in court.
It can’t hold up in court. It ultimately does not matter whether someone is compelled to do evil, or chooses to do evil. Society must be protected in either case
Thoughts and muscle movements come about through the opening and closing of ion channels that allow information to travel through neurons and for muscle fibers to contract and relax. ‘Free will’ in the sense that our mind is separate from our body and that it can somehow open those ion channels is a combination of dualism and molecular telekinesis, so I do not believe that, no.
But I do believe that consciousness is an essential emergent property of our brain. What we experience might be the output of a causal prediction engine in our brain that is making a prediction about the immediate sensory experience in a way that we can respond to stimuli before they happen. In that sense, yes, I do believe in free will because that conscious output that I experience is me! This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.
I think that a materialist framing of free will requires accepting some model of consciousness in which consciousness is not just a weird accident but is a physical phenomenon that is part of us. An essential feature of how our brain works. This is not yet demonstrated (very difficult if not impossible to do so), but I think it is. Then ‘free will’ and ‘a material system following the laws of physics’ is no longer a contradiction.
Is the emergent phenomena, consciousness, weak or strong? I think the former, which I think you support, posits a panpsychism and the latter is indistinguishable from magic.
I’m a little confused about the relationship between the causal prediction machine (CPM) and the self. to reiterate, the brain has a causal prediction engine. It’s inputs are immediate sensory experience. I assume the causal prediction engines’ output is predictions. These predictions are limited to the what the next sensory stimuli might be in response to the recent sensory input. These predictions lead to choices. Or maybe the same as choices.
So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?
So this sentence confuses me: “This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.” Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?
I think that its emergence is weak but I see no resolution to the hard problem of consciousness any time soon, so for the time my opinions about it are ideas that I find compelling and intuitive and not grounded in facts and evidence. Weak emergence does posit some form of pansychism in the sense that sentient-like behavior can emerge in other brains and even that characteristics that we might associate with sentience might emerge from other phenomena present through the universe. But, because of the same reasons that the hard problem is hard, it is also hard to study and learn about these phenomena.
I can try to explain a little better what I meant.
I don’t believe we have “free will” in the sense that the mind is separate from the body (dualism) and that it is able to break the laws of physics by altering our physiological processes. I don’t think that the non-determinism of quantum mechanics in itself gives us agency, and our mind does not have a mechanism to select how a particular wavev function collapses (not a fan of the Orch OR model).
So, in this traditional sense my answer is “no, we do not have free will”
But I think that the existential crisis and feeling of a lack of agency stems from the model of sentience that one believes. If one rejects dualism, posits that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but then ascribes only very loosely a mechanism to consciousness such as ‘complex information processing gives rise to consciousness’, then sentience appears to be just some unexplained quirk that is not essential and just happens to be there. Combining a lack of dualism and free will with consciousness being a useless quirk is what (I think) creates the existential crisis associated with a lack of free will. I used to fall into this camp of thought and resolved the crisis through a logic such as: “Yeah, there is no free will, living is nice though so I am happy that I can accidentally experience the world”.
What pushed me to re-assess this way of thinking originally was reading through a paper about teaching a dish of neurons how to play pong](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6). At first it did not make sense to me how one can possibly provide feedback to a group of isolated neurons such that it could learn to play a game. What ‘reward’ can you give a group of neurons to push them to do what you want?!
I looked into Karl Friston, the last author of that paper, which led me down a path of study. I discovered Judea Pearl, who formalized causal reasoning in a way that lets us build statistical models to move from correlations to counterfactual causes. This makes it possible to teach causal inference even to machines.
Karl Friston’s work and other researchers in the field argue that the brain is a computer built for causal computing. This idea underpins the Bayesian brain, Predictive Coding Theory, Active Inference.
In Karl Friston’s Active Inference book, sentience is proposed to emerge as a result of the prediction engine. What we experience is not actually what our senses already experienced, but instead it is what our brain expects that we will sense in the next instant. This model of reality that is built by our brain in its attempt to perform its basic function (link causes to effects in order to predict the next stimulus).
One idea is that consciousness emerges because the predictive brain is creating a ‘model’ that does not exist in physical space and so it needs imagination to explore it. The imagination of things that do not exist is essential to the process of generating counterfactuals, and counterfactuals are at the core of the causality machine. To show that A causes B, you need to imagine a situation in which A is not present and estimate the likelyhood of B. One idea is that it is precisely in the creation of a world without A that sentience emerges.
A lot of these ideas are not falsifiable, so it is difficult to say that this is indeed the mechanism of consciousness. But some of the ideas are falsifiable, and those ideas have helped these researchers teach neurons how to play pong, so I think they might have a point.
So, then, I find it plausible that consciousness is not a quirk but an essential feature of our brain. To me this resolves the free will crisis because my consciousness is not an accidental outcome of physical processes just chaotically whizzing by but an actual feature of the machinery that is me.
So these outputs are experienced. And that experience of making predictions is me. Am I the one experiencing the predictions as well?
So this sentence confuses me: “This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.” Am I making the predictions or is it the CPM?
I am this machine and I follow the laws of physics. I am part of physical reality, and my sentience is a feature of who I am. If I do something it is because I chose to do so, and the fact that I chose to do so in accordance to the law of physics does not remove my agency.
Sorry for the long delay. I think engaging with the material and what you wrote requires some reflection time and, unfortunately, my time for that is limited these days. And so while I was hoping to offer a more robust response after having read the links you provided, I think engagement was more necessary to keep the conversation fresh even if I’ve only had a glance at the material.
The brain in the dish study seems to be interesting and raised new questions for me. “What is a brain?” comes to mind. For me, I have a novice level understanding of the structures of the brain and the role in neurotransmitters, hormones, neuron structures, etc. But I’ve never really examined what a brain is and how it is something more than or other than it’s component parts and their operations.
Some other questions would be:
- What is the relationship between brain and mind?
- What do we mean by mind? Do all brains create a mind?
- Or, in context of this conversation, do all brains have a CPM?
- Does adaptive environmental behavior by species without a brain indicate a CPM?
So those are some of the initial thoughts I had and would read the paper to see if the authors are even raising that question in their paper.
But more fundamentally, we still have to examine the mind-body problem. Recontextualizing it to a CPM, “what is the relationship between a CPM and either the brain or the mind?” I am unclear if the CPM is a mental or physical phenomena. There seems to be a certainty that the CPM is part of the brain, but the entirety of it’s output is non-physical. I imagine that we assume a narrative where the brain in the dish is creating a CPM because it demonstrates learning, adaptive behavior based upon external stimuli.
Ultimately, I bring it back to a framing question. Why choose weak emergence prematurely? It limits our investigation and imagination.
Well… that’s my set of issues. I’ll try to find time to read those articles in the next few days!
Cheers!
In my view, neuroscience may contribute to clarifying questions like:
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Do all brains support a conscious predictive model (CPM)?
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Does adaptive behavior in brainless organisms suggest a primitive CPM?
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What is the relationship between brain and mind?
But deeper questions, such as “What do we mean by mind?” or “Why assume weak emergence?” remain tied to the hard problem of consciousness, which currently lies beyond the reach of empirical science.
In trying to describe promising cognitive models, I buried my main point. I am not arguing that the brain and mind problem is close to a solution, or that science is close to resolving it.
Here is my actual point:
Certain materialist views unintentionally reproduce dualist thinking. Substance dualism claims that the mind exists outside physical law. Materialism, in contrast, holds that the mind emerges from brain activity. But when this emergence is explained only as complexity or undefined processing, a conceptual gap forms: brain -> black box -> mind. This reproduces dualism in practice, even if not in theory.
This gap renders consciousness a passive byproduct. It becomes a new kind of soul, unable to influence the body. A mind without agency.
Predictive processing and active inference models offer an alternative. They describe the brain as a generative system that continuously updates predictions based on sensory input. As summarized in a recent review:
Active inference casts the brain as a fantastic organ: a generator of fantasies, hypotheses and predictions that are tested against sensory evidence.
While these models do not resolve the hard problem, they help remove part of the black box. They suggest that consciousness may play a functional role in these feedback loops. It is not a detached illusion but a process embedded in how the brain operates.
For me, this shift changed how I think about free will. Not because it provides final answers, but because it allows me to see mental acts in a similar way to how I see muscle movement. These acts are constrained by physical laws, but they are still mine.
I’m going to stick with the meat of your point. To summarize,
- Some materialist views create a black box in which consciousness is a passive activity
brain -> black box -> mind - CPMs extract consciousness from the black box
- Consciousness plays a function role by providing feedback
brain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness -> black box -> mind
But to go further,
stimuli -> brain -> black box -> CPM-> consciousness update CPM -> black box -> mind -> response to stimuliThe CPM as far as I can tell is the following:
representation of stimuli -> model (of the world with a modeled self) -> consciousness making predictions (of how the world changes if the self acts upon it) -> updating model -> updated prediction -> suspected desired resultI feel like I’ve mis-represented something of your position with the self. I think you’re saying that the self is the prediction maker. And that free will exists in the making of predictions. But presentation of the CPM places the self in the model. Furthermore, I think you’re saying that consciousness is a process of the brain and I think it’s of the mind. Can you remedy my representation of your position?
Quickly reading the review, I went to see if they posited role for the mind. I was disappointed to see that they, not only ignored it (unsurprising), but collapsed functions normally attributed to the mind to the brain. Ascribing predictions, fantasies, and hypotheses to the brain or calling it a statistical organ sidesteps the hard problem and collapses it into a physicalist view. They don’t posit a mind-body relationship, they speak about body and never acknowledge the mind. I find this frustrating.
I’m going to stick with the meat of your point. To summarize, …
That is not quite how I see it. The linear diagram “brain -> black box -> mind” represents a common mode of thinking about the mind as a by-product of complex brain activity. Modern theories are a lot more integrative. Conscious perception is not just a byproduct of the form brain -> black box -> mind, but instead it is an essential active element in the thought process.
Ascribing predictions, fantasies, and hypotheses to the brain or calling it a statistical organ sidesteps the hard problem and collapses it into a physicalist view. They don’t posit a mind-body relationship, they speak about body and never acknowledge the mind. I find this frustrating.
That text was probably written by a materialist / physicalist, and this view is consistent within this framework. It is OK that you find this frustrating, and it is also alright if you don’t accept the materialist / physicalist viewpoint. I am not making an argument about materialism being the ultimate truth, or about materialism having all of the answers - especially not answers relating to the hard problem! I am specifically describing how different frameworks held by people who already hold a materialist view can lead to different ways of understanding free will.
Scientists often do sidestep the hard problem in the sense that they acknowledge it to be “hard” and keep moving without dwelling on it. There are many philosophers (David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Stuart R. Hameroff), that do like getting into the nitty-gritty about the hard problem, so there is plenty of material about it, but the general consensus is that the answers to the hard problem cannot be find using the materialist’s toolkit.
Materialists have is a mechanism for building consensus via the scientific method. This consensus mechanism has allowed us to understand a lot about the world. I share your frustration in that this class of methods does not seem to be capable of solving the hard problem.
We may never discover a mechanism to build consensus on the hard problem, and unfortunately this means that answers to many very important questions will remain subjective. As an example, if we eventually implement active inference into a computer, and the computer claims to be conscious, we may have no consensus mechanism to determine whether they “really” are conscious or not, just as we cannot ascertain today whether the people around us are conscious. In my opinion, yes, it is physically possible to build conscious systems, and at some point it will get tricky because it will remain a matter of opinion. It will be an extremely polarizing topic.
I should start off and say I’m less interested in the quesiton of free will than the relationship between consciousness and matter. I want to reframe that so you know what I’m focused on.
Modern theories are a lot more integrative. … [I]nstead it is an essential active element in the thought process.
Here, I’m assuming “it” is a conscious perception. But now I’m confused again because I don’t think any theory of mind would deny this.
On the other hand, if “it” is “the brain” then I need to know more about the theory. As I understanding it, the theory says that the brain creates models. Models are mental. I just don’t know how that escapes the black box that connects to the mind. But as you assert and I understand, it is:
stimuli -> CPM ⊆ brain -> consciousness update CPM -?> black box -?> mind -?> brain -> nervous system -> response to stimuliIf it isn’t obvious, the question marks represent where I don’t understand the model.
So if I were to narrow down my concerns, it would be:
- Is a model a mental process?
- If mental processes are part of the brain, then how so?
- Some materialist views create a black box in which consciousness is a passive activity
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We have free will, but the majority are not free to exercise it because of material conditions and/or circumstance.
