There isn't really a 'freewill problem'.

[Emily Lake]

Free Willie: "You determinists. If behavior is determined, we don't have a choice. So, if we have no choice, what is the point of putting people in prison?"

Determinist: "If we don't have a choice, then we can't choose not to put them in prison. If the perp did then crime because she didn't have a choice, then we can lock her up because we don't have a choice."

[/joke]

You are not required to think that's funny. In fact, you may not even have a choice.

Lol, now that's funny!

 

[bilby]

Stochastic processes are not inevitable until they have concluded. I'm happy to dump will and freewill, but you are going to struggle to sell rejecting ideas like choice, especially in a system that is in the business of predicting and explaining itself.

However, I'm keen to see the argument.

I am sorry to disappoint, but I think we are in agreement, but talking past each other.

In my thought experiment in which we accept, ad argumentum, the Many Worlds Interpretation, reality is a static block multiverse. No choice is possible, insofar as all possibilities actually occur. 'Choice' is real only from the POV of a single thread of this multiverse - and so from the POV of any intelligence inhabiting it, the universe is Stochastic. A Tropical Cyclone could make landfall anywhere on a thousand km or more stretch of coast; Under MWI, it actually does make landfall at all of the possible locations, but in different universes. From the POV of a single thread, the Cyclone 'chooses' a place to make landfall. But that 'choice' is a result of the action of the components of the Cyclone upon each other, and of the rest of the environment on those components, all interacting in ways that defy prediction - but which can be described probabilistically. No 'thought' or 'intelligence' on the part of the Cyclone is assumed.

Complex systems constantly make 'choices' (as viewed from a single 'strand' of the multiverse), but not in the sense of the word that advocates of 'free will' use it. Whether or not the other 'strands' exist is a whole other question, and I suspect is also unimportant - the difference between multiple universes which cannot communicate with one another after being spawned at a decision point, and a single universe where the other possibilities do not get realized once a decision point is passed, is nil, from our perspective in any given strand.

Again... how is this a more parsimonious explanation than that choice actually exists?

How can it not be? "What we observe" is necessarily more parsimonious than "what we observe + choice". We don't (usually) assume 'choice' when it comes to the behaviour of cyclones, so why would we introduce this needless new entity when discussing the behaviour of brains?

 

[Copernicus]

I doubt that our human empathy works very well when projected on other species, especially for species that are very different from our own.

I'm sorry - I don't follow where empathy comes into this?

Right where you started imagining what goes on in their heads. It is related to the  Clever Hans phenomenon, which you may have heard of. Also, you may be familiar with Nagel's famous paper,  What It's Like to Be a Bat. Empathy between humans is possible, because we all tend to have the same equipment and experiences on which to base it. Imagining the experiences and reasoning processes in other animals is not as easy.

However, it is interesting that you attempt to quantify the degree of "freedom" on a scale of intelligence. There is something to that intuition, because the ability to project future outcomes is what gives us so many alternative paths to resolving goal conflicts and fulfilling our needs and desires. We gain more freedom of choice by expanding the options available to us. That allows us also to justify our choices, i.e. to explain why we chose to do what we did. And, as human beings, it is a facile assumption to believe that our futures are filled with a greater number of choices than those of animals we deem to have less ability to predict future outcomes.

I don't think it's a facile assumption. At the end of the day, some species have straight up fewer neurons than humans, and they're evolved to perform different functions. Most animals don't have pre-fontal cortexes, or have less complex, or smaller ones. But they're certainly not limited to humans. And when we some day meet space aliens, we may find ourselves in the short-bus

The physical facts speak for themselves, but we don't really know that it has as much to do with the number of neurons as it does with how the larger structures composed of neurons generate world models. What is it about the size of the prefrontal cortex that creates a greater quantity of choices? Or is it just a different quality of the same number? IMO, without a clear understanding of how it works in animal cognition, it is very easy to jump to wrong conclusions. Take for example, this Scientific American article that challenges traditional assumptions about the frontal cortex relative to other animals: Gorillas Agree: Human Frontal Cortex is Nothing Special.

And that is certainly why something as unpredictable as QM events has nothing at all to do with free will. How do we praise or blame decisions based on quantum fluctuations? If QM had anything to do with free will, then our behavior would be utterly unpredictable. We wouldn't ever bother to try to explain our actions. The question "Why?" would be pointless and meaningless. Nobody could be praised or blamed for anything they did.

What does praise or blame have to do with it? Other than in the most rudimentary case of one member of a group attempting to impose behavior modification onto another?

I have explained the importance of praise and blame in my previous posts, some of which you responded to. We judge each other's actions under the assumption that they are in control of their behavior, do we not? The entire free will debate is ultimately about responsibility for one's actions. That's why people criticize naive determinists so heatedly for denying free will. It then becomes necessary to explain how we could possibly hold anyone accountable for their behavior, if they can't help themselves.

In regard to QM events... if you assume a model similar to what I outlined previously, using a form of pattern-based clustering of past experiences and a "seek until sufficiently similar" sort of a protocol, QM events would be sufficient to create a non-deterministic scenario and allow for agency.

I don't think that your outline was sufficiently detailed to make that case. For one thing, you need to explain what an "experience" is in terms of QM. Otherwise, how can you do your clustering? The problem with trying to attribute cognitive significance to QM is that everything physical involves QM, not just brains. What is it about brains that makes an appeal to QM so appealing?

Given the complete hypothetical of the same entity, with the same past experience, and the same initial conditions... different outcomes could be reached in different trials.

I suspect that there would be some really big gaping holes in your experimental design, especially in terms of how you bootstrap the learning process. At some point, you also still need to explain how it is that we can "explain" our behavior. It is inescapable that we construct causal models to explain our choices, and that suggests that agency is a fully determined process, albeit one that may be chaotically deterministic. Causation is never just a simple relationship between two events, because reality is a chaotic mix of physical interactions.

 

[fast]

This might seem like it's coming out of left field, but in hopes there might be a smidgen of relevancy, is there compatibility between the notions of contingent truths and necessary events?

 

[DBT]

How would that help build a case for free will? Can you explain?

First of all, the state of QM is indeterministic. This is necessary for the free will I argue for. And since there is an observer that reports and experiences determining/making the choice, it would seem very reasonable to believe that it is the observer that actually makes the selection.

But the observer has no control over quantum states. The observer cannott consciously access quantum states or effect changes as desired through an act of will.

 

[ryan]

How would that help build a case for free will? Can you explain?

First of all, the state of QM is indeterministic. This is necessary for the free will I argue for. And since there is an observer that reports and experiences determining/making the choice, it would seem very reasonable to believe that it is the observer that actually makes the selection.

But the observer has no control over quantum states. The observer cannott consciously access quantum states or effect changes as desired through an act of will.

How do you know this? How do you even know what the observer is?

 

[DBT]

But the observer has no control over quantum states. The observer cannott consciously access quantum states or effect changes as desired through an act of will.

How do you know this? How do you even know what the observer is?

Are we not talking about our own experience as conscious people?

Do you as a conscious person have access to the underlying mechanisms of your conscious experience, including your very existence?

Do you as a conscious person have access to quantum activity, manipulating it to your advantage and will?

 

[Juma]

We have been through this so many times before... it is complete baloney.
Indeterminism doesnt give you free will, only indeterminism. You cant steer it.
your hogwash about an observer has been thouroughly delt with by bilby.
Last: even if ”decisions” would performed in quantum processes those decisions are so tiny parts of the brainfunctions that there will be no resemblancesto the high level decisions we perceive us make.

Look at the research done by Wang et al using quantum probability theory to BETTER explain decision making (whether QM is actually behind it or not).
.

As you say yourself: that doesnt say anything about your argument. So why bring it up?

 

[The AntiChris]

Now let's add a memory function. Let's assume the entity has a way to store past experiences, and to compare the current experience to past experiences and select the response that "best fits" the current experience based on what it has learned. This is no longer perfectly deterministic. It's close, but not exact. Some degree of uncertainty has entered the system at this point. The reaction now depends not only on the current experience, but also on what other experiences the entity has had. This makes it less predictable. Unless we know all of the experiences that the entity has had, as well as the action taken in response to each experience, we can't perfectly predict a future reaction. It also means that as soon as you have more than one entity, it gets much more complicated to predict the general behavior of this type of entity in response to stimulus.

I think you misunderstand determinism. The process you describe could be 'perfectly deterministic'.

Determinism doesn't entail predictability.

 

[fromderinside]

This might seem like it's coming out of left field, but in hopes there might be a smidgen of relevancy, is there compatibility between the notions of contingent truths and necessary events?

From The Metaphysicist we have the following: Necessity and Contingency http://metaphysicist.com/problems/necessity/

Contingency is the idea that many things or events are neither necessary nor impossible. Possibility is normally understood to include necessity. If something is necessary, it is a fortioripossible. Contingency must be defined as the subset of possibility that excludes necessity.Information philosophy claims that there is no physical necessity. The world is contingent. Necessity is a logical concept, an idea that is an important part of a formal logical or mathematical system that is a human invention.
Like certainty, analyticity, and the a priori, necessity and necessary truths are useful concepts for logicians and mathematicians, but not for a metaphysicist exploring the fundamental nature of reality, which includes irreducible contingency.

This is only one point in the the general discussion so you need to search and find what suits your intent.

 

[Speakpigeon]

But there is something physical.

People are human beings, which all have a physical body, and a human body has a reasonably well-defined physical boundary, which in turn defines a physical inside and a physical outside of this body, the latter being something which is the object of meticulous and detailed studies and research by perfectly respectable scientists.

The upshot of this fact is that whatever happens inside a human body at any given point in time is determined by its physical state at that point. And then, I'm pretty sure all scientists concerned are convinced that whatever a human being does is best explained by the physical state of his body immediately before doing it. That's true because that's true of just about anything physical, save perhaps some weird particles and fundamental things.

And then the difference between a human being and, say, a rock, is that the rock does not have anything like a representation of the world to decide what to do next. It does not have, like humans do, the ability to represent a number of alternative actions, all different, select one among them, perform the one he will have selected, and perform this action in a way pretty close to the one imagined initially. We definitely do that.

We even make computers perform a vastly simplified but nonetheless very effective version of what we do.

As I see it, that's essentially what people mean by free will and we all have that.

This is also independent of the precise nature of the world we live in, whether deterministic or not.

To be fair, I have to say that perhaps this view is in fact wrong. For example, maybe what we do is in fact decided by some almighty god. However, the view I have outlined is the one most people believe is true, including most scientists, including people who repeat 'free will doesn't exist' from sunrise to sunset.
EB

Ok, now tell me about a mathematician calculating the Banach Tarski paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

Everything supervenes upon the physical but there are plenty of people who recognise that some things, especially logical and mathematical things, are irreducibly emergent - such that the physical state doesn't allow you to work out the logical or mathematical outcome. The Banach Tarski paradox (so called because of the clear disjunction between physical expectation and mathematical proof) is one example and Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim discuss other examples in exhaustive detail.

I'd like first to see anyone moving around and rotating pieces of any one solid ball and produce in this way two solid balls each identical to the first.

I'd also note that rather a lot of cognitive scientists are also externalists and are increasingly less convinced that the boundary of skin and skull is as much of a cognitive boundary as it is a physical one.

The state of the art moves on while the Free Will Problem remains frozen in amber like some sort of Jurassic mosquito.

Wake me up whenever they're done.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

So far as I can tell... those idiots are the people who argue for the side of determinism. I've always thought it was a stupid interpretation of what free will means, but I've lost track of the number of times that (or something substantially similar) has been tossed out as an argument for why we don't have free will.

Alright, fair enough, but the way you phrased the bit I responded to suggested, and in fact still suggests to me, that you essentially agreed with this view of free will.
EB

Hmm. I can see how you might get that from that sentence in isolation... but I thought the remainder of my post did a pretty good job of clarifying my position. How could I have explained the remainder differently to prevent this miscommunication?

Excuse me!?

I'm re-reading you post and I don't see how it could be interpreted differently from you saying that Free Will is wrong because we can't just decide to disobey gravity.

And I repeat your post here so you can try to have a brain wave.

A thought on the eternal free-will vs. determinism argument: Both of these are probably wrong.

The key word there is 'probably'.

Determinism is wrong. As you said, you cannot have the exact same conditions again. But it's even more than that. No matter how much you know, it is not possible to know everything. Some things are not knowable. It is impossible to know all of the initial conditions. And at least some portion of those initial conditions are random. Maybe not a very big portion, but it's still there.

Free Will is wrong. Clearly we can't just decide to disobey gravity.

But we DO have feedback loops - we learn from our past actions, and we learn vicariously form the actions of others. We extrapolate and project. All of those imply a degree of agency that is inherent in the concept of thinking. To cast the entirety of human knowledge and functionality as an elaborate joke played on us by the entire universe is about as un-Occam-ish as you can get.

I propose that it's neither free will nor determinism. It's probability. Human actions and choice are bounded complex systems. There is a degree of randomness involved - any given action or thought process has a distribution of possible outcomes, bounded by the laws of physics. So depending on the initial circumstances, a person's actions may be highly predictable with extremely low likelihood of other outcomes, or highly unpredictable with many possible outcomes of nearly uniform likelihoods.

You may have to try really hard.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

I'd like first to see anyone moving around and rotating pieces of any one solid ball and produce in this way two solid balls each identical to the first.

I'd also note that rather a lot of cognitive scientists are also externalists and are increasingly less convinced that the boundary of skin and skull is as much of a cognitive boundary as it is a physical one.

The state of the art moves on while the Free Will Problem remains frozen in amber like some sort of Jurassic mosquito.

Wake me up whenever they're done. (
EB

Are these counter arguments?

The whole point is that Banach Tarski gives different results to those you would expect in the physical world. As such it is emergent but irreducible. I assume the implications of this are obvious?

As you seem happy to sneer, perhaps you can explain your understanding of externalism as only an idiot would reject something they don’t understand.

 

[ruby sparks]

Yeah. And while you're at it, speakpigeon, explain it using your free will. It'll be a sort of demonstration of your, um, thesis. No cheating now. make sure that when you answer, you do so using your free will.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'd like first to see anyone moving around and rotating pieces of any one solid ball and produce in this way two solid balls each identical to the first.

I'd also note that rather a lot of cognitive scientists are also externalists and are increasingly less convinced that the boundary of skin and skull is as much of a cognitive boundary as it is a physical one.

The state of the art moves on while the Free Will Problem remains frozen in amber like some sort of Jurassic mosquito.

Wake me up whenever they're done. (
EB

Are these counter arguments?

It's my kind of counter-arguments to your kind of arguments.

The whole point is that Banach Tarski gives different results to those you would expect in the physical world.

Sure, I got that.

As such it is emergent but irreducible. I assume the implications of this are obvious?

I still don't get that bit. Can you articulate for me?

As you seem happy to sneer, perhaps you can explain your understanding of externalism as only an idiot would reject something they don’t understand.

Did I reject anything? What? I merely asked for an objective result whenever it comes about.
EB

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah. And while you're at it, speakpigeon, explain it using your free will. It'll be a sort of demonstration of your, um, thesis. No cheating now. make sure that when you answer, you do so using your free will.

Explain what? Externalism?

Very simple, I don't pretend to understand it.

It just took Subsymbolic's explanation at face value and looked up Wiki on the subject. I think I understood both of those.

Maybe I was wrong.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

Are these counter arguments?

It's my kind of counter-arguments to your kind of arguments.

The whole point is that Banach Tarski gives different results to those you would expect in the physical world.

Sure, I got that.

As such it is emergent but irreducible. I assume the implications of this are obvious?

I still don't get that bit. Can you articulate for me?

As you seem happy to sneer, perhaps you can explain your understanding of externalism as only an idiot would reject something they don’t understand.

Did I reject anything? What? I merely asked for an objective result whenever it comes about.
EB

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah. And while you're at it, speakpigeon, explain it using your free will. It'll be a sort of demonstration of your, um, thesis. No cheating now. make sure that when you answer, you do so using your free will.

Explain what? Externalism?

Very simple, I don't pretend to understand it.

It just took Subsymbolic's explanation at face value and looked up Wiki on the subject. I think I understood both of those.

Maybe I was wrong.
EB

So you cheerfully concede that you don’t understand BT. Then you concede you didn’t understand externalism until you Wikipedia’d it. Cool, so now you understand it, consider the effect on the position I responded to.

Me, If I was so far out of my depth I’d be a tiny bit more circumspect.

 

[Emily Lake]

Again... how is this a more parsimonious explanation than that choice actually exists?

How can it not be? "What we observe" is necessarily more parsimonious than "what we observe + choice". We don't (usually) assume 'choice' when it comes to the behaviour of cyclones, so why would we introduce this needless new entity when discussing the behaviour of brains?

Because the explanations required to explain the "illusion" of choice are significantly less parsimonious than choice actually existing.

 

[Emily Lake]

Right where you started imagining what goes on in their heads. It is related to the  Clever Hans phenomenon, which you may have heard of. Also, you may be familiar with Nagel's famous paper,  What It's Like to Be a Bat. Empathy between humans is possible, because we all tend to have the same equipment and experiences on which to base it. Imagining the experiences and reasoning processes in other animals is not as easy.

I see what you're saying, but I disagree that it relates to my post. Saying that two animals can both perceive an experience is not at all comparable to hypothesizing about the impact and interpretation of that experience. We know that dogs smell things. We know that dogs can be taught behavior - they learn. I haven't opined on their feelings in any fashion. A robot can perceive and learn... that observation requires neither empathy nor in-depth knowledge of its programming to note.

I don't think that your outline was sufficiently detailed to make that case. For one thing, you need to explain what an "experience" is in terms of QM. Otherwise, how can you do your clustering? The problem with trying to attribute cognitive significance to QM is that everything physical involves QM, not just brains. What is it about brains that makes an appeal to QM so appealing?

First the short answer - QM is essentially the source of randomness in all things. It's a well established field that has repeatedly demonstrated the fundamentally non-deterministic nature of, well, everything. That's why it ends up coming up in discussions of free will vs. determinism. Because it is fairly well established that reality is NOT perfectly deterministic - it is stochastic.

Now for the longer bit. The process I outlined doesn't rely on QM for the experience part of it. I thought it was relatively clear... but then I also know exactly what I meant . The "experience" is the set of perceptions received by the entity in question. That is all pretty macro level, and there's unlikely to be any meaningful impact.

QM comes in at the neural synapse level - it's the randomness effect.

What I'm talking about is essentially an evolving cluster algorithm... only instead of the cluster algorithm comparing the new data element set being compared to ALL of the existing cluster centroids, there would be a boundary condition. The new set would be compared to a subset of centroids (depending on whether we're talking about parallel or series processing) UNTIL such time as a sufficient fit to centroid has been achieved. In the case of a thinking algorithm, the data set would be the set of perceptions associated with an event. The brain would then effectively sample past experience clusters, and compare the set of experiences this time against the centroid of the cluster. It would keep sampling until it finds a centroid that is "close enough" to the current experience. It wouldn't look exhaustively to find the "best fit" centroid - it wouldn't be identifying the true nearest neighbor. It would only look until it finds a neighbor that is within a reasonable radius (although it's a tad more complex to talk about radii in a n-dimensional space where n itself is a variable ).

If we were running this as a machine learning model, we'd have a pseudo-random starting seed that dictates which centroid is the first compared, and each subsequently compared centroid would be chosen at random as well. That would mean that different runs of the model would produce different outcomes, and because it's an evolving algorithm, it means that with each repeated run, the centroids themselves would change. For an entity with a very small range of perceptive sets (for example, a snail simply has fewer receptor cells than a dog does), there would necessarily be very few possible clusters, and they're likely to converge - so that over a large number of observed entities, the clusters of perception-response pairs would be small and very similar to each other. For an entity with a larger range of perceptive sets (the dog), they would be more likely to develop a larger number of clusters or perception-response pairs (they'd exhibit more complex behaviors, which are less predictable). For a large enough observed sample of that entity, there would be some convergence in clustering (they'd start to form general patterns of behavior across individuals), but there would still be a fair bit of residual variation from one entity to another of the same type.

In this sort of model, QM is the physical mechanism for randomization. It would be less random than a computer generated psuedo-random element would be... but it would still be present.

That means that the exact same entity, at the exact same time, with the exact same past experiences, and the exact same perception experience set... may have a different response than in the first run.

That's all only getting us to how randomness (the QM element) plays into the framework for learning. That's not agency, it's not choice. It's the mechanism for learned and adaptive behavior.

To get from there to agency, the entity needs to be able to reference past experience sets (both as individual specific experiences and as representative centroid sets), and be able to extrapolate from those past experience to imagine a set of possible future experiences. They need to be able to learn and adapt from 1) extrapolated, imagined scenarios or 2) vicarious experiences.

- - - Updated - - -

This might seem like it's coming out of left field, but in hopes there might be a smidgen of relevancy, is there compatibility between the notions of contingent truths and necessary events?

Maybe? I don't know what you mean in this context.

I understand each word that you used, but when you put them together in that order I have no idea what you're saying!

- - - Updated - - -

But the observer has no control over quantum states. The observer cannott consciously access quantum states or effect changes as desired through an act of will.

How do you know this? How do you even know what the observer is?

Are we not talking about our own experience as conscious people?

Do you as a conscious person have access to the underlying mechanisms of your conscious experience, including your very existence?

Do you as a conscious person have access to quantum activity, manipulating it to your advantage and will?

Manipulation of the mechanism for randomness is not necessary for the existence of a decision-making framework.

- - - Updated - - -

Now let's add a memory function. Let's assume the entity has a way to store past experiences, and to compare the current experience to past experiences and select the response that "best fits" the current experience based on what it has learned. This is no longer perfectly deterministic. It's close, but not exact. Some degree of uncertainty has entered the system at this point. The reaction now depends not only on the current experience, but also on what other experiences the entity has had. This makes it less predictable. Unless we know all of the experiences that the entity has had, as well as the action taken in response to each experience, we can't perfectly predict a future reaction. It also means that as soon as you have more than one entity, it gets much more complicated to predict the general behavior of this type of entity in response to stimulus.

I think you misunderstand determinism. The process you describe could be 'perfectly deterministic'.

Determinism doesn't entail predictability.

You seem to have a very different understanding of determinism than I do. What do you mean by determinism?
ETA: I re-read, and I see what you mean. I apologize, my WoT has things out of order. Or I guess, the progression isn't out of order, but I'm referencing the implicit randomness before I've introduced it. My presentation of the concept wasn't particularly good.

 

[Speakpigeon]

So you cheerfully concede that you don’t understand BT.

???

You'd need to improve your reading skills.

I didn't say or suggest I didn't understand the Banach Tarski paradox as such in my post.

What I said I didn't understand was your cryptic formulation "it is emergent but irreducible" relative to it.

And I asked you to explain, something you haven't got down to doing it yet.

If you want to know, I'm pretty sure I broadly understand the principle of the Banach Tarski paradox. I did two years of maths at university and I liked topology best so I'm intuitive enough about that sort of things. That's also why I understand it has no import for the physical world as we understand it so far.

Still, I'm very much impressed that somebody should be able to prove something like that.

Then you concede you didn’t understand externalism until you Wikipedia’d it.

No. I never pretended to have understood it.

I said both that I don't pretend to understand externalism and that I thought I understood both your explanation and the Wiki page on it.

You'd need to improve your reading skills.

Cool, so now you understand it <snip>

Again, I never pretended to understand it.

You'd need to improve your reading skills.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

???

You'd need to improve your reading skills.

I didn't say or suggest I didn't understand the Banach Tarski paradox as such in my post.

What I said I didn't understand was your cryptic formulation "it is emergent but irreducible" relative to it.

And I asked you to explain, something you haven't got down to doing it yet.

If you want to know, I'm pretty sure I broadly understand the principle of the Banach Tarski paradox. I did two years of maths at university and I liked topology best so I'm intuitive enough about that sort of things. That's also why I understand it has no import for the physical world as we understand it so far.

Still, I'm very much impressed that somebody should be able to prove something like that.



No. I never pretended to have understood it.

I said both that I don't pretend to understand externalism and that I thought I understood both your explanation and the Wiki page on it.

You'd need to improve your reading skills.

Cool, so now you understand it <snip>

Again, I never pretended to understand it.

You'd need to improve your reading skills.
EB

It's odd that quite a lot of people need to improve their reading skills, perhaps when one has the same complaint about many around them, it's worth thinking about why that might be.

So, how does your understanding of BT and externalism affect your position on freewill?

Because It's hard to see how you can hold the position you held if you accept both of them, Also I note Emily Lake has done a lovely job on stochasticism in machine learning, you might want to have a go at understand that too...