5 ms·

In 2014 I wrote a short post on this subject: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/your-choice https://thelocalyarn.com/article/your-choice It aimed to be a thesis

In 2014 I wrote a short post on this subject: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/your-choice https://thelocalyarn.com/article/your-choice It aimed to be a thesis on the topic that anyone could verify by interrogating their own experience. As opposed to most approaches that appeal to either religion or scientific studies. The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know). This explains why the "will I/won’t I drop the pen” test of free will is a perfect example of why free will is both real and irrelevant. Of course you have a perfectly free opportunity to either drop or not drop the pen; the choice has (for most of us) almost no bearing on our actual desires.

addaon 4y ago
I have a hard time taking any argument for free will too seriously without a suggestion for a mechanism that would make it possible.
- syzar 4y ago
  As fas as I know there is no known mechanism for why consciousness exists. Do you have a similar view towards arguments in favor of the existence of consciousness? What about the laws of physics? There’s no known mechanism for how they came about. People studied gravity well before they came up with plausible theories for its existence and how exactly it operates (at a large enough scale).
  - addaon 4y ago
    I think you would have to have similar arguments for consciousness as well? Certainly I don't think there's much argument that the laws of physics are a moderately good fit for observed phenomenon. They came about by generations of physicists refining previous models. I would consider the question of why mathematical models that fit observed phenomenon exist at all to be an open question.
    - syzar 4y ago
      My point is that before the refined physics theories we have today people had to poke around in the dark, so to speak. I don’t think it’s valid to critique the argument you responded to on the grounds you mentioned. What you require before you will consider something, if adopted by everyone, would impede progress.
      - addaon 4y ago
        But without some level of mechanism, arguments for free will and arguments for God end up looking very similar. They both have massive explanatory power, are consistent with many people's claimed subjective experience, and are unfalsifiable. Why did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? God did it; it was the causal result of initial conditions; the asteroid or some other party acted non-causally (free will). Of these, I've seen the most evidence for the existence of initial conditions, Boltzmann brains notwithstanding.
- velcrovan 4y ago
  Right; the argument is more that free will is beside the point; anyone can interrogate their own experience and verify that it is their desires over which they have no control, so it makes no difference whether you have “free will” or not. (I agree that “free will” probably evaporates at the biological level)
- edgyquant 4y ago
  I have a hard time taking arguments against it seriously since they all rest on aspects created entirely by your brain. Your arm moving a split second before you decide to move it just means you, and your will, are more complex than we expected. All arguments against free will rely on describing the brain as a mathematical and statistical model that predicts the universe. Yet mathematical and statistical models are a feature of the brain and the actual topology of its mechanisms isn’t even close to understood.
  - addaon 4y ago
    But the brain is, at most, incidental to any of this. The starting point has to be causality violation, no? If all observed actions are either direct or no-hidden-variable-random consequences of previous states, what room is there for free will?
    - criddell 4y ago
      That’s a big if there.
      - addaon 4y ago
        It sure is! But an observation contradicting it would be the biggest discovery in physics in at least a century.
        criddell 4y ago
        I was thinking about the spontaneous appearance of particle anti-particle pairs in a vacuum. Can you say conditions x, y, and z are responsible for those particles appearing at that instant and there's no other way it could have gone?
        addaon 4y ago
        Particle/anti-particle pairs don't really "pop into existence" in any meaningful sense, so probably not the best example of randomness. We do see unpredictable effects (randomness) quite often, though. Bell's theorem provides some constrains on their source. But for one to exercise free will (selection of one of multiple future states from a given present state) to, say, not eat the last oreo by biasing quantum randomness to invoke a whole chain of high-gain non-linear effects (maybe have a sodium ion change it's momentum slightly to cause a neuron to trigger to... etc etc... to send different actuation commands to the muscles to pick up the cookie) would require not just a mechanism for this free-will biasing but also retrocausality to let something in the system "know" that this was the place in its orbital where the electron had to interact in order to choose to leave the cookie until tomorrow. The use of a high-gain effect chain means that the initial instance of free will is smaller, and therefore more likely that we've just not noticed it so far, but it makes it harder to put together a meaningful story for how these free will instances reflect a "choice" instead of just a statistical divergence.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  > I have a hard time taking any argument for free will too seriously without a suggestion for a mechanism that would make it possible. Well obviously there is no known mechanism at this point. As far as we know all matter obeys the laws of physics and our brain is no exception. Even if you want to suppose quantum effects are present in the brain (unlikely), that would at most impart some degree of randomness. The real nail in the coffin for any potential new scientific discovery that could cause free will is that this would have to entail some localized overriding of the currently known laws of nature to work - your motor neurons, or their inputs/etc, not being driven by chemistry but rather by this new "force" overriding chemistry. The problem of course is that no-one has ever observed the laws of chemistry not being observed, not even once, in our brain or elsewhere, which seems a major problem given that "free will" is subjectively happening non-stop. So, while it's not inconceivable that some new force/whatever might be discovered that controls matter in ways we've not seen, the real problem is that in this case there is no problem to solve! It's not like postulated "dark matter" invented to solve a problem with gravity ... in the case of brain/body function there is no mystery to solve, and no need for new physics - our brain/body appears to operate entirely under the control of the currently known laws of nature, which doesn't leave anything for undiscovered physics (or dualistic "souls") to control!
ianbutler 4y ago
This aligns well with some of my thoughts on free will. That though I cannot control what I desire as long as I am not constrained by outside forces I am acting of my own will. This of course is compatibilism[0] which I nearly instantaneously gravitated towards conceptually during my philosophy minor some moons ago, though I don't entirely agree with it. I would add that free will is the ability to act in accordance with one's desires AND choose how to act within a limited possibility space presented by previous determined circumstance towards those desires. I disagree with your prioritizing comment though, a simple test here is do I put off video games to work on my own projects, the answer is yes, even though I in the immediacy maybe more intensely desire to play video games. Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
- iokanuon 4y ago
  >Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit. That's basically living with ADHD - so about 2% to 7% of all people have a lot less free will than the rest.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    I'm a physicalist, there's nothing in my view that says biological disorders can't affect the effectiveness of the software, free will must in my view be an effect provided by our bodies and a disorder can surely remove it. Just as sure as if you were lobotomized, you'd lose free will. Edit: Plus upon re reading this and not just giving a two second flippant response, you did not clearly read my reply (which I ironically did not then read yours correctly either). I was talking about the ability to prioritize desires, not free will itself on the part you quoted.
    - 4y ago
dghf 4y ago
> The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know). Schopenhauer: > Man can do what he wills; but he cannot will what he wills. -- On the Freedom of the Will, 1839.
trashtester 4y ago
Nothing "real" exists exactly the way we perceive it. The world we experience is one where the amount of detail has been compressed by an extreme factor. We don't perceive the quantum fields of the surfaces we touch, we don't perceive individual photons hitting our eyes. The "real" world contains so much information that our brains have no way to process it in detail. Instead, our brains will create a model of the world that is optimized for utility (in a Darwinian sense). In fact, this happens at different levels. Some centers of the brain (those that regulate basic functions as well as sensory input) will have access to different information to what reaches our consciousness. A "purple" flower doesn't emit "purple" photons, but rather a combination of photons that our sensory system aggregate to "purple". Another mix of the same types of photons, but at different relative number may look "brown", "gray", "white", etc. In other words, all such qualia are some kind of illusion, or maybe more accurately, aggregated information. The same is true for most categories of concepts. Physical objects, surfaces, fluids, living objects, etc. Including what we think of as "agents". "Agents", whether they are the tiger we imagine in the forest, another human or indeed ourselves, and whether real or imagined, are also way too complex for us to comprehend in detail. What we're interested in (or rather, what has Darwinian utility) when dealing with "Agents", as opposed to non-"Agents", is that "Agents" tend to respond to stimuli in more sophisticated ways than non-"Agents". If we look big and scary, a wolf may decide not to eat us or a robber from robbing us, but it will not stop a house fire from burning us. As a consequence, there are actions we may take to improve the odds that the "agent" types around us behave in ways that are beneficial to us. Just like we're not able to comprehend something as simple as "real" photons behind the color "purple", our brain is not able to calculate EXACTLY what we can do to reach that goal, however. Instead we (most of us) seem to have a simplified framework more or less built in to find something approximate to optimal ways to modify the environment in ways that affect the behavior of the "agents" around us. "Free will" or "consciousness" or not perfect representations of the ways the brains of "agents" work. But the concepts are simple enough that our brains can reason about them (at some level), while predictive enough to have significant utility and also to be hard to "hack" for an agent that may have conflicting interests. Roughly speaking, the utility of the concept "free will" is that it allows us to communicate to others a set of behaviors that are likely to be met with retribution, while mostly limiting such threats to situations where the threat itself is likely to prevent the unwanted behavior from happening in the first place. Actually having to dish out punishment is usually not high utility behavior. It can be both costly and expensive. Having to do it, can mean one (or more) out of three things: 1) The punishment isn't harsh enough 2) The adversary does not see the threat as credible. A thief may think they will not be caught, or a state leader thinks the ally of a country will not help defend them. 3) The adversary is not able to understand the threat, or in some other way incapable of taking the threat into account when acting. In the case of the last one, one can have a rule that punishes people from killing other people, for instance. If the punishment is severe enough, and the likelihood of getting caught is close to 100%, most people will stop killing each other. However, SOME people will not be able to take the information into account for some reason or another. It could be that they go into a rage that make them ignore any kind of upcoming punishment, there may be some kind of mental disease, they may not have enough intelligence to understand the threat, or avoiding killing them could require some skill they do not possess (maybe they were not able to tell the gun was real, and indeed loaded). If we were able to isolate all cases that fall under type 3, we might call those cases acts should not be punished, in other words, they did not have the "free will" to avoid them. But the distinction may be hard to identify. Making too many exceptions will often both increase the number of people who do not see a threat of punishment as credible AND also increase the number of people that would be able to understand what the rule was. So, basically: - "Free will" is a simplification of the kind of process that causes threat of punishment to prevent us to do some set of actions that will be met by retribution. If legal systems (or similar informal retribution threats) are set up properly, those who actually have "free will" about the type of action, will really be punished for it. - Those who DO get punished will very often NOT have "free will", in the sense that they are unresponsive to stimuli about that type of action. When people DO end up in prison (and assuming that punishment is strict enough and the police is able to catch most criminals), will be those NOT responsive to the threat of punishment, for some reason or another. - This may still provide close to optimal utility for the set of people who decide what to punish. The cost of punishing those who are for some reason not able to avoid doing the "crime" is lower to that group than the benefit gained by the threat causing many others to NOT commit the "crime", when they otherwise would have. - Indeed, since we are not capable of a fully detailed analysis of the "real" things happening inside the brains of "agents", we have no choice but using a simplified model. Some concept like "Free Will" is probably needed to lay out consequences of actions. Also some people have more of an ability to understand the details and limitations of such models, so simpler models have the advantage that it is easier to communicate. (To children, people with limited cognitive abilities or immigrants with poor cultural understanding.) At this point, I could start writing about how empathy comes into this, how empathy is modulated by a feeling of kinship or shard identity as well as a perception of being threatened by someone, but that would make this post quite long :)

addaon 4y ago

I have a hard time taking any argument for free will too seriously without a suggestion for a mechanism that would make it possible.

syzar 4y ago
As fas as I know there is no known mechanism for why consciousness exists. Do you have a similar view towards arguments in favor of the existence of consciousness? What about the laws of physics? There’s no known mechanism for how they came about. People studied gravity well before they came up with plausible theories for its existence and how exactly it operates (at a large enough scale).
- addaon 4y ago
  I think you would have to have similar arguments for consciousness as well? Certainly I don't think there's much argument that the laws of physics are a moderately good fit for observed phenomenon. They came about by generations of physicists refining previous models. I would consider the question of why mathematical models that fit observed phenomenon exist at all to be an open question.
  - syzar 4y ago
    My point is that before the refined physics theories we have today people had to poke around in the dark, so to speak. I don’t think it’s valid to critique the argument you responded to on the grounds you mentioned. What you require before you will consider something, if adopted by everyone, would impede progress.
    - addaon 4y ago
      But without some level of mechanism, arguments for free will and arguments for God end up looking very similar. They both have massive explanatory power, are consistent with many people's claimed subjective experience, and are unfalsifiable. Why did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? God did it; it was the causal result of initial conditions; the asteroid or some other party acted non-causally (free will). Of these, I've seen the most evidence for the existence of initial conditions, Boltzmann brains notwithstanding.
velcrovan 4y ago
Right; the argument is more that free will is beside the point; anyone can interrogate their own experience and verify that it is their desires over which they have no control, so it makes no difference whether you have “free will” or not. (I agree that “free will” probably evaporates at the biological level)
edgyquant 4y ago
I have a hard time taking arguments against it seriously since they all rest on aspects created entirely by your brain. Your arm moving a split second before you decide to move it just means you, and your will, are more complex than we expected. All arguments against free will rely on describing the brain as a mathematical and statistical model that predicts the universe. Yet mathematical and statistical models are a feature of the brain and the actual topology of its mechanisms isn’t even close to understood.
- addaon 4y ago
  But the brain is, at most, incidental to any of this. The starting point has to be causality violation, no? If all observed actions are either direct or no-hidden-variable-random consequences of previous states, what room is there for free will?
  - criddell 4y ago
    That’s a big if there.
    - addaon 4y ago
      It sure is! But an observation contradicting it would be the biggest discovery in physics in at least a century.
      - criddell 4y ago
        I was thinking about the spontaneous appearance of particle anti-particle pairs in a vacuum. Can you say conditions x, y, and z are responsible for those particles appearing at that instant and there's no other way it could have gone?
        addaon 4y ago
        Particle/anti-particle pairs don't really "pop into existence" in any meaningful sense, so probably not the best example of randomness. We do see unpredictable effects (randomness) quite often, though. Bell's theorem provides some constrains on their source. But for one to exercise free will (selection of one of multiple future states from a given present state) to, say, not eat the last oreo by biasing quantum randomness to invoke a whole chain of high-gain non-linear effects (maybe have a sodium ion change it's momentum slightly to cause a neuron to trigger to... etc etc... to send different actuation commands to the muscles to pick up the cookie) would require not just a mechanism for this free-will biasing but also retrocausality to let something in the system "know" that this was the place in its orbital where the electron had to interact in order to choose to leave the cookie until tomorrow. The use of a high-gain effect chain means that the initial instance of free will is smaller, and therefore more likely that we've just not noticed it so far, but it makes it harder to put together a meaningful story for how these free will instances reflect a "choice" instead of just a statistical divergence.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
> I have a hard time taking any argument for free will too seriously without a suggestion for a mechanism that would make it possible. Well obviously there is no known mechanism at this point. As far as we know all matter obeys the laws of physics and our brain is no exception. Even if you want to suppose quantum effects are present in the brain (unlikely), that would at most impart some degree of randomness. The real nail in the coffin for any potential new scientific discovery that could cause free will is that this would have to entail some localized overriding of the currently known laws of nature to work - your motor neurons, or their inputs/etc, not being driven by chemistry but rather by this new "force" overriding chemistry. The problem of course is that no-one has ever observed the laws of chemistry not being observed, not even once, in our brain or elsewhere, which seems a major problem given that "free will" is subjectively happening non-stop. So, while it's not inconceivable that some new force/whatever might be discovered that controls matter in ways we've not seen, the real problem is that in this case there is no problem to solve! It's not like postulated "dark matter" invented to solve a problem with gravity ... in the case of brain/body function there is no mystery to solve, and no need for new physics - our brain/body appears to operate entirely under the control of the currently known laws of nature, which doesn't leave anything for undiscovered physics (or dualistic "souls") to control!

ianbutler 4y ago

This aligns well with some of my thoughts on free will. That though I cannot control what I desire as long as I am not constrained by outside forces I am acting of my own will. This of course is compatibilism[0] which I nearly instantaneously gravitated towards conceptually during my philosophy minor some moons ago, though I don't entirely agree with it. I would add that free will is the ability to act in accordance with one's desires AND choose how to act within a limited possibility space presented by previous determined circumstance towards those desires. I disagree with your prioritizing comment though, a simple test here is do I put off video games to work on my own projects, the answer is yes, even though I in the immediacy maybe more intensely desire to play video games. Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

iokanuon 4y ago
>Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit. That's basically living with ADHD - so about 2% to 7% of all people have a lot less free will than the rest.
- ianbutler 4y ago
  I'm a physicalist, there's nothing in my view that says biological disorders can't affect the effectiveness of the software, free will must in my view be an effect provided by our bodies and a disorder can surely remove it. Just as sure as if you were lobotomized, you'd lose free will. Edit: Plus upon re reading this and not just giving a two second flippant response, you did not clearly read my reply (which I ironically did not then read yours correctly either). I was talking about the ability to prioritize desires, not free will itself on the part you quoted.
  - 4y ago

dghf 4y ago

> The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know). Schopenhauer: > Man can do what he wills; but he cannot will what he wills. -- On the Freedom of the Will, 1839.

trashtester 4y ago

Nothing "real" exists exactly the way we perceive it. The world we experience is one where the amount of detail has been compressed by an extreme factor. We don't perceive the quantum fields of the surfaces we touch, we don't perceive individual photons hitting our eyes. The "real" world contains so much information that our brains have no way to process it in detail. Instead, our brains will create a model of the world that is optimized for utility (in a Darwinian sense). In fact, this happens at different levels. Some centers of the brain (those that regulate basic functions as well as sensory input) will have access to different information to what reaches our consciousness. A "purple" flower doesn't emit "purple" photons, but rather a combination of photons that our sensory system aggregate to "purple". Another mix of the same types of photons, but at different relative number may look "brown", "gray", "white", etc. In other words, all such qualia are some kind of illusion, or maybe more accurately, aggregated information. The same is true for most categories of concepts. Physical objects, surfaces, fluids, living objects, etc. Including what we think of as "agents". "Agents", whether they are the tiger we imagine in the forest, another human or indeed ourselves, and whether real or imagined, are also way too complex for us to comprehend in detail. What we're interested in (or rather, what has Darwinian utility) when dealing with "Agents", as opposed to non-"Agents", is that "Agents" tend to respond to stimuli in more sophisticated ways than non-"Agents". If we look big and scary, a wolf may decide not to eat us or a robber from robbing us, but it will not stop a house fire from burning us. As a consequence, there are actions we may take to improve the odds that the "agent" types around us behave in ways that are beneficial to us. Just like we're not able to comprehend something as simple as "real" photons behind the color "purple", our brain is not able to calculate EXACTLY what we can do to reach that goal, however. Instead we (most of us) seem to have a simplified framework more or less built in to find something approximate to optimal ways to modify the environment in ways that affect the behavior of the "agents" around us. "Free will" or "consciousness" or not perfect representations of the ways the brains of "agents" work. But the concepts are simple enough that our brains can reason about them (at some level), while predictive enough to have significant utility and also to be hard to "hack" for an agent that may have conflicting interests. Roughly speaking, the utility of the concept "free will" is that it allows us to communicate to others a set of behaviors that are likely to be met with retribution, while mostly limiting such threats to situations where the threat itself is likely to prevent the unwanted behavior from happening in the first place. Actually having to dish out punishment is usually not high utility behavior. It can be both costly and expensive. Having to do it, can mean one (or more) out of three things: 1) The punishment isn't harsh enough 2) The adversary does not see the threat as credible. A thief may think they will not be caught, or a state leader thinks the ally of a country will not help defend them. 3) The adversary is not able to understand the threat, or in some other way incapable of taking the threat into account when acting. In the case of the last one, one can have a rule that punishes people from killing other people, for instance. If the punishment is severe enough, and the likelihood of getting caught is close to 100%, most people will stop killing each other. However, SOME people will not be able to take the information into account for some reason or another. It could be that they go into a rage that make them ignore any kind of upcoming punishment, there may be some kind of mental disease, they may not have enough intelligence to understand the threat, or avoiding killing them could require some skill they do not possess (maybe they were not able to tell the gun was real, and indeed loaded). If we were able to isolate all cases that fall under type 3, we might call those cases acts should not be punished, in other words, they did not have the "free will" to avoid them. But the distinction may be hard to identify. Making too many exceptions will often both increase the number of people who do not see a threat of punishment as credible AND also increase the number of people that would be able to understand what the rule was. So, basically: - "Free will" is a simplification of the kind of process that causes threat of punishment to prevent us to do some set of actions that will be met by retribution. If legal systems (or similar informal retribution threats) are set up properly, those who actually have "free will" about the type of action, will really be punished for it. - Those who DO get punished will very often NOT have "free will", in the sense that they are unresponsive to stimuli about that type of action. When people DO end up in prison (and assuming that punishment is strict enough and the police is able to catch most criminals), will be those NOT responsive to the threat of punishment, for some reason or another. - This may still provide close to optimal utility for the set of people who decide what to punish. The cost of punishing those who are for some reason not able to avoid doing the "crime" is lower to that group than the benefit gained by the threat causing many others to NOT commit the "crime", when they otherwise would have. - Indeed, since we are not capable of a fully detailed analysis of the "real" things happening inside the brains of "agents", we have no choice but using a simplified model. Some concept like "Free Will" is probably needed to lay out consequences of actions. Also some people have more of an ability to understand the details and limitations of such models, so simpler models have the advantage that it is easier to communicate. (To children, people with limited cognitive abilities or immigrants with poor cultural understanding.) At this point, I could start writing about how empathy comes into this, how empathy is modulated by a feeling of kinship or shard identity as well as a perception of being threatened by someone, but that would make this post quite long :)