Peter Tse - How Free Will Probes Mind and Consciousness

Can free will reveal the nature of mental states? Free will seems so obvious, yet defies physical explanation. That’s the reason why free will can be a tool to explore the mind. Free will probes consciousness by examining what it means to pick, choose, select, decide in the closed physical system of the world. But is ‘free will’ just a trick of the brain?

Peter Ulric Tse is a cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College. He directs the NSF EPSCoR Attention Consortium.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[pazitor]

Finally, something reasonable, observable, testable and intuitively spot on, needing no magic or unobserved factors/forces. I totally agree with his take on qualia, which I further attribute to the two-way nature of the peripheral nervous system, which not only provides vibrant experience but allows for its playback using memory (extending to the physical imagination of potential experiences). Note that his take is very friendly to evolutionary biology, and implies consciousness of a sort in animals.

[ResmithSR]

My cat pays attention to me when I get her food ready. Amazing!!!

[mohdnorzaihar]

The mathematics behind the relationship between human and god @Jeffrey Lang..we are here to grow and learning about god

[simonhibbs]

Computers don't have to manage attention. They can simultaneously track hundreds of thousands of objects in three dimensions, each with different trajectories and speeds, continuously in real time. It's just not a problem for them. So it may be that consciousness evolved for us to help manage the inherent limitations of our neural network based cognitive architecture.

[edwardtutman]

Great job, Peter! Explaining to linear thinkers the non-linear consciousness is an impossible task...

[RuneRelic]

Basically arguing about the outside world sensory/motor system which I call secondary awareness,
can not exist without first aguing about the internal sensory/motor system which I call primary awareness.
But here we get into the issue of the relationship between the subcosconsious and conscious mind as well as the autonomous system under control of that subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is the at best the second layer of the onion.

[jamesmckenzie]

I recently learned of Capgras syndrome. It was suggested that in forming memories, processing by the emotional part of the brain is an essential part in that if we do not have a 'feeling' for what a thing is, we believe it is a fake. Wouldn't zombies suffer from this delusion? It suggests to me that the emotional aspect is large in what consciousness is. A lot of it may simply be us having feelings about everything we experience. Thanks.

[feltonhamilton]

Consciousness is the internal activity always receiving information through vibrations, and awareness is external activities being organized into common sense for different input output information by the body of five senses. My understanding of all living things are not in control because everything is set in order and we are living inside of a design maze controlled by something through light and vibrations.

[REDPUMPERNICKEL]

6:03
Experience is very different from reactivity.
A billiard ball does not 'experience' the impact of another.
A billiard ball simply reacts to the impact and
it does not and cannot remember the event.

Experience, on the other hand,
is the manifestation of content and events
in the conscious field of a conscious self and
the committing of that content to memory where,
in conjunction with subsequent thinking,
become roughly what is meant by 'the lessons of experience'.
Surely?

[bn]

We are over thinking and making things complicated for no reason.
The living are conscious they will die but as for the dead they have no consciousness at all.

[missh]

What good is maths if it cant do braile? If i deleted the background of a boat on water. No sky, island, birds, houses etc. And the water and boat was the only thing in the picture. Id want the blanked out bits to at least hint that the object mass is a boat and the object mass is water. One is not the same mass qualities as the other.

[smartarsetube]

Sadly this argument for free will totally ignores the philosophical and physical problem of free will that goes back at least to Hume. We may be able to choose to divert our attention to whatever we will, but there is no explanation here for being able to will what we will. That brings us back to the will as some duality that exerts downward causation, possibly from influencing quantum processes by consciousness, or we are stuck with the billiard ball pre-determinism of classical physics. Free will is closely tied to consciousness, and that is still a hard problem for both philosophy and science.

[tomazflegar]

Is attentional tracking inside of our awareness or not? And if it is, then consciousness is something different of conscious experience.

[spacebear]

Maybe. Just maybe we can learn something from the mystery of dark matter when it comes to consciousness (when that mystery one day resolves through some means - maybe by many important future findings).

"Something" is assumed to exist because it makes visible and highly important changes that we can measure (indirect measurement). But what that "something" REALLY is remains a mystery both when it comes to dark matter and consciousness.

It's absolutely fascinating that we don't have any superior ideas or theories about this. Because it's almost like the long long time before we discovered such a thing as DNA. IF our DNA at least partially has the blueprint for our consciousness... where is the other part of that blueprint located? Because we can try all day long to inject "a little happiness" or "a happy thought" OR "a complex thought" in our brain through a direct line of serotonin (and/or similar ways) but we already know that it's not THAT simple. Then... how complex is it really? Well. It seems to be at least as complex as solving the dark matter problem. That's for sure. Maybe it's 10 times more difficult to solve.

EDIT: I find the very ending lines of Peter Tse very interesting.

[Corteum]

Kuhn: "free will, which is a philosophical concept, now being studied by neuro-"

It's also a practical application or capacity.... one that can be applied moment to moment in various ways.

[willrose]

Anybody else annoyed by the blur at the opening? I learned a new word. Volition. Free will defined as moving according to its limits. Ex. Fish in water. Free will is evolving to have an omnipresent ability.

[samc]

If consciousness is the domain of percepts, and volition just ranks those percepts according to experiential percepts informed by qualia, all you are really discussing is a deterministic model of perception, slave to causation. However the perceptive will understand in order to be slave to causation one would need to be separate from it, which one however never is.

[brianlebreton]

Although this interview did help to categorize some concepts involving consciousness, I feel like it didn’t make any revelations about consciousness, feelings or experience. I think that science will one day accept that the best it can do is to map out what happens, where, what, when and how in the brain, when we experience conscious, feelings, choosing, deliberating, etc. But establishing all the parameters still doesn’t fully capture the fundamental sense of being or existing. The “I am” I believe is the seed of life that is given and that everything else is built upon it. All of our bipolar concepts and rainbow concepts applied to the concept of existence:non-existence are not being studied or debated. To me, “closer to truth” should also be “closer to existence”. Descartes got it down to I think therefore I am relying on our innate sense of rationality, but still never defined the I am. Can anything that truly exists, cease to exist? We’ve agreed that energy cannot be created or destroyed? Is the I am the fundamental or underlying energy that is always conserved? So many questions that science may tackle and never reveal. Is science fundamental or emergent?

[Think__Yourself]

i thought the explanation of the intentional tracking as an absent feature in zombies was lackluster. what proof does he have that zombies don't exist or couldn't exist in this way? it seems likely that computer s will develop the capacity to track and have an "awareness" based on thresholds, so why is he so sure that we are so much different?

[-PureRogue]

How is it voluntary attention, there are so many examples where it does not apply.