17 ms·

What You (Want to)* Want

150 points by razin 4y ago

informatimago 4y ago
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger. This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Was just thinking that religion was the one thing that caused me decades of unnecessary anxiety over my natural wants and interests. Would not recommend.
- leethargo 4y ago
  I believe this to be similar to Epicurus' excuse [1]: He couldn't publicly say that there are no gods as creators, because that would have been blasphemy. But he wanted to take away the fear that everybody had of punishment by gods. So he argued that our (human) lives aren't important enough for the gods to mess with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Theology
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming I don't quite understand - you're using our "programming" as an argument that we have free will? Wouldn't our "programming" imply that our will is already deterministic? In other words, is there any difference between our will being driven by our programming, and driven by God's debugger? We're following orders either way...
xnorswap 4y ago
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  2022 feels like the year the sheen of genius wears off our tech overlords.
osipov2k 4y ago
zozbot234 4y ago
If you're desires are not too weird, you can certainly find a fixpoint such that what you Want-To <repeated n times> Want is the same as what you Want. I'm not seeing any paradox here.
jvanderbot 4y ago
You can do whatever you want, but the wanting is the hard part. Once you realize what something truly requires, the interest usually dries up. TFA says this is the wrong model, and tries to get closer to something else. But it's right enough that it's helped me to avoid huge amounts of wasted effort and forced me to consider what I truly want.
jagrsw 4y ago
> the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s Technically 0.(9) == 1
- distcs 4y ago
  What you say does not contradict what PG said. That is how limits are defined, technically.
sph 4y ago
I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe [1] I shared because maybe someone can suggest some reading material along these lines from someone much smarter than me. But for now, I enjoy the idea that I have complete freedom in a very ordered universe. 1: there are some interesting corollaries to this idea. One among them is that the interaction between other entities with similar free will (other people) increases the complexity even further. We are agents of chaos.
- oezi 4y ago
  As far as we know the universe isn't deterministic.
  - sph 4y ago
    Do we know it is non-deterministic, or do we not have any proof it's one way or the other?
    - api 4y ago
      AFAIK hidden variable models have been ruled out in many quantum scenarios. It really does appear that the universe is not deterministic.
      - jagrsw 4y ago
        It opens itself up to interesting interpretations ;). god(s) aka the simulation developer(s) playing with outcomes of quantum events in order to manipulate your/my behavior, punish the bad, reward the good, make the bushes burn etc. Since quantum events can have macroscopic outcomes, this should be possible? :)
distcs 4y ago
Why is PG writing these pseudo-scientific metaphysical posts? His last post on Alien Truth was a disaster. Now this? I normally enjoy PG's writings! His writings on Lisp had good influence on me. But these recent posts are embarrassing. How can someone who has had so much influence in tech communities bring themselves to write these pseudo-scientific posts so glibly?
- klpolg 4y ago
  He's currently on the AI train. Humans are made of matter, neural networks, etc. Many of his recent essays are pushing a company or a group of companies. The original essays were much better.
- qsort 4y ago
  It's a long-standing tradition in the hacker community to delve into stuff one only has a cursory understanding of. At times it's productive, as it helps uncover intellectual impostures. At times it's just embarrassing.
  - eckza 4y ago
    It's gonna be super fun for absolutely nobody but the hecklers when he finds out about Lacan.
  - nowherebeen 4y ago
    Or does he have so much free time because of how wealthy he has become through YC that he has lost touch with reality. Now he spends all his free time thinking you can't want to want what you want. Or is it you can't (want to)* want what you want?
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  A variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease probably.
- seafoam 4y ago
  It is simple. In this case he is just trying to figure out how to write the macro the expansion of which is motivation.
stephc_int13 4y ago
A common misunderstanding about the human brain is that we think of the higher part to be more or less in control of the rest, like a conductor with an orchestra or a pilot with an airplane. The reality is much weirder and complex.
kajaktum 4y ago
I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that. Just looking inwards is enough to convince me that I have no idea what I am going to think next, type next, or how I am even going to finish this sentence. It simply arrives and I am the first (and possibly only) one to experience it. I cannot will the will to will.
- jondeval 4y ago
  > I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that. How about over a longer time period? For example, say you want to pickup a new good habit and get rid of a bad habit. When you start to intentionally make thousands of little choices over time that all add up to a major change in your life, can't you say that you freely chose that path? Even if each individual impulse along the way maintains a connection to a more materialist/deterministic set of causes, you can still meaningfully talk about your own free will at this higher level of abstraction. What am I missing?
  - kajaktum 4y ago
    >want >intentionally >chose None of these words make sense. I can't want what I want (author's thesis here). This higher level of abstraction that you talk about is an illusion caused by not paying attention. I can ruminate for years about how I am going to do this and that; but at the end of the day, the impetus to actually do it is still mysterious. I can't want to change. I just change. I just do the little things that shifts my life for the better and then one day just simply stop. I can forge some reasons as to why I change but I could have easily muster my way through it. Can I choose how much will power I have? Now people will say because free will doesn't exist means that choices don't matter. It absolutely does. The fact that you "chose" to do good things matter. Because experiences matter. Because experience pain/suffering however you wish to define it is not a "good" thing. I can perfectly understand some issues people have with this concept because it causes them trouble with their addiction/depression. But just because we tell lies like we always do in programming to facilitate discussion/teaching/abstraction does not mean that those things are not real. You don't want to make decisions on a national/scale on lies that you tell yourself to get to sleep.
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Are doing and wanting really two different things? Both start by thinking, and choosing to think about X is certainly in our control¹. So at the bottom of it, both are just chemical reactions in your brain, willingly set off by your ghost. ¹that is not to say that not thinking about Y is also in our control.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
> We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more "want to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s following a decimal point. In practice three or four "want to"s must surely be enough. Ultrafinite recursion strikes again!
sokoloff 4y ago
I think the regular expression would be at least as correct and make for a less ambiguous headline if it used + instead of *.
squaredot 4y ago
It happened to me to think about this (but from another perspective). It seems to me that the sentences "I want [A]", where A is an object outside me, and "I want [to want A]" are essentially different. But the sentences "I want [to want A]" and "I want [to want to want A]" are not really different since both have as object my own will. Or said in another way: wanting to want something is already wanting something. Moreover an essential differentiation that is not addressed is the difference between desire and will (not easy).
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
In the context of startups maybe he's referring to those that want to want something which I take to mean as a poser. It would be like someone starting a club for a favorite color and someone wants to want that favorite color to be their favorite color but the reality is you can't want to want a favorite color, you either want or don't. Or it could be any number of things being referred to. People wanting to want to work in tech. People want to want control of a social media company.
motohagiography 4y ago
Aspirational desires, like wishing you liked a band your cool friend did so that you could have that in common are real, but the object of desire (what is wanted) is not the band, it's the affection of the friend. You could say, "I wish all these things I had made me happier," but they haven't, and therefore do not. However, is this just not the logical artifact of the phrase "want to," relating to its subject as a negative counterfactual? To desire to want something is like trying to be funny, where if you are, you aren't - hence to want-to-want, or wish you wanted, means you don't actually want it. Maybe the solution is for each thing I want, to say out loud, I do not want it, and hear which statements give you the most peace?
mhb 4y ago
Better versions considering the illusion of free will: https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/revising-fault-line https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/revising-fault-line https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will It could be there are others..
Errancer 4y ago
Eh, this article touches on something important but 1. the material aspect of determinism is the most boring one, if everything is materially determined then so is our feeling of freedom therefore it doesn't really change anything. Strawson has a nice article about this called "Freedom and resentment" which shows that the thesis of determinism doesn't really change anything about our ethics. 2. the programming lingo seems to me to make the issue more obscure rather than clear but the problem he is mentioning is discussed under the name "second-order desires" and is quite important since it leads to much more interesting problem of determinism - the psychological determinism. Usually we believe we have certain freedom in choosing our beliefs through weighing and choosing our interpretations of what is happening. The issue of psychological determinism is threefold. First proposition is that our beliefs change due to some causes, they don't simply pop into our head. Second proposition is that our given beliefs will dictate what interpretations will make sense to us. Therefore every cause will make us believe what our current beliefs allow. Third proposition is that our actions are driven by combination of beliefs and desires. So ultimately we can't chose our actions since we can't choose our beliefs and the hope for "freedom" is lost. What is left is the will which is not free but driven by beliefs and desires that are outside "our" control. Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.
nnoitra 4y ago
auggierose 4y ago
I don't think the universe is deterministic. Why would you think such a thing? So, if you start from a wrong assumption, the rest that comes is not that interesting.
- mistermann 4y ago
  One possibility: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic See also: how to train a neural network.
  - auggierose 4y ago
    Are these not at least two possibilities? Furthermore, what kind of heuristic is that? I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      I'd say they're kind of a blend - heuristics is what enables the Illusory Truth Effect. > I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability. Agree, but people seem generally unable to realize this (there is a similar problem with Truth, another thing people predict without realizing - see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593349). Now, what is the causality of this? Presumably it is a natural consequence/side effect/service of consciousness. But: so (presumably) are things like racism, but because that is harmful, society has deemed it inappropriate and this is socially enforced in various ways. Might the same be possible with clairvoyance and soothsaying, or at least in certain special scenarios/venues? The institution of science seems to have accomplished it, and realized substantial benefits as a consequence - might it have utility in domains other than science (politics, human relations, etc)?
civilized 4y ago
I don't think this is a very productive direction because it seems like unfalsifiable speculation. Placing the hidden determinism enough "wants" away seems to make it obscure enough that you can think "sure, that's where the magic happens" and it's impossible to be proven wrong. IMO, the perception of free will comes from our observation of our deliberations and our actions. We observe that we often have choices and uncertainty about what to do, but something always breaks the impasse, because we always continue making choices and going on living. That "something" is what we call free will, and isn't entirely transparent to us. If you tried to crack open the black box, I think you'd see wants and want-to-wants driving things in there, but I don't think you'd see a clean system of n-th removed want-to-wants determining everything.
darkerside 4y ago
Like many others, I've also thought about few will. By best answer at this point is, we have limited free will but we don't always know how to use it. It's like surfing. You can't do everything you want to do, but you can position yourself to make choices that better leverage the waves of your subconscious.
pgsandstrom 4y ago
When I was two I started wondered how I could reconsile my qualia with determinism. But when I was three I read Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant and laid the matter to rest.
wccrawford 4y ago
I've had things I wanted to want, but didn't want. They were usually things that would have put me closer to the values of a group I was involved in. An off-the-top-of-my-head example would be talking with friends about video games, and they start talking about physical art from the game that they bought and enjoy. I don't like having little knick-knacks around the the house, and I don't get enjoyment from them. But I see the joy they get from them, and I want that, too. So I want to want those things, but I still don't want them.
jondeval 4y ago
I actually think PG is exploring something that is at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Interestingly, the traditional teaching of Original Sin is that we are broken at the level of what we 'want'. The phrase commonly used is 'disordered desire'. The key idea here is that if you want the wrong things, you are not actually free, even if you perceive yourself as choosing freely. As a corollary, the more you practice the good, the more you desire it, and the freer you become.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  The concept of original sin is garbage.
  - originalmind 4y ago
    Wow, thanks for sharing this deep insight. -- A fellow "original mind"
  - Bilal_io 4y ago
    As someone that believes in the Quran, which talks about the Adam&Eve tree incident, I agree. Then there is the whole definition of God being just, and for someone to die for someone else's sin is far from just. I personally believe in a God that I can ask directly for forgiveness and he forgives. That being said, he wouldn't forgive me for wronging someone else, I will have to settle it with that person in this life, or we'll meet and settle it in the day of judgement.
onlycoffee 4y ago
> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? We have a soul, unlike actual machines or animals.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I don't really get what he means here. >you can't (want to)* want what you want It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. you can't (want to want what you want). you can't want to want to want what you want). And it is recursive: you can't (want to want to want it)
- suslik 4y ago
  I think this is just a wordplay that abuses the imprecision of the word 'want'. For example, a drug addict wants (as in has a very strong internal, biology- and subconsious-driven desire for) heroin, but doesn't want to want it (as in when thinks about it consciously).
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    I don't see that beyond holding two one or more beliefs in juxtaposition which is the definition of uncertainty. A chemical addiction is not a "want".
- fluoridation 4y ago
  >It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. Tell that to an addict.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    Tell what? I am not sure I am following you... can you be more specific?
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      That wanting something implies that you want to want it.
      - theGnuMe 4y ago
biscuits1 4y ago
I want someone to want to explain it to me like I'm five?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
doorman2 4y ago
Basically, there is no free will. Think about it like this: where do your thoughts come from? They appear magically in your head. So you can choose between the set of things you think about, but the set of things you think about is out of your control.
alfor 4y ago
My take at the moment is that each humans are like cells of a human where the human is a civilisation. We have autonomy but must generally work for the welfare of the whole organism. If some people are not aligned to the general good we try to dissuade them or punish them because if it become too big the whole system collapse in the same way that our organism would if there is too many cancer cells. Our consciousness operate on the scale of a human life but there is a similar "consciousness" of the civilisation that operate on a much larger timescale, thousand of years, we call those religions. While we can seek personal gain, it’s much the same as a cell trying to outcompete it’s neighborhoods, it’s misaligned to the more important goal of global welfare. There is something inside us in our soul that know this and won’t make you satisfied of yourself if you are not a net positive for the whole. Now we have looked everywhere to try to find the God of our stories but didn’t (it's a pattern operating on a different timescale). So we are like cells that rebelled against the organism, discarting all the rules that we had because we don’t understand them. The result will be a sickness of the organism up to a point where we see we have to go back to our ancients rules or the death of the organism (civilisation collapse) Those rules are: each must try to align himself with truth and love toward others, must try it’s best, it’s ok to fail, but recognised it and improve. Those rules are the preconditions for the survival and slow improvement of our civilisation. Other religions have other rules and other outcomes.
xianshou 4y ago
Schopenhauer: "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration: In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed. In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice. There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't. To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  So, Action: Act(Environment|Character) Reflection: Act(Character|Environment) An agent has free will iff it engages in action<->reflection cycles. Also: An agent A "could have taken" action X vs Y: ActX(Env|CharA) vs ActY(Env|CharB) in the sense that there is a graph "of some sort" linking their CharA to the CharB which could realise ActY. Eg., Bob can either steal the money or return it. Bob chooses to steal it. Bob is morally responsible for this act because there is a realisable "action<->reflection" path from bob's actual character to the one he should have had. If bob had had this character, he would not have stolen.
  - xianshou 4y ago
    This is a very interesting definition of "free will" and not one I would expect most philosophers to agree with, but more measurable and useful than most would propose. In this case "free will" reduces to self-modifying action with randomness injected by the environment, which feels more like a stochastic model than genuine self-determination. That said, the existence of a "reflection" function is still the primary determinant of any moral responsibility.
superb-owl 4y ago
Schrödinger had an interesting resolution to this paradox, which I wrote about recently: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schrodinger-believed#%C2%A7free-will https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schroding...
prionassembly 4y ago
PG becoming a Lacanian.
hugs 4y ago
"You can do what you want, but you can't want to want what you want." I've read many of PG's essays, but this one feels like GPT-3 wrote it. It's borderline gibberish. Like he trained an AI on all his other essays, fed it the essay title, and this was the result. I half-expect a year from now that he'll tell us all his recent essays were written by this AI and it's now the core IP in some recent YC investment.
- lisper 4y ago
  Not only that, but he got it totally wrong. It's not that people change what they want, it is that they think they want something, but then they discover that they were wrong. Also, what you want changes over time, but not because you decide to want something new, or to stop wanting something. It just happens. The best example of this is going through puberty, where you develop desires that you didn't have before. This is not a decision that you make. Figuring out what you want is a process of discovery, not of decision-making.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
teg4n_ 4y ago
Looks like PG finally took an Introduction to Philosophy class.
vagab0nd 4y ago
You will do what you are programmed to do. "Free will" is an illusion that you don't know what you are going to do before you have computed the outcome. The Matrix said it best: > Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice? > The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.
63 4y ago
I wouldn't go so far as to call this gibberish like other commenters, but I don't get the point. I follow the logic but it feels incomplete. Why does the thesis matter?
hugepuppy 4y ago
Seems like he's saying that you can't change who you are at the core, which I disagree with. With each want, however, the meaning becomes more and more frivolous. Who cares what you want to want to want to want to want? That's not recognizable even on a subconscious level.
xianshou 4y ago
You can read however many PG essays you want to, but you can't control what you think of them.
csdvrx 4y ago
Maybe I'm the only one who liked it, but I found the essay nice as it gives a simple model to understand ourselves better. Here's my take on it: there're many things out there (musical genre like classical music, cooking like Indian, French, Ethiopian) and your utility function has coefficients for most of them. When you don't know the coefficient, you try, and you come with a quick conclusion (like or don't like) that can be further refined by experience (ex: like Indian food, vegetarian Indian food is ok-ish, vegan Indian food nope) Sometimes you want to alter the coefficient because it can create conflict with your identity (what if you're vegan? what if your parents are Indian?) or other things. Sometimes you succeed through different methods, sometimes you just can't. And there're things you like you shouldn't, because of society (taboos, or banned substances) or the consequences on yourself (addictions, risks for your future health) but it's just the same thing: trying to alter the coefficient in your utility function. It may be worth it (learning something new) or futile (something you just can't change) which leads us to Seneca prayer (the wisdom to separate the two, knowing the battles you can win to avoid wasting effort). And there's another dimension if it's possible: the amount of effort required, which might be measured in years (and what if you're old and bound to fail?) Personally, I find it simpler to go epicurian and if I find something new I enjoy (right now, Russian rap lol) just enjoy it without asking myself too many questions. And if I don't like something or have no want for something I should like (Drill rap, Trap rap), I don't force myself but don't exclude it out of my life either: I leave that to serendipity :)
joisig 4y ago
> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? First, accept the fact that "you" are _only_ that machine. No higher "soul". The machine (you!) has free will in that it decides for itself, through physical processes occurring within it, what it wants - albeit with some outside forces, circumstances and other individuals influencing this anywhere from a bit to a lot. You are this mostly-independent machine operated by physical forces. Therefore, you have free will. A secondary question is whether the state of the universe and therefore of you the machine at time T also pre-ordains what you will do and what you will want at time T+1. I think a more interesting question is whether that actually matters in any practical or even metaphysical sense, given that we experience time linearly in the direction we do?
lliamander 4y ago
> Randomness destroys the ghost in the machine as effectively as determinism. I totally agree, and yet my encounter with academic philosophy was that most people with a free-will orientation see that randomness as precisely the origin of free will. Personally, the only notion of free will that makes sense (and the one to which I personally hold) is the notion of agent-causation[1]. > it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions The philosophical notion of free will is actually completely irrelevant here. The relevant questions are a) "Is social accountability psychologically effective and altering someone's behavior?" and b) "what sorts of behavior modifications are morally permissble?" [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/#3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/...
quantonomical 4y ago
mikewarot 4y ago
There are some hidden assumptions, including the idea that consciousness is a continuous phenomenon and/or experience. Our brain is amazingly good at making up retroactive explanations to match our observations. Also, our thought processes are sufficiently chaotic that no amount of inspection can catch all the starting conditions, so any model has to be statistical in nature.
v_london 4y ago
I saw lots of people criticizing PG's essay, but I really liked it. Free will and agency are interesting philosophical topics to wonder, even if they don't hold much practical value.
asdadsdad 4y ago
PG is more and more like a reputation-building farm these days, churning garbage at an impressive rate lol
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
karaterobot 4y ago
Whenever I think about the universe being deterministic, I get caught up on things like the Monorail episode of The Simpsons. For some reason, that's always the specific example that pops into my mind when I think "does it make sense that the initial position of atoms in the universe would lead ineluctably to the exact state of the world today, without anyone making choices about it?" The idea that a materialistic universe made of unthinking, unchoosing matter bumping into each other would create the "Monorail" song, with all the specific cultural assumptions built into it, is just so much less likely to me than the alternative that I end up just siding with free will by default. Neither the free will argument, nor determinism, nor any attempted unification of the two that I'm aware of are fully satisfying. But, the idea that we're just atoms that, for no particular reason, happen to write the words "I call the big one Bitey", and then just happen to create the infrastructure to broadcast that out, and view it, seems like the more absurd of the available options.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  The way I think about this is: physical laws lead to the emergence of information processing machines that form big networks together and develop cultural language of ever increasing sophistication. The monorail song is just the production of this large distributed thinking machine.
hbarka 4y ago
What you want? Rolling Stones https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8 https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8, Joe Jackson https://youtu.be/XGqmiT7JJVg https://youtu.be/XGqmiT7JJVg or New Radicals https://youtu.be/DL7-CKirWZE https://youtu.be/DL7-CKirWZE ?
madrox 4y ago
This reads like an autodidact's rediscovery of psychological egoism: https://iep.utm.edu/psychological-egoism/ https://iep.utm.edu/psychological-egoism/
brudgers 4y ago
We must believe in free will, we have no choice. Isaac Bashevis Singer
mkoubaa 4y ago
Am I the only one who never cared about free will? Either we have free will or we don't - we will never know - and it doesn't actually matter.
savryn 4y ago
this reminds me of the end of Lawrence of Arabia the entire film thus far about destiny, fate, making our own paths... and then to pinch a bit of flesh and understand what we are. magnificent and sorrowful, all at once
dzink 4y ago
The brain feels like a quantum alien that took over a biological shell to survive on this planet and is now trying to optimize its casing options. (Deliberately changing the terms for a concept can help us see it in a new light.) - Some wants damage the casing but feel great to the brain (sugar). - Some wants take over a portion of the brain's activity and tax it to eternity (addiction), so its best to never ever try them. - Some wants are very very bad for other brains and casings, so carnivores draw the line making non-carnivorous varieties inferior and thus worth sacrificing (meat consumption). - Some wants damage the connections and relationships between human brains and thus ability for all of humanity to survive collectively, so religion and laws have stepped in to set the rules of engagement. - Some wants are psychological and financially a bad idea. - Few wants are fundamental, and most wants are based on something we've seen others done that we want to try. - Wanting not to want something is a tax and conflict with our own brain, and just like addiction it can be tackled if the want was caused by exposure to the activity, or exposure to the idea, or the subject/object of want and that exposure is reduced or removed from view. - If you are the subject of the want (an attractive person, a VC, a Billionaire, a person of influence), all of a sudden your life incurs an overhead and a cost for deterring everyone else's wants towards you. Psychology/Philosophy may have more insight into whether the origin of bad wants is curiosity, wrongful exposure, greed, or inborn instincts based on biological/genetically ingrained habits. Economics + Business has the job of satisfying the wants of an increasing number of intelligent agents in the system by encouraging those who want more to make more and increase supply of the the most wanted kinds of objects of want. Government has the job of satisfying the needs of everyone in its jurisdiction, while entrepreneurship has the luxury of picking which wants and needs to serve that are most profitable and desirable to the entrepreneur. Advertising has the job of involuntarily planting more wants in the brains of everyone. Fun paths to explore. Thanks PG!
Dig1t 4y ago
This is genius, I strive to reason this well. I am endlessly fascinated by thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. I have observed my brain’s ability to think recursively about its own thoughts many times before and it’s such a cool phenomenon. This strikes me as very similar, the regex expression is a useful way of explaining his point.
Nevermark 4y ago
A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds. But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors. If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting. If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us. The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them. We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to. ---- One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors. So now we can discuss things a little more clearly: Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want? There are three answers. The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience. The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small. Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that. ---- If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic. Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.
dilap 4y ago
If many worlds is true, you took all options of every choice (if we assume, as seems likely, a non-zero probability of your neurons firing in a way that actuate each option). But where does the "wanting" lie? What if it's an experience that is not physical, but real? I.e. it exists and experiences itself, but it does not in any way change our scientific description of the universe. It doesn't change how all of the many worlds are playing out. Would this "wanting" have to inhabit every branch of the unierse? Perhaps it only exists along the path of choices that it "wanted". Then everything that can happen, happens, but your consciousness only experiences what it "wanted". Mechanistic action and free-will are both preserved.
omandi 4y ago
I think that the number of recursions is infinite so that is what gives you free will.
Barrin92 4y ago
Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here: >"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?" I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest. Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannGrid.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...
enasterosophes 4y ago
I struggled a lot with the depression and irresponsible behaviour that arises when you realize that free will can't be reconciled with physics. It seemed like there was no reason to do anything and no reason not to do anything. The level of nihilism I sunk to led to all sorts of unhappy consequences. I am still prone to those lines of thought sometimes, but with experience, I can also suggest ways to defuse the nihilism and existential angst so they don't continue to lead to suffering for yourself and people around you. 1. Concepts like "free will" are ill-defined, so there is actually no problem to solve. Stop itching at problems which are complete bullshit. Focus on lived experience, not vague distractions. 2. Even if there is no freedom, you can still experience suffering, and it is possible to learn to avoid paths which lead to suffering. The learning might be deterministic, but that doesn't mean you don't experience the results. Or, just continue to suffer if you're too stubborn to learn. Your ... choice, or whatever you want to call it, when you insist on shooting yourself in the foot even after you learned it hurt. 3. Responsibility is not the same as free choice. Responsibility is a contract where you agree to take on the bad consequences if something bad happens, and in return you gain power over what you are responsible for. One of the paths which leads to suffering is to assume you're not responsible for your actions. There are lots of ways people try to abdicate their personal responsibility. Excuses like "it was drugs" or "I was treated badly" or "my brain is controlled by the laws of physics so I can never really choose anything" or "it was so-and-so's fault." Whether or not these things are true, you are still admitting defeat and allowing disempowerment and suffering into your life whenever you say something was not your responsibility. Hemingway was on the right track when he resolved to always honor promises he made while drunk. To do otherwise is to admit that your actions were out of your control; it invites intrusion and censure by those who see you as weak for not being able to take responsibility. Every time you blame someone or something else for a problem, you grant them power which you could have kept for yourself, if only you had owned the problem.
Archelaos 4y ago
This little piece reminds me of Thomas Hobbes' "Of Liberty and Necessity" (1646, publ. 1654).[1] Hobbes would have very probably rejected the recursive application of "want to" onto itself as nonsense, but uses a very similar structured chain of reasoning as the author when it comes to "necessary causes": "... But here I must take notice of certain words of his Lordship's in this place, as making against his own tenet. Where all the causes, saith he, being joined together, and subordinate one to another, do make but one total cause, if any one cause, much more the first, in the whole series or subordination of causes, be necessary, it determines the rest, and without doubt maketh the effect necessary. For that which I call the necessary cause of any effect, is the joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause. If any of these, saith he, especially the first, produce its effect necessarily, then all the rest are determined. Now it is manifest, that the first cause is a necessary cause of all the effects that are next and immediate to it, and therefore by his Lordship's own reason all effects are necessary." (p. 261) This "joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause" is not far away of applying the tactics of a regular expression. Instead of a chain of "wants", Hobbes speaks of "alternate succession of contrary appetites" and only the last one is what we call "will". In this view, the author's example of the drug adict would have been irrelevant for the problem. An adiction merely describes a (psychological) habit. However, the analysis of "will" is always about a specific, individual event and everything that leads to it, which can often include diverse intentions: "... I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often." (p. 273) In Hobbes view a "voluntary action" is an action where somebody was deliberating. Only in this sense the person has a choice. And if the person is "free" to do something, this means that the process of deliberating is still ongoing: "... I conceive that those actions, which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done apon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing ; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating." (p. 273) Therefore the freedom of the will is in accordance with determinism ("necessary causes" in Hobbes' terminology), which is itself unavoidable: "... I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." (p. 274) Hobbes' argumentation in "Of Liberty and Necessity" has far more interesting details and touches a lot more related topics than I could have presented here. For those who want to delve deeper into the philosophical discussion on the freedom of the will, I highly recommend the text as a basic read. [1] See: https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ [pdf] (pp. 229-278)
uptownfunk 4y ago
This post I think offers some perspective on the whole "Do we have free-will or is it all predetermined?" discussion. I don't have any science around this, but some Indian wisdom- What I learned from one of my mentors KN Rao (one of the advisors whose advise was sought by great leaders of India): The famous grandsire Bheeshma Pitamaha of the Mahabharata was once asked this question regarding fate vs free-will. His answer was to liken it to a man in a boat rowing in a river. The river has a current, however man has effort. I believe his verdict was "effort is greater than destiny". Perhaps it has to be so, because were it not, then we are just part of the clockwork creation. PG is trying to go one level deeper in his post. Namely, are we living under the illusion that we have free will, because our free-will (which is essentially our ability to have agency over our environment) is itself a product of our desires, and now the question is are our desires our own or are they themselves determined? It may not be possible to know the answer to this one. I think it is equivalent to something like the collatz conjecture, to which Erdos replied "Mathematics is not ready for such problems" I don't think we are ready for such problems either.
broof 4y ago
the illusion of free will isn't much of an illusion once you pay attention.
theonemind 4y ago
Roger Penrose doesn’t think the universe is computable or a computation. For now, we can’t reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, so I really don’t feel we have very strong evidence that it is—thinking it computable seems like an article of faith as well. We also have Godel’s incompleteness theorem—even if it appears we can model the universe as something computable, I think there’s going to be room for mystery, and human consciousness seems like just the sort of strange self-referentiality eddy where that kind of thing would come in to play. I think a lack of free will be unfalsifiable--you'd have to measure all aspects of a brain, including the quantum state, which would change what you observed--so maybe then you can predict it, but you also had a hand in determining it, which undermines what you want to know, that it was determinable. On the other hand, free will seems to just refer to the feeling you could’ve made a different choice. But you didn’t. I don’t see why people get so defensive about a junk concept. At some level, it doesn’t really seem like there are separate things, and I don’t feel like there’s a need to invoke some kind of separate individual free will aside from the operation of a universal stoicism type logos/the totality of natural law operating as something like a universal “will”
carapace 4y ago
> the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted That feeling is an illusion. This has been demonstrated with brain scans. By the time you feel like you are making a decision your brain has already made it and you are just becoming aware of it. It's actually possible to turn off that feeling, to do without the illusion of free will. Your body keeps moving and doing "all the things" but you are totally non-agential, just watching it, along for the ride. It's fun and deeply relaxing once you get used to it. (Note that this does nothing to resolve the question of free will. Your conscious mind doesn't have free will, but that doesn't mean your unconscious mind necessarily doesn't have it.)
dqh 4y ago
Given the observable order of the universe, I have always found it hard to accept that pausing it, copying it, then resuming both copies could result in two different universes over time.
amts 4y ago
He should try to rewrite this topic in ketamine and/or other dissociatives and with appropriate combinations of set&setting, otherwise it's just another one biased opinion.
lakeshastina 4y ago
A desire arises in one's mind, prompting us to act upon it. Why such desires arise are due to a multitude of reasons - cultural conditioning, advertising, etc. When such a desire arises, we "want" to fulfill it. So from this perspective, there is little free-will in what we can "want". Through meditation, when there is the ability developed to detach from the thoughts that arise in one's mind, one can choose to not act on desires that urge action. So, there is then the possibility of freedom.

150 points by razin 4y ago

IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger. This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Was just thinking that religion was the one thing that caused me decades of unnecessary anxiety over my natural wants and interests. Would not recommend.
leethargo 4y ago
I believe this to be similar to Epicurus' excuse [1]: He couldn't publicly say that there are no gods as creators, because that would have been blasphemy. But he wanted to take away the fear that everybody had of punishment by gods. So he argued that our (human) lives aren't important enough for the gods to mess with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Theology
bheadmaster 4y ago
> He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming I don't quite understand - you're using our "programming" as an argument that we have free will? Wouldn't our "programming" imply that our will is already deterministic? In other words, is there any difference between our will being driven by our programming, and driven by God's debugger? We're following orders either way...

xnorswap 4y ago

itsoktocry 4y ago
2022 feels like the year the sheen of genius wears off our tech overlords.

osipov2k 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

If you're desires are not too weird, you can certainly find a fixpoint such that what you Want-To <repeated n times> Want is the same as what you Want. I'm not seeing any paradox here.

jvanderbot 4y ago

You can do whatever you want, but the wanting is the hard part. Once you realize what something truly requires, the interest usually dries up. TFA says this is the wrong model, and tries to get closer to something else. But it's right enough that it's helped me to avoid huge amounts of wasted effort and forced me to consider what I truly want.

jagrsw 4y ago

> the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s Technically 0.(9) == 1

distcs 4y ago
What you say does not contradict what PG said. That is how limits are defined, technically.

sph 4y ago

I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe [1] I shared because maybe someone can suggest some reading material along these lines from someone much smarter than me. But for now, I enjoy the idea that I have complete freedom in a very ordered universe. 1: there are some interesting corollaries to this idea. One among them is that the interaction between other entities with similar free will (other people) increases the complexity even further. We are agents of chaos.

oezi 4y ago
As far as we know the universe isn't deterministic.
- sph 4y ago
  Do we know it is non-deterministic, or do we not have any proof it's one way or the other?
  - api 4y ago
    AFAIK hidden variable models have been ruled out in many quantum scenarios. It really does appear that the universe is not deterministic.
    - jagrsw 4y ago
      It opens itself up to interesting interpretations ;). god(s) aka the simulation developer(s) playing with outcomes of quantum events in order to manipulate your/my behavior, punish the bad, reward the good, make the bushes burn etc. Since quantum events can have macroscopic outcomes, this should be possible? :)

distcs 4y ago

Why is PG writing these pseudo-scientific metaphysical posts? His last post on Alien Truth was a disaster. Now this? I normally enjoy PG's writings! His writings on Lisp had good influence on me. But these recent posts are embarrassing. How can someone who has had so much influence in tech communities bring themselves to write these pseudo-scientific posts so glibly?

klpolg 4y ago
He's currently on the AI train. Humans are made of matter, neural networks, etc. Many of his recent essays are pushing a company or a group of companies. The original essays were much better.
qsort 4y ago
It's a long-standing tradition in the hacker community to delve into stuff one only has a cursory understanding of. At times it's productive, as it helps uncover intellectual impostures. At times it's just embarrassing.
- eckza 4y ago
  It's gonna be super fun for absolutely nobody but the hecklers when he finds out about Lacan.
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  Or does he have so much free time because of how wealthy he has become through YC that he has lost touch with reality. Now he spends all his free time thinking you can't want to want what you want. Or is it you can't (want to)* want what you want?
iLoveOncall 4y ago
A variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease probably.
seafoam 4y ago
It is simple. In this case he is just trying to figure out how to write the macro the expansion of which is motivation.

stephc_int13 4y ago

A common misunderstanding about the human brain is that we think of the higher part to be more or less in control of the rest, like a conductor with an orchestra or a pilot with an airplane. The reality is much weirder and complex.

kajaktum 4y ago

I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that. Just looking inwards is enough to convince me that I have no idea what I am going to think next, type next, or how I am even going to finish this sentence. It simply arrives and I am the first (and possibly only) one to experience it. I cannot will the will to will.

jondeval 4y ago
> I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that. How about over a longer time period? For example, say you want to pickup a new good habit and get rid of a bad habit. When you start to intentionally make thousands of little choices over time that all add up to a major change in your life, can't you say that you freely chose that path? Even if each individual impulse along the way maintains a connection to a more materialist/deterministic set of causes, you can still meaningfully talk about your own free will at this higher level of abstraction. What am I missing?
- kajaktum 4y ago
  >want >intentionally >chose None of these words make sense. I can't want what I want (author's thesis here). This higher level of abstraction that you talk about is an illusion caused by not paying attention. I can ruminate for years about how I am going to do this and that; but at the end of the day, the impetus to actually do it is still mysterious. I can't want to change. I just change. I just do the little things that shifts my life for the better and then one day just simply stop. I can forge some reasons as to why I change but I could have easily muster my way through it. Can I choose how much will power I have? Now people will say because free will doesn't exist means that choices don't matter. It absolutely does. The fact that you "chose" to do good things matter. Because experiences matter. Because experience pain/suffering however you wish to define it is not a "good" thing. I can perfectly understand some issues people have with this concept because it causes them trouble with their addiction/depression. But just because we tell lies like we always do in programming to facilitate discussion/teaching/abstraction does not mean that those things are not real. You don't want to make decisions on a national/scale on lies that you tell yourself to get to sleep.

jdthedisciple 4y ago

Are doing and wanting really two different things? Both start by thinking, and choosing to think about X is certainly in our control¹. So at the bottom of it, both are just chemical reactions in your brain, willingly set off by your ghost. ¹that is not to say that not thinking about Y is also in our control.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

> We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more "want to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s following a decimal point. In practice three or four "want to"s must surely be enough. Ultrafinite recursion strikes again!

sokoloff 4y ago

I think the regular expression would be at least as correct and make for a less ambiguous headline if it used + instead of *.

squaredot 4y ago

It happened to me to think about this (but from another perspective). It seems to me that the sentences "I want [A]", where A is an object outside me, and "I want [to want A]" are essentially different. But the sentences "I want [to want A]" and "I want [to want to want A]" are not really different since both have as object my own will. Or said in another way: wanting to want something is already wanting something. Moreover an essential differentiation that is not addressed is the difference between desire and will (not easy).

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

In the context of startups maybe he's referring to those that want to want something which I take to mean as a poser. It would be like someone starting a club for a favorite color and someone wants to want that favorite color to be their favorite color but the reality is you can't want to want a favorite color, you either want or don't. Or it could be any number of things being referred to. People wanting to want to work in tech. People want to want control of a social media company.

motohagiography 4y ago

Aspirational desires, like wishing you liked a band your cool friend did so that you could have that in common are real, but the object of desire (what is wanted) is not the band, it's the affection of the friend. You could say, "I wish all these things I had made me happier," but they haven't, and therefore do not. However, is this just not the logical artifact of the phrase "want to," relating to its subject as a negative counterfactual? To desire to want something is like trying to be funny, where if you are, you aren't - hence to want-to-want, or wish you wanted, means you don't actually want it. Maybe the solution is for each thing I want, to say out loud, I do not want it, and hear which statements give you the most peace?

mhb 4y ago

Better versions considering the illusion of free will: https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/revising-fault-line https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/revising-fault-line https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will It could be there are others..

Errancer 4y ago

Eh, this article touches on something important but 1. the material aspect of determinism is the most boring one, if everything is materially determined then so is our feeling of freedom therefore it doesn't really change anything. Strawson has a nice article about this called "Freedom and resentment" which shows that the thesis of determinism doesn't really change anything about our ethics. 2. the programming lingo seems to me to make the issue more obscure rather than clear but the problem he is mentioning is discussed under the name "second-order desires" and is quite important since it leads to much more interesting problem of determinism - the psychological determinism. Usually we believe we have certain freedom in choosing our beliefs through weighing and choosing our interpretations of what is happening. The issue of psychological determinism is threefold. First proposition is that our beliefs change due to some causes, they don't simply pop into our head. Second proposition is that our given beliefs will dictate what interpretations will make sense to us. Therefore every cause will make us believe what our current beliefs allow. Third proposition is that our actions are driven by combination of beliefs and desires. So ultimately we can't chose our actions since we can't choose our beliefs and the hope for "freedom" is lost. What is left is the will which is not free but driven by beliefs and desires that are outside "our" control. Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.

nnoitra 4y ago

auggierose 4y ago

I don't think the universe is deterministic. Why would you think such a thing? So, if you start from a wrong assumption, the rest that comes is not that interesting.

mistermann 4y ago
One possibility: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic See also: how to train a neural network.
- auggierose 4y ago
  Are these not at least two possibilities? Furthermore, what kind of heuristic is that? I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    I'd say they're kind of a blend - heuristics is what enables the Illusory Truth Effect. > I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability. Agree, but people seem generally unable to realize this (there is a similar problem with Truth, another thing people predict without realizing - see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593349). Now, what is the causality of this? Presumably it is a natural consequence/side effect/service of consciousness. But: so (presumably) are things like racism, but because that is harmful, society has deemed it inappropriate and this is socially enforced in various ways. Might the same be possible with clairvoyance and soothsaying, or at least in certain special scenarios/venues? The institution of science seems to have accomplished it, and realized substantial benefits as a consequence - might it have utility in domains other than science (politics, human relations, etc)?

civilized 4y ago

I don't think this is a very productive direction because it seems like unfalsifiable speculation. Placing the hidden determinism enough "wants" away seems to make it obscure enough that you can think "sure, that's where the magic happens" and it's impossible to be proven wrong. IMO, the perception of free will comes from our observation of our deliberations and our actions. We observe that we often have choices and uncertainty about what to do, but something always breaks the impasse, because we always continue making choices and going on living. That "something" is what we call free will, and isn't entirely transparent to us. If you tried to crack open the black box, I think you'd see wants and want-to-wants driving things in there, but I don't think you'd see a clean system of n-th removed want-to-wants determining everything.

darkerside 4y ago

Like many others, I've also thought about few will. By best answer at this point is, we have limited free will but we don't always know how to use it. It's like surfing. You can't do everything you want to do, but you can position yourself to make choices that better leverage the waves of your subconscious.

pgsandstrom 4y ago

When I was two I started wondered how I could reconsile my qualia with determinism. But when I was three I read Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant and laid the matter to rest.

wccrawford 4y ago

I've had things I wanted to want, but didn't want. They were usually things that would have put me closer to the values of a group I was involved in. An off-the-top-of-my-head example would be talking with friends about video games, and they start talking about physical art from the game that they bought and enjoy. I don't like having little knick-knacks around the the house, and I don't get enjoyment from them. But I see the joy they get from them, and I want that, too. So I want to want those things, but I still don't want them.

jondeval 4y ago

I actually think PG is exploring something that is at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Interestingly, the traditional teaching of Original Sin is that we are broken at the level of what we 'want'. The phrase commonly used is 'disordered desire'. The key idea here is that if you want the wrong things, you are not actually free, even if you perceive yourself as choosing freely. As a corollary, the more you practice the good, the more you desire it, and the freer you become.

theGnuMe 4y ago
The concept of original sin is garbage.
- originalmind 4y ago
  Wow, thanks for sharing this deep insight. -- A fellow "original mind"
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  As someone that believes in the Quran, which talks about the Adam&Eve tree incident, I agree. Then there is the whole definition of God being just, and for someone to die for someone else's sin is far from just. I personally believe in a God that I can ask directly for forgiveness and he forgives. That being said, he wouldn't forgive me for wronging someone else, I will have to settle it with that person in this life, or we'll meet and settle it in the day of judgement.

onlycoffee 4y ago

> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? We have a soul, unlike actual machines or animals.

theGnuMe 4y ago

I don't really get what he means here. >you can't (want to)* want what you want It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. you can't (want to want what you want). you can't want to want to want what you want). And it is recursive: you can't (want to want to want it)

suslik 4y ago
I think this is just a wordplay that abuses the imprecision of the word 'want'. For example, a drug addict wants (as in has a very strong internal, biology- and subconsious-driven desire for) heroin, but doesn't want to want it (as in when thinks about it consciously).
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I don't see that beyond holding two one or more beliefs in juxtaposition which is the definition of uncertainty. A chemical addiction is not a "want".
fluoridation 4y ago
>It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. Tell that to an addict.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Tell what? I am not sure I am following you... can you be more specific?
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    That wanting something implies that you want to want it.
    - theGnuMe 4y ago

biscuits1 4y ago

I want someone to want to explain it to me like I'm five?

deleted 4y ago

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doorman2 4y ago

Basically, there is no free will. Think about it like this: where do your thoughts come from? They appear magically in your head. So you can choose between the set of things you think about, but the set of things you think about is out of your control.

alfor 4y ago

My take at the moment is that each humans are like cells of a human where the human is a civilisation. We have autonomy but must generally work for the welfare of the whole organism. If some people are not aligned to the general good we try to dissuade them or punish them because if it become too big the whole system collapse in the same way that our organism would if there is too many cancer cells. Our consciousness operate on the scale of a human life but there is a similar "consciousness" of the civilisation that operate on a much larger timescale, thousand of years, we call those religions. While we can seek personal gain, it’s much the same as a cell trying to outcompete it’s neighborhoods, it’s misaligned to the more important goal of global welfare. There is something inside us in our soul that know this and won’t make you satisfied of yourself if you are not a net positive for the whole. Now we have looked everywhere to try to find the God of our stories but didn’t (it's a pattern operating on a different timescale). So we are like cells that rebelled against the organism, discarting all the rules that we had because we don’t understand them. The result will be a sickness of the organism up to a point where we see we have to go back to our ancients rules or the death of the organism (civilisation collapse) Those rules are: each must try to align himself with truth and love toward others, must try it’s best, it’s ok to fail, but recognised it and improve. Those rules are the preconditions for the survival and slow improvement of our civilisation. Other religions have other rules and other outcomes.

xianshou 4y ago

Schopenhauer: "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration: In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed. In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice. There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't. To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.

mjburgess 4y ago
So, Action: Act(Environment|Character) Reflection: Act(Character|Environment) An agent has free will iff it engages in action<->reflection cycles. Also: An agent A "could have taken" action X vs Y: ActX(Env|CharA) vs ActY(Env|CharB) in the sense that there is a graph "of some sort" linking their CharA to the CharB which could realise ActY. Eg., Bob can either steal the money or return it. Bob chooses to steal it. Bob is morally responsible for this act because there is a realisable "action<->reflection" path from bob's actual character to the one he should have had. If bob had had this character, he would not have stolen.
- xianshou 4y ago
  This is a very interesting definition of "free will" and not one I would expect most philosophers to agree with, but more measurable and useful than most would propose. In this case "free will" reduces to self-modifying action with randomness injected by the environment, which feels more like a stochastic model than genuine self-determination. That said, the existence of a "reflection" function is still the primary determinant of any moral responsibility.

superb-owl 4y ago

Schrödinger had an interesting resolution to this paradox, which I wrote about recently: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schrodinger-believed#%C2%A7free-will https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schroding...

prionassembly 4y ago

PG becoming a Lacanian.

hugs 4y ago

"You can do what you want, but you can't want to want what you want." I've read many of PG's essays, but this one feels like GPT-3 wrote it. It's borderline gibberish. Like he trained an AI on all his other essays, fed it the essay title, and this was the result. I half-expect a year from now that he'll tell us all his recent essays were written by this AI and it's now the core IP in some recent YC investment.

lisper 4y ago
Not only that, but he got it totally wrong. It's not that people change what they want, it is that they think they want something, but then they discover that they were wrong. Also, what you want changes over time, but not because you decide to want something new, or to stop wanting something. It just happens. The best example of this is going through puberty, where you develop desires that you didn't have before. This is not a decision that you make. Figuring out what you want is a process of discovery, not of decision-making.
- deleted 4y ago
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teg4n_ 4y ago

Looks like PG finally took an Introduction to Philosophy class.

vagab0nd 4y ago

You will do what you are programmed to do. "Free will" is an illusion that you don't know what you are going to do before you have computed the outcome. The Matrix said it best: > Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice? > The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.

63 4y ago

I wouldn't go so far as to call this gibberish like other commenters, but I don't get the point. I follow the logic but it feels incomplete. Why does the thesis matter?

hugepuppy 4y ago

Seems like he's saying that you can't change who you are at the core, which I disagree with. With each want, however, the meaning becomes more and more frivolous. Who cares what you want to want to want to want to want? That's not recognizable even on a subconscious level.

xianshou 4y ago

You can read however many PG essays you want to, but you can't control what you think of them.

csdvrx 4y ago

Maybe I'm the only one who liked it, but I found the essay nice as it gives a simple model to understand ourselves better. Here's my take on it: there're many things out there (musical genre like classical music, cooking like Indian, French, Ethiopian) and your utility function has coefficients for most of them. When you don't know the coefficient, you try, and you come with a quick conclusion (like or don't like) that can be further refined by experience (ex: like Indian food, vegetarian Indian food is ok-ish, vegan Indian food nope) Sometimes you want to alter the coefficient because it can create conflict with your identity (what if you're vegan? what if your parents are Indian?) or other things. Sometimes you succeed through different methods, sometimes you just can't. And there're things you like you shouldn't, because of society (taboos, or banned substances) or the consequences on yourself (addictions, risks for your future health) but it's just the same thing: trying to alter the coefficient in your utility function. It may be worth it (learning something new) or futile (something you just can't change) which leads us to Seneca prayer (the wisdom to separate the two, knowing the battles you can win to avoid wasting effort). And there's another dimension if it's possible: the amount of effort required, which might be measured in years (and what if you're old and bound to fail?) Personally, I find it simpler to go epicurian and if I find something new I enjoy (right now, Russian rap lol) just enjoy it without asking myself too many questions. And if I don't like something or have no want for something I should like (Drill rap, Trap rap), I don't force myself but don't exclude it out of my life either: I leave that to serendipity :)

joisig 4y ago

> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? First, accept the fact that "you" are _only_ that machine. No higher "soul". The machine (you!) has free will in that it decides for itself, through physical processes occurring within it, what it wants - albeit with some outside forces, circumstances and other individuals influencing this anywhere from a bit to a lot. You are this mostly-independent machine operated by physical forces. Therefore, you have free will. A secondary question is whether the state of the universe and therefore of you the machine at time T also pre-ordains what you will do and what you will want at time T+1. I think a more interesting question is whether that actually matters in any practical or even metaphysical sense, given that we experience time linearly in the direction we do?

lliamander 4y ago

> Randomness destroys the ghost in the machine as effectively as determinism. I totally agree, and yet my encounter with academic philosophy was that most people with a free-will orientation see that randomness as precisely the origin of free will. Personally, the only notion of free will that makes sense (and the one to which I personally hold) is the notion of agent-causation[1]. > it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions The philosophical notion of free will is actually completely irrelevant here. The relevant questions are a) "Is social accountability psychologically effective and altering someone's behavior?" and b) "what sorts of behavior modifications are morally permissble?" [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/#3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/...

quantonomical 4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago

There are some hidden assumptions, including the idea that consciousness is a continuous phenomenon and/or experience. Our brain is amazingly good at making up retroactive explanations to match our observations. Also, our thought processes are sufficiently chaotic that no amount of inspection can catch all the starting conditions, so any model has to be statistical in nature.

v_london 4y ago

I saw lots of people criticizing PG's essay, but I really liked it. Free will and agency are interesting philosophical topics to wonder, even if they don't hold much practical value.

asdadsdad 4y ago

PG is more and more like a reputation-building farm these days, churning garbage at an impressive rate lol

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karaterobot 4y ago

Whenever I think about the universe being deterministic, I get caught up on things like the Monorail episode of The Simpsons. For some reason, that's always the specific example that pops into my mind when I think "does it make sense that the initial position of atoms in the universe would lead ineluctably to the exact state of the world today, without anyone making choices about it?" The idea that a materialistic universe made of unthinking, unchoosing matter bumping into each other would create the "Monorail" song, with all the specific cultural assumptions built into it, is just so much less likely to me than the alternative that I end up just siding with free will by default. Neither the free will argument, nor determinism, nor any attempted unification of the two that I'm aware of are fully satisfying. But, the idea that we're just atoms that, for no particular reason, happen to write the words "I call the big one Bitey", and then just happen to create the infrastructure to broadcast that out, and view it, seems like the more absurd of the available options.

randomsearch 4y ago
The way I think about this is: physical laws lead to the emergence of information processing machines that form big networks together and develop cultural language of ever increasing sophistication. The monorail song is just the production of this large distributed thinking machine.

hbarka 4y ago

What you want? Rolling Stones https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8 https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8, Joe Jackson https://youtu.be/XGqmiT7JJVg https://youtu.be/XGqmiT7JJVg or New Radicals https://youtu.be/DL7-CKirWZE https://youtu.be/DL7-CKirWZE ?

madrox 4y ago

This reads like an autodidact's rediscovery of psychological egoism: https://iep.utm.edu/psychological-egoism/ https://iep.utm.edu/psychological-egoism/

brudgers 4y ago

We must believe in free will, we have no choice. Isaac Bashevis Singer

mkoubaa 4y ago

Am I the only one who never cared about free will? Either we have free will or we don't - we will never know - and it doesn't actually matter.

savryn 4y ago

this reminds me of the end of Lawrence of Arabia the entire film thus far about destiny, fate, making our own paths... and then to pinch a bit of flesh and understand what we are. magnificent and sorrowful, all at once

dzink 4y ago

The brain feels like a quantum alien that took over a biological shell to survive on this planet and is now trying to optimize its casing options. (Deliberately changing the terms for a concept can help us see it in a new light.) - Some wants damage the casing but feel great to the brain (sugar). - Some wants take over a portion of the brain's activity and tax it to eternity (addiction), so its best to never ever try them. - Some wants are very very bad for other brains and casings, so carnivores draw the line making non-carnivorous varieties inferior and thus worth sacrificing (meat consumption). - Some wants damage the connections and relationships between human brains and thus ability for all of humanity to survive collectively, so religion and laws have stepped in to set the rules of engagement. - Some wants are psychological and financially a bad idea. - Few wants are fundamental, and most wants are based on something we've seen others done that we want to try. - Wanting not to want something is a tax and conflict with our own brain, and just like addiction it can be tackled if the want was caused by exposure to the activity, or exposure to the idea, or the subject/object of want and that exposure is reduced or removed from view. - If you are the subject of the want (an attractive person, a VC, a Billionaire, a person of influence), all of a sudden your life incurs an overhead and a cost for deterring everyone else's wants towards you. Psychology/Philosophy may have more insight into whether the origin of bad wants is curiosity, wrongful exposure, greed, or inborn instincts based on biological/genetically ingrained habits. Economics + Business has the job of satisfying the wants of an increasing number of intelligent agents in the system by encouraging those who want more to make more and increase supply of the the most wanted kinds of objects of want. Government has the job of satisfying the needs of everyone in its jurisdiction, while entrepreneurship has the luxury of picking which wants and needs to serve that are most profitable and desirable to the entrepreneur. Advertising has the job of involuntarily planting more wants in the brains of everyone. Fun paths to explore. Thanks PG!

Dig1t 4y ago

This is genius, I strive to reason this well. I am endlessly fascinated by thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. I have observed my brain’s ability to think recursively about its own thoughts many times before and it’s such a cool phenomenon. This strikes me as very similar, the regex expression is a useful way of explaining his point.

Nevermark 4y ago

A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds. But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors. If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting. If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us. The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them. We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to. ---- One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors. So now we can discuss things a little more clearly: Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want? There are three answers. The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience. The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small. Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that. ---- If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic. Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.

dilap 4y ago

If many worlds is true, you took all options of every choice (if we assume, as seems likely, a non-zero probability of your neurons firing in a way that actuate each option). But where does the "wanting" lie? What if it's an experience that is not physical, but real? I.e. it exists and experiences itself, but it does not in any way change our scientific description of the universe. It doesn't change how all of the many worlds are playing out. Would this "wanting" have to inhabit every branch of the unierse? Perhaps it only exists along the path of choices that it "wanted". Then everything that can happen, happens, but your consciousness only experiences what it "wanted". Mechanistic action and free-will are both preserved.

omandi 4y ago

I think that the number of recursions is infinite so that is what gives you free will.

Barrin92 4y ago

Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here: >"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?" I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest. Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannGrid.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...

enasterosophes 4y ago

I struggled a lot with the depression and irresponsible behaviour that arises when you realize that free will can't be reconciled with physics. It seemed like there was no reason to do anything and no reason not to do anything. The level of nihilism I sunk to led to all sorts of unhappy consequences. I am still prone to those lines of thought sometimes, but with experience, I can also suggest ways to defuse the nihilism and existential angst so they don't continue to lead to suffering for yourself and people around you. 1. Concepts like "free will" are ill-defined, so there is actually no problem to solve. Stop itching at problems which are complete bullshit. Focus on lived experience, not vague distractions. 2. Even if there is no freedom, you can still experience suffering, and it is possible to learn to avoid paths which lead to suffering. The learning might be deterministic, but that doesn't mean you don't experience the results. Or, just continue to suffer if you're too stubborn to learn. Your ... choice, or whatever you want to call it, when you insist on shooting yourself in the foot even after you learned it hurt. 3. Responsibility is not the same as free choice. Responsibility is a contract where you agree to take on the bad consequences if something bad happens, and in return you gain power over what you are responsible for. One of the paths which leads to suffering is to assume you're not responsible for your actions. There are lots of ways people try to abdicate their personal responsibility. Excuses like "it was drugs" or "I was treated badly" or "my brain is controlled by the laws of physics so I can never really choose anything" or "it was so-and-so's fault." Whether or not these things are true, you are still admitting defeat and allowing disempowerment and suffering into your life whenever you say something was not your responsibility. Hemingway was on the right track when he resolved to always honor promises he made while drunk. To do otherwise is to admit that your actions were out of your control; it invites intrusion and censure by those who see you as weak for not being able to take responsibility. Every time you blame someone or something else for a problem, you grant them power which you could have kept for yourself, if only you had owned the problem.

Archelaos 4y ago

This little piece reminds me of Thomas Hobbes' "Of Liberty and Necessity" (1646, publ. 1654).[1] Hobbes would have very probably rejected the recursive application of "want to" onto itself as nonsense, but uses a very similar structured chain of reasoning as the author when it comes to "necessary causes": "... But here I must take notice of certain words of his Lordship's in this place, as making against his own tenet. Where all the causes, saith he, being joined together, and subordinate one to another, do make but one total cause, if any one cause, much more the first, in the whole series or subordination of causes, be necessary, it determines the rest, and without doubt maketh the effect necessary. For that which I call the necessary cause of any effect, is the joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause. If any of these, saith he, especially the first, produce its effect necessarily, then all the rest are determined. Now it is manifest, that the first cause is a necessary cause of all the effects that are next and immediate to it, and therefore by his Lordship's own reason all effects are necessary." (p. 261) This "joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause" is not far away of applying the tactics of a regular expression. Instead of a chain of "wants", Hobbes speaks of "alternate succession of contrary appetites" and only the last one is what we call "will". In this view, the author's example of the drug adict would have been irrelevant for the problem. An adiction merely describes a (psychological) habit. However, the analysis of "will" is always about a specific, individual event and everything that leads to it, which can often include diverse intentions: "... I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often." (p. 273) In Hobbes view a "voluntary action" is an action where somebody was deliberating. Only in this sense the person has a choice. And if the person is "free" to do something, this means that the process of deliberating is still ongoing: "... I conceive that those actions, which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done apon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing ; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating." (p. 273) Therefore the freedom of the will is in accordance with determinism ("necessary causes" in Hobbes' terminology), which is itself unavoidable: "... I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." (p. 274) Hobbes' argumentation in "Of Liberty and Necessity" has far more interesting details and touches a lot more related topics than I could have presented here. For those who want to delve deeper into the philosophical discussion on the freedom of the will, I highly recommend the text as a basic read. [1] See: https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ [pdf] (pp. 229-278)

uptownfunk 4y ago

This post I think offers some perspective on the whole "Do we have free-will or is it all predetermined?" discussion. I don't have any science around this, but some Indian wisdom- What I learned from one of my mentors KN Rao (one of the advisors whose advise was sought by great leaders of India): The famous grandsire Bheeshma Pitamaha of the Mahabharata was once asked this question regarding fate vs free-will. His answer was to liken it to a man in a boat rowing in a river. The river has a current, however man has effort. I believe his verdict was "effort is greater than destiny". Perhaps it has to be so, because were it not, then we are just part of the clockwork creation. PG is trying to go one level deeper in his post. Namely, are we living under the illusion that we have free will, because our free-will (which is essentially our ability to have agency over our environment) is itself a product of our desires, and now the question is are our desires our own or are they themselves determined? It may not be possible to know the answer to this one. I think it is equivalent to something like the collatz conjecture, to which Erdos replied "Mathematics is not ready for such problems" I don't think we are ready for such problems either.

broof 4y ago

the illusion of free will isn't much of an illusion once you pay attention.

theonemind 4y ago

Roger Penrose doesn’t think the universe is computable or a computation. For now, we can’t reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, so I really don’t feel we have very strong evidence that it is—thinking it computable seems like an article of faith as well. We also have Godel’s incompleteness theorem—even if it appears we can model the universe as something computable, I think there’s going to be room for mystery, and human consciousness seems like just the sort of strange self-referentiality eddy where that kind of thing would come in to play. I think a lack of free will be unfalsifiable--you'd have to measure all aspects of a brain, including the quantum state, which would change what you observed--so maybe then you can predict it, but you also had a hand in determining it, which undermines what you want to know, that it was determinable. On the other hand, free will seems to just refer to the feeling you could’ve made a different choice. But you didn’t. I don’t see why people get so defensive about a junk concept. At some level, it doesn’t really seem like there are separate things, and I don’t feel like there’s a need to invoke some kind of separate individual free will aside from the operation of a universal stoicism type logos/the totality of natural law operating as something like a universal “will”

carapace 4y ago

> the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted That feeling is an illusion. This has been demonstrated with brain scans. By the time you feel like you are making a decision your brain has already made it and you are just becoming aware of it. It's actually possible to turn off that feeling, to do without the illusion of free will. Your body keeps moving and doing "all the things" but you are totally non-agential, just watching it, along for the ride. It's fun and deeply relaxing once you get used to it. (Note that this does nothing to resolve the question of free will. Your conscious mind doesn't have free will, but that doesn't mean your unconscious mind necessarily doesn't have it.)

dqh 4y ago

Given the observable order of the universe, I have always found it hard to accept that pausing it, copying it, then resuming both copies could result in two different universes over time.

amts 4y ago

He should try to rewrite this topic in ketamine and/or other dissociatives and with appropriate combinations of set&setting, otherwise it's just another one biased opinion.

lakeshastina 4y ago

A desire arises in one's mind, prompting us to act upon it. Why such desires arise are due to a multitude of reasons - cultural conditioning, advertising, etc. When such a desire arises, we "want" to fulfill it. So from this perspective, there is little free-will in what we can "want". Through meditation, when there is the ability developed to detach from the thoughts that arise in one's mind, one can choose to not act on desires that urge action. So, there is then the possibility of freedom.