Embracing Life and Death - Adam Frank @ NPR 13.7

While I'm willing to put my bets down against an immortal soul ascending to heaven or descending to damnation, I'm simply agnostic about the fundamental nature of awareness as a phenomenon in the cosmos. Given how little we understand about the roots of consciousness, it simply doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to make commitments one way or other when it comes to questions of what exactly dies and how.

 the real question before us today is not what happens after we die but, instead, how do we approach death now.

 We are here for such a short time, surrounded by questions both intimate and vast. For some questions we have definite answers. (Why do stars shine?) For some we don't really know what an answer should look like. (What is the meaning of life?) And for some questions we are just going to have to wait to find out. 

 In the face of that inescapable truth, what else is there to do but remain true to ourselves and stay radically open and deliciously curious?

 Through sorrow and joy, gain and loss, we can always keep asking that one question: what is it like to experience this life right here, right now?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/19/245996903/embracing-life-and-death

John Searle on the Problem of Free Will

The special problem of free will is that we cannot get on with our lives without presupposing free will. Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation that calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom. 

given the structure of our consciousness, we cannot proceed except on the position of free will.

in the old mind-body problem we have the belief that the world consists entirely of material particles in fields of force, but at the same time the world seems to contain consciousness, an immaterial phenomenon; and we cannot see how to put the immaterial together with the material into a coherent picture of the universe. In the old problem of skeptical epistemology, it seems, on the one hand, according to common sense, that we do have certain knowledge of many things in the world, and yet, on the other hand, if we really have such knowledge, we ought to be able to give a decisive answer to the skeptical arguments, such as, How do we know we are not dreaming, are not a brain in a vat, are not being deceived by evil demons, etc.? But we do not know how to give a conclusive answer to these skeptical challenges.

when it comes to explaining a certain class of human behavior, it seems that we typically have the experience of acting "freely" or "voluntarily" in a sense of these words that makes it impossible to have deterministic explanations. 

On the one hand we have the experience of freedom, and on the other hand we find it very hard to give up the view that because every event has a cause, and human actions are events, they must have sufficient causal explanations as much as earthquakes or rain storms.

The terminology of mental and physical, of materialism and dualism, of spirit and flesh, contains a false presupposition that these must name mutually exclusive categories of reality — that our conscious states qua subjective, private, qualitative, etc. cannot be ordinary physical, biological features of our brain. Once we overcome that presupposition, the presupposition that the mental and the physical naively construed are mutually exclusive, then it seems to me we have a solution to the traditional mind-body problem. And here it is: All of our mental states are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are themselves realized in the brain as its higher-level or system features. 

However, the philosophical solution kicks the problem upstairs to neurobiology, where it leaves us with a very difficult neurobiological problem. How exactly does the brain do it, and how exactly are conscious states realized in the brain? What exactly are the neuronal processes that cause our conscious experiences, and how exactly are these conscious experiences realized in brain structures?

there is a striking difference between the passive character of perceptual consciousness and the active character of what we might call "volitional consciousness"

I find a feature of my experiences of free, voluntary actions that was not present in my perceptions. The feature is that I do not sense the antecedent causes of my action in the form of reasons, such as beliefs and desires, as setting causally sufficient conditions for the action; and, which is another way of saying the same thing, I sense alternative courses of action open to me.

In typical cases of deliberating and acting, there is, in short, a gap, or a series of gaps, between the causes of each stage in the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting, and the subsequent stages.

There is a gap between the reasons for the decision and the making of the decision. There is a gap between the decision and the onset of the action, and for any extended action

The gap, as I have described it, is a feature of our conscious, voluntary activities. At each stage, the conscious states are not experienced as sufficient to compel the next conscious state. There is thus only one continuous experience of the gap, but we can divide it into three different sorts of manifestations, as I did above. The gap is between one conscious state and the next, not between conscious states and bodily movements or between physical stimuli and conscious states.

This experience of free will is very compelling, and even those of us who think it is an illusion find that we cannot in practice act on the presupposition that it is an illusion. On the contrary, we have to act on the presupposition of freedom.

The conscious experiences of the gap give us the conviction of human freedom.

A basic feature of our relation to the world is that we find the world causally ordered. Natural phenomena in the world have causal explanations, and those causal explanations state causally sufficient conditions. Customarily, in philosophy, we put this point by saying that that every event has a cause

An interesting change occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the most fundamental level of physics, nature turns out not to be in that way deterministic. We have come to accept at a quantum mechanical level explanations that are not deterministic. However, so far quantum indeterminism gives us no help with the free will problem, because that indeterminism introduces randomness into the basic structure of the universe, and the hypothesis that some of our acts occur freely is not at all the same as the hypothesis that some of our acts occur at random.

Without the conscious experience of the gap, that is, without the conscious experience of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will. We have the conviction of our own free will because of certain features of our consciousness.

the psychological experience of freedom so compelling that it would be absolutely astounding if it turned out that at the psychological level it was a massive illusion, that all of our behavior was psychologically compulsive.

According to the definitions of these terms that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible. The thesis of determinism asserts that all actions are preceded by sufficient causal conditions that determine them. The thesis of free will asserts that some actions are not preceded by sufficient causal conditions. Free will so defined is the negation of determinism.

some of the most worrisome questions about how we as human beings fit into the rest of the universe. Our conception of ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall self-conception.

Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules in directions that they were not otherwise going to move. So it really does look as if everything we know about physics forces us to some form of denial of human freedom.

if there is any fact of experience that we are all familiar with, it's the simple fact that our own choices, decisions, reasonings, and cogitations seem to make a difference to our actual behaviour. There are all sorts of experiences that we have in life where it seems just a fact of our experience that though we did one thing, we feel we know perfectly well that we could have done something else.

it is just a plain empirical fact about our behaviour that it isn't predictable in the way that the behaviour of objects rolling down an inclined plane is predictable. And the reason it isn't predictable in that way is that we could often have done otherwise than we in fact did. Human freedom is just a fact of experience.

if on the other hand he freely acts, if he acts, as we say, of his own free will, then his behaviour is free. Of course it is also completely determined, since every aspect of his behaviour is determined by the physical forces operating on the particles that compose his body, as they operate on all of the bodies in the universe. So, free behaviour exists, but it is just a small corner of the determined world – it is that corner of determined human behaviour where certain kinds of force and compulsion are absent.

The problem about the freedom of the will is not about whether or not there are inner psychological reasons that cause us to do things as well as external physical causes and inner compulsions. Rather, it is about whether or not the causes of our behaviour, whatever they are, are sufficient to determine the behaviour so that things have to happen the way they do happen.

I said that we have a conviction of our own free will simply based on the facts of human experience. But how reliable are those experiences? As I mentioned earlier, the typical case, often described by philosophers, which inclines us to believe in our own free will is a case where we confront a bunch of choices, reason about what is the best thing to do, make up our minds, and then do the thing we have decided to do.

But perhaps our belief that such experiences support the doctrine of human freedom is illusory.

Now the interest of these cases is that the patient always gives some more or less adequate reason for doing what he does. That is, he seems to himself to be behaving freely. We, on the other hand, have good reasons to believe that his behaviour isn't free at all, that the reasons he gives for his apparent decision to crawl around on the floor are irrelevant, that his behaviour was determined in advance, that in fact he is in the grip of a post-hypnotic suggestion.

'Is all human behaviour like that?' Is all human behaviour like the man operating under a post-hypnotic suggestion?

The thesis of psychological determinism is that prior psychological causes determine all of our behaviour in the way that they determine the behaviour of the hypnosis subject or the heroin addict. On this view, all behaviour, in one way or another, is psychologically compulsive. But the available evidence suggests that such a thesis is false. We do indeed normally act on the basis of our intentional states — our beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, etc. — and in that sense our mental states function causally. But this form of cause and effect is not deterministic. We might have had exactly those mental states and still not have done what we did. As far as psychological causes are concerned, we could have done otherwise. Instances of hypnosis and psychologically compulsive behaviour on the other hand are usually pathological and easily distinguishable from normal free action.

That is, if determinism were true, then the world would proceed pretty much the way it does proceed, the only difference being that certain of our beliefs about its proceedings would be false. Those beliefs are important to us because they have to do with the belief that we could have done things differently from the way we did in fact do them. And this belief in turn connects with beliefs about moral responsibility and our own nature as persons. 

if libertarianism, which is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes in our beliefs about the world. In order for us to have radical freedom, it looks as if we would have to postulate that inside each of us was a self that was capable of interfering with the causal order of nature. That is, it looks as if we would have to contain some entity that was capable of making molecules swerve from their paths. I don't know if such a view is even intelligible, but it's certainly not consistent with what we know about how the world works from physics.

Mental features are caused by, and realised in neurophysiological phenomena, as I discussed in the first chapter. But we get causation from the mind to the body, that is we get top-down causation over a passage of time; and we get top-down causation over time because the top level and the bottom level go together.

But the top-down causation works only because the mental events are grounded in the neurophysiology to start with. So, corresponding to the description of the causal relations that go from the top to the bottom, there is another description of the same series of events where the causal relations bounce entirely along the bottom, that is, they are entirely a matter of neurons and neuron firings at synapses

What is it about our experience that makes it impossible for us to abandon the belief in the freedom of the will? If freedom is an illusion, why is it an illusion we seem unable to abandon? The first thing to notice about our conception of human freedom is that it is essentially tied to consciousness.

The second point to note is that it is not just any state of the consciousness that gives us the conviction of human freedom. If life consisted entirely of the reception of passive perceptions, then it seems to me we would never so much as form the idea of human freedom.

The characteristic experience that gives us the conviction of human freedom, and it is an experience from which we are unable to strip away the conviction of freedom, is the experience of engaging in voluntary, intentional human actions.

certain bodily movements occur, and that they occur as caused by that very intention in action. It is this experience which is the foundation stone of our belief in the freedom of the will.

the difference between the experience of perceiving and the experience of acting is that in perceiving one has the sense: 'This is happening to me,' and in acting one has the sense: 'I am making this happen.' But the sense that 'I am making this happen' carries with it the sense that 'I could be doing something else'. In normal behaviour, each thing we do carries the conviction, valid or invalid, that we could be doing something else right here and now, that is, all other conditions remaining the same. This, I submit, is the source of our unshakable conviction of our own free will.

try to imagine that a portion of your life was like the Penfield experiments on a grand scale. Instead of walking across the room you simply find that your body is moving across the room; instead of speaking you simply hear and feel words coming out of your mouth. Imagine your experiences are those of a purely passive but conscious puppet and you will have imagined away the experience of freedom. But in the typical case of intentional action, there is no way we can carve off the experience of freedom. It is an essential part of the experience of acting.

But we can't similarly give up the conviction of freedom because that conviction is built into every normal, conscious intentional action. And we use this conviction in identifying and explaining actions. This sense of freedom is not just a feature of deliberation, but is part of any action, whether premeditated or spontaneous. The point has nothing essentially to do with deliberation; deliberation is simply a special case.

In fact we can't act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system. there is a sense of 'could have', in which there were a range of choices available to me, and in that sense there were a lot of things I could have done, all other things being equal, which I did not do. Similarly, because the psychological factors operating on me do not always, or even in general, compel me to behave in a particular fashion, I often, psychologically speaking, could have done something different from what I did in fact do.

for reasons I don't really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour. For that reason, I believe, neither this discussion nor any other will ever convince us that our behaviour is unfree.

It is tempting to think that just as we have discovered that large portions of common sense do not adequately represent how the world really works, so we might discover that our conception of ourselves and our behaviour is entirely false. But there are limits on this possibility. The distinction between reality and appearance cannot apply to the very existence of consciousness. For if it seems to me that I'm conscious, I am conscious. We could discover all kinds of startling things about ourselves and our behaviour; but we cannot discover that we do not have minds, that they do not contain conscious, subjective, intentionalistic mental states; nor could we discover that we do not at least try to engage in voluntary, free, intentional actions.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/searle/