The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Let me posit a different world view that resolved this dilemma: we live in a present moment which is always unfolding in a chaotic kaleidoscope. QM tells us as much, that we live in a world based on nonlocal probabilistic events and that we can’t ever “rewind”. Under such circumstances “free will” as conceived by a middle schooler doesn’t make sense, but determinism hardly does either.
Determinism brings to mind the idea of a roller-coaster-track of past-present-future. Physicists call this “eternalism”. Eternalism is great if you are calculating how a ball will behave at time t when thrown in a parabolic arc, but I really do believe that time t+1 and time t-1 doesn’t actually “exist”. We remember the past like ripples in a pond remembering the rock that fell in. We anticipate the future based on patterns we have stored up. But it hardly makes sense to say that the future is determined by the past other than to say that our concept of a future is informed by our ability to make inferences from the ephemeral memories we call “the past”.
Like most philosophical problems we let words get in the way of reality. “Could have done otherwise” sounds like a statement of fact but we only ever use it to express our own every-day thought experiments, or to express desire. “He could have taken a shorter route.” “She could have been nicer to me.” In reality neither thing happened differently because /now/ is when everything happens and we only get one shot. And that’s the crux of it to me. Talk of free will is mostly just anxiety over having made the right actions in the moment or not when mulling it over later. Certainly we have no future fate since the present has inflexible probability baked into it.
To live life is to live in servitude. I'm a slave to my own needs of bread, water and circus. To supply this never-ending need I must serve someone else too. I must serve the needs of my family as well : they want and expect things out of me too. So where does that leave me? A never-ending cycle of busy-bodying. I can't even get mad or push back anymore. To what end? I'm simply a spectator to my own fate which unravels before me. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. Since it wasn't someone else, therefore, it has to be me. I am just a replaceable cog, but this cog still needs to be put to use in a machine.
This made me realize death is the true gift of God to mankind. An end to our seemingly never-ending drudgery.
But I still get to be a part of some really fun games. I still feel shame if I blunder a piece, or the thrill of hunting down a vulnerable king.
And every so often, a pawn makes it to the back rank and promotes to win the game.
Huh? Why?
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
As much as I have a personal will, I will continue to will the same thing if we replay the situation -- all other things being exactly the same.
I don't chose something at random. I express who I am, based on my life story in space time.
To make a light example, if I'm a person who prefers Big Macs over Chinese, I will pick a Bic Mac if I'm asked to make such a decision, no matter how many times we rewind and replay the universe state.
Free will is not about me suddenly picking some random alternative. How would that ever express who I am (and thus, my, _my_ personal will?).
What's "free" about this free will since its inexorably tied to my space-time history? Well, it's exactly the fact that it's my space-time history, and can't be altered based on some external factor.
It's not "free" as in arbitrarily changeable, but free as in "expressing me and only me" (that is: my space-time history who made me what I am).
You share most of your specificities with other homo sapiens.
Individualism is a thought system that is centered on liberalism. Watch "the century of the self".
Sure, but that's neither here, nor there - and totally orthogonal to the discussion.
Free will is about expressing the self, not about the self being unique.
This realization can be difficult to process. The illusion of free will is intensely persistent, even after we’ve accepted that fact. Personally, I try to focus on the higher-order positives that come with this understanding: increased humility, greater compassion for others and oneself and equanimity via acceptance.
I had once strived to grok Zen Buddhism. I think shedding my belief in free will brought me much closer than drugs, meditation or reading religious texts ever did.
It is free in the sense that it's determined by the essense of you (your journey in space-time) - as opposed to some external factor (e.g. someone making a machine that makes you take a certain choice without it having anything to do with your experiences).
It's not some "action at a distance" that has nothing to do with you, your past, your experiences, etc. If that was the case, it wouldn't be _your_ will (whether free or not).
It's free as in not determined by external factors. Factors pertinent to who you are (like where you grew up, your friends, your parents, your experiences and so on - that is, your space-time history) _are_ pertinent to who you are. You can't separate from them, and I wouldn't call separating from them "free".
So it's not free as in "random" or as in "independent of your history deliberation by something external to your body (e.g. a soul) that's unaffected by your past".
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2018/02/15/scale.ht...
Quantum theory is probably not going to save us from this, even if it at some point is fully and entirely proven and understood in a grand unified field theory. Even if something is not deterministic, does not mean that the thing is "will" or even a part of it.
Even on a macroscopic scale we can have unpredictable events, at least practically unpredictable ones, which can change our behavior, but that's just it, external events chainging our internal state. For all I know, a high energy particle may once every so often hit one of my synapses, changing its chargs just-so, making me decide to opt for the smaller menu at Mc.Donalds.
No matter what, every action -- even if that action is somehow clearly defined as an act of free will (I guess the "classic" example being one of rebellion or a wholly unexpected action) -- springs from a cause. That cause has its own cause. And so and on and so forth, until you pass the barrier between what we call consciousness and what we call organic hardware and pass into the realm of the (currently) measurable and predictable.
Just as a technology, sufficiently advanced, appears to be magic, so then does a complexity, sufficiently complex, appear to be something other than what it is. I bet everyone on HN a Coke that Consciousness will one day be understood than to be nothing more than a whole lot of complexity masquerading as something more. Ditto for any concept of free will within the universe, though I suppose that'd be a whole hell of a lot more harder to prove ;)
Free will simply does not exit, no matter how complex reality is or brains are.
Side-note: while they're pretty bad movies over all, the Matrix sequels summed this concept up pretty will with the whole idea of the One being essentially the free will machine of the Matrix, the "Integral Anomaly" -- essentially baked-in variety/novelty/choice/etc, which is still no less part of the machine itself. Just as a random number generator function returns a random number, it's still programmed to do it.
It's a really really nebulous phrase, and that frequently leads to people talking past each other.
This comic illustrates things quite nicely: https://scienceandtheology.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/dilbert-...
However, when we talk about decision mechanisms, we inevitably introduce the question of whether this decision mechanism can work better or worse.
“Free will” may be seen as a computational notion of “health” for this decision mechanism, similar to how we use the term health for our physical bodies. A free will is a healthy will, in the sense that our decision mechanism is not broken by e.g. drugs, electrodes or mental illness.
Second, many people, myself included, hold the assumption that the ordering between options A and B is not purely subjective. If there exists an ordering of options which is objective and external to the agent of choice, then the choices that are actually made can be compared to that external ordering. Free will in this sense denotes the observation that our choices may reflect an ordering which is significantly different from the ordering imposed by reality. This is not a scientific claim and cannot be disproven scientifically. Holding this assumption is in fact a choice.
I think it's more likely that the decision mechanism emerges from a race condition between multiple competing signals. We choose the one that arrives first, even if it takes time to be consciously aware of the choice.
Isn't the drug example a contradiction? If my brain was healthy ("free") when I decided to take drugs, why would the resulting drugged state be less "free"? After all, it was my "free" choice to take the drugs and alter my mental state.
Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
> Edit: Also the definition of "mental illness" is somewhat nebulous and not historically fixed. Homosexuality was at one point called a mental illness.
Yep, insights and definitions of illness will keep changing. But while insights in the details of e.g. psychosis may vary, few would deny a correlation with chemical issues.
But in the opinions of some, the laws of physics stop at the neck, beyond which things are neither causal nor non-causal nor random nor non-random but 'free'. Whatever that might mean. (Apparently it's some sort of unmoving mover which moves itself and interacts with the universe without being interacted upon by the universe.)
This is probably the most succinct statement that sums up the problem with "free will". As soon as you start to try to define "free will" in terms of the natural sciences you run into insurmountable contradictions that suggest that it must be an illusion.
Edit: I wonder what proportion of posters here believe both that "free will" is not an illusion and that "strong AI" is possible.
Moreover, even if human brains were somehow special relative to animal brains, there's no reason to think they operate in a way that that's separate from all the other matter in the universe. And as the GP said - interactions between matter are either causal or random. There's no "free will" interaction. Such a thing would be - almost by definition - supernatural.
More recent studies of cognition and reaction have provided some of the counter-mechanisms, the things we do without deciding to do them, such as reflex arcs (the mechanism in action that causes us to withdraw our hands from something hot before our brains have realized it was hot, e.g.,), and, more importantly for the free-will discussion, Kahnemann's (and Tversky)'s two-systems model.
The basic idea of that model is that our body and brain do a lot of prefiltering, dealing with much of what we encounter and manage without ever involving the conscious mind. Think of driving on a familiar, quiet road. You never think about it, you might not even be aware of much of the drive, but you drove safely.
That "fast", low-energy-requirement system only flags things to the conscious mind - the slow, high-energy-system that we identify as ourselves - when it cannot make sense of what it encounters or when there are surprising happenings.
The workings of the fast (aconscious) system are inaccessible to the slow (conscious) system.
So we have within us a system that decides a great deal without our being involved, at least not consciously, and that only presents for our conscious consideration things it needs help with.
We make conscious, free-will-like decisions, based on filtered and reduced information. How free is that, really?
Of course, the definition of consciousness is a question all its own.
In saying that he says that most of our actions simply come out of the fast thinking system, and when we think something through slower we have an "illusion of free will" but still act in a way that to an external observer would say was "in character".
Our destiny in this material world is determined by a combination of our partial free will and the three modes of material nature. According to our previous karma, we are destined to face certain situations in this life. In those situations we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how we want to react. Once we choose, we come under the control of the mode associated with our choice, and we are obliged to accept the consequences, be they happy or miserable.
Fate and free will, as described in the Bhagavad-gita, are analogous to the relationship between the state, the law-abiding citizen, and the criminals in prison. A citizen is considered free only if he obeys the laws of the state. If he breaks the law, he goes to jail. A prisoner may enjoy limited freedom to choose between reading a book or writing a letter: between Jell-0 or ice-cream for dessert; between work in the barber shop or in the kitchen. But he is not free to abandon the prison altogether. By comparison, the free citizen is in a better position, but both are controlled by the law. Practically, the only unconditioned exercise of their free will is in their decision to choose between being a good citizen or a criminal.
I guarantee you that nobody outside of a tiny group of academics would care at all. The only reason that people care about evolution is that they feel insulted at being called monkeys. Call them mammals instead and you’ll get no response, because it doesn’t trigger the same emotional reaction. Call them animals, they’ll protest. Call them vertebrates, shrug. There’s no logic involved. People just react to the connotation of what an “animal” or an “ape” is and then rationalize that reaction after the fact. If you just the word “hominids” instead of apes they wouldn’t care. People are idiots, it takes years of training to be able to think the way a scientist does.
Free will is an airy abstraction. Nobody cares about that. Only someone like Harris could possibly think they would.
Why does my cloud of atoms disagree with yours? ;)
I'm not a philosopher, I didn't even know who daniel dennet was, so while certain that my view was covered somewhere long before I was born, I wouldn't know which century, but would guess all of them.
I am the deterministic set of operations and coefficients that calculates my choice. My will is not caged by a deterministic universe, the deterministic universe is the the constraint ensures my choice is the true reflection of who I am, the true has of the private key of my character. A quantum magic spinny wheel doesn't liberate me, it would undermine the integrity of my choice.
Better to replace free will with sense of agency.
Also the only way to really make random choices is quantum mechanics. Everything else can only look random.
This sort of hubris is astounding. It boggles the mind that a "scientist" could make such a definitive statement when there is so much we don't understand about physics, and the universe(s?) in general.
It's only facts after the action is made.
Well, he couldn’t....
“It is obvious that the world is covered in prisms. It’s obvious that those prisms don’t fit in my eyeballs, therefore the entire scientific edifice is mistaken and we need a metaphysical explanation for my experience.”
No one denies the lived experience of free will, the inquiry into it asks if we can quantify that qualia without resorting to complete determinism.
If we can’t, it is perhaps an illusion. There is ample precedent for lived experience being an illusory lie told to our minds by our brains - visual hallucinations are the closest example to hand.
(Eat this!)
Who are you to disbelieve in anything?
Free will only becomes important on a personal (I do x because it's meaningful to me) or social contexts (I'm responsible for consequences of x action).
I doubt the philosophers are trying to say anything about our day to day lives and that's where most of the opposition is coming from (ie no free will, therefore no meaning in life or responsibilities for anyone).
As you suspect, people discussing this misses out on how it's all relative, not so absolute.
However I don't think we're living there. We live in our own minds with a limited view and understanding, mostly dealing with social problems day to day, and emotions coloring that view however they see fit.
So IMO the "soul" and "free will" (or whatever other beliefs one may have) are ultimately metaphors for navigating the complex inner world. They can be very important/useful for the individual and society yet non-existent in the "objective world".
To me there's no contradiction.
There are knows: We have shared lucid experiences and we can share contemplations of such.
There are unknowns: What is consciousness, what happens exactly in brain in relation to outside (body, family, room, house, area, town).
It all seems interconnected to the point of break-down when not, for minds especially.
> But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings.
Free will or no free will, is not the assumption in point 2 fundamentally flawed?
Quantum mechanics is surely at the heart of all interactions and so at some level is responsible for the ‘illusion’ making any difference between free will and predetermination unknowable.
If one has will to choose based on a preference is the will free from having that preference?
Was the preference chosen?
I was born preferring to avoid danger and pain. It was never a free choice.
I have not yet observed a choice that is independent or free.
What happens before birth (or conception really) is a Mystery.
I believe in anticipation though. A dog may bark in anticipation of owner returning home, before they come home or not.
So you need a frame of reference to speak of. If it's all bounded outcomes are certain. But nothing pragmatic is ever perfectly bounded..
Notice that Free Will doesn't imply we always get what we want!
FREE is a loaded word; It can mean free as in no cost, or free as in without restriction. These are interrelated; Restrictions increase cost. Resources diminish restrictions. But no action in the universe is completely without cost nor restriction.
Even when you generate power you're not creating it from nothing, you're extracting it from one form into another, more usable to you. After use it transforms into yet another, waste form, economically unviably unusable to you personally, but not any kind of "absolute waste". One being's waste is another's food.
Even the most powerful systems in the known universe are subject to restrictions of the physical laws. Humans have long theorized the existence of god(s), systems that transcend all limitations. But they have never been observed scientifically. Every system previously thought "ultimate" in any way has been discovered to be a measurable part of our universe. Currently the most "ultimate" thing challenging our comprehension are black holes. Compare them to god(s): They cannot be seen directly. They are the most powerful things we think might exist. They affect everything around them. We know almost nothing about them, besides how they affect the universe.
So then what is FREE WILL? We can intuitively point to instances of it, and it seemes to be some kind of power that facilitates change in the universe. Humans seem to have more of it than other animals, on the basis that we've changed our world in more numerous and complex ways than any other animal. It might be an energy source we can draw from, like the Sun or black holes. Something we're not sure where it's coming from, yet. Once we discover the exact nature of it, what revelations about our universe might we achieve?
Consider that at one point in the evolutionary history of life on this planet, the Sun was this magical, invisible, distant, ambient energy that some organisms learned to harness with a process later named photosynthesis. Plants probably still don't understand the nature of the Sun, but their proliferation of the surface has allowed us to thrive and understand it. And for most of our civilized history we only knew it's a cyclic point energy source that makes everything go more alive when there's enough of it, and increasingly dead when there's too much of it.
Is the Sun an illusion? Of course not. Is free will an illusion? Of course not. We just don't know what it is, yet.
This isn't _new_, this "chorus" has existed for so long that it used to be referred to exclusively as a "khoros." Secondly, it's totally embarrassing that the matter isn't considered settled. The standard argument against free will is sound. The closest thing to an objection you'll see is people moving the goalposts so far that we are talking about something else.
I must have missed that memo :-P
If there are events that don’t have causes, either they are random, or we need to introduce an unfalsifiable explanation. In a random world, a “will” is still constrained by rolls of the dice. It does not express itself. It is not “free”.
If we introduce a metaphysical explanation, then it is no longer science, and can properly be discarded as “nonsense” in the context of the project of inquiry into the physical world. In its company we find concepts like souls, ghosts, deities, magic, etc.
I had a lot of fun with this lecture series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w
But it bugs me that so many people are eager so claim that because magical free will doesn't exist, that means no free will can exist. Compatibilism is not a new idea either. The usual argument is that compatibilists are moving the goal posts, but I simply don't understand that argument.
Suppose an argument between two sided: "Bigfoot exists" versus "no non-human apes exists". Is it moving the goalposts to point to gorillas?
Or suppose we're in the 1700's, and people are discussing vitalism: The force that separates dead things from living. The two sides debate whether the "vital spark" exists, or whether life is an illusion and it's meaningless to talk about living things at all. Is it moving the goal posts to try to find a non-magical definition of life?
To me it's pretty clear that we have free will, and that has nothing to do with determinism.
Virus don't contemplate their hosts.
Mature minds handle unknowns properly.
Injecting non-determinism makes the question of free will rather funny, in that the standard argument "you would not choose differently" does not work as the act of traveling back in time injects further nondeterministic results...
Under non-determinism, free will would be something like changing location of probability wells for actions. Our brains do that structurally and chemically all the time, and not particularly deterministically either. (Chemistry is involved.)
On the other hand, posing free will as decision theoretic choice, you're facing an outcome of statistical masses of decisions a lot of which are not observable. Philosophically simplifying it to binary choice ends up with absurd results.
Determinism in an infinite interconnected quantum universe ceases to have pragmatic meaning. There is order, but we can't measure everything exactly. It's playing out right here with us, but we fail to grasp it all.
The possibility of higher frames of references invalidates absolutism to mind-games. Which is what hypotheticals are, until new actions are made.
It is moving the goal post because it just changes the definition of free will into some triviality. I had a choice between apples and oranges and I picked the apple because I like apples more. Sure, you can call this free will if you want to but what is the point? The max function had a choice between 1 and 2 and picked 2 because it likes bigger numbers more.
Maybe you want to contrast the above situation with a situation where the apples are sold out or someone forces you at gunpoint to pick the orange. But this is now an entirely different thing, now we are talking about external constraints. And you can move into all kinds of directions and define free will to be this or that but the result will always be kind of trivial.
Or between someone who is free to make a choice because they are informed versus one who can't make it because they don't know of it? Or between someone who is capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and someone who is not?
These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.
By the way, the difference between internal and external factors is not the critical thing. There are several ways to restrict people's free will with internal factors - like for example, a person who doesn't know X exists cannot make a free choice to do X.
So why continue to use an unrelated term that has so much baggage? Why not just tackle these issues individually, on their own terms, in language that isn't laundering outmoded intuitions about some magic grounds for responsibility?
And then you can _actually_ begin to articulate why someone is culpable and another person isn't. A magical free will believer can't really make sense of that, because if free will is something indescribable and magic, there is no reason to believe a person does not have free will to do X, just because they e.g. are incapable of doing it.
Conversely, if you believe _both_ in magical free will, and have also thought about the material conditions for free will (e.g. they must be informed, and understand the consequences, and not be coerced etc.), then you already have a completely coherent materialistic belief about free will, and have just awkwardly bolted supernaturalness to its side, completely unnecessarily.
But this is the problem right there, you call it actual free will and someone believing in magical free will will deny this and call magical free will actual free will. Sure, one can do this, overload the term, and figure out from context what kind of actual free will is meant in each instance. But would it not be much easier to give up on the term free will and use new different terms for different things?
No matter the academic discussion of what free will is or isn't, we still have to address the fact that dominoes and animals and people appear to behave according to different rules. We have to consider the difference between freedom and coercion. We have to address what accountability and responsibility means, and what makes a person morally blameworthy.
This is what people talk about when they talk about free will. That's why people can claim they strongly believe in free will without being able to articulate, or even having thought much about, how free will is instantiated.
In short: Because "free will" is a name for something we concretely observe. We may be misinterpreting what we observe (maybe it _is_ an illusion), but we still only have that one name for that thing.
The crux of the issue is that you're wrong here. Humans have this vanity that we're special, but we're really not. We behave according to the same rules, we're just relatively complex systems within those rules compared to dominoes.
When most people think of "free will", what they actually mean is "unpredictability". That's why nobody thinks dominoes have free will, some people think animals have free will, and lots of people think humans have free will. It's much harder to predict human behavior from the point of view of a human than dominoes, but to a superintelligent AI, we're just dominoes.
> accountability and responsibility ... morally blameworthy.
It's actually very simple and doesn't require any such notions. If there is a thing that is causing you or others harm, you act to prevent that thing from causing harm. There's no difference between a murderer and a deadly snake in that regard. I'm not going to ponder whether or not its morally blameworthy as I remove it from my house.
How would one go about proving this statement. Hint: it’s impossible (by definition)
This is a variant of the god-of-the-gaps argument, which is not turning out well for proponents of religion, as those gaps keep getting smaller and smaller. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.
Why is it relevant how easily we can reason about them?
* I see a piece of litter on the sidewalk and a garbage can on the other side of the road. Do I pick it up or not. Why/why not?
* I never feel like working out. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Why?
Sure, you can reduce these down to apples v oranges and just claim they have more variables to check first, but there's a lot of things we "decide" to do outside of preference.
On my view it is literally nothing. It's the tautological observation that agents with desires, uninhibited, can and will seek to satisfy those desires. It gives us no grounds for responsibility, punishment, etc etc. (Those are all good things, but their justification has to come from elsewhere.)
But by continuing to call it "free will," you're invoking the intuitions that many people have regarding the magical bullshit variety, and laundering those intuitions/feelings into the new discussion.
In my view, everything we associate with free will: Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will!
For example, everyone agrees that children are not as morally responsible as adults. Even though children supposedly are as magically free as adults. How can that be? That _only_ makes sense in the compatibilist view.
Suppose someone invents a completely deterministically programmed robot that has general intelligence and understands the world, and people well. Would you sign a contract with it? Would you punish it if it broke it? Would you hold it responsible? Would you be outraged if it decided to lie to you? I definitely would.
And we've found the point of disagreement. I simply think they're not. I believe they have to be justified independently, in terms of the degree to which they tend our lives and our society in a desired direction.
Anyway, you are free to chose your definition (and I bet I can predict what yours will be).
The absolutists are going to explode.
Most likely not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...