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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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But what explains how we select one outcome over the other? It can't be anything in the universe itself, even the alleged "will", because everything that goes into making up the state of the "will" has also been fixed at one specific instant. There isn't any possible explanation for how we select one outcome over the other except to say that it's "just because". That is, it's random. But a purely random selection isn't free will either.

I can conceive of a model where the human brain is somehow connected to some higher 'free will dimension' where there's some ethereal being (call it a soul) that is capable of observing a person's environment and acting in some small way to impact the outcome of their decisions against what their immediate environment would demand.

For example, what if there were a single neuron or a couple neurons, deep in the brain, that were specialized to act as 'antennae' to this higher dimension, and by activating or deactivating this neuron, and the cascade effects this would have on the rest of our cognitive processes, the actual behaviors we exhibit are meaningfully altered? How could we detect and identify such a neuron amongst the billions of others in the brain?

This is not the literal model I propose, but just example of a biological, materialist understanding of human cognition could still have some blind spot we are simply unable to detect, which nonetheless does create some version of 'free will' beyond our understanding.

Major objections to this:

A) This just pushes back the materialism/determinism debate to this new dimension/realm, what makes the ethereal being any more 'free' in its own terms? I'd still chalk this up to a sort of 'mystery' we can't solve under current tech, and thus still a mysterious, supernatural phenomenon.

B) Even if true, it's just 'free will of the gaps.' The vast majority of the universe remains uncaring and humans making free will decisions is so irrelevant that the rules of physics need not even consider this issue to rule.

C) It is special pleading in the extreme. Why are human brains the only thing that could have such an antennae? Why not cats? or cows? or fish, insects, trees, or even rocks? There are massive unstated assumptions as to why the human brain would have access to "The free will dimension" and yet other configurations of matter would not. How would this even evolve unless it was an intentional design?

Ultimately this is the same class of argument as e.g. Maxwell's Daemon, (IF this impossible thing exists, natural laws could be falsified!) but it is barely enough for me to leave aside some small probability for things working in ways we haven't fully understood yet.

I’ve seen a really appealing idea that the sort of “observer” you use for quantum experiments allows for an expression of free will. If our brains had some quantum-scale machinery which put a thumb on the scale when collapsing waveforms, then maybe we could sneak in some concept of preferences. Then we mumble mumble multiverses, and…

Needless to say, this was somewhere on LessWrong. I also think it was followed by the most gentle sort of debunk: an article saying that scientists had worked on one or more testable claim from the theory, and found it wanting. Sadly, I can’t find either.

You don't need quantum mechanics for that sort of interference though. Even in an apparently deterministic universe, you could just say that your mind influenced what happened. Quantum mechanics adds nothing to either the plausibility or mechanics of the thought experiment.

That's what OP is suggesting and it works in every possible universe. There are an infinite number of possible models that describe our universe and the only thing constraining them is their complexity.

Rationalism is choosing the least complex option; because, it makes the best predictions.

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