5 ms·

Yes, Determinists, There Is Free Will

11 points by dnetesn 7y ago

YjSe2GMQ 7y ago
How is this defensible? I'm out of words. > Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.
- chr1 7y ago
  This sentence indeed doesn't make much sense, but it has a grain of truth in it. Indeterminism at the physical level can't be translated to free will, it could be translated only to randomness, because if say your choice is affected by the way the wave function collapses, it is as much your choice as tossing a coin would be. But there is one property of complex systems that looks very much like free will: For simple systems like planets rotating around sun, it is easy to accurately predict the future behavior thousands of years forward by using a formula. For more complicated systems like weather there is no analytical formula, but a simplified numerical simulation can give predictions for several days. For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to have 100% exact simulation. But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it!
  - zaat 7y ago
    >For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to have 100% exact simulation. >But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it! If rerunning the simulation will always give result the same outcome, wouldn't that mean that there is no free will, that the system is deterministic? And how could any of the reruns possibly give different outcome?
    - chr1 7y ago
      If you put a person into exactly same situation, with same memories, why would he make different choices? Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random choice. After running the simulation once you know the outcome, but it is simply equivalent to knowing the history. And if even a tiny thing is changed in the initial conditions, you again won't know what choice the system will make. Basically the system is deterministic, but you do not have any way to know how it will behave based on initial conditions other than letting it live and observing the result.
      - zaat 7y ago
        If the system is deterministic I have no idea what the free in Free Will refer to. If we don't assume that the current situation is the product of the person's free will, his determined reaction to it isn't freely decided either. Me having or lacking means to predict behavior entails nothing about the freedom of will, is is only outcome of my limited knowledge and technical ability. If the system is deterministic it is possible in principal to perfectly predict person's behavior and if that is the case, he has no freedom but to act in the way he does. > Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random choice. Perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by free will.
        chr1 7y ago
        I don't know of any good definition of free will, intuitively it should be something that would allow to say "this person made a choice and that choice wasn't something that i could predict simply with some machine or equation". Say the system is deterministic, and we have the technical ability to perfectly predict its future. There are several ways to predict that future, for instance for a dropped stone, we simply put a number into a simple formula and get the position, for water flow we have to compute some integrals. In both cases what we do, is not exactly equivalent to the process we are trying to simulate, and we omit all the things that happen during the process. My conjecture is that for a system containing a person, the computation is irreducible, and the only way to predict the future is to simulate it with 100% faithfulness which makes the process of prediction equivalent to that person living an making a choice. This explains the paradox of god knowing everything, but people making their own choices, because even though all the information about the future exists at current time, the only way to extract that information is to let people live and see what they do. The system being indeterministic doesn't seem to give a more useful interpretation to the vague definition above. It either doesn't fully describe the person (something from outside the system makes the choice like in games), or adds some randomness to the choice. Do you know a better definition of free will?
  - ascii_only 7y ago
    You are confusing complexity with chaotic system. Weather is not more complex system it is just chaotic system so it changes a lot with very small difference in initial parameters. You can make very simple system that you cant predict.It just have to be chaotic. For example double pendulum.
    - chr1 7y ago
      Perhaps i didn't formulate my hypothesis well. What i was trying to say, was that if combination of complexity and chaotic behavior makes the system computationally irreducible (that is any method to compute its future is fully equivalent to that system evolving), then we get an interesting situation when the future is computable but the system can make its own choices, and there are no shortcuts to find what these choices will be.
percentcer 7y ago
I think his counterpoint with the weather/meteorology undermines his whole argument and gives the determinism side much more weight. Just because you're modeling something probabilistically doesn't mean that its outcome is truly uncertain. It's merely a means of managing complexity for beings that don't have the processing power to deal with the raw data.
- zaat 7y ago
  like you say, from the article: >That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities. Isn't the need for explanation is driven by our ignorance?
c3534l 7y ago
So the argument is basically "there appears to be free will so long as you don't look at the details, so free will is not an illusion, so long as you ignore the details." Even if you accept the argument that unpredictability implies free will (which I don't, a mindless algorithm which behaves according to a pseudorandom number generator no more has free will than one that uses quantum noise for it's RNG), is basically equivalent to saying "I don't understand how free will could arise from simple atoms, so I'm just going to ignore the atomic nature of the universe."
- darioush 7y ago
  I enjoyed ^ this articulation a lot.
- atemerev 7y ago
  From the outside point of view, free will is indistinguishable from the stochastic algorithm. As a functionalist, I believe that free will is not some mystical property of living organism -- it is an emergent property of sufficiently complex stochastic systems with feedback loops and reflectivity; someday, we'll create machines capable of free will.
  - sametmax 7y ago
    This assume there is such a thing as chaos, and not just a state with so many variables it seems chaotic to our limited eyes. I'm open to it, but let's not pretend we have certitudes.
    - chr1 7y ago
      The chaos is not related to the number of variables, it is sensitivity to initial conditions. Even system with one variable, and the simplest evaluation rule can be chaotic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map. The only requirement is that after some time all the points in the phase space are mixed so heavily that to find one you need to do exactly the same calculations the system itself had to do. And btw this gives a plausible explanation of free will, it is not that the future behavior of the system is not completely predictable from the past, but the fact that to predict it you need to simulate the system faithfully, which is equivalent to that system living and making its own choice.
atemerev 7y ago
> "if the universe is deterministic, as at least some of our best physical theories suggest" But the universe is most certainly _not_ deterministic. Indeterminism is required at the fundamental quantum level. Why it is even a line of argument?
yorwba 7y ago
Discussed to death yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911
Barrin92 7y ago
I think the point that the author makes it sensible, but I think the defence of free will itself isn't really addressed. What I agree with is that intentionality and free will are useful concepts to describe how agents behave. There is no need to 'physicalise' things, when description at a higher level is useful for understanding or conduct, and he draws from Dennett who has described the concept of a "useful fiction" like money, which is not physically real, but it makes sense to believe in it nonetheless. In the beginning of the article the author says that "the practical need for assuming free will is not an argument in itself.", but then every argument that follows draws precisely on the subjective need of humans to assert free will to make sense of something at a high level of abstraction.
yhoneycomb 7y ago
Not a fan of article titles that take a controversial topic and boil it down to "I'm right, you're wrong" Incredibly obnoxious
hugh4life 7y ago
I disagree... our will is bound by the will of others... consciously and unconsciously. Our selfhoods are fictions that emerge in dialogical relationships and every significant relationship in a way changes both your selfhood and your will. Our wills are neither free nor determined but negotiated.

11 points by dnetesn 7y ago

How is this defensible? I'm out of words. > Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.

chr1 7y ago
This sentence indeed doesn't make much sense, but it has a grain of truth in it. Indeterminism at the physical level can't be translated to free will, it could be translated only to randomness, because if say your choice is affected by the way the wave function collapses, it is as much your choice as tossing a coin would be. But there is one property of complex systems that looks very much like free will: For simple systems like planets rotating around sun, it is easy to accurately predict the future behavior thousands of years forward by using a formula. For more complicated systems like weather there is no analytical formula, but a simplified numerical simulation can give predictions for several days. For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to have 100% exact simulation. But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it!
- zaat 7y ago
  >For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to have 100% exact simulation. >But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it! If rerunning the simulation will always give result the same outcome, wouldn't that mean that there is no free will, that the system is deterministic? And how could any of the reruns possibly give different outcome?
  - chr1 7y ago
    If you put a person into exactly same situation, with same memories, why would he make different choices? Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random choice. After running the simulation once you know the outcome, but it is simply equivalent to knowing the history. And if even a tiny thing is changed in the initial conditions, you again won't know what choice the system will make. Basically the system is deterministic, but you do not have any way to know how it will behave based on initial conditions other than letting it live and observing the result.
    - zaat 7y ago
      If the system is deterministic I have no idea what the free in Free Will refer to. If we don't assume that the current situation is the product of the person's free will, his determined reaction to it isn't freely decided either. Me having or lacking means to predict behavior entails nothing about the freedom of will, is is only outcome of my limited knowledge and technical ability. If the system is deterministic it is possible in principal to perfectly predict person's behavior and if that is the case, he has no freedom but to act in the way he does. > Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random choice. Perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by free will.
      - chr1 7y ago
        I don't know of any good definition of free will, intuitively it should be something that would allow to say "this person made a choice and that choice wasn't something that i could predict simply with some machine or equation". Say the system is deterministic, and we have the technical ability to perfectly predict its future. There are several ways to predict that future, for instance for a dropped stone, we simply put a number into a simple formula and get the position, for water flow we have to compute some integrals. In both cases what we do, is not exactly equivalent to the process we are trying to simulate, and we omit all the things that happen during the process. My conjecture is that for a system containing a person, the computation is irreducible, and the only way to predict the future is to simulate it with 100% faithfulness which makes the process of prediction equivalent to that person living an making a choice. This explains the paradox of god knowing everything, but people making their own choices, because even though all the information about the future exists at current time, the only way to extract that information is to let people live and see what they do. The system being indeterministic doesn't seem to give a more useful interpretation to the vague definition above. It either doesn't fully describe the person (something from outside the system makes the choice like in games), or adds some randomness to the choice. Do you know a better definition of free will?
- ascii_only 7y ago
  You are confusing complexity with chaotic system. Weather is not more complex system it is just chaotic system so it changes a lot with very small difference in initial parameters. You can make very simple system that you cant predict.It just have to be chaotic. For example double pendulum.
  - chr1 7y ago
    Perhaps i didn't formulate my hypothesis well. What i was trying to say, was that if combination of complexity and chaotic behavior makes the system computationally irreducible (that is any method to compute its future is fully equivalent to that system evolving), then we get an interesting situation when the future is computable but the system can make its own choices, and there are no shortcuts to find what these choices will be.

percentcer 7y ago

I think his counterpoint with the weather/meteorology undermines his whole argument and gives the determinism side much more weight. Just because you're modeling something probabilistically doesn't mean that its outcome is truly uncertain. It's merely a means of managing complexity for beings that don't have the processing power to deal with the raw data.

zaat 7y ago
like you say, from the article: >That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities. Isn't the need for explanation is driven by our ignorance?

c3534l 7y ago

So the argument is basically "there appears to be free will so long as you don't look at the details, so free will is not an illusion, so long as you ignore the details." Even if you accept the argument that unpredictability implies free will (which I don't, a mindless algorithm which behaves according to a pseudorandom number generator no more has free will than one that uses quantum noise for it's RNG), is basically equivalent to saying "I don't understand how free will could arise from simple atoms, so I'm just going to ignore the atomic nature of the universe."

darioush 7y ago
I enjoyed ^ this articulation a lot.
atemerev 7y ago
From the outside point of view, free will is indistinguishable from the stochastic algorithm. As a functionalist, I believe that free will is not some mystical property of living organism -- it is an emergent property of sufficiently complex stochastic systems with feedback loops and reflectivity; someday, we'll create machines capable of free will.
- sametmax 7y ago
  This assume there is such a thing as chaos, and not just a state with so many variables it seems chaotic to our limited eyes. I'm open to it, but let's not pretend we have certitudes.
  - chr1 7y ago
    The chaos is not related to the number of variables, it is sensitivity to initial conditions. Even system with one variable, and the simplest evaluation rule can be chaotic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map. The only requirement is that after some time all the points in the phase space are mixed so heavily that to find one you need to do exactly the same calculations the system itself had to do. And btw this gives a plausible explanation of free will, it is not that the future behavior of the system is not completely predictable from the past, but the fact that to predict it you need to simulate the system faithfully, which is equivalent to that system living and making its own choice.

atemerev 7y ago

> "if the universe is deterministic, as at least some of our best physical theories suggest" But the universe is most certainly _not_ deterministic. Indeterminism is required at the fundamental quantum level. Why it is even a line of argument?

yorwba 7y ago

Discussed to death yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927911

Barrin92 7y ago

I think the point that the author makes it sensible, but I think the defence of free will itself isn't really addressed. What I agree with is that intentionality and free will are useful concepts to describe how agents behave. There is no need to 'physicalise' things, when description at a higher level is useful for understanding or conduct, and he draws from Dennett who has described the concept of a "useful fiction" like money, which is not physically real, but it makes sense to believe in it nonetheless. In the beginning of the article the author says that "the practical need for assuming free will is not an argument in itself.", but then every argument that follows draws precisely on the subjective need of humans to assert free will to make sense of something at a high level of abstraction.

yhoneycomb 7y ago

Not a fan of article titles that take a controversial topic and boil it down to "I'm right, you're wrong" Incredibly obnoxious

hugh4life 7y ago

I disagree... our will is bound by the will of others... consciously and unconsciously. Our selfhoods are fictions that emerge in dialogical relationships and every significant relationship in a way changes both your selfhood and your will. Our wills are neither free nor determined but negotiated.