Kicking and Dreaming
Heres a little mind/body puzzle that occurred to me recently.
Im one of those people who sometimes kicks during sleep (much to the dismay of my wife). This kicking is almost always accompanied by a dream in which Im also kicking my Kung Fu skills in the dreamworld are amazing!
The standard sleep-disorder explanation of this involves a loss of the normal inhibitions on bodily movement that allow us to dream safely, without acting out everything in the dream. Leaving aside many details about this explanation, I want to point out that, in every version of it Ive read, the assumption is that a dream about kicking causes the body to kick. Or, if were not happy with mental events causing anything, we can say that the kicking supervenes on the dream there would be no physical kicking without the mental dream-kicking.
Now consider a much more familiar nocturnal experience. We all know what its like to have a full bladder during the night, and then to begin a dream that in some way involves urination. Here, it is surely the case that the causal (or supervenience) relation is reversed: My full bladder (a physical event) leads to my dream involving urination. To suppose otherwise to posit that by chance Im having a dream involving urination and therefore my bladder fills, or I feel it to be full is unlikely to the point of absurdity.
But why couldnt the kicking phenomenon be like the full-bladder phenomenon? Do we in fact know that the dream precedes, or grounds, the kicking? Might it not be the case that my legs kick for some independent, strictly neurological reason, which then causes me to dream about kicking, in the same way that a full bladder causes me to dream about urination?
Ive been using cause and supervene (or ground) to describe the same relation, but now lets discriminate it. We have three possibilities:
1. Dream X is caused by physical event Y. (the full-bladder explanation)
2. Physical event Y is caused by dream X. (the kicking explanation)
3. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but rather one of supervenience or grounding.
As is now apparent, this is a little microcosm of the whole mental-causation problem. But I offer it because its curiously amenable to analysis, and makes me wonder whether any sleep researchers have actually used brain scans to look into this.
Im one of those people who sometimes kicks during sleep (much to the dismay of my wife). This kicking is almost always accompanied by a dream in which Im also kicking my Kung Fu skills in the dreamworld are amazing!
The standard sleep-disorder explanation of this involves a loss of the normal inhibitions on bodily movement that allow us to dream safely, without acting out everything in the dream. Leaving aside many details about this explanation, I want to point out that, in every version of it Ive read, the assumption is that a dream about kicking causes the body to kick. Or, if were not happy with mental events causing anything, we can say that the kicking supervenes on the dream there would be no physical kicking without the mental dream-kicking.
Now consider a much more familiar nocturnal experience. We all know what its like to have a full bladder during the night, and then to begin a dream that in some way involves urination. Here, it is surely the case that the causal (or supervenience) relation is reversed: My full bladder (a physical event) leads to my dream involving urination. To suppose otherwise to posit that by chance Im having a dream involving urination and therefore my bladder fills, or I feel it to be full is unlikely to the point of absurdity.
But why couldnt the kicking phenomenon be like the full-bladder phenomenon? Do we in fact know that the dream precedes, or grounds, the kicking? Might it not be the case that my legs kick for some independent, strictly neurological reason, which then causes me to dream about kicking, in the same way that a full bladder causes me to dream about urination?
Ive been using cause and supervene (or ground) to describe the same relation, but now lets discriminate it. We have three possibilities:
1. Dream X is caused by physical event Y. (the full-bladder explanation)
2. Physical event Y is caused by dream X. (the kicking explanation)
3. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but rather one of supervenience or grounding.
As is now apparent, this is a little microcosm of the whole mental-causation problem. But I offer it because its curiously amenable to analysis, and makes me wonder whether any sleep researchers have actually used brain scans to look into this.
Comments (71)
Nice post. I want to add 4. to that list:
4. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but one in which they supervene on or are grounded in some further Z.
As in the kick and the dream are two aspects of the same broader state, rather than a relation between mind and idea. They don't need to be reactions to each other. They can be part of the same action done by the body.
If dreaming is the result of our predictive coding being cut off from sense information and instead relies on virtual sense simulations to form consistent experiences of dream sequences, that forms the experience we have in dreams. But if the body have problems subduing the normal predictive coding behavior, getting actual sense data, I would assume that there becomes a point of confused state between the two; you have both simulated senses grounding the generated experience of reality, as well as actual senses coming through from your body in bed.
Maybe this has to do with how the different regions of the brain controls the body. That the region for motor control and the region for bladder control doesn't function on the same principles and therefore when the brain is scrambled between two states of sense data and tries to predict behavior and actions, it takes two different actions.
And you know, some people wet themselves during sleep, so maybe it's just a matter of automatic self-control that is programmed in our long term memory due to how emotional values attached to memories create stronger biases. That the emotional intensity of wetting yourself is so strong that compared to just "kicking", the bias forms two different intensities in whether or not to let the body act.
Sorry if I didn't engage with the X or Y event, but I think the science may hint at the reasons.
Yes, I guess that's another possibility -- dream and body may switch roles, mutually reinforcing the experience. At one point the bodily sensation informs the dream, then at another point the dream that unfolds influences the body.
Yes, it's very interesting what happens to our conscious experience when our body are unable to regulate the chemicals that suppose to keep us sedated during sleep.
Another syndrome that happens because of this is sleep paralysis. I've suffered this experience and it is terrifying. Basically it lets dream experiences into our real world, a hallucinatory state in which I'm more in the awake state than sleeping, so the opposite of sleepwalking, being paralyzed while experiencing dream experiences forming hallucinations within the room I'm sleeping in. And since sleep also controls breathing, a state of fear doesn't register in the same way and leading to the same reactions in breathing, so you feel out of breath, which in turn led to the many artworks featuring suffocation in the state of sleep paralysis.
Wow, it certainly sounds like it.
Quoting J
My guess is if one kicks without volition while asleep, ones dream will not likely incorporate the kicking into a narrative where one has chosen to kick. Instead, the dream might consist of ones legs being manipulated by someone or some thing. This argument assumes the dream state knows the difference between passive sensory impingement and sensory feedback from intentional acts.
Strikes me that the mechanisms and processes of dreaming are not a suitable subject for philosophical speculation. As you have hinted, the answers to your questions can be examined empirically - there are facts of the matter.
Having said that, I have always been intrigued and amused when I watch sleeping dogs moving their legs in their sleep. I have always speculated they are dreaming of running across a field.
I was going to mention this too. My experience of sleep paralysis is that one can learn to recognise it, and to struggle less and just wait for awareness to grow and the paralysis to wear off. And this relates also to my experience of learning to stop bed-wetting, which involved, in my experience, learning that a dream of urination should be 'a wake-up call'. Once the alarm is set, the problem is solved.
All of which seems to me to favour explanation 1, but also suggests that wakefulness and sleep are not a dichotomy in the first place, but rather related, graded and complex conditions.
I can add to the phenomenology an occasional grand-mal epileptic fit, which begins with a sort of shaking or palsy noticeable in hands or eyes and the jaw, that precedes a total loss of consciousness during the fit proper, followed by a confused state that one does not remember in which one might try to get up and wander but with no memory thereof. The return of awareness is gradual and memory is absent and then vague and patchy for several hours.
This makes clear that wakefulness in the normal condition involves voluntary muscle control, presence to sensory information including proprioception, but also crucially, the activity of memory, all integrated to produce a continuing narrative of experiential flow. Whatever I do not remember in some way, hasn't happened for me, whether it be dream or reality.
That picture is so evocative!
You could consider the case of sleep apnea. Suppose a person is asleep, and quits breathing. At the same time, that person is dreaming that they are sinking in a pool of water, and is holding their breath.
Since a person who quits breathing in one's sleep doesn't necessarily have a corresponding dream, we can conclude that the dream is not the cause of the cessation of breathing. And, it may well be the case, that the cessation of breathing triggers the dream of being under water, as the cause of that dream. However, there may be a sort of feedback relation where the dream causes the person to hold their breath, and increase the length of time that the stoppage lasts for. A feedback relation is not straightforward causation, nor is it a relation of supervenience.
Right, this connects with @Christoffer's idea, above, that the dream and the physical event may mutually stimulate each other.
Does anyone know whether there is a term for this "reciprocal causality"-type phenomenon, in either the scientific or the philosophical literature?
There is certainly a possibility that a scientific investigation would show which comes first, the REM event (dream) or the physical event (leg-kicking). Do you think the entire mental/physical causation problem may be similarly resolved? I could imagine that happening if it is indeed causation that we're dealing with, because we could demonstrate a temporal gap between cause and effect. But if we discovered no such gap, we'd be left with the problem of how to understand the supervenience of the mental on the physical, or vice versa.
In any case, I agree with your term "speculation" -- that's all it is. And of course that dog is running! :smile:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521730062X
That is, you kicked in your dream as the result of a spasm and convinced your dream self you chose to strike your enemy in order to maintain the free will illusion we're programmed to have.
If dream states can be interpreted to be just like real life states, then we'd conclude free will is just a rationalization and not a true cause. Some do believe dreams can be used to explain real life, repeating over and over and over that life is but a dream (row row row your boat).
The potassium and magnesium of bananas are said to reduce night kicking. Worth a try, but that would of course eliminate the higher plane of perception you've achieved through essential mineral depletion.
Yes, that would draw the arrow of causation from physical to mental, with an interesting twist: As may happen in waking life, I came up with a rationalization that posited a mental choice. If dreams really do contain important symbols, then the symbolism of "choosing to do something" is powerful. It would reinforce my desire, in waking life, to see myself as an agent with genuine choices.
Quoting Hanover
Oh yes, tried that one. Couldn't find any correlation. I would gladly keep the kicks in exchange for that higher plane of perception . . . if I can persuade my wife not to make me sleep on the couch.
Feedback isn't reciprocal causality. On the level of a system feedback relationships occur sequentially from one variable at time t to another variable at the next time point t+x. People will use feedback more loosely though.
But you can find reciprocal causality, the term, used in social studies. People use it the same way as cocausality, the pairing "construct and enact" you might find in enactivism, and "coconstitute". "Reciprocal dependence" also.
I know originally all of these terms meant something different, eg coconstitution isn't causal and feedback doesn't care about whether it's read in a constructionist manner, but people never gave a fuck.
I don't think there is any mental/physical causation problem that needs to be resolved. Let's not dive into a "hard problem of consciousness" discussion.
Nice. That's the flavour of account I gestured toward with my response earlier.
Quoting fdrake
The further Z being a functional state of the body, the choice to kick is a flavour of quale that came along with the leg kicking, neither caused the other since they were parts of the same event.
Other empirical studies have been performed similar to the one you linked that purport to cast doubt on free will. This is from Wikipedia.
Quoting Wikipedia - Neuroscience of free will
I find this kind of argument unconvincing. It seems that people assume that an act can't be considered free unless conscious awareness of the decision takes place before the act itself - as if the consciousness somehow pushes a button that makes the muscles move. It's that little man inside our heads again. That doesn't make sense to me. The neurological process described in the Wikipedia excerpt, some of which is conscious and some of which isn't, is the freely made choice. We're responsible for the action. It is clear that our minds do significant mental processing at a pre-conscious level.
I've said it before and I'll say it again (and again and again). The free will vs. determinism issue is one of metaphysics. There is no fact of the matter, only a perspective.
Quoting fdrake
I think this is plausible, but I don't think it's relevant to the situation @Hanover was describing. What you've described is relevant to any two events that may or may not have a causal relationship.
Yeah. The account of choice where a choice is an experiential component of an action is just an instance. The action in the OP is the body's evolving state during kick, and the choice to kick is part of experiencing that evolving state. The choice and the movement are "grounded" in the action, "supervene" on it, or are otherwise inseparable parts of it.
That would hold so long as what constitutes the choice to move that leg as it was moved, in the body, is causally implicated in the leg movement and vice versa. Whether it construes choice as a spectator on what's already happened, or whether some actions count as choices and some don't based on other bodily processes.
I think the paper @Hanover linked ultimately sides against seeing choice as purely post hoc, since the experiment elicited a greater degree of intention to actions when a subtle pain signal was given to the body prior to making a choice. A bit like someone almost imperceptibly shouting "GO!" at the beginning of a race, you'll find your body moving as if on its own, even though you choose to run. "GO!" makes you experience your legs moving of their own accord as an act of your will.
I quite like that idea for horror purposes, it brings to mind a machine you can put someone in to make them experience random crap as their own choice.
I've been searching for papers for the finding that electrical stimulation of the brain that results in involuntary movement is interpreted by the subject as resulting from free will.
The best I could find si far: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/electrical-stimulation-produces-feelings-of-free-will
In this, a subject's brain was stimulated which caused him to want to move his arm and he actually thought he moved his arm (although he did not). This would suggest the feeling of volition is simply a sensation that precedes certain activity, but not that it has special ontological status.
That is, the feeling of free will that precedes the act is just that - a feeling - and not s cause. Our attribution of the will as the cause is just our programmed interpretation.
What might challenge this interpretation of the study is whether the subject always maintained the power to stop the urge to act, but that's not apparent from this study.
Aye. I think it's quite clear at this point that "free will" as a concept is a theological atavism. The body's volitional processes are nothing like a soul making a decision in accordance with its essential nature.
Do you know of a theory that covers the anatomy and physiology of concepts such as free will and theological atavism?
I just have a take.
1) Free will as a concept arose as a response to the theodicy. AFAIK this is just true. As a concept it was never meant to make sense of the human on its own terms, it was meant to make sense of our relationship with god and the world's evil.
2) Educated minds started thinking of the will as what is essentially human, roughly equating it with the action of the human soul in the world. {This is me speculating}
3) Laws use intention {mens rea} as a metric for culpability, connecting the presence of an intent to the outcome of an action. Culpability is diminished when an agent is coerced, even if the intention is present.
The way people talk about the will pretheoretically is effectively some hodgepodge of the concept in ( 3 ) - uncoerced choice - and the concept in 2 - undetermined choice, even though the concept of determination behaves like it does in ( 1 ), total causal isolation from all that is thingly, a mental uncaused cause. There is no faculty corresponding to "the will", volitional signals couple with every signal in our nervous systems, and they can be messed with experimentally. It's a fairytale, honestly.
Which isn't to say we don't have freedom of choice, or determinism is true, or whatever, it's just that the way people describe free will is a fairytale masquerading as common sense, masquerading as a model of human conduct, then partially enshrined in law.
That is an interesting article. I however think that the conclusion, assigning free will to neural process, is wrong. The main reason for this is that the conscious mind is absent during anesthesia. The subconscious mind is however active always. Stimulating the parietal cortex produces a pulse. This pulse then propagates to different parts of the brain depending on the exact point of the electrodes. When the subconscious mind receives a pulse coming from that center it acts accordingly and also registers the command in its memory. The person can only report the activities during anesthesia after she/he is conscious again. A conscious person however only has access to the subconscious memory therefore what he reports is not what he freely performed but only a memory that was registered in the subconscious mind during anesthesia.
I find this doubtful. Omnibenevolence, omniscience, and omnipotence are idiosyncratic of Western monotheistic religion. The problem of theodicy arises from that, asking how there can be evil if a perfectly good and all powerful being created it.
If you can show that societies that developed outside that tradition (e.g. rain forest, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American societies) emerged with no sense of free will, then that would be supportive of your position, but I question if that's true.
That is, if free will theory exists as the result of theodicy, why would societies that have no problems with theodicy still have free will? There are plenty of polytheistic societies that have dozens of gods, all with various flaws and weaknesses, all with I'd assume an acceptance that free will exists.
I have a German friend who's fluent in English and Russian. She read War and Peace in each language and says it's a different book depending on the language. In German especially, she said, it sounds psychoanalytic, like we're looking at unconscious motivations which play out. In Russian, she said it sounds more like each character is propelled by external forces, and that all slavic languages are like this. What a German would speak of as personal property, a Russian says is "upon me."
Moses Finley says the Homeric epics were like Russian depictions. When a goddess showed up on the battlefield to give someone courage, Finley says Bronze Age people really believed that was how it worked. Gods made people do things. Gods invented things like fire, paper, smelting, etc, and gave them to humans..
Quoting fdrake
Maybe as old religions died out, people lost the old explanations for things. So today we would say it's crazy that they thought a god invented paper. We know humans invented it. As we pulled all that creativity within us (as our property), the concept of the human will appeared. The last vestiges of the old way shows up in the way an artist talks about inspiration, as if it's coming from somewhere else.
Quoting fdrake
All I would say is that we don't fully understand how the universe ends up being conscious of itself. There may be weirdness we don't know about.
Quoting fdrake
We're saying we're divine. That's Schopenhauer's point in WWR. We're identifying with the forces that move the whole universe when we take responsibility for the simplest thing. Tolstoy was a giant Schopenhauer fan, btw.
"In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had argued that although we can acknowledge the bare logical possibility that humans possess free will, that there is an immortal soul, and that there is a God, he also argued that we can never have positive knowledge of these things (see 2g above). In his ethical writings, however, Kant complicates this story. He argues that despite the theoretical impossibility of knowledge of these objects, belief in them is nevertheless a precondition for moral action (and for practical cognition generally). Accordingly, freedom, immortality, and God are postulates of practical reason. (The following discussion draws primarily on Critique of Practical Reason.)"
https://iep.utm.edu/kantview/
This is to say, to be able to engage in practical cognition (i.e. the ability to meaningfully reason), you must believe (i.e. accept as a given, even if not rationally or empirically supported) in free will.
This is consistent with doxatic volunteerism, the belief you can choose your beliefs. The reductio conclusion for one who disbelieves in free is that they don't believe in free will because they are determined not to. They'd be similarly forced to accept a believer believes because he must. If that's the case, we argue not to persuade or effectuate our opponents to choose our way of thinking, but because we simply must argue and bend as programmed. That is, the very concept of deliberation and consideration collapse in a determined world because the thought processes and conclusions were just another set of pool balls colliding. We don't choose option A bc it's most rational. We choose it because we're compelled.
That is, free will is required for not just moral responsibility, but for practical cognition as well (i.e. rational thought itself).
Yeah. At least you know what you're smoking.
I think you're assuming that "free will" is a space of concepts, whereas it's a fairly demarcated one in public parlance. People think of a self causing mind able to manifest choices in a body.
Quoting Hanover
You may as well be quoting Aquinas.
This view of decision is inimicably Christian. The concept of will must be inherently unconstrained so that the horrible crap in the world can be our fault. That's what it's for. Free will gives humanity legislative authority over our own evils.
Compare:
[quote=Bhagavad Gita 3.27]
All activities are carried out by the three modes of material nature. But in ignorance, the soul, deluded by false identification with the body, thinks of itself as the doer.[/quote]
Totally opposite metaphysics. You have humans as unique willing agents vs human choice as relatively demarcated, somehow deluded, and part of the broader acts of nature.
We've then ended up thinking the broadly Christian concept of it applies everywhere and it's just "natural" and "innate" to see humans as legislative authorities on our own actions like existence is our own little fiefdom. It isn't even a cultural universal to see ourselves like this. People end up equating this Christian model of the agent with the concept of choice simpliciter, because we don't know any different.
I don't agree with this. The fundamentals of the modern concept of free will were developed by St Augustine, from principles derived from Plato and Aristotle. The basic premise is that a person chooses what is apprehended by that person as good, whether or not that good is consistent with the true good in the mind of the divinity. The problem Augustine grappled with was to make this understanding of the human being's freedom of choice, compatible with the idea of God.
So it's not that "free will" is an attempt to make sense of our relationship with God, but rather the contrary. The reality of free will tends to make God incomprehensible. And there is a number of ways that this is demonstrated. For instance, if God is omnibenevolent, why does He allow human beings to choose evil? If God is omnipotent, then He must know what a person will chose prior to the person making the choice, making that person's choice predetermined. These are the types of problems which Augustine had to deal with in his attempt to make the understanding of human choice, as derived from Plato and Aristotle, consistent with the idea of God.
Quoting fdrake
I don't think you understand what you quoted. Notice: "Nevertheless the order of justice belongs to the order of the universe; and this requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners. And so God is the author of the evil which is penalty..."
Yes, we are to blame for our own bad choices, but obviously it's God, not us, who has legislative authority over our evils. If we had authority over ourselves, we would never punish ourselves, always seeing what we choose, as good. And so the difficulty of making "free will" compatible with "God".
Daniel Dennett proposed that we don't dream, that we do not have an experience over a period of time while asleep, but that rather a memory of dreaming is confabulated on waking. Dreams are not lived but merely recalled as if they had been.
Not likely, given other empirical evidence, but curious.
Christianity isn't a monolithic belief system, so to argue a Catholic theologian holds consistently with a Kantian concept of freedom being necessary for moral responsibility doesn't make it Christian.
The freedom of the will position I've described is consistent with Judaic beliefs and Greek views pre-existing Christianity.
For a general overview of theological position on free will: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_in_theology
There are Christian views on predestination of course as well, meaning Roman Catholic views do not define Christianity. Consider too that Christianity comes with a whole host of other theological baggage when it comes to moral responsibility. My eternal reward will not come from just a benevolent use of my free will, but it will require acceptance of Jesus as the messiah.
I'm open up learning Hinduism, but my running down the rabbit hole trying to understand this didn't lead me to the conclusion that Hindus universally argue we lack free will or that one's karmic rewards aren't tied to freely chosen decisions. From the Wiki article, it's apparent there are differing views within Hinduisn on this issue.
Your quote I take to mean that only through transcending your physical being can you understand the soul as entirely without physical ability, which is the way to ultimately cease the birth/rebirth process. Sacred literature is often interpreted in highly contextualized ways, and it's hard to conclude much from a literal, four corners interpretation of a quote.
We could consume 100s of pages of debate on what Genesis 1:1 means for example.
As this is a foreign theology to me, it's hard to follow, as are many theologies, because they are not entirely rational. That is to say, I'm not convinced with what I've come across that freedom divorced from causation is not something you find within. Hinduism, and it's certainly something that pre-existed Christianity.
The ideas you expressed approval of, through Kant, are very Christian though. While his views on the matter had {at best} a mixed reception from theologians of his day, his stance on God is still firmly within the Christian tradition - closer to Catholic and Orthodox ones. I'm sure you're aware of his comment that he needed to "deny knowledge to make room for faith" regarding the limits of reason. The contradiction between the concept of will we're discussing and the causal structure of the universe was something he highlighted within his own philosophy, it's one of his antimonies. And he sided with that view of free will faithfully.
I dunno what to say, Kant's image of the human mind facing a decision is not particularly secular in origin. Even though his view on the relationship of reason and God, and maybe God's less literal existence, made him a bit of a heretic. Or not {seen as} particularly good at apology.
Quoting Hanover
I hardly know a thing about it.
I remember this, and I believe there was at least one experiment that provided possible evidence: An experimenter awakened a subject by (doing something like) placing his hand in a bucket of cold water. The subject then described a dream he said he'd been having, with a complicated plot that led logically to his being thrown into a pond. The idea is that there was no time between the immersion of the hand and the awakening in which the subject could have had such a purportedly long dream. So he must have retro-fitted it somehow; perhaps dreams appear all in an instant, but can only be remembered as sequenced stories.
Yes. I think this whole issue is troublesome because of disagreement on what actually "constitutes the choice."
Quoting fdrake
As you've heard me say many times, this issue cannot be addressed empirically. It's metaphysics.
An interesting article, but I don't think it really says anything about whether or not there is free will. Why is it significant that "the feeling of volition is simply a sensation that precedes certain activity, but not that it has special ontological status," in this context?
It's really confusing, right?
Here's the way I look at it. When I raise my hand, it can be the result of a variety of things:
1. I internally desire to raise my hand, so I raise my hand.
2. I have no desire one way or the other, but someone raises my hand for me.
3. I have a spasm and my hand flies upward.
4. Someone shocks my brain and me hand goes upward (I meant to say "me" here so I could sound like Oliver Twist).
I think we can say that 1 is the result of free will. We can also clearly say that 2 and 3 are not the result of free will.
Note that 1 and 3 are similar in that they are entirely the result of internal stimulation, but they are different in that 1 is a free will event and 3 is not.
Note that 2 is clearly not a free will event, and it's externally caused.
#4 is our interesting case and the subject of the article I cited (and which got a rave review by you, calling it "interesting"). #4 straddles the fence in being external and internal. It's external because some external fucker is sticking shit inside my brain, but it's internal in the sense that it directly stimulates as if it were an adjacent neuron.
What also makes it interesting is that the subject (the guy with electrodes coming out his noggin) self reports that he raised his hand on his own volition. That is, he insists he had free will, yet I'm sitting here staring at a dominatrix mashing a button and making him like a marionette.
What then is free will? The argument here is that it's just a feeling one has, much like the feeling one has of a gentle breeze up one's kilt. Free will, under this discussion (which I'm trying to pepper with ridiculous comments to keep you interested) is not a divine spark, a something from nothing, or a sudden spontaneous force. It's just a feeling fuck heads have when they do something. If it feel free, it is free. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no ontological, metaphysical difference.
When someone steals your mama's purse, the question of whether it was stolen freely then isn't whether it came from an uncaused event or even an entirely internal event. The question would be whether one would have expected the bastard to have had that feeling of freedom, much like a draft up the bawsack.
But there's more to be said about this. I've just run out of words. I don't actually buy into this because I believe in Cartesian freedom, a mind seperate from a body, a divine spark, and the holiness and sacredness of humanity. That will always be my belief. I feel it like an unmistakable gentle breeze. I just like to talk to the godless and hear what they have to say. It's important to listen to everyone so you can say you did it right before you go back to believing what you always did.
I see this as a misconstruing of what libertarian free will entails, aka that divine spark you mentioned, as some might interpret it.
How can there be consciousness's free will involved if there is no conscious deliberation involved as to whether or not one should raise one's hand? Yes, I get that we intend outcome X and then it happens without being in any way obstructed. We willed X (in this case to raise the hand) and it became real as we intended without any bars, so to speak, to our so doing. Many thereby deem this a volition, will, that was free to do what it intended, and ergo conclude it to be "free will". All the same, it's ain't the conscious agent which so decided between alternatives that it do so. Not unless there was that conscious deliberation which I just mentioned in which one deliberates between which alternative to choose.
Most of what we do on a moment by moment basis is freely willed in the sense of being done as we consciously wanted without any obstruction. We don't for example, deliberate on which words, what intonations, what volume of sound, etc. to express when speaking a sentence to another - and we end up (usually) communicating that which we wanted to communicate. Willed without obstructions to (or constraints upon) our so realizing and hence free in this sense, but this misses the point of that spark which is pivotal to the issue of what in philosophical literature is formally termed "free will".
And I find that this can easily converge with #4 which you've presented. No deliberation between which alternative to pursue, no (technical) free will. The electricity to the brain stimulates the same unconscious processes (a complex topic I'm seeking to keep as simple as possible) that determine our voluntarily raising our hand in manners devoid of deliberation. If there are no second thoughts to do so between which we deliberate, then there is no free will in the sense of that spark involved.
But whenever one deliberates between alternatives, then one does, or at least can be argued to, make use of one's libertarian free will as conscious being.
Technically, free will is defined as freedom of which choice to make in moments of choice-making. And not doing that which one as a total mind (conscious and unconscious) wants in the absence of any conscious deliberation (i.e., conscious choice making) so long as the outcome is not obstructed.
I'll keep this short and see how that goes. So I'll stop here.
It doesn't make sense to me that the feeling of intention and agency you are referring to is the free will. We make decisions and take voluntary action all the time without that feeling. The cliche example is driving our car on a route we are familiar with while thinking about beating Donald Trump Jr. with a stick. And now we have an example from the article you linked where we have the feeling of intention and agency without actually having voluntary control. So - the feeling, i.e. our conscious awareness - is not the important part - the part that verifies our choices are freely made. Then what is? I think that's where the whole question just dissolves. You might say there's no way we can know. I would say there's nothing to know.
Of course, that only applies to the metaphysical question. At a human-scale, everyday, psychological level, of course our decisions are influenced by things outside of us, usually without our awareness and you might say without our control or intention. Because my father didn't love me, I have an obsession with beating Donald Trump Jr. with a stick. And that's the name of that tune.
"And that's the name of that tune" was one of Tony Baretta's catchphrases. "Baretta" was a TV police show from the 1970s. Baretta was played by Robert Blake back before he murdered his wife. His other catchphrase was "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time," but that wouldn't have made sense in my response.
I think you could make the case I am stealing your schtick again - using non-sequiturs to send a discussion off on a tangent. Even me using Yiddish words like "schtick" could be considered stealing your schtick. And that's the name of that tune.
This comment just speaks to your privilege. You didn't grow up in a cage, and so what feels like the sunshine of freedom to me just feels like a normal Tuesday for you.
My people were enslaved for 400 years only to be stuck another 40 years in the hot desert. So I know the bitterness of freedomlessness.
But I digress.
Let me start afresh, de novo if you will. We live our lives partially on autopilot, halfway paying attention to much of anything. It's not until we see the sign welcoming us into Mississippi that we realize that home from Birmingham was right, not left.
So, sure, you can overlook the feeling of freedom just like you can brain fart your way through anything, but if we can't make sense of the notion of free will logically, yet blokes say certain things be free, what be they referencing other than a feeling?
And this is just my odd way of saying, "to be free is to feel free. " Fred sleeps in his crate, door closed or open, just as free either way.
That last sentence actually was interesting despite the rest of the post, designed just to be quirkier than you.
Just depends on where the logic starts from. If what you are is a gear in the works, then it sounds like magic that you could rise up from gear-hood and replace what would have been with what you ordain.
But what if you aren't a gear? What if your body acts all gear-like, but what you are is something beyond that? Maybe someday we'll discover what consciousness really is and be amazed.
I had a dream once where I exited this universe. I was in this blackness and I turned to see the universe like a big ball beside me. I experimented on re-entering it. It had something to do with how I looked into it. There was a certain way that everything in the ball would start to make sense, and I'd realize I was re-entering it. But I didn't want to get trapped in it, so I turned and got back out.
Anyway, the point is that there's nothing clear about what's really going on. We have no clue. What drives you to believe this or that about determinism is emotion, not logic.
Uni means one, which means it's all there is. You therefore couldn't be outside the universe. You were just outside, like being on the sidewalk out front of Taco Bell, wanting to get in, but at the same time wanting to chill outside.
Quoting frank
So there's a few reasons you might say this: (1) you're the Cartesian devil, (2) you're the Kant's noumena, or (3) you hold that determinism robs us if the ability to judge facts. I'm none of those. I'm one of the faithful, so I do know, but you're unconvinced because you're not. Such is the value of faith.
And really you too have faith, but you just deny it but act as if you do for all practical purposes. Nothing is clear you say, your windshield smudged and foggy in the pitch of night, yet you amazingly navigate. You see clearly, but you're sure you don't, but can't explain how you keep getting home unscathed.
Of course you have free will. How could anything make sense without it?
The believer believes as he does at present, because he must due to the history that shaped the way he believes at present. However we can contribute to what will be the history that shaped the way the believer believes in the future, by interacting with the believer now.
Quoting Hanover
That we can change each others thinking isn't particularly problematic on a determinist view.
This by way of an explanation for your (3) in the OP.
Although I think the driving example is a good one to address the issue we were discussing, there are better ones. Taoism has a concept of wu wei, acting without acting, without intention but with attention. In my experience, that covers many, perhaps most, of my own decisions and actions. Most of the time, there is not the little voice of my consciousness talking to me and telling me what to do.
1) Most people don't kick in their sleep, yet they kick in their dreams. So the sleeping kick can't be the cause of the dreaming kick in most instances. We don't usually punch, walk, or drive in our sleep either, yet we do those things in our dreams.
2) I've occasionally kicked in my sleep. I remember waking up in some pain because I kicked the wall, while dreaming about kicking something. My sleep kick could not have caused my dream kick, because kicking the wall woke me up instantly. It's the order of events. I did not sleep kick the wall, remain asleep and dream kick, then wake up.
Sounds Freudian, describing a mediated superego and id by your ego.
If you are constantly being told what to do by your conscious self, you'd have an over active superego. If you are pure urge, you'd be all id.
That's just to say you're normal. Ordinary really. Beige.
And lucky to be.
Cannabinoids can help.
I think that's over general. If we're aware that a coercion, addiction, or being inebriated impacts someone's capacity for choice, then studying how coercion, addiction or being inebriated studies choice. Topics and events in that list are able to be studied empirically, which means that a hypothesis about choice can be inferentially connected to experiment - you can say stuff about a choice concept using a study.
If someone's got a concept of choice which can't be studied empirically, at that point it's on them to demonstrate its relevance to anything. Considering the bar for relevance above is sufficiently light that qualitative connection to events is enough to count as an inferential connection to studyable events, that isn't much a demand. As in, if people report that coercion impacts their ability to choose... that's an empirical connection between choice as a construct and an event. If you end up believing that choice isn't inferentially connected to anything that occurs? Well you can't do any explaining or theorising with it about anything that occurs, otherwise there'd be an inferential connection.
Isn't it just contingent or random events or responses? To say X is caused by Y, Y must be possible to repeat for more observations to see if X will happen.
In human dreams, possibility of exactly same dream can happen is very low, if not impossible. And the contents of dreams are not something which can be controlled by external conditioning or by the dreamer himself.
Well, but what about a long dream which the subject reports as including a kick? How could we tell if the events in the dream caused the physical kick, or whether the kick occurred unrelatedly, and was then incorporated into the the story of the dream? This would certainly be a hard case to determine, but it seems to me that if we gathered enough data from simpler dreams showing that, let's say, the act of dreaming precedes the physical kick, we'd consider it strongly probable that this is usually the case in the longer dreams as well.
Notice, too, that this is all based on the hypothesis that the relation is causal. To me, that's by no means certain. If the physical kick supervenes on the dream-moment of kicking, then at best we might be able to say that the dream as a whole caused the kick, but the dream-kick and the physical kick, on this view, would be simultaneous. This is where the parallel with mental causation in waking life becomes clear: We want to say that my thoughts do result in physical actions, but that doesn't have to mean that there is a moment in time at which thought X causes action Y, with a teeny temporal gap. The thought process as a whole may be the causative part of the relation.
Ok, good point. Another reason that it is not causal reaction is that, when you say X is caused by Y. Y must cause on all instances of X i.e. if the dream caused your kicking, it must cause kicking to all other folks who has the same dream or similar dream kicking. But it doesn't. Maybe it does to some folks, but definitely not to all the folks. Hence it is not causal event. It is random or contingent event or reaction during the sleep.
You mentioned also on supervenience i.e. Kicking was based on dreaming. It seems also not convincing, because when an action is based on something i.e. the dreaming, there must be also thought processes or willful motivations which must accompany the action Kicking. During sleep, your thought and willful motivations wouldn't be present for your Kicking to be based on the thoughts process or willful motivation on the dreaming.
Or maybe it's necessary but not sufficient. In order to produce the kicking, some other factors have to be in play as well.
Quoting Corvus
Fair enough. I was definitely interpreting "thought process" generously to include whatever a dream is. Maybe we should just say "mental event" instead -- I think we can include more than just conscious thoughts as possible relata in the mental/physical causation problem. Memories, for instance -- where might they fall on the "willful" spectrum?
Or maybe, given all the evidence presented here, there is no causal relation between dream and kick.
We are enamoured of causality, a figment of our rationalisations. We supose that if only we find the cause, all will be well. We rely on causes to explain the way things are, but when pushed we can't clearly explain what causes are. Most especially in the case of disturbances of the mind, which is what both nocturnal kicking and dreaming are.
Memories seem to play a part in dreams, but they are not exactly correct memories of the past. You might just see something you have had experience with in real life, but in a totally different context. There would be no thoughts or reasonings happening in dreams. You get what is unfolding in your dreaming without your choice in totally unpredictable manner.
Even if you get to see the images and in some cases the situations happening albeit without any context, reason or history, you still have feelings and willful motivations which make you angry, sad, or joyous, and you might even act to defend yourself if you feel you were in danger even in your dreams. It tells us even when we are asleep, some part of our mind is semi conscious, and a lot might be happening in there.
I don't believe it is a causal relationship between dreaming and actions while in sleep, but more likely contingent or random reactions due to the mental activities happening during sleep, because there is no constant regularity or necessity between the contents of dreaming and the reactions during dreaming. And it doesn't affect the majority of folks in the same way, but looks to be some random and contingent reactions to the dreams in some folks.
As a youth, I had a couple of recurring very unpleasant dreams. Someone told me that although I was sleeping, I had the ability to recognize that I was in the dream again. By doing this, I could also just wake myself up out of the dream by counting to 3 and telling myself to wake up.
It worked.
There were a couple of other dreams that I could also 'control' my 'dream self' in. Flying around like Peter Pan was one. I'm pretty sure that it was only after I began waking myself up from the most unpleasant one, that I began this sort of realizing and 'controlling' my dream self.
Fast forward several years, add to the life mix a massive head injury, and now I very very rarely remember anything I dreamed the night before. Just a few times in 40 years.
Yes, you're right. Of course we are influenced by our environment and our human nature. That kind of influence is addressable by empirical methods. But I stick with my judgment the overall question of determinism and free will is metaphysical. I wrote this earlier in the thread in a response to @Hanover.
Quoting T Clark
I think you misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that if someone has some metaphysical idea, and if that idea tells you something about how stuff happens, how stuff happens then must influence what they will believe about that metaphysical idea.
Eg "Humans always can choose otherwise, regardless of circumstance"
+ "An addict's capacity for choice can be eroded so much it can be unfeasible for them not to take their drug of choice" = "Maybe what I think about how humans can choose needs to change, maybe how I understand can, there, isn't about practical possibility"
[PEDANTRY WARNING] Metaphysical ideas don't tell you about how stuff happens, they tell you how to talk about how stuff happens.
Quoting fdrake
Maybe I still don't understand. I'm making a distinction between metaphysical free will and regular old my daddy beat me and now I can't help but beat my own kids free will. The idea of metaphysical free will grows out of a materialistic view of the world. If the world is a machine and everything is caused, then the future can be precisely predicted given an adequately accurate and detailed knowledge of current conditions. In that case, all human decisions and actions can be predicted and are, therefore, determined in advance. Thus - no free will.
Regular old everyday free will is called into question by regular old everyday determinism, which is a product of human biology, psychology, and social conditioning.
I apologize for this post.
Yeah. And it surprises me that you believe how stuff happens has no bearing on how we can, or should, talk about how stuff happens. It's an incredibly incautious claim, that things which happen necessarily don't influence how we talk about stuff in the abstract. A defeater of the claim would be a single example of something which possibly can have this influence. And there are examples.
Physics example - determinism vs beta decay. Which lets you refute the antecedent of your conditional statement below:
Quoting T Clark
Since beta decay isn't caused in anything like the billiard ball sense. It just kinda... happens... at some point. Spontaneously. There's potentiating conditions but no immediately antecedent, distinguishable, determining event to serve as a proximate cause. The connection between a thing which has happened to an allegedly independent realm of claims undermines the necessity of their independence.
Modally though, the mere possibility of a dispute between this interpretation of a physical process is enough to undermine the idea that the metaphysical is closed off from the way of things. It's a paradigmatic case of the possibility that how things are constraints how we may talk about them in the abstract. It thus undermines the claim that we necessarily cannot relate metaphysics and how stuff happens, by providing the possibility of a relation.
In my view it's much more metaphysically gluttonous, principle hungry, philosophically un-conservative, to believe in the independence of metaphysical theses from the stuff they concern. It is, ironically, an incredibly strong constraint on the relationship between reasoning, metaphysics and what occurs.
I'm not ignoring your post, just thinking through an answer. And also tending to my hurt feelings because you called me incautious and metaphysically gluttonous.
I called your idea it. I have plenty of ideas like that. Sorry for hurting your feelings.
Quoting fdrake
I'll give an example, which doesn't address your quantum mechanics comments. I got this from "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt which I recommend. Forgive me if I don't get the details right. The metaphysics of scholastic science, which is what they call it from ancient Greece up through the end of the Middle Ages, focused on human involvement in the world. The universe revolved around the Earth - us. The principles of science were focused on human involvement and logical connections. Explanations were teleological in terms of human purpose. Here's what Burtt had to say:
In the 1500s and 1600s, scientists started to focus on different factors. I was really impressed by Kepler. He was one of the first to identify and focus on the mathematical nature of the world, in particular cosmology. He also was one of the first to propose relativity, i.e. we don't have to stand on the earth or use a human perspective. Things we know and see can be studied from any perspective. This again from Burtt.
So, metaphysics gives us the words to talk about how the world works. I'm going to leave it at that for this post so it doesn't get too long. I'll be back to talk about your quantum mechanics examples.
And now for the hard part. To start - and I don't think this is directly related to my argument - if you look on the web you'll find that opinion is about evenly split over whether quantum mechanics is deterministic. I have a hard time following the arguments. It seems that some interpretations are and others aren't. That underlines my thoughts that the interpretations are metaphysics and not science. That will be true unless someone can find a way to distinguish among them empirically.
Now the hard hard part. Let's look at the instance you discuss - beta emissions. Does that mean that if the whole world reran that things would have worked out differently - a particular particle would not be emitted at the same time? It's not clear to me that it does. Again, I don't think that's really important. If I understand correctly, the idea of strict determinism had already been undermined in the late 1800s before QM arrived by thermodynamics and engineering mechanics, i.e. considering the behavior of matter and energy as statistical macroscopic phenomena rather than microscopic. Bertrand Russell wrote a paper in 1912 - "On the Notion of Cause" - which called into question the value of causation as an organizing principle. Engineering mechanical explanations are what allows quantum mechanics to be applied to the world as we know it.
So, where does this leave us? Well... when we use science, we still have to be able to say "If I do this, that will happen." You can talk about uncertainty, but physicists can make incredibly precise predictions about how the world works at atomic scale. It's not the strict billiard ball determinism of pre-QM days, but it's still determinism. So - strict determinism is and has always been bonehead metaphysics, but loosey goosey determinism makes the world work.
Quoting T Clark
I was looking for something in Burtt's book and came across something that I think explains what I was trying to say in my first post better than the quotes I gave you.