Flies Show Free Will

Evidence for free will is evidence against Darwinism, no matter how it is spun.

Unless science discovers that this is what is called “an emergent property” that is neither predetermined nor plannable but simply is the result of forces that give the appearance of something that is not real but assumed to be real since no explanation for it is found. Many times we can say, unless we have the math, that something “simply is.”

Like the “magical” properties of H20, which would be difficult to predict based on the properties of oxygen and hydrogen alone. It can be explained, but is rather dry and complicated.

As a Calvinist and a student of philosophy, I think the problem is with libertarian views of free will. You will never, ever choose something you don’t want to do.

So if you think you can’t have free will unless there is something completely random going on, you are going to have problems. And if your will is based on something random, how can you have responsibility with the same assumptions?

And were they able to communicate their will, I think we all know what they would say…

“Help meeeee”

Oh great. So they ARE being intentionally annoying when they buzz around our food and head.

The Scubaredneck

It seems that free will and intentionality is at the heart of a lot of what gets discussed regarding Design, theodicy, “problem” of evil, etc.

It also seems likely that free will is one of those irreducible, fundamental phenomena of the universe that cannot be explained in terms we humans can comprehend. Just like gravity, or whatever the “stuff” that subatomic or sub-subatomic particles are made of, or energy, or even the universe itself. These are all so fundamental that you can’t get to anything more fundamental than them, and they cannot be explained–just described and accepted. It seems that free will is (or could be) in the same category.

I sometimes wonder if the sense in which the Judeo-Christian worldview asserts that humans are made in “God’s image” is in the matter of free will. God has free will; so do we. You can’t explain it; it just IS. An expansion of this, IMO can help explain things like the “problem” of (moral) evil, but I won’t go into that here.

I also sometimes wonder if instead of talking about “Intelligent Design,” we should be talking about “Intentional Design,” because, after all, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Were these things designed the way they are “on purpose” by some volitional agency, or did they just occur by undirected accident?

isn’t this about the “illusion of free will” anyway? If an all knowing creator knows every action you are going to make in the future, then no matter what actions you take, you will simply be following a course that was already known.
This goes for a deterministic universe as well. If it’s completely deterministic then our free will is just an illusion.
Either way, someone’s actions should never be dismissed as “well they couldn’t help it, they are merely doing what was already determined “(by God or by genes, etc) Actions have consequences and that means those were determined too! hehe

dacook writes,

Of course standard Darwinian orthodoxy denies the reality of free will. Though many Darwinists shy away from the implications of their beliefs as they apply to ascribing responsibility for human behavior, their position demands that all behavior is determined by the genetic heritage of selfish genes. If free will in fact exists, it must exist outside the deterministic universe of materialism. But if free will exists in flies, can it be denied in humans?

“Standard Darwinian orthodoxy”, if that is meant to refer to mainstream evolutionary biology, does not deny nor affirm the reality of free will, as free will is a philosophical issue that is beyond the scope of science.

dacook is another person confusing science with the philosophy of materialism: many non-materialists, including many Christians and other theists, accept evolutionary biology and have additional religious beliefs that would include issues of free will and personal responsibility.

Secondly, it is not even a given that “if free will in fact exists, it must exist outside the deterministic universe of materialism.” For one thing, current materialistic views of the universe are profoundly not deterministic at the quantum level, and it is not obvious at all that some type of encapsulated and consolidated freedom might not reside in the individual as a consequence of that.

And last, many non-materialistic philosophies have problems with the concept of free will also: for instance, how does free will reconcile with the notion of an omniscient God who already knows all moments of time clear up until the end of time?

So I wish those that who wish to discuss philosophical issues and argue with materialists would make it clear that is what they are doing, rather than inaccurately lumping all supporters of science into one materialistic bag.

Jack Krebs,

Since you are back, you might want to visit the thread on common descent and see if you still want to make your assertions that ID precludes common descent after reading the discussion. You said that was one of your main issues with ID.

Jack Krebs,

To be fair, it’s almost impossible to have a ‘clean’ discussion of terms like this.

I’ve had it explained to me that the quantum level provides a fierce challenge to determinism, and also that it proves that the world is more deterministic than previously thought. I’ve had it explained that evolution is devastating evidence against God, profound evidence for God, and utterly inapplicable as evidence in either direction. (In particular, I get told that design cannot be detected in nature and suggestions to the contrary are unscientific. Then the person goes on to say that scientists have studied nature and found ample evidence that there is no design present. I ask, how can you find the lack of design in nature if you cannot detect design in principle? And then they get angry.)

Not that I’m defending misuse of terms. Just, such debates have been opportunistically messed up and hijacked so much at this point that it’s hard to be accurate.

If Darwinists really do not believe in free will, how come they are always trying to convince me to “choose” to believe them?

It seems they really want me to exercise the free will that they insist I do not have.

Oh well, internally inconsistent belief systems will always have their conundrums.

“free will is a philosophical issue that is beyond the scope of science.”

This is an outlandish statement. Science consists of observation and deduction. Deduction implies choice. Choice implies freewill.

The definition of Science itself is therefore dependent on free will. Free will is not outside the scope of Science. It is the basis of it.

nullasalus, “I ask, how can you find the lack of design in nature if you cannot detect design in principle? And then they get angry.”

Heh heh. Well put.

For me, I prequalify every conversation on the subject with a single question: if a certain feature of the biotic nature was designed, could we determine it?

How a person answers that generally tells me all I need to know whether or not a discussion with the person would probably be a waste of my time.

When I wrote, ” dacook is another person confusing science with the philosophy of materialism… ,”

dacook responded, “Then I’m in good company with Richard Dawkins and many others ..”

Actually I don’t consider Dawkins good company in this regard, and I don’t think dacook believes that he is good company either. Furthermore, I don’t consider Dawkins the “premier public explainer” of science, especially since his latest book is not really about science.

dacook goes on to say, “Actually it’s not me who confuses science with materialist philosophy, but those who insist that only materialist explanations are allowed in the realm of science.”

These are two different things. There are good reasons to restrict science to materialistic explanations, I think, and, again, many non materialists, including many Christians and other theists, agree with me on that. Science is not the only way of investigating the world, and science does not and cannot investigate all aspects of the world.

So I’ll continue to argue that it is a mistake to conflate materialism as a philosophy with a support for science as seeking materials explanations: these are different.

I can’t post a picture, but this is an easy Venn diagram to draw: imagine a little circle (the world as accessible to and known by science) surrounded by a bigger circle (the world as known as completely as possible by human beings. For materialists, the two circles are identical, but for many people (more than the number of materialists, I’m sure) the outer circle is indeed bigger than the inner circle: there is more to our understanding than science can provide.

So of course all materialists accept science as a materialistic endeavor. That doesn’t mean that all who accept science as a materialistic endeavor are all materialists. This seems like a simple distinction to me.

Jack Krebs,

There are indeed many “materialists” who think the very idea of “free will” is pure hooey. Some have mentioned the escape hatch of “sociobiology” (e.g., culture, or socialization) as a way of saying this is so without, well, saying it. But in my mind the whole difference in nature vs. nurture debate is a distinction without a difference. Nurture is part of nature, not an adversary or competing interest.

Daniel Dennett and William Provine come to mind, but are merely two of the more prominent popularizers of “materialism rejects free will” movement, not its originators nor its only major adherents. I have certainly found in my conversations with self-identified materialists like Ed Babinski that “free will” and “induction” are considered mythology akin to the Soul, the Conscience, and other so called “pre-science” notions. They respond as did B.F. Skinner–the psychologist who hated the very term “psyche” because it implied that the physical mind has the ability to think outside of evolutionary constraints. Free Will is basically a slight of hand that outperforms David Copperfield’s greatest TV specials.

As to the rest: The issue of an omniscient God who knows all ahead of time is no more confusing—or no less—than the notion Stephen Hawking put forth saying that while free will is certainly a myth, it may as well NOT be since on our side of the coin we THINK we have free will and a conscience; and nature allows us to flow with this tomfoolery as a survival mechanism against discouragement, etc.

Theologically, the issue you raise has been dealt with by men better than myself. As with your recoil from the “lumping together” method about what “materialists” think about this, this notion that there is some major problem with the omniscience/free will dichotomy is no more a “problem” than when materialists point out that we are “free to believe” whatever we want about things but that thinking itself is mostly predetermined by blind, mechanistic forces that evolved via hook and crook over great epochs of time as a way of, say, avoiding predators and forging community relations for survival. In other words, we “think” for much the same reason we eat avocados and why mice scurry along the floor and make mice nests in the attic: To make more copies of oneself.

JK said:

Science is not the only way of investigating the world, and science does not and cannot investigate all aspects of the world.

Do you mind, Mr. Krebs, if I can write that down in a journal somewhere for future reference?

I think all the other quotations I have from those claiming to speak for science say something that would disagree. Somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred quotes to the opposite of yours.

Certainly the major movers and shakers who popularize science for the masses would disagree that science cannot and should not investigate all aspects of human interest and life. We have the scientic take on love.

(all chemicals and hormones, all the rest is poetic much and gush)

We have the materialist take on human origins.

(evolved from creatures who were once dumber than chimps)

We have the scientific take on theology.

(all mechanistic reactions based on cultural interaction designed to make us feel better about ourselves and handle life’s hardships)

We have the scientific analysis of economics and politics.

(conservative politics and certian ideas are now largely regarded as either anti-social, or anti-science, or non-earth friendly, or anti-human and anti-efficient or signs of neurosis in the human condition)

We have the scientific take on morals.

(purely pragmatic, with no real transcendent truths to behold–evolved as behavior modifications merely to make the going good for getting along in the community)

we have the scientific take on art, cuisine, and beauty and the explanation for cultural difference differences on these.

(they evolved to make us feel better, and while cultural differences are found, it is commonly known now that art and perceptions of art are found in the limbic system, with a cascade of hormones to tell us what female beauty is for utilitarian goals of you-know-what and other elements of brain evolution that seek “settlement” of surroundings–thus art).

I think that about wraps it up, Jack.

What else is left besides choice of friends and wine?

Hi Jack,

Since your concern seems to center on confusing science with philosophy, I wanted to direct your attention to the original article. BTW, I’m glad you post from time to time. Seems that more and more, for whatever reason, dissenters from ID don’t write much here. Thank you.

Anyway, if “free will is a philosophical issue that is beyond the scope of science,” then your objection really should be directed at the authors of the study—or maybe MSNBC—which reported that “Scientists say even the humble fruit fly, with its tiny brain, may have a spark of free will,” and that this “could shed light on the nature and evolution of free will in humans.”

The claim here is that scientists do indeed have something to say about free will, and further that they know something about how this philosophical concept has evolved.

I’m all for science and philosophy not being confused with each other but c’mon, the conflating was done by the authors of the study and the media who reported on it (where it is often done… sigh.) long before dacook responded.

-sb

JKrebs: ““Standard Darwinian orthodoxy”, if that is meant to refer to mainstream evolutionary biology, does not deny nor affirm the reality of free will, as free will is a philosophical issue that is beyond the scope of science.”

Incredibly wrong.

Dawkins, Provine, virtually every materialist/naturalist and even LiveScience say the contrary. And if Darwinism is true then they are right - genes control everything and free will is an illusion - as so many Darwinists “freely” proclaim!

Do a short Google search for “free will an illusion” and check the vast number of books and articles written by Darwinists.

Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.

~ William Provine

I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is “Oh they were just determined by their molecules.” It’s stupid to punish them. What we should do is say “This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced.”
———–
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour.

Dawkins

The three lies are: God, immortality, and free will.

Robert Gulack.

Check: http://www.naturalism.org/currents.htm#ethical

Yours Jack, is another example of Darwinist confusion in the ranks. Even Darwinists don’t know what Darwinism really is.

mike1962: Good point and good premise for accepting to debate it or not.

But, if one says that “we cannot determine design in biotic nature” then they’d have to demonstrate why. IOW, Prove it. A whole other debate ensues.

Of course it is impossible to prove that design cannot be detected in nature anymore than it can’t be detected anywhere else!

If we can discern design at all, we can determine it anywhere.

All of you folks are talking about philosophy. Of course there are lots of materialists, some of whom are also prominent biologists. I not saying one shouldn’t argue against materialism if one is so inclined: what I’m saying is - the point that is being skipped over - is that there are lots of non-materialists who accept the nature of science as the pursuit of materialistic explanations.

So argue against Dawkins and Provine and all them - make the case for non-materialism, including theism, but please don’t think that those guys have the right or the authority to speak philosophically for all of science or all scientists or all suporters of science, because they don’t.

“The notion Stephen Hawking put forth saying that while free will is certainly a myth, it may as well NOT be since on our side of the coin we THINK we have free will and a conscience; and nature allows us to flow with this tomfoolery as a survival mechanism against discouragement, etc.”

Did he really say this? Surely not, because it is stupid and certainly not science, but philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Surely one of the most intelligent minds ever didn’t conceive this crock of tomfoolery. Surely not.

. . . there are lots of non-materialists who accept the nature of science as the pursuit of materialistic explanations.

Fine and dandy but the problems start when materialist explanations are offered that aren’t very good — and in fact inferior to non-material explanations — then defended dogmatically solely because they are the best materialist explanation and by means that have nothing to do with science, philosophy or any type of reasoned debate.

Jack Krebs, “there are lots of non-materialists who accept the nature of science as the pursuit of materialistic explanations.”

And I think they are wrong, and am doing my part to fight against such a limiting philosophy.

Jack Krebs,

Actually, it’s not materialism, per se, that I am primarily against (although I am against it), but against an anti-ID position, which is not the same thing, obviously. The proximate cause of certain biotic features may indeed have a intelligent and yet materialistic explanation.

“Free will is essentially an oxymoron — we would not consider it ‘will’ if it were completely random and we would not consider it ‘free’ if it were entirely determined,” Brembs said. In other words, nobody would ascribe responsibility to one’s actions if they were entirely the result of random coincidence. On the other hand, if one’s actions were completely determined by outside factors such that no alternative existed, no one would hold that person responsible for them.

Darwinians really should get out of the Humean philosophy business and back to biology. Does Brembs credit David Hume for this? It is, after all, Hume who came up with this stuff.

I finally read the whole article, and think it is full of some pretty amateurish and un-thought-out philosophy that really obscures the science being done. My 2 cents.

P.S. Upon re-reading the article, I’d say “amateurish and un-thought-out” are not very good adjectives to have used. However, I don think that quite a few points made in the article are not very good, and I think the whole “free will” aspect of the article is sort of artificially imposed on top of the science.

How simple does the life form have to be before we stop describing it as having free will? Suppose the experiment was repeated with amoeba or plants?

“standard Darwinian orthodoxy denies the reality of free will”

Francisco Ayala concluded his latest “Design without a desiger” by saying “chance and necessity … has spurted … humans who think, love, endowed with free will and creative power” PNAS vol 104 8573 May 15 2007

Actually, we paid great attention in our press release to make sure we only frame the free will issue as a question.
Of course, our original study makes no mention of free will, it is not a scientific concept. However, spontaneity even in flies makes us ponder what, if anything, this might entail for our subjective experience of free will in a macrocosm we believe to be largely deterministic. Therefore we addressed the issue with an ironic question in our press release: “Do fruit flies have free will?”
Of course, people with a political rather than a scientific agenda will drop the question mark, which was not entirely unexpected.

Scientifically, the most important aspect is that we found evidence for an evolutionarily conserved brain function which always spontaneously varies ongoing behavior. Why would so many kinds of brains have this function? There are a number of very good evolutionary reasons cited in our original article.

dacook: “As with biological complexity, the more we discover about behavior, the less deterministic it looks. Evidence for free will is evidence against Darwinism, no matter how it is spun.”

Erm, excuse me, “evidence for free will” is just like saying “evidence for love” or “evidence for excitement”. The discovery of an evolutionary conserved mechanism generating spontaneous behavior may be evidence for the importance of generating variable behavior in survival and procreation. It may also be a prerequisite for the mechanism by which we attribute agency to our actions. Which in turn might be one of the processes in our brain leading to our impression of free will. But if you need scientific evidence for free will, you might as well go to a chemist and ask for evidence for love.
Just as the chemist might tell you something about what biological processes are participating in what you feel as love, our study might tell us something about what is going on in brains that feel they have free will.

In summary: There’s nothing supernatural or divine or extraterrestrial about flies. In fact, once it has been figured out how their brain generates spontaneous behavior, one will be able to construct agents/robots that work the same way. And when it is known which genes are involved in which animals, we will be able to find out just in how many steps and from what ancestry this mechanism evolved, as with so many other traits these days.

That’s all fairly straightforward and doesn’t require any spin at all.

If free will and consciousness are illusions, who, then, is it that is being illuded?

IOW, if I have the illusion that I am conscious and have free will, who is the “I” that is being fooled by this charade?

Ah… This is the central question asked by Buddhism - who is this “I” that we are?

By the way, I don’t think anyone is saying consciousness is an illusion.

I am really glad to read brembs remarks. They help me understand the difference between the science and some of the popularization that came out in the press release.

The fact that some behavior is generated from internal processes rather than from a simplistic stimulus-response to the environment is well know. Brembs study adds to our knowledge of the nature and evolutionary history of that internally generated behavior.

i remember in philosophy class our teacher asked a question regarding free will: “If there is an all knowing being that predicts your every thought and action, then do you truly have free will? Or are you just doing exactly what was already known that you’d do?” One student turned really red with frustration and said “No I have free will and I can decide to do whatever I want.” The teacher said “yes, but no matter what you do, God will have already known you were going to do that.” The student stood up and said “well what if I choose to leave this class room and just walk out on my own free will?”. He stomped out of the classroom thinking that by doing something he normally wouldn’t do, he was proving that he had free will. Upon his exit, the teacher said to the rest of us “God knew he was going to do that.”

That was the funniest moment in my education.

[off topic]
Jack,

Feel free to keep posting here. But was that you who destroyed my thread at KCFS? The one which began with an excerpt from Richard Lewontin talking about Fitness.

You just didn’t want me there after you called me despicable and dishonest and after you allowed members to continually refer to me in the most vulgar terms.

My last two postings were references to PNAS and Santa Fe papers which is orders of magnitude higher in their discussion of science than the usual dreck that you allow to fill your discussion board.

Let the readers of UD be made aware of the post for which I was reprimanded at KCFS:

Lewontin argues Darwin’s notion of fitness is obsolete

Brembs–

What on earth is the “political” agenda of making a claim about “free will” as possibly seen or hyped from an obervation about…fruit flies?

Perhaps the word you meant was “philosophical”?

And your statement to the effect that “free will” is not a scientific question? Perhaps you might relay that little ditty to the editors and writers of publications like Scientific American?

Science indeed lays claim, as I demonstrated above, to uncover the reasons behind ANY behavior–love included. Thus the commentary I’ve read from “research” purporting to show that “love” is chemically based, morals are pragmatic bio-responses, and evolved, and human thinking is a grand parlor trick evolved to help us make more little humans more efficiently. There is not much left after all that.

Don’t try and kid a kidder. I’ve seen the notations.
_________________________
Mr. Krebs, not sure if this is really all that “amateurish” of a research moment.

Sheer observation does fine for looking at aspects of free will (or perhaps we like the term “non-deterministic behavior” if the conditions are set up properly and one knows what to look for. The popularization of these kinds of findings is another issue entirely, whether by accident or by design of the researchers trying to get attention. Fruit flies are ideal research subjects for many reasons. They are easy to care for, don’t threaten each other, have a breeding cycle of about 2 weeks or so depending on ambient temperature, and their chromosomes are gigantic, and read like a “Mendel’s Gene Manipulation and Inheritance for Dummies” manual.

I use the wingless variety to feed exotic frogs myself, to prevent easy escape. One switch—just one—in the chromosomes can do this at a lab where I buy them, and then you isolate the wingless generation from their wild pals to avoid interbreeding to continue this deleterious effect.

My modest proposal is this: Find, or attempt to find, the loci or locus of this apparent “free will” center that allows the fly to have a randomized behavior.
Among the large genes this creature has, this should not be too difficult.

Thought experiment to follow the findings:

1) If it is a single chromosome or block in the chromosomes, the notion of free will is mechanical in nature and evolved.

2) If it cannot be found in a single unit or set of units but can only be located in a very general region of a chromosome strand? Thus it must be assumed to be an emergent property of the genes that cannot be understood except when in concert among the genes.

3) If it cannot be found at all? It is an aspect that is beyond our ability to measure and must be assumed to be part of the very nature of living organisms per se.

Whatever the results, they will please only a few people, since it can always be claimed that the mere existence of such attributes means one of two things:

a) It means little for humans if found in flies, as flies and humans are too disparate beings.
b) It means little for humans OR flies if found at all, as purely mechanistic forces now explain such behaviors in the simplest creatures, and evolution fills in the needs for the “higher organisms” with different needs

Faith and Shadow:

Yes–he said that. At least according to Charles Colson’s book How Now Shall We Live?I’ve loaned the book out so I don’t have the page down pat in my mind, but look under the chapter titled “is science our salvation”?

Hawking was holding/attending a conference of sorts on the future of human evolution and was asked a question about how “we” as a species can turn things around for a better world.

Hawkings answer left everyone limp, in that his answer was basically that nothing can be changed, and either things will happen or not and he was not sanguine about our future prospects for continued survival, BUT that since we don’t KNOW the exact outcome of our human interest and investigation in things, we “might as well” believe in the illusion of free will.

Not that in the long run it made any difference.

That’s the gist of it.
Sorry for the ill report.

DaCook

The article says that the flying behaviour can be described as a Levy Distribution. And emails, letters, and money flow are examples of Levy Distribution. But the flow of emails is not free will. So, this is NOT evidence of free will.

brembs,

“But if you need scientific evidence for free will, you might as well go to a chemist and ask for evidence for love.
Just as the chemist might tell you something about what biological processes are participating in what you feel as love, our study might tell us something about what is going on in brains that feel they have free will.”

I agree that the question of free will is, as you put it, not a scientific question per se. It’s philosophy, and whatever the answers to those philosophical questions may ultimately be (if there are any real answers), the scientific data can inform a viewpoint and do little beyond that. The Libet experiments (widely cited as scientific evidence against free will - would you agree that was the result of a political agenda as well?) are similar; they inform, they provide data for those philosophizing to consider, but that’s as far as it goes.

However: “In summary: There’s nothing supernatural or divine or extraterrestrial about flies.”

You just explained that the philosophical question of free will is not a scientific one; science can’t address issues so firmly planted in that realm. Then you end by saying that there’s nothing supernatural, divine, or extraterrestrial about fruit flies. Not that I think that’s been advocated here, but - on what grounds do you say that? It can’t be any scientific grounds; those questions (perhaps not ET) are in a philosophical realm you yourself said science just can’t be the deciding factor on. The data is the data, and it speaks for itself.

Maybe the experiment provided no scientific insight/evidence regarding questions of the divine, supernatural, or extraterrestrial. I’d agree with that much. But if science can’t affirm those things in principle, it can’t deny them by the same principle. The data just sits there mute and waits for the philosophers and theologians to process them.

Consciousness, desire, intention, free will, agency … exactly what materialism was designed to deny—or when that gets difficult to obfuscate and issue promissory notes and assert: “That’s all fairly straightforward and doesn’t require any spin at all.” Interestingly the Scripture calls it soul and makes all the creatures souls—though man alone has language all creatures are souls. My Darwinist mentor called it “Aristotle’s anima” and conceded that it was a great mystery but that Darwinism couldn’t do without it. A mechanism has no will to live (and therefore enters no struggle for survival), for even if we programmed the automatic pilot on an advanced aircraft with a “will to live” chip this could mean no more than a set of stimulus-response algorithms. It would lack the intention even of a housefly. You can make a machine that responds to stimuli in order to survive, but the “in order to” is part of the maker’s intention—not that of the machine.

And neither is intention some kind of randomness. Randomness at the quantum level wouldn’t explain intention, but it might suggest where necessity is suspended so that conscious intention might have its say.

I wonder if Dr Brembs and his colleagues actually intended to design and perform this study, or if their actions were merely a “subjective experience of free will in a macrocosm we believe to be largely deterministic.”
Just curious.

brembs: “excuse me, “evidence for free will” is just like saying “evidence for love” or …”

This is an error of reason.

Free will is a far more substantial & verifiable thing than “love”.

Did you freely post what you wrote or not?

If you did then it is a question of abductive reasoning that reliably tells us that consciousness and conscience both imply that our powers of volition are indeed free - i.e self-determined.

If you did not, then certainly I’m not writing these lines freely either, no one else is either and all conversation and debate is a mere hoax of nature upon man.

If free will is a lie or illusion, then all the great deeds, all the despicable deeds, in all of history carried no intrinsic merit or culpability whatsoever and thus are neither great nor despicable.

All deeds become deterministic, all actions robotic and reflexive.

You do not condemn a man for being forced to pull a trigger against his will.

Neither do you thank or congratulate someone for what the biochemical movements of matter and energy in their brain determined they would do in response to stimuli.

The whole of history goes down the tubes as meaningless events of a determined non-responsible nature if there is no free will.

That is the idiocy of the deniers of free will.

Are they deniers by choice or not?

If they are not then we have no more reason to listen to them than to a rock falling down a hill. Indeed, we being without free will ourselves, are unable to “change our minds”!

If they are then they are also the greatest of fools.

Fross:
” i remember in philosophy class our teacher asked a question regarding free will: ‘If there is an all knowing being that predicts your every thought and action, then do you truly have free will? Or are you just doing exactly what was already known that you’d do?’ ”

Hello Fross,

How does awareness of someone’s free will revoke that person’s free will? When does free will exist and when does it not? Do you have free will when someone observes you doing something that they also heard you say that you were going to do?

If you were able to see into the future and then tell us about it, would the scenes you describe be scences that resulted from other’s free will. Would your mere observation of the results of their free will somehow revoke their free will? Likewise, if you stood “above” time and thus necessarily saw all of time as a “block,” are human actions, which are within that “block of time,” the result of free will or has your mere observation revoked all notion of free will?

Borne:
“That is the idiocy of the deniers of free will.

Are they deniers by choice or not?

If they are not then we have no more reason to listen to them than to a rock falling down a hill. Indeed, we being without free will ourselves, are unable to “change our minds”! ”

Reminds me of a book I am presently reading entitled “The brain that changes itself.” It is an excellent book documenting many inspirational “stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science” and approaches the subject from the science of “neuroplasticity.”

It seems to imply that conscious effort can change how the brain operates in relation to the body, from overcoming obsessive compulsive disorders to recovery from strokes and “mental retardation.”

Borne:

“If they are not then we have no more reason to listen to them…”

“If they are then they are also the greatest of fools”

A nice way to summarize, in a single sentence, your same thought when someone claims to you there is no free-will:

“If what you say is true, I have no choice but to call you an idiot.”

Furthermore, in either case (true or false) you have no choice but to consider them fools.

I’ve observed dragonflies play. Their actions looked planned and coordinated.

dacook:

“To the classic dichotomy of ‘nature vs. nurture’ to explain behavior, we must add a third choice which trumps the others: free will, or the ability to make choices undetermined by one’s background or heritage.”

So to have this sort of freedom, we must make choices that are undetermined by our background or heritage, so therefore *we* must in some sense not be determined by our background and heritage. In which case one wonders, what *does* determine us and thence our choices?

We’re not ultimately self-determined (a logical impossibility) and indeed as far as science can tell all our attributes are ultimately traceable to non-self factors. So this leaves the contra-causal free will option (neither nature nor nurture) pretty obscure in terms of explaining how a particular choice gets made as a function of a determinate self.

If we want good, transparent explanations of ourselves and our choices, then it seems we’re driven to nature, nurture, and their complex interaction. If you posit something immaterial going on, then you still have to tell a transparent story about how the self came to be, and how it selects among options. Otherwise you’re appealing to a mystery - the opposite of science.

Jack Krebs wrote,

how does free will reconcile with the notion of an omniscient God

By avoiding the modal fallacy, upon which all such supposed contradictions between free-will and knowledge rest.

That is the idiocy of the deniers of free will.

If they are not then we have no more reason to listen to them than to a rock falling down a hill.

____________________________

You guys are really big on this argument around here. I’ve heard the same argument used to suggest that any statement of the theory of evolution by natural selection is similarly nonsensical.

When someone claims that human behavior is determined, they don’t mean that it isn’t rational, or that it’s independent of any context. You guys talk as if the suggestion is that we are all just puppets that only act like, or appear as though we’re responding to the world in an organized and deliberate manner.

If logic is in some sense an aspect of the physical world, then it would be advantageous to evolve the capacity to use it. By taking advantage of logic, our brains can organize action with regard to the future, with regard to objects or people that are currently out of our line of sight, with regard to things that are only similar to–not identical to, things we have encountered before. But our behavior may be rational because the mechanisms that control it evolved in a rational world. Maybe logic is built directly into our brains somehow, or maybe we learn to use it via some more basic mechanism, but either way, nothing about this process is necessarily non-deterministic. Behavior may be in part determined by logic and reason–but still determined.

So the determinist is suggesting that at the end of a long biological and cultural history, by combining empirical observation and logic, we discover that–apparently–it turns out our behavior is ultimately determined, not free. But to suggest that if he were correct, he couldn’t possibly command the logic to even reach the conclusion, is just a non-sequitur.

I don’t know if free will exists or not, but I don’t think this tidy little reductio ad absurdum of determinism works. Explain why a determined being couldn’t be a rational being. Don’t just heavy-handedly assert the idiocy or foolishness of anyone who disagrees with you.

BYE BYE

unscientific disclaimer:
I shouldn’t even be here. I have to do my experiments, write papers, grants, etc. to get a job and to find funding. In other words, survive in science. I should bother about the scientific controversies which exist and not those which people with money make up. I really shouldn’t be here at all, I have no rational reason whatsoever.

However, debating you guys is way more fun than I can withstand. So there you go, I admit it: I occasionally indulge in the futile but very amusing and almost addictive past time of debating creationists/IDers
For further incriminating evidence see the numerous posts on my blog.

My past time is futile, because we have more and better data showing how evolution works than how gravity works. Yet, I have only seen one reference to intelligent falling! While this reference was roughly as entertaining as intelligent design, it doesn’t have nearly as many followers. If data can’t overcome this discrepancy, who am I to even have the slightest sliver of hope to be able to do that myself.

Futile or not, I will take some time and respond to a few select issues raised here very soon. I apologize to everybody whose points I won’t be able to address, but unfortunately, I don’t get paid for this hobby! Some of the points I may have already addressed on my blog. I hope to be able to start posting here later today (if my experiments go well).
Take it easy!
Bjoern

Just joined. I note that there is as much discussion of science versus Creationism as of fruit fly free will, unsurprising given the site.

Free will is a very interesting question, and an important one in applied social science. I joke that I was predestined to believe in free will despite choosing to be a determinist.

I agree that a position that free will does not exist is perfectly reasonable (despite fruit flies), but I find it uninteresting (perhaps fated to feel thay way). In terms of applied social science, the only interesting approach is to assume that some degree of choice exists, leading to the consideration of how much and under what conditions. We are clearly not totally free, as anyone who has dealt with addictions will testify; but at the same time, we do appear to have some ability to choose to overcome even strong addictions. In fact, for someone on the wagon, apparent free will is a danger: the concern being that the next decision will be to fall off the wagon, so that much effort is made to prevent the making of such choices.

But it’s not just addictions — anyone involved in disease prevention, promotion of healthy aging, and so on is very aware that a decision to “live healthier” is not only difficult to implement but can also be a struggle to maintain. I can just imagine those fruit flies thinking “we gotta pump some wing if we want to stay in shape.” But I wonder what would happen should the experimenters place convenient fruit-fly perches in the experimental enclosures — would those flies keep on flying of their own free will?

dacook:

“But IF the designer is in fact “god,” then the ID studies have in fact revealed aspects of “god,” and “god” is therefore no longer a complete mystery unamenable to investigation by science.”

One has to be careful about this, since to the extent science reveals aspects of god, that tends to naturalize god. As theologian John F. Haught says in a forthcoming book chapter “Paul Tillich in Dialogue with the Natural Sciences” (don’t know the book title yet, sorry):

“But by making God the first in a series of causes, supranaturalism, especially as expressed in the cosmological arguments for God’s existence, ironically ends up naturalizing God. In effect it turns God into a spatialized and temporally definable causal substance to be understood in terms of the categories applicable only to finite being. All attempts to prove God’s existence as a first cause, Tillich emphasizes, implicitly make the divine a part of nature. The danger in thinking of God as a first cause is that the ultimate depth and ground of being is assigned the greatly diminished role of playing only a part—even if the most important part—in a series of purely natural causes.

“This idolatrous way of thinking about God, Tillich argues, is the root cause of modern naturalistic atheism. Supranaturalism deserves the naturalistic reaction, and theology needs to take the latter’s atheism seriously as a necessary step in the movement toward an adequate understanding of God’s relationship to nature and of theology’s relationship to science.”

On how ID would, if successful, naturalize god, see http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm#Dembski

“Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. Determinism may also be defined as the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.” –Wikipedia (my emphasis)

Wittenstein, on the other hand, asserts that we can take advantage of and command logic, and that “our brains can organize action with regard to the future…” But this is exactly what the determinist cannot do. Read the definition again: “every event, including human cognition, decision and action…”
So, the determinist doesn’t have the ability to command anything—not his actions, not his research proposals, not his ‘decision’ about who to marry, not his advice to his children, not even the thoughts in his own head. “Every event … is causally determined” by something or someone else. Not only is it a pretty tough parcel of ground to try to defend–I’m wondering why anyone would want to.

(56) TWClark:

As a Christian, I do not believe in “miracles” in the normal sense of the word.

Apostate, then?

No. Apologists like JP Holding are good company and agree that terms of convenience once used to describe attributes we humans can barely understand are the artificial demarcation line of the natural vs. the “supernatural”. Take your notebook computer or ipod back in time to the days of the Inquisition and no doubt you’ll burn alive for witchcraft and supernaturalism unkempt for the rest of humanity. But no “magic” is found in these devices, and in my mind this artificial distinction of supernatural vs. natural (say, making wine quickly, for a wedding supper at Cana ) being a miracle or creating entire worlds or sustaining nature is not so much what I think is the old school term of “supernatural” but simply processes we can’t grasp yet, as with Torquemed not comprehending your plea that you mean no harm with images and music coming from magic boxes should you have the misfortune to ever cut a hole in time and end up in old world Spain in front of church elders. We are told these deeds were done in a way the other gods in history did not take into account in all their flashiness. These “Miracles” were performed to let people know the Godship of certain individuals, not to put on a light and magic show as with the throwing of thunderbolts in earlier tales, or merging humans with swans, etc.

I agree with you, in part, and the majority of biologists and others who say that supernaturalism has no place in science. But perhaps this parody we see of God standing above in the clouds and watching as things fall to entropy is mistaken on many fronts. If God is part or all the picture of Creation, then “supernatural” is the wrong word, and there is an interaction that He has that at present is mostly undetectable by most of our methods.

ID does not purport to “see” or “detect” the supernatural(as is common charge has it), but as you see here references the natural world to see what aspects might show design parameters.

Indeed, Francis Bacon purportedly said not to block the way of inquiry, and some of Christianity’s strongest and most dogged adherents since the days of Augustine have been in the forefront of discovery and inquiry, and indeed felt that a rational God (not some kind of Protean flasher who pops in and out of reality) is exactly the kind of God who creates a universe that is both comprehendible and predictable and moves according to regular material laws.

I understand the part of your post as it relates to the very real danger of trivializing God as being merely a clockwinder or getting things punched off and stepping aside. But the Scriptures say (and ID, I THINK, would agree) that a Designer would probably not only get things kicking but as the Scriptures say SUSTAIN all of creation. We don’t know all the ways this is done, no. But as even the most obstinate Darwinist would agree (and those of Dawkins tenure and