6 ms·

I think the question of free will is even simpler. It doesn't come down to determinism vs indeterminism because either way it's not "you" making a decision. At

I think the question of free will is even simpler. It doesn't come down to determinism vs indeterminism because either way it's not "you" making a decision. At the lowest level (neuron or whatever) when a decision is "made" it is either deterministic (determinism) or probabilistic (indeterminism) based on physics but either way, where is the "you" in the process? Only way free will makes sense is if something supernatural is involved.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
You can't possibly hope for eliminativism to be meaningful? Like a computer is not on the level of a transistor, "you" is not on the level of a neuron, but on a higher integrative level.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  I mean I am saying it does not matter. If "you" is the sum of your experiences, genes and your environment programming your brain over time, but decisions are either deterministic or probabilistic, then "you" really had no input on how your brain/body would ultimately develop. It does not matter how complex your program is, each decision ultimately comes down to a process on the lowest level that you don't control.
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    Programs have full input on what ultimately happens: the result completely depends on the program. There's no "you" on the lowest level, by looking there you don't see what happens to "you", so your claims about "you" aren't based on knowledge, but prejudice.
srcreigh 5y ago
Physics is based on what can be measured objectively. In other words the probability could be an approximate description of a real (and perhaps knowable) yet un-objectively-measurable process. The idea "everything that is natural can only be everything we can objectively measure" should be problematic right? Of course whatever out there that is unmeasurable is rife with confusion, messiness, lies etc but that shouldn't mean it doesn't exist at all. The old confounding variables problem. It's silly to believe there must be none, yet that's what the physics = everything worldview amounts to. EDIT: I love Scott Aaronson. Of course he predicted this type of answer explicitly and is looking for a more nuanced one :)
- seiferteric 5y ago
  Yes you can never rule out the unknown, even the supernatural is in this category. Nevertheless it is just speculation until some evidence that it exists comes about. That being said, even if what I said is true, it does not really effect anything since we still live as if free will exists and I don't think we have the ability to choose differently :)
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    I object to the term "supernatural". It means more like "supermaterial" or "super-harnessable-in-an-experiment-by-humans". It has well known limitations. Regarding speculation, that assumes there isn't steps to knowledge about other things which physicists do not take. Any scientist will easily change their mind with the right evidence. The only issue is that the evidence takes place in one's subjective experience. It may take place specifically in contexts where it cannot be convincingly demonstrated to the general population. It sounds silly, but if that's the nature of the object of investigation, it's necessary.
- adrianN 5y ago
  You seem to suggest some kind of hidden variable theory for free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory. As far as I know they're not particularly popular among physicists, although we haven't (completely) ruled out such an explanation.
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    Newton and Einstein both seem to be on the side of hidden variables, so I'm not sure if it's unpopular among the elites. I have a lot of trouble imagining any experiment which could completely rule out every other influencing factor. There are silly thought experiments such as what if the world has been objective for the last x00 years - prior to that and after, the laws we've observed during the period would bend; things will become inconsistent. It's silly and I don't even believe it, but it does show that science is incapable of completely ruling out everything. The truth could be endemic mystery. Endemic insanely and terrifyingly simple endless levels of understanding. In a way science is nothing unless that's the reality.
guerrilla 5y ago
> At the lowest level (neuron or whatever) when a decision is "made" it is either deterministic (determinism) or probabilistic (indeterminism) based on physics but either way, where is the "you" in the process? It's a matter of scale. At the highest level, of the individual, if you present them with two options, they will chose one of the options. At that level, the question is a trivial: yes, obviously they have "the capacity [] to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded."[1] Your description was just an explanation of how they choose. If you then ask if the individuals also have "the capacity to do otherwise"[2] then that depends on whether things are deterministic or probabilistic. If they're probabilistic, then yes, otherwise no. In all three cases, yours and my two, the question is answered trivially and uninteresting. The real question philosophers are asking, I'm told, is whether people have moral responsibility or not. It's interesting psychologically too, should you really feel guilty if you couldn't have done differently? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#FreeDoOthe https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#FreeDoOthe
- seiferteric 5y ago
  It's not satisfying that it would be considered free will if the outcome is based on the result of a probabilistic random number generator but perhaps that's what they mean... As for moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process. As for whether you should feel guilty... well again I am not able to make that decision... Either I do or I don't and it is predetermined or random :) So there is really not much to debate I don't think.
  - raindeer2 5y ago
    "moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process." This view is based on a misunderstanding of what moral responsibility is. Moral responsibility is essentially credit assignment [1]. It exists as a concept not because it matters whether or not you actually could have done differently before, but rather as a mechanism to teach you to do differently in a similar situation in the future. "You" is just a machine making decisions. When you make a bad decision, according to the other machines surrounding you (society) or your own brain's reward system, you are assigned blame or feel guilty because you should avoid making the same decision again in a similar situation. To say that moral responsibility requires something supernatural doesn't make sense, since we successfully use the concept all the time. Its a mechanism for multi-agent learning. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435
nurettin 5y ago
I thoroughly enjoy these discussions where someone wants to talk about a bat, a natural occurrence, and people immediately produce a man with a bat costume and start talking specifically about their construction, completely oblivious to the aforementioned bat.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  I get your point, it is a vast simplification, perhaps inaccurate, it is possibly that more exists in nature that we don't yet understand that could make free will possible (even God) but is not much more than speculation or chimera.
  - nurettin 5y ago
    I want to show an example of what I mean. News: "Wow look how that tachyon beam exceeded speed of light!" Commenters: "So are humans going to be able to travel FTL? Let's talk about that hypothetical for 200 comments!" Completely ignoring physics. Everything must be human centric, everything must be dumbed down and anthropomorphised and become absolutely boring to the core until there is no more low hanging fruit left to pick.
robbedpeter 5y ago
It's not that easy, unfortunately. The problem lies in the relationship between a mind - the system of patterns of connections and processes that constitute whatever it is that allows a subjective experience to occur as an emergent property - and the external world. That singleton which has experience, and the infinite outside which it experiences. Free will could be framed as unpredictable behavior arising from the emergent system itself, where the selection of one choice among many is deterministic, but otherwise indistinguishable from a non-deterministic system to any other mind. This is a plausible scenario that aligns with chaos theory and implies that every mind is a unique occurrence. The firing of a single neuron can be triggered by quantum circumstances affecting the location and energy of a single calcium ion, and that single neuron can be responsible for radically different states in the meta-patterns that comprise a mind at any given point in time. Even software on silicon could be subject to bitrot, cosmic bit flips, and other fundamentally unpredictable changes. How such randomness affects the system plays into whether free will can exist in this sense. The idea behind free will is that the mind has the ability to make choices independent of any influence except itself. It's highly probable that minds are entirely abstract, dependent on the physics of its substrate but existing as an emergent result of the particular arrangement of particles and energy in the substrate. If the choices made by a mind are indistinguishable from a hypothetically independent system not dependent on the physics of the substrate, it could be seen as "free will." Is definitely not the religious/supernatural Free Will, though. If a mind is perfectly replicable - if you can perfectly simulate the state and ongoing experience of the mind bit for bit, - then you should be able to perfectly predict its behavior and state over time. It could be that such replication is mathematically possible but fundamentally intractable. Such a result would mean minds exhibit behavior indistinguishable from free will. It would mean that perfect knowledge of the state of the mind could never be known outside the mind itself - an extension of Heisenberg uncertainty - and simulations would be inaccurate. The emergent, entirely abstract meta-system comprising the mind and its subjective experience could also be seen as the non-physical soul or spirit. That doesn't make room for the supernatural or magic in the universe. It might mean that divergence from prediction by the outside exists but is vanishingly small. It could also imply high probability of divergence if compute capacity needed for simulation grows exponentially over time and capacity of the mind being simulated. The answers will depend on exactly whatever "minds" turn out to be and the mathematics that govern the phenomena. I personally think that radical divergence is likely, for no better reason than to think the universe is a much more interesting and weird place should that be true. It would mean that minds will forever be surprising, however much we increase computation and efficiency.
astrange 5y ago
There can't be a "you" with true free will even if there's a supernatural other dimension containing you, because there's still only those two options wherever you are. The best you can do is be evolved to use true randomness (if it exists) to choose between good-enough actions, so at least nobody else can predict what you're going to do.
meroes 5y ago
This goes against the idea of strong emergence (mainly the bottom up causation part). I’m not arguing for or against it, but the SEP has an entry about it https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ “This often takes the form of rejecting physical realization, affirming fundamental higher-level causal powers, or both.” I find it fascinating to wonder about causal powers in multiple directions. Does it even make sense? Does it conflict with physicalism? What is the physical anymore? Chomsky says there is no physical for the past few hundred years. It’s worth reading about at least.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > multiple directions. [...] Does it conflict with physicalism? Since you like SEP, "Backward Causation"[1] is sometimes attempted as an explanation for entanglement. I don't buy it but it could be related to your question. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/
ummwhat 5y ago
I have an answer. Consider the opposite of free will. Things that aren't considered to have free will inherit their reasons for doing/being from the outside. A computer isn't considered to have free will, the reason for everything it does serves the purpose of the programmer or user. A piston doesn't push on its free will, but does so because of steam pressure and the steam pressure doesn't choose to be in the pipe, but is put there by the engineer to serve some design purpose. A person doing a job isn't generally expressing their free will. They are manifesting the will of their boss, who himself is manifesting the will of the company on up the chain. In general, the concept of reason for things (aka purpose) follows a hirearchy tree structure. X happens because Y wills it. Y wills it because Z wills it. And so on. Whenever we reach a node in this tree where we can't find the parent node, we are left with a free floating will. So long as there are things about our likes and dislikes and how we spend our time which can't be correlated with anything measurable, there is no choice but to attribute those things to our free will. The moment some component of who we are becomes predictable by science, we stop attributing that component to our free will.
simonh 5y ago
I see the relationship of determinism to free will completely differently. Without determinism there is no agency. If my state - my memories, preferences, experiences, skills, personality and emotions do not determine my actions, how can those actions be truly mine? I know many people are very uncomfortable with this, but I don't really know what they actually want. I think appealing to QM to wave an indeterminism wand and 'somehow' resolve the problem is wishful thinking. Randomness, as pointed out by others here, is no answer and if all QM contributes is randomness then it's no real help. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there's a certain degree of randomness in our choices, that's fine, but it's not the answer to the question of free will. I also don't see how appeals to some non-material source of decisions helps either, surely such a source must also have a state? It's simply punts the question, and I see no reason to suppose it actually helps answer it. Aside from the fact that if a 'non-material' source of choices interacts with real matter, surely that makes it real, right? It's just nonsense on stilts. IMHO we are real, material beings. Our state determines our actions, with some randomness sprinkled in, and I'm fine with that. Yes this has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, but that's ok. In fact I think it's a good thing. If we're all driven by our state, and that's determined by factors outside our control, it humanises us. We're flawed beings living in a dangerous universe. We need to stick together and learn to understand and tolerate our flaws and weaknesses. Coming to this realisation has changed my attitude to a lot of things, and to me that capacity for change is all the free will I need.
Paradigma11 5y ago
Its also question about metaphysics. If you dont believe in metaphysics all this problems do not arise in the first place.
bobthechef 5y ago

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

You can't possibly hope for eliminativism to be meaningful? Like a computer is not on the level of a transistor, "you" is not on the level of a neuron, but on a higher integrative level.

seiferteric 5y ago
I mean I am saying it does not matter. If "you" is the sum of your experiences, genes and your environment programming your brain over time, but decisions are either deterministic or probabilistic, then "you" really had no input on how your brain/body would ultimately develop. It does not matter how complex your program is, each decision ultimately comes down to a process on the lowest level that you don't control.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Programs have full input on what ultimately happens: the result completely depends on the program. There's no "you" on the lowest level, by looking there you don't see what happens to "you", so your claims about "you" aren't based on knowledge, but prejudice.

srcreigh 5y ago

Physics is based on what can be measured objectively. In other words the probability could be an approximate description of a real (and perhaps knowable) yet un-objectively-measurable process. The idea "everything that is natural can only be everything we can objectively measure" should be problematic right? Of course whatever out there that is unmeasurable is rife with confusion, messiness, lies etc but that shouldn't mean it doesn't exist at all. The old confounding variables problem. It's silly to believe there must be none, yet that's what the physics = everything worldview amounts to. EDIT: I love Scott Aaronson. Of course he predicted this type of answer explicitly and is looking for a more nuanced one :)

seiferteric 5y ago
Yes you can never rule out the unknown, even the supernatural is in this category. Nevertheless it is just speculation until some evidence that it exists comes about. That being said, even if what I said is true, it does not really effect anything since we still live as if free will exists and I don't think we have the ability to choose differently :)
- srcreigh 5y ago
  I object to the term "supernatural". It means more like "supermaterial" or "super-harnessable-in-an-experiment-by-humans". It has well known limitations. Regarding speculation, that assumes there isn't steps to knowledge about other things which physicists do not take. Any scientist will easily change their mind with the right evidence. The only issue is that the evidence takes place in one's subjective experience. It may take place specifically in contexts where it cannot be convincingly demonstrated to the general population. It sounds silly, but if that's the nature of the object of investigation, it's necessary.
adrianN 5y ago
You seem to suggest some kind of hidden variable theory for free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory. As far as I know they're not particularly popular among physicists, although we haven't (completely) ruled out such an explanation.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Newton and Einstein both seem to be on the side of hidden variables, so I'm not sure if it's unpopular among the elites. I have a lot of trouble imagining any experiment which could completely rule out every other influencing factor. There are silly thought experiments such as what if the world has been objective for the last x00 years - prior to that and after, the laws we've observed during the period would bend; things will become inconsistent. It's silly and I don't even believe it, but it does show that science is incapable of completely ruling out everything. The truth could be endemic mystery. Endemic insanely and terrifyingly simple endless levels of understanding. In a way science is nothing unless that's the reality.

guerrilla 5y ago

> At the lowest level (neuron or whatever) when a decision is "made" it is either deterministic (determinism) or probabilistic (indeterminism) based on physics but either way, where is the "you" in the process? It's a matter of scale. At the highest level, of the individual, if you present them with two options, they will chose one of the options. At that level, the question is a trivial: yes, obviously they have "the capacity [] to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded."[1] Your description was just an explanation of how they choose. If you then ask if the individuals also have "the capacity to do otherwise"[2] then that depends on whether things are deterministic or probabilistic. If they're probabilistic, then yes, otherwise no. In all three cases, yours and my two, the question is answered trivially and uninteresting. The real question philosophers are asking, I'm told, is whether people have moral responsibility or not. It's interesting psychologically too, should you really feel guilty if you couldn't have done differently? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#FreeDoOthe https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#FreeDoOthe

seiferteric 5y ago
It's not satisfying that it would be considered free will if the outcome is based on the result of a probabilistic random number generator but perhaps that's what they mean... As for moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process. As for whether you should feel guilty... well again I am not able to make that decision... Either I do or I don't and it is predetermined or random :) So there is really not much to debate I don't think.
- raindeer2 5y ago
  "moral responsibility, essential no, it cannot exist again unless supernatural is involved for the same reasons outlined above, there is no "you" making a decision, just a process." This view is based on a misunderstanding of what moral responsibility is. Moral responsibility is essentially credit assignment [1]. It exists as a concept not because it matters whether or not you actually could have done differently before, but rather as a mechanism to teach you to do differently in a similar situation in the future. "You" is just a machine making decisions. When you make a bad decision, according to the other machines surrounding you (society) or your own brain's reward system, you are assigned blame or feel guilty because you should avoid making the same decision again in a similar situation. To say that moral responsibility requires something supernatural doesn't make sense, since we successfully use the concept all the time. Its a mechanism for multi-agent learning. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08435

nurettin 5y ago

I thoroughly enjoy these discussions where someone wants to talk about a bat, a natural occurrence, and people immediately produce a man with a bat costume and start talking specifically about their construction, completely oblivious to the aforementioned bat.

seiferteric 5y ago
I get your point, it is a vast simplification, perhaps inaccurate, it is possibly that more exists in nature that we don't yet understand that could make free will possible (even God) but is not much more than speculation or chimera.
- nurettin 5y ago
  I want to show an example of what I mean. News: "Wow look how that tachyon beam exceeded speed of light!" Commenters: "So are humans going to be able to travel FTL? Let's talk about that hypothetical for 200 comments!" Completely ignoring physics. Everything must be human centric, everything must be dumbed down and anthropomorphised and become absolutely boring to the core until there is no more low hanging fruit left to pick.

robbedpeter 5y ago

It's not that easy, unfortunately. The problem lies in the relationship between a mind - the system of patterns of connections and processes that constitute whatever it is that allows a subjective experience to occur as an emergent property - and the external world. That singleton which has experience, and the infinite outside which it experiences. Free will could be framed as unpredictable behavior arising from the emergent system itself, where the selection of one choice among many is deterministic, but otherwise indistinguishable from a non-deterministic system to any other mind. This is a plausible scenario that aligns with chaos theory and implies that every mind is a unique occurrence. The firing of a single neuron can be triggered by quantum circumstances affecting the location and energy of a single calcium ion, and that single neuron can be responsible for radically different states in the meta-patterns that comprise a mind at any given point in time. Even software on silicon could be subject to bitrot, cosmic bit flips, and other fundamentally unpredictable changes. How such randomness affects the system plays into whether free will can exist in this sense. The idea behind free will is that the mind has the ability to make choices independent of any influence except itself. It's highly probable that minds are entirely abstract, dependent on the physics of its substrate but existing as an emergent result of the particular arrangement of particles and energy in the substrate. If the choices made by a mind are indistinguishable from a hypothetically independent system not dependent on the physics of the substrate, it could be seen as "free will." Is definitely not the religious/supernatural Free Will, though. If a mind is perfectly replicable - if you can perfectly simulate the state and ongoing experience of the mind bit for bit, - then you should be able to perfectly predict its behavior and state over time. It could be that such replication is mathematically possible but fundamentally intractable. Such a result would mean minds exhibit behavior indistinguishable from free will. It would mean that perfect knowledge of the state of the mind could never be known outside the mind itself - an extension of Heisenberg uncertainty - and simulations would be inaccurate. The emergent, entirely abstract meta-system comprising the mind and its subjective experience could also be seen as the non-physical soul or spirit. That doesn't make room for the supernatural or magic in the universe. It might mean that divergence from prediction by the outside exists but is vanishingly small. It could also imply high probability of divergence if compute capacity needed for simulation grows exponentially over time and capacity of the mind being simulated. The answers will depend on exactly whatever "minds" turn out to be and the mathematics that govern the phenomena. I personally think that radical divergence is likely, for no better reason than to think the universe is a much more interesting and weird place should that be true. It would mean that minds will forever be surprising, however much we increase computation and efficiency.

astrange 5y ago

There can't be a "you" with true free will even if there's a supernatural other dimension containing you, because there's still only those two options wherever you are. The best you can do is be evolved to use true randomness (if it exists) to choose between good-enough actions, so at least nobody else can predict what you're going to do.

meroes 5y ago

This goes against the idea of strong emergence (mainly the bottom up causation part). I’m not arguing for or against it, but the SEP has an entry about it https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ “This often takes the form of rejecting physical realization, affirming fundamental higher-level causal powers, or both.” I find it fascinating to wonder about causal powers in multiple directions. Does it even make sense? Does it conflict with physicalism? What is the physical anymore? Chomsky says there is no physical for the past few hundred years. It’s worth reading about at least.

guerrilla 5y ago
> multiple directions. [...] Does it conflict with physicalism? Since you like SEP, "Backward Causation"[1] is sometimes attempted as an explanation for entanglement. I don't buy it but it could be related to your question. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/

ummwhat 5y ago

I have an answer. Consider the opposite of free will. Things that aren't considered to have free will inherit their reasons for doing/being from the outside. A computer isn't considered to have free will, the reason for everything it does serves the purpose of the programmer or user. A piston doesn't push on its free will, but does so because of steam pressure and the steam pressure doesn't choose to be in the pipe, but is put there by the engineer to serve some design purpose. A person doing a job isn't generally expressing their free will. They are manifesting the will of their boss, who himself is manifesting the will of the company on up the chain. In general, the concept of reason for things (aka purpose) follows a hirearchy tree structure. X happens because Y wills it. Y wills it because Z wills it. And so on. Whenever we reach a node in this tree where we can't find the parent node, we are left with a free floating will. So long as there are things about our likes and dislikes and how we spend our time which can't be correlated with anything measurable, there is no choice but to attribute those things to our free will. The moment some component of who we are becomes predictable by science, we stop attributing that component to our free will.

simonh 5y ago

I see the relationship of determinism to free will completely differently. Without determinism there is no agency. If my state - my memories, preferences, experiences, skills, personality and emotions do not determine my actions, how can those actions be truly mine? I know many people are very uncomfortable with this, but I don't really know what they actually want. I think appealing to QM to wave an indeterminism wand and 'somehow' resolve the problem is wishful thinking. Randomness, as pointed out by others here, is no answer and if all QM contributes is randomness then it's no real help. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there's a certain degree of randomness in our choices, that's fine, but it's not the answer to the question of free will. I also don't see how appeals to some non-material source of decisions helps either, surely such a source must also have a state? It's simply punts the question, and I see no reason to suppose it actually helps answer it. Aside from the fact that if a 'non-material' source of choices interacts with real matter, surely that makes it real, right? It's just nonsense on stilts. IMHO we are real, material beings. Our state determines our actions, with some randomness sprinkled in, and I'm fine with that. Yes this has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, but that's ok. In fact I think it's a good thing. If we're all driven by our state, and that's determined by factors outside our control, it humanises us. We're flawed beings living in a dangerous universe. We need to stick together and learn to understand and tolerate our flaws and weaknesses. Coming to this realisation has changed my attitude to a lot of things, and to me that capacity for change is all the free will I need.

Paradigma11 5y ago

Its also question about metaphysics. If you dont believe in metaphysics all this problems do not arise in the first place.

bobthechef 5y ago