5 ms·

No one thinks that computers have free will. Not yet anyway. The idea that the conscious mind isn't the one making decisions seems to have implications for free

No one thinks that computers have free will. Not yet anyway. The idea that the conscious mind isn't the one making decisions seems to have implications for free will. Can you explain why it's misunderstanding of the concept?

xfs 8y ago
A radical implication is then to locate free will in the unconscious. The true acts of freedom are choices made unaware. The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made.
- naasking 8y ago
  > The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made. A point made in the Matrix movies: you're not here to make a choice, you've already made it. You're here to understand why you've made that choice. I think that's probably a pretty good analogy of how consciousness operates.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  It wouldn't necessarily have to push it to the unconscious. Free will could be an infrequently-exercised veto power. Which might not even be an unreasonable way to look at it. Many people make a contrast between habit and will. There already seems to be a common idea that much of the time, people do things the way they always have, and it is only at certain key moments that the will asserts itself and changes course.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I think the idea in dispute is that the area scientists had called unconscious isn't just exclusively unconscious, but also takes part in conscious thought.
booleandilemma 8y ago
I guess the idea that my conscious mind isn’t actually making decisions isn’t so bad, as long as the decisions are coming from somewhere in me. Then again, I may be biased.
- sorokod 8y ago
  An interesting question then is in what way unconscious you is different from unconscious me.
fsloth 8y ago
Brain has much more unconscious processing than conscious. Some of that processing deals with complex high level topics. Once the processing is done the result "pops" into conscious mind. It does not mean the conscious mind does not have free will, rather, that it works as an editor for a bunch of autonomous agents running in the background. Some of the feedback from those agents is bullshit and we are taught to fight against those impulses.
- naasking 8y ago
  > It does not mean the conscious mind does not have free will, rather, that it works as an editor for a bunch of autonomous agents running in the background. I rather think of it as an integrator, in that, it collects and integrates the results of various subsystems into a coherent "rationale" for why you've made a choice, and that rationale is then stored in your memory as "my choice".
jules 8y ago
I find that the intuitive idea of free will doesn't make all that much sense anyway. Leave aside the discussion of whether people have free will in this universe, how would a universe in which people actually have what most people call free free will even work?
- pault 8y ago
  Assuming that "free will" doesn't include manipulating the laws of physics, pretty much like the one we live in? I can see where people are coming from when they say there is no such thing as free will, but it sounds like they are saying the no one has the ability to consciously override their impulses. I don't smash the skull of everyone that makes me angry, for example.
  - justanotherjoe 8y ago
    the danger is ascribing too much agency to a person's actions. We are all a product of circumstances. Instead of saying "You're lazy!", it's more productive to increase their living conditions.
    - naasking 8y ago
      I think your response often conflates two things: it's correct to classify a lazy person as lazy, but a diagnosis is not a treatment. For instance, diagnosing someone with a sprained muscle as being out of shape doesn't help get them in shape, and in fact, the immediate treatment is more rest until they're healed. So I think it's incorrect to say that people don't have agency, but it's equally incorrect to say that merely identifying that they have agency should suffice if such a person is making incorrect decisions. Sometimes it might, but not always.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - demiurgical 8y ago
    but why is bifurcation required? is the one stopping the impulses any different than the impulses engine? the reason you don't smash all of the skulls is as causal and determined as the impulses afaict. to me it seems that life is just sufficiently complex self contained units that are completely bound by deterministic laws. we have a sense of self referential capalbility which may give the illusion of free will but I'd say that it's not your decision to stop the impulses of smashing skulls rather it is the inescapable result of your unique determined state or rather process that your brain has been configure d for based on life experience and genes.
naasking 8y ago
> The idea that the conscious mind isn't the one making decisions seems to have implications for free will. Can you explain why it's misunderstanding of the concept? Because "you" are not just your conscious mind, you are your entire body and mind, including your unconscious; these are holistic and interdependent systems. The tendency to want to separate these is a common mistake reminiscent of an absurd mind-body dualism. "Free will" is making a choice according to what "you" want, not according to what your conscious mind thinks it wants.
- posterboy 8y ago
  conscious and unconscious have no discrete definitions. They are fuzzy concepts. Separation of those concepts would require an interface between them. Now you've got three states to your fuzzy system. At some level of granularity, the model might be accurate. But going one level above a single blob is already an achievement.
cgriswald 8y ago
If I decide to type the words "free will", I don't tell my fingers, "move to coordinates <x, y, z> and apply force vector F", I just type the words. I'm not really even conscious of typing the individual letters unless I slow down and think about it. That's because, through months of training followed by decades of use, I've trained my unconscious to type without having to consciously think about anything other than what to type (and even some of that I can fob off onto my unconscious). Does this imply it was not my choice to type "free will"? Would I be unable, through conscious effort, to learn how to type with a different keyboard layout? I can't think of a reason to suspect that we don't also train our decision-making processes the same way. (This is especially true for such trivial, inconsequential decisions as to which pattern to select in an experiment.) And I suspect we could train ourselves to always prefer a particular kind of pattern fairly easily through conscious effort. So even if you limit free will to consciousness, I am not sure how you can say anything specific about free will as a result of the study.
posterboy 8y ago
Computers are ideally non-deterministic, but due to NP-completeness, they can't predict their own results.
- tsimionescu 8y ago
  It's actually due to the undecidability results that there can't be a general algorithm to predict the result of any algorithm. If the problem were merely NP-complete, it would mean that, as far as we know, it would take a very long time to do it, but it would still possible.

xfs 8y ago

A radical implication is then to locate free will in the unconscious. The true acts of freedom are choices made unaware. The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made.

naasking 8y ago
> The consciousness merely registers the choices that are already made. A point made in the Matrix movies: you're not here to make a choice, you've already made it. You're here to understand why you've made that choice. I think that's probably a pretty good analogy of how consciousness operates.
adrianmonk 8y ago
It wouldn't necessarily have to push it to the unconscious. Free will could be an infrequently-exercised veto power. Which might not even be an unreasonable way to look at it. Many people make a contrast between habit and will. There already seems to be a common idea that much of the time, people do things the way they always have, and it is only at certain key moments that the will asserts itself and changes course.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I think the idea in dispute is that the area scientists had called unconscious isn't just exclusively unconscious, but also takes part in conscious thought.

booleandilemma 8y ago

I guess the idea that my conscious mind isn’t actually making decisions isn’t so bad, as long as the decisions are coming from somewhere in me. Then again, I may be biased.

sorokod 8y ago
An interesting question then is in what way unconscious you is different from unconscious me.

fsloth 8y ago

Brain has much more unconscious processing than conscious. Some of that processing deals with complex high level topics. Once the processing is done the result "pops" into conscious mind. It does not mean the conscious mind does not have free will, rather, that it works as an editor for a bunch of autonomous agents running in the background. Some of the feedback from those agents is bullshit and we are taught to fight against those impulses.

naasking 8y ago
> It does not mean the conscious mind does not have free will, rather, that it works as an editor for a bunch of autonomous agents running in the background. I rather think of it as an integrator, in that, it collects and integrates the results of various subsystems into a coherent "rationale" for why you've made a choice, and that rationale is then stored in your memory as "my choice".

jules 8y ago

I find that the intuitive idea of free will doesn't make all that much sense anyway. Leave aside the discussion of whether people have free will in this universe, how would a universe in which people actually have what most people call free free will even work?

pault 8y ago
Assuming that "free will" doesn't include manipulating the laws of physics, pretty much like the one we live in? I can see where people are coming from when they say there is no such thing as free will, but it sounds like they are saying the no one has the ability to consciously override their impulses. I don't smash the skull of everyone that makes me angry, for example.
- justanotherjoe 8y ago
  the danger is ascribing too much agency to a person's actions. We are all a product of circumstances. Instead of saying "You're lazy!", it's more productive to increase their living conditions.
  - naasking 8y ago
    I think your response often conflates two things: it's correct to classify a lazy person as lazy, but a diagnosis is not a treatment. For instance, diagnosing someone with a sprained muscle as being out of shape doesn't help get them in shape, and in fact, the immediate treatment is more rest until they're healed. So I think it's incorrect to say that people don't have agency, but it's equally incorrect to say that merely identifying that they have agency should suffice if such a person is making incorrect decisions. Sometimes it might, but not always.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- demiurgical 8y ago
  but why is bifurcation required? is the one stopping the impulses any different than the impulses engine? the reason you don't smash all of the skulls is as causal and determined as the impulses afaict. to me it seems that life is just sufficiently complex self contained units that are completely bound by deterministic laws. we have a sense of self referential capalbility which may give the illusion of free will but I'd say that it's not your decision to stop the impulses of smashing skulls rather it is the inescapable result of your unique determined state or rather process that your brain has been configure d for based on life experience and genes.

naasking 8y ago

> The idea that the conscious mind isn't the one making decisions seems to have implications for free will. Can you explain why it's misunderstanding of the concept? Because "you" are not just your conscious mind, you are your entire body and mind, including your unconscious; these are holistic and interdependent systems. The tendency to want to separate these is a common mistake reminiscent of an absurd mind-body dualism. "Free will" is making a choice according to what "you" want, not according to what your conscious mind thinks it wants.

posterboy 8y ago
conscious and unconscious have no discrete definitions. They are fuzzy concepts. Separation of those concepts would require an interface between them. Now you've got three states to your fuzzy system. At some level of granularity, the model might be accurate. But going one level above a single blob is already an achievement.

cgriswald 8y ago

If I decide to type the words "free will", I don't tell my fingers, "move to coordinates <x, y, z> and apply force vector F", I just type the words. I'm not really even conscious of typing the individual letters unless I slow down and think about it. That's because, through months of training followed by decades of use, I've trained my unconscious to type without having to consciously think about anything other than what to type (and even some of that I can fob off onto my unconscious). Does this imply it was not my choice to type "free will"? Would I be unable, through conscious effort, to learn how to type with a different keyboard layout? I can't think of a reason to suspect that we don't also train our decision-making processes the same way. (This is especially true for such trivial, inconsequential decisions as to which pattern to select in an experiment.) And I suspect we could train ourselves to always prefer a particular kind of pattern fairly easily through conscious effort. So even if you limit free will to consciousness, I am not sure how you can say anything specific about free will as a result of the study.

posterboy 8y ago

Computers are ideally non-deterministic, but due to NP-completeness, they can't predict their own results.

tsimionescu 8y ago
It's actually due to the undecidability results that there can't be a general algorithm to predict the result of any algorithm. If the problem were merely NP-complete, it would mean that, as far as we know, it would take a very long time to do it, but it would still possible.