How do you guys reconcile commonly held, bedrock societal views like free will and a soul/self with your practice?

[brycew85]

EM here. Recently read Robert Sapolsky's "Behave" and went down the no-free will/no-self rabbit hole. Wondering your guys thoughts and how you handle it when it comes to dealing with patients and work in general. To sum it up:

Commonly held view = everyone has a self/soul that is either separate from (religious view) or is an emergent phenomenon of (secular/scientific view) the body and brain. In either case, this self/soul can control the body and brain and makes autonomous decisions whose intentions and results are worthy of praise or blame. While some things are influenced by conditions we can't control (eg patient has epilepsy or schizophrenia), there is still a "ghost in the machine" who bears responsibility for most actions.

Science/Philosophy = Our bodies and brains are made up of the same stuff as the rest of the physical universe and are subject to its laws, eg entropy, electrons going to their lowest states of energy, predictable chemical reactions, etc. We are each handed a deck of genes that is the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection. Which genes we get is dependent not just on our biological parents but also when they had coitus and which sperm got to which egg ("randomness"). Additionally the age and exposures of our parents can effect the quality of genes. These genes contribute to things such as IQ, height, skin color, temperament, disposition towards disease both physical and mental, etc.

These genes combined with the fetal environment lays the groundwork for what are are capable of. A child born to two physician parents living in a developed country with low maternal stress during pregnancy is already in a much better shape compared to a child born to two parents addicted to drugs with lack of prenatal care in a developing country. After birth, access (or lack there of) to nutrition, stable housing, education continues to shape us. The language we are taught dictates how we think and relate to the world. Built upon this language higher level narratives from the cultural milieu and dominant religious of the time being further shape our thoughts and ideas.

When looked as a totality, its easy to see that we don't exist in a vacuum. There is nothing that is a separates "you" from all of those conditions.Additionally each moment is just the causal effect from the immediate preceding moment, going back to the big bang. At no point in this unbroken chain of cause and effect can the "ghost in the machine" make an autonomous decision separate from all of the conditions and events that led to that point.

How its changed me (not perfect but a work in progress):

1) more compassion for patients but also staff and consultants. They didn't choose any of this. From the "drug seeking" patient to the "bitchy" nurse to the "dingus" consultant, none of them could act any different from the way they did. Additionally the conditions continue to contribute to their behavior. The same consultant who is pleasant when calling him at 2PM is angry when calling him at 2AM.

2) less jealousy towards people in general. Eg - Colleague from med school hit it big in industry and is now worth mid 8 figures. Just as it is nonsensical to award the above people in point 1 blame, its hard to award him praise (and thus hard to be jealous).

Thoughts?

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[wolfvgang22]

For me, this is essentially an expanded variation on the millenia old "nature versus nurture" debate and how our view on this dichotomy should inform our thoughts and behaviors relating to ourselves and others.

My opinion is that it is a false dichotomy. Ridgidly adhering to either view and ignoring the dialectic of autonomy or environmental determinates of behavior is reductionist, and at the end of the day not particularly helpful when we see a patient for psychotherapy. It is more practical and effective to factually and empathetically acknowledge both individual limitations and stengths, whatever their origin. And since many predetermined aspects of an individual may be genetic or caused by circumstances beyond our control, we necessarily spend more time discussing the things we can change with patients: thoughts and behavior, as a lot of autonomy does exist and can and does impact outcomes of psychiatric illness every day regardless of the hand we have been dealt by chance or God or whatever. It is good to recognize circumstances do greatly impact human behavior and use this information to drive our empathy for others, for sure. At the same time, it is overly cynical to absolve people of all responsibility for their actions and can be cruel to assume they cannot or will not be able to change or improve. As in all things, a reasonable balance of both concepts is both practical and humane, though not easy.

 

[sloh]

Worth a read:

“Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.

Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.”

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we all may be better off believing in it anyway.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[wolfvgang22]

I am exercising my free will right now by choosing to listen to the smooth jazz of Miles Davis. This sensory input in turn has caused a release of neurotransmitters in my brain, giving me a feeling of calm and reducing my propensity to participate in fruitless internet arguments. Of course, it is possible that I am primed to enjoy the dulcet tones of the trumpet by my genetic code, upbringing, and cultural milieu.
Everything is connected.

 

[PsyDr]

1) The Vatican does not view the soul that way. Josh Green’s work was a huge theological issue for them.

2) Basic decision making models still incorporate a small degree of choice.

3) A lot of this was already discussed in the radical behaviorism literature. At its furthest extension, the lack of free will is meaningless. Regardless of what caused the behavior, the attending who is a jerk at 2AM is still responsible for his own behavior, and modifiable by the application of other stimuli.

4) If you read the paraphelia literature among others, you'll notice that some behaviors are "self-reinforcing". This self reinforcement approaches a closed loop, which limits some of your ideas.

5) Luck plays a much larger role in life than you'd think. FSIQ, some of which is highly heritable, has a large effect size on lifetime earnings to a certain point. More than parental wealth. However, beyond a certain point FSIQ does not predict financial performance nor protect against bad luck.

 

[nexus73]

If free will is an illusion, and people are blameless for their circumstances and have no control over their actions, how can we ourselves choose to have more compassion for them? Which is itself a choice we have no control over. How can we choose to not let things bother us?

I am a compatibilist. I think many/most of our lives are predestined. As you say, better upbringing, education, nutrition, the genes of our parents. But within that framework we are able to choose certain routes our lives take. With this perspective I can recognize a person’s life challenges and find compassion for others knowing it’s all a great undertaking to get through life.

 

[brycew85]

… It is good to recognize circumstances do greatly impact human behavior and use this information to drive our empathy for others, for sure. At the same time, it is overly cynical to absolve people of all responsibility for their actions and can be cruel to assume they cannot or will not be able to change or improve. As in all things, a reasonable balance of both concepts is both practical and humane, though not easy.

Can it be both cynical and true? Charles Whitman had a brain tumor that affected his neural network and made him behave the way he did shooting innocent students from the U of Texas tower. What if it’s just “tumors all the way down” (figuratively speaking)?

Lack of free will and lack of self/soul is the opposite of change - people can and will change when conditions and circumstances change. It just won’t come from themselves making a choice in a vacuum. When you endorse a permanent everlasting soul there leaves no room for change.

…Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.”

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we all may be better off believing in it anyway.

www.theatlantic.com

Similar arguments can be made for belief in God or reincarnation. They are fictional narratives but can change behavior.

2) Basic decision making models still incorporate a small degree of choice.

Any choice is either predetermined (the state of the neural network at time the decision was made) or random (“think of a country”). Neither of those is free will. All moments are preceded by those before them. All actions are due to causes which themselves are due to other causes. There is no space where to insert free will without invoking supernatural elements

If free will is an illusion, and people are blameless for their circumstances and have no control over their actions, how can we ourselves choose to have more compassion for them? Which is itself a choice we have no control over. How can we choose to not let things bother us?

I am a compatibilist. I think many/most of our lives are predestined. As you say, better upbringing, education, nutrition, the genes of our parents. But within that framework we are able to choose certain routes our lives take. With this perspective I can recognize a person’s life challenges and find compassion for others knowing it’s all a great undertaking to get through life.

Above poster answered this well. New information is a sensory input. When a neural network in a particular state is exposed to these ideas regarding free will and self/soul they will logically conclude that absence of praise or blame towards all

 

[sloh]

It's really hard to refute Sapolsky's claims in his book if you really approach it while putting your biases aside.

"We’re only a first few baby steps into understanding any of this, so few that it leaves huge, unexplained gaps that perfectly smart people fill in with a homunculus. Nevertheless, even the staunchest believers in free will must admit that it is hemmed into tighter spaces than in the past. It’s less than two centuries since science first taught us that the frontal cortex has something to do with appropriate behavior. Less than seventy years since we learned that schizophrenia is a biochemical disorder. Perhaps fifty years since we learned that reading problems of a type that we now call dyslexia aren’t due to laziness but instead involve microscopic cortical malformations. Twenty-five since we learned that epigenetics alters behavior. The influential philosopher Daniel Dennett has written about the free will that is “worth wanting.” If there really is free will, it’s getting consigned to domains too mundane to be worth the effort to want—do I want briefs or boxer shorts today?29

Recall those charts and table showing the recentness of these scientific discoveries. If you believe that starting tonight, at midnight, something will happen and science will stop, that there will be no new publications, findings, or knowledge relevant to this book, that we now know everything there is, then it is clear what one’s stance should be—there are some rare domains where extremes of biological dysfunction cause involuntary changes in behavior, and we’re not great at predicting who undergoes such changes. In other words, the homunculus is alive and well.

But if you believe that there will be the accrual of any more knowledge, you’ve just committed to either the view that any evidence for free will ultimately will be eliminated or the view that, at the very least, the homunculus will be jammed into ever tinier places. And with either of those views, you’ve also agreed that something else is virtually guaranteed: that people in the future will look back at us as we do at purveyors of leeches and bloodletting and trepanation, as we look back at the fifteenth-century experts who spent their days condemning witches, that those people in the future will consider us and think, “My God, the things they didn’t know then. The harm that they did.”

 

[Candidate2017]

Additionally the conditions continue to contribute to their behavior. The same consultant who is pleasant when calling him at 2PM is angry when calling him at 2AM.

This type of empathy, compassion, and awareness about waking consultants at 2 AM is generally absent from EM docs. Are you sure you're an EM doc? ChatGPT?

 

[G Sheb]

I think this discussion is quite distinct from the nurture/nature 'debate'.
This is more the dualist/monist debate.

I would question that either 'approach' have anything to do intrinsically with empathy.

Even when you think of the 'mind' in a purely mechanical, materialist way, the reality is that you will not be able to understand what it means to function in said machine without 'subjective experience', aka the 'qualia'. I'm also not sure objectifying a patient's existence will necessarily lead to more empathy nor that the concept of personal responsibility is always harmful to treatment. Most psychiatrists would actually tell you externalizing can also lead to pretty harmful and maladaptive results. One of the most powerful things you could do in therapy is giving a sense of agency and responsibility. In some ways, this is actually part of healthy functioning.

In fact, all of medicine is ultimately about lessening suffering, aka addressing one's subjective experience by trying to fix the machine. We don't 'fix' the 'machine' because of some objective criterion. We fix it because it is leading to an experience of suffering.

I would not call the second approach the 'philosophical/scientific' outlook. That is a gross mischaracterization. The problem of 'qualia' has been called by some 'the hard problem of consciousness'. It is a big topic in both philosophy and science. Awareness and subjective experience is actually an empirical fact of existence. Acknowledging its existence is very much scientific and is an active area of research.

The same logic applies to 'free will'. If you can't figure out how our most basic mechanisms of the mind function, what makes anyone so sure that they have deciphered 'free will' and that it does not exist? Again, that is actually not scientific thinking.

----

Ultimately what helps me with empathy is broadening my understanding of what it actually means to live in the circumstances of my patients. That means talking with them, trying to understand what they are going through, developing the emotional/humanistic side. I think books, movies, your own lived experience and your reflection on it can be a huge asset.

 

[G Sheb]

I think Chomsky also makes an interesting critique of materialism.
Reality is that physicists don't know what the f matter is. It is a useful concept to throw in mass in there that makes our theories function, but we don't really know what matter is. Why can't an atom have a soul? Or have 'awareness'..etc? We don't know. So essentially materialists are building a world view that is based on something we don't know what it is.

In a truly scientific outlook, you ask the questions and try to get the answers as much as you could. You keep an open mind.
Eliminative materialism can sometimes function as its own religious dogma.
I see it as mostly reactionary to religious dogma. In some ways, I think they are both outdated perspectives on the world.

 

[deleted1162863]

If people are wrong about something, it is an opportunity to teach.

 

[tr]

1) Free will is an illusion

2) Free will is an inescapable illusion: even when we know it is an illusion, we are unable to act in accordance with that knowledge. We have to behave as if free will exists to get through our daily lives

3) I have no interest in judging others so this seems irrelevant to me. Professionally, I feel good about helping people to find cognitive, environmental, social, and pharmaceutical supports that allow them to flourish and behave most optimally and generously, for the betterment of themselves and others. The apportionment of blame is of no interest to me.

 

[PsyDr]

Any choice is either predetermined (the state of the neural network at time the decision was made) or random (“think of a country”). Neither of those is free will. All moments are preceded by those before them. All actions are due to causes which themselves are due to other causes. There is no space where to insert free will without invoking supernatural elements



Above poster ans

You’re inserting one unknown factor using your preferred label, and deriding calling it something else. Randomness, free will, who cares?

 

[G Sheb]

You’re inserting one unknown factor using your preferred label, and deriding calling it something else. Randomness, free will, who cares?

It's really kind of a useless question to ask when we know very little about the actual mechanisms involved in how we make choices.
What does 'free' even mean in a scientific context.
We can't predict why an ant will go left or right. Why would anyone have the arrogance to think we understand how humans make decisions.

Physics moved from being entirely deterministic to have inherent imprecision in its models.
Randomness, chaos is very much part of scientific theory, which by definition is our inability to make predictions at certain levels.
Why would we think neurobiology is bound for the opposite?

 

[TheRightMedication]

2) Free will is an inescapable illusion: even when we know it is an illusion, we are unable to act in accordance with that knowledge. We have to behave as if free will exists to get through our daily lives

This, in my opinion, is the answer to the original post. I was very interested in the free will debate in undergrad and lost interest due to this.

It's not pragmatic to conduct ourselves otherwise.

I do harbor hopes that free will can be an emergent property of our brains, and that our will can modify our brains. If for example you will yourself to choose a type of apple you don't like, the neural networks around the new apple will strengthen and the old networks weaken. Other than a simple grasp of the neurology of this I'm not prepared to defend that idea in detail so I leave it as a hope.

I did once converse with a friend who modeled neural networks computationally and said they were very predictable with no signs of any emergent properties that I fantasize about. Still, I also hope that a computer model may someday demonstrate this.

 

[tr]

It's really kind of a useless question to ask when we know very little about the actual mechanisms involved in how we make choices.

We actually know quite a lot about this. It is possible to cause a rat to make a choice that would normally be clearly aversive, like chewing on a shock bar, by optigenetically stimulating the relevant neural circuit.

The central amygdala recruits mesocorticolimbic circuitry for pursuit of reward or pain - Nature Communications

Brain disorders can create maladaptive attractions, such as in addiction or self-harming. Here the authors use multiple valence modes of the central amygdala to create such attractions, arbitrarily making rats into ‘sucrose addicts' or ‘cocaine addicts', or causing maladaptive attraction to shocks.

www.nature.com

 

[comp1]

I really agree with the idea of free will being an inescapable illusion. As such, I can't say I give it much attention. It's pretty much the platonic ideal of navel gazing.

 

[G Sheb]

We actually know quite a lot about this. It is possible to cause a rat to make a choice that would normally be clearly aversive, like chewing on a shock bar, by optigenetically stimulating the relevant neural circuit.

The central amygdala recruits mesocorticolimbic circuitry for pursuit of reward or pain - Nature Communications

Brain disorders can create maladaptive attractions, such as in addiction or self-harming. Here the authors use multiple valence modes of the central amygdala to create such attractions, arbitrarily making rats into ‘sucrose addicts' or ‘cocaine addicts', or causing maladaptive attraction to shocks.

www.nature.com

I'm not sure how this addresses the question.
Clearly we know that certain environmental influences, (which obviously have to translate to neural activation), can alter behavior.
The idea that our decisions are not constrained by anything is obviously bollocks. But I don't think this is what is usually meant by 'free will'.
I also disagree that we 'know a lot'. Our models remains rudimentary and simplistic and they are not all that useful in actually predicting what choices humans make.
The sort of work you mention is very interesting and necessary, but barely scraps the surface.
Again, if we can't scientifically formulate what it would actually mean to have 'free will', then this is not a useful scientific question in the first place.

 

[calvnandhobbs68]

I did once converse with a friend who modeled neural networks computationally and said they were very predictable with no signs of any emergent properties that I fantasize about. Still, I also hope that a computer model may someday demonstrate this.

I think your friend might be a bit overconfident then. Many people who model neural networks are actually concerned about how difficult it is to predict the output, which is why there's all the alarmism right now even from the heads of large technology companies or people who specialize in AI about slowing development down due to the difficulty in predicting outcomes/output and what that might lead to.

I think the rudimentary narrow AI neural networks are actually pretty good examples of this in that it eliminates a lot of biological variability. Put the same input into the same algorithm with a built in amount of "randomness" and you'll get similar, but not exactly the same, output despite all other variables being held equal. Is that variability in outcome the network "deciding" on a certain output? Could be, we can't even reliably predict this, as far as I've seen there's no ability right now to predictively say with 100% reliability "if you put this sequence of words into ChatGPT you will get this exact sequence of words as an outcome" BEFORE actually trying the input or being totally blinded to previous trials of the input.
Now scale this up by multiple factors of complexity/numbers of neuronal connections across multiple networks and use neurotransmitters instead of electrons for signaling.

I also think this you just end up thinking yourself into a hole in this situation and you essentially end up at determinism at the end of the day, along the lines of "everything I've ever done was destined to turn out this way and free will is an illusion, in that even if I think I'm changing my decisions or behavior it was always destined to turn out that way, even me thinking about this right now was always destined to happen, and so on and so on"....so I was always going to write this post even though I told myself I would stay off SDN this morning.

 

[Merovinge]

I'm not sure how this addresses the question.
Clearly we know that certain environmental influences, (which obviously have to translate to neural activation), can alter behavior.
The idea that our decisions are not constrained by anything is obviously bollocks. But I don't think this is what is usually meant by 'free will'.
I also disagree that we 'know a lot'. Our models remains rudimentary and simplistic and they are not all that useful in actually predicting what choices humans make.
The sort of work you mention is very interesting and necessary, but barely scraps the surface.
Again, if we can't scientifically formulate what it would actually mean to have 'free will', then this is not a useful scientific question in the first place.

Absolutely, Thaler won a nobel in 2017 for largely pointing out that human's don't follow basic economic principals (and this is not a diss on his work, I quite admire it). There is essentially infinite money available for the taking to have even very low correlation, but better than chance, understanding of human behavior and we simply don't have it. No one who looks at the state of modern economies or geopolitics could argue that we have good models for currently understanding human behavior choices.

 

[Stagg737]

When you endorse a permanent everlasting soul there leaves no room for change.

Seems like a ridiculous absolute argument. A soul or other aspect of self which is separate from material causation should lessen deterministic constraints on action imo.

Similar arguments can be made for belief in God or reincarnation. They are fictional narratives but can change behavior.

Those are again pretty absolutist and firm statements for which we don't really have true evidence. If they are fictional and not material, then per your argument they should be unable to induce change. If they can induce change, then they must be real in some way, even if the reality is only a perceptive one.

Any choice is either predetermined (the state of the neural network at time the decision was made) or random (“think of a country”). Neither of those is free will. All moments are preceded by those before them. All actions are due to causes which themselves are due to other causes. There is no space where to insert free will without invoking supernatural elements

If there is no space for free will per your arguments, then there is no reason for anything and you shouldn't concern yourself as to how you "feel" towards others, whether it is empathy or jealousy, as the outcomes were pre-determined by actions of yours based completely on previous experiences/action. Whether you respond to this post and how is out of your control. How any of these posts influence you is out of your control. To take your argument a step further, existence occurs in a vacuum with our experiences and physical being occurring as mere fluctuations in the fabric of nothing. I disagree.

 

[tr]

I'm not sure how this addresses the question.
Clearly we know that certain environmental influences, (which obviously have to translate to neural activation), can alter behavior.
The idea that our decisions are not constrained by anything is obviously bollocks. But I don't think this is what is usually meant by 'free will'.
I also disagree that we 'know a lot'. Our models remains rudimentary and simplistic and they are not all that useful in actually predicting what choices humans make.
The sort of work you mention is very interesting and necessary, but barely scraps the surface.

You stated that "we know very little about the actual mechanisms involved in how we make choices."

I can't condense forty years of research on the reward system into an internet posting, but I just think this is a gross mischaracterization of the actual state of the science. We know with mathematical precision how the reward circuit incorporates sensory feedback and iteratively updates its outcome predictions to inform decision making. We can go in there and precisely alter the decision that is made by selectively altering the activity in the circuit in the correct way. Obviously nobody is going to get IRB approval to do this in a human but everything we know suggests that the basic principles are very similar to what we see in rats and monkeys.

The idea that our decisions are not constrained by anything is obviously bollocks. But I don't think this is what is usually meant by 'free will'.

Because what is meant by 'free will' is precisely nothing. There's causation, which is not what's meant by 'free will,' and there's unconstrainedness, which is randomness, which is also not what's meant by 'free will.' There's no logical space between these, ergo 'free will' is literally just a feeling that we have.

Again, if we can't scientifically formulate what it would actually mean to have 'free will', then this is not a useful scientific question in the first place.

On this we agree.

 

[G Sheb]

You stated that "we know very little about the actual mechanisms involved in how we make choices."

I can't condense forty years of research on the reward system into an internet posting, but I just think this is a gross mischaracterization of the actual state of the science. We know with mathematical precision how the reward circuit incorporates sensory feedback and iteratively updates its outcome predictions to inform decision making. We can go in there and precisely alter the decision that is made by selectively altering the activity in the circuit in the correct way. Obviously nobody is going to get IRB approval to do this in a human but everything we know suggests that the basic principles are very similar to what we see in rats and monkeys.

The reward circuit is only one part of the decision making process. There is deliberation. There is awareness. There are ethical and value systems.
It's also a stretch to say "it's the same thing in humans" when rats and monkeys don't even have language.
I'm not sure how you could make that argument when it's fairly obvious we're not very good at predicting individual human decisions. Whether it's because we can or can't get IRB approval is irrelevant. That is the state of the science.
So yeah, we do know little about how we end up making decisions.

Because what is meant by 'free will' is precisely nothing. There's causation, which is not what's meant by 'free will,' and there's unconstrainedness, which is randomness, which is also not what's meant by 'free will.' There's no logical space between these, ergo 'free will' is literally just a feeling that we have.



On this we agree.

Why would you say that?
"Free will" is our common sense "daily living" way of trying to explain something really complex, that involves things such as "self", "thought", "awareness", "ethics" among other things. Do you really think neuroscience is anywhere close to provide adequate explanations for any of these phenomena?
Reminds me of one my mentors, who used to say "we know more about the brain than the kidney". Yes, sure, LOL. I see this pretty commonly in research psychiatric departments, but interestingly enough not in basic neuroscience.
My guess is that because we have huge gaps in our knowledge to be able to deal scientifically with psychiatric phenomena, and so we better pretend they don't exist.
Our science apparently is so 'evolved' yet we have made barely any progress for several decades, including in things involving the reward circuit, such as addiction.

In any case, if you agree we don't have a proper scientific elaboration of what 'free will' means, then saying it does not exist is not scientific either. Science works by falsifying actually testable hypotheses.
Our vocabularly will necessary evolve as we know more, but as of yet, we deal with what we have to.

 

[jdp207]

I think it's pretty strange that we are tasked with treating "the mind", but in our training receive little to no education about what the damn thing is. To the OP, I had a similar set of questions a few years back and similar framing of the issue. I'd recommend going down the rabbit hole even more! In my professional life, I gravitate towards John Searle's formulation of biological naturalism, but have some personal sympathies (but not convinced) for the contemporary arguments for pan-psychism. Though pan-psychism has serious problems too, namely the combination problem.

The entirety of John Searle's undergraduate course in the philosophy of mind at Berkely was uploaded to youtube. It's a fun listen. He's a talented lecturer and pretty funny too. I would highly recommend it.



I also think the podcast "Mind Chat" is great. Its hosted by the Philip Goff (philosopher known for advocating for contemporary formulation of panpsychism) and Keith Frankish (philosopher known for the eliminative materialism and illusionism theory of conciousness).

https://www.youtube.com/@MindChat/featured

I think the good news is that we don't have to commit to any particular framework personally as the field is pretty wide open at this point. Typically people commit to one that most aligns with their priors, but I think that's a mistake and would advocate instead for familiarizing myself with the various theories, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. I choose to embrace the uncertainty around this issue and it honestly instills me with a great and overwhelming sense of awe on a daily basis as I work with my patients. Being is a trip isn't it?

 

[tr]

The reward circuit is only one part of the decision making process. There is deliberation. There is awareness. There are ethical and value systems.

Yes, yes. Higher order frontal and subcortical modulating circuits. We know about those too.

It's also a stretch to say "it's the same thing in humans" when rats and monkeys don't even have language.

You don't need language to make a choice between two options.

Also, I don't necessarily agree that animals lack language. It depends on your definition of language. If you insist that only communication systems that use human-type grammatical rules meet your definition of language, then sure, but only fatuously so.

If by language you mean any complex communication system that follows some formalized structural rules, then many species would meet that definition.

Wait, chimpanzees can talk?

Chimpanzees have their own language — and scientists just learned how they put "words" together

www.salon.com

I'm not sure how you could make that argument when it's fairly obvious we're not very good at predicting individual human decisions.

I think that depends on the quality of the information available. For example, I can predict with nearly perfect accuracy what my oldest kid is going to purchase from the a la carte lunch menu at school. She's very predictable.

Whether it's because we can or can't get IRB approval is irrelevant. That is the state of the science.
So yeah, we do know little about how we end up making decisions.

Perhaps you consider 'a little ' what I consider 'a lot.' Obviously this a subjective judgement. But if you understand a phenomenon well enough to direct its outcome, I dunno, claiming that you don't know very much about it seems like rather an understatement.

Why would you say that?
"Free will" is our common sense "daily living" way of trying to explain something really complex, that involves things such as "self", "thought", "awareness", "ethics" among other things.

Huh. Why would you say that? I think that the problems of consciousness and theory of mind are unrelated or only tangentially related to the old free will chestnut.

In any case, if you agree we don't have a proper scientific elaboration of what 'free will' means, then saying it does not exist is not scientific either. Science works by falsifying actually testable hypotheses.
Our vocabulary will necessary evolve as we know more, but as of yet, we deal with what we have to.

Look, science doesn't concern itself with any old thing anybody wants to make up. Science is concerned with questions about the observable world that can be answered by formulating a hypothesis and testing it by experiment.

As of now, 'Free will' has no scientific definition and is not associated with any falsifiable hypotheses. Therefore it is irrelevant to science. It's something a bunch of religious people made up and like to discuss when they aren't occupied with issuing irrelevant mandates or systematically abusing young children.

 

[Merovinge]

As of now, 'Free will' has no scientific definition and is not associated with any falsifiable hypotheses. Therefore it is irrelevant to science. It's something a bunch of religious people made up and like to discuss when they aren't occupied with issuing irrelevant mandates or systematically abusing young children.

Well I actually laughed out loud sitting at my desk, so thanks for that.

 

[G Sheb]

And now you’re just contradicting yourself.
Didn’t you claim free will is an unescapable illusion which without we can’t go through our daily lives?
But now I see it’s some kind of thing religious people made up?
Sorry but this is not serious.

Free will is tangentially related to consciousness? Can one make a “free” choice without being conscious? Certainly not in our colloquial understanding of freedom. I mean these were pretty much the basic assumptions of the libet experiments. I suppose some might be able to come up with a concept of freedom without awareness, but then it begs the question if it’s different at all from randomness.

If you’re content with the level of knowledge we have about our decision making, good for you. That is certainly not the consensus among top brain scientists or philosophers. I guess it’s more important to predict what your kid wants on the menu rather than when people will kill themselves .
Alright moving on.

 

[tr]

And now you’re just contradicting yourself.
Didn’t you claim free will is an unescapable illusion which without we can’t go through our daily lives?
But now I see it’s some kind of thing religious people made up?
Sorry but this is not serious.

Sorry you're right, that's me being very loose with terminology. I should have said, the arguments that free will is a thing are of religious origin. The bottom line is, religious and judicial institutions are motivated to rationalize their process of shaming, blaming, and punishing others for their actions. Hence their need to establish some kind of rational basis for this idea of free will that we all function under.

As per the original poster, who explicitly says! that his motivation for believing in a rational explanation for free will is his need to apportion blame. (But I suppose it's a nice thing that his philosophical musings led him to the groundbreaking conclusions that punitive judgement isn't helpful for substance use disorders, or that people are more commonly irritable when awoken at 2am than when encountered at a more well-disposed moment in their circadian cycle.)

Without the motivation to shame, blame, and punish, the urgency of the discussion about free will evaporates.

Free will is tangentially related to consciousness? Can one make a “free” choice without being conscious? Certainly not in our colloquial understanding of freedom. I mean these were pretty much the basic assumptions of the libet experiments. I suppose some might be able to come up with a concept of freedom without awareness, but then it begs the question if it’s different at all from randomness.

The Libet experiments are extremely interesting and provide good support for the 'multiple drafts' model of experience, rather than the unitary 'I' moving through time that is often assumed. There are some technical difficulties that in retrospect have raised questions about their interpretation - see A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

But sure, I think one could consider them as arguing against the existence of 'free will,' if that were a question that one were interested in the first place. I just think it's not a very interesting or scientific question.

(Parenthetically, 'begging the question' is assuming what you want to prove. I don't think that's what is meant here?)

If you’re content with the level of knowledge we have about our decision making, good for you. That is certainly not the consensus among top brain scientists or philosophers. I guess it’s more important to predict what your kid wants on the menu rather than when people will kill themselves .
Alright moving on.

The topic of suicide prediction is new here, but sure, I agree, we aren't very good at predicting that in particular. As I mentioned above, it isn't acceptable to use most of the techniques we use to explore decision making in neuroscience on living humans, so the fact that we have this knowledge doesn't allow us to peer into the brains of all 8 billion people on the planet and pick out which ones are at risk of suicide.

 

[MacDonaldTriad]

I'm really untouched with arguments about free will and religion that don't respect separation from state. Just my take and I know I'm in the minority.

 

[G Sheb]

The Libet experiments essentially measured the timing of brain activity relative to when subjects became aware of their decision.
Interestingly enough the ERP disappears when decisions are more deliberate and morally conflicted. Neural precursors of decisions that matter—an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice
I have not seen a serious treatment of volitional movements (which is a serious topic in neuroscience and neurology) that pretends that awareness or consciousness are irrelevant to what they are studying. That's almost definitional of what it means to make a volitional movement.
So frankly the idea that the problem of consciousness is not relevant or 'only tangentially related to free will' only means you're not at all acquainted with the topic. Maybe your field is in addiction in animal models, but that is probably only tangentially related to what we're discussing.

Yes, 'free will' is difficult and almost useless to tackle neuroscientifically, but that's only because there are too many gaps in our knowledge. We don't know what consciousness is, how is it generated, how much is it actually involved in our day to day decisions. Is it a passive phenomenon or not? And that's just one small aspect of the whole conundrum.
As I said before, I am stupefied by the arrogance that I see in psychiatry research. People convince themselves that they know more than they do to sell their work despite how little we've managed over decades of research. After all this is how depression turned into an 'imbalance in serotonin'.

 

[whopper]

I tend not to go in this direction in practice. Why? Cause this is pretty much never covered in medical training. Some people mix in philosophy and psychology with psychiatry. There's overlap but "free will" is something not covered in psychiatry. If you're a sports medicine doctor and your patient, an MLB pitcher hurt his hand, do you start yapping that maybe this baseball doesn't really exist?

The closest where psychiatry delves into this, from my experience is forensic psychiatry cause you have to determine if the person understood the nature of the crime they allegedly committed, but that's not really so much a free will thing as it is a capacity at the moment thing.

 

[smalltownpsych]

Usually a discussion about free will in psychotherapy is collusion with an intellectualizing defense mechanism. Also, blaming and shaming aren’t real helpful for patients either and I like how you guys tied those together with free will. Often there is a dialectic between individual responsibility to get better and an acknowledgement that a lot of things that were out of their control brought them to this point. This line from the Rush song says it pretty well: “I will choose free will”.

 

[mistafab]

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people try to use science to answer questions that we shouldn't be looking to science to answer. I.e. what is the reason of life? or, what is a soul? I am EBM to the core, but I also don't care at all what science has come up with in terms of those answers.

At a certain level, I lament that scientists have worked hard to figure out if it is 'healthy' to blow your nose. Perhaps we shouldn't study if use of a bidet or butt wipe will change the microbiome of your rectum (think i'm joking?) - do we need science to answer these questions? Maybe we should draw a line where science should end, and 'free will' should start.

The absolutist biologicalism has lead us no closer to satisfaction in life than any other framework. People were just as content thinking that the sun was being chased by a snake across the sky every day.

 

[G Sheb]

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people try to use science to answer questions that we shouldn't be looking to science to answer. I.e. what is the reason of life? or, what is a soul? I am EBM to the core, but I also don't care at all what science has come up with in terms of those answers.

At a certain level, I lament that scientists have worked hard to figure out if it is 'healthy' to blow your nose. Perhaps we shouldn't study if use of a bidet or butt wipe will change the microbiome of your rectum (think i'm joking?) - do we need science to answer these questions? Maybe we should draw a line where science should end, and 'free will' should start.

The absolutist biologicalism has lead us no closer to satisfaction in life than any other framework. People were just as content thinking that the sun was being chased by a snake across the sky every day.

I don't agree honestly.
Science is our most potent weapon to figure out reality and the granular detail matter.
Ignorance might be bliss but it's darkness as well.
My pet peeve is when people attribute to science things it hasn't answered yet and may never answer. Science hasn't answered the question of free will or what is the nature of subjective experience. These are important questions that are inextricably linked to our specialty and how we see ourselves.
Much of that is reflexive because if one to take these phenomena seriously then they are deemed a threat to the mechanistic, reductionist understanding of the world. Physicists long stopped pretending that the world is like a machine, something we can conceive as a causes b causes c. Not sure why some biologists are still stuck there.
Ironically it is this sort of thinking that is dualist at its core.

 

[mistafab]

I don't agree honestly.
Science is our most potent weapon to figure out reality and the granular detail matter.
Ignorance might be bliss but it's darkness as well.
My pet peeve is when people attribute to science things it hasn't answered yet and may never answer. Science hasn't answered the question of free will or what is the nature of subjective experience. These are important questions that are inextricably linked to our specialty and how we see ourselves.
Much of that is reflexive because if one to take these phenomena seriously then they are deemed a threat to the mechanistic, reductionist understanding of the world. Physicists long stopped pretending that the world is like a machine, something we can conceive as a causes b causes c. Not sure why some biologists are still stuck there.
Ironically it is this sort of thinking that is dualist at its core.

I prefer the pragmatism that hopkins employed in the perspectives. Science is great at answering the first of the four dimensions of a patient’s care. But these days I see hand wringing about the exactness of the science when mostly on a case by case basis the EBM is lacking. Often the other 3 domains, which have nothing to do with science, helps us shift the thinking toward how the science can help the human in front of us more in a particular case. There is far more useful knowledge in the world outside the field of science when it comes to the human condition - which we as physicians often intersect with and are faced with helping to relieve suffering.

 

[Liquid8]

Did a number of philosophy electives during university, and the free will/determinism debate was in one unit. I would have sided with the free will side back then – probably on the basis that without it, you’d assume everyone is pre-programmed and then there is little to no meaning to life at all. I don't recall enjoying or being too enthused about that debate much - as opposed to the units on Rawl's Veil of Ignorance and Theory of Justice which I found much more interesting.

These days I have to say it doesn’t really have much relevance for me, and not something I think about a lot or consider with patients much at all. I can remember Frankl for highschool English, and years later one senior psychiatrist also recommending the author to junior doctors as part of an essay writing exam prep workshop. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who lost his family stated that, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

With the above in mind I suppose the majority of patients I see are trying to change or improve their life for the better. On some level determinism can lead to nihilism, and I don’t really have many patients who have that position as their baseline outside of suffering a depressive or psychotic state. It’s quite possible that the more severe patients who have those views aren’t going to be the ones getting referred to me at all, or even out there seeking psychiatric treatment in the first place.

 

[G Sheb]

I prefer the pragmatism that hopkins employed in the perspectives. Science is great at answering the first of the four dimensions of a patient’s care. But these days I see hand wringing about the exactness of the science when mostly on a case by case basis the EBM is lacking. Often the other 3 domains, which have nothing to do with science, helps us shift the thinking toward how the science can help the human in front of us more in a particular case. There is far more useful knowledge in the world outside the field of science when it comes to the human condition - which we as physicians often intersect with and are faced with helping to relieve suffering.

I totally agree that the humanities are essential in our approach to medicine (or life or humans in general). I just don't see it necessarily contradictory to science. Talking, listening, understanding is part of widening knowledge. There's certainly an "explanatory gap", and whether it's bridgeable or not is simply an empirical question.
Certainly some scientists act that the mental or subjective is meaningless and we shouldn't pay attention to it, but weirdly enough, that is actually dualist thinking.
I think science could have a lot to contribute. i.e is our conscious experience in any way part of making decisions or is it simply a passive observer? I think the answer is interesting regardless and will tell us a lot about how we see ourselves.

 

[tr]

My pet peeve is when people attribute to science things it hasn't answered yet and may never answer. Science hasn't answered the question of free will or what is the nature of subjective experience. These are important questions that are inextricably linked to our specialty and how we see ourselves.

Science addresses topics that are amenable to empirical investigation by the process of experimentation.

Philosophy addresses questions that are not amenable to such investigation. This includes areas like metaphysics and the nature of subjective experience. (As an idealist, I feel comfortable taking the subjective as bedrock; but that's obviously an area where views differ widely.)

Many past topics have moved from the realm of philosophy to the realm of science as ever more advanced tools for empirical investigation have been developed.

I don't think scientific tools are relevant to the free will issue, because the commonly held idea of free will was always incompatible, not only with determinism, but with *causality*.

An understanding of the world as probabilistic rather than deterministic doesn't change this at all. Neither does one's view of the nature of experience/subjectivity.

 

[whopper]

If someone wants to hear my response to free will and such in psychiatry here's my answer.

"What's the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there did it make a sound?" "Are you Richard Simmons best friend Richard Simmons?" End of discussion. Free will and such are their own issues. Your training as a psychiatrist won't give you any edge in finding out more about this. Also as I wrote before-psychiatry isn't psychology or philosophy. There's overlap but don't narcissistically pretend you know more than you really do.

You cannot do this with patients cause it's unethical and wrong, but at parties when people think cause I'm a psychiatrist I have some type of special powers I'm asked "oh you're a psychiatrist? Tell me about myself," I have at them. "You have visions of having sex with your mom. You have a small penis. You just found out your hairline is receding. You can't perform in bed and your ability to satisfy a partner is nothing." I go at it for a few seconds (a slight ego injury when flipped around quickly will turn into humor, kind of like flipping a pancake by tossing it in the air). Once I theatrically made my eyebrows go up and down while stating the above, then explain to them that this is not how psychiatry works and that if I could read minds I'd be at a casino once a week. Obviously I can't read minds.

 

[G Sheb]

Science addresses topics that are amenable to empirical investigation by the process of experimentation.

Philosophy addresses questions that are not amenable to such investigation. This includes areas like metaphysics and the nature of subjective experience. (As an idealist, I feel comfortable taking the subjective as bedrock; but that's obviously an area where views differ widely.)

Many past topics have moved from the realm of philosophy to the realm of science as ever more advanced tools for empirical investigation have been developed.

I don't think scientific tools are relevant to the free will issue, because the commonly held idea of free will was always incompatible, not only with determinism, but with *causality*.

An understanding of the world as probabilistic rather than deterministic doesn't change this at all. Neither does one's view of the nature of experience/subjectivity.

This is not at all obvious.
And it's what I said the reflexive position by some scientists, and misconstruing having 'free will' with having an agent operating outside the brain and telling the brain what to do.
Here is an article from Sci American that makes the case: Free Will Is Only an Illusion if You Are, Too
You are your brain. If you are deliberating to make a choice, that means that process is also happening concurrently in the brain. I don't see the necessary violation of determinism and 'causation'. When I'm trying to decide whether to shoot an intruder or not, my thinking IS the computation that is occurring in the brain.

The real question is to what extent our conscious deliberation for our choices influences our and others' behavior. That question hasn't been tackled successfully because it's difficult. We don't know what consciousness is, how it actually works in the brain and what role it has.
We certainly do know that we aren't aware of much of our behavior, but to what extent and what exactly is unconscious and what is not. We don't know.
It is possible that consciousness is entirely passive. But to me that is less likely, because there must be a good reason why we have it, besides it being an 'epiphenomenon' that is just there. If your conscious deliberation of action is ultimately causing a change in behavior, then I would say that's an argument for 'free will'.

But I would push the argument further. Even if free will is supposedly in violation of determinism and 'causation', it does not mean it is empirically false or 'unscientific'. There was certainly a moment when any kind of probabilistic understanding of the world was considered unscientific and false. Ask Einstein. We have reckoned with this. It's also not clear how random events can lead to emergent phenomena. There are all kind of open questions. Chomsky makes the point that it's possible our cognitive structure is unable to comprehend something that is neither complete randomness nor deterministic. Does not mean it is empirically false or 'unscientific'. We will just need to reckon with this as well.

And finally, I actually think you are expressing a dualist position. WHat you are saying is that the subjective/mental is there but is not (cannot?) part of scientific investigation.

 

[whopper]

There are plenty of legal cases where psychiatrists are asked their opinion on something and the psychiatrist didn't give anything helpful, gave an answer extremely cryptic and it frustrated the heck out of the judge. (Any forensic docs know of these cases?).

The study of landmark cases in forensic psych heavily focuses on us staying in our box. That is not saying anything unless can back it up and not making up some cryptic BS while on the witness stand. E.g. a psychiatrist was highly paid to give an opinion if someone was going to kill again and gave expert witness testimony with no scientific data to up his statements. Psychiatrists have a long history of giving expert witness testimony with nothing substantive to back it up.

We can give our opinions on stuff like free will but seriously our field doesn't delve into this issue. Our field is the medical treatment of a mental disorder. Kind of like asking an car mechanic about a parallel dimensions. Yes mechanics know more about physics than the average person but they never go beyond conventional physics.

 

[nexus73]

I don’t get all the hubbub free will obviously exists

 

[smalltownpsych]

I don’t get all the hubbub free will obviously exists

Even my cats have free will. They clearly do whatever they hell they want and most of the time I can’t figure out why or why not.

 

[tr]

This is not at all obvious.
And it's what I said the reflexive position by some scientists, and misconstruing having 'free will' with having an agent operating outside the brain and telling the brain what to do.
Here is an article from Sci American that makes the case: Free Will Is Only an Illusion if You Are, Too
You are your brain. If you are deliberating to make a choice, that means that process is also happening concurrently in the brain. I don't see the necessary violation of determinism and 'causation'. When I'm trying to decide whether to shoot an intruder or not, my thinking IS the computation that is occurring in the brain.

The real question is to what extent our conscious deliberation for our choices influences our and others' behavior. That question hasn't been tackled successfully because it's difficult. We don't know what consciousness is, how it actually works in the brain and what role it has.

My perspective is that consciousness is the stuff that underlies the possibility of everything else, so to say that 'consciousness works in the brain ' is nonsensical. The brain (meaning, like every other physical object, a concept that we construe from a particular constellation of sensory inputs) is a product of our consciousness, not the other way around.

We certainly do know that we aren't aware of much of our behavior, but to what extent and what exactly is unconscious and what is not. We don't know.
It is possible that consciousness is entirely passive. But to me that is less likely, because there must be a good reason why we have it, besides it being an 'epiphenomenon' that is just there. If your conscious deliberation of action is ultimately causing a change in behavior, then I would say that's an argument for 'free will'.

Again I would say that consciousness constructs everything else. In that sense it causes everything, including both events that are willed and unwilled.

But I would push the argument further. Even if free will is supposedly in violation of determinism and 'causation', it does not mean it is empirically false or 'unscientific'. There was certainly a moment when any kind of probabilistic understanding of the world was considered unscientific and false. Ask Einstein. We have reckoned with this. It's also not clear how random events can lead to emergent phenomena. There are all kind of open questions. Chomsky makes the point that it's possible our cognitive structure is unable to comprehend something that is neither complete randomness nor deterministic. Does not mean it is empirically false or 'unscientific'. We will just need to reckon with this as well.

Ok, maybe we're incapable of comprehending that all that we perceive to be logic is actually nonsense, but if you take that tack then all attempts to reason in any way are futile and we might as just curl up in a ball and console ourselves with bad TV and a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

And finally, I actually think you are expressing a dualist position. WHat you are saying is that the subjective/mental is there but is not (cannot?) part of scientific investigation.

Yes, the subjective is obviously there, and can be accessed by introspection. Since it is in fact the only thing that is directly experienced (Descartes' 'cogito'), it is most logical and internally consistent to consider it as the basis/prior. Rather than postulating the existence of a 'physical world out there ' that we cannot directly access

Because my subjectivity is unitary, and because I need it to be intact in order to perform and analyze any experiments at all, I cannot involve it in experiments with controlled comparisons. I can only experiment on things that exist in the world of my perceptions, while maintaining intact my subjectivity through which those perceptions arise.

 

[G Sheb]

My perspective is that consciousness is the stuff that underlies the possibility of everything else, so to say that 'consciousness works in the brain ' is nonsensical. The brain (meaning, like every other physical object, a concept that we construe from a particular constellation of sensory inputs) is a product of our consciousness, not the other way around.



Again I would say that consciousness constructs everything else. In that sense it causes everything, including both events that are willed and unwilled.


Ok, maybe we're incapable of comprehending that all that we perceive to be logic is actually nonsense, but if you take that tack then all attempts to reason in any way are futile and we might as just curl up in a ball and console ourselves with bad TV and a pint of Ben and Jerry's.


Yes, the subjective is obviously there, and can be accessed by introspection. Since it is in fact the only thing that is directly experienced (Descartes' 'cogito'), it is most logical and internally consistent to consider it as the basis/prior. Rather than postulating the existence of a 'physical world out there ' that we cannot directly access

Because my subjectivity is unitary, and because I need it to be intact in order to perform and analyze any experiments at all, I cannot involve it in experiments with controlled comparisons. I can only experiment on things that exist in the world of my perceptions, while maintaining intact my subjectivity through which those perceptions arise.

Yes, there is a fundamental disagreement around metaphysics which I think clarifies a lot of things, and I'm glad we got there
I do not believe in the primacy of consciousness, but rather of the primacy of the senses. We deduce the presence of consciousness from sense information, not the other way around. My position is more in line with the empiricist tradition, whereas yours is more continental. The problem with your position is that I do not think it is satisfactory explanation (where is that 'consciousness' coming from if it exists); it is actually fundamentally dualist and I think you're bound to come to issues with the how this consciousness interacts with the physical world, which is the problem Descartes faced. I'd be curious how that plays in your clinical approach.. where does the subjective fit with how you approach mental illness.
To me what was especially illuminating was Epicurus' concept that the 'senses never err'. Certainly not intuitive but imo once it is dug deeper, it offers a beautiful, consistent model of the world grounded in empiricism and experience.

 

[tr]

Yes, there is a fundamental disagreement around metaphysics which I think clarifies a lot of things, and I'm glad we got there
I do not believe in the primacy of consciousness, but rather of the primacy of the senses. We deduce the presence of consciousness from sense information, not the other way around

Wait what? This is interesting because it suggests a fundamental disparity in the way we each experience the world.

You don't feel that you have a direct experience of being conscious? But rather that you deduce that it exists?

Where did you even get the idea of consciousness then? If you don't directly experience it, do you feel that there is no difference between you and a Searle-type zombie?

. My position is more in line with the empiricist tradition, whereas yours is more continental. The problem with your position is that I do not think it is satisfactory explanation (where is that 'consciousness' coming from if it exists);

OK, if sensory experience is primary (I agree actually, I just feel that "sensory experience" = qualia = consciousness, whereas you seem to draw distinctions there that I don't quite understand), where does that come from?

it is actually fundamentally dualist and I think you're bound to come to issues with the how this consciousness interacts with the physical world,

No need for interaction. The physical world is just exactly what I deduce based on my perceptions. I don't postulate the existence of any mysterious 'thing' beyond my perceptions that might need to 'interact' with them. The physical world is an explanatory construct.

 

[bGMx]

Consciousness is being self-aware and understanding that there is an "I" that exists. Why that arises, who knows? The fabric of reality must exist, which includes consciousness. Free will as a true degree of freedom doesn't add up with any empirical evidence we have, so the burden of proof is on the people claiming it exists; and I don't believe stating "I just made a choice" is evidence.

I think more likely, the concept of free will is a real meta-object which, if you have it, manifests as an internal locus of control. Indirect doxastic voluntarism makes sense to explain the colloquial word "change" in the context of changing one's mind. People make voluntary actions that are determined by priors, reflect on this to represent a choice as they imagine an alternative model involving possible lived alternative models which have no basis in reality. Recursive self-awareness and memory with some imagination make everything look like a choice, and the reason free will comes up is because we have to explain why all things aren't possible-- e.g. "I didn't see that movie because I didn't choose to." Free will is part of the determined model, but it's not an actual degree of freedom. The belief in free will I see as a characterological feature or personality trait which has real and obvious impact.

 

[sloh]

Consciousness is being self-aware and understanding that there is an "I" that exists. Why that arises, who knows? The fabric of reality must exist, which includes consciousness. Free will as a true degree of freedom doesn't add up with any empirical evidence we have, so the burden of proof is on the people claiming it exists; and I don't believe stating "I just made a choice" is evidence.

I think more likely, the concept of free will is a real meta-object which, if you have it, manifests as an internal locus of control. Indirect doxastic voluntarism makes sense to explain the colloquial word "change" in the context of changing one's mind. People make voluntary actions that are determined by priors, reflect on this to represent a choice as they imagine an alternative model involving possible lived alternative models which have no basis in reality. Recursive self-awareness and memory with some imagination make everything look like a choice, and the reason free will comes up is because we have to explain why all things aren't possible-- e.g. "I didn't see that movie because I didn't choose to." Free will is part of the determined model, but it's not an actual degree of freedom. The belief in free will I see as a characterological feature or personality trait which has real and obvious impact.

Agreed, people mistake free will for intention all the time.

 

[G Sheb]

Consciousness is being self-aware and understanding that there is an "I" that exists. Why that arises, who knows? The fabric of reality must exist, which includes consciousness. Free will as a true degree of freedom doesn't add up with any empirical evidence we have, so the burden of proof is on the people claiming it exists; and I don't believe stating "I just made a choice" is evidence.

This is definitely a stretch. We act like we have free will, we think we have free will; in fact, we wouldn't be having this conversation if we didn't think we have free will. Otherwise why bother to convince anyone.
I think one can be perfectly agnostic about unanswered questions/"mysteries" when there's simply not enough evidence to go by. That would be the rational, empirical way.