Re: Preprogrammed
> Comment from Jim
> I saw this response after I sent my comment. You did not resolve the
> validity question.
> The dot can not be replaced by an intelligent agent in the computer. The
> dot has no free will. It behaves "randomly" because of a mathematical
> equation. An intelligent agent does have free will and can not be
> programmed into any computer. The system illustrates nothing that is even
> plausible. There is no valid analogy between the choices of a human agent
> and Sierpinski's gasket.
> end of Jim's comment here.
Like many games, Jim, this game is not restricted to the computer. One can lay out a board on the floor and have a real live person move in response to what I suggested(good, bad or neutral deeds) and mark the points. Or maybe they could move by a minute by minute tally of the stock market. Go half the distance to 1 if the NASD and NYSE are both up, half the distance to 2 if there is a mixed result and half the distance to 3 if both are down. The stock market is moved by millions of intelligent beings buying and selling stock. If you are going to argue that those shareholders have no free will, then we will have to talk about what free will means.
And, given that you cited Penrose, in an earlier note, I would point out that Penrose does believe that our brains reach down into a quantum world. He starts with the paramecium,
"I want to address the question. 'What are individual neurons doing? Are they just acting as computational units? Well, neurons are cells and cells are very elaborate things. In fact, they are so elaborate that, even if you only had one of them, you could still do very complicated things. For example, a paramecium, a one-celled animal, can swim towards food, retreat from danger, negotiate obstacles, and, apparently, learn by experience. These are all qualities which you would think would require a nervous system but the paramecium certainly has no nervous system. The best you could do would be if the paramecium were a neuron itself! There are certainly no neurons in a paramecium -there is only a single cell. The same sort of statement would apply to an amoeba. The question is 'How do they do it?' Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 127
Paramecium, according to Penrose, use microtubules to move about.
Penrose believes that microtubules play a role in quantum coherence and give us the non-computational part of our intelligence.
"Thus, a single microtubule could itself behave like a computer, and one has to take this into account if one is considering what neurons are doing. Each neuron does not just behave like a switch but rather involves many, many microtubules and each microtubule could be doing very complicated things.
"This is where my own ideas make an entry. It might be that quantum mechanics is important in understanding these processes. One of the things that excites me most about microtubules is that they are tubes Being tubes, there is a plausible possibility that they might be able to isolate what is going on in their interiors form the random activity in the environment. In Chapter 2, I made the claim that we need some new form of OR physics and, if it is going to be relevant, there must be quantum-superposed massm ovements which are well isolated from the environment. It may well be that, within the tubes, there is some kind of large-scale, quantum coherent activity, somewhat like a superconductor. . . .
"It seems to me that consciousness is something global. Therefore, any physical process responsiblefor consciousness would have to be something with an essentially global character. Quantum coherence certainly fits the bill in this respect. Quantum coherence certainly fits the bill in this respect. For such large-scale quantum coherence to be possible, we need a high degree of isolation, as might be supplied by the microtubule walls. However, we also need more, when the tubulin conformations begin to get involved. This needed additional insulation from the environment might be supplied by ordered water just outside the microtubules. Ordered water (which is known to exist in living cells) would be likely also to be an important ingredient of any quantum-coherent oscillation taking place inside the tubes. Though a tall order, perhaps it is not totally unreasonable that all this might be the case." Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 131-133
He believes that coherent quantum oscillation takes place in the microtubules in the neurons. While most psychologists think he is all wet, if he is correct, then intelligence would indeed involve randomness, through the random quantum world. So, I would suggest that citing Penrose actually falls into my definition of what free will must mean.
> Jim's response
> The output from a random generator does not create human free will!!
> Because the use of both random numbers and free will appear unpredictable,
> we can not assume that they are related. You apparently choose to believe
> that they are. Many scientist will treat free will as a fixed program so
> that they can create a deterministic explanation. That is a extremely
> simplified free will. It is not human free will!! Human free will selects
> between the intentions of a human during an evaluation and response. This
> is certainly not random. How predictable that human free will may be
> depends on how rational the human is behaving. Humans make many free will
> decisions based on emotional input that overrides cognitive judgment.
> Hence, they become irrational or arational. Francis Fukuyama in The Great
> Disruption provides a useful classification of human norms based on a
> rational-arational dimension. He is the senior social scientist for the
> RAND Corporation.
It is interesting that you are saying that human free will chooses between alternatives. There is a famous experiment by Libet and colleagues which has some implications to your claim that human free will choses between intentions.
"Libet et al. have demonstrated that a 'person's' brain makes a decision to act before the 'person' is aware of having decided to act; that is, the brain makes the decision and then informs the person of the decision, who (mistakenly) believes he or she actually 'made' the decision. In the experiment to show this, a spot rotating on a TV screen at a rate of 2.5 cycles per second is watched by an experimental subject. The subject is asked to decide of his or her own free will to bend a finger, and note the position of the spot when the decision is made. An electrode attached to the head shows that, on average, a potential change in the brain occurred 0.35 seconds before the person said he or she 'intended ' to act." ~ Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 201
Tipler refers to B. Libet et al, "Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness Potential). The Unconcious Initiation of a Freely Voluntarary act," Brain, 106(1983):640ff. I would also point you to Deeke, Grotzinger and Kornhuber, 1976 "Voluntary finger movements in Man..." Biol.Cybernetics 23,99ff. Tiper goes on:
"The free decisions of the agents are an irreducible factor in the generation of the physical universe and its laws, not merely the reverse. This means that, even if the randomizer in the human nervous system is apparently merely pseudorandom, we will still have ontological free will if the Omega Point Boundary Condition applies to the actual universe. With this boundary condition, the ultimate laws of physics are generated by agents, not vice versa. Thus, under the Omega Point Boundary Condition, the laws of physics necessarily have a little 'vagueness' about them; they cannot determine all decisions of all agents." ~ Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p.202-203
Penrose discusses these experiments in Emporer's New Mind p. 440-444 and concludes:
"Can we take these experiments at their face value? If so, we appear to be driven to the conclusion that we act entirely as 'automatons' when we carry out any action that would take less than a second or two in which to modify a response." p. 443
How in the world can we claim to have freely chosen to bend our finger when we weren't even aware of it? So, I would say that there is a 'randomizer' in the brain and there is evidence of it in Libet's and Kornhuber's experiments.
>
> We have yet to use mathematics to estimate rational decisions, because of
> our poor understanding of relationships between values. Evaluating
> irrational and arational decisions based on our emotions with mathematics
> may be impossible. I choose to see this human free will as a spiritual
> force that interacts with our brains. We must use that gift of free will to
> reach out to God for guidance in our decisions. Those intentions become the
> causes for our actions after the act of using human free will. We foolishly
> hide this true free will in our concepts of chance, randomness, spontaneity,
> etc.
> end of Jim's comment here
But once again, how can we be free when we don't even know what we did? Free will must be tied to randomness. In this way God limited His knowledge as well as our knowledge. And because our knowledge is limited, He needed to come, in the form of the Messiah, to tell us about Himself.
I would interpret Libet's experiments as follows: We are tied to some randomizing agent. We inform this agent of what we want to do in the future--bend our finger. Then that agent must act on our account before we are informed of his action. The person sitting at the experiment already agreed to bend his finger and then delegated the action to the randomizer.
We do this when we throw things, like baseballs:
"One of the fastest loops is from arm sensors to spinal cord and back out to arm muscles: it takes 110 milliseconds for feedback corrections to be made to an arm movement.
"But dart throwing doesn't take much longer. Thus feedback from joints and muscles is wasted--you might use it to help you plan for the next time, but your arm is an unguided missile shortly after the throw has begun. You must plan perfectly as you 'get set' to throw, create a chain of muscle commands, all ready to be executed in exactly the right order. The same is true for hammering, which both baboons and chimpanzees use effectively to crack open shells. You need something like a serial buffer memory in which to load up all the muscle commands in the right order and with the right timing relative to one another--and then you pump them out blindly, without waiting for any feedback." ~ William H. Calvin, "The Unitary Hypothesis: A Common Neural Circuitry for Novel manipulations, Language, Plan-ahead, and Throwing?" in K. R. Gibson and T. Ingold, eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp 230-250, p. 234
And given that neurons fire randomly, one needs a lot of neurons to maintain control and to set up threshold levels of a circuit:
"Throwing has a crucial timing step that is not present in hammering or clubbing or kicking: the projectile must be released at just the right instant. Too early, and the launch angle will be too high, the projectile overshooting the target. Too late, and the projectile hits the ground in front of the target. We can talk of the 'launch window' as that span of release times wherein the projectile will hit the target somewhere between its top and bottom. for a throw at a rabbit-sized target from a four meter distance (about the length of an automobile), this launch window is 11 ms wide. So at the end of a throw which started several hundred ms earlier, one must time the relaxation of the grip to stay withing that 11 ms. The typical spinal motorneuron has an intrinsic timing jitter of at least that much when the cell is generating action potentials at 200 ms intervals.
"But most people can, with practice, hit a rabbit-sized target at such a comfortable distance on perhaps half of the tries, so let us assume that the timing mechanisms are sufficient. Move the target out to twice the distance, eight meters, and practice enought to achieve hits on half the tries. The reason that this is so hard is that the launch window shrinks by a factor of eight to only 1.4 ms. The solid angle subtended by the target fell by a factor of four; furthermore, throwing twice as far with a reasonably flat trajectory means throwing twice as fast, so the time scale is halved. An electronic instrument would have no trouble in keeping its timing jitter to within a 1.4 ms window over several hundred milliseconds. But neurons would probably have to be redesigned from scratch."
The law of large numbers.
"Nature seldom redesigns, but it does one thing very well: it duplicates cells endlessly. And it seems that the way around cellular jitter is simply to assign a great many neurons to the same task, timing the launch, and then to average their recommendations. Need to halve the jitter? Just use four times as many cells as originally sufficed. To double the throwing distance and maintain hit rate, one needs an eight-fold reduction in jitter: that merely requires 64 times as many timing cells as originalloy sufficed. Triple the distance? Only 729 times as many cells." ~ William H. Calvin, "The Unitary Hypothesis: A Common Neural Circuitry for Novel manipulations, Language, Plan-ahead, and Throwing?" in K. R. Gibson and T. Ingold, eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp 230-250, p. 246-247
Our bodies are designed to control the randomizer that exists in our nerves.
> Jim's comment
> God does not have to hide God's free will behind randomness. Your
> explanation just shows your preference for a deterministic worldview. We
> need to build coherent worldviews. You seem to leave no room for true
> spiritual forces that are beyond deterministic models. Deterministic models
> ignore true human free will.
I have been arguing all throughout this thread for a NON-DETERMINISTIC model of free will. How on earth can you possibly say that. Have I not said over and over that free will must be tied to randomness? That is certianly NOT arguing for a deterministic universe, unless your definition of deterministic is totally different than any definition I have ever heard.
>
> Jim's comment:
> You have more faith in quantum mechanics for spiritual answers than I do.
No, you misconstrue what I have faith in. I have faith in God and see his hand in quantum. I am interested in how he has used it to give us free will. It is not quantum that gives, but God.
> Glenn continues: So when you said at the first of your note:
>
> >No random generator can create this free will. Just because a choice is
> >unpredictable does not establish human free will.
>
> It is inconsistent with your two statements: "Free will decisions are not
> predictable." and, "God chose to limit what God could know for a reason."
> I see no way for God to limit his knowledge without randomness. If there is
> another way for God to limit his knowledge without introducing randomness,
> please explain it. And please explain the contradictory nature of your
> statements above.>
>
> Jim's conclusion
> The inconsistencies that you see are based on your worldview and your
> definitions. We have to reach out beyond our personal worldviews to better
> understand where others are coming from.
Let me get this straight. We are free to be contradictory so long as we are reaching out? I don't get it.
We can only share our personal
> worldviews and let each other choose to change our own worldviews when valid
> conflicts become evident. Change can follow revealed valid conflicts within
> our personal worldviews, not between different worldviews. We are in the
> process of privatizing religion. Searching for common assumptions upon
> which to build a coherent worldview is what we all must do.
I would think that being internally consistent would be a plus.
It requires the
> use of human free will to change those assumptions. One of those common
> assumption ought to be the existence of a human free will that is beyond
> randomness, chance, or spontaneity. The truth in reality is not completely
> deterministic or programmed. Human free will exists within the constraints
> set by God. Our task is still to learn how to better use that human free
> will to build a stable global community.
>
> Thanks Glenn for sharing. Are other readers willing to share their
> convictions about the existence of human free will? What assumptions ought
> we hold in common?
Can we consider one important assumption that we should be internally consistent for any view we finally accept?
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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