@EmperorNero,
This response will be framed in a quote by quote format, since that is the format you seem to be most comfortable with. However, I will be addressing your statements out of their original order and in what I feel is their relevance to the current debate. For simplicity's sake, I've placed the most relevant passages toward the beginning of this post, and the less relevant will form a sort of set of corollary statements and questions.
EmperorNero wrote:
If I could predict all your decisions, and not just measuring the decision itself before you are consciously aware of it, but calculate the decision before you even make it, that would disprove that you could have made the other decision. I.e. that you have the capability of having made either decision.
Your final statements are false; that an action is predictable does not make it necessary or inevitable. Let me invite to to imagine an experiment. A subject, a woman, is seated in front of a table. On this table is a small console in which two light bulbs, a green bulb and blue one, are set. The console is programmed to flash one bulb every 2 seconds, in a random pattern of blues and greens. The object of the experiment is for the subject to attempt to guess which color will appear next in the interval between flashes. Each sequence is 100 flashes long. After each round the subject will be told the percentage of flashes guessed correctly in that sequence.
After the first three rounds, the subject's percentage of correct guesses are 32%, 22%, and 24% respectively. A poor enough showing to prove that she is not psychic, I'm afraid, but enough time for her to adjust to the game. Using some inductive reasoning, she decides that, since her random guessing is no match for the random pattern of lights, she might get better results by always saying the same color. The reason this might work better is that in a random sequence this increases her odds, making them 50-50%. So in the fourth sequence she guesses blue everytime. And in the 5th and 6th rounds she always guess green. Her number of correct guesses do improve and her totals for those rounds are 52%, 59", and 47%.
As you can see her decisions became more and more predictable in the following rounds. They did not become so as a consequence of their becoming any more necessarily so, but as a consequence of their increased effectiveness and likelihood of success. Your (or the experiment's observer's) capacity to predict the outcome of each decision does not represent a limit to the subject's options.
EmperorNero wrote:
Razzleg wrote:In all of this, I can't help but notice that you have failed to address my proposition that the existence of learning curves substantiates the free will argument. How does that variation on the argument impact your skepticism?
I don't think it impacts free will in the sense that I explained above and in recent posts. I mean free will not in the sense that we are zombies. If it does, please explain.
I'm becoming increasingly confused as to what you think "free will" should mean. You do not deny that human beings have agency (which I suggest you google before you agree to it). Nor do you deny that people are conscious, and that they have the ability to make decisions. You keep insisting that the fact that someone makes a particular choice means that they could only have made that decision, and that for free will to be true one must be able to demonstrate that they could have done differently after the fact. Well, I'm afraid that my time machine is in the shop, but even if I had it here with me I'm afraid you would have to come to my location to use it (it doesn't travel well.)
But let's look back to my hypothetical for a moment, and imagine that we can travel back to the beginning of the imaginary experiment. When we arrive in the past I quickly induce a small butterfly that I happen to have with me to flap its wings. When the woman begins her guessing game again for the first time, she has been subtly induced by the movement of insect wings to try a different combination of guesses for her first round. This leads her to make different guesses in the 2nd and 3rd rounds as well. But this does not prove anything about free will, right? The change in these early guesses is the result of the change we have brought with us. However, due to a lack of success similar to the first first run-through of guessing, she alters her behavior again and begins to guess one color every time: blue, green, green.
This isn't proof that she couldn't have made different decisions. She did make different decisions at the beginning of her challenge. It's proof that she improved her skill set during the process of making similar decisions over and over again. Time machines aside, the only way to test for a person's "variability" is to present them with similar stimuli repeatedly, and observe the changes in response. It is through the identity of the decision-maker and the "inner" changes that determine different responses that, what we might call, "free will" may be demonstrated.
I don't know quite what you would consider "will" to be. I can't peel back skin and saw through bone, and point to a particular part of the brain and say, "it's right about here." Nor do I know what you mean when you refer to "free"-dom of will. I can't travel though time. I can't fly either, but I don't think either of these would demonstrate the sort of freedom of which will is capable. I don't, as you and Fil Albuquerque seem to, identify "free will" with some sort of omnipotence that can only be supported by some sort of faith. Nor do I believe that it is some substance contrary to what might otherwise be considered varied causal forces, such as genetic predisposition, a chain of events, or the constraints of logic.
If you will, imagine all of the forces that you consider determinative as a variety of strings. The individual is the point of interaction of those strings. But this point is not simply an intersection, a puppet on her strings. As they cross and wrap around each other the strings form a knot. Now this knot is loose enough so that the strings can be pulled through it, and in the course of being so pulled these strings weave themselves together into a thicker rope. Imagine that "will" is not a string among strings, but rather a result of their interaction. A mobile point involving all of the strings, distinguishable by a specific pattern and individuated from the remainder of the threads. "Will" is a metaphor, just as my knot is a metaphor, and while it is not a substance it is not insubstantial.
What do I mean by "freedom" when I link it with "will"? I basically mean an individual's capacity to pursue advantageous goals over the course of time, and the ability to improve the nature of that pursuit. I don't know what goals that logic, genetic imperatives, and chains-of-events had in common before their bond in the individual, all of these things do not even seem to operate teleologically. It is the individual agent, and her ability to alter her methods of success in the course of successive attempts that demonstrate her freedom. Of course, her freedom is constrained in certain instances, like the first time she encounters a set of circumstances, sometimes to the point of near nullity. Consider, for example, oh I don't know...birth. But as the girl matures, her capacity to make decisions grows with her, and perhaps in some sense her freedom of will increases.
And just to repeat your quote one more time:
EmperorNero wrote:
If I could predict all your decisions, and not just measuring the decision itself before you are consciously aware of it, but calculate the decision before you even make it, that would disprove that you could have made the other decision. I.e. that you have the capability of having made either decision.
What method would you use to predict
all of my decisions? In classical skepticism, the argument is that all possibilities are equally probable. So
your scientific method is highly unlikely to be able to produce this result. On the other hand, I don't know of any other method that does so either. But even if you arrived at such a method, how would that prove that I couldn't have made other decisions? Since the only way of testing your method's accuracy would be to compare your results against my actual decisions, the only things that would be proven would be the relative efficiency of your system and that I didn't act otherwise. "Internal variability" (whatever that means) is in no way disproved.
To wrap up:
EmperorNero wrote:
Matter is physical stuff, it's dead, it doesn't have free will. Like a cogwheel. If a cogwheel doesn't have free will, but a machine that's made out of many of them appears to have free will, then it has to be explained how it happened.
Your use of the word "dead" would imply that matter is somehow innately un-living, in contrast to "alive". An explanation as to how it achieves the latter state would have little to do with the free will debate, unless you are actually suggesting that we
are zombies. Or are cells not composed of matter?
EmperorNero wrote:
Razzleg wrote:Could you explain how we know that lobsters brains are causally determined sequences of electrical stimuli?
We studied their brains enough figure out that every of their moves is the outcome of predictable electrical stimuli. Thus we know they don't have free will in the sense I speak of.
Laying aside the issue of free will for a moment, I'm intrigued by this series of experiments. Could you do me the favor of citing them, I'd like to investigate them further? Was it a series of experiments by a single team of scientists, or was there more than one team at work? When these scientists were applying their epistemological method in the philosophically pure sense, how did the lobsters demonstrate that their brains operated in the way you refer to. How did the lobster's arguments persuade them?
EmperorNero wrote:That is not the formal definition from school textbooks, but that is the spirit of [science]. The default is - should be - denial, no position should be declared the default because it sounds obvious or because of majority opinion (consensus), or because the church happens to like it.
That's how science should work, but my point was that that is being redefined recently.
My only response is my referral to you of Charles Sanders Pierce (he didn't fry chicken):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
I apologise for the length of the post, but I tried to use as many smaller words as possible. And with that I think I will shuffle off, as promised...
(to me is a strong intuitive instrument)
