Re: Making your mind up

On 02/05/2024 17:37, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 5/2/24 5:45 AM, Arkalen wrote:

On 02/05/2024 00:22, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 5/1/24 5:12 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 30 Apr 2024 16:30:47 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
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On 4/30/24 2:08 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:43:03 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
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[…]
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As it happens, I have been reading Yuval Noah Harari's _Homo Deus_ and
yesterday read his take on free will.  He considers it a modern myth
disproved by science. One example he gives is "robo-rats", rats in a
laboratory which have electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of
their brain, which scientists can stimulate to make the rats do what the
scientists want them to do. The rats turn this way and that not of their
own choice, but according to the choices of the people pressing buttons.
Now, imagine you are one of those rats. You turn left. Why? Because you
*chose* to turn left. "What does it matter whether the neurons are
firing because they are stimulated by other neurons or by transplanted
electrodes connected to Professor Talwar's remote control? If you ask
the rat about it, she might well tell you, 'Sure I have free will! Look,
I want to turn left -- and I turn left. I want to climb a ladder -- and
I climb a ladder. Doesn't that prove I have free will?'" [pp. 333-334]

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Most brain research that I'm aware of - including the Lbet experiments
- show a considerable difference in brain activity between trivial
decisions and important decisions. I think it's safe to say that 'Turn
left or tun right' is well into the trivial category.
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You and he also seem to be making the assumption that the decision
process in rats can be directly transposed into humans which isnot
necessarily the case - there are distinct difference between rats and
primates, including humans. See my response to Arkalen below.

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I took the rat illustration as an illustration, not as proof of final
concept. If a rat controlled by a human can be thinking, "I made that
decision on my own", so can a human controlled by fate.

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Sorry to burst your bubble but that idea has already been dismissed by
*neurological research*. I've previously referred to work by Wilder
Penfield who is regarded as the pioneer in surgery for epilepsy and
developed the process of carrying out surgery on fully alert patients
which allowed him to observe and record the effect of stimulating
various parts of the brain;
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"The Quebec meeting heard some compelling evidence for localisation of
function from Penfield, who described his work showing that electrical
stimulation of the cortex could evoke both dream-like states and motor
activity. But as Penfield explained, although the patient's body moved
if the motor cortex was stimulated, the subjects always said that this
occurred 'independent of, or in spite of, their own volition'.
Similarly, the very precise experiences he was able to evoke never
resembled 'things seen or felt in ordinary experience' but were more
like dreams."
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Cobb, Matthew. The Idea of the Brain: A History: SHORTLISTED FOR THE
BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020 (p. 337). Profile. Kindle Edition.

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Good points.  Thanks for reminding me.
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I think he makes a good point to highlight that we don't just blindly think "this was my decision" of any behavior we display - we have sophisticated systems to examine our own behavior and relate it to possible decisions that can result in us thinking "this was my decision" but also "my body is moving against my will" or "this wasn't like me" or "I have no idea why I did that" or "I'll regret this" - or indeed "it wasn't my fault [=this wasn't a decision at all]" or "they made me do it [=it was someone else's decision]".
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I think it's still worth noting that this system can be fooled (some might even argue that accuracy isn't its primary purpose to being with, so), so the rat thinking "it's my decision to turn left" when some dopamine center is stimulated isn't that unrealistic for humans. For example I think there are experiments with people with blindsight where their decisions would be prompted by visual stimuli their brain processed but that they couldn't consciously see, and they'd give justifications for why they'd made that decision, fully seeing them as their own and not coming from external prompts.

 Similar examples of people rationalizing behaviors which they are not conscious of making exist for split-brain patients and people with short-term amnesia.
 

I don't think that helps save the analogy though because 1) actual experiments into this probably involve as Martin Harran points out trivial decisions that could go either way for anyone. Our decisions go through many layers and loops of sophisticated filters. One could imagine asking a person to pick a red or a blue token and flashing "red" in their blindsight field of vision could make them pick red, but if you flashed "kill your wife" the most you'd get is them having a vague sentiment of unease, or a weird intrusive thought as the suggested decision got immediately quashed by the rest of the decision-making system for all the obvious reasons. It kind of gets into the general question of how manipulable humans can be and the overall situation seems to be "yes" and "not infinitely so though". Like Barnum said about being able to fool everyone some of the time and some people all of the time but not all the people all of the time.

 That quote is identified not with Barnum, but with Abraham Lincoln (even though he didn't say it).  Apparently, Barnum did not say, "There's a sucker born every minute", either.
 Anyway, I don't see an meaningful distinction between small decisions and large ones. The same sort of brain activities, presumably, occur in each. My car doesn't have more or less free will when I take it for a 400-mile drive than which I take it just out the driveway.
 

I'm not sure why you'd presume that. It would make sense if "decision-making" was simple and not a complex combination of different brain activities but to my understanding all evidence point to it being the second. Subjectively do you really feel you're doing the exact same kind of thing when you're taking the same right turn you've taken a million times without even noticing, when you put time and effort to think through a high-stakes decision, when you make a snap decision you don't really care about, when you choose an action that doesn't even feel like a decision because of how obvious the choice seems, when you make some choice, think better of it and try and make a different choice the next time, ...etc?
None of that has any bearing on free will or determinism; it can be brain activity either way with the only disagreement being on whether it's the *same* brain activity. But it has a bearing on the applicability of experiments into some kind of decision-making or another to decision-making in general.