WSU: Free Will and Neuroscience with Alfred Mele 

kind of proves there's no free will

Free will now!

Hahahahahahaha quality xD

They use "functional magnetic resonance imaging" (fMRI) to see how the brain works, which maps blood flow in the brain in real time in three dimensions (and blood flow is known to be correlated with neuronal activity). They are not just attaching electrodes to the scalp any more.

@@Pandaemoni still it doesnt answer how things like bacterias even from the same species take diferent decisions without a brain or even they why blood Flow evolved to a part of the brain and the other didnt also that experimento that subconcious already takes decisions doesnt mean shit decisions can change super fucking fast so its dumb to say we are as free as rocks cause thats a really dumb analogy (I read this one from other coments from this video not you).

@@latioswarr3785 there’s also species out there which are conscious yet do not have any sort of brain whatsoever, they do consciously act; many jelly fish in fact.

Before we consciously know about something, our unconscious already knew about it. To understand the above, it is convenient to explain what conscious action is about. Matter only exists in the Present. Actions take place in the Present. To carry out actions, living beings with a brain capture information from their relevant material environment through their senses. This information is processed by the brain, activating memories (groups of neurons) associated with the information captured, acquiring meaning what is perceived. Simultaneously, action expectations are generated (Pavlovian conditioning). We will call the mental correlate of the relevant material environment, which represents what is happening in the Present, "reality of the Individual". Although the brain manages information from the Present, the Past and a possible Future, the brain is not confused, and manages to differentiate between the Past, the Present and a possible Future. The green monkeys of Central Africa use three types of sounds as warning signals in their language. When a monkey hears the alert signal for an eagle, it integrates itself into that segment of its mental correlate of the relevant medium that represents the airspace, an eagle, which leads the monkey to raise its head and using its sight it tries to locate spatially to the predator, thereby improving their survival prospects by reducing uncertainty. From his life experience, my dog's brain stores information on various entities, generating a biography of these entities. So then, my dog knows how to differentiate between my different siblings, the postman, the neighbor's cat, etc. When I get home, my dog watches me and is able to recognize my mood. When I arrive in a good mood, my dog jumps on me. When I don't arrive in a good mood, then he lies on the ground with his tail between his legs. His life experience in which I have participated, that is, the biography that his brain manages of me, allows him to make an adequate projection of the future and carry out actions according to the circumstances. In the first four years of life, a child hears between ten and forty million words. When the mother tells her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for the child's brain Little Red Riding Hood is very real. Just as the green monkey that listens to the alert signal for an eagle does not need to see the eagle for said predator to be integrated into the mental correlate of its relevant environment, in a child it does not need to see Little Red Riding Hood to integrate it into its mental correlate. When adults speak to the child mentioning his name (for example Pedrito), and refer to actions that the child is not carrying out at that moment (tomorrow we will go to the beach Pedrito), his brain places the entity Pedrito being on the beach, in the Present you are living. In turn, when adults speak to the child mentioning his name and refer to actions that the child is carrying out at that moment, his brain attributes both his body and the entity Pedro said action. Gradually, in the child's brain, an increasingly strong association is established between his body and the entity Pedrito, but a complete fusion between his body and said entity is never established. This is because the function of the brain is to administer bodily actions that take place in the Present, and on occasions the child hears that they refer to the entity Pedrito carrying out future or past actions, actions in which the material body of the child not participate. During wakefulness, in the brain of a ten-year-old boy, Pedrito's biography is permanently activated. This entity is given to perform actions that are not taking place in the Present. In this sense, the entity Pedrito (the Being) is capable of "dwelling" in timeless and immaterial worlds. This does not happen with Pedrito's material body. His body is a "slave of the Present". Being able to carry out actions in timeless and immaterial worlds meant an extraordinary "evolutionary leap" for the human being. Thanks to human language, Reason and Being arose. Thanks to language, the mental correlate of the relevant environment of a human is significantly expanded, since it not only represents what is happening in the material environment but also those "mental scenarios" that, without being part of the world of matter, represent the "worlds of matter". timeless and immaterial in which the Being is given to carry out actions. The brain assumes, in an unconscious process, that in these immaterial and timeless scenarios it is the Being who carries out actions and integrates said life experience into the life biography of the Being. A similar process happens when, for example, a dog watches a bird fly, an opportunity in which the brain integrates the dog's life experience, the bird's act of flying, in turn, integrates as its own life experience, that of watch the bird fly. We make use of Reason every time we make use of language, be it speaking, thinking, listening to speak, reading, or using sign language. Through it we can generate mental correlates that represent the reality of the Pedrito entity, a reality that is no longer a slave to the Present. That entity is the conscious entity. To an adult's unconscious, the conscious entity, the Self, is "very real." Our unconscious “does not think”. We think using language, and our brain assumes, in an unconscious process, that the action of thinking is not our own, but of the Being. Our unconscious “does not know” that the Being is a fiction of our mind.

Did you mean Libet or Liver?

@@TheRealGabrielMercer Libet. Fixed.

@@bmdecker93 Thanks for clarifying. I recently just had class with Dr.Mele and we discussed those experiments. It's widely known for being flawed now.

@@TheRealGabrielMercer Very, very good to hear. The Schurger experiment was done back in 2012 ( and some since then) but they just haven't gotten the attention they deserved.

Which study by Haynes are you referring to?

But that's not how human society works. We make laws that guide people's actions toward "right" and away from "wrong" by punishing wrong deeds and rewarding right deeds. These will make humans to live "right" way and not just arbitrarily. And the laws are set so that they make the human life better (for instance you punish for murdering another human being as being alive is considered better than dead).

The real difference between a marble and a person is the range of responses the person has to stimulus. We can react is countless different ways to information we gather through our senses, memories we have of the past, or patterns we identify. And beyond all this, our brains have evolved to give us the sensation of free will - which is an amazing achievement in itself. This is what we should be astounded by, and not attached to a notion of free will that has little logic or science to support it.

@@jambojack we can't truly identify or measure if there's no free will cuz that would imply a cause and we are not a cause we're an effect/reaction(based on the theory of no free will). We're basically just a giant bag of marble so there's more calculations, more mass, and energy involved but it's still only reaction we aren't causers without free will we're inanimate machines that are simply winding down. Not saying that like in a bad way but it's basically just a theory that says life doesn't have a purpose. If there is no free well at least I still feel like I do have one so like you said I guess it's a good thing. Still sounds kind of bleak

@@jambojack you are free to be astounded by the illusion of free will but it won't make it any more real.

That’s totally depending on your definition of free Will AND we don’t even know the laws of physics yet . We have some laws, that we observed, but the true „WHY“ can never be found, that’s a common misconception from physics, physics is purely empirical. All we do is observe and describe, no one really knows why things happen we just now what they do but never why. Now Quantumphysics come and totally blow away our world view. So how can you say free will cant be true? You realize that’s the same argument for god right? You cant imagine how and where the Universe comes from? What was before the Big Bang? Well must be god! Is the same thing here, you can’t understand free will, where it would come from and how Humans could from they’re own decisions? Well it must just not exist. We simply don’t know. We don’t even know how strict the border in between unconscious and conscious is or what kind of role both exactly play , its like trying to explain how the color green or any color looks, you can describe through wave lengths and stuff, but a blind person will still never exactly know what Green looks like to you , i wont even Know for sure what green looks like to you.

Nah. Some behaviors possibly yes, but most will come from the lived experience and how your genes manifest from environmental influence.

I think not only "mainstream physics" or better the physical models given by the simplest consistent model (and therefore the most likely models to be predictive) must be wrong for free will to exist. There must be something wrong with mathematical logic and weak causality too. Why? I see two problems. At least with my intuition about free will. _Problem with causality:_ Are your actions determined by the past state of yourself (including wishes, fears,...) and your environment? Then it is deterministic and this is at least in conflict with my intuition about free will. Or is it not determined. Therefore I (and my unconsciousness and the environment) was not in control of my action. Therefore I would intuitively not call this my free will. It's not even from my will. _Problem with mathematics:_ One can show (every sequence is Turing reducible to an algorithmic random sequence) that every information can be split into a structure (deterministic) and a completely random part. Neither part nor their combination is different to the problem "mainstream physics" has with consciousness. So in order for free will to exist there must be something wrong with mathematics. Based on that, I don't think this strong form of free will is true. A very much weaker form (but currently not at all evidential and not what I would call free will) is that our consciousness contains an incomputable component (this is an idea of R. Penrose). I don't think he is right. Especially his arguments based on Gödel's theorem are just wrong, but this is at least one last remaining possibility.

Unfortunately, "physics as we understand it" can always be wrong and so if one relies on that then the whole question becomes non-falsifiable and therefore scientifically unanswerable. In other words, "current physics" suggests free will is impossible, but that physics might be wrong so we can't rely on it; but if a century from now "better physics" shows that we **do** have free will...well, that physics might be wrong so we can't rely on that.

@@Pandaemoni Science cannot relate to consciousness at all, since it is subjective and the scientific method is not applicable to anything but what is objective. I know that I have free will, that is not even a falsifiable theoretical claim, that is first hand existence. All of science might be false, but I am undeniably aware of what I am aware of.

​@@tofu-munchingCoalition.ofChaos The result of a quantum decoherence is fundamentally non-deterministic, why couldn't free will be so? There's nothing in today known physics to stop it. I'm not the one to go into the philosophy of Gödel's theorem, but doesn't it logically prove, on the very terms of math itself, that there are (or could be) true statements that cannot be logically derived?

@@bjorntorlarsson But you might be deluding yourself into thinking you have free will. For that matter you might only be a Boltzmann brain deluding yourself into believing the world is real. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of what is "real" because we all know that some people believe things that are not true. Some of those people are psychotic, most are subject to lesser cognitive errors. In any event, I think the is a category error, whether or not you have free will is not necessarily subjective. You subjectively experience it, but that is true of everything. If your free will is generated by the brain, then that is observable and capable in principle of being monitored and proven because the brain is a deterministic, if complex, physical system. It would be hard to disprove free will exists (because that is proving a negative), but if we can show all action on the brain is determined by prior brain states and external stimuli and not some independently generated factor we should be able to establish a lack of free will within reasonable bounds of uncertainty... though we are a long way from doing that. If you free will is generated by some immaterial "soul" or somesuch, then free will may be unprovable, as studies of the brain will never touch upon it.

the onl;y thing i care about in terms of free will is the semantics. if you ignore the semantics all you have left to choose from is the phonology or the syntax. is THAT what this is? people denying free will are just focusing on the phonology and syntax of " free will" but have no interest in the semantics? ( i cannot believe the person in the video openly admitted ".... i don't want to get into the semantics..." the only thing you should care about in this very specific context about free will IS the semantics.

free will is that you have the ability to transform any aspect of yourself. its a figure of speech to describe the subjective experience NOT objective reality. you can write out a schedule to follow and do 150 pushups eacg morning for 2 years and transform the body or not do that and sit on couch for two years and transform the body for the worse you decide. you can spend six months learning japanese or you can instead nmot do that . you can transform your mind over time by doing daily excersies to increase concentration, or instead you can spend six months doing the opposite making your concentration worse by doing impulsive behaviors. so we can transform any aspect of the self using our ability to make decisions. meaning start out with th e idea of the way you want to be then use free will to make that happen.

@Eugene Borisenko If i show you a image of a house and i say there is no car in the image therefore there is no such thing as a car, does that make sense or add up?

@Eugene Borisenko free will does not mean information in the category {external influences} however, you comment does contain free will. free will is how you deliberately concentrated on the category {external influences} right at that moment. that is what free will is about.

you used free will when you deliberately and intentionally focused and directed your concentration onto that category of {external influences}

@@johnjacquard863 _Free will is, when you deliberately and intentionally (free) focused and directed your concentration (will) onto ..._ Thanks for the circular reasoning. You can use different words and make it seem more intuitive. That's not my problem and tossing this word salad does not help. I wanted a precise formal model of free will. What you're doing is extremely vague and therefore not at all helpful.

It's not that the brain can see into the future. It's that we are collections of atoms. Atoms have no free will, but they react to cause and effect very much like the balls on a billiard table do. If I rack up those balls and break and after ten seconds of movement and hundreds of collisions the 8-ball falls into a side pocket, the 8-ball didn't have to predict that ten seconds in advance. It was just going where the deterministic forced applies to it were pushing it, all without the 8-ball having free will. If it bounced off a bumper and collided with the 2-ball, the new path the 8-ball took as a result of that collision was "pre-determined" at the moment of the break without anyone having foreknowledge of the future. The problem with free will is one of composition. Atoms have no free will, any more than billiard balls. If you get a brain's worth of atoms, though, arranged in the right pattern, then the brain develops free will? That suggests that if I had a large enough number of colliding billiard balls, and arranged them in the right pattern, then the balls might develop free will. That assumes, of course, a materialist view of the universe. Dualists have an easier time justifying free will, as they don't have to worry about the fact that everything we see in the world obeys rules and they can posit something that has no set rules that drive electrons in accordance with our wishes. But that sounds like magic or mysticism, as that is to say we have "souls" by that name or some other term (and it leaves open the problem of how a non-physical soul causes physical particles to move and why the soul can only induce physical changes in physical particles inside our bodies and not in particles or systems outside our bodies).

It was the guy who wrote that paper who suffers from a ten second lag (at least).

@@Pandaemoni Does dark matter, 80% of the mass in the universe, consist of atoms?

@@bjorntorlarsson No, but it likely consists of some weakly interacting particle, but not all particles are atoms.

Maybe the entire universe causes every event within it. "Mutual co-arising" gives you a hint of how events 'emerge" (to use a popular word) from what we call the universe.

Your aware that the arguments of Sam Harris are the same as for god right? „We cant explain it, must be god“ in this case „We cant explain it, must not exist“.

I like Harris, but in this subject I don’t think these people actually have a clue wtf is going on, they study only what is observable TO THEM in the physical world, there’s those that argue quantum physics destroys determinism due to randomness, yet then again those with a set bias in favor of physicalism and naturalism will look past or attempt to debunk even that, when they start to claim definitively that x must be the case, they lost me, they don’t even know what consciousness is or how it all operates, heck we have people like Richard Dawkins who is baffled by it all despite being a materialist; the problem occurs when people state with so much confidence that free will does not exist; when there may be cases in which it favors it’s existence.

Thank you haha 😆😆

Please watch a video about free will by anticitizenX. Much better than this one. That goes to the core of the whole concept of free will and not just nitpicking of other people's experiments.

​@Peter Lustig "the universe has to be deterministic" Why? Physics only explains what physics explains. Claiming that the same method could explain everything is a brave claim, what proof do you have of that? Did God tell you that it is so? How ever could the cause of Big Bang be scientifically explained, for example? Cosmologists don't even touch that question because it is beyond the reach of the scientific method. As is consciousness. When one writes a school paper, it is important to be aware of the limitations of ones methods.

i just cannot understand how anyone could say free will is not real. free will is demonstrable. if we have demonstrable information that is best you can get. so free will is the truest thing in reality.

When I was going through my individuation process; I could give myself over to that feeling "God helmet feeling" and it was like i was paying attention to my mental track from outside my ego; it was like i couldn't stop my movements and actions per say, it was like i felt scared to move or do anything other than what my body was doing in the background; like i was going to turn the scissors on myself if I didn't play ball with the unconscious...the unconscious unfolds potential infront of your eyes. I found it creepy that you could then watch yourself commit suicide or watch yourself go down a bad path and have little ability to turn that ship because you are stuck in a mindstate where you are hyper aware of your actions. Hyper aware of your actions to the point that the illusion of free will disappears...

Matityahu 🙄

so you wrote that comment against your will? you had no choice to do otherwise? or did you choose to write that comment?

@@johnjacquard863 essentially i was compelled by the interaction between my genes and environment. that's what a phenotype is.

@@chetgaines1289 so you believe that narrow context which you just describes has the capacity to fully capture the situation as a whole in reality itself?

Maybe to the purely materialistic and physicalism world, but this is based on a blindsight, nothing definite. Believe or not believe.

@@bhavinmehta1490 it doesn't change even if you believe that non-material souls exist.

@@srelma ehh I think it does change. If agency issues from metaphysical conscious choice, that realization we feel in our subjective experience at the end followed by the readiness potential in the middle is just part of a process of experiencing our choice. But to you your own belief. Look into Dr. Christian List, Robert Kane, Michael Engor, etc. Also they misrepresent Libet often, Libet believed in a some free will he saw in the form of “free won’t,” either way people simply do not know, they only profess.

I choose to believe it. What do people even know, they just act like they know, when it’s only what is observable TO THEM. So free will. Some believe it some don’t.

Just because it seems illogical to your brain doesn't mean it is bullshit. You don't even understand the F of Freewill that is why you're calling it stupid.

Free will is a silly, childish idea - best reserved for fairy tales.

@@bobaldo2339 The perception of free will is different for everybody. You can't say there is or there isn't free will. There is for one person in one thing like there isn't for one person in another thing. These two words do not determine what free will is. And, because you can't determine what free will is, you can't just say there is or there isn't free will. It's like saying there is nothing, something or everything. You have to refer to what you are referring to as having that or not. Grammar. Asking what is free will referring to the words "free will" is stupid. Choice is not one thing or the opposite. These guys believe if they can solve free will they can be powerful, its never been a problem to solve wether there is or there isn't free will.

@@Shubhamsharmaaaaaaa It is not illogical or logic, it is stupid illogical and stupid logic.

I call ur mom

So what?

@@nikitanikita7388 so that it was wasted 39:37 minutes of your life

@@srelma I don't see the connection.

@@nikitanikita7388 I was just pointing out that if you agreed that it was a word salad of a presentation, then you wasted a bit more than half an hour of your life watching a meaningless presentation. And now you're wasting more time discussing your "so what?" comment.

Those very very stupid experiments, but they have gotten HUGE attention in stupid news media and sensationalist fake popular science media. So they have to be explained for the frauds they are (although this guy is too polite to use those words).