[ExI] Humans losing freewill

[Stuart LaForge]

On 23 November 2016 at 15:20, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

Stathis wrote:

<Ontological randomness. Apparent randomness due to ignorance in a
deterministic universe is less interesting.>

Fair enough. We can assume that for what follows. If you have free will
and that free will is caused by true randomness in your brain, then you
can have realism too. But you have to accept that the future can cause the
past.

That being said, I don't think free will is quite random. There is some
experimental justification for this view. For one thing humans are
notoriously bad at being deliberately random. If asked to write a string
of random symbols, we will often times fall into unconscious patterns that
repeat. There won't be enough cryptographic entropy etc.

It's this periodicity that makes me think that free will is a wave-like
phenomenon where different impulses originating from various brain regions
propagate around the brain as waves and the interference pattern they
produce in the motor cortex determines the observed behavior.

Stathis continues:

<It's difficult to understand what this could possibly mean. Unless the
agent is in an isolated system there are always puppet strings from the
environment, both visible and invisible. Even if the agent is isolated,
again his behaviour is either determined by the configuration of his brain
or by truly random processes in his brain.>

Well observing individuals in isolation would probably be an informative
controlled study of free will. Better yet put them in sensory-deprivation
chambers to really get at the nuts and bolts of it. Take physiological
readings and IR video with two-way audio. Periodically give them choices
about some small aspect of their minimal environment and analyze their
preferences.

<So "free will" doesn't amount to any more than something like "doing what
you want to do", which is coherent, but trivial.>

Catullus wrote that "Great events from trivial causes spring." So it's
trivial until someone gets hurt. But yes, that's pretty much all there is
to it. Another way to think of free-will is that it is the part of you
that feels violated when you are co-erced into doing something that you
didn't want to do.

Stuart LaForge