There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But research also supports the plasticity of the brain/mind and we know that we can build/change habits and personality traits (apparently) through conscious effort. Perhaps "free will" should be defined more specifically as the ability to consciously shape the deterministic systems that are our minds?
You are indeed conscious, and do indeed have thoughts. What the article discusses is that the overwhelming evidence seems to show your thoughts are generated by deterministic/proabilistic physical processes, and that in fact your conscious thoughts occur after your decisions are already made and often serve only as post-hoc justifications of what you already did.
Consciousness is just another component in the car. It doesn't determine or influence where the car is going. Perhaps the most valuable part of consciousness is it provides an effective way to use reflection which can communicate data about the internal state of the car to the other cars. (Often this data is objectively inaccurate, but still serves the interest of the car or the fleet.)
You do realize those aren't the same thing, right? In fact, they're basically opposites. Deterministic is "if/then", while probabilistic is "maybe". Something is either deterministic or probabilistic, and it matters which it is.
In your metaphor, consciousness is the learning system which is used to generate the model which drives the car. Our brains are semi-supervised learning, and our models get retrained when they drift far enough.
I say "deterministic/probabilistic" because I am thinking about physical laws; i.e., what we know of physics and quantum mechanics. The intent is to exclude the idea that consciousness is somehow above the rules of cause and effect. It probably would be safer to just say "deterministic" to prevent all the magic-shoehorning people sometimes attempt with QM, but I was being pedantic.
> In your metaphor, consciousness is the learning system which is used to generate the model which drives the car. Our brains are semi-supervised learning, and our models get retrained when they drift far enough.
No, in my metaphor, consciousness is totally unrelated to learning, as the article suggested. In my metaphor consciousness is basically just part of the network stack.
I recommend you read the works of the scientist upon which my pseudonym is based (not the Unicode part, that's just a dig at HN for the type of characters they allow)
Briefly, you cannot fully describe a complex system using merely the axioms of a less complex system (or more simplistically, all metaphors are (subtlety but importantly) wrong).
This is especially true of quantum mechanics, but in general it's a good rule to keep in mind. It prevents comfortable but naïve assumptions like "physics is just Newton because that's what we can perceive", or assuming that cognition is just summing neurons together.
In every aspect of life, you can safely assume that It's More Complicated Than That.
Although, after making that point, is there really a difference between a self driving car and a car and a driver in your example? Probably not. They're both being driven by something, and the answer shouldn't change based on what the driver is.
Which is the aforementioned firing of neurons. Consciousness is not supernatural.
Edit: impossible to prove if we consider this a self-referential first order logical system
Prove it. And update the wiki while you are at it.
"The NSA is not spying on anybody"
"Prove it"
"Burden of proof error, those claiming the NSA is spying on somebody must prove it. Not spying is the null hypothesis and backed by mountains of evidence"
The problem is that I wasn't making a claim either way. I only requested proof of a definitive statement made by OP.
Please review the HN guidelines, which include this:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.
Which would also be the correct burden of proof. Burden of proof isn't about who's making the claim, it's about whether the claim is positive or negative. You can't logically prove a negative, i.e. you can't prove the NSA isn't spying on you, you can only prove they are. It only takes one example to prove they are, but no number of checks of their equipment can prove they aren't because you might not have seen them all and they could be hiding some. The same applies to claims of anything, regardless of which side is making a claim, the claim itself can be looked to, and phrased in the positive and that's where the burden of proof lies. So whichever side is on the side of "X is true" suffers the burden of proof, never the side that says "X is false".
If I say God doesn't exist for example, the burden of proof still lies upon those who believe he does despite my poor stating of my side of the argument because God exists is still the positive claim and thus the only one that's provable.
That's simply not true. You can prove a negative, it just takes a lot more effort.
Imagine if computer scientists took the same approach:
"Hey everybody use our new crypto, there are absolutely no flaws in the design"
"Prove it"
"Nope, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that there is a flaw"
That type of "burden of proof" argument is not helpful or productive in real life, which is why algorithm/hardware designers go to great lengths to mathematically prove there are no flaws in their design. It's called Formal Verification. If you toss the burden of proof on your customers, you'll have no customers.
I can certainly challenge any claim that anyone makes, positive or negative, and I have no obligation to spend time and energy proving or disproving anything. It all comes down to who wants the other party to change more.
> I can certainly challenge any claim that anyone makes, positive or negative
Yes you can, but it doesn't make your challenge logical. If you challenge someone to prove a negative claim, you are logically wrong and are demanding the impossible. Yes, they may have made a negative claim, the correct response is to say the claim itself is invalid and rephrase it to a valid form and then determine where burden of proof lies.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
If you say "Fish definitely don't have dreams", I'll say that can't ever be proven, there may be one mutant fish somewhere that does dream and you can't examine them all and thus the claim is simply logically invalid. So the claim should be rephrased as "fish dream" and whoever is on that side suffers the burden of proof. However, just because it hasn't been proved that fish dream doesn't mean it's true that they don't, what it does mean is lacking evidence that they do, the answer is unknown.
OP's original claim was "Consciousness is not supernatural." Here, I'll define supernatural as "beyond our understanding of the laws of nature". Thus, OP's claim rephrased is:
"Consciousness is within our current understanding of the laws of nature."
Now we have a positive claim, and the burden of proof is back on OP.
No, I've been very clear how to deterministically determine it, you're not listening or responding to anything or any point made; You're having the same argument with several people yet are unable to admit you're wrong; so we're done, you don't know how to converse or the capacity to change your mind when shown your mistakes.
Oh yes, you've been very clear indeed. "All" I have to do is prove that consciousness is supernatural in order to be right. And how do I do that? You've basically cornered me with an impossible task by shaping the semantics to be in your favor.
You want proof that consciousness is supernatural? Just wait until you die and then you can marvel all day long at the fact that you can still think without a physical body. I'll reserve my "told you so" until then (~50 years?)
No all you have to do to be right is not demand impossible proofs of negative statements. The correct answer to a claim that "consciousness is not supernatural" is say it's an invalid claim as it's impossible to prove a negative statement except in maths. Done, simple as that. Negative claims are invalid and ought simply be rejected out of hand. Only falsifiable claims are valid claims, this is basic science, if it isn't falsifiable it's garbage.
Fish definitely don't have dreams.
Dark Matter isn't real
There are no undiscovered artifacts left in the amazon jungles.
There are no sunken ships in the seas that we are not aware of.
By your logic nobody can contest any of the above claims without the burden of proof being on them. That's great. It means I can say anything negative I want as truth and then everybody else has to do the work to disprove me.
How do you prove a negative?
That aside, if the "supernatural" exists it's just laws of physics we do not understand yet.
At this point in time, the overwhelming majority of evidence indicates that consciousness is deterministic. If you disagree, you'll need to provide concrete proof to the contrary.
I'm not claiming it is supernatural. I'm only challenging the definitive statement that it is not supernatural and asking for proof.
Consciousness is definitely not deterministic.
Still I do not see how indeterminism would actually enable free will. Would an automa without free will acquire it if a higher counter was added to its brain?
At this point in time, the overwhelming majority of
evidence indicates that consciousness is deterministic.
Regardless if we're a brain in vat, can we not enjoy the ride?
It would mean the choice is mostly determined by their "self", but the definition you give isn't clear about whether that would count as free will or not.
It's more difficult if we have to consider the internal, subjective state of the system. A radioactive particle probably doesn't experience anything we could identify with when it "chooses" to decay. And the experience we imagine to be free will could in fact be entirely deterministic, even if other aspects of the universe are nondeterministic. But if we can rule out any kind of nondeterminism in the universe, then we can rule out free will.
I mean, think about it for a second. You have a choice between A and B, and you freely choose A. From your definition it seems that if I rewound time to that moment, you might choose B instead. But it's the same situation! If I freely choose to take a walk this morning because it's nice out, I goddamn mean to go out. No matter how many times you rewound time, I would want to go out every single time. It isn't random: there's a reason why I'm doing this, and reasons are never random.
If free will is nondeterministic or random, then I don't want to have free will.
The key difference is whether that reason is entirely internal to you or it's the result of external influence. If you always take a walk, an observer could infer that by some arcane law of physics, the sun forces you to take the walk - and they might not be far off.
What I mean by nondeterministic/random is there is nothing someone could know about you, the sun, and the rest of the universe that would let them predict with certainty whether you'll go for a walk or not.
The supernatural ability to rewind time seems like cheating, to be honest. But if that were possible and everything always went the same, then perhaps we could rule out free will (depending on the nature of this time reversal mechanism).
Nothing someone could know about me? If someone knew everything there is to know about me, I sure hope they would be able to predict everything I will do. Free will doesn't mean freedom from my own nature.
The only way to be perfectly unpredictable is to act at random and without reason. If you act for a reason, then in principle, that reason could be known by someone else, and they could predict your actions. I think that's acceptable: I don't feel that in order for my choices to be free, my nature and my reasons must be unknowable to anyone but myself.
> But if that were possible and everything always went the same, then perhaps we could rule out free will
According to your definition, yes. Not according to mine. So I guess we made the OP's point ;)
The other side of this though is if the agent believes he or she has the ability to do or not do, but actually doesn't, is it still free will? An example being you enter your office with the intention of working for five hours. Without realizing it, the door locks behind you from the outside, leaving you effectively trapped. Even if you never attempt to leave the room, are you staying at your own free will?
But in simple model, of just a world, where one only has configurations of atoms (or configurations of some substance or etc), there's nothing uniquely determining what's internal and what's external, what's an agent and what's not. So "free will" winds-up achingly ill-defined/under-determined here.
I think your definition is further relevant in that a lot of arguments confuse an ontological model and with a social/political model. And this could well be natural - as social beings, it seems like we tend to both model the world and see agents within it and so saying "in this model, you have choice but in this other model, you and choice don't exist" is highly counter-intuitive to an average human.
This is really interesting. Thanks for the reply.
* some people "choose" to believe in Compatibilism, which I consider a cop out.
Event X happens. How you react depends on your state of mind.
Same problem as with coding. As soon as outputs are not wholly dependent on inputs, and they can have side-effects, all bets are off. Anything could happen.
On the per-event basis, this model boils down to a 'function' evaluating each event with multiple outputs and inputs:
Inputs: the stimuli, mental state prior to stimuli
Outputs: your actions and resultant mental state
The output mental state is then the input for the next iteration/evaluation.
Say the universe is perfectly deterministic. You could look into the future by simulating everything perfectly but why would that prohibit free will? Most people wouldn't argue that an all knowing god would mean free will is impossible, why is this different?
I'd argue that an all-knowing God is something that can't really be reasoned about. It's the introduction of an infinite value into the discussion (or maybe more like a division by zero?). You end up with logically contradictory statements when describing the properties of such a being.
Maybe the general definition of free will most people seem to go with just doesn't deal with weird edge cases because it basically developed to fit reality.
Consequently, people have "effective" free will - because the knowledge space "to know all outcomes" is too vast to control/comprehend completely.
A algorithm can choose something (e.g. netflix will choose a particular film to recommend), and it doesn't cause anyone to worry about free will.
My favourite way of thinking about 'free will', is that it is what it feels like from the inside of an algorithm that is choosing.
> We’re better off believing in it anyway.
Nihilism is easy to start but hard to finish.
Hard to finish.
Consider: 'Does the observation that people who believe in [demons] act differently than people who don't demonstrate that [demons] exist?'
But perhaps I'm not getting exactly what you're trying to say?
> Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes.
Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable:
> Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true.
Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.
The first quote was from Gay Science - I grabbed the second of Wikipedia, but I was sure it, or something to the same effect, was also in Gay Science. I don't have a searchable copy of my favorite translation, unfortunately, but Nietzsche talks a lot of psychology in Gay Science.
People who steal more when it is suggested that there is none probably suffer from the same condition that people who feel that people who don't share their religion are inherently unethical suffer from: axiomatic ethical principles, rather than ethical principles that they derive from axioms.
edit: The most interesting positive thing I've ever read on the existence of a thing that we call "free will" is How Brains Make Up Their Minds[1] by Walter J. Freeman[2], a person who I think has gotten closest to the mechanics of how "consciousness" is automated. I don't mean to say that it's convincing, because for me it wasn't; but the number of contortions that it takes for him to make his point in the face of all of his physical theory is astounding, and possibly the best case that could be made.
And he died last month, which I didn't know. How sad.
[1] http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/Books/HB/HowBrains.htm...
Still I have no problem to accept free will as a subjective experience, the same way I accept love, fear, hope, despair, and other states of mind, including consciousness. They are just the way our mind work, byproducts in a way. That doesn't mean that in principle one couldn't imagine mind without them, but it would be alien to us an we would probably not even recognise as intelligence.
I guess that makes me a compatibilist.
[1] modulo quantum indeterminism which seems to have surprisingly little effect to the macro world.
In terms of fundamental physics we know probabilities are determined, but the exact outcomes are not. There's strong evidence that this isn't a matter of us being ignorant of some hidden deterministic state (Bell's inequality experiments) but rather is fundamental to how our universe works, though it's not a totally settled debate. Whether this gives an escape hatch where our brains are capable of free will is way too complex a question for me to think it'll be settled empirically any time soon, but I personally suspect it's true in a faint way. We're mostly reactive, but have some way to influence those reactions over time.
But surely we believe in "free will" not because we observe it in a lab but because we experience it directly. Pick up a menu at a restaurant. Sure there is mechanistic cause and effect going on in your selection—memories, sights, smells—but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.
Science is always compelled to dismiss these individual and personal experiences and perceptions, and as science rightly so. But as people we can take them into account. And so we should. To dismiss the sense of "I" that makes us, in fact, people is to cast away perhaps the most important part of our world. We retain a sense of choice, of free will, not because it's a compelling illusion but because it is in fact in large part what we are and what we recognize others to be. Be careful with that word "illusion": you can call something an illusion, but you then have to account for where the illusion came from and why it functions so powerfully. I'd say that free will is not an illusion so much as a thing that science deals badly with and is therefore tempted to dismiss. Well, dismiss free will from the laboratory, sure, but don't pretend we aren't free-willing things or you'll be left with nothing but a lab, populated by not-quite-people.
Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.