[FRIAM] alternative response

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Hi, yall,

I think, for most people, the idea of free will is irrevocably tied to
Descartes's notion that, while animals are machines, God Gave to Man (and
perhaps even to Woman) the power to choose between good an evil.  It is the
idea of the ghost in the machine, and lies at the core of our legal system.
Now stripped of all its religious and legal freight, it boils down to the
notion that, when I act deliberately, there are two of me, the me that acts
and the me that chooses to act.  So, the me that decides whether or not to
pick up the dropped dried cranberry  is different from the me that kicks it
under the toe board, whence the mice, hopefully,  will carry it off before
Penny sees it.   Now from a third person point of view, you have no need of
any of that.  You see the cranberry fall, you see, if you know me well,
perhaps that two parts of me are activated, a preparing to bend down and a
preparing to move my foot into place.  For a flash, I seem hesitatant; my
behavior is, momentarily disintegrated.  But then, it re-integrates, my foot
scuffs the cranberry out of sight, and you might, if you are observant, see
me scan the room with my eyes to reassure myself that nobody has seen me.
>From your point of view, it is like one of those moments when the mercury
bubble in the thermostat jiggles in its vial and the furnace stutters,
coming on and off twice or three times in a few seconds.  No need for free
will there.  

Now I am under no illusion that human individuals are wholly integrated
beings.  In fact, evolutionary theory suggests that we have been designed by
two selection regimens, one that privileges the individual, and one that
privileges any group that we associate with.  At any one time, these two
behavioral tendencies are struggling for the controls of our body-engine,
like the villain and the hero, struggling for the controls of the locomotive
hurtling down the tracks toward the the bound maiden.  In ethology, the
field in which I trained, this sort of struggle for the control of the
apparatus of the body is commonplace in animals.  Two ducks, competing for a
female, balanced between stimuli that tell them to attach and stimuli that
tell them to flee, will suddenly break into elaborate preening, the "energy"
aroused by the conflict allegedly spilling over and taking control of the
preening apparatus.  Such displacement preening serves both combatants
because it prevents either from fruitless combat, and so it gets woven into
aggressive displays, and has even resulted in special plumage to enhance the
visual impact of the bogus preening.  

All the best, 

Nick 
 

The only need for free will arises from my first person sense that I have
made a decision not to pick up the cranberry and then acted on that
decision.  It's this strange notion that something other than decisive
action constitutes decision.  But we entertain many illusions in our
perception and I chose to give this one no more credence than the illusion I
had the other night that the full moon rose in the east, or that it shrunk
in size as it vaulted toward the zenith.  

Now I got bogged down over the weekend, so I still don't know where you guys
came down on that issue.  I get the impression, perhaps, that what you have
been arguing about is entirely orthogonal to my concern.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2020 4:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] alternative response

Jon, Glen, 

As a matter of historical fact, I think Jon is right.

But for me the most interesting cases of free will occur in the most trivial
and banal situations.  Let it be the case that I drop a dried cranberry on
the floor: Am I going to bend down and pick it up?  Or am I going to slip it
into the toe space under the cupboard.  I used to ask myself, as if I were
in charge, Which shall I do?  Now I just wait to see what I do.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2020 3:56 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] alternative response

Glen says:
I don't think free will is bound with (naive) morality at all. It's all
about selection functions. Do I turn this way or that. Do I eat some food,
go for a run, or read a book. So, I don't see it as "importing" anything.
Free will is all about which things are bound and which things are free (and
which things are partially bound ... constrained).

I would have to disagree. While I think that *will* more generally has to do
with the agency you mention, conversations of *free will* are a kind of
pathology that happens in the limit. When we discuss whether or not I have
this choice or that, the most trivial philosophical cases are those of
selection functions and don't require the full import of FREE will. Again,
the discussion of free will is for the benefit of whom? Outside of
conversations where we go back and forth about determinism and the degree to
which biology is or is not able to exploit indeterminism, the motivating
impetus for discussing free will is one of assigning responsibility.



--
Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/