5 ms·

It’ll be interesting to see if and how this tech ends up being used to prove/disprove free will.

LoganDark 3y ago
"Free will" doesn't seem to have a generally accepted concrete definition to be proven or disproven in the first place. Besides, as someone with ADHD I know that even if I have free will, other parts of my brain work against me anyway, so I don't actually have total control over my actions.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  I think it’s generally understood to mean that you can consciously decide to do a specific thing. The “anti” free will side is generally understood to mean that the brain chooses to do something and then you experience it as a decision after the fact. That’s my understanding of it at the very least and I tend to lean towards the “It thinks therefore I am” side of things.
  - mistercow 3y ago
    All definitions (that I’ve ever heard) do this thing, though, where they just instantly add more concepts that either don’t have precise definitions, or whose definitions instantly render free will trivially existent or nonexistent, depending on what you go with. What do “you”, “consciously” and “decide” mean? And in particular, how is “you” distinct from “the brain”?
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      It probably helps if you look at some of the existing experimental work that’s been done in the field, starting with the infamous Libet paper. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/
      - mistercow 3y ago
        I’m aware of that research, but my point is that whether you consider that to have any bearing on free will depends largely on where you draw those other boundaries.
      - idiotsecant 3y ago
        This doesn't fundamentally answer what the post you're responding to is asking. What do you mean by 'you'? When we use that word we often presuppose that such a thing exists. I suspect that if you dig deep enough 'you' will be something like a fancy version of a mixture of experts 'blind sight' system.
      - braingravy 3y ago
        While you’re reading papers (especially if they are 40+ years old), it’s worthwhile to read more modern experimental data on the subject as well. Here’s one from 2012 that rebuts the Libet interpretation directly: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109
    - potsandpans 3y ago
      In the words of Karl Pilkington, > Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.
      - bilekas 3y ago
        This man is an underrated profound philosopher! Protect him at all costs.
    - a_gnostic 3y ago
      In the words of a famous President: "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is."
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    I can try to decide to do whatever I want, but sometimes my brain will "disagree" with me by making it impossible for me to actually perform any action towards that thing. I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad. However, I also feel like this ability for me to disagree with what my brain wants could be what free will is. Sometimes I can even win against it. But other times it's impossible for me to do anything about it. Now, the real question is whether the separation between these processes is purely an ADHD thing, or whether normal non-ADHD brains have the same processes but simply don't ever have this kind of "disagreement". The next one would be whether the disagreement never happens because their brain is less picky about what it lets them do (free will), or whether it never happens because the conscious mind doesn't attempt to defy the brain's wants (no free will). How would a neural implant help with this?
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      > I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad. Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact? > How would a neural implant help with this? The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        > Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact? You're implying a definition of "you" here that I don't use. My definition of myself is like the collection of signals that can be attributed to myself. Which is important since my brain contains multiple people who can each have their own independent signals. (Of course, there are multiple definitions of myself depending on which realm I'm using it in, but in terms of the physical realm, yeah it's whatever my brain does that can be attributed to "me" somehow. So it's self-describing, technically. Or I am. Literally.) In other words, my self is not a physical point in the brain from which decisions originate. My concept of self is meant to make it easier for me to communicate where it feels like a thought or action of mine ("of mine", see?) originated. You can see something like this in split brain experiments, where one side of the brain can do something visible to, but completely independent of, the other side, which is neurologically disconnected. That other side will then interpret this as having been an action of its self, even without ever actually having done it. That suggests the self exists only as something to which actions and feelings can be attributed. A thought device, maybe. Part of the reason why it's important for me to recognize this is because my brain does contain multiple selves, also known as dissociative identities. I need to have some way of identifying myself in here that's more nuanced than "if my brain consciously did it, then obviously it was me". During polyconscious periods I have a stable identity even while others coexist, but I'm not always polyconscious, so sometimes my identity will change and I have to figure out who I've changed into. --- I have experienced a difference between "arriving at something through conscious thought" and "my brain arriving at something without conscious thought", because the latter typically completely bypasses conscious thought. It can take years for me for me to consciously catch up to things that my brain had already figured out long ago, because it didn't use thoughts to do it. An example is trauma responses. I have a few elaborate protection mechanisms that I did not understand for about six years because they relied on quite a few bits of knowledge that I simply did not have until recently. But the trauma was shocking enough to force my brain to make an immediate correction, and I was not consciously involved whatsoever in this. I was never given conscious thought or awareness but it managed to protect me so well that it took me years to figure out what it was even protecting me from. That's fascinating to me. So there is compelling evidence that my brain has the capacity to make extremely elaborate calculations without my conscious involvement whatsoever. I guess your question still stands about whether or not my experience of consciousness is a direct result of these same processes or whether the experience of consciousness is different enough to have its own semblence of "free will". This is ignoring the materialistic observation that the brain is technically deterministic, of course. --- > The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision. This won't necessarily allow you to tell apart whether someone had the thought first or interpreted some non-thought signal as a thought retroactively. Both would feel exactly the same from the perspective of whatever form of consciousness had the corresponding experience of thought. It's even likely that both possibilities happen, considering you can be reminded of things by your senses, and, you know, get feedback from the world. I sometimes figure out thoughts retroactively, but because I'm used to this I can typically tell it apart, or at least tell apart the fact that I retroactively re-identified something that had occurred before the identification. But this is over time scales of minutes, hours or longer, to the point where I would remember having considered that thought differently before. If it happened in some sort of direct chain reaction, it would be indistinguishable from the thought happening that way from the start. There's a load of other nuance in it from my perspective but that should be the most relevant bit of it. By the way, keep in mind I'm autistic so I don't know if neurotypical brains work in an even remotely similar manner.
akomtu 3y ago
Regimes like North Korea will implant it into soldiers and prisoners so it gives an electric shock every time those show signs of "wrong" neural activity. False positives is a plus. Other similar regimes will follow.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Elon will absolutely use this to "permaban" someone from meatspace if Neuralink ever takes off.
- astroboiiii 3y ago
  Lil kidney pains if you go to the library when you were supposed to go elsewhere :(
bbor 3y ago
I think it’ll do even more: show why that’s impossible. We already know that thoughts are electric patterns, so the thought that the manipulation of those patterns could change the inputs or outputs of your conscious mind shouldn’t be a surprise.
downboots 3y ago
An unpolished thought: Consider the case of a computer simulation of a worm [0] If your simulation predicts the worm behavior up to some tolerance, you then laugh at it's supposed free will There's some outside conditions that can't be controlled (the simulator is also a subset of the same universe) and may deterministically affect the worm behavior To fully account for these factors and their corresponding deterministic chains, the simulation must grow more and more complex if you want more precision Maybe free will could be thought instead of as a determinism ratio taking into account compute limits I suspect a logical contradiction could arise presuming a subset of the universe being able to simulate the whole universe If the simulation has to be limited, some "wiggle room" of free will must be granted to the worm [0] https://openworm.org/ https://openworm.org/
a-dub 3y ago
my pet theory: consciousness, free will, the soul, the spice, whatever you want to call it is a sum of the evolutionary process which produces a living being plus the noise that its substrate and environment excite it with. i believe that the true fuel that drives complex behaviors in neurological systems is noise, and what appears to be free will is simply noise that we can never completely measure, understand or replay. i suspect neurological systems are deterministic only in context of a completely deterministic environment/universe which for our purposes simply doesn't exist. so maybe the field of artificial intelligence, with its completely deterministic and replayable ttl worlds may produce some interesting results around the notion of free will, but i suspect that unless we can replay and then mutate the physical world deterministically, we'll never know if the study of neurological systems can. if you excite a machine with noise, and it creates a memory while producing a complex behavior, is it any less alive than a living biological system that is excited by the noise in its environment? my $.02, definitely keep the change!

"Free will" doesn't seem to have a generally accepted concrete definition to be proven or disproven in the first place. Besides, as someone with ADHD I know that even if I have free will, other parts of my brain work against me anyway, so I don't actually have total control over my actions.

iamacyborg 3y ago
I think it’s generally understood to mean that you can consciously decide to do a specific thing. The “anti” free will side is generally understood to mean that the brain chooses to do something and then you experience it as a decision after the fact. That’s my understanding of it at the very least and I tend to lean towards the “It thinks therefore I am” side of things.
- mistercow 3y ago
  All definitions (that I’ve ever heard) do this thing, though, where they just instantly add more concepts that either don’t have precise definitions, or whose definitions instantly render free will trivially existent or nonexistent, depending on what you go with. What do “you”, “consciously” and “decide” mean? And in particular, how is “you” distinct from “the brain”?
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    It probably helps if you look at some of the existing experimental work that’s been done in the field, starting with the infamous Libet paper. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/
    - mistercow 3y ago
      I’m aware of that research, but my point is that whether you consider that to have any bearing on free will depends largely on where you draw those other boundaries.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      This doesn't fundamentally answer what the post you're responding to is asking. What do you mean by 'you'? When we use that word we often presuppose that such a thing exists. I suspect that if you dig deep enough 'you' will be something like a fancy version of a mixture of experts 'blind sight' system.
    - braingravy 3y ago
      While you’re reading papers (especially if they are 40+ years old), it’s worthwhile to read more modern experimental data on the subject as well. Here’s one from 2012 that rebuts the Libet interpretation directly: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1210467109
  - potsandpans 3y ago
    In the words of Karl Pilkington, > Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.
    - bilekas 3y ago
      This man is an underrated profound philosopher! Protect him at all costs.
  - a_gnostic 3y ago
    In the words of a famous President: "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is."
- LoganDark 3y ago
  I can try to decide to do whatever I want, but sometimes my brain will "disagree" with me by making it impossible for me to actually perform any action towards that thing. I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad. However, I also feel like this ability for me to disagree with what my brain wants could be what free will is. Sometimes I can even win against it. But other times it's impossible for me to do anything about it. Now, the real question is whether the separation between these processes is purely an ADHD thing, or whether normal non-ADHD brains have the same processes but simply don't ever have this kind of "disagreement". The next one would be whether the disagreement never happens because their brain is less picky about what it lets them do (free will), or whether it never happens because the conscious mind doesn't attempt to defy the brain's wants (no free will). How would a neural implant help with this?
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    > I feel like I don't have free will, because even though I have the capacity to want anything at any time, what I can actually do is limited by what my brain will agree with me on. However, I am conscious about this and aware of the things that I am not allowed to do, and this makes me sad. Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact? > How would a neural implant help with this? The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      > Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact? You're implying a definition of "you" here that I don't use. My definition of myself is like the collection of signals that can be attributed to myself. Which is important since my brain contains multiple people who can each have their own independent signals. (Of course, there are multiple definitions of myself depending on which realm I'm using it in, but in terms of the physical realm, yeah it's whatever my brain does that can be attributed to "me" somehow. So it's self-describing, technically. Or I am. Literally.) In other words, my self is not a physical point in the brain from which decisions originate. My concept of self is meant to make it easier for me to communicate where it feels like a thought or action of mine ("of mine", see?) originated. You can see something like this in split brain experiments, where one side of the brain can do something visible to, but completely independent of, the other side, which is neurologically disconnected. That other side will then interpret this as having been an action of its self, even without ever actually having done it. That suggests the self exists only as something to which actions and feelings can be attributed. A thought device, maybe. Part of the reason why it's important for me to recognize this is because my brain does contain multiple selves, also known as dissociative identities. I need to have some way of identifying myself in here that's more nuanced than "if my brain consciously did it, then obviously it was me". During polyconscious periods I have a stable identity even while others coexist, but I'm not always polyconscious, so sometimes my identity will change and I have to figure out who I've changed into. --- I have experienced a difference between "arriving at something through conscious thought" and "my brain arriving at something without conscious thought", because the latter typically completely bypasses conscious thought. It can take years for me for me to consciously catch up to things that my brain had already figured out long ago, because it didn't use thoughts to do it. An example is trauma responses. I have a few elaborate protection mechanisms that I did not understand for about six years because they relied on quite a few bits of knowledge that I simply did not have until recently. But the trauma was shocking enough to force my brain to make an immediate correction, and I was not consciously involved whatsoever in this. I was never given conscious thought or awareness but it managed to protect me so well that it took me years to figure out what it was even protecting me from. That's fascinating to me. So there is compelling evidence that my brain has the capacity to make extremely elaborate calculations without my conscious involvement whatsoever. I guess your question still stands about whether or not my experience of consciousness is a direct result of these same processes or whether the experience of consciousness is different enough to have its own semblence of "free will". This is ignoring the materialistic observation that the brain is technically deterministic, of course. --- > The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision. This won't necessarily allow you to tell apart whether someone had the thought first or interpreted some non-thought signal as a thought retroactively. Both would feel exactly the same from the perspective of whatever form of consciousness had the corresponding experience of thought. It's even likely that both possibilities happen, considering you can be reminded of things by your senses, and, you know, get feedback from the world. I sometimes figure out thoughts retroactively, but because I'm used to this I can typically tell it apart, or at least tell apart the fact that I retroactively re-identified something that had occurred before the identification. But this is over time scales of minutes, hours or longer, to the point where I would remember having considered that thought differently before. If it happened in some sort of direct chain reaction, it would be indistinguishable from the thought happening that way from the start. There's a load of other nuance in it from my perspective but that should be the most relevant bit of it. By the way, keep in mind I'm autistic so I don't know if neurotypical brains work in an even remotely similar manner.

akomtu 3y ago

Regimes like North Korea will implant it into soldiers and prisoners so it gives an electric shock every time those show signs of "wrong" neural activity. False positives is a plus. Other similar regimes will follow.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Elon will absolutely use this to "permaban" someone from meatspace if Neuralink ever takes off.
astroboiiii 3y ago
Lil kidney pains if you go to the library when you were supposed to go elsewhere :(

bbor 3y ago

I think it’ll do even more: show why that’s impossible. We already know that thoughts are electric patterns, so the thought that the manipulation of those patterns could change the inputs or outputs of your conscious mind shouldn’t be a surprise.

downboots 3y ago

An unpolished thought: Consider the case of a computer simulation of a worm [0] If your simulation predicts the worm behavior up to some tolerance, you then laugh at it's supposed free will There's some outside conditions that can't be controlled (the simulator is also a subset of the same universe) and may deterministically affect the worm behavior To fully account for these factors and their corresponding deterministic chains, the simulation must grow more and more complex if you want more precision Maybe free will could be thought instead of as a determinism ratio taking into account compute limits I suspect a logical contradiction could arise presuming a subset of the universe being able to simulate the whole universe If the simulation has to be limited, some "wiggle room" of free will must be granted to the worm [0] https://openworm.org/ https://openworm.org/

a-dub 3y ago

my pet theory: consciousness, free will, the soul, the spice, whatever you want to call it is a sum of the evolutionary process which produces a living being plus the noise that its substrate and environment excite it with. i believe that the true fuel that drives complex behaviors in neurological systems is noise, and what appears to be free will is simply noise that we can never completely measure, understand or replay. i suspect neurological systems are deterministic only in context of a completely deterministic environment/universe which for our purposes simply doesn't exist. so maybe the field of artificial intelligence, with its completely deterministic and replayable ttl worlds may produce some interesting results around the notion of free will, but i suspect that unless we can replay and then mutate the physical world deterministically, we'll never know if the study of neurological systems can. if you excite a machine with noise, and it creates a memory while producing a complex behavior, is it any less alive than a living biological system that is excited by the noise in its environment? my $.02, definitely keep the change!