4 ms·

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? It doesn't seem

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of. - It feels like it exists; it feels like I'm making my decisions. Even if my whole life is a series of decisions calculated by me in some inevitable way, the calculations still had to happen in my head, and the experience of deciding was part of that. Therefore I own my decisions either way. - For that reason, a criminal is just as guilty of their crime, whether they spiritually willed themselves to rob the bank, or whether they are predetermined to. The decision to rob the bank happened in their head. - Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains, possibly lowering the chances they will in turn decide to rob the bank. Removing errant decision-making matrices from society should reduce the amount of badness. - All of the opposite things are also true for rewarding good behavior. What would you do with a CPU that can do nothing but churn out malware due to a design flaw? What if it's a CPU that only does amazing things? Or if it's some mix of both? It seems very similar to how we'd treat people who behave differently.

jddj 3y ago
>For that reason, a criminal is just as guilty of their crime, whether they spiritually willed themselves to rob the bank, or whether they are predetermined to. The decision to rob the bank happened in their head. > Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains, This could be a local maxima. I'm not sure there is a reason (other than us having arrived at it, which does count for something) why blaming, and particularly hating/attributing evilness to people for performing a certain act while operating under an imagined agency is more effective than some alternative. It's possible that there could be a means of dissuading others from the behaviour without that illusion/emotional baggage. It could arrive at the same conclusion (incarceration, for example) but more compassionately. Does that matter? For the bigger picture arguably not, but for the human experience maybe.
- FredPret 3y ago
  It could be more or less compassionate - if we say "this unit is faulty, put it in a firewalled environment with the others" it might encourage us to be nicer to the criminal, especially for minor misbehaviors. But we might also conclude "this unit only churns out malware" and that might encourage us to end all further processing, or to banish it forever to some lonely, inescapable cell. Edit: now that I think about it, this way of thinking might actually predispose us to try debugging first.
  - jddj 3y ago
    It may be true that a part of the population already (privately?) thinks more like that. Some members of the justice system perhaps - criminal lawyers, charitably, and associated medical professionals. These moments of "what if it wasn't like this?" always tend to lead me to ESS and fizzle out. The status quo which I called a local maxima is likely much less well defined and homogeneous than I speculated and where we find ourselves is just what you get when you mix hate / compassion / firewall / dispose / debug in today's specific concentrations
mewpmewp2 3y ago
We are all using mechanisms that developed throughout evolution to peform as well as we could in order to spread our genes. That is it. Free will doesn't matter, you are right. As a society we try to align incentives so that everyone would do as good as possible for the group, because throughout evolution the groups who did that were more likely to survive. And, yes it is all pre determined. The reason to praise or condemn is because these are the pre determined things we are bound to do because it increases our odds of survival.
radiojosh 3y ago
I came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding. How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't have to invoke determinism or quantum mechanics to demonstrate that people aren't always consciously in control of their actions. Some people are far more capable of compassion and forgiveness in the face of tragedy when they can see that a genuine accident occurred, or when they understand the generational trauma that laid the ground work for unthinkable choices. Why not take it one step further and recognize that we're all stuck on this involuntary ride and we all deserve a little grace because none of us could have chosen any differently? Does this mean we expect the aggrieved to forgive the perpetrator? No. Does that mean we cease handing out jail sentences for dangerous crimes? No again. But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people? I get that people who hurt other people should feel remorse, and people who are dangerous should be isolated, but how can you say anyone deserves punishment when their actions are predetermined?
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  I am not a huge fan of justice-as-punishment, but the argument for punishment is straight-forward: The deterrent effect of punishment does not require free will to work.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    That's assuming that the deterrent effect is a major cause of crime reduction, which is questionable.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  > But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people What's the point of hitting a ball to score a goal if the ball had no free will and it was moving deterministically? You punish people in order to provide incentives for people that would align with society's goals. Human being, having the input and knowledge that they would get punished, would make them avoid doing certain things. "Deserves" is just a way to provide some idea of a framework on what is the behaviour expected from people for society to perform at its best, together.
rexpop 3y ago
> [If] they are predetermined to, the decision to rob the bank happened in their head. That's nonsense. If they're predetermined, then the decision happened _outside_ their head. You might otherwise describe a river as its own source and tributary.
- FredPret 3y ago
  If I build an AI that is biased toward creating malware, is it the AI's fault? I say "maybe" because the calculations are performed by the AI, you say "maybe not" because of the creators' influence, but it still makes sense to me that we should debug/firewall/shut down that AI.
  - crawancon 3y ago
    the difference between toy and the Ai model is intent.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Our natural languages are just too confusing to talk about this topic. I think GP meant that when we say that a decision happens "inside the head" it means that the brain performs a computation where it combines all the "training* the brain got during its life so far and the perceptions of the current events and produces stimuli for muscles that will act on the world. In order to produce the right kind of stimuli for the muscles the brain performs a modeling of what the future will look like after the muscles have been moved. Imagine a scenario where you're walking with a child on the side of a road with some car traffic. You hold the child's hand. The brain constantly asses the sensorial input of pressure in your hand and gauge what will happen if the child hand slips from yours. The brain computes the possible outcomes of that particular child veering off in the traffic and weighs in the horror of an accident that might happen into the decision making of whether to move the muscle of your hand just a little bit more so that the child's hand doesn't slip away. This computation, the imagining of the accident happening and your reaction may or may not reach your awareness (i.e. feel conscious). It involves an enormous amount of assumptions about how the world works and about the things you value in life, your past experience, your expectations of torment in the case something bad happened while the child was under your watch. This "computation" is determined by millions of factors that we colloquially smuggle under a single deceivingly simple word: "you" All those parameters, what it means to be "you", is constantly changing based on what happens every single second to you. Everything that makes you you is based on this constant flux of input your brain processes, since the day you were born. The structure of your body as built by your genes also affects this since it produces the very machinery that processes these inputs and reacts to them causing new inputs to be fed, since the day you were born. This incredibly complex mechanism, that involves constant imagining and predicting the future, weighting different predicted outcomes and reaping the rewards of correct ones and suffering the consequences of bad ones happens continuously in your head without any "agency" on your part. This very mechanism is your agency. Whether each little step in this cascade of events that implements your "agency" is "deterministic" it doesn't change the fact that the computation that defines that agency must happen for the agency to have effects on the real world. A deterministic evolution of a system still requires the system to exist. When you predict the exact movement of a billiard ball hitting other balls and the walls of the table you don't say "ah since I know exactly where the ball will go this means that the other balls and the table are useless, I'll just place the ball I care about in the final position and call it a day, since it's all predetermined anyway*. You don't say that because the positions of the other balls after the action will matter for the next actions. Similarly, even if the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and can be in principle used to predict the behaviour of a complex system like brain, the act of predicting it must perform at the very least the same computation that the brain is doing (and much more, since that one brain constantly reacts to other things including many other brains making their own action/reaction loops?) Even if we all lived in a simulation it would make sense to say that your brain makes the decisions. Because that's a useful way of talking about what this organ does. It's a useful way to coarse grain reality in systems and environment. It's compatible with another way of looking at the overall simulated system from the POV of the simulator. Those two points of view can coexist and are equally real. In practice our real world is so complex that even if in principle the laws of physics are deterministic, you need a pretty special being, (a laplacian deamon) with enormous compute power to carry out the predictions of the whole system. This being would have to be external to the system it is predicting and better have to effect on it otherwise it would have to simulate itself too. Whether a laplacian daemon exists, or whether the underlying laws are indeed deterministic, doesn't change the fact that it's useful to describe individual agents in the system and talk about them in terms of what these agents so based on their local inputs and outputs. Both views are "compatible" with each other. In the same way as the view of a gas being made of molecules that move and bump to each other each with their own position and momentum is compatible with the way of talking that the gas has a temperature and a pressure.
thebricklayr 3y ago
I like to ask people _how_ non-deterministic laws of nature would give rise to free will, and listen as they stumble toward the realization that determinism is orthogonal to the subject.
h0l0cube 3y ago
I think you would like ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky (mentioned in the article), an endocrine neurobiologist and ethologist. He talks about predeterminism from a biological point of view, as well as implications on responsibility and justice systems in the absence of free will.
mo_42 3y ago
> I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about > quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? > It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of. Most of the time, we don't care actually. Only in philosophical discussions similar to this one, we talk about free will. To me, it seems that it's really an unnecessary assumption. In my everyday life I just don't care whether someone has free will or not. It's more about a meaningful interaction or to get something accomplished together. I guess we need to separate simulations about the real world happening in our brains from the actual reality. Actual reality is based on quantum mechanics. Of course our brains developed as an organ that supports survival of the organism. So there's not really a reason to reflect an accurate picture of physical reality.
ajuc 3y ago
Free will is a very useful heuristic that lets you quickly determine when to stop looking for the root cause of events that interest you. When a stone hits you - you want to attack the person that threw it at you and not the stone or that person's ancestors. So you divide the world into agents with free will and objects without. And stop asking "why" when you encounter the first agent in the root-cause chain. It's a very effective heuristic, so people are strongly persuaded it's real.
GoblinSlayer 3y ago
If you don't believe in free will, you become fatalist, and that's harmful for decision making. Hard determinists also often think in absurdist way, and losing ability into logic is very dangerous. The popular take how to use free will to punish everyone in most cruel way or how to evade such punishment by pretending to be a piece of inert matter is very dumb if not outright malicious and ignores the whole point that free will is primarily needed for the agent himself for survival and isn't needed for most cruel punishments at all. If you really want to cruel, just be cruel for no reason.
apatil 3y ago
Penalizing a crime might make sense for the purpose of deterrence even if there is no conscious free will. The size of the deterrent effect is a scientific question, and how to weigh the benefits of deterrence to society vs. the harm the punishment inflicts on the criminal is a moral question (where by moral I mean "should we do this"). However, penalizing a crime for the purpose of retribution makes no sense if there is no conscious free will. The criminal's consciousness experiences the harm of the punishment, but didn't cause the actions that constituted the crime. This is patently unfair. I don't think conscious free will exists. One of the reasons I care is that, if most people shared that belief, we would talk and think about crime so differently that our approach to crime would change in the direction of becoming more humane. For example, given the news of SBF's conviction for fraud, no one would be happy about the fact that he will likely experience many years in prison. We might be happy that the harm his actions caused has been stopped, and we may feel a kind of dutiful satisfaction in the knowledge that the system is working to deter and prevent this kind of harm. However, these emotions would be tempered by regret that a young man is going to lose part of his life, and we would be questioning whether there's any way to achieve the same level of harm prevention without inflicting such serious harm on one person.

jddj 3y ago

>For that reason, a criminal is just as guilty of their crime, whether they spiritually willed themselves to rob the bank, or whether they are predetermined to. The decision to rob the bank happened in their head. > Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains, This could be a local maxima. I'm not sure there is a reason (other than us having arrived at it, which does count for something) why blaming, and particularly hating/attributing evilness to people for performing a certain act while operating under an imagined agency is more effective than some alternative. It's possible that there could be a means of dissuading others from the behaviour without that illusion/emotional baggage. It could arrive at the same conclusion (incarceration, for example) but more compassionately. Does that matter? For the bigger picture arguably not, but for the human experience maybe.

FredPret 3y ago
It could be more or less compassionate - if we say "this unit is faulty, put it in a firewalled environment with the others" it might encourage us to be nicer to the criminal, especially for minor misbehaviors. But we might also conclude "this unit only churns out malware" and that might encourage us to end all further processing, or to banish it forever to some lonely, inescapable cell. Edit: now that I think about it, this way of thinking might actually predispose us to try debugging first.
- jddj 3y ago
  It may be true that a part of the population already (privately?) thinks more like that. Some members of the justice system perhaps - criminal lawyers, charitably, and associated medical professionals. These moments of "what if it wasn't like this?" always tend to lead me to ESS and fizzle out. The status quo which I called a local maxima is likely much less well defined and homogeneous than I speculated and where we find ourselves is just what you get when you mix hate / compassion / firewall / dispose / debug in today's specific concentrations

mewpmewp2 3y ago

We are all using mechanisms that developed throughout evolution to peform as well as we could in order to spread our genes. That is it. Free will doesn't matter, you are right. As a society we try to align incentives so that everyone would do as good as possible for the group, because throughout evolution the groups who did that were more likely to survive. And, yes it is all pre determined. The reason to praise or condemn is because these are the pre determined things we are bound to do because it increases our odds of survival.

radiojosh 3y ago

I came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding. How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't have to invoke determinism or quantum mechanics to demonstrate that people aren't always consciously in control of their actions. Some people are far more capable of compassion and forgiveness in the face of tragedy when they can see that a genuine accident occurred, or when they understand the generational trauma that laid the ground work for unthinkable choices. Why not take it one step further and recognize that we're all stuck on this involuntary ride and we all deserve a little grace because none of us could have chosen any differently? Does this mean we expect the aggrieved to forgive the perpetrator? No. Does that mean we cease handing out jail sentences for dangerous crimes? No again. But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people? I get that people who hurt other people should feel remorse, and people who are dangerous should be isolated, but how can you say anyone deserves punishment when their actions are predetermined?

kybernetikos 3y ago
I am not a huge fan of justice-as-punishment, but the argument for punishment is straight-forward: The deterrent effect of punishment does not require free will to work.
- n4r9 3y ago
  That's assuming that the deterrent effect is a major cause of crime reduction, which is questionable.
mewpmewp2 3y ago
> But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people What's the point of hitting a ball to score a goal if the ball had no free will and it was moving deterministically? You punish people in order to provide incentives for people that would align with society's goals. Human being, having the input and knowledge that they would get punished, would make them avoid doing certain things. "Deserves" is just a way to provide some idea of a framework on what is the behaviour expected from people for society to perform at its best, together.

rexpop 3y ago

> [If] they are predetermined to, the decision to rob the bank happened in their head. That's nonsense. If they're predetermined, then the decision happened _outside_ their head. You might otherwise describe a river as its own source and tributary.

FredPret 3y ago
If I build an AI that is biased toward creating malware, is it the AI's fault? I say "maybe" because the calculations are performed by the AI, you say "maybe not" because of the creators' influence, but it still makes sense to me that we should debug/firewall/shut down that AI.
- crawancon 3y ago
  the difference between toy and the Ai model is intent.
ithkuil 3y ago
Our natural languages are just too confusing to talk about this topic. I think GP meant that when we say that a decision happens "inside the head" it means that the brain performs a computation where it combines all the "training* the brain got during its life so far and the perceptions of the current events and produces stimuli for muscles that will act on the world. In order to produce the right kind of stimuli for the muscles the brain performs a modeling of what the future will look like after the muscles have been moved. Imagine a scenario where you're walking with a child on the side of a road with some car traffic. You hold the child's hand. The brain constantly asses the sensorial input of pressure in your hand and gauge what will happen if the child hand slips from yours. The brain computes the possible outcomes of that particular child veering off in the traffic and weighs in the horror of an accident that might happen into the decision making of whether to move the muscle of your hand just a little bit more so that the child's hand doesn't slip away. This computation, the imagining of the accident happening and your reaction may or may not reach your awareness (i.e. feel conscious). It involves an enormous amount of assumptions about how the world works and about the things you value in life, your past experience, your expectations of torment in the case something bad happened while the child was under your watch. This "computation" is determined by millions of factors that we colloquially smuggle under a single deceivingly simple word: "you" All those parameters, what it means to be "you", is constantly changing based on what happens every single second to you. Everything that makes you you is based on this constant flux of input your brain processes, since the day you were born. The structure of your body as built by your genes also affects this since it produces the very machinery that processes these inputs and reacts to them causing new inputs to be fed, since the day you were born. This incredibly complex mechanism, that involves constant imagining and predicting the future, weighting different predicted outcomes and reaping the rewards of correct ones and suffering the consequences of bad ones happens continuously in your head without any "agency" on your part. This very mechanism is your agency. Whether each little step in this cascade of events that implements your "agency" is "deterministic" it doesn't change the fact that the computation that defines that agency must happen for the agency to have effects on the real world. A deterministic evolution of a system still requires the system to exist. When you predict the exact movement of a billiard ball hitting other balls and the walls of the table you don't say "ah since I know exactly where the ball will go this means that the other balls and the table are useless, I'll just place the ball I care about in the final position and call it a day, since it's all predetermined anyway*. You don't say that because the positions of the other balls after the action will matter for the next actions. Similarly, even if the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and can be in principle used to predict the behaviour of a complex system like brain, the act of predicting it must perform at the very least the same computation that the brain is doing (and much more, since that one brain constantly reacts to other things including many other brains making their own action/reaction loops?) Even if we all lived in a simulation it would make sense to say that your brain makes the decisions. Because that's a useful way of talking about what this organ does. It's a useful way to coarse grain reality in systems and environment. It's compatible with another way of looking at the overall simulated system from the POV of the simulator. Those two points of view can coexist and are equally real. In practice our real world is so complex that even if in principle the laws of physics are deterministic, you need a pretty special being, (a laplacian deamon) with enormous compute power to carry out the predictions of the whole system. This being would have to be external to the system it is predicting and better have to effect on it otherwise it would have to simulate itself too. Whether a laplacian daemon exists, or whether the underlying laws are indeed deterministic, doesn't change the fact that it's useful to describe individual agents in the system and talk about them in terms of what these agents so based on their local inputs and outputs. Both views are "compatible" with each other. In the same way as the view of a gas being made of molecules that move and bump to each other each with their own position and momentum is compatible with the way of talking that the gas has a temperature and a pressure.

thebricklayr 3y ago

I like to ask people _how_ non-deterministic laws of nature would give rise to free will, and listen as they stumble toward the realization that determinism is orthogonal to the subject.

h0l0cube 3y ago

I think you would like ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky (mentioned in the article), an endocrine neurobiologist and ethologist. He talks about predeterminism from a biological point of view, as well as implications on responsibility and justice systems in the absence of free will.

mo_42 3y ago

> I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about > quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? > It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of. Most of the time, we don't care actually. Only in philosophical discussions similar to this one, we talk about free will. To me, it seems that it's really an unnecessary assumption. In my everyday life I just don't care whether someone has free will or not. It's more about a meaningful interaction or to get something accomplished together. I guess we need to separate simulations about the real world happening in our brains from the actual reality. Actual reality is based on quantum mechanics. Of course our brains developed as an organ that supports survival of the organism. So there's not really a reason to reflect an accurate picture of physical reality.

ajuc 3y ago

Free will is a very useful heuristic that lets you quickly determine when to stop looking for the root cause of events that interest you. When a stone hits you - you want to attack the person that threw it at you and not the stone or that person's ancestors. So you divide the world into agents with free will and objects without. And stop asking "why" when you encounter the first agent in the root-cause chain. It's a very effective heuristic, so people are strongly persuaded it's real.

GoblinSlayer 3y ago

If you don't believe in free will, you become fatalist, and that's harmful for decision making. Hard determinists also often think in absurdist way, and losing ability into logic is very dangerous. The popular take how to use free will to punish everyone in most cruel way or how to evade such punishment by pretending to be a piece of inert matter is very dumb if not outright malicious and ignores the whole point that free will is primarily needed for the agent himself for survival and isn't needed for most cruel punishments at all. If you really want to cruel, just be cruel for no reason.

apatil 3y ago

Penalizing a crime might make sense for the purpose of deterrence even if there is no conscious free will. The size of the deterrent effect is a scientific question, and how to weigh the benefits of deterrence to society vs. the harm the punishment inflicts on the criminal is a moral question (where by moral I mean "should we do this"). However, penalizing a crime for the purpose of retribution makes no sense if there is no conscious free will. The criminal's consciousness experiences the harm of the punishment, but didn't cause the actions that constituted the crime. This is patently unfair. I don't think conscious free will exists. One of the reasons I care is that, if most people shared that belief, we would talk and think about crime so differently that our approach to crime would change in the direction of becoming more humane. For example, given the news of SBF's conviction for fraud, no one would be happy about the fact that he will likely experience many years in prison. We might be happy that the harm his actions caused has been stopped, and we may feel a kind of dutiful satisfaction in the knowledge that the system is working to deter and prevent this kind of harm. However, these emotions would be tempered by regret that a young man is going to lose part of his life, and we would be questioning whether there's any way to achieve the same level of harm prevention without inflicting such serious harm on one person.