[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Marcus Daniels]

Here’s a review paper on the topic.   https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2017.14

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Sent: Friday, April 2, 2021 8:26 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

Hi, Dave,

I have, more and more, been drinking my own monist Kool-Aid.  Now Eric may dispute me here, but I think that in a true experience monism, there is no behavior, except as we experience it.  As an experiencing entity, we are truly along for the ride.  Free will is just another experience.  You might ask, then, what is experience “for”?  It aint for nothin’.  It just is.

Anyway, that’s the Friday morning report.

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, April 2, 2021 7:53 AM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

Pieter quoted: "the brain is a physical system like any other, and we have no more will to operate it in a particular way than we will our heart to beat".

But we do have the ability, and can "will" our heart to beat in a particular way.

Not only that, we (at least some individuals in the world) can control pretty much every aspect of our "autonomous nervous system." I learned how to generate alpha waves in my brain while awake and talking. Researchers recently conducted cogent conversations with individuals in the middle of lucid dreams. Then there is all the "bio-feedback" data and practices. Hundreds of similar examples could be cited.

Just because we don't, as a general rule, does not mean we cannot.

Not saying anything in this post is an argument for free will — just that the quoted argument against free will is fatally flawed.

davewest



On Fri, Apr 2, 2021, at 7:10 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
From a strict scientific perspective I accept that we don't have free will. I don't argue that we have free will. I accept, and I quote from the article quoted above:
"the brain is a physical system like any other, and we have no more will to operate it in a particular way than we will our heart to beat". But...

From how humans perceive our own actions, I assert that we do have free will of "some sorts''. Similar to some computer programs that also have free will of "some sorts". We all agree that AlphGo who beat Lee Sedol in Go does not have free will, it did exactly what the computer code instructed it to do, but it came up with creative play that the human programmers did not even know about. This is in my view also "some sorts" of free will.

On Fri, 2 Apr 2021 at 14:15, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net<mailto:jofr at cas-group.net>> wrote:
Was it only 150 years ago when Charles Darwin first published 'On the Origin of Species' ? It feels longer. Interesting story from Stephen Cave
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/

-J.

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