Re: Making your mind up

On 30/04/2024 11:10, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:56:24 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

On 29/04/2024 18:43, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 4/26/24 11:57 PM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:32:27 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
>

On 4/26/24 12:27 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:45:37 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
>

On 4/22/24 2:12 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

rOn Thu, 18 Apr 2024 18:36:48 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
>

On 4/7/24 8:01 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Sat, 6 Apr 2024 10:22:18 +0000, j.nobel.daggett@gmail.com
(LDagget)
wrote:
>

Martin Harran wrote:
>

On Fri, 5 Apr 2024 16:29:20 -0500, DB Cates
<cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>

On 2024-04-05 11:05 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

There was quite an interesting discussion a few weeks ago on
Free Will
vs Determinism but it died a death, at least in part due to the
departure of some contributors to the Land Beyond GG. I'd
like to take
up some of the issues again if anyone is interested.
>
One point made by Hemidactylus that didn't get developed any
further
was the way that we sometimes give a lot of time and effort
into
making a decision - he gave the example of buying a car.
It's also
common for someone to want to "sleep it on it" before making a
decision where the decision is important but it is not clear
what
decision is best. If a decision is essentially predetermined
then what
is the point of that time and effort or sleeping on it?

>
Do you not see that this argument depends on the belief that
there was
an *option* to make the decision earlier under different
conditions
(lack of 'thinking it over' and/or 'sleeping on it'). IOW
that free will
exists. You are 'begging the question'.

>

It's actually the complete opposite, I am starting with the
assumption
that there is no free will and asking what then is the point in
deliberating over the various options. You seem to be taking
things a
bit further and saying that if determinism exists then there
aren't
any options to begin with but that is just a variation in
emphasis, it
doesn't address the question of why we spend so much time
pondering
those options when they don't even exist.

>
You missed his point.
Consider writing an algorithm controlling a robot walking down
a path.
The robot comes to a fork in the road. Does it take the left
fork or
the right fork?
>
The robot has no free will. It can, however, process data.
>
The algorithm can have layered complexity. Scan left, scan right,
process data. Simple-minded algorithm scans 1 sec each way,
sums up
some score of positive and negatives and picks the best. If it's a
tie, it might kick the random number generator into gear.
>
Alternatively, it can get into a loop where it keeps scanning left
and right until one "choice" passes a threshold for "better" that
is not just a greater than sign, maybe 10% better or such. From
the outside, this is "pause to think". With a little imagination,
one can add much more complexity and sophistication into how the
robot chooses. It can be dynamically adjusting the thresholds. It
can use it's wifi connection to seek external data. It can find
that
its wifi signal is poor at the fork in the road so back up to
where
it was better.
>
Map "go home and sleep on it" to some of that or to variants.
Map it into Don's words. The robot could not "choose" left or
right until its algorithm met the decision threshold, i.e. it
didn't have a legitimate option yet. (hopefully he'll correct
me if I have abused his intent too far)
>
To an outside observer lacking full knowledge of the algorithm,
it looked like it had a choice but inexplicably hesitated.

>
It is *you* who have missed the point. What you have described
above
is an algorithm to process data and arrive at a decision; what I
was
asking about is why we delay once all the information that is
available or likely to be available *has been processed*. Once
all the
information has been input in your algorithm there is no reason for
the processor to continue analysing unless you add in some sort of
rather pointless "just hang about for a while" function; no
matter how
many times your algorithm runs with a given set of inputs, it will
reach the same decision.

>
The answer to that is simple: Once all information is in, it has
*not*
all been processed. The decider may have thought about price,
quality,
ease of cleaning, subjective appreciation of pattern (for both
self and
one or two others), and availability, but there are undoubtedly
tradeoffs midst all that data that cannot be expressed in
six-variable
differential equation, much less in something that you could
decide by
reasoning. Furthermore, there are innumerable other factors that the
decider probably did not consider on the first pass (how does it
look in
various other lightings? What, if anything, would it imply about our
social status? Is it going to remind me of Aunt Agatha's horrible
kitchen?) All of that processing takes time,

>
Which goes back to the question I have already asked here about the
underlying principle of Cost versus Benefit in Natural Selection; if
the benefits from a trait or characteristic outweigh its cost, then
that trait Is likely to be selected for; if the cost outweighs the
benefits, then it will likely be selected against; if cost and
benefit
more or less balance out, then it is really down to chance whether or
not the trait well survive.
>
What you have said above highlights that there is significant cost
involved in this pondering in terms of brain resources. Can you
identify any benefits that would outweigh the cost of such pondering
when the final decision is predetermined?

>
I think you can identify such benefits yourself. For example,
suppose a
tribe is faced with a decision of moving elsewhere or staying in a
marginal environment. Pondering the pros and cons can be life-saving.

>
It can only be life-saving if they have control over the decision
(free will). If the decision is made for them (determinism), then the
pondering makes no difference.
>

As
for the cost, that is part of the predetermination (if, indeed, the
decision is predetermined).

>
I have asked the question in the context of decisions being
predetermined or at least beyond the control of the people making
them.

>
I get the feeling that predetermination means, to you, that if I am
predetermined to choose to buy this house (say), then no matter what I
think, or even if I don't think at all, I will end up deciding to buy
that house. I could move to Tibet, scramble my brain with acid, and
spend all my conscious time playing Candy Crush, and still, in a day or
two, the though will come to me, "I need to buy that house."
>
That's not how predeterminism works. In a predetermined world, I find
myself in need or want of a house, contact a realtor who shows me
available listings; I visit those houses which are in good price range
and neighborhoods; probably I am influenced by external factors such as
the amount of traffic I had to fight through to get there or how hungry
I am at the time. The good and bad points of the different houses being
fed into my mind, I eliminate some obvious non-candidates, and let my
gut guide me to the best of the remaining.
>
That is predetermination at work.  Note that it appears, to all
observers, exactly the same as non-predetermination. That's why the Free
Will issue has never been resolved.

>
No, that is not at all how determinism works. It does not say that if
you move to Tibet you will somehow feel the to buy that house inn the
USA. What determinism says is that if you move to Tibet, you will
decide to buy a different house but that decision has not been a free
will one, it was a result of your conditions changing (moving to
Tibet). Your change of country, however, was also not a free will
choice, it in turn was the result of other conditions and preceding
events:
>
"If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13
billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already
settled. Every event that's ever occurred was already predetermined
before it occurred. And this includes human decisions. If determinism
is true, then everything you've ever done - every choice you've ever
made - was already predetermined before our solar system even existed.
And if this is true, then it has obvious implications for free will.
>
Suppose that you're in an ice cream parlor, waiting in line, trying to
decide whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream. And suppose
that when you get to the front of the line, you decide to order
chocolate. Was this choice a product of your free will? Well, if
determinism is true, then your choice was completely caused by prior
events. The immediate causes of the decision were neural events that
occurred in your brain just prior to your choice. But, of course, if
determinism is true, then those neural events that caused your
decision had physical causes as well; they were caused by even earlier
events - events that occurred just before they did. And so on,
stretching back into the past. We can follow this back to when you
were a baby, to the very first events of your life. In fact, we can
keep going back before that, because if determinism is true, then
those first events were also caused by prior events. We can keep going
back to events that occurred before you were even conceived, to events
involving your mother and father and a bottle of Chianti.
>
So if determinism is true, then it was already settled before you were
born that you were going to order chocolate ice cream when you got to
the front of the line. And, of course, the same can be said about all
of our decisions, and it seems to follow from this that human beings
do not have free will."
>
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/determinism-classical-argument-against-free-will-failure/
>
>
That full article is well worth a read, he covers a range of issues
including the arguments between determinists like Einstein and
indeterminists like Heisenberg and Bohr.

>
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]
>
References he cites are S.K. Talwar et al., 'Rat navigation guided by
remote control', Nature 417 (2002); Ben Harder, 'Scientists drive rats
by remote control', Nat. Geographic 1 May 2012; Tom Clarke, 'Here come
the ratbots: Desire drives remote-controlled rodents', Nature 2 May
2002; D. Graham-Rowe, 'Robo-rat controlled by brain electrodes', New
Scientist 1 May 2002.  Most or all of those are available online; I did
not bother copying links, nor have I read them myself.
>
The book on the whole is well-written, thought-provoking, and
deliberately provocative; there is stuff in there for everybody to
disagree with. Or in some cases, maybe, to hate the conclusions even as
they agree with them.
>

>
Wow sounds like someone with no executive dysfunction at all. Some of us
are *constantly* going "WHY DID I DO THAT" and I'm pretty sure that's
how making a choice via neural stimulation would often feel. Of course
rationalization happens too but it's not the only way we have of
interacting with/interpreting our own behavior.

 I mentioned elsewhere that my initial impression of 'The Evolution of
Agency ' is that I can't see how it in any way supports determinism. > I'm conscious that I owe you a couple of replies else-thread [(time
pressures) but having criticised Mark fore directly transposing rat
mental process to humans and other primates, here might be a useful
place to explain how I got that impression. For example, in his
introductory chapter, Tomasello says:
 "To explain in the end specifically human agency- as I wish to do- we
need an account that traces the evolutionary steps in agentive
behavioral organization from creatures who make few and highly
constrained decisions to creatures who quite often decide for
themselves what to do."
 Again due to time pressures, I am still only half-way through the book
(I hope to get back to it this week) so I don't want to draw final
conclusions but that statement and similar ones in the early parts of
the book seem to imply choices freely made by individuals rather than
determined purely by conditions.
 

Like I said I hadn't brought up the book in support of determinism in particular. As far as that explanation of why you think it doesn't goes, the thing is I don't even know what it is you think of as "determinism". Most people to my understanding see "determinism" as impacting "free will" by saying choices are determined by conditions *including those in the brain of the individual making the decision*.
Tomasello in particular draws a distinction (cleverly IMO) between behaviors that are directly optimized via evolution and those that are developed within the brain itself, i.e. evolution metaphorically delegating those decisions to the individual. I think it neatly accounts for our sense that some organisms have the ability to "decide" things that others don't within the same evolutionary framework.
To be more precise a brain-based account of behavior asks us to imagine behavior X is the result of some specific pattern of neural connections Y. It seems paradoxical to think the same could be true of an insect and a dog if they both display behavior X but the dog seems to have much more "going on under the hood" than the insect; the temptation is either to deny the dog is implementing behavior X via pattern Y, or to deny the dog has more going on than the insect after all. The difference proposed here is that there are different ways pattern Y can come to be: it can arise directly as an evolutionary adaptation, or it could arise during brain development via learning, or it could arise via processes of the brain self-modifying on the fly... Each time the brain involved is an evolved system under selection to display pattern Y (resulting in behavior X) at some point but pattern Y itself can be any number of steps downstream from the traits being directly modified via natural selection & random mutation, and this difference would be enough to account for the notion that some organisms have more autonomy than others while all ultimately having evolved. Just like some organisms evolve a hardwired house (snails), others evolve behaviors to get one (hermit crabs), others evolve behaviors to build one (beavers)... They all can be said to have "evolved" to have the houses they do but the different *ways* they evolved to get the house has very different implications on how they get their houses and what their houses are like.