What You (Want to)* Want

I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration:

In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed.

In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice.

There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't.

To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.

I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself.

You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe [1]

I shared because maybe someone can suggest some reading material along these lines from someone much smarter than me. But for now, I enjoy the idea that I have complete freedom in a very ordered universe.

1: there are some interesting corollaries to this idea. One among them is that the interaction between other entities with similar free will (other people) increases the complexity even further. We are agents of chaos.

Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.

I don't have any science around this, but some Indian wisdom-

What I learned from one of my mentors KN Rao (one of the advisors whose advise was sought by great leaders of India):

The famous grandsire Bheeshma Pitamaha of the Mahabharata was once asked this question regarding fate vs free-will. His answer was to liken it to a man in a boat rowing in a river. The river has a current, however man has effort. I believe his verdict was "effort is greater than destiny".

Perhaps it has to be so, because were it not, then we are just part of the clockwork creation.

PG is trying to go one level deeper in his post. Namely, are we living under the illusion that we have free will, because our free-will (which is essentially our ability to have agency over our environment) is itself a product of our desires, and now the question is are our desires our own or are they themselves determined?

It may not be possible to know the answer to this one. I think it is equivalent to something like the collatz conjecture, to which Erdos replied "Mathematics is not ready for such problems"

I don't think we are ready for such problems either.

Also, our thought processes are sufficiently chaotic that no amount of inspection can catch all the starting conditions, so any model has to be statistical in nature.

Once you realize what something truly requires, the interest usually dries up.

TFA says this is the wrong model, and tries to get closer to something else. But it's right enough that it's helped me to avoid huge amounts of wasted effort and forced me to consider what I truly want.

I am still prone to those lines of thought sometimes, but with experience, I can also suggest ways to defuse the nihilism and existential angst so they don't continue to lead to suffering for yourself and people around you.

1. Concepts like "free will" are ill-defined, so there is actually no problem to solve. Stop itching at problems which are complete bullshit. Focus on lived experience, not vague distractions.

2. Even if there is no freedom, you can still experience suffering, and it is possible to learn to avoid paths which lead to suffering. The learning might be deterministic, but that doesn't mean you don't experience the results. Or, just continue to suffer if you're too stubborn to learn. Your ... choice, or whatever you want to call it, when you insist on shooting yourself in the foot even after you learned it hurt.

3. Responsibility is not the same as free choice. Responsibility is a contract where you agree to take on the bad consequences if something bad happens, and in return you gain power over what you are responsible for. One of the paths which leads to suffering is to assume you're not responsible for your actions. There are lots of ways people try to abdicate their personal responsibility. Excuses like "it was drugs" or "I was treated badly" or "my brain is controlled by the laws of physics so I can never really choose anything" or "it was so-and-so's fault." Whether or not these things are true, you are still admitting defeat and allowing disempowerment and suffering into your life whenever you say something was not your responsibility. Hemingway was on the right track when he resolved to always honor promises he made while drunk. To do otherwise is to admit that your actions were out of your control; it invites intrusion and censure by those who see you as weak for not being able to take responsibility. Every time you blame someone or something else for a problem, you grant them power which you could have kept for yourself, if only you had owned the problem.

An off-the-top-of-my-head example would be talking with friends about video games, and they start talking about physical art from the game that they bought and enjoy. I don't like having little knick-knacks around the the house, and I don't get enjoyment from them. But I see the joy they get from them, and I want that, too.

So I want to want those things, but I still don't want them.

- Some wants damage the casing but feel great to the brain (sugar).

- Some wants take over a portion of the brain's activity and tax it to eternity (addiction), so its best to never ever try them.

- Some wants are very very bad for other brains and casings, so carnivores draw the line making non-carnivorous varieties inferior and thus worth sacrificing (meat consumption).

- Some wants damage the connections and relationships between human brains and thus ability for all of humanity to survive collectively, so religion and laws have stepped in to set the rules of engagement.

- Some wants are psychological and financially a bad idea.

- Few wants are fundamental, and most wants are based on something we've seen others done that we want to try.

- Wanting not to want something is a tax and conflict with our own brain, and just like addiction it can be tackled if the want was caused by exposure to the activity, or exposure to the idea, or the subject/object of want and that exposure is reduced or removed from view.

- If you are the subject of the want (an attractive person, a VC, a Billionaire, a person of influence), all of a sudden your life incurs an overhead and a cost for deterring everyone else's wants towards you.

Psychology/Philosophy may have more insight into whether the origin of bad wants is curiosity, wrongful exposure, greed, or inborn instincts based on biological/genetically ingrained habits.

Economics + Business has the job of satisfying the wants of an increasing number of intelligent agents in the system by encouraging those who want more to make more and increase supply of the the most wanted kinds of objects of want. Government has the job of satisfying the needs of everyone in its jurisdiction, while entrepreneurship has the luxury of picking which wants and needs to serve that are most profitable and desirable to the entrepreneur.

Advertising has the job of involuntarily planting more wants in the brains of everyone.

Fun paths to explore. Thanks PG!

Moreover an essential differentiation that is not addressed is the difference between desire and will (not easy).

On the other hand, free will seems to just refer to the feeling you could’ve made a different choice. But you didn’t. I don’t see why people get so defensive about a junk concept. At some level, it doesn’t really seem like there are separate things, and I don’t feel like there’s a need to invoke some kind of separate individual free will aside from the operation of a universal stoicism type logos/the totality of natural law operating as something like a universal “will”

>"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?"

I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest.

Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...

Interestingly, the traditional teaching of Original Sin is that we are broken at the level of what we 'want'. The phrase commonly used is 'disordered desire'.

The key idea here is that if you want the wrong things, you are not actually free, even if you perceive yourself as choosing freely. As a corollary, the more you practice the good, the more you desire it, and the freer you become.

We have autonomy but must generally work for the welfare of the whole organism. If some people are not aligned to the general good we try to dissuade them or punish them because if it become too big the whole system collapse in the same way that our organism would if there is too many cancer cells.

Our consciousness operate on the scale of a human life but there is a similar "consciousness" of the civilisation that operate on a much larger timescale, thousand of years, we call those religions.

While we can seek personal gain, it’s much the same as a cell trying to outcompete it’s neighborhoods, it’s misaligned to the more important goal of global welfare. There is something inside us in our soul that know this and won’t make you satisfied of yourself if you are not a net positive for the whole.

Now we have looked everywhere to try to find the God of our stories but didn’t (it's a pattern operating on a different timescale). So we are like cells that rebelled against the organism, discarting all the rules that we had because we don’t understand them. The result will be a sickness of the organism up to a point where we see we have to go back to our ancients rules or the death of the organism (civilisation collapse)

Those rules are: each must try to align himself with truth and love toward others, must try it’s best, it’s ok to fail, but recognised it and improve.

Those rules are the preconditions for the survival and slow improvement of our civilisation.

Other religions have other rules and other outcomes.

The idea that a materialistic universe made of unthinking, unchoosing matter bumping into each other would create the "Monorail" song, with all the specific cultural assumptions built into it, is just so much less likely to me than the alternative that I end up just siding with free will by default.

Neither the free will argument, nor determinism, nor any attempted unification of the two that I'm aware of are fully satisfying. But, the idea that we're just atoms that, for no particular reason, happen to write the words "I call the big one Bitey", and then just happen to create the infrastructure to broadcast that out, and view it, seems like the more absurd of the available options.

Rolling Stones https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8, Joe Jackson https://youtu.be/XGqmiT7JJVg or New Radicals https://youtu.be/DL7-CKirWZE ?

Here's my take on it: there're many things out there (musical genre like classical music, cooking like Indian, French, Ethiopian) and your utility function has coefficients for most of them.

When you don't know the coefficient, you try, and you come with a quick conclusion (like or don't like) that can be further refined by experience (ex: like Indian food, vegetarian Indian food is ok-ish, vegan Indian food nope)

Sometimes you want to alter the coefficient because it can create conflict with your identity (what if you're vegan? what if your parents are Indian?) or other things.

Sometimes you succeed through different methods, sometimes you just can't.

And there're things you like you shouldn't, because of society (taboos, or banned substances) or the consequences on yourself (addictions, risks for your future health) but it's just the same thing: trying to alter the coefficient in your utility function.

It may be worth it (learning something new) or futile (something you just can't change) which leads us to Seneca prayer (the wisdom to separate the two, knowing the battles you can win to avoid wasting effort). And there's another dimension if it's possible: the amount of effort required, which might be measured in years (and what if you're old and bound to fail?)

Personally, I find it simpler to go epicurian and if I find something new I enjoy (right now, Russian rap lol) just enjoy it without asking myself too many questions.

And if I don't like something or have no want for something I should like (Drill rap, Trap rap), I don't force myself but don't exclude it out of my life either: I leave that to serendipity :)

I totally agree, and yet my encounter with academic philosophy was that most people with a free-will orientation see that randomness as precisely the origin of free will.

Personally, the only notion of free will that makes sense (and the one to which I personally hold) is the notion of agent-causation[1].

> it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions

The philosophical notion of free will is actually completely irrelevant here. The relevant questions are a) "Is social accountability psychologically effective and altering someone's behavior?" and b) "what sorts of behavior modifications are morally permissble?"

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/...

IMO, the perception of free will comes from our observation of our deliberations and our actions. We observe that we often have choices and uncertainty about what to do, but something always breaks the impasse, because we always continue making choices and going on living. That "something" is what we call free will, and isn't entirely transparent to us.

If you tried to crack open the black box, I think you'd see wants and want-to-wants driving things in there, but I don't think you'd see a clean system of n-th removed want-to-wants determining everything.

First, accept the fact that "you" are _only_ that machine. No higher "soul".

The machine (you!) has free will in that it decides for itself, through physical processes occurring within it, what it wants - albeit with some outside forces, circumstances and other individuals influencing this anywhere from a bit to a lot.

You are this mostly-independent machine operated by physical forces. Therefore, you have free will.

A secondary question is whether the state of the universe and therefore of you the machine at time T also pre-ordains what you will do and what you will want at time T+1. I think a more interesting question is whether that actually matters in any practical or even metaphysical sense, given that we experience time linearly in the direction we do?

However, is this just not the logical artifact of the phrase "want to," relating to its subject as a negative counterfactual? To desire to want something is like trying to be funny, where if you are, you aren't - hence to want-to-want, or wish you wanted, means you don't actually want it. Maybe the solution is for each thing I want, to say out loud, I do not want it, and hear which statements give you the most peace?

But where does the "wanting" lie? What if it's an experience that is not physical, but real? I.e. it exists and experiences itself, but it does not in any way change our scientific description of the universe. It doesn't change how all of the many worlds are playing out.

Would this "wanting" have to inhabit every branch of the unierse? Perhaps it only exists along the path of choices that it "wanted".

Then everything that can happen, happens, but your consciousness only experiences what it "wanted".

Mechanistic action and free-will are both preserved.

That feeling is an illusion. This has been demonstrated with brain scans. By the time you feel like you are making a decision your brain has already made it and you are just becoming aware of it.

It's actually possible to turn off that feeling, to do without the illusion of free will. Your body keeps moving and doing "all the things" but you are totally non-agential, just watching it, along for the ride. It's fun and deeply relaxing once you get used to it.

(Note that this does nothing to resolve the question of free will. Your conscious mind doesn't have free will, but that doesn't mean your unconscious mind necessarily doesn't have it.)

Through meditation, when there is the ability developed to detach from the thoughts that arise in one's mind, one can choose to not act on desires that urge action. So, there is then the possibility of freedom.

The reality is much weirder and complex.

Or it could be any number of things being referred to. People wanting to want to work in tech. People want to want control of a social media company.

This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.

https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/revising-fault-line

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will

It could be there are others..

> Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?

> The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.

I am endlessly fascinated by thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. I have observed my brain’s ability to think recursively about its own thoughts many times before and it’s such a cool phenomenon.

This strikes me as very similar, the regex expression is a useful way of explaining his point.

Ultrafinite recursion strikes again!

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schroding...

>you can't (want to)* want what you want

It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it.

you can't (want to want what you want). you can't want to want to want what you want).

And it is recursive:

you can't (want to want to want it)

Both start by thinking, and choosing to think about X is certainly in our control¹. So at the bottom of it, both are just chemical reactions in your brain, willingly set off by your ghost.

¹that is not to say that not thinking about Y is also in our control.

With each want, however, the meaning becomes more and more frivolous. Who cares what you want to want to want to want to want? That's not recognizable even on a subconscious level.

the entire film thus far about destiny, fate, making our own paths... and then to pinch a bit of flesh and understand what we are. magnificent and sorrowful, all at once

Isaac Bashevis Singer

We have a soul, unlike actual machines or animals.

Technically 0.(9) == 1

"... But here I must take notice of certain words of his Lordship's in this place, as making against his own tenet. Where all the causes, saith he, being joined together, and subordinate one to another, do make but one total cause, if any one cause, much more the first, in the whole series or subordination of causes, be necessary, it determines the rest, and without doubt maketh the effect necessary. For that which I call the necessary cause of any effect, is the joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause. If any of these, saith he, especially the first, produce its effect necessarily, then all the rest are determined. Now it is manifest, that the first cause is a necessary cause of all the effects that are next and immediate to it, and therefore by his Lordship's own reason all effects are necessary." (p. 261)

This "joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause" is not far away of applying the tactics of a regular expression.

Instead of a chain of "wants", Hobbes speaks of "alternate succession of contrary appetites" and only the last one is what we call "will". In this view, the author's example of the drug adict would have been irrelevant for the problem. An adiction merely describes a (psychological) habit. However, the analysis of "will" is always about a specific, individual event and everything that leads to it, which can often include diverse intentions:

"... I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often." (p. 273)

In Hobbes view a "voluntary action" is an action where somebody was deliberating. Only in this sense the person has a choice. And if the person is "free" to do something, this means that the process of deliberating is still ongoing:

"... I conceive that those actions, which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done apon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing ; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating." (p. 273)

Therefore the freedom of the will is in accordance with determinism ("necessary causes" in Hobbes' terminology), which is itself unavoidable:

"... I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." (p. 274)

Hobbes' argumentation in "Of Liberty and Necessity" has far more interesting details and touches a lot more related topics than I could have presented here. For those who want to delve deeper into the philosophical discussion on the freedom of the will, I highly recommend the text as a basic read.

[1] See: https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ [pdf] (pp. 229-278)

But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors.

If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting.

If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us.

The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them.

We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to.

----

One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors.

So now we can discuss things a little more clearly:

Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want?

There are three answers.

The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience.

The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small.

Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that.

----

If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic.

Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.

I've read many of PG's essays, but this one feels like GPT-3 wrote it. It's borderline gibberish. Like he trained an AI on all his other essays, fed it the essay title, and this was the result. I half-expect a year from now that he'll tell us all his recent essays were written by this AI and it's now the core IP in some recent YC investment.

I normally enjoy PG's writings! His writings on Lisp had good influence on me. But these recent posts are embarrassing.

How can someone who has had so much influence in tech communities bring themselves to write these pseudo-scientific posts so glibly?