Proactive Behaviour and Causality

[Roger Bissell]

The book lists for $65, and I didn't find any discounted prices. So, maybe I'll just digest the relevant chapters and post summaries we could discuss, if there is sufficient interest. I could probably start work on this next week. I think we also ought to take a look at Hobbes and Locke, in regard to compatibilism and/or determinism/free will.

REB

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I shall definitely straggle along.

Michael

[Paul Mawdsley]

Ellen, you suggest:

I see will as the core proactive force of animalian motion -- and the problem of "will" as beginning with the first evolutionary hint of voluntary motility. ...I'm probably more extreme than you are.

I am in absolute agreement with the core proactive force extending all the way back to the beginning of voluntary self-generated motion but you are not more extreme than I am. I am only revelling a few cards at a time.

On Branden's forum previously I made a number of novice mistakes with regard to presenting my own little twist on existence. One of those mistakes was trying to take on too grand a subject than the time I could allow to present it. Here, I am taking little bites.

I see proactive causation to extend all the way down. Again, my view is in alignment with Branden's assertions regarding "the mind body problem." I see one substance who's actions can be integrated into higher level entities in two fundamentally different ways. The second level of integration is dependent on the existence of the first-- ie. animate action is dependent on the existence of inanimate action, or mind action depends on brain action. But proactive causation is the only causation acting through both. All other concepts of causation can be captured by an understanding of proactive causation-- eg. the reactive causation found in Newton's laws of motion are just a manifestation of proactive causation. I think this makes me pretty extreme.

We are not at this point in the discussion yet. I will come back to this later. Let's forge on with proactive causation in the problem of "will."

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

Ellen,

When I sat down the other night to respond to your post I had two things in my mind to say. There was a lot happening around me here, at home, when I was writing and I never got to read over my post before I sent it. I missed saying one of the things I meant to say.

Thank-you. It is comforting to know I am not alone in my unusual thinking. From our brief interaction in the past, I thought you were somewhat as twisted as I. I look forward always to your comments.

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

Dragonfly and Roger,

There are many levels of abstraction from which the “will” can be approached. Beyond the different levels of abstraction there is also different orientations of consciousness from which the subject can be approached. Dragonfly would like a very logical approach, using strict verbal definitions and logically constructed arguments. This could rightly be described as very left-brained thinking. I tend to think and present my arguments from a very causal perspective, using images of entities and their actions in causally constructed arguments. This would be very right-brained thinking. Dragonfly wants Maxwell; I keep giving him Faraday. Both approaches to understanding are powerful and perfectly valid in their own right but integrating the two approaches would reveal the most insight. That’s what I am going to try to do. I think I can think left brained.

I have been piecing together a number of arguments for the case of human will but every time I sit down to write I stumble on one thought: the roots of our disagreement lies as much in epistemology as it does in metaphysics.

The Einstein/Bohr debates revolved around the same metaphysical subject matter, causality. I remember feeling how sad it was that these two intellectual giants could not find a way to resolve their differences and get on with their friendship. Their exchange, using physics thought experiments, is legendary but I don’t think their disagreement was ever fundamentally about physics or metaphysics. The root of their disagreement was epistemology. They had fundamentally different epistemological orientations. Bohr operated more from the Aristotelean epistemological tradition and Einstein operated more from the Platonic epistemological tradition. This meant they could never see eye to eye.

I don’t want to waste time engaged in discussions that will lead us to the point of agreeing to disagree. First we need to consider if we can agree what constitutes a valid means to generating knowledge and understanding. As a first step in this process I have created a new thread under the Epistemology title called “Synthesizing Two Epistemological Orientations.” I hope the two of you and others will join me there.

Paul

[JennaW]

I am saying that this potential energy can be released by one other means, an act of will. The act of making a choice can initiate the release of the body's potential energy and begin a causal chain that was not necessitated by the antecedent conditions inside or outside the body. If this is the case, there is a breakdown in classical physics, and in the action-to-action view of causation upon which it is based.

Maybe what Dragonfly was getting at was biochemistry-- the fact that with the food we eat, we obtain energy in the form of ATP; we use this ATP (this potential energy) to keep our nerve cells firing, and our nerve cells firing allows us to use the volitional aspects of our brain (and every single other aspect of the brain and body as well). This is the biological viewpoint, and does not negate active will. However, active will and energy are intertwined. Without ATP derived from food & metabolism, our brains, and hence volition, would not work.

For example, imbibing alcohol suppresses brain metabolism of glucose, which would explain why drunkenness causes lack of inhibition, decreased motor response, vocal slurring, and bad choices.

Well, that's the biological connection between volition and energy.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Jenna,

Good to meet you. I figured we'd cross paths sooner or later.

What you have suggested would account for reactive behaviour but not proactive behaviour. When you make a choice, how is the action of consciousness, which is that choice, caused? Where does the energy to initiate action come from? Once the initial action is engaged, the potential energy of the cell can come into play in a reactive cascade of action.

Dragonfly is saying that there is no initial action. They are all just reactions to antecedent events. I am saying there is a hole in reactive causation. What do you think?

Thanks,

Paul

[JennaW]

What you have suggested would account for reactive behaviour but not proactive behaviour. When you make a choice, how is the action of consciousness, which is that choice, caused?

Are you asking for the biochemical reason? Or a larger picture reason? In any case, both proactive and passive responses need ATP, biologically. Choice resides in the executive function of our brains, and that works through numerous and complex interrelationships between the frontal cortex and all other brain parts; the brain, due to its nature, requires ATP to do all this.

Because of this, I never think of the brain/mind as only passive OR active, I think of it as both at the same time. It's active by seeking out responses, and passive because stimuli affects it, which causes it to choose, and this occurs at many levels. For every choice you make, is there a cause behind it? But, considering that you made a choice, how many other choices could you have made, and how many possible things could've happened differently? In these situations, you have both used passively gained information and used active volitional processes.

Where does the energy to initiate action come from? Once the initial action is engaged, the potential energy of the cell can come into play in a reactive cascade of action.

I'm not sure what you're asking... for me, energy in the body is basically ATP and similar molecules that release energy via bond breakage.

Dragonfly is saying that there is no initial action. They are all just reactions to antecedent events. I am saying there is a hole in reactive causation. What do you think?

I'm not sure what you mean by intial here... if you trace back choices upon choices, eventually you'll get to your childhood, to your parents, to before your parents, to their childhoods... etc. along one branch of contingent history. So when was your inital action? When you first kicked in the womb? What caused that?

Or are you asking me where the inital action is for every choice that you make? Aren't your choices dependent on something happening before, either by volition or not? If you think of events/choices causing other events/choices, how far back can you trace your history to? I think these are interesting questions, especially if one asks how if a different important choice was made--- how would your life change via the choices you could have made?

[Paul Mawdsley]

Jenna,

I’m sorry. I did not explain myself very well. I assumed too much. I am talking about something more abstract and metaphysically more fundamental than biological explanations. It’s probably best if I try a new approach.

Via the sciences, we are very accustomed to processing the world through a particular causal lens. We all have grown up with and studied existence from the causal perspective of action-reaction. When we observe a change in the behaviour of some thing, we look for the action of some other thing that precipitated, and caused, that change in behaviour. The logical extrapolation from this causal principle, when assumed to be universal, is that all events though history, today, and in the future are determined by this causal chain. All actions are simply reactions to an unbroken causal chain. This idea is so built into our culture today that many can barely imagine a way of conceiving another answer to why things behave as they do. This idea is built into the way we process information about the world.

When we apply the concept of action-reaction to human behaviour, it comes into conflict with our intuition of “free will.” Many have believed consciousness to be a different type of substance acting on different causal rules. The idea is that conscious agents have a unique ability to break the action-reaction causal chain. With awareness of the forces that “push” our consciousness, we can choose to be free from the necessity to react to antecedent events. We can choose not to act, or to defer action, and end the action-reaction chain. With the capacity to create new behaviour options– ie: to create alternative choices, we are able to generate action plans that had no prior existence. While the action plan may be an act of the will channelled through the imagination, it does not initiate the action of the body. There is a point at which a choice is made as about which action plan to engage in. The making of this choice initiates the action of the body and a new causal chain. The question is: Where does the energy to initiate the action of will– whether in the creation of a new action plan or in the initiation of a new causal chain– come from when the causal chain has been stopped?

It is important to note that “free will” isn’t in conflict with reality. It is in conflict with an interpretation of reality that applies a particular causal framework. As I have said elsewhere, there are three solutions I know of to this conflict: 1) there exists two substances with two distinct modes of causation (Descartes' view); 2) free will is just an illusion and there is no break in the chian of action-reaction causation (Dragonfly’s view); 3) there is one substance that acts according to underlying principles of proactive causation that can account for both the action-reaction behaviour of inanimate matter and the proactive causation of animate matter (my view).

Paul

[JennaW]

the action-reaction causal chain

That is the root of the problem I see: that people really want to think of causality in chain formation, like a neverending string of spaghetti.

What if you took the causality principle and expanded it dimensionally, like it's done here, visually?

Instead of a chain, you have networks, possibilities, and probabilities. You have multiple feedbacked, dynamic, and adaptive systems in which a single chain is actually a part of a greater whole. Each possibility is there from something that happened before: one cause may branch out into 10 possibilities. It's like having one ingredient--- how many recipes could you make with that one thing? So, what if you added another ingredient? What if you added 5 more ingredients? Perhaps then, with 10 specific ingredients, you can make only ONE thing instead of multiple.

Okay, then, what if multiple ingredients can make multiple meals? This doesn't deny free will nor causality: you can choose which path to take. However, one thing still causes another.

What makes you choose? Perhaps it's a number of different causes, and they are additive: you are hungry AND you like cake AND your kids want cake AND you have money for it AND you have half the ingredients, so on. You choose, based on current situation, current possibilities. Perhaps it's one cause-- you just want to make a cake, period. But you don't usually make a choice out of sheer and utter randomness, from NO cause. However, what your possibilities are is determined by how creative you are, what is reasonably possible (say, you can't make a rocketship from an egg), and how those ingredients act together, and what methods you have to use for a certain goal, etc. How you come up with those possibilities is determined by multiple factors: your cooking education, other people, your ingredients, technology, money, what you choose over another, etc. My take is that an initiation of action depends on previous choices and contingent history.

Since I don't think of causality in terms of straight chains, I cannot answer ultimate initiation of action of will questions. I am the wrong person to ask this, perhaps someone else can help you. I think reality is too complex; I don't seek out ultimate singular beginning causes for all that I do.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Jenna suggests some visuals:

Thanks for the visuals. I have spent a fair bit of time understanding and integrating the idea that an individual’s consciousness can be conceived as a node in a web of relationships, whereby the node and the web, or the entity and the field, exist in a state of reciprocal causation. The visuals you recommended do a great job of graphically lending geometry to this idea.

Jenna proposes:

That is the root of the problem I see: that people really want to think of causality in chain formation...What if you took the causality principle and expanded it dimensionally...Instead of a chain, you have networks, possibilities, and probabilities. You have multiple feedbacked, dynamic, and adaptive systems in which a single chain is actually a part of a greater whole.

I agree that a complete understanding of dynamic systems requires the consideration of nonlinear/nonlocal causation as well as linear/local causation. The problem is that increasing complexity does not change the fundamental issue. Nonlinear/nonlocal causation can still be interpreted as reactive or proactive systems. We can see energy as being a separate “stuff” that is exchanged between entities (reactive), or we can see energy being an element of an entity that is expressed via the entity’s action (proactive).

Going back to “free will,” from the perspective of a single entity, a single consciousness, it doesn’t matter whether one thing is acting on that consciousness or a network of things: reactive causation says that the actions of this consciousness are necessitated by antecedent events; proactive causation says the actions of this consciousness are not necessitated by antecedent events. If the necessary effects of the causal network can be halted by consciousness (I know Dragonfly would say this is a big “If”.), then we would still need to consider how the will is able to initiate a new causal chain if it is unpushed by antecedents.

Jenna suggests that past experiences, previous choices, and contingent history cause choices. I will agree that these things, and more, contribute to the creation of the choices that are available to us. But the selection of the specific choice to be acted upon, and the initiation of action related to that choice, are not caused by ideas, or feelings, or histories. Mind/brain actions are caused by the mind/brain, not its contents. How does the non-physical, unextended contents of the mind/brain transfer energy to the mind/brain to initiate an action? It can’t.

The contents of the mind/brain, the contents of our experience, are the result of the actions of the physiological components of the brain. It is the physical components of the brain that cause these actions. It is possible that the brain can have automatic, preprogrammed response to certain activities in the brain which would appear to be reactive. In fact, I would suggest that this is exactly the purpose of the cerebellum: it is to initiate automatic, preprogrammed responses to certain physiological activities.

Note that some part of the brain– I’m suggesting the cerebellum– is initiating the action that is a reaction to an experience. How is an action initiated that is not preprogrammed? Another part of the brain would have to be responsible for the type of willed action that is required to learn a new skill, like riding a bike for the first time. Causing the individual, previously unlearned, actions necessary to learn how to ride a bike requires an intense focus to initiate the uncoordinated actions of early learning behaviour. Ideas, beliefs, feelings, etc do not initiate these actions. Some particular physical component of the brain must initiate previously unlearned actions. I would suggest that the reticular formation, acting via the prefrontal lobes on the region of the frontal lobes responsible for specific individual actions, is the physical component that initiates such uncoordinated actions that are associated with new learning.

This new learning is an act of will. It is the initiation of the action of consciousness without a necessitating antecedent event because the antecedent event was an idea, a feeling, or a belief, etc. An unextended, non-physical entity– an idea, a feeling, or a belief– cannot transfer energy to a physical component of the brain to maintain a reactive causal chain. The action of new learning must then be initiated by an act of will. This requires proactive causation.

It is important to note that proactive causation does not assume the uncaused or the mystically caused. It means the energy for initiating action is contained within the entity, not transferred between entities. Newton’s laws of motion suggest energy is transferred between entities. This is the basic assumption I contest. The suggestion that energy is some sort of substance that is transferred between entities is the mystical notion of causality we have to expose and guard against, not proactive causation. Conceiving energy as substance is the mystical idea.

Proactive causation can be consistently applied to our interpretations of existence without requiring other notions of causation, without the need to resort to unextended substances, and without the need to resort to disembodied actions. Reactive causation cannot make this claim.

Paul Mawdsley

[JennaW]

Mind/brain actions are caused by the mind/brain, not its contents. How does the non-physical, unextended contents of the mind/brain transfer energy to the mind/brain to initiate an action? It can’t.

This new learning is an act of will. It is the initiation of the action of consciousness without a necessitating antecedent event because the antecedent event was an idea, a feeling, or a belief, etc.

I'm not understanding having no antecedent, yet having the antecedents of idea, feeling, or belief, etc. An act of will acts on something, from something. If I took away all your short term memory --- a type of mind content--- how would the rest of your choices for the rest of your life look like? Do amnesiacs have a self? Can that self make acts of will regarding the self?

How can mind contents not have any influence on actions?

[Paul Mawdsley]

Jenna wrote:

I'm not understanding having no antecedent, yet having the antecedents of idea, feeling, or belief, etc.

The key word that is missing here is “necessitating.” When we are talking about reactive causation, or action-to-action causation, we are talking about antecedent events necessitating all current and future actions. My point is that ideas, feelings, beliefs, etc. do not necessitate the responses of consciousness.

In physics, when ball collide, the action of one ball necessitates the action of another ball because, as it has come to be understood from an action-to-action perspective, the energy from the first ball is transferred to the second ball. This transfer of energy necessitates the action of the second ball.

The contents of consciousness are not physical entities so they cannot necessitate the actions of the brain. Not being physical, the contents of consciousness do not have the energy required to initiate the action of a physical entity.

Jenna also asks:

How can mind contents not have any influence on actions?

They do. I was just saying that reactive causation cannot account for this relationship but proactive causation can.

Paul

[Dragonfly]

Paul:

My point is that ideas, feelings, beliefs, etc. do not necessitate the responses of consciousness.

Those ideas, feelings etc. are only part of the story, they correspond to the upper levels of our mind of which we're conscious. We "see" only a very small part of what's going on in our brain, and that part is not sufficient to determine a causal chain, but that doesn't mean that there is no causal chain.

The contents of consciousness are not physical entities so they cannot necessitate the actions of the brain. Not being physical, the contents of consciousness do not have the energy required to initiate the action of a physical entity.

I'll try to explain it with a computer analogy. The software instruction "print this page" is not a physical entity. The physical entity in this case is the hardware which is organized in such a way that that instruction is represented as a special (sub)structure in that hardware. The software instruction is a higher level description of that hardware structure. We could say that the software instruction initiates the action to print a page on paper. In a sense the non-physical instruction initiates a physical action, but there is no contradiction, as the software instruction is in fact nothing else than a shorthand description of the special hardware structure that really initiates the printing action. In the hardware is all the energy you need to do that. However, it would be very cumbersome to describe all the electrons moving through those logic gates resulting in the printing action, so we abstract the essential features of that hardware by summarizing it as the abstract instruction "print this page".

In the same way the contents of our consciousness are abstractions of the enormously complex hardware system of our brain, so there is no problem in initiating action, the energy is there, there is no need for some mysterious pro-active causation, all the energy transfers in the brain can in principle be accounted for.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Dragonfly makes the point:

We "see" only a very small part of what's going on in our brain, and that part is not sufficient to determine a causal chain, but that doesn't mean that there is no causal chain.

I’m not suggesting there is no causal chain. I am suggesting there is an apparent break in causation when we view the world through a reactive causation lens. It is because I want to hold onto causation all the way down that I want to consider an alternative view of causality.

He continues:

Ideas, feelings etc. are only part of the story...I'll try to explain it with a computer analogy...In the same way the contents of our consciousness are abstractions of the enormously complex hardware system of our brain, so there is no problem in initiating action, the energy is there, there is no need for some mysterious pro-active causation, all the energy transfers in the brain can in principle be accounted for.

Why does the word “qualia” come to mind? I believe Dragonfly is an epiphenomenalist; so there should be no disagreement over whether or not qualia can cause brain activity. So I assume this is not the point of dispute.

The point, then, that Dragonfly is making is that the causation of consciousness can be understood without reference to qualia. This makes sense if the basis of his argument is a computer analogy. I don’t think anyone is claiming that computers have “ideas, feelings, etc.” The question then is: does qualia– our experience of mental images, feelings, beliefs, etc.– have a causal influence on the action of our brains? I say yes. Epiphenomenalism requires us to answer no, or a conditional yes. Only if we define qualia as nothing more than an effect of brain activity, like electromagnetism is an effect of the physical activity in the earth’s core, can we begin to say yes to this question from the epiphenomenal point of view. On this view, the physical brain can react to other physical brain processes. In this way, the brain process that is associated with particular qualia can trigger brain processes that are associated with reactions to that qualia.

Epiphenomenalism does a fine job of handling the automatic responses I described as being initiated from the cerebellum. But it sucks at handling the idea of new learning (ie: new programming), creative passionate self-expression (ie: new programming), creating and initiating choices (ie: new programming). For these types of activity qualia has to be able to have an effect on the brain as well as the brain having an effect on qualia. Causality has to be bidirectional.

Dragonfly, if I can suggest a way that this bidirectional causality can be understood, in principle, within the context of current observations in physics, even though not within current interpretations, would you be interested in entertaining the possibility of such an idea? It is a simple little idea that gets past dualism and epiphenomenalism. Are you curious?

Paul Mawdsley

[Dragonfly]

Paul:

Epiphenomenalism does a fine job of handling the automatic responses I described as being initiated from the cerebellum. But it sucks at handling the idea of new learning (ie: new programming), creative passionate self-expression (ie: new programming), creating and initiating choices (ie: new programming). For these types of activity qualia has to be able to have an effect on the brain as well as the brain having an effect on qualia. Causality has to be bidirectional.

I don't see the problem of "new learning" or "creating choices". What you call "new learning" doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a logical consequence of the thinking processes. If you could somehow suddenly erase all memories of a person, he wouldn't be able to come up with anything new. Hofstadter wrote an interesting article about that theme: "Variations on a theme as the crux of creativity" (in: Hofstadter, Metamagical Themes). Even computers can come up with new ideas, like mathematical conjectures or theorems. You may compare it with the process of evolution: that shows that a dumb mechanical process can generate the most fantastically complex and sophisticated systems, which are certainly "new", it is the height of creativity! Nevertheless there is no special kind of causality involved in that process.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Human will, consciousness or whatever you want to call it exists as an entity. Or it is an attribute of another entity.

If it is an entity, it can be a prime cause for causation. This is the view I hold. I'm highly into synergy where life is involved. 2 + 2 often comes to 5 or more, and that brings new entities into existence.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Michael:

2 + 2 often comes to 5 or more, and that brings new entities into existence.

I think you should brush up your mathematics...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

You never heard of synergy? Let's simplify the math: 1 + 1 = 3.

Sex.

Michael

[Dragonfly]

This is a kind of "A is non-A" math...

[Paul Mawdsley]

Thanks Michael! I needed that. I just had the kind of day where most of the people I dealt with were pylons. And the rest were determined to piss me off. I came here for a moment to try to break my mood, read your "1 + 1 = 3" post, and laughed out loud. Now I can get back to being me.

Paul

[Roger Bissell]

That's rich -- Dragonfly, who says that mathematics does not apply to the real world, challenging someone as being arithmetically challenged who says that he observes a combination of two entities producing a third entity. Hilarious! :-)

Synergy exists; it is not arithmetic. And arithmetic DOES apply to the real world. It can't NOT apply. And you'll NEVER find a counterexample. But if you'd like to try, be my guest. It would keep you busily occupied long after the current members of this list were deceased.

REB

[Paul Mawdsley]

Dragonfly,

I didn't want to sneak one by you. I made a comment about our discussion on the "Chewing on Ideas" thread. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

Roger, I don't think Dragonfly was claiming that "mathematics does not apply to the real world." I think his point was that mathematical entities do not have a separate existence from the mind. If I am right, I would have to say I agree with him.

Paul

[Roger Bissell]

Paul, I think that Dragonfly has said on more than one occasion, if not here, than on RoR (Rebirth of Reason) that mathematics and logic are not about anything in the real world. If this is not an accurate representation of his actual views, he is welcome to clarify. But I recall being perplexed and dismayed to find someone as interested in the Objectivist philosophy and milieu as he is who regard math and logic as basically having no necessary connection to reality. They apply...somehow, as in counting...but they are not ABOUT (which I take to mean DERIVED FROM) reality.

REB

P.S. -- check out General Forum: Mind-Body Problem, Post 75, where Dragonfly (under yet another pseudonym) writes so condescendingly to Bill Dwyer (who is one of the most intelligent, NON-dogmatic Objectivists):

I see you have the naive view of mathematics of a high-school student, just like Rand who IIRC thought that mathematics was all about measurement. In mathematics "two" is not about anything, it is a purely abstract construction, which doesn't refer to anything in the physical world, in contrast to the abstraction "person". You may apply this abstract construction to the physical world, for example when you're counting cows, but there is no such thing "two" in the physical world, in contrast to the abstraction "person", which does have concrete realizations.

...Mathematics is not about concrete reality, you shouldn't confuse the applications with the thing itself.