Cito di Pense wrote:Tse is at least making reference to results from physics that are relevant and meaningful. Back in 2013, Tse wrote:

I do not think agency or consciousness collapse the wave function. Here are two relevant paragraphs from my book:

A veritable cottage industry has emerged among physicists who
have suggested that mental events somehow follow from quantum domain entanglement and nonlocality (e.g., Hameroff, 2001; Penrose, 1989, 1994) or electron tunneling (Walker, 2001; cf. Macgregor, 2006). Such claims are improbable (Tegmark, 2000; Grush & Churchland, 1995: but see Penrose
& Hameroff, 1995, for a rebuttal) and are not needed to account for mental causation. In contrast, criterial detectors, such as receptors or neurons, can operate in the domain of ordinary temperatures where the kind of coherence that would be necessary to realize entanglement would be made incoherent (Koch & Hepp, 2006). There is no need to invoke quantum nonlocality, superposition, entanglement, coherence, tunneling, quantum gravity, or any new forces to understand informational causal chains in the brain. Criteria can be realized in the input–output mechanisms of relatively large scale, high-temperature entities, such as receptors or neurons, in the absence of nonlocality effects. What is needed, however, is some degree of noise in the system that arises from amplified microscopic fluctuations that manifest themselves as randomness concerning the timing of EPSPs and IPSPs and therefore neural dynamics. Because of such noise at the synapse and within neurons themselves, there is no guarantee that identical presynaptic input will lead to identical postsynaptic output, even if time could be “rewound” and initial conditions were truly identical. But noise could also be introduced by external factors, such as, say, noise in perceptual inputs, or cellular damage due to free radicals or cosmic rays, or many other possible causes that have nothing to do with nonlocal quantum level effects. While I argue that noise can be harnessed for the purposes of generating novel solutions using criterial causality, this is a far cry from notions that nonlocal quantum-level effects are in some mysterious way responsible for mental events. It is improbable that any of the strange, nonlocal quantum coherence effects can have any influence on how neurons behave, or how consciousness or information is realized in neural events. The brain is, simply put, too “warm” to support this kind of quantum-domain coherence, and synapses are too wide to support electron tunneling. Just because some quantum effects are mysterious and
the physical realization of mental phenomena is also mysterious does not mean they are related. In short, I doubt that quantum-domain effects— beyond the variability in neural dynamics introduced by amplification of microscopic fluctuations—are required to account for how information is processed by neurons.

Some physicists and philosophers have argued that quantum indeterminism permits a gap in physical causal chains that can be exploited by consciousness to bias which possibilities become real (cf., e.g., Hodgson, 1993; Penrose, 1989, 1994; Stapp, 2004). The view developed here is unlike such views because consciousness, in the sense of experience, is not seen to play a necessary role in determining which possibility is actualized. Rather, consciousness, and the entertainment of possible scenarios and courses of action in working memory, plays a role in changing the criteria for firing on neurons that might lead to future mental events. In other words, experience and online manipulation of representations in working memory allow the potentiation of future mental events and actions, not present ones.

http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/fl ... rview.html

[Comments section, reply at the bottom of the first page of comments]

So, it looks like Tse says that you you can get non-deterministic results where some people look under all sorts of rocks for quantum weirdness. That gets you as far as shedding a full commitment to determinism, but probably doesn't take you all the way to where you want to go with freedom and autonomy, although for most people will admit their brains are their own to do with as they please within limits imposed by all that noise and commotion.

In short, I doubt that quantum-domain effects— beyond the variability in neural dynamics introduced by amplification of microscopic fluctuations—are required to account for how information is processed by neurons.

John Platko wrote:I wonder if Tse, or anyone else, has worked out exactly how these "quantum domain effects" play a role in neural dynamics.

archibald wrote:'Want to go' might be the operative function. I would not be surprised if a big part of these guys' (and gals') motivation is to find real true free will. I should know, it's arguably my motivation too. It might be a little like looking for fairy dust.

And what they seem to end up saying is, look, I've found some dust! And I feel like saying, 'why were you even looking for fairy dust? Why don't you just get back to neuroscience that is NOT about looking for fairy dust or any kind of dust? Why can't you just do neuroscience and stop doing articles entitled ' Free Will Unleashed'?'

Unkind, I know.

John Platko wrote:Is Cito gas lightning me?

GrahamH wrote:

John Platko wrote:

What exactly do you think is wrong with his argument?

Tse wants to talk about "mental causation" but only refers to neural interactions so he fails to get to mental causation.

He only has neural causation and is stuck on the mind body problem. If your thoughts are the result of neural processes your thoughts themselves are not causal.

He needs to make a bridge there. He already discounted one bridge, that the neurons compute the mental states, since he rejects computational theories of mind. Where is he going to go?

The his version of free will misses some of the key features. It's not will as generative and willful. The moves are random but filtered. This is like evolution by natural selection in a sense.

Next he says there is conscious creation of criteria, but choosing criteria is simply regression. How are the criteria chosen? By some prior criteria that were chosen...? So he has gone nowhere.

We now just ask how can his choice of criteria really be free?

John Platko wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

John Platko wrote:

What exactly do you think is wrong with his argument?

Tse wants to talk about "mental causation" but only refers to neural interactions so he fails to get to mental causation.

He talks about mental causation and conscious volition.

He only has neural causation and is stuck on the mind body problem. If your thoughts are the result of neural processes your thoughts themselves are not causal.

How do you imagine your thoughts not to be the result of neural processes?

John Platko wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
Next he says there is conscious creation of criteria, but choosing criteria is simply regression. How are the criteria chosen? By some prior criteria that were chosen...? So he has gone nowhere.

He explains how at ever stage of the chain, random fulfilment of the criteria is what breaks the chain while preserving the will.

John Platko wrote:
For a given choice, the criteria are not free - they were fixed at when a free will choice set them up.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:When I walk in the store with conscious volition that's intentional.

Well you could certainly use the words 'volition' and 'intentional', but ok, how is it a freely-willed intention or volition?

Because don't forget, that part is what is being implied here.

I agree that I can experience what I describe as conscious intentions, but I don't freely-will them to occur, do I?

"I intentionally set up some criteria"
Really? How do you manage that? The setting of the criteria I mean.

John Platko wrote:
You look at the selections and think: vanilia - , shitsucker chocolate , cherry Garcia .

And some are in, and some are out (those are all individual free will choices but ...), and different probability weights are set, and a bit of brownian motion at some synaptic junctions and you find yourself licking cherry Garcia. I think that's what Tse is saying.

John Platko wrote:For the free will choice of which ice cream to choose the intentional part is not a current free willed choice. It is a past free willed choice. For choosing the ice cream the intention is setting up the criteria for selection.

John Platko wrote:If your current intention is part of a past free will choice you do.

John Platko wrote:You look at the selections and think: vanilia - , shitsucker chocolate , cherry Garcia .

And some are in, and some are out (those are all individual free will choices but ...), and different probability weights are set, and a bit of brownian motion at some synaptic junctions and you find yourself licking cherry Garcia. I think that's what Tse is saying.

archibald wrote:I'm going to give you a hint that might save us from 10 pages of fudge. You can't explain it. No one can or ever has. Yet. That's not a reflection of any shortcomings on your behalf or on the part of any of the people you've cited.

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:I'm going to give you a hint that might save us from 10 pages of fudge. You can't explain it. No one can or ever has. Yet. That's not a reflection of any shortcomings on your behalf or on the part of any of the people you've cited.

I do find some shortcoming in some of the things Tse said. I think the questioners at the end of his long lecture at BU called him out rather nicely. The woman who said that one could model his mechanism for free will on a computer knew what she was talking about and I don't think Tse could understand why she said that. And his explanation of how computers work serially and why therefore they couldn't model neural behavior was

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:I'm going to give you a hint that might save us from 10 pages of fudge. You can't explain it. No one can or ever has. Yet. That's not a reflection of any shortcomings on your behalf or on the part of any of the people you've cited.

I do find some shortcoming in some of the things Tse said. I think the questioners at the end of his long lecture at BU called him out rather nicely. The woman who said that one could model his mechanism for free will on a computer knew what she was talking about and I don't think Tse could understand why she said that. And his explanation of how computers work serially and why therefore they couldn't model neural behavior was

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:I wonder if Tse, or anyone else, has worked out exactly how these "quantum domain effects" play a role in neural dynamics.

No, not exactly. Why do you think anyone should be able to do that? Physics isn't exact, but it's the most exact stuff we have, not that you don't know this. In this case, Tse refers to quantum domain effects at the level of thermal noise, rather than spewing about quantum tunneling or what-have-you. Not that you have much.

Tse is pretty clear, I think, about why you needn't expect an exact recurrence on some hypothetical rewind, because even thermal noise has to deal with the probabilistic evolution of wave functions that should, if it were possible, sketch the evolution of a macroscopic system like a single neuron.

Energy barriers are not so high that tunneling is required. You do need that for nuclear fusion reactors like the cores of stars, but we're in a different thermal regime, here.

GrahamH wrote:

John Platko wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
Next he says there is conscious creation of criteria, but choosing criteria is simply regression. How are the criteria chosen? By some prior criteria that were chosen...? So he has gone nowhere.

He explains how at ever stage of the chain, random fulfilment of the criteria is what breaks the chain while preserving the will.

Random noise fulfils previously defined criteria. How were those criteria decided? By random noise that fulfilled previous criteria and so on in an indefinite regress. So his criteria depend on the past,

not his will,

not his conscious thoughts. Not mental causation.

It's as much free will as is the course of a river as it follows the lie of the land to carve a channel. Some 'random' variation and pre-set criteria that track back to initial conditions.

Cito di Pense wrote:Perhaps it's worth thinking about the contrast between letting the (stochastically-) behaving molecules in thermal motion produce something that we will later call 'intention' and some woo-level Intention (upper case!) that guides the molecules in their courses. ...

John Platko wrote:
It's as much free will as is the course of a river as it follows the lie of the land to carve a channel. Some 'random' variation and pre-set criteria that track back to initial conditions.

John Platko wrote:
But only in a criterial causal way.