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I exercise free will, like a DOG!  But no, like others are saying the whole topic of free will is a thorny philosophical question further complicated by our (still incomplete) understanding of the brain and underlying mechanics thereof. There's a reason a lot of this stuff comes up in sci-fi, especially the genre-defining stuff focused on robots (beings that act like humans but don't have free will) and aliens (creatures that don't act like humans but do have free will, who may or may not recognize that humans have free will). In terms of psychology, there are phases of human mental development with associated behaviors and brain development checkpoints that can serve as a useful model for things like developmental disabilities, but they are far from a full accounting of the possible factors. If you come at it from a neurobiology perspective, you can pinpoint the exact electrochemical processes that lead to thoughts and decisions, and since we don't have any examples of thoughts without these associated processes it's often assumed that all conscious thought can be accounted for by these processes. In fact, due to the relative processing speed, our reasoning for why we did something almost always comes after doing it, even for actions that aren't "reflexive" (in terms of coming from the brain stem or cerebellum), which implies that we don't do things based on logic or reason, but purely based on what paths we have appropriately strengthened. When I was in high school my fascination with these sorts of processes drove me into biology as a field, even though I had no particular love for lab work. In terms of the mechanism for why you pick "heads" or "tails" when calling a coin in the air, or why you associate the word "grandma" with "pie", "wolf", or "cooking" but not "antacid", "chameleon", or "spelunking", the nuts and bolts of it mostly comes down to the thickness of myelin on various neurons (basically insulation on a wire that ensures the current makes it from one end to the other), the positions of neurons with respect to one another, and the concentration of various ions and other neurochemicals at the junctions between them (which allow an electric current to be carried by opening and closing selective ion channels). Arguably, the gambler's fallacy (if it flipped heads the last 3 times it definitely won't flip heads again) could be partially attributed to this sort of thing, because once a neuron passes a signal it takes time before the charge differential can build up again (through the gradual movement of ions back to their pre-excited concentrations), perhaps making us less likely to pass a signal through the same series of neurons twice in a row. In some ways, you have the time-travel paradox issue here as well, where whatever action we CHOOSE to take, even if we take it deliberately in opposition to our usual actions, is really the action we were GOING to take all along. Edit: There's actually a wikipedia page with some neat graphs that helps illustrate this, if this is a direction people want to take this conversation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will The EEG level on the topmost graph is illustrating the difference in charge on either side of a neuron's membrane - essentially, one-way receptors open up moving potassium, sodium, and other ions from one side to the other, creating a electrical differential due to the positive and negative charge inherent to the particles, then a floodgate opens at the peak and the rush of particles across the non-selective channel pushes the next neuron down the line towards its own peak, and so on. There's also a lot of things that have good models in CS as Cabbages and Kings alludes to on the previous page. One of the last classes I took to finish my degree was an AI class, and most workable AI models we have accomplish their goals by creating a facsimile of human neural process using virtual neurons. Specifically, there's a boatload of research on visual pattern recognition because it is both practical to test and practical to use. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 00:57
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