Reason Won't Save Us

and it's probably a data processing bug in the analysis! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

I’ve felt the despair of this article for a time (and the quote above gave me some peace), but some recent hope came from Daniel Schmachtenberger[1]. He postulates that our conception of debate in our current information ecology selects and optimizes for bias. He refers to the Hegelian dialectic as an alternative to debate—of an earnest synthesis from understanding both a thesis and its antithesis, resolving paradox with a higher order model. I’ve heard this described as steel-manning[1] another’s argument to find its signal (as opposed to straw-manning the noise).

But Schmachtenberger, as well as Bret Weinstein I believe, proposes that the game-theoretic win/lose dynamic of our current system is so entrenched that it really selects for this type of narrative warfare which doesn’t promote this type of open and honest information ecology for this to really work yet. So there’s something to their post-game-theoretic frameworks (Bret’s “Game B”) that make me a lot less fatalistic and anarchist about the whole complexity game.

[1] The War on Sensemaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ

[2] a.k.a purva paksha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purva_paksha

It's interesting that whenever the discussion of free-will comes up, it's always in the context of someone making a decision on how to interpret if or how someone else has free-will. The diehard anti-free-will determinists have no choice in attending the game, and if they do or not is not dependent on how they see the outcome of the game as deterministic or not. In this vein, the classic free-will argument of if criminals deserve punishment if they don't have free-will is an argument made from a hubristic point of view, as if those deciding the punishment exist outside of determinism. This is often an attempt to get anti-free-will types in a contradiction, similar to the claim/argument that there no atheists in foxholes.

- Free will does not exist either, let's face it, the evidence will keep getting more and more conclusive. So, why despair? Our brains are not "magic machines acting on a dangerous world", our brains generate the world. Free will is our little game.

- All of our thinking is ex-post facto rationalizations. We seem to be good at creating models of this generated world. There is no distinct boundary between "reasoned thinking", "a hunch" and "trust your feelings", they re all beliefs that stem from different sets of assumptions.

- Our feelings are calculations, for which we don't yet have a model, but a hunch (e.g. time is absolute) is not to be discarded lightly, but only when reasoned thinking provides a much more satisfactory view of the world (time is relative). Very few tools are of guidance in that respect, only Occam's razor.

- The world that our brain generates includes the AI machines of the future, for which we will have to somehow rationalize and reason about even without a good model.

- Until we build a better model of our individual and collective behavior, our motivations and our beliefs, we must stick with the current political/judicial model. Neuroscience has not yet deciphered human intention to a comprehensive mathematical theory. Patience, we 'll get there.

If you experience an optical illusion and it's explained to you, your reasoning power will enable you to fully accept that your perceptions are incorrect. But if you have a bias that causes you to have a strong opinion on a controversial subject, even if someone tries to point out to you that your bias is rendering your perceptions invalid, and even if you accept in theory that that is the case, it likely won't change your strongly held belief.

For example if you have a strong opinion regarding the existence of the Christian God, and someone tells you that your bias is affecting your opinion, you might concede that you have some kind of bias, but most likely you'll continue to believe that your opinion is right.

So in one culture you talk with reason; in another, you talk with emotions. In the full scale of the world - in the context of civilisation as discussed in the article - there is too much variation among the people; especially among the mix of cultures there are now in every country, so it can become very difficult to come to agreements. This is because if you are not careful what you are trying to say will make no sense to anyone.

One effective way is to identify who thinks how, allow themselves to organise into groups based on how the ratios of reason or emotions, then address each group in a manner that that group would understand.

- when we can say "this ought to happen", and work towards that to happen.

- when we can say "I desire this but intend that", and follow-through our intention rather than our desire.

- when we can not model a person's action on a purely cause-and-effect basis, and there appears to be an inherent unpredictability in their decision.

It is useful to say/think that there's "free will" at play, as there's a certain character to the situations (and why not name it, so it's easier to recognize).

Above three scenarios owing to Kant (Critique of Practical Reason). The first two, we generally do not ascribe to other species, which might imply that they have less free will than we do.

Studies show people with brain injury unable to feel, are unable to make sound decisions (pure rational thought). We know what happens when only feelings decide, that would wreck society overnight.

Luckily, the way our brain works. Intuition/feelings come first, and then we can rationalize and filter, based on logic!

I wonder if he's a Buddhist?

Most of the way through he seems to be making the case that consciousness and will are illusory, and that we are indistinguishable from mechanisms. But towards the end, he seems to allow that we can take measures to improve our decision-making abilities.

My interpretation of Buddhist psychology is that, for the most part, our behaviour (decision-making) is the result of "causes and conditions", i.e. our actions are generally not "voluntary"; but that we can nevertheless, through introspection and practice, improve our understanding and decision-making.

I think his poker-bot needs an "introspection circuit" to oversee and direct the learning process. I do not accept his contention that poker-bots demonstrate that deep-learning/AI can ever model a conscious mind without such a circuit.

[Edit: I spent several decades studying Buddhism; I returned to an uncompromising rationalism about 10 years ago, and I'm much better now. Doesn't that suggest that people can change their minds?]

im kind of a determinist even though I don't enjoy it, I think if you're a determinist and you still get up every morning, you've made some kind of arrangement with the paradox of having no choice yet "having" choice such that enjoying a baseball game is pretty low difficulty level among determinist daily challenges.

For much of human history though, reason took a back seat to centralized power and shared belief systems (even if they were not based on reason). E.g.: Egyptian society could get a lot more done if everyone believed in the sun god, and that the pharaoh was god-like. Shared beliefs, even if false or unreasonable, increased stability and allowed society to better organize.

Roughly since the enlightenment, reason has had a similarly strong ability to organize society, and the civilizations that embraced it have tended to live longer than those that don't. In the context of history, it's arguably more of a social tool than a underlying value.

Just because we're not good at explaining our behaviour after the fact, doesn't mean we lack agency or 'will.'

Personally, I strongly disagree, though of course there are plenty of huge obstacles in the way, most of them bake in our "human hardware". It doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to get past them.

But make your own (rational :)) opinion.

commonly believed? by who? I have never heard that claim before.

what is this abyss author is so afraid of?