8 ms·
Humans progressively feel agency over events triggered before their actions
- skybrian 3y agoThis sounds similar to how autocomplete works. If it guesses right then it feels like writing the word yourself, and if it guesses wrong, you fix it, and maybe complain a bit.
- hindsightbias 3y agoMaybe Hinton isn’t going far enough - what if free will is just autocomplete too?
- notjoemama 3y agoBased on how neurons work, you could say a component of free will is a bloom filter. https://llimllib.github.io/bloomfilter-tutorial/ https://llimllib.github.io/bloomfilter-tutorial/
- ethanbond 3y agoLots and lots of serious thinkers believe free will “is just autocomplete.” Or more precisely, we don’t actually possess free will but we have a convincing-enough intuition that we have it. It’s a compelling argument because no one seems to have any idea where free will would come from and actually when you pay close attention to your own cognition, it doesn’t feel free-willy at all.
- nyokodo 3y ago> no one seems to have any idea where free will would come from No materialists have any idea perhaps. A more common sense approach is to deduce from our common experience of free will (and consciousness too) and lack of a matter based reason for that experience that we are not merely made of matter.
- taneq 3y agoOr that our self-reports of experiences are notoriously unreliable, perhaps.
- nyokodo 3y agoThis isn’t a statistical study with questionable methodology or a fleeting observation, it is a constant and personal empirical experience we all have that has been observed and analyzed for all human history. It is not self reported data, you have access to it right now, this is a totally different thing.
- taneq 3y agoOK, here's self-reported evidence that I have precognition. When I'm riding my motorbike I typically have my face shield open (I wear sunnies so no point keeping it down, plus I like the fresh air.) If a piece of grit or something gets past and hits my face near my eyes, it feels like I blink a split second before it hits. Clearly I have precognition. An alternate explanation is that my blink reflex is triggered locally by nerve cells around my eyes, regardless of what my brain does. My brain then receives sensory inputs indicating that I've blinked. It only finds out that something hit my face a split second (say 100ms, that seems to be one 'tick' for most brain things?) afterwards since touch data from that area of skin is fairly low resolution. At this point my brain feels pretty strongly that it wants to blink, to protect my eyes. Here comes the fun bit: Since there's always a strong and seemingly causal link between "something hitting face near eye", "eye has blinked", and "brain wants to blink" my brain is pretty sure it actually decided to blink just before the grit actually hit me. This feels to me like I blink, out of nowhere, then a split second later feel something hit my face. How can you argue with my constant and empirical experience?
- ethanbond 3y agoThis is just confidently stating you have no idea where it comes from
- DougEiffel 3y agoThe only reason I sometimes hesitate to agree with this line of thinking is precisely because we have the ability to think about free will at all. I can take a moment right now to consider whether I want to lift my right hand over my head - to no benefit of my own. I can also consider how free will plays into that and decide to lift my left hand instead, stay with my right hand, or lift no hands at all. When you have the ability to do that, I think you have free will. At least, you have the closest thing to free will anyone can ever have. By the way, I wiggled my right foot. That was my decision after my comment.
- ethanbond 3y agoAll of your thoughts of lifting your right hand or to wiggle your foot were downstream of reading my comment. You can definitely have thoughts before making actions, but you don’t choose to have the thought. It just appears!
- Planktonne 3y agoAre you not capable of thinking about something deliberately? If so, I would be cautious about generalising that limitation to other people.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat was responsible for the idea to think about something deliberately?
- Planktonne 3y agoAny one of a number of things, one of which is volition. The majority of people are capable of determining both proximal and ultimate causes/motivations for their actions. They're influenced by external stimuli, sure, but humans are capable of directing their thoughts deliberately to, for example, perform simple mental arithmetic. Every time someone thinks "What's 20% of 38?" or "How do I spell conceive?" or "What's the quickest way to Dave's house?", they are triggering a mental process. They are choosing to focus their thoughts in a particular direction to get a result that they will then use in future decision making. It's not relevant what caused the thought that led to them making the decision; the decision still gets made and acted on by the person. The sequence of thoughts from the decision point to the result/abandonment is volitional. Is that really not something you can do?
- sstevenshang 3y agoSince the animation was “ based on the history of the players’ past movements and on the beginning of their current movement”, the human subjects did in fact have agency over the animation. Their brains probably figured out the pattern: “if I move the mouse towards a subject, it will explode”, which changes the game a little but nonetheless gives the players agency.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- p1necone 3y agoYeah it kinda sounds like technically the outcome isn't triggered by the players inputs, but practically they've just designed a system that reacts to the players inputs in a much more convoluted manner than normal.
- Jensson 3y agoIt is like auto aim in games, it aims the gun for you and you just click and enemies dies. The crutch makes people feel more in control since now the guy on the screen do what they want it to do rather than what input they gave it, making them less frustrated. Of course that is the average case, some get more frustrated by the program altering their aim so they can't shoot exactly where they want. The same will probably be true for most AI tools.
- fluoridation 3y agoFunnily enough this is somewhat explored in an episode of Ghost in the Shell, where a professional sniper rejects an AI-enhanced rifle mount because its correction is in conflict with his aiming, even if following the correction exactly would have been a better shot. He preferred to have complete control of the aiming.
- laserbeam 3y agoNot only that... Their measurement of the sense of agency (SoA) is weird. Within the same paper they're inventing a new way to estimate moment to moment SoA and correlating it to reported SoA. Whether their modeling is valid should have been a separate paper. There's a very good chance their experimental design and measurement strategy are influenced by one another.
- sho_hn 3y agoThis is interesting in an abstract-intellectual sense, but doesn't really seem to surprise me. If I understood the abstract right, they made a program learn where a user clicks, then used this to anticipate where the user would click next and begin visual feedback prior to the actual click. Users either didn't think twice or understood that the system was anticipating them and rolled with it. This is what I would expect. Extrapolation and prediction of how a system will evolve based on past experience (if I roll this ball off the table it will fall; it was me who set it in motion) is something humans master as young children. From the submission title I expected it would be about something more like this: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will... A wrong prediction as it turns out ... :-)
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago>This is what I would expect. Extrapolation and prediction of how a system will evolve based on past experience (if I roll this ball off the table it will fall; it was me who set it in motion) is something humans master as young children. Also something that causes people to lose massive amounts of money in financial markets and other forms of gambling.
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y agoPlease provide code for moving my ad banner to underneath the mouse before click
- withinboredom 3y agoWe don't need a repeat of the '90s (this is incredibly trivial to implement, especially with modern js).
- debugnik 3y agoWe already have that, we just call it "layout shift" and pretend its unintentional.
- clbrmbr 3y agoDoes anyone else sometimes have the experience where you feel like you know everything that’s going to be said or happen, as if life were a movie you saw so many times in grade-school that you know every line, but forgot about the film until just now? I feel like this is another situation where sense of time can be reversed. Derives from consciousness being actually a slow integration of diverse parallel processes.
- danilor 3y agoDo you mean a deja-vu? Or do you mean something different?
- scrollbar 3y agoI think a clinical psych person may label this as depersonalization/derealization. But I like how the parent called it "a slow integration of diverse parallel processes" - not labeling the experience as some kind of problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- girvo 3y agoI think they mean the strong sense of déjà vu. I get a weird one where the déjà vu itself is what I've felt before, déjà vu squared. Feels horrible!
- caseyohara 3y agoYes! I've experienced this a few times before, like a meta-déjà vu. It is a really uncomfortable feeling.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoDescription sounds like normal déjà vu to me. It's not a feeling that I felt before, it's a feeling that I know what's going to happen the next moment, but I can't actually recall it, but the moment it happens I recognize it as recalled.
- trashtensor 3y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 3y agoIs agency a feeling as a way to keep us sane about how we are just reacting to everything?
- Jensson 3y agoI think it is the feeling that what you wanted to happen happened at a micro level. Like, when you watch someone use telekinesis in a movie you feel the person is controlling it since you see the objects moving like that person obviously wants them to move, you know that can't be possible but your mind feels that the person has control over the boxes, I think that is the same effect here.
- ggm 3y agoThere are things I have seen in popSci which go to the minimum possible signal delay between some sense of things in the world, and the brain being told, and the continuous model we operate as brains, which has to integrate over those inputs. So believing that is a tenable view of things, I can believe in this model we maintain, we can assign 'agency' to actions which other parts of the model predict "are going to happen" based on mismatches between actual signal delay, "computed" delay, and synthesized interior world-view delay. Events can happen in real world time, and lag into the system. Events can lag into the system in a fully integrated manner but we can have a computed sense of their likely outcome based on our internal predicted model. Measurement across this would be complicated. I don't know I think ML is going to be the best path, if it actually drives to some "wrong" assumptions about where delay is, and where "agency" is being inferred. Agency in gross time, where we choose to press a button and therefore cause things to happen, and where we can choose not to press the button at the last moment, and have them not (yet) happen, is different to a sense of agency over things which are happening, and which we sense internally against our world model, distinctly from when we get input signals about them.
- Frummy 3y agoMy interpretation is that rather than lack of agency, the paper demonstrates perfect analogy of what agency turns out to be in real life. Not our willpower or decisionmaking in the minutiae, but rather a general pattern of our behavior over time. Removing the explicit causal link for the click, making it rather implicit based on an algorithm over their past behavior, is still a ”reflection” of their will. If they happen to identify with the mimicked behavior or not is less significant. I think it’s fitting because in real life the noise of minute events can detract from ”us”, but over time our values and character is revealed through actions and results. Let’s extend the concept. Deploying AI agents in the future say with my values and simulated life experience, they would (maybe) act independently of me but according to my instruction or general desires and values. It’s not far removed from an employer instructing their employees, or a parent instructing a child. Or removing instruction, perhaps just expectation of a certain type of maneuvering in the world. Or presuming no expectation at all, let’s say I have an AI copycat without knowing about it, acting like me but in another setting, there would be remnants of my will in how it acts. Like information theory or energy laws, since it has information replicating me that it uses to act in the world, it’s like a lack of entropy, my will is preserved and extended. Disclaimer: None of what was just written makes too much sense, and many what-ifs.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoThe events in the study are triggered after the participants actions. Both in terms of accounting for past actions as such, and in terms of anticipating continuation of present actions.
- barrenko 3y agoI believe Ted Chiang has a short story with a similar "device".
- johngossman 3y agoYeah, “Predictor.” And “Story of your Life” (aka “Arrival”) also has elements of this. “Predictor” is about Compatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are compatible with each other depending on the boundaries. The paper could use some perspective.
- firstbabylonian 3y agoThe story is called What’s Expected of Us, and it’s an excellent piece. Link for those who haven’t read it (it’s short): https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mellosouls 3y agoI'm surprised to see no reference in the paper to Bereitschaftspotential or Libet's famous (and criticized) experiments - at least to give some context on how the findings here relate or differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
- isaacfrond 3y agoSound a lot like Scott Aaronson's free will challenge. A user types a 'random' sequence of Ts and Fs. A computer can predict about 70% correctly though, by just counting 5-grams. Here the taks is the opposite, make the prediction even easier.
- apienx 3y ago"Control-seizing is a more fundamental principle from which intelligence emerges, not vice versa" (quote from a slide in Alex Wissner-Gross's A new equation for intelligence @TED)
- smeej 3y agoHumans are used to dealing with natural intelligences all the time, in the form of other humans. Other humans often get a sense of what we're going to do next based on what we've done before and move to our next step alongside or slightly before us. This kind of experience-based cooperative alignment arguably even has an evolutionary advantage. The fact that a computer can do it now too doesn't make it a novel experience for us. Most of us have known since we were kids that we can affect the actions of other entities by establishing a pattern.
- frans 3y agoI recall a study with a setup similar to what's described in this article, but with an important change. In the experiment, when the equipment predicted a subject's choice to push button 'A', they ingeniously manipulated the outcome (perhaps through some neural stimulation?) causing the subject to choose button 'B' instead. What's fascinating is how participants consistently rationalized their choices as products of their own free will, despite the external influence. This suggests that our conscious mind might often act as a 'spokesperson', justifying actions initiated by our subconscious. Can anyone remember this and perhaps post a link to that study?
- broscillator 3y agoI think I saw that in some documentary but I can't recall either. However I'm curious about your phrasing "this suggests that our conscious mind might often act as a 'spokesperson', justifying actions initiated by our subconscious." To me this is far from a suggestion, it's an observable fact, both in others and in first person. Are there people who don't view it like this? Who think all their actions are conscious decisions and don't catch themselves spinning narrative threads by their biases and fears?
- daniel-cussen 3y ago[dead]
- spacebacon 3y agoSame clinical mouse trap, new clinical budget target.