During the first month or so after my stroke, while my nervous system was busily rewiring itself, I experienced all sorts of transient proprioceptic illusions.
One of them amounted to the absence of the feeling of free will… I experienced my arm as doing things that seemed purposeful from the outside, but for which I was aware of no corresponding purpose.
For example, I ate breakfast one morning without experiencing control over my arm. It fed me, just like it always had, but I didn’t feel like I was in control of it.
To give you an idea of how odd this was: at one point my arm put down the food item it was holding to my mouth, and I lay there somewhat puzzled… why wasn’t my arm letting me finish it? Then it picked up a juice carton and brought it to my mouth, and I thought “Oh! It wants me to drink something… yeah, that makes sense.”
It was a creepy experience, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I could “take control” if I chose to… letting my arm feed me breakfast was a deliberate choice, I was curious about what would happen.
I think that’s what it feels like to not experience myself as having free will, which is I think close enough to your second question.
As for your first question… I think it would feel very much like the way I feel right now.
Yeah, that’s more or less how I interpreted it… not so much lag, precisely, as a failure to synchronize. There were lots of weird neural effects that turned up during that time that, on consideration, seemed to basically be timing/synchronization failures, whcih makese a lot of sense if various parts of my brain were changing the speed with which they did things as the brain damage healed and the swelling went down.
Of course, it’s one thing to know intellectually that my superficially coherent worldview is the result of careful stitching together of outputs from independent modules operating at different rates on different inputs; it’s quite another thing to actually experience that coherency breaking down.
It felt like you couldn’t control yourself, but which one of you (two) was really “yourself”? English usually refers to people and minds in the singular, but my mind feels more like a committee. Maybe the stroke drove more a wedge between the committee members than usual.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a “self,” but in pragmatic terms, everything involved in making decisions seemed to be more or less aligned and coordinating as well as it ever does… what was missing was that I didn’t have any awareness of it as coordinated.
In other words, it wasn’t like my arm was going off and doing stuff that I had no idea why it was doing; rather, it was doing exactly what I would have made it do in the first place… I just didn’t have any awareness of actually making it do so.
That said, the more extremely disjointed version does happen… google “alien hand syndrome.”
I’d say that you felt that you had free will, along with more severe problems expressing it than usual. I’m guessing that paranoid schizophrenics obeying voices telling them to do things is a better example of a feeling of not having free will.
I don’t think I ever had this confused concept of free will. That is thinking that the future of my actions is undetermined until I make a decision or that my actions are governed by anything other than normal physics never made any sense to me at all.
To me possessing a free will means being in principle capable of being the causal bottleneck of my decisions other than through pure chance.
Making a decision means caching the result of a mental calculation about whether to take a certain course of action (which in humans has the strong psychological consequence of affirming that result).
Being the causal bottleneck is much more difficult to define than I thought when I started this post, but it involves comparing what sort of change to me would result in a different decision to what sort of changes to the rest of the world would result in the same.
The only ways I could see not having a free will would be either not being able to make decisions at all, or not being able to make decisions unless under the influence of something else that is itself the causal bottleneck of the decision, and which is not part of me. I can’t see how the second could be the case without some sort of puppet master (and there has to be some reason against concluding that this puppet master is the real me), but it’s not obvious why being under the control of the puppet master would feel any different.
it’s not obvious why being under the control of the puppet master would feel any different.
This is essentially why I posed the question. Anyone who believes they do have free will or is disturbed by the idea that they don’t, ought to be able to say what (at least they think) would feel different without it.
I posit that if such a person tries to describe how they think “lack of free will” would feel, either they won’t be able to do it, or what they describe will be something obviously different from human experience (thereby implicitly redefining “free will” as something non-controversial).
I think Occam’s razor is reason enough to disbelieve the puppet master scenario. I’d readily admit that my idea of free will might be something entirely non-controversial. And i don’t have any problem with the idea that some currently existing machines might already have free will according to my definition (and for others the puppet master scenario is essentially true).
If my actions were not correlated to my desires and my earlier resolutions, this would feel like not having free will. Weak correlation would feel like diminished free will.
Weak correlation sounds like akrasia. In this interpretation of free will, the difference between wanting and liking might then say that 100% free will is impossible.
Here is an example of what I am talking about that happened yesterday. I was staying with friends, and in the morning I went to take a shower. So I gathered the clothes I would put on afterwards, and my towel. But when I got into bathroom, I found that instead of the towel, I had my sweater which had been on the shelf above where the towel was hanging, which I apparently grabbed instead. This felt like not having free will.
It sounds like you trusted the judgment of your earlier self (or a subconscious subroutine) to have grabbed the right item, but there was a glitch. This reminds me of those dreams where it’s a given that “you” have already made a major decision in the dream, but it happened in the past (before you entered the dream world) so you had no control over it. That’s one terrible feeling, if the decision was a bad one.
The only consistent way I can think of existing in a form without free will would be as a “prisoner” in my body: a mind that is capable of thinking and learning from the information presented to it by the senses, but unable to alter it in any way, the arms and body moving without the consent of the conscious mind.
I was thinking more along the lines of a P-zombie, but with the consciousness intact and unable to influence the zombie’s actions, disconnected from it somehow.
Nice post, and great method.
On free will, I’d like to pose a question to anyone interested: What do you think it would feel like not to have free will?
(Or, what do you think it would feel like to not think you have free will?)
During the first month or so after my stroke, while my nervous system was busily rewiring itself, I experienced all sorts of transient proprioceptic illusions.
One of them amounted to the absence of the feeling of free will… I experienced my arm as doing things that seemed purposeful from the outside, but for which I was aware of no corresponding purpose.
For example, I ate breakfast one morning without experiencing control over my arm. It fed me, just like it always had, but I didn’t feel like I was in control of it.
To give you an idea of how odd this was: at one point my arm put down the food item it was holding to my mouth, and I lay there somewhat puzzled… why wasn’t my arm letting me finish it? Then it picked up a juice carton and brought it to my mouth, and I thought “Oh! It wants me to drink something… yeah, that makes sense.”
It was a creepy experience, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I could “take control” if I chose to… letting my arm feed me breakfast was a deliberate choice, I was curious about what would happen.
I think that’s what it feels like to not experience myself as having free will, which is I think close enough to your second question.
As for your first question… I think it would feel very much like the way I feel right now.
Sounds to me like the left-brain interpreter experiencing lag.
Yeah, that’s more or less how I interpreted it… not so much lag, precisely, as a failure to synchronize. There were lots of weird neural effects that turned up during that time that, on consideration, seemed to basically be timing/synchronization failures, whcih makese a lot of sense if various parts of my brain were changing the speed with which they did things as the brain damage healed and the swelling went down.
Of course, it’s one thing to know intellectually that my superficially coherent worldview is the result of careful stitching together of outputs from independent modules operating at different rates on different inputs; it’s quite another thing to actually experience that coherency breaking down.
That is creepy as hell.
Heh. You’re telling me? ;-)
Fascinating!
It felt like you couldn’t control yourself, but which one of you (two) was really “yourself”? English usually refers to people and minds in the singular, but my mind feels more like a committee. Maybe the stroke drove more a wedge between the committee members than usual.
In this particular case, I don’t think so.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a “self,” but in pragmatic terms, everything involved in making decisions seemed to be more or less aligned and coordinating as well as it ever does… what was missing was that I didn’t have any awareness of it as coordinated.
In other words, it wasn’t like my arm was going off and doing stuff that I had no idea why it was doing; rather, it was doing exactly what I would have made it do in the first place… I just didn’t have any awareness of actually making it do so.
That said, the more extremely disjointed version does happen… google “alien hand syndrome.”
I’d say that you felt that you had free will, along with more severe problems expressing it than usual. I’m guessing that paranoid schizophrenics obeying voices telling them to do things is a better example of a feeling of not having free will.
Not to mention ordinary people who happen to have guns pointed to their heads.
I don’t think I ever had this confused concept of free will. That is thinking that the future of my actions is undetermined until I make a decision or that my actions are governed by anything other than normal physics never made any sense to me at all.
To me possessing a free will means being in principle capable of being the causal bottleneck of my decisions other than through pure chance.
Making a decision means caching the result of a mental calculation about whether to take a certain course of action (which in humans has the strong psychological consequence of affirming that result).
Being the causal bottleneck is much more difficult to define than I thought when I started this post, but it involves comparing what sort of change to me would result in a different decision to what sort of changes to the rest of the world would result in the same.
The only ways I could see not having a free will would be either not being able to make decisions at all, or not being able to make decisions unless under the influence of something else that is itself the causal bottleneck of the decision, and which is not part of me. I can’t see how the second could be the case without some sort of puppet master (and there has to be some reason against concluding that this puppet master is the real me), but it’s not obvious why being under the control of the puppet master would feel any different.
This is essentially why I posed the question. Anyone who believes they do have free will or is disturbed by the idea that they don’t, ought to be able to say what (at least they think) would feel different without it.
I posit that if such a person tries to describe how they think “lack of free will” would feel, either they won’t be able to do it, or what they describe will be something obviously different from human experience (thereby implicitly redefining “free will” as something non-controversial).
I think Occam’s razor is reason enough to disbelieve the puppet master scenario. I’d readily admit that my idea of free will might be something entirely non-controversial. And i don’t have any problem with the idea that some currently existing machines might already have free will according to my definition (and for others the puppet master scenario is essentially true).
Me too. Didn’t mean to imply that I disagreed with your analysis.
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If my actions were not correlated to my desires and my earlier resolutions, this would feel like not having free will. Weak correlation would feel like diminished free will.
Weak correlation sounds like akrasia. In this interpretation of free will, the difference between wanting and liking might then say that 100% free will is impossible.
Here is an example of what I am talking about that happened yesterday. I was staying with friends, and in the morning I went to take a shower. So I gathered the clothes I would put on afterwards, and my towel. But when I got into bathroom, I found that instead of the towel, I had my sweater which had been on the shelf above where the towel was hanging, which I apparently grabbed instead. This felt like not having free will.
It sounds like you trusted the judgment of your earlier self (or a subconscious subroutine) to have grabbed the right item, but there was a glitch. This reminds me of those dreams where it’s a given that “you” have already made a major decision in the dream, but it happened in the past (before you entered the dream world) so you had no control over it. That’s one terrible feeling, if the decision was a bad one.
The only consistent way I can think of existing in a form without free will would be as a “prisoner” in my body: a mind that is capable of thinking and learning from the information presented to it by the senses, but unable to alter it in any way, the arms and body moving without the consent of the conscious mind.
Since you’re not stricken with this inability, you obviously have free will as you’re interpreting it (but that result wouldn’t be controversial).
Obviously?
I was thinking more along the lines of a P-zombie, but with the consciousness intact and unable to influence the zombie’s actions, disconnected from it somehow.