> From: glenn morton <mortongr@flash.net>
> Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 16:02:43 -0000
> To: James W Stark <stark2301@voyager.net>
> Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
> Subject: Re: Preprogrammed
>
> 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.
>
Jim's comment
The analogy here is much better and, yes, those shareholders would have
human free will. I doubt that their behavior follows the mathematical
equations behind Sierpinski's gasket.
end of this comment
>
>
> 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.
>
Jim's comment
Thanks for including Penrose's views from The Large, the Small and the
Human Mind. I only have two of his books, The Emperor's New Mind and
Shadows of the Mind. However, that intelligence at this level would be a
fixed smart program with designed reactions. It has no free will. It is an
artificial intelligence.
end of this comment
>
> Glenn continues: "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 mass movements 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 responsible for 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 comments
Thanks again for the fill-in. Yes, randomness could enter the decision
process here, but it would not be human free will. Your definitions of free
will and randomness appear to be just high order programs. These would not
be non-deterministic. I see several levels of free will ranging from fixed
programs to a non-programmable free will. Spiritual free will that humans
use is a force not a fixed program.
end of comment
>
>> 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 Unconscious
> Initiation of a Freely Voluntary 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.
>
Jim's comments
Your conclusion may be true, if you accept the face value of the
interpretations. I have learned to be more skeptical. I find too much
scientific reporting that is structured to "find" what the scientist
intended to find. i.e. a deterministic free will. I will have to read
Tipler's book and possibly Libet's. I am familiar with readiness potential
but not with the concept of an Omega Point Boundary Condition. Richard E.
Cytowic in The Man Who Tasted Shapes describes a similar experiment. How we
make decisions has not been clearly established. If a theory does not
consider a separation between automated and non-automated decisions, any
experiment based on that theory will only find automated decisions.
Experimenters need to separate automated [reactions] from non-automated
[responses]. If an experiment requires no evaluation, it becomes automatic
and does not use a non-deterministic free will. In automated trials the
readiness potential occurs before awareness. How do we know that the moment
of reported awareness is the moment of decision? Activated
non-deterministic free will sets the moment of decision not the moment of
awareness. Thanks for the added evidence to explore.
end of this comment
>>
>> 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
>
> Glenn says: But once again, how can we be free when we don't even know what we
> did?
Jim's comment
This depends on the situation. We use our free will to build [reaction]
habits. That reaction can be outside our field of awareness. They can be
triggered by our emotions. We use free will to make selections during
conscious evaluations.
end of this comment
>
> Glenn continues: 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.
>
Jim's comment
The decision to move the finger was already made and delegated to a smart
program agent. Action was committed to a random generator.
end of this comment
>
> 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 comments
It is your association of free will to randomness that creates the
impression
of a deterministic worldview. So does the subject title. The literature
that you quote use deterministic arguments. Non-determinism demands the
existence of human free will. Randomness does not. The lack of
understanding lies in the meaning given to randomness. The meaning of
randomness in science is not consistent. It may be seen as an indication of
either high order or low order. We need to realize that the meaning of
randomness depends on its theoretical context. Ludwig Boltzmann locked the
definition of randomness for the microworld to an assumed equality for
chance events so that he could create a statistical property of a collection
of molecules that would mimic entropy, a macroscopic property of gases. That
randomness was believed to be a state of low order. Yet, David Bohm saw
randomness as an infinitely high degree of order. It would be a fixed order
that is unpredictable. If we look at random real numbers, we again see a
correlation of randomness to high order, not disorder. Rudy Rucker in
Infinity and the Mind tells us that "a sequence of digits is random if there
is no finite way of describing it." A real number is random "if it has an
irreducibly infinite amount of information." . Its order is very unique.
Thus, randomness is equated with unnameability. It is a complexity of high
degree of order. Computer generated "random" numbers represent a very high
order rather than no order. You seem to want both low order and high order.
The randomness of a smart agent in our brain uses a high order randomness.
It has no free will (low order) in it.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
Jim's comment
Sorry, perhaps I should have used trust rather that faith.
>
>> 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.
>
Jim's explanation
There are bound to be contradictions between the worldviews of different
individuals. We need to reach for internal consistency in our personal
worldviews and external consistency between "competing" worldviews. We do
that by being openly honest, sharing without threat, and reaching out beyond
our personal worldviews for the truth of what those worldviews ought to be.
Some worldviews are closer to that truth than others.
end of explanation
>
> 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?
>
> Glenn continues: Can we consider one important assumption that we should be
> internally consistent for any view we finally accept?
>
> Jim's answer
Yes, but we build that worldview and periodically modify it. It normally
is not handed to us on a platter. This is why I like to share mine and seek
to minimize my internal contradictions. We generally can not convince
others to change just because their perspective is different from ours. We
must use our human free will to intentionally change our selves.
>
>
>
>
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