an interesting article on free will

[BaalChatzaf]

I thing MSK might want to see this article.

Look at

http://tinyurl.com/58njs3

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

I read it. Here is the link again so others will know what we are talking about.

Do subatomic particles have free will?

By Julie Rehmeyer

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Science News

A few things jumped out at me in the article:

And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

. . .

They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule.

. . .

Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice.

. . .

Ideally, a mathematical proof settles all uncertainty, but Kochen and Conway haven’t yet managed to convince many of the physicists they are addressing.

Philosophy-wise, there are some interesting premises, and I think they need to be checked:

1. This overall blanket issue between free will and determinism is either-or.

2. A pure mathematical argument is the proper form of settling uncertainty.

3. Measuring the smallest particle in the universe will give the answer to the free will versus determinism issue.

I look at this and think they are not measuring all the things that are needed to be measured.

They are doing the equivalent of measuring the surface area of a falling rock and perplexed at why this does not give a reading for gravity.

The free-will versus determinism issue gets simpler when you look at both form and content, accept that they are both essential, and accept that they have different characteristics. Then you see that something exists in form which is called free will on the human level. But trying to look at all of reality from a free will perspective is like trying to explain atoms in terms of fully developed human beings. Free will does have a counterpart for simpler forms.

On the inanimate level there exists in form a self-generated aggregation and expulsion of particles and holons (or systems within systems if you don't like the word holon). Self-generated boundary is a good term, but it is more than that. (This makes an interesting topic of its own.) On the basic life level (which includes all the former inanimate stuff for form) I am quite happy with the Objectivist "self-generated action" (to which I would add self-generated reproduction), and getting more complex, but always building on what came before for form, you get to human volition. Using this perspective, free will exists as a property of human form.

Determinism exists as a property of content. The part is what it is and is not anything else. Its identity determines what the form is with respect to its place in the form.

This might appear to be a contradiction, but only if looked at from one perspective or the other. When looked at from the perspective that form and content exist for all things and they both have equal standing, it makes perfect sense.

For a simple metaphor—a geometric image—that hints at the kind of thinking I am getting at, imagine a circle drawn on a sheet of paper. Which part defines the circle: the part outside it or the part inside it?

That is a false dichotomy. Both parts define the circle.

If I try to measure one and try to pretend the other is not essential, I will never be able to define the circle. It needs both inside and outside to exist.

This is the kind of mistake I see with approaches of the kind given in the article. A satisfactory answer that defines form and content will never happen just by measuring content and pretending form is not essential.

Notice that the math, despite being rock-solid sound, did not convince all scientists. That's because one school is measuring one thing in the false dichotomy and another is measuring the other. (The false dichotomy being that either free will or determinism exist in the universe, when both actually do.) From what I see, if you remove the attempt by one side or the other to present the whole answer and examine their stuff as just one part, both sides are right and both are wrong depending on what you are looking at.

Interestingly enough, even the "pure mathematical argument" is not so purely mathematical when you examine it up close. It needs an initial non-mathematical observation of spin just to get set up.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

This is worthless. If sub-atomic particles have "free will" then physical laws will be actually always in a state of flux. Maybe so, but only if we cannot live long enough to experience it. And there is the problem of the fossil record. And the geological record. It seems they have chosen not to be free. Your sub-atomics are equivalent to French "intellectuals" yammering their lives away drinking coffee at sidewalk cafes. All ingrown; not for ~out there~.

--Brant

Edited August 19, 2008 by Brant Gaede

[Dragonfly]

There is a lot of confusion here. Whether the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic or not has nothing to do with free will. First, that the behavior of elementary particles is not deterministic does not mean that the brain cannot be an effectively deterministic machine (just as a computer is an effectively deterministic machine). Second, the notion of "free will" doesn't depend on whether the brain is a deterministic system or not, adding random elements to a deterministic system wouldn't make the brain any more "free" than with a completely deterministic system. What we call "free will" is our inability to predict our own thoughts and actions.

[BaalChatzaf]

This is worthless. If sub-atomic particles have "free will" then physical laws will be actually always in a state of flux. Maybe so, but only if we cannot live long enough to experience it. And there is the problem of the fossil record. And the geological record. It seems they have chosen not to be free. Your sub-atomics are equivalent to French "intellectuals" yammering their lives away drinking coffee at sidewalk cafes. All ingrown; not for ~out there~.

--Brant

Quantum physical laws make your computer possible. The laws are quite definite. Quantum observables are faithfully modeled by Hermitian Operators which have very definite eigenvalues.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Guyau]

Free will does have a counterpart for simpler forms.

On the inanimate level there exists in form a self-generated aggregation and expulsion of particles and holons (or systems within systems if you don't like the word holon). Self-generated boundary is a good term, but it is more than that. (This makes an interesting topic of its own.) On the basic life level (which includes all the former inanimate stuff for form) I am quite happy with the Objectivist "self-generated action" (to which I would add self-generated reproduction), and getting more complex, but always building on what came before for form, you get to human volition. Using this perspective, free will exists as a property of human form.

Determinism exists as a property of content. The part is what it is and is not anything else. Its identity determines what the form is with respect to its place in the form.

Michael, I like the reaching.

The minerals of the earth have lineages, forms and materials building on earlier forms and materials.* But as you know, their aggregations and exclusions are profoundly not self-generated and self-perpetuating in the way of an amoebae and it species. For a free-determined counterpart, I would suggest concentrating on living systems and leaving aside inanimate ones.

From “Volitional Synapses” at page 190 of Objectivity V2N4, as follows:

Water and pebble at the waterfall move and change under circumstances, but purely passively. The living thing behaves in response to certain circumstances. The living thing is a highly structured system; one capable of internally actuated responses, one poised to make efforts toward valuable states of itself. The living system has behaviors in virtue of the fact that it contains, in its constitution (in constraints of its dynamics; Pattee 1973, 75–101), possible states G such that subsystems are activated by differences between G and an actual state A so as to bring A to G. The gravitropic root made horizontal will make itself vertical. In contrast, falling water or pebbles do not actively pursue lower levels on the earth; they do not detect and respond to gravity.

Hobbes’ compatibilism of liberty and necessity is confused. When Hobbes spoke of the liberty and necessity of water descending by the Channel, he confused liberty with simple power, or simple ability. That water has the ability to fall (does fall when not constrained) does not amount to a liberty of water to fall. Liberty arises only in living systems, in connection with vital powers. The gravitropic root has a power to align itself in the direction of gravity. Falling water has no such directing powers. Having no such powers, it can have no curtailments on such powers, no loss of “liberty.” The vital powers of plants, of course, fall short of what we should strictly call liberty, or free action, because plants are not at all cognizant of the possibilities—short and long, valuable and disvaluable—before them.

Well, might as well continue a bit (from pages 192–93):

Feedback loops, in organisms or machines, complicate the determination of future events by past events. . . . There are two senses of feedback, strict and loose. In the strict sense, a feedback controller is prompted by states of the very system it is controlling. In the loose sense, a whole system, responsive to its environment, is prompted by some aspect of the environment.

Although strict feedback control loops complicate behavior, enabling control to be exercised on the basis of actual, rather than “anticipated,” performance and enabling the organism (or machine) to better avoid becoming “autistically derailed and therefore useless and destructive” (Oyama 1985, 116), I do not think that adding such loops introduces freedom into the organism. Such loops make possible the self-maintenance and adaptabilities of organisms, and these are groundwork for freedom. Such loops reset the organism for further existence and propagation. Organic resetting (such as homeostasis, homeokinesis, and neuronal discharge) is built upon the resetability of conditions and constraints of the inanimate matter composing the organism. Freedom is not yet on the scene, but we can now see that if organic resetability is a groundwork for freedom, then the contingent character of inanimate matter grounds freedom not only by its presence in the world outside the organism, but by its presence within the organism.

What about feedback control in the loose sense? Does it introduce freedom? Surely it does not when we are considering life at the lowly levels of the bacterium or the gravitropic root. The root’s response to the plant being uprooted is a living behavior, but not a free act. If we consider loose-sense feedback control in the lives of animals, particularly higher ones, then we shall have introduced additional layers of sophistication in the control system(s)—representations of environment, inhibitions of prepotent responses, conscious deliberations on possibilities—and I think freedom is introduced by those additional layers, not by loose-sense feedback control per se.

* http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id...along_with_life

References

Oyama, S. 1985. The Ontogeny of Information.

http://www.amazon.com/Ontogeny-Information...7191&sr=1-1

Pattee, H.H. 1973. Physical Basis and Origin of Control. In Hierarchy Theory.

http://www.amazon.com/Hierarchy-theory-cha...7077&sr=8-2

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

Heh.

I do agree that saying that dice have "volition" when they are rolled is a stretch (and I have see writing that calls this volition). But a couple of things jumped out at me in your post. You said:

The minerals of the earth have lineages, forms and materials building on earlier forms and materials.* But as you know, their aggregations and exclusions are profoundly not self-generated and self-perpetuating in the way of an amoebae and it species.

If the big bang theory is true and everything comes from a "singularity" that set itself in motion, I don't see how it could be otherwise on a fundamental level, albeit a vastly more limited one than life.

Just on this limited level alone (but not as we go higher in complexity), I have a problem with certain facets of the following:

From “Volitional Synapses” at page 190 of Objectivity V2N4, as follows:

Water and pebble at the waterfall move and change under circumstances, but purely passively. The living thing behaves in response to certain circumstances. The living thing is a highly structured system; one capable of internally actuated responses, one poised to make efforts toward valuable states of itself. The living system has behaviors in virtue of the fact that it contains, in its constitution (in constraints of its dynamics; Pattee 1973, 75–101), possible states G such that subsystems are activated by differences between G and an actual state A so as to bring A to G. The gravitropic root made horizontal will make itself vertical. In contrast, falling water or pebbles do not actively pursue lower levels on the earth; they do not detect and respond to gravity.

To start with, the living being has many behaviors that respond just as passively as your water and pebble at a waterfall. For the most basic example, a living being that does not fly will flow and fall just as surely as anything not organic. I also see water and pebbles detecting and responding to gravity to the extent that they do flow and fall. The very action of doing so is a form of integrating their being with an external force, which is a form of acknowledging that force's existence (even though it is weird to call it "acknowledge" for non-aware entities). This actually is the axiom of existence and identity in action.

But my reaching cuts both ways, too. There actions and values present in higher forms of life that are purely deterministic in the water and pebble sense, which is why I don't like the term "deterministic" to be applied to volition. A very clear example is from Influence: Science and Practice (4th Edition) by Robert Cialdini, which I have been studying for my Internet marketing stuff. Here is a quote (from Chapter 1, "Weapons of Influence"). Cialdini is discussing a case where a woman consulted him about an incident in her tourist shop where an accidental higher markup in some hard-to-sell products resulted in selling them.

I thought I knew what had happened but told her that, if I were to explain things properly, she would have to listen to a story of mine. Actually, it isn't my story; it's about mother turkeys, and it belongs to the relatively new science of ethology—the study of animals in their natural settings. Turkey mothers are good mothers—loving, watchful, and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning, and huddling their young beneath them; but there is something odd about their method. Virtually all of this mothering is triggered by one thing: the "cheep-cheep" sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks, such as their smell, touch, or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.

The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviorist M. W. Fox (1974) in his description of an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experiments found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack.

When, however, the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.

CLICK, WHIRR

How ridiculous a mother turkey seems under these circumstances: She will embrace a natural enemy just because it goes cheep-cheep and she will mistreat or murder one of her chicks just because it does not. She acts like an automaton whose maternal instincts are under the automatic control of that single sound. The ethologists tell us that this sort of thing is far from unique to the turkey. They have begun to identify regular, blindly mechanical patterns of action in a wide variety of species.

Called fixed-action patterns, they can involve intricate sequences of behavior, such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of these patterns is that the behaviors comprising them occur in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the patterns were recorded on tapes within the animals. When a situation calls for courtship, a courtship tape gets played; when a situation calls for mothering, a maternal behavior tape gets played. Click and the appropriate tape is activated; whirr and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.

This speaks for itself. Cialdini mentions several other interesting things about this example (concerning the acceptance of one feature of something more complex as a shortcut method of identifying the whole and responding to its other features, but this is beyond the scope of this point). I find this stuff fascinating, but there is one thing he did not discuss. Even though the entire sequence of behavior was triggered in the turkey by a single trigger, she would definitely exercise a certain amount of self-generated acts during a fight in her attacks and dodges, or in her acts of nurture.

If we are to conclude that the universe is one big single thing with a single cause, I see it based on both elements, deterministic and self-generated, and one cannot be separated from the other. This is how I see the bottom up and top down thing I talk about. If this is true, the issue then becomes degree of presence in all existing things, not kind.

I came up with a way of asking a rhetorical question that illustrates my point: Can a thing have a top without a bottom? (And vice-versa.)

You can even ask: Does a thing have more top or more bottom? And this is where the universe comes in. All things have both to the same extent, but one governs the existent's actions more than the other depending on the nature of the existent.

Inanimate stuff has a degree of self-generated action (which is called volition at the highest level, but I have difficulty using the term "volition" for inanimate stuff) and the rest is purely deterministic. Ditto (but the contrary) for human beings, who have the highest form of self-generated action (volition) known at our level of awareness, but human beings also contain many purely deterministic elements, albeit they govern a human beings acts (complexity-wise) to to a far lesser degree than the deterministic component does for a water or a pebble.

Michael

[Guyau]

The living being has many behaviors that respond just as passively as your water and pebble at a waterfall. For the most basic example, a living being that does not fly will flow and fall just as surely as anything not organic. I also see water and pebbles detecting and responding to gravity to the extent that they do flow and fall. The very action of doing so is a form of integrating their being with an external force, which is a form of acknowledging that force's existence (even though it is weird to call it "acknowledge" for non-aware entities).

Michael, you observe that “the living being has many behaviors that respond just as passively as your water and pebble at a waterfall.” That is correct. Biological systems are subject to the principles of physics all the way. A man falls if he goes over the falls. Principles of physics (and chemistry) are also occasioned, in their usual inanimate way, in all the steps of a biologically responsive behavior. Recall the fall of the amyloplasts in the collumella cells of the tip of the uprooted root.

From “Volitional Synapses” in Objectivity V2N4 on pages 188–89, as follows:

Consider gravitropism, the ability of certain plants to respond to being uprooted by redirecting growth of their roots in the direction of gravity. This redirection occurs a half hour or so after the plant is uprooted.

Researchers have found that the initial detection of the new direction of gravity with respect to the root occurs in the core of the root cap, the terminal half-millimeter of the root. . . . The cells composing the core, or collumella region, of the root cap are rich in dense amyloplasts, organelles which are filled with starch grains. In the normal, vertical root, the amyloplasts reside at the lower end of each collumella cell. When the plant is uprooted, within seconds, amyloplasts in the collumella fall and settle along the new lower wall of each cell. The detection step seems to be the only step of the gravitropic response in which gravity directly pulls down a component (amyloplasts) of the root system.

In the uprooted plant (roots horizontal, say), the rate of root growth is reduced on both the upper and lower surfaces of the elongation zone, a zone five to six millimeters long, near the root cap. However, growth rate is reduced most on the lower surface two to three millimeters behind the cap. The slower growth rate along the lower side of the root causes a downward curving growth of the root.

What accounts for the slowing of growth along the lower side of the gravitropic root? The growth of plant cells is controlled largely by hormones, and evidently [today, we know this for sure] it is the hormone auxin that controls gravitropic root curvature. Auxin inhibits growth. Auxin moves from cell to cell and concentrates along the lower side of horizontal roots, in their elongation zone.

The amyloplasts within the columella cells fall onto the endoplasmic reticulum, a complex of calcium-rich membranes and vesicles. Calcium ions escape from the complex, elevating calcium levels along the lower side of the cells. Beyond a threshold concentration of calcium, the protein calmodulin is activated, which then turns on calcium ion pumps in the cell wall, thereby allowing the eventual accumulation of calcium ions along the lower side of the root cap. Calmodulin also activates auxin pumps. Calcium seems then to facilitate the movement of auxin from the lower side of the cap to the lower side of the elongation zone.

Water and pebble at the waterfall move and change under circumstances, but purely passively [like the falling-amyloplast step in the gravitropic response]. . . .

You say “I also see water and pebbles detecting and responding to gravity to the extent that they do flow and fall.” No. Detections are functions in biological and machine systems. In our physics, a natural inanimate falling body has no internal organization for detection. A living falling man, of course, does.

There is no need to cast inanimate physical system activity in terms of analogies with distinctive living-system activities. Our standard physics concepts have been very hard-won, and they work extremely well.

(By the way, I continue to work on the promise in the last sentence of the following post:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...amp;#entry59833. It is a lovely story.)

Leibniz imputed perception downward, to elements below manifestly animate systems. Whitehead tried a downward imputation too, with “prehension.” This is unnecessary. We can work our way up the living behaviors, with their inanimate constituents, just fine, just as the scientists are doing. (See pages 198–202 of my “Volitional Synapses” in V2N4.)

PS

Kat, many happy returns!

Edited December 13, 2008 by Stephen Boydstun

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephan,

I will take some time out and digest your mathematics essay. It looks very interesting.

As for what I am reaching for, maybe if I approach if from a different angle, you will see where I am going. (Incidentally, I see nothing in my approach that even remotely threatens physics. So you can rest easy. )

I mentioned top and bottom. Let's go with variety and sameness. Or even form and content. I believe all existing things have both.

Where I am particularly interested is in the idea that life came from inanimate matter. I fully agree that life is a special form of existence that brings new principles along with it, but I do not believe that it is severed from existence as something totally apart from the inanimate world.

So if life came from inanimate matter and developed into more complex organisms, then the potential for volition had to be present in the starting stuff. Some kernel or seed (I am speaking metaphorically, but it operates similarly).

I hold that the reason our volitional minds can validly process and abstract information from outer reality, and make self-generated choices, is because the mind is constructed from the same stuff as everything else is at root.

I have read determinists try to argue the same thing, except that they make no difference between life and a robot. That is too much oneness for me to grok, just like the other end is (oneness of being, God is all things, etc.).

We have variety and oneness in all things.

A very close analogy, but not an exact one, of what I am talking about with the connection between inanimate and animate (keeping in mind that awareness is implicit in this analogy) would be a physical mark developing into letters and words, then developing into an alphabet, then other words evolving and surging, then all this developing finally into literature and a novel.

Without the mind and the mark, all the rest would not be possible, but you could still say that a mark (inanimate) is a far cry from a novel (living). Still the potential for the novel was present in the mind+mark.

This sounds a bit like intelligent design, but it isn't. I am talking about characteristics of what exists, not what controls existence.

Either the potential for volition is present in the lowest particles, or volition is simply a miracle imposed by chaos on the universe somehow during evolution, or worse, something that created the universe and decided to finally jump aboard.

I don't see any other alternatives.

My issue is trying to understand that connection and how it appears in the inanimate stuff.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

ff

Edited July 26, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[kiaer.ts]

Will is the ability of an organism to act when external circumstances do not force it to do so. For example, a dog can either decide to stay on the mat or to get up and see who is at the door when it hears someone coming up the steps. That stimulus does not force it to act mechanically in the way that a chemical gradient will cause a microorganism to swim away from an alarming substance.

Free will simply means will morally unconstrained. When you are threatened by a criminal you are not acting of your free will. Free will is a moral concept, not a metaphysical one.

The notion that you are not free if your body is subject to physical laws is based on the dualist fallacy that sees the mind as separate from and yet in some way subject to the body. You do not have a body. You are a body. Your body is an entity which is the cause of its own actions. Volition is a specific faculty of your body which exists as a result of your having a well-functioning nervous system. The freedom of your body is its ability to act without determination by some outside influence such as coercion, physical restraint, or some intrusive physical influence such as a drug. There is no need to be free of your body to act freely.