Free will is not an illusion | Denis Noble

The age-old debate on free will has resurfaced with new fervor. With many contending it's merely an illusion, distinguished biologist Denis Noble presents a revolutionary perspective, arguing our very bodies may be the compass to our autonomy.

Denis Noble stands as a beacon in the realm of physiology. As one of the trailblazers of Systems Biology, and Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, Noble's profound insights originate from his groundbreaking work, most notably his development of the first substantial mathematical model of the heart's mechanisms in 1960.

[LeeGee]

Just as we were getting to the meat, I learnt that free videos are an illusion.

[FM-lovv]

The talk was amazing while it lasted. It's bad practice and even disrespectful to viewers to make us watch/listen for 15 min and then not get the payoff. The effect was not of a cliffhanger, but rather of a 'catch', and the emotions associated with this experience are likely not conducive to converting customers. Please do tell us about subscriptions for exclusive content, but if you share something, please give us a dish we can eat, then we can make our minds if we want the full banquet. Nevertheless thank you for the quality of the ideas and calibre of the speaker.

[wattshumphrey]

I'm hoping that in the full talk he gets from "stochastic processes" to "free will" with some important intermediate step. A "free will" entirely dependent upon chance is not free, but random.

[Counterjoint]

The whole argument boils down to a misconception of what free will is. He seems to think free will is possible via any kind of nondeterminism. He thinks Brownian motion is the candidate but it only takes a few seconds of thought to realise that random processes can't explain how a conscious being is able to make a choice either. It's more than just indeterminacy that's required. Free will requires some kind of transcendental force that is able to willfully choose one outcome out of a number of different outcomes. Randomness implies the complete opposite. If he really wanted to appeal to uncertainty then i'm not sure why he didn't just invoke quantum uncertainty, which is based on fundamental and true randomness (this still wouldn't explain free will)

[kirillnovik]

A simple and effective argument. I really enjoyed it. But it's pretty cruel when they make you go to the website to buy a subscription to watch the full video.

[stephenlawrence]

Before arguing for free will one needs to be very clear about what it is. Most who don't think we have free will do think we make choices. The question is how could we have selected the options we did not select? Is it ultimately a matter of fortune, good or bad, which option we did select? If the answer to that is yes, then we don't have free will.

[jmdawlat]

Very respectfully, whatever was presented was not a coherent argument. Brownian motion, water properties, membrane physics, etc. are not disputed by anyone who either argues for or against free will. Yes. These can be arguments against the gene centric view of biology (an proponent of which is Dawkins), but has absolutely nothing to do with free will.

Even if stochastic motion is truly unpredictable and indeterministic, it does not follow that we humans are in control of that in our cells. Whether the fundamental biological processes are deterministic or not, they can not support free will in the way we experience it. Free will emerges as thoughts and intentions in our minds operating over time scales of several tens of milliseconds to seconds, which is much longer than the molecular chaos and fluctuations over the time scales of sub picoseconds to a few picoseconds.

The above is a well known argument, and is known by all those conversant on this topic. I am surprised that the speaker does not acknowledge that.

[alanmccarthy]

There are two big flaws with his argument. One, he argues that our bodies undergo brownian motion, which is stochastic and (he claims) random, and therefore we are not deterministic. But being non-deterministic doesn't conclude that we have free will. Randomness is not a panacea for determinism's dismantling of free will. (Also, as a side point, brownian motion isn't random... it IS deterministic, it's just there's an interesting effect in systems with large numbers of interacting elements whereby initial conditions predict future states no better than random chance for large N particles and/or after large t number of interactions...so they APPEAR random, though they are determinisitic)

The second major flaw in the argumentation is that free will is a perceived sense. It "feels" like we have free will, it "feels" like we are a being who controls our body. So even if he could somehow identify in his chemical analysis of our bodies that there were some non-deterministic, non-random component of decision making... perhaps some sort of soul, he would still need to demonstrate that this component really is causally linked to one's perceived sense of free will, before being able to conclude it's non-illusory.

[Nyghl]

"Free Will of the gaps" it is, then.

Stochasticity may pose a problem to pure determinism, at least on the assumption that we don't in future find out that there's a way to determine even those processes, but that doesn't at all mean that Free Will is therefore the case or that there's any compatibilist room for it whatsoever.

The fatal problem for Free Will is simply logical. To the extent that there's randomness, things are "free" but not "will", and to the extent that things can be determined, they might be "will" but not "free".

In other words: to the extent that there's randomness then "you" have no deterministic effect or control over any will, what causes it and/or what effects it has - so if there's will then it's hardly yours. And to the extent that things are deterministic, other factors led to your will in a chain that went back to before you even existed. Again, any will is hardly yours.

"Free Will" is simply a blindness/ignorance as to what randomness or causation formed "your" will. It's a simple mistake that put you under the impression that your will is free.

[The-Wide-Angle]

Stochastic events can not be the source of free will. It would make us only act randomly.

[monkerud]

there is no criteria distinguishing the content of experience in a false choice or a real choice, and so its two identical concepts in terms of the content of experience. that means that whatever you can possible mean by free will, it is compatible with determinism.

[sonarbangla]

Just like probability and determinism, free will is both free and 'not free'.

[MeHighB]

Superb intellectual structure. True and beautiful. Impartial. Thank you!

[Boris]

People will go to great lengths to keep believing in free will
In fact they're run by their emotions who are having a hard time to live without it
When you think about it we don't know where our thoughts and feelings come from
Free will is a feeling based on not knowing what is going to happen

[delavan]

The endocrine system largely drives our emotional states, energy levels, perceptions, drives, etc. So just in that one domain, one can see that we do not have free will. Same goes for the immense control that the deeper, older structures of the brain have on us. Moods, feelings, fears, etc. all have a far greater effect on our behavior than the upper levels of consciousness do. All our decisions have come about under the uncontrollable influence of our biology. So how can we say we have free will?

[Apebek]

From a philosophical point of view.
Descartes said "I think therefor I am" and Socrates said "I know only one thing and that is that I know nothing". Basically they are saying the same thing; That the one thing you are 100% sure of is that you have a conscious experience. Everything else (the physical world) could be a a dream. The only thing we do is process information but how can we be sure of where that information comes from?

If there is no consciousness then the physical universe has nothing to project onto. It is only the mind that differentiates within a clump of matter and in that way creates different numbers. Without it the universe would be just one thing (absolute nothingness). There would be no space and time to measure and no person that can assume it exists.

To me it is more plausible that consciousness is more real then objective reality and that it is transcendental. It is superior because all physical matter can be grasped into an idea but not every idea can be manifested into physical reality.

I believe the question of consciousness and free will can never be answered through modern science, because science reduces everything to data. We can measure brain activity, but not conscious experience.

[mpaczkow]

I am often disappointed that people assume that we all have the same definition of terms like “free will”. It would seem to make sense to first start an argument with a definition. What Noble seems to be describing is survival mechanism in living things and not free will but they may be equivalent if he defined it this way. Even the simplest organisms show decision processes based on survival and this seems to be the core programming of living things - from single cell organisms to mammals. The model of the cell that we are taught in school is not accurate and still not resolved since there are probably more proteins integrated in the cell wall than is taught. Each protein has a function, just like a subroutine in a computer programme. Machine learning is a thing - we know how to do this - why can’t a biologicals composed of “chemical reactors” do the same thing by building a large number of variants that can act in the same way? It is determinism based on core programming and machine learning that we interpret as free will.

[shrimpytcoon]

Denis Noble is a Godfather of systems biology

[tom-kzpb]

Before you declare whether "free will" is an illusion or not, you should first rigorously define what you really even mean by "free will". In what sense are you "free" of the internal biological mechanisms of your own brain? Even if that mechanism is not perfectly deterministic or predictable, how does introducing an element of random chance into the decision-making process constitute "freedom"? Is a roulette wheel more "free" than an alarm clock? Your brain mechanism is partly like a wound-up clock, partly like a roulette wheel or weather vane. But it is a mechanism, all the same. There is no other "you" who "controls" it. You will basically make whatever decisions that you might, because some neural pathways will be more heavily reinforced than others, at the time of the decision.

The term "free will" is how people describe their lack of understanding of neural functioning.

[scotchhollow]

I don’t think we can ever objectively verify that the physical world even exists outside of our conscious experience. Even with measurements and tools. To say we don’t have free will based on a deterministic physical world can’t be 100% proven at the end of the day.