Search the Community

Physicalism (Materialism) Verifies Free Will Defining free will and physicalism The 'will' is the conscious experience of deciding and initiating human actions. Stefan Molyneux defines free will as the ability to compare an action to an ideal standard, but I will take a broader definition of free will which I would assume Stefan would agree with (without allowing for compatibilism): Free will is the ability to choose between possible actions independently of events that are external to a persons 'will'. That is, a person who decided to pursue action A at time X could have chosen action B under exactly the same external circumstances if he or she had 'willed' to do so. The opposite of free will is determinism which is: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the 'will'. Another definition of determinism is that events including the 'will' are determined by previously existing causes, however, this definition will not be used because I believe it does not necessarily touch the core of the issue which is whether our 'will' can act undetermined by external causes. If we were to assume this second definition, then determinism would be compatible with free will. Physicalism (also known as materialism) is the doctrine that the real world consists only of the physical world. The contradiction between free will and physicalism In this section, I will play devil's advocate and suggest a contradiction between free will and physicalism. Stefan argues that it is self-evident that free will exists, i.e., that our will causes human actions, as anyone arguing against this is causing their human action of 'arguing'. Not only that, but they are assuming that the other person is in a sense causing their 'listening' or 'acceptance' or 'non-acceptance' of their argument, which are also human actions. An issue with free will that probably troubles the minds of others in this community is that if free will is self-evident, it is true. If it is true, then determinism is false. If determinism is false then physicalism is false. It seems if we accept free will, we must abandon physicalism and adopt mind-body dualism, that is, that the 'will' is real but is independent of the physical world. It seems that the physical world is synonymous with objective reality because all that is objective is in some way measurable and that which is measurable is physical. However, mind-body dualism would mean that reality consists of more than objective reality, which means truth is subjective. However, the statement that 'truth is subjective' demonstrates that truth is objective, which is a contradiction. We are left in a bind. Either determinism or free will is true. Determinism must be false because free will is self-evident, and free will must be false because mind-body dualism is self-contradictory. This is a contradiction. Defending free will and physicalism I believe there is an error in the above reasoning. It does not follow that "if determinism is false then physicalism is false". In fact, I will now argue that if physicalism is true, then free will is true, and hence determinism is false. The 'will', self, or consciousness exists and this is self-evident (cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am). Therefore, physicalism would imply that the 'will' is physical. This conclusion is in line with physicalist theories of consciousness including Integrated Information Theory (IIT) which states that a system's consciousness is determined by its causal properties and is therefore an intrinsic, fundamental property of any physical system. If physicalism is true, then consciousness is a property of the causal links between neurons in a person's neural network. Then, consciousness is identical to the neural network. They are one of the same. If consciousness is the neural network, then our 'will' is also the neural network. Determinism would suggest that human actions are caused by this neural network but that human actions are caused by events external to our 'will': Determinism would suggest that the neural network itself is determined by external events such as non-conscious 'zombie' networks or neural networks connected to but external to the brain such as the peripheral nervous system. Therefore, if our brain determines actions and our brain is determined by external events, then our actions are determined by external events. However, it is not necessarily the case that external events determine our conscious neural network. According to IIT, the neural network is causally linked in such a way that the system is more akin to a positive feedback loop than a feed-forward system. That is, rather than external events causing consciousness causing action, external events play a role in consciousness (for example, I might say the reason I drank a glass of water is that I am thirsty) but that consciousness is caused by prior consciousness. Therefore, actions would be caused by consciousness, but consciousness would not be caused by external events. And because the 'will' is synonymous with our experience of consciousness, our 'will' has self-caused the action. It is not even that non-conscious processes cause our 'will'. It is that our 'will' and indeed our 'self' is composed in that integrated neural network that plays out causes and effects with itself. This is exactly what free will is, it is the freedom of the 'will' to act without being determined by external events, and because the ‘will’ is equal to the neural networks, the neural networks don’t count as external events. The best way to describe free will would be to say that it is an endogenous system. So we must conclude that physicalism actually demonstrates that free will is true and determinism is false. Looking at it from this perspective, it is completely, both ontologically and metaphysically accurate to say that 'I' convinced myself do to action A or action B. Conclusion The conception of free will I have suggested seems to dissolve much of the worries that people have about determinism. Some may worry that if determinism is true, then how can we ever be satisfied that we act rationally or are responsible for our actions? If external events determined that I would do something irrational or evil, how are we to expect any kind of integrity from ourselves. If we cannot expect integrity from ourselves, how can we say that we are really rational animals and how can we assign responsibility to ourselves and others? It seems that if determinism is true, then we are in a way doomed to a quasi-pathological life and we are fundamentally not in control of our own happiness. I believe this is the fundamental worry among free willers. The conception of free will I suggest solves this issue by suggesting that our self-integrity lies within the physical integrity (literally the integrated information) in our neural networks that retain a self-generating, endogenous system. If we look at free will with a physicalist lense, I believe we can preserve free will without compromising physicalism.

I just finished reading a fantastic little book called Mind, Language and Society by Berkeley philosopher John R Searle. It's an introductory work to philosophy focusing on epistemology and ontology. Not that I'm some great philosopher or anything, but I was super surprised by how much I learned reading a 161 page introductory work. John Searle focuses on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language and is a controversial figure in academia (apparently). I just heard about him a few months ago. And I would say that he takes a very different, but complementary, approach to metaphysics as Stef. The value I see in this and the other material I've consumed of John's is the focus on distinguishing different senses of the word "objective", in that something can be objectively real (ontology) or can be objective knowledge (epistemology). Like how you've heard Stef talk about how the state and the collective doesn't exist, John offers an interesting framework for thinking about how something can not exist, but still be objectively true, and how, if you think about it, that's actually a pretty trippy thing to think about. How can it be the case that a collection of fibers and inks can constitute a 100 dollar bill. It's almost completely identical with a one dollar bill, or a sheet of printer paper for that matter, and yet we recognize collectively a significant amount of value that it represents, and objective ways that we know it's valuable, because counterfeits aren't and not all paper is. How can an electronic signature like a bitcoin be worth $580 to us? Money is an interesting example, but there are a ton more, like how is it that we can collectively agree that carrying a football across the opposing team's in-zone constitutes a field goal in american football, and that a field goal is worth 6 points, and that these "institutional facts" be objectively true? And how that can seem arbitrary yet objective, but math not at all arbitrary and objective in the same sense (epistemically speaking). How might we confuse this sense of the word "objective" with objective statements about the physical constitution of a dollar bill in terms of mass, and volume and chemistry, etc? It turns out that this confusion happens all the time and it gets us in trouble. The ways you are familiar already with are that we can say outrageous things like the state has opposite moral rights, or that we need to give our lives for the collective like how Stef talks about. Another way is in confusing simulations with the things they are meant to simulate. For example, we tend to think that if we can get a robot programmed well enough that it's "machine learning" causes it to gain new capabilities or accept new inputs, that this is actually real learning, real intelligence, and that the difference between ourselves and the robot is merely a difference in sophistication, that we have a better "program" in our brains. This, as it turns out, is a categorical error. The Turing test is for computer simulations of human beings, where Alan Turing says that if you can have a chat with a computer and not know that it's a computer, it's responses so well programmed, that this means that you have achieved true "artificial intelligence". And there are a lot of people who've been trying to do this and succeeding to different degrees, but even if this was accomplished, it's still worlds away from actual intelligence, and this is because the program doesn't actually understand any of the meaning of the responses it gives. Consider the following thought experiment: you are asked to go into a small room with no view or contact with the outside world except one slit in the wall where sheets of paper with questions written in chinese symbols are pushed in. You are tasked with sending out an answer sheet of paper with chinese symbols so that the person outside thinks that there is a native chinese speaker inside of this room. You have a manual that says that if you get X symbols, respond with Y symbols. The manual is very good and you succeed in getting the person outside to believe that they are communicating with a chinese speaker. This is called the "Chinese Room" argument. At no point in this process do you actually understand what the questions are or what the answers mean. A computer is the same way. A computer has no mind at all to think or know anything. It's just a very very very sophisticated symbol manipulation machine. The only meaning that is gotten out of a computer is by human observers, placed there by other users, or at a more dynamic and lower level the developers of the many symbol manipulation subsystems. John focuses a lot on consciousness, language and institutional facts like I described above, and the importance in understanding these topics seems to me now to be of massive importance. I consider finding out how much I don't know, what I just take for granted without really understanding the implications, to be an awesome opportunity, and for me, this book accomplishes that very well. And he's a really good communicator and writer and makes some seriously heavy philosophy accessible to laymen. If you buy it on amazon, make sure to use the amazon affiliate link for FDR: http://www.fdrurl.com/amazon