There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don’t
m.nautil.us
m.nautil.us
It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.
1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.
If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.
You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.
Who says it's a physical process to begin with? That's an assertion, not a proof.
More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)
Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument, and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!
A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the abstract sense of course) in magic.
Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
The concept has utility.
2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
edited: To add point #2
The concept has utility.
You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.
> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.
>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.
That's where hard determinism fails it, because all it can do is to make a very broad statement that our behaviour was predetermined, without going into the details.
Really we can't make "down to the hardware" fixes or even do a post hoc analysis of the cause of behaviour, so it's really useless as a theory, it has no predictive power.
I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)
I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.
> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.
> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word
You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.
> The concept has utility.
This is a thinly veiled argument from consequences. You're not the only one to do this, I see this from many people arguing in favor of free will.
Edit: I would also question the utility of the concept compared to the alternative. Show me some hard numbers for what happens in a society constructed around the lack of a metaphysical free will, and then I may reconsider. (I suspect that this sort of society hasn't existed and may never exist, because free will is such a persistent illusion that it may as well be a phantom limb for most people. We're probably hardwired for it at some level, like the incessant drive for reproduction that most people have.)
And every time someone brings up free will, someone will shout hard determinism from a pulpit like they are the final authority on the matter.
The same could easily be said on the reverse, but that's the whole point of a discussion isnt it?
And I dont think anyone considers themselves the final authority, the idea of the falsity of freewill has been around for quite some time.
You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.
Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.
Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.
So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?
Wow!
Also, what does a total lack of free will mean for the criminal justice system, which operates on the unspoken assumption that behavior is at least in part willful?
nothing, the goal of justice system is to prevent repetition of the crime, and it works the same whether the behavior was willful or not.
Why do you build wind barriers? Same reason for prisons - to prevent future things. As best as you can. Now is that a deterministic, chaotic, stochastic or purely random but stable process - do we care that much?
Should the fact that you want to punish/reward influence how you interpret the universe and logic?
Human centric always free will is...
It's a matter of denotative vs. connotative definitions. Free will proponents are saying, "hey that thing we all do when we make a choice that rocks can't do, that's free will", and you're saying "free will has such and such properties, so whether we have it depends on whether our choices have these properties".
I'd argue that most people reason denotatively, in which case merely pointing out the thing we're trying to define suffices as an existence proof. What remains is defining what it is, logically.
> 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case
It sure does!
> The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.
Agreed. I don't see why this poses any difficulty. The behaviour of the process is largely governed by free will, just like a process on your computer will often sort lists.
> If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not.
Sure, via suicide.
So why control _those_ thoughts? Why deliberate in _that particular way_?
It is the answer to the problem as stated. Of course, if you move the goalposts to require two properties that are logically inconsistent, then sure, no conception of free will would qualify. I'm not sure why I should find that compelling.
Finally, your focus on "control" is telling of particular assumptions that free will must have certain properties (a connotative definition). Consider whether you are simply mistaken that these properties are necessary.
As I said, there is a clear distinction between the behaviour of people and inanimate matter. There is a lot of latitude there for a process that we would recognize as free will.
Hence why there can be no true hard science based around these areas, and indeed no agreed-upon "truth".
I don't see why. Free will is a choice made for our own reasons that isn't coerced by another actor's will.
No doubt there are nuances to this when you get into the details, but it's a big leap to say it simply evaporates. We can clearly see it doesn't because we can make meaningful distinctions between the behaviour of people and that of rocks.
This is exactly why free will evaporates. Your decision making apparatus and the factors that go into your choice are a given. Multiply yourself and the situation by a million, you will always make the same decision using the same apparatus and the same factors, unless there is a random element, but that is random, not free. You're not constrained, but you are, at a very basic level, determined.
The Frankfurt cases debunked the principle of alternate possibilities as necessary for free will. I suggest reading my other comment where I go into further details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19928438
That's what the free will debate in philosophy is about: whether there's a coherent conception of free volition that can justify holding an actor morally responsible for their choices.
The philosophical question is the context of "free will" discussed by the article. Other notions of free will may or may not overlap, as I described in my other comment.
> Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will, and certainly believe in moral responsibility.
Interesting claim, but from what I've just read they do believe in free will, but they also believe that God knows all outcomes, ie. determinism/predestination. In other words, they are Compatibilists.
Well, I don't care about that question. I'm interested in whether free will exists as a matter of [meta]physics, prior to questions of morality.
“It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level.”
All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.
Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?
Yes. Pseudo-random generators are deterministic on lower level, yet they effectively non-deterministic in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value.
Or you can just take a system with large number of interacting particles - even if behavior of each of them is determined, the system as a whole is hard to predict.
Converse is also possible, you can build effectively deterministic system on top of a non-deterministic one. We do that with computers, we have digital computers (deterministic) on top of solid-state physics, which is non-deterministic due to interactions of electrons and the material.
This is not really a paradox, since at the higher level you only consider macrostates, so the fact that the microstates, which you consider at the lower level, are (non-)deterministic doesn't really matter.
Easily or _in principle_?
Do not conflate our physical constraints with the actual mechanism behind the scene. Free will is not about our own ignorance or inability, it is the principal thing.
My point is the question "is it deterministic" is wrong without considering the level of detail you're looking at. Even in deterministic universe, a roll of dice is considered to be undeterministic, and this is good enough for casinos.
If you're asking "in principle", then it might as well be unknowable because, as I pointed out, how we might observe the system to be (our model of it is deterministic or not) doesn't have to correspond at all whether it is actually deterministic or not at the lower level. So there always can be another level which can behave differently.
> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this microphysical detail. That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.
> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not deterministic, but stochastic, or random.
The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom number generator. It appears stochastic to someone who is only given the high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world. Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for alternative possibilities.
I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect this. He is saying "we don't want the Laplace's demon description of the system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which obviously it's not.
But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever - if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.
Still, the article makes the same mistake thinking that free will requires indeterminism and alternative possibilities when it really doesn't.
Can you elaborate more? I'm genuinely interested.
Firstly, to set the stage, understand that the "free will" debated in philosophy around questions of moral responsibility is not the same "free will" as typically used in science, eg. one such definition is where experimenters are free to set up their measurements independently of the system they're measuring. This is a common confusion.
What matters for the philosophical free will debate is whether there is a coherent definition of free will/choice which can make sense of our language of volition and moral reasoning, and which can serve to justify moral responsibility. Note also that "moral responsibility" does not necessarily entail "punishment" (which is a question of justice). This is another common confusion.
Finally, note that you make choices according to your nature, but to also have a choice in your nature would be logically circular.
So is there at least one definition of free will that can satisfy all of these criteria? Compatibilism is the most widely accepted approach among philosophers, and seems to match most people's intuitive moral reasoning [2]. For a rough example of what this might look like, consider a definition like "the moral responsibility of an agent capable of general learning is proportional to the amount of information it has learned, and a freely willed choice is one made based on internal reasons and not forced by other agents".
Note how this is perfectly compatible with determinism, how it makes sense of why we don't hold babies responsible but we hold adults responsible, it makes sense of how environmental [and] social factors that can impede learning moral lessons can diminish moral responsibility, it strictly defines what "free" means in the context of choice, and "moral responsibility" reduces to "moral feedback", ie. instructing what was done wrong. It's not perfect, but it should suffice as an introduction to Compatibilist-style reasoning.
This does not cover justice, which is what we must do in response to moral culpability, and which bring in further assumptions.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bojcl0/research_ha...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
I postulate that we cannot build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces - we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. With enough data, and a system of sufficient predictive complexity, we can still predict everything, I'd wager.
Which is observably indistinguishable from indeterminism.
1. Imagine a finite formal system which universally can identify if an input is regular (compressible) or random (not compressible) / So we are using the Kolmogorov-complexity definition of randomness here...
2. Assume the above formal system can be described using L bits (e.g. it is an L bit long program)
3. Lets take the first (e.g. smallest in numerical ordering) 2×L (or 10×L, 100×L, ... take it as large you want) long bit string that the program classifies as random bit string
4. "3." is a definition of a 2×L long string in L bits (the formal system itself) + constant
5. The 2×L long string is therefore compressibe so it is not random - but our original algorithm is misclassify it as random (it is in its definition) - so the algorithm is not universal...
I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell.
Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.
Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion)
>We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible.
In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time does fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are not physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.
I'm not sure I buy it.
Present company included, naturally.
Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly like that?
To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of fundamental physics yet. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.
They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of "truly random" or "magical" or something like that.
With this definition of "free will":
Does a cow have free will?
Does a tree have free will?
Does a rolling dice have free will?
The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.
The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a choice in being born.
It likely varies a lot across individuals.
For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from chance.
As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more unpredictable in our youth.
0. https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-wi...
Funks are often caused by an abrupt shift in worldview without a corresponding set of tools for integrating that worldview into the rest of your life.
I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.