----- Original Message -----

From: John Widger

To: Peter Rose

Cc: David Skinner ; Jon Cartmel ; Dave Thompson

Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2006 2:20 PM

Subject: [SPAM] Free Will

Peter,

 

I’ve now caught up, and have been struck by the amount of agreement reached and the misunderstandings resolved. I think we all agree that behaviour is affected not just by genes, but by our environment, and that “thoughts” can affect the physical body (including the brain itself) in a sort of feedback loop - though determinists would want to point out that “thoughts” are (pre-determined) biochemical activity in the brain.

 

We all feel we have free will, and will continue to live our lives as though we had (determinists would say because we’re “programmed” to do that).

 

Forgive my gross simplification of the preceding debate, and do put me right if I’ve misinterpreted, but your main remaining contentions seem to be:

 

·         Science can never explain everything (Godel, Quantum effects …), so cannot fully explain the workings of the brain. Hence free will may well exist.

True, it may; it’s down to what’s more likely. Dave has pointed out that science does explain an awful lot, and history suggests it will explain more and more. Good evidence, therefore, that it’s a case of us not knowing the explanations today, rather than there not being any explanations.

And if one believed in free will in humans, it feels reasonable to me that one should take a view on free will in other species. Chimps? Dogs? Worms? Fungi? [I’ve attached my earlier comments (in May) on this below.]

 

·         Your own experience of free will e.g. “If I have a new thought that I have consciously never had before, then consider it and either accept or reject it but if I accept it then this is a new event which has conditioned my memories.  But part of this is my conscious acceptance of it what I would call my free will.”

 

Most (all?) of us feel exactly as you do. In my May document I challenged folk to explain the difference between us and computers regarding this debate (in priniciple;  of course, with today’s technology, there’s a massive difference in complexity).  [I've attached this below, too.] 

 

Let me take it a step further. Let’s equip our medical diagnosis computer with a camera which is directed at the screen, and has the ability to read text, parse it, identify key words etc. And let’s program the computer so that when asked to reach a decision, it searches its memory for relevant information and displays it on the screen. The intelligent camera then reads and analyses it, passes back its analysis to the computer, which then applies weighting factors to reach a decision: “Take a course of Valium!”.

 

Now replace “computer, screen, camera” with “brain”, and replace “camera reads and analyses” with “think” or “consciousness”.  What’s the difference?

 

When you talk of a “new thought” Peter, you know (by now!) that determinists believe it’s merely been generated by your neurons, based on the electro-chemical make-up of your brain. I’m not sure if you agree with that? If not, where do you believe it comes from?  In my computer analogy, the camera – just like our consciousness - has no idea where the information on the screen came from.

 

 

Look forward to your comments, if you have time - and the endurance,

 

John

 

[Jon, David, Dave - please let me know if you don't want to be copied on this kind of stuff]

 

 

Repeat of my Earlier Stuff …

 

Where, in the evolutionary chain, does free will appear?

 

One could interpret this flight from the lion in terms of free will: “I have the choice to stay still; the lion might just have eaten an antelope, and might decide that post-prandial sex with a nearby lioness is more important than eating me but, on the other hand, why take the risk … I’m out of here!”

 

If so, I think one has to concede that the same sort of “reasoning” goes on in many other species – with less sophistication as we move down the species to the most primitive. Even plants react to events (e.g. light, heat) in a way which we could interpret as them “thinking things through”. So you’d have to specify where in the evolutionary chain free will is introduced, and that feels too arbitrary to me.

 

 

If we have free will, then so do computers

 

If you define free will as weighing up alternative courses of action, then of course humans have free will. However, we can build computers and robots that can do that. You’re no doubt aware of “expert systems”; medical diagnosis software conducts a Q&A with a patient and is apparently more accurate (over many cases) than real doctors. It could be programmed to respond, logically, at some point “I’m sorry, on balance, I think this case is too complex for me – I recommend you consult a cardiac specialist” for example (maybe they’ve already incorporated such things).

 

And such systems can learn from experience, updating their rules in flight. So can robots; maybe you’ve seen the film of the little robot teaching itself to walk: it stumbles, gets up again and carries on with increasing success – just like a real baby.

 

Of course, human decision-making is massively more complex than computers can achieve today, but it’s a question of scale not principle.  So we end up concluding that computers and robots have free will. Their free will is silicon-based programming, whereas humans’ free will is carbon-based “programming” (dependent, as you say, on both genetic and environmental factors).