Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Normal · 06-11-2003, 09:47 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Wounded King
And to Normal,

Your subjective experience of choice can hardly be considered empirical evidence by anyon else. I will try to find you some references to neurological disorders which are derangements of the experience of free will.

One example is passivity in schizophrenics, often associated with the feeling that ones actions are being directed by alien influences.

TTFN,

Wounded

Exactly, my subjective empirically evidence is laughable to scientific standards, but what scientific empirical evidence (for or against) free will is there? Merely "interesting research", and that's all.

I'll read that article, but I hardly think that showing me neurological disorders is adequate refutation of free will.

Wounded King · 06-11-2003, 02:48 PM

It is notoriously hard to prove the non existence of anything, let alone something as intangible as free will. Looking at neurological disorders which involve derangements of the experience of free will do serve to highlight the fact that you can experience something and attribute it incorrectly to an outside influence, or conversely attribute your own intentions to something outside of your influence.

Given these factors it is just as, if not more, reasonable to consider free will as an illusion fostered by the brain attributing volition to our actions rather than as some mysterious spiritual process.

If on the other hand you are attributing free will to quantum uncertainty then presumably 'the soul' is nothing more than a probabilistic eigenstate collapse and the outcome is stochastic rather than directed.

Jesse · 06-11-2003, 03:02 PM

The best way to demonstrate the nonexistence of metaphysical "free will" (as opposed to practical free will, which almost everyone believes in) would be something like "mind uploading"--map out a person's brain exhaustively and then create a simulation on a computer (giving it a robotic or simulated body so it's not just an isolated brain), and then see if the "simulation" passes the Turing Test, if it seems to display all the attributes of a biological human (creativity, understanding, emotions, curiosity, perhaps even 'spirituality'). If so, and if the computer running the simulation is itself totally deterministic, that would show that whatever random elements are present in our brains do not play any essential role in our own "human-ness." Of course there might still be a few doubters who said that even if uploaded minds acted human they might really still be unconscious automatons, but I think this would pretty quickly become an extreme fringe position, like claiming the Jews or blacks are really unconscious automatons despite all evidence from their behavior.

The technology and scientific knowledge necessary to do something like this is probably not that far off--I expect that such an experiment will most likely be possible within the next few decades. If various trends in computing (like Moore's Law) and brain-scan resolution hold up, I think it's predicted that it'll be doable by 2030 or so.

yguy · 06-11-2003, 03:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Goober
There is evidence that some aspects of decision making occur withing the brain, like areas of the brain lighting up in MRI images when a person is asked to make decisions about something, and brain damage leading to poor decision making. Can I prove that decision making resides entirely within the brain? No, I can't, and I don't have to.

You are making the positive assertion that decision making occurs in places other than the brain.

"The brain takes in information and makes decisions based on that information. It is free to make any decisions it wants to based on the information it has. Sounds like free fucking will to me!!!"

That doesn't qualify as a positive assertion, I suppose.

Quote:

You need to prove that decision making occurs outside the 'neurological arena', just like scientists had to prove that decision making occurs within the brain.

I don't need to prove anything for which I have not accepted such a burden; which I almost never do, seeing how proving anything of this nature is virtually impossible, especially on the net.

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So I guess you're off evidence hunting, or are you just throwing out another indefensible red herring?

It is understandable that you find it convenient to view it thus, but pointing out a logical flaw which is relevant to the argument hardly qualifies as a red herring.

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Prove that living entities are hardwired to desire to live. Oh, wait you just DISPROVED this with your own examples.

Not at all. There is no reason to believe such behavior is hardwired.

Quote:

If you want to discuss this, do it in a new thread in evolution.

Somebody made you the Thread Relevancy Police?

Wounded King · 06-11-2003, 03:25 PM

Jesse,

Goober already made an argument along similar lines. Although bringing the Turing test in to it makes things rather broader than in Gobber's scenario.

TTFN,

Wounded

P.S. I know a few humans who might not pass the Turing Test.

Normal · 06-11-2003, 05:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Wounded King
Looking at neurological disorders which involve derangements of the experience of free will do serve to highlight the fact that you can experience something and attribute it incorrectly to an outside influence, or conversely attribute your own intentions to something outside of your influence.

Given these factors it is just as, if not more, reasonable to consider free will as an illusion fostered by the brain attributing volition to our actions rather than as some mysterious spiritual process.[/B][/QUOTE]

Except the people who attribute it incorrectly to an outside influence have a disorder. They still have control over their actions from what I can tell by that study, being able to claim that their actions are dependant on an outside source is exhibiting control.

Quote:

Originally posted by Wounded King
If on the other hand you are attributing free will to quantum uncertainty then presumably 'the soul' is nothing more than a probabilistic eigenstate collapse and the outcome is stochastic rather than directed.

I am not attributing free will to anything but the metaphysical concept of the soul. If you look carefully I was merely saying that quantum uncertainty might have an answer to free will, and it might not.

Normal · 06-11-2003, 05:53 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jesse
Upload our brains to a humanoid robot

If you look at the "progress" we've made as far as the sight/touch/smell/hearing/tasting cognitive processes for robots, 2030 seems awfully close. I think the most we can do now is make them hap-hazardly move around a building, forget about resonably distinguishing objects. And as everyone related to the computer industry knows, Moore's law will not last forever.

Even then, the Turing test is not exactly a test for the soul, the robot would merely have to mimic a humans behavior to the point where we could be fooled. That's not hard to do, now is it?

Jesse · 06-11-2003, 08:08 PM

Normal
If you look at the "progress" we've made as far as the sight/touch/smell/hearing/tasting cognitive processes for robots, 2030 seems awfully close. I think the most we can do now is make them hap-hazardly move around a building, forget about resonably distinguishing objects.

But what you're talking about is trying to build an A.I. with various cognitive abilities completely from scratch--to do that you need a lot of high-level understanding of how these functions actually work. Uploading is based on the idea that you just need the ability to map out an existing human brain at the synaptic level, and knowledge of the way individual neurons influence their nearest neighbors, so you can accurately simulate neurons on a computer. Assuming the reductionist idea is true and that high-level intelligence emerges out of some arrangement of lots of neurons interacting according to much simpler rules, a high-resolution simulation of a brain should behave pretty much like the original. Slavishly copying an existing brain would require much less insight into how the mind works than building a mind from the ground up.

Normal:
And as everyone related to the computer industry knows, Moore's law will not last forever.

Fundamental physics says it can't last forever (the ultimate limit is provided by the Bekenstein bound), but I suspect you're talking about the more immediate limit on our ability to shrink transistors indefinitely. It is possible that this will lead to the end of Moore's law, but there's reason for optimism, as discussed in this article by Ray Kurzweil:

Quote:

The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as "Moore's Law." Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of integrated circuits, and then Chairman of Intel, noted in the mid 1970s that we could squeeze twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every 24 months. Given that the electrons have less distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an overall quadrupling of computational power.

After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course. So, will that be the end of the exponential growth of computing?

Don't bet on it.

If we plot the speed (in instructions per second) per $1000 (in constant dollars) of 49 famous calculators and computers spanning the entire twentieth century, we note some interesting observations.

Moore's Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential Growth of Computing

Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace

It is important to note that Moore's Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing's relay-based "Robinson" machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.

But I noticed something else surprising. When I plotted the 49 machines on an exponential graph (where a straight line means exponential growth), I didn't get a straight line. What I got was another exponential curve. In other words, there's exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Computer speed (per unit cost) doubled every three years between 1910 and 1950, doubled every two years between 1950 and 1966, and is now doubling every year.

But where does Moore's Law come from? What is behind this remarkably predictable phenomenon? I have seen relatively little written about the ultimate source of this trend. Is it just "a set of industry expectations and goals," as Randy Isaac, head of basic science at IBM contends? Or is there something more profound going on?

In my view, it is one manifestation (among many) of the exponential growth of the evolutionary process that is technology. The exponential growth of computing is a marvelous quantitative example of the exponentially growing returns from an evolutionary process. We can also express the exponential growth of computing in terms of an accelerating pace: it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS (million instructions per second) per thousand dollars, now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every day.

Moore's Law narrowly refers to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit of fixed size, and sometimes has been expressed even more narrowly in terms of transistor feature size. But rather than feature size (which is only one contributing factor), or even number of transistors, I think the most appropriate measure to track is computational speed per unit cost. This takes into account many levels of "cleverness" (i.e., innovation, which is to say, technological evolution). In addition to all of the innovation in integrated circuits, there are multiple layers of innovation in computer design, e.g., pipelining, parallel processing, instruction look-ahead, instruction and memory caching, and many others.

From the above chart, we see that the exponential growth of computing didn't start with integrated circuits (around 1958), or even transistors (around 1947), but goes back to the electromechanical calculators used in the 1890 and 1900 U.S. Census. This chart spans at least five distinct paradigms of computing, of which Moore's Law pertains to only the latest one.

It's obvious what the sixth paradigm will be after Moore's Law runs out of steam during the second decade of this century. Chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions. Nanotubes, for example, which are already working in laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain. There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time.

Normal:
Even then, the Turing test is not exactly a test for the soul, the robot would merely have to mimic a humans behavior to the point where we could be fooled. That's not hard to do, now is it?

A proper Turing test would not be based on a few minutes exchanging text messages with someone, but on spending years in close relationship with them. Do you think it would be easy to fool people in that version of the test? Can you imagine that any of your close friends could be unconscious automatons with no understanding of anything they say or do?

Also, remember that in the case of an upload we are not creating a generic intelligence but a specific individual with a long history before being uploaded. I think people who already knew the person would be in a good position to judge whether the upload was really the "same person" or not.

Again, although we could never totally rule out the possibility that an upload wasn't really conscious, we can never totally rule out the possibility that people of other races are unconscious (or 'soulless') either. But for any group of people that you have a good amount of first-person experience interacting with, it's going to seem pretty unthinkable that they're just zombies, and the same would be true of uploads if they did indeed act just like regular people.

Goober · 06-11-2003, 08:29 PM

Normal,

Quote:

I don't believe you have adequately disproved free will according to my defintion at all.

I think you missed the point of the argument. I was not trying to prove that free will does not exist, because as you are aware proving a negative is pretty much impossible. I was trying to show that we can't have empirical evidence for the existence of free will.

Quote:

It is true that there is one unique outcome for every set of choices, but that does not disprove the existence of multiple choices at each choice that was made. If you're lost, you can either turn left at the intersection, turn right at the intersection, or stop and ask for help, or any number of things. The choice (and outcome) will be unique, but that does not falsify the existence of multiple choices existing at the time you made the choice.

I clearly said that just because you think you could turn right does not prove that you actually could turn right it you chose to turn left. Just because you think you have that option does not prove that you actually have that option. It would be easy to make a computer program that, for example, considered turning left or turning right, but always chose to turn left in the end. Before you even ran the program you would know that it would turn left, but the program itself may well consider the pros and cons of turning right, but never chose it. That program would obviously have no free will, so you cannot claim that just being able to think about it means it is possible to do it. Just because I might think I can fly does not prove that I can.

The point is you cannot falsify the existence of multiple choices at the end, all we can ever observe is that a single outcome occurs. If we cannot falsify it, it is just an illogical belief, as much as fairies and invisible monkeys runnning the world.

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I think you would agree that 'the existence of multiple possible choices' is a better statement that 'the existence of choice'

I mean 'choices' as in 'alternatives'. If there is only ever one alternative then there is no free will as you describe it.

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Ah, this is an interesting point. Again, science fails to give us any answers here, but I would say that for electrons, their position is dependant on their previous state in a much more linear fashion, so it is not so much a "choice" as it is an "effect we can't track down".

Another thing, electrons are not alive. I would restrict the existence of free will to living things, and specifically, humans. My justification for this is simply the complexity of life, which is still (as of this writing) an unsolved mystery.

Who cares how linear it is? My position is often dependent on my previous state in a linear fashion, say when I'm walking in a straight line. The electron has choices, it makes a choice. Therefore it has a soul. If satisfies your definition. Your definition says nothing about things moving in a 'linear fashion' or why they should be discounted.

You have already said that free will is not a product of structure it is a product of the soul. Complexity is a matter of structure, so complexity has nothing to do with free will according to you, so there is no reason why an electron does not have a soul.

These are just an ad hoc rationalisations to try and avoid the holes in your faulty definition.

Goober · 06-11-2003, 08:53 PM

Wounded King,

Quote:

Doesnt the interference pattern in the unmeasured double slit experiment show that the photon makes both choices in its natural state?

Yes, the photon travels through both slits in order to interfer with itself, but that wasn't really what I was referring to.

As I understand probability that a photon will end up in a particular place is dependent on it's wave function. It's wave function passes through both slits, and collides with the screen. But the photon ends up in one place only, even though its wave function extends over the screen in an interference pattern, so it could appear in a number of places. That's why I say it has a choice and makes a choice. It ends up in one place, when a number of places could be possible.

Quote:

It is only when the experimenter measures the passage of the photon through the slits that a choice is made.

True. Measuring the position of the photon makes it turn up in a particular place. But measuring it's position does not determine where it will turn up on the screen. It forces the photon to make a 'decision', but it does not make the 'decision' for the photon.

Quote:

If we want to skirt the realms of wild invention we could always mention the many worlds interpretation of QM. Yous simply perform all the possible actions as your brain state evolves from a given superposition, obviously the reduced brainstates will agree with the world they end up in giving you an illusion of free will.

You could mention it, but I hesitate to because it hasn't actually been proven. That does raise a whole lot of questions though, doesn't it? I might have to think about that one.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, I can't say I'm that knowledgeble about quantum physics.

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06-11-2003, 02:48 PM	#272
Wounded King Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Edinburgh Posts: 1,211	It is notoriously hard to prove the non existence of anything, let alone something as intangible as free will. Looking at neurological disorders which involve derangements of the experience of free will do serve to highlight the fact that you can experience something and attribute it incorrectly to an outside influence, or conversely attribute your own intentions to something outside of your influence. Given these factors it is just as, if not more, reasonable to consider free will as an illusion fostered by the brain attributing volition to our actions rather than as some mysterious spiritual process. If on the other hand you are attributing free will to quantum uncertainty then presumably 'the soul' is nothing more than a probabilistic eigenstate collapse and the outcome is stochastic rather than directed.

06-11-2003, 03:02 PM	#273
Jesse Moderator - Science Discussions Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Providence, RI, USA Posts: 9,908	The best way to demonstrate the nonexistence of metaphysical "free will" (as opposed to practical free will, which almost everyone believes in) would be something like "mind uploading"--map out a person's brain exhaustively and then create a simulation on a computer (giving it a robotic or simulated body so it's not just an isolated brain), and then see if the "simulation" passes the Turing Test, if it seems to display all the attributes of a biological human (creativity, understanding, emotions, curiosity, perhaps even 'spirituality'). If so, and if the computer running the simulation is itself totally deterministic, that would show that whatever random elements are present in our brains do not play any essential role in our own "human-ness." Of course there might still be a few doubters who said that even if uploaded minds acted human they might really still be unconscious automatons, but I think this would pretty quickly become an extreme fringe position, like claiming the Jews or blacks are really unconscious automatons despite all evidence from their behavior. The technology and scientific knowledge necessary to do something like this is probably not that far off--I expect that such an experiment will most likely be possible within the next few decades. If various trends in computing (like Moore's Law) and brain-scan resolution hold up, I think it's predicted that it'll be doable by 2030 or so.

06-11-2003, 03:25 PM	#275
Wounded King Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Edinburgh Posts: 1,211	Jesse, Goober already made an argument along similar lines. Although bringing the Turing test in to it makes things rather broader than in Gobber's scenario. TTFN, Wounded P.S. I know a few humans who might not pass the Turing Test.

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