Do You Believe In Free Will?

It's just saying that Free Will may be limited for some, but that doesn't mean that Free Will doesn't exist as a potential and natural part of existence. There are parameters for Free Will as well.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L5XbuxKNI8

 

Oh man, it's hard to get through that first speaker . . . poor calvinist lol . . . you can see the audience cringing too sometimes lol

 

nothing is unlimited by its surrounding circumstance. it is not reasonable to conclude from this however, that nothing alone exists.

so i believe in lots of things. where my belief stops is where people tell each other to believe things that in reality no one knows or is ever capable of knowing.

lots of people have written lots of books about such things, and of course many religions, and especially the dominant two, are largely based on such books.

i would say people limit their free will when they take such beliefs to be absolute truths. but it is most often their own, mostly free will choice, to do so.

 

Do they actually have free will to believe the ideas they believe? Do you chose to believe what you believe, or do you simply find yourself believing certain propositions and not others?

I know I can't "decide" to believe something, anymore than I can decide to find a joke funny.

 

yes. the degree varies, but yes "i" do. even if the physical brain has no such capacity. a computer, which the brain is, can 'make decisions', but only in accordance with its programing. i'm not arguing otherwise. but i am suggesting that not all of the brain's programing comes from the combination of environment and genetics. that there is another factor involved which is not subject to these same limitations. and that factor is a completely non-physical one. its also one that no belief knows entirely what it claims to about it.

i certainly choose not to believe in the goodness of anything that wishes to be feared. nor its trustworthyness outside of isolated contexts.

 

In a relative sense, i can get behind the idea of free will. The natural tendencies we have to behave or believe a certain way or thing caused by our psychological evolution are often comfortable enough for us not to question them, and this is free will as well. However, if we do find ourselves taking pause to consider first instinct it is well within our power to consciously choose something else.

 

Do you have a choice in taking the pause to consider? Or do you find yourself either acting on that first instinct, or otherwise pausing to consider? I actually have never experienced a moment of free will in my whole life, and I'm very interested to hear what it's like.

 

Interesting take, I'd likely consider habituation and routine better arguments against free will. As far as the last sentence, it's not clear to me that this is the case. For example, we might consider an individual who eats hamburgers every week on Mondays but then one Monday decides to skip lunch, which might suggest the "free will " you are suggesting but then consider an individual who eats hamburgers every week on Mondays but then falls ill one week and has appetite suppression due to this and doesn't eat. Are we to suggest in the latter case that the act is that of free will ?

 

Even the thought to reconsider your initial course of action is an instinct, but how far its taken, and what the next step there after includes are complete conscious free choice. Whether that be to follow the original course, cosider further, or simply put the whole thing on pause till a more convenient time to deal with the whole thing.

The allowance of sickness doesnt follow classical model prerequisits that all considerations in the model be their most average characteristics without the enactment of outside forces. Ceterus Perebus as its referred in economic modeling.

The prescense of instinctual natural courses of behavior may not lend to free will, but it also doesnt negate its existence. Id say, it more qualifies that there are then levels of aptitude for free will. The one who doesnt stray from their Monday burger ever without once considering has little free will, the one who chooses to stray on whim has much, and so on. That should also extrapolate on that power to consciously choose.

 

They appear to be conscious free choices on the surface; if you look carefully at what is going on, you will see that there is no more "free will" in how far exactly to take the reconsideration or which next steps to take than there is free will in having an instinct.

In this sense every single thing is an instinct. You point at one thing and say it's instinct, and think this other thing that happens slightly less frequently is not instinct, is you "going against" instinct, but it's all just instinct. It's all just the universe doing the universe. There never once was a point in which some center within you willed the universe to behave a certain way.

If you like we can go step by step through a detailed example and I would love for you to point out exactly where free will enters when we are making a decision.

 

If you always do what you are supposed to do, that is, follow your cultural programming and be a good citizen, you will probably not use your free will for much more than mundane things like, 'should I get a latte or a frappucino.'

If you live on the edge, if you challenge yourself, if you face your shadow, or push yourself out of your comfort zone----these things will all help you achieve greater individuation----or as Kierkegaard would say, make you more authentic as a human being.

Haven't you ever faced a moral dilemna? Have you ever had to stand up for yourself or others, when it would be so much easier to go with the flow? Had an existential crisis? Have you ever decided to make a choice towards something, after weighing the consequences and realizing that you are taking the path of greater risk, or the path you know you shouldn't take?

Have you ever set out to change reality?

These are all cases of where we exercise our free will. And in all other cases we exercise our free will by choosing not to exercise it----going with the crowd, or following the program.

 

The stock market is an excellent example. It is place where everyone has the choice to give in to the crowd, or give in to instincts-----the instincts that drive the market being fear, and greed, or you have the choice to stand out and act on your own.

I have built up a very sucessful career as a contrarian investor. But I am only a contrarian when it is time to be contrarian----which happens to be the very points in the market where instincts take over for over 90% of the market participants.

Now by definition, you would never be able to call my behavior instinctual because it went against the grain of over 90% of all market participants. Because my own instincts, if I would have followed them, would have lead me into the same losses everyone else was taking, or missed out on good profit with everyone else. You could argue that my behavior was learned, but instinctual behavior is not learned behavior and I always had a choice. My behavior was triggered by an event in the environment--but I did not follow along with the instinctual response to that event. My behavior was not automatic, because I made a choice, and again, the automatice response would have led to the outcome of almost everyone else.

In fact, instinctual behavior is considered unmodifiable and irresistable. However I modified my behavior and acted against what seemed like irresistable impulses, therefore, in man I would say that instinctual behavior is subject to existential freedom.

But I would argue also that much of mankind's behavior is culturally programmed beehavior rather than instinctual behavior----it doesn't fit the definitions of instinct very well. If someone acts against that programming they are clearly taking their lives into their own hands. In the end, we are responsible for the results of our own decisions.

 

Practically all those questions you ask are necessarily based in response to antecedent conditions though, so I think the counter is that it's not clear at what point we are exercising our free will. I'm not sure that a response to any of these situations that would be a statistical outlier necessarily grants us free will.

 

I shouldn't have used a blanket statement suggesting that in all cases these would be examples of free will, but in those cases where the choice is not wholly dependent on the antecedent conditions, I think you would find free will at work.

For example, a moral dilemna would not be a dilemna if there was an easy answer, or if we were largely inclined to choose one path over the other.

Or consider when someone weighs the outcomes, risks, and other factors and chooses the more difficult or riskier path. We could argue that this person must be predisposed to taking a challenge or being risky, but that would be overly reductionist, and is based on assumptions that are not always going to be true.

An existential crisis involves a lot soul searching, and questioning of one's very existence. If that was not the case then it would not really be an existential crisis---and if it is approached authentically, one will not know what the outcome will be.

Something I would consider to be an existential crisis that one can bring on themselves is what I suggest to people if they really want to know what they themselves truly believe in a religious or spiritual sense. I tell them that they have to break through all that programming that has told them what to believe their whole life----to do this they need to tear down and eliminate every spiritual and religious belief they have. Once they are done, they can then rebuild their own beliefs as to how it makes sense to them---without any guarantee of what that would be. This would be a modern day version of the death-rebirth motif that is so universally common to religions and spiritualities.

But then I would also question whether we can actually determine whether free will is exercised or not through statistical measures. How can we really quantify the factors that go into making a decision, and then be able to determine why these factors would not produce the same results from one individual to another. We would have a very difficult time determining whether one person in a specific situation exercised free will, while another gave in to personal weakneses, or tendencies that he/she has developed over a personal history, and for that matter, whether or not the second case actually involved a free will choice to give into such impulses. Even if we were to take two cases and feel that we had succesfully determined such, how could we in turn relate that to a significant data set of other individuals. This is a very subjective problem and you could very well have individuals who thought they exercised free will, but did not, while another may think they did not but actually did.

Carl Jung in his book, The Undiscovered Self, stressed adamently that man's personality cannot be reduced to mathematical generalizations or statistical measures.

I agree with Jung. An example of this can easily be seen in the stock market. I wrote in my last post about how I built a succesful career off of contrarian investing. To be succesful I had to be able to determine market sentiment. Market technicians (i.e. those traders, advisors, and investors who use charts) have tried many different ways of quantifying and measuring market sentiment. Some use option trades, others use price divergence from moving averages, volume, volatility, and all kinds of other things. These measures do provide an indication of market sentiment, but none of them are ideal, none of them are accurate enough to make decisions when the real make or break point comes.

I use charts extensively when I trade, but when it comes to market sentiment, and when that sentiment is the most important, I listen to people. I listen to the commentators on CNBC, and the people they interview (CNBC is not there to push the market up or down, as many investors believe, or to trick people into buying when they should sell----CNBC reflects the feelings and moods on Wall Street, and it is therefore very valuable----except Jim Cramer---he is a loudmouth egotist and should have been kept on only his own show), I listen to investors and traders. (Actually I don't listen to investors and traders anymore because I no longer work in the Stock Market, though I will call into my broker and listen to them.) I don't listen to any of them to see what to buy-----all my trades I determine on my own. Instead I listen to them to gain their emotions, and their thought process, and what they are doing-------their sentiment.

How sucessful is that? I have spotted every major top, knowing that it will happen within a few weeks, and every major bottom, knowing that it will happen on the day, since 1986. I have spotted most correction tops and bottoms as well. No sentiment indicator has done so well.

Now if someone were to argue that if free will cannot be quantified and measured, then it must not exist, I would disagree, and I think that in all the situations I provided in my previous two posts, there can be found examples of bona fide free will, and that instinctual behavior generally does not occur (except, for example, situations of reacting to greed and fear as I mentioned in my last post).

I don't believe in a predetermined future. I have always based, and continue to base, my life on the belief that I shape my own future. I have made good choices and bad choices, and because of those choices I have had a lot of excitement, I have gone around the world, I've had a lot of fun, I've done things I have regretted, and things I am ashamed of, but most of all I have done what I loved----and if I had to do it all over again, I would! (...but then it would be predetermined...)

 

Your example of free will is this:

"I could have done Action X, which is what I would normally do in that situation, or what society would expect me to do in that situation, but instead I did Action Y, which is less anticipated. Therefore I have free will, because I performed an action which was counter to cultural programming."

What I am saying is that if you look at all the reasons for why Action X was a "predictable" action, and then apply that same level of scrutiny to Action Y, you will see that Action Y has exactly as much reason to happen.

If you made stock market choices which were counter to the prevailing knowledge, why did you do that? Is it not the case that your life led you to that moment, to that decision? Is it not the case that working counter to the intuitions of most other people is something which had become intuitive to you? Why was it intuitive to you? Why did you make those decisions? Did you have a choice in being counter to the movement at large?

Again I will ask to pick one example of free will and look at it closely. Sam Harris does a wonderful and quick thought experiment in this video which is applicable to ANY example you can choose, whether the more trivial question he uses, or whether it's a moral dilemma or existential crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ebjk319Wg

Chinacat, simply asserting "but i DO have free will" is not an argument; you are employing zero cognitive machinery in your analysis. You are only failing to step outside the language and do real introspection and work with the subject at hand.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3h--K5928M

 

I would like to watch the video, but at this time I choose not to------I'm joking! My computer is screwed up and won't allow me to watch videos, and my tablet is not working.

But---to clarify, I was referring to situations where, whether there is cultural programming or not, there is a decision based on examining both choices. Cultural programming would tend to induce us to choose one choice over another, even without thinking about it. Granted, one could weigh both sides and choose the cultural progammed choice because they were culturally programmed and someone could easily argue---that he was destined to make that choice all along. But if he weighed both choices carefully and chose against that choice, the argument is stronger that he exercised free will, and I would argue that even if he made the first choice then, that it is still free will.

I showed up at a Starbucks the other day and had a free Starbucks coming to me. I was going to get a venti Frappucino, because we have had some warm weather here. But it was evening and I realized it was getting cooler out. I like the flavor of both the frappacino and a latte, but I haven't had a frappucino for a while---because I prefer a warm drink usually in the cold weather. Since it was evening and getting cold, I thought about getting a latte instead. I fretted while I waited in line, over which one I wanted, and then ordered a latte. As she swiped my card, I realized, 'wait, I will be here writing for a good 3 hours, and even though its a bit cool in here, I haven't had a frappucino for a while, so I'll get that instead. So I changed my order. Even though this is mundane---I had a choice of either one, or even something else, as I will sometimes decide to get something else. We could argue that there were conditions to my choice, but then why change my choice at the last minute, if I had already decided and weighed the conditions. Or one could even point out that I was shaking and jonesing and I always have them slip a little cocaine into my frappucino----but that couldn't have been it (I'm joking!)

Sartre uses an example of a young man who wants to join the military and go out and defend France, but he was the last surviving child, and his mother could not bear the thought of losing him on a battleground. He knew it would break her heart to join, but he also wanted to join----it was a moral dilemna for him, and he weighed both choices very heavily.

In the case of the stock market if you have ever traded you would know what I am talking about. You can have gut feelings, and a life long experience and knowledge of the markets as I do. But every trade is a risk. You can take all that knowledge, and intuition, and look at the market to enter, for example, some trades are easy, and I place it and walk away for a few hours or a day or so. But most trades are going to be more difficult. The market doesn't follow a straight line, it moves back and forth, it jumps, it drops, it slides up or down or both. I take big positions----in fact I like to trade lower priced stocks (very rare that I will touch a penny stock though) so that I am buying not a hundred shares, but 20,000 or 30,000 shares or even over 100,000 share positions. I like these because a little move is a big profit, but it can also be a big loss. There are plenty of times to second guess yourself. There may come a point where I have to determine to cut my losses---but to do so risks a potential profit. Because I am a contrarian investor on the big moves, the ones where everyone is excited and happy, or everyone is scared to death----I have experience, and intuition going for me, but at these moments I am trading my whole portfolio, and I am only human. Its a big choice in the face of many emotions---and once the trade happens, you are committed.

I have taught a lot of people how to do this. It is market common sense. We walk through trades. I have even told them what to do when it was actually happening. But I know that if I teach 100 people, there will only be 4 or 5 at most that will actually act on it. Most people will want to do it. But other than that 4 or 5 everyone else will be caught up in the emotions, and I even tell them that, and remind them when it is happening. When you lose yourself to the crowd, you are certainly not exercising free will, but for those few...

Or we could argue since it is an issue of emotions, that we can program a computer to do this. If these signals are clear and the market is predestined, then they should be able to do better than a human being. The fact is there are tons of programs out their trading all kinds of strategies, and most of the results are not very good. The only computer trading that is any good are those programs designed to spot aberations in value between securities and markets, and to arbitrage or hedge to take advantage of that opportunity. The trades are very large because the returns are very small. But if the program is good the success rate for those small returns is good. Outside of that, I have never seen a program that is very sucesful over the long run.

But this is a very difficult problem. Neurosurgeons,for example, see the world through biochemical processes which suggests an epiphenomenal reality of consciousness which I don't agree with. But they make a strong case. But in the end, we can argue these scenarios to the point of which came first---the chicken or the egg...

But for those individuals, like myself, who have had long term goals which they believed in, and made those things happen, we believe that we have the ability to make it happen because we do not buy into predestiny, but existential freedom. We shape our future accordingly.

And then there are those cases that actually involve altering reality. Take for example, the experiments at MIT where subjects altered such things as the .ph of water, or the coagulation of blood, or the rate of development of insect larva---not through a physical process, but through intention. The results were so effective that it bled over into the control experiment and they had to separate them.

 

Some issues I have with the Sam Harris video:

Sam - "Even if a conscious intention were truly simultaneous with its neuro-physiological underpinnings, there would still be no room for free will. You still wouldn't know why it is you do what you do"

Who says free will has to be instantaneous? It involves thought and considerations. It also involves subconscious parts of your brain making decisions before an option is even delivered to your conscious. It is still YOUR brain choosing these options from what it knows. Just because there are parts of your mind's free will that your conscious is unaware of, it does not mean that you don't have one.

Sam, after telling us to choose two cities - "Were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose?"

Again, just because some subconscious level brain functions only supplied you with a small finite list of city options does not mean you have no free will. YOUR MIND gave YOU options, I guarantee anyone taking part in that thought experiment came up with more than just ONE city to choose from. Of course your mind can't come up with EVERY city, your not a God. Of course you can't come up with cities you've never heard of. Just because we are a product of our environment doesn't mean it's the only single factor that our brains function by. Also, I say that without even the slightest belief in religion, Gods, or out of mind spirituality.

Sam - "You as the conscious witness of your life, are not making these decisions. You can only witness these decisions"

That is a blatant false assertion. We did just witness our consciousness make a FINAL decision on a list that our subconscious provided. His only excuse to dismiss our decisions, that humans on average have predictable general responses to stimuli. So what, of course we have general tendencies. That doesn't give Sam just cause to assume the we are simply 100% predictable nervous responses.

Sam - "You no more picked the city you settled on, in subjective terms, than you would have if I picked it for you"

Nonsense, if you understand that YOUR MIND encompasses more processing than just your conscious awareness center, then you know Sam is full of shit right now.

Sam - "So if you pay attention to how thoughts and intentions arise, and how decisions get made moment to moment. I think you can see that there's no evidence for free will. That actually our experience in life is compatible with the truth of determinism."

Lies and false assertions, he reminds me of a hypnotist trying to convince a weak minded group that they are in fact chickens. He really exposes his true irrational bias in those last three words. TRUTH OF DETERMINISM, what a bold face lie. Talk about intellectual dishonesty, determinism is no more TRUTH than religion and God. You can not prove determinism exists any more than a theist can prove Yahweh exists. Not in the scope of a billion neuron brain or quantum world. As if Sam Harris knows everything there is to know about the physical and quantum world and exactly how our brains work. I don't appreciate an atheist pushing gross assumptions and non-falsifiable speculations, as if they were matters of fact, any more than if a religious person does it to support their own irrational biases.

 

If the subjective experience of making a decision comes measurably after we can tell that the neurology has already made that decision, then the experience of making that decision is an illusion. It would be as though a doctor hit your knee and your leg swung up and you suddenly "remembered" that you "decided" to lift your leg.

If there are parts of your "decision making process" which are wholly removed from your conscious thought, to what degree are you a free agent making those decisions? It's an ever-receding horizon as you realize just how much you are unaware of.

I think you missed the point on this point; he is saying that from the get go, with the most liberal interpretation of free will, your choices are already constricted by that which did not occur to you to choose. He is starting his argument in which he shows that the area of action we call "free will" is an ever-receding concept. As soon as you think you've found it, and you look closely, you realize it can't be here, so it must be one step behind this one.

If you are asked to make the free choice of choosing a city in your mind, and it did not occur to you to choose Zanzibar, then we can confidently say that as far as the choice of choosing Zanzibar, you had no choice in not choosing it. Harris is placing a marker in your mind here for you to notice, because this marker is going to keep arising at every single possible junction of mental activity in which you believe yourself to be acting freely.

Both you and MVW are on this same tangent and it's actually not what either me nor Harris are arguing. We are not discussing predictable general responses to stimuli; we are not discussing cultural norms or the behaviors of society, although that is all highly relevant to the discussion. What we are discussing is something much, much deeper, and much, much closer to your immediate experience of every moment of your life. I think maybe that's why it's hard to get the conversation on that, because maybe you guys think I'm talking about something very cerebral and abstract, when I'm really talking about something sitting right in your retina.

You say "We did just witness our consciousness make a final decision"; that is exactly Harris' point. You witnessed a decision being formed in your mind, you did not author that decision, anymore than you can author a single thought in your mind, ever. For you to create a thought in your mind willfully, you would have to think that thought before you thought that thought. Rather, thoughts simply arise. Decisions are a kind of thought, are they not? they operate in the same manner; thoughts arise in our consciousness, we call some of them "emotions", some of them "observations", some of them "decisions", some of them "day dreams", etc; yet what we call them does not change the fact that we are essentially watching a kind of movie being played out for us by our biology.

Look closely at that last moment, when you decide "no, not Tokyo, Cairo! I've decided. Cairo." Did you decide to have those thoughts? Did you select from a list of decisions and choose one out? Or did you find yourself thinking the thought "no, not Tokyo, Cairo! I've decided. Cairo." It just appears; that is his point. Look closely without bias.

Seeing as how Harris is a neurologist and a world authority on vipassana meditation, I think we can assume he is aware that there are things going on in the mind outside of conscious awareness. He does some really interesting research with decision making and fMRIs which support his view and are reproducible; you should read the research in this area if you are interested. In fact, his thesis here is this exact point, only taken to its astounding conclussion; you say that there are aspects of decision processing which are outside of conscious awareness. Well, to what degree are we free if we are not able to know the processes by which we arrive at decisions? 50% free? What is that? It turns out that every time you scrutinize a mental phenomenon, you find its neurological correlate; you find your neurology, your body, your brain, doing things before you decided to do those things.

This is falsifiable by the way; both experientially and medically. The data supports Harris. These are not gross assumptions either, this is careful research backed by advanced imaging technology, control groups, statistically significant studies, and thousands of years of scientific introspection from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

It is actually the concept of Free Will which is akin to the concept of Yaweh; everywhere we check for it, we find only more universe doing universe. We have to keep pushing the goalpost back further and further. This is the definition of an illusion.





Harris also notes that of all the hot button issues he discusses, whether Islam, gun control, feminism, or free will, it is this topic which reliably gets him the most explosive emotional reactions. I think this is really interesting, I think this is chipping away at the basal metaphysic of most people. i once carefully walked someone through Harris' argument and when they finally understood it, they actually burst into tears and I spent a few hours consoling them emotionally and I realized that this argument, properly understood, can strip away some really fundamental worldview parameters for people, and if they don't have the right kind of worldview, it can be extremely traumatic.

I think your very negative and abrasive ad hominem here is really saying a lot about what is going on inside you when you start to work with this argument. I can only say that if we lose an illusion, we gain everything. If we lose that which we never had, all we gain is freedom.