So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.
It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.
1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case.
2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random.
3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made.
4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.
If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.
Your claims are no more convincing than the article.
You're entirely free to hold your beliefs about this, of course (or are you? perhaps they're predetermined), but don't imagine they're somehow more valid than the alternatives.
They're convincing to me. I have a hard time seeing a reason to ascribe 'free will' to a physical process that was always going to happen in that particular way. A ball doesn't choose to bounce when it is dropped on the ground.
> More interestingly, did you make that assertion of your own free will? :-)
Very cute if unoriginal, someone says that anytime I bring up this argument, and the answer is very simple, of course I didnt!
A 'decision' is a physical process, as in 'physics' physical, if something is not physical, then it is magic, and I dont believe (believe being used in the abstract sense of course) in magic.
Again you are simply asserting it is so. I'll grant you it's a very popular assertion, but you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
The concept has utility.
2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
The concept has utility.
You must understand, this is the most horrifying part! People are sentenced to prisons, torture, and death for "making bad/evil decisions". I'm not saying we should let murderers be murderers, but what I am saying is we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison. If we are operating on this whole free-will notion, then that will never happen.
> 2) Processes with simple rules can still exhibit emergent behaviour.
Define emergent in this case, I dont know of any truly emergent behavior that violates the rules of what caused it, you could say 'organic life' was an emergent behavior, but it still obeys physics.
>you'll forgive me if I don't just take your word for it.
I think if we can't get passed an agreement that magic isnt real, that may be a reasonable time to end the discussion.
> we should start looking closely into possible "down to the hardware" remedies instead if prison
That's where hard determinism fails it, because all it can do is to make a very broad statement that our behaviour was predetermined, without going into the details.
Really we can't make "down to the hardware" fixes or even do a post hoc analysis of the cause of behaviour, so it's really useless as a theory, it has no predictive power.
In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.
I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
(Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word: as if people disagreeing with you are just children who believe in silly things.)
> In every culture, in every era, people have usually been pretty sure they had everything figured out, and that they understood life and the world completely.
I don't think anyone here believes they have everything figured out.
> I don't believe our present time is any more enlightened in this matter than any other.
I think we're slowly getting better over time, as our collective knowledge compounds as time goes.
> Also it seems to me that you keep using the word 'magic' as a weasel word
You made a claim that a 'choice/decision' is not necessarily a physical process, I don't know how else I should interpret that.
> 1) I think free will is a concept that has to be approached in a practical matter: as in we get better social outcomes if we assume people have free will.
> The concept has utility.
This is a thinly veiled argument from consequences. You're not the only one to do this, I see this from many people arguing in favor of free will.
Edit: I would also question the utility of the concept compared to the alternative. Show me some hard numbers for what happens in a society constructed around the lack of a metaphysical free will, and then I may reconsider. (I suspect that this sort of society hasn't existed and may never exist, because free will is such a persistent illusion that it may as well be a phantom limb for most people. We're probably hardwired for it at some level, like the incessant drive for reproduction that most people have.)
They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.
You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
> It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...
But you can have a process interacting with itself in a nonlinear way, and the outcome of those types of processes are difficult to predict.
Even if you write a small non linear program, with each instruction completely simple and clear, it's still very difficult to predict the outcome without running the program.
Now imagine that at a scale ten or twenty orders of magnitude higher.
But then free will requires you to mentally conceptualise future events like "I want to go to cafe" and then translate them into interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!
So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?
Yeah, free will is perhaps our sensed experience of the process you describe (the interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!)
Proving free will exists is like proving red exists. You can point to the wavelength (or the brain signals) and declare “that is red” (or “that is the brain signature of a person deciding”) but neither of these conveys in any way the actual subjective experience of perceiving red or making decisions. Note that even if you were to, say, take a colorblind person and force them to see red by directly stimulating the relevant portion of their brain, that STILL does not neatly encompass everything there is to know about “seeing red.”
Also, what does a total lack of free will mean for the criminal justice system, which operates on the unspoken assumption that behavior is at least in part willful?
So it boils down always to moral choices - hence the whole problem is basically a problem of moral systems.
Why do you build wind barriers? Same reason for prisons - to prevent future things. As best as you can. Now is that a deterministic, chaotic, stochastic or purely random but stable process - do we care that much?
Should the fact that you want to punish/reward influence how you interpret the universe and logic?
You assert that people simply define the term in a way that allows them to claim it exists, but then you simply define it in a way that allows you claim it doesn't exist. Wouldn't the obvious conclusion be that there is a semantic disagreement, rather than "no, you're wrong and I'm right"? Your post seems very dissonant to me.
> People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.
It's a matter of denotative vs. connotative definitions. Free will proponents are saying, "hey that thing we all do when we make a choice that rocks can't do, that's free will", and you're saying "free will has such and such properties, so whether we have it depends on whether our choices have these properties".
I'd argue that most people reason denotatively, in which case merely pointing out the thing we're trying to define suffices as an existence proof. What remains is defining what it is, logically.
> 1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case
It sure does!
> The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.
Agreed. I don't see why this poses any difficulty. The behaviour of the process is largely governed by free will, just like a process on your computer will often sort lists.
> If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not.
Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control.
So why control _those_ thoughts?
Why deliberate in _that particular way_?
> Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide
It is the answer to the problem as stated. Of course, if you move the goalposts to require two properties that are logically inconsistent, then sure, no conception of free will would qualify. I'm not sure why I should find that compelling.
Finally, your focus on "control" is telling of particular assumptions that free will must have certain properties (a connotative definition). Consider whether you are simply mistaken that these properties are necessary.
As I said, there is a clear distinction between the behaviour of people and inanimate matter. There is a lot of latitude there for a process that we would recognize as free will.
The strongest argument against free will doesn't have to do with determinism (and I agree with Christian List that looking at lower levels is a category error). Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.
That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art, culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction any less real or useful.
No, I don't think that's it. Art, justice, etc, have constituent parts. People disagree, but there's lots of stuff in those boxes. When I turn my minds eye to free will, there's nothing there.
> Even if you chuck out determinism, you still can't say what free will is a supposed to _be_. It just evaporates while you try to examine it, no matter what sort of framework you put up around it.
I don't see why. Free will is a choice made for our own reasons that isn't coerced by another actor's will.
No doubt there are nuances to this when you get into the details, but it's a big leap to say it simply evaporates. We can clearly see it doesn't because we can make meaningful distinctions between the behaviour of people and that of rocks.
>I don't see why. Free will is a choice made for our own reasons that isn't coerced by another actor's will.
This is exactly why free will evaporates. Your decision making apparatus and the factors that go into your choice are a given. Multiply yourself and the situation by a million, you will always make the same decision using the same apparatus and the same factors, unless there is a random element, but that is random, not free. You're not constrained, but you are, at a very basic level, determined.
> Multiply yourself and the situation by a million, you will always make the same decision using the same apparatus and the same factors, unless there is a random element, but that is random, not free.
The Frankfurt cases debunked the principle of alternate possibilities as necessary for free will. I suggest reading my other comment where I go into further details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19928438
The Frankfurt cases addresses your thought experiment. My comment fills in the blanks of how we can define free will without relying on the principle of alternate possibilities which the Frankfurt cases debunked (and also explains the difference between the various conceptions of "free will" that typically cause this confusion).
A lot of this is about moral philosophy, which doesn't interest me. I'm more interested in causality. But I don't see why determinism would mean you can't be held morally responsible, or "free will" would be necessary for morality to work. Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will, and certainly believe in moral responsibility.
> A lot of this is about moral philosophy, which doesn't interest me
That's what the free will debate in philosophy is about: whether there's a coherent conception of free volition that can justify holding an actor morally responsible for their choices.
The philosophical question is the context of "free will" discussed by the article. Other notions of free will may or may not overlap, as I described in my other comment.
> Sunni Muslims don't believe in free will, and certainly believe in moral responsibility.
Interesting claim, but from what I've just read they do believe in free will, but they also believe that God knows all outcomes, ie. determinism/predestination. In other words, they are Compatibilists.
>That's what the free will debate in philosophy is about: whether there's a coherent conception of free volition that can justify holding an actor morally responsible for their choices.
Well, I don't care about that question. I'm interested in whether free will exists as a matter of [meta]physics, prior to questions of morality.
Err replying to myself here... I just had the personal revelation that this could also be a strong argument _for_ free will. If we can't properly examine is by breaking it down, it might be said to be a fundamental property (like consciousness, perhaps?).
> If you try to make sense of human behavior, not just in ordinary life but also in the sciences, then the ascription of intentionality is indispensable. It’s infeasible and not illuminating to explain human behavior at the level of astronomically complex neural firing patterns that take place in the brain.
“It’s difficult to describe macro behavior as a direct function of micro behavior, therefore, intentionality doesn’t belong on, nor should be falsified at, the micro level.”
All of the lines of argument in this article seem pretty weak. My time of disrespecting modern philosophy has sure come to an abrupt middle.
> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.
Not sure I understand/agree with that. Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?
> Can you build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces?
Yes. Pseudo-random generators are deterministic on lower level, yet they effectively non-deterministic in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value.
Or you can just take a system with large number of interacting particles - even if behavior of each of them is determined, the system as a whole is hard to predict.
Converse is also possible, you can build effectively deterministic system on top of a non-deterministic one. We do that with computers, we have digital computers (deterministic) on top of solid-state physics, which is non-deterministic due to interactions of electrons and the material.
This is not really a paradox, since at the higher level you only consider macrostates, so the fact that the microstates, which you consider at the lower level, are (non-)deterministic doesn't really matter.
> in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value
Easily or _in principle_?
Do not conflate our physical constraints with the actual mechanism behind the scene. Free will is not about our own ignorance or inability, it is the principal thing.
These are constraints from computational complexity.
My point is the question "is it deterministic" is wrong without considering the level of detail you're looking at. Even in deterministic universe, a roll of dice is considered to be undeterministic, and this is good enough for casinos.
If you're asking "in principle", then it might as well be unknowable because, as I pointed out, how we might observe the system to be (our model of it is deterministic or not) doesn't have to correspond at all whether it is actually deterministic or not at the lower level. So there always can be another level which can behave differently.
Well put. Compatibilist arguments typically hinge on some bait and switch and this is a popular one. The author does this exact thing in his weather example:
> At the level of individual air molecules, there is no such thing as weather. Perhaps the system at that very fine-grained level of description would indeed behave deterministically according to classical physical laws, but as you move to a more macroscopic description, you abstract away from this microphysical detail. That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.
> When you consider the macroscopic weather states, the system is not deterministic, but stochastic, or random.
The high level weather pattern is just like the output of the pseudorandom number generator. It appears stochastic to someone who is only given the high level description, but it is still deterministic in the actual world. Given the Laplace's demon description of the system, there is no room for alternative possibilities.
I think the author is only added the part I have bolded to try and deflect this. He is saying "we don't want the Laplace's demon description of the system, we just want the high level precis." Weirder still, he seems to suggest that getting the Laplace's demon is a realistic possibility, which obviously it's not.
But the fact is it doesn't matter whether it's possible for a human to get the Laplace's demon description, or whether you actively pursue it or whatever - if your accept that it's there, as List seems to, then it fully determines the higher level phenomena and this idea about higher level indeterminacy is moot.
I agree that they are different because determinism is a (mathematical) property of the model, while the predictability (with respect to class of models) is observed.
I guess it depends on how you define randomness. Chaos Theory, for example, starts with deterministic parts, but the outcome can be unexpected; this is largely a result of scale and feedback loops. Take the weather, for example: if you could track literally everything, then arguably you could predict the weather with 100% accuracy.
Yes, free will and determinism are compatible. It's known as Compatibilism, and most philosophers are actually Compatibilists. I often debate free will on reddit [1], so I'll reproduce the relevant argument here:
Firstly, to set the stage, understand that the "free will" debated in philosophy around questions of moral responsibility is not the same "free will" as typically used in science, eg. one such definition is where experimenters are free to set up their measurements independently of the system they're measuring. This is a common confusion.
What matters for the philosophical free will debate is whether there is a coherent definition of free will/choice which can make sense of our language of volition and moral reasoning, and which can serve to justify moral responsibility. Note also that "moral responsibility" does not necessarily entail "punishment" (which is a question of justice). This is another common confusion.
Finally, note that you make choices according to your nature, but to also have a choice in your nature would be logically circular.
So is there at least one definition of free will that can satisfy all of these criteria? Compatibilism is the most widely accepted approach among philosophers, and seems to match most people's intuitive moral reasoning [2]. For a rough example of what this might look like, consider a definition like "the moral responsibility of an agent capable of general learning is proportional to the amount of information it has learned, and a freely willed choice is one made based on internal reasons and not forced by other agents".
Note how this is perfectly compatible with determinism, how it makes sense of why we don't hold babies responsible but we hold adults responsible, it makes sense of how environmental [and] social factors that can impede learning moral lessons can diminish moral responsibility, it strictly defines what "free" means in the context of choice, and "moral responsibility" reduces to "moral feedback", ie. instructing what was done wrong. It's not perfect, but it should suffice as an introduction to Compatibilist-style reasoning.
This does not cover justice, which is what we must do in response to moral culpability, and which bring in further assumptions.
I have the same confusion about his statement as you do. His weather analogy is also strange because the weather only takes one path, presumably determined by physics and initial conditions. I doubt many people would argue there's agency directing local weather (although some might).
That is not non-determinism; it's just difficult to predict determinism.
I postulate that we cannot build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces - we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. With enough data, and a system of sufficient predictive complexity, we can still predict everything, I'd wager.
It is not possible universally. I like the proof of this, it is simple and resembles to many similar no-go theorems (like the halting problem).
1. Imagine a finite formal system which universally can identify if an input is regular (compressible) or random (not compressible) / So we are using the Kolmogorov-complexity definition of randomness here...
2. Assume the above formal system can be described using L bits (e.g. it is an L bit long program)
3. Lets take the first (e.g. smallest in numerical ordering) 2×L (or 10×L, 100×L, ... take it as large you want) long bit string that the program classifies as random bit string
4. "3." is a definition of a 2×L long string in L bits (the formal system itself) + constant
5. The 2×L long string is therefore compressibe so it is not random - but our original algorithm is misclassify it as random (it is in its definition) - so the algorithm is not universal...
Are you going to read this comment or not? this is a choice. If you read it, will you respond to it? yet another choice.
I can stay the fact that you're reading this far is a free choice you made out of possible alternative forks of reality. Yet, if I attempt to dig deep on why you have decided to read thus far, I've to factor in your genetic makeup and the summation of all the experiences from the moment you were conceived until this very moment, which is impossible to do, I also have no way to infer the current state of your mind, your brain state is unaccessible information to me. So, I just abstract it all by giving YOU agency, a free will. You choose to read this far by your own freewill as far as I can tell.
Therefore, freewill is a concept that exist at certain plan of abstraction (along with the concept of I and YOU) but they all dissolve once you try to peek inside inner-working of the brain's decision making machinery. But since we human don't have a way to peek inside each other brain in real-time with ease, we operate at the higher level concepts of YOU, and I assign the agency and "freewill" to YOU since I've no better explanation of why you have read up until this point.
All arguments I have ever seen involving free will, from both sides, are very weak. It is a branch of philosophy that is particularly self-obsessed, and particularly unlikely to make any decent forward progress. The people who write books about free will are self-selected for a tendency to pontificate on a topic that has no foreseeable resolution.
>The jury is out on whether the world is fundamentally deterministic...but suppose it is. This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description.
Ah, so there can exist counterfactual levels of description which are inconsistent with what may be the fundamental nature of reality. This seems accurate. (C.f. religion)
>We can attach probabilities to different scenarios, but it’s not the case that the weather state at the present time fully determines the weather state in a few days’ time. Multiple different trajectories are entirely possible.
In superdeterminism, the state of the universe at the present time does fully determine the weather state in a few days time. Multiple trajectories are not physically possible, though we are able to probabilistically model such trajectories based on the incomplete information that we do have access to.
This article seems (to me) to be advocating some sort of scientific cognitive dissonance. Where you can 'believe' different (and contradictory) things about the nature of systems surrounding you.
It's not saying the same thing is different, but the fact free will is an emergent concept that only works on the level of a person. There is no reasonable definition of free will at the atomic level, it just doesn't exist. Let's say a picture is beautiful. Well atoms can't be beautiful so hence the picture can't be beautiful. Beauty is a very high level emergent concept that only exist at that level. It's completely compatible with determinism but the fact its ultimately deterministic atoms at play is irrelevant. It's similar for free will, the cocomcept doesn't reply on determinism and that it's completely independent from it. It's about a person's actions not the underlying mechanism of how a person acts.
HN should institute a rule than anyone replying to a free will thread should get 2ⁿ negative points for each post, where n is the depth position in the thread.
I'm not convinced. At least not by the summary this article puts forward. Perhaps the world isn't deterministic (although how could we possibly know?). Even if it isn't, that non-determinism is only visible at the smallest of scales. Whether an electron is here or there is hardly likely to be caused by my mental states. So, if we don't have free will, at best we have random will. That is not free will as most people conceive of it.
To the whole section about human behavior being too complex to explain in terms of fundamental physics, my answer is: it can't be explained in terms of fundamental physics yet. But, again, given sufficient time, research, and computational power, it seems highly likely that eventually human behavior will be explained in terms of fundamental physics. Or at least, we will be able to simulate a human (or higher animal) brain with sufficient resolution so as to demonstrate that there are no other inputs to cognition than current state + laws of physics. I really don't see how our current inability to explain human behavior physically has any bearing on the question of cognitive determinism.
I think the root of the problem is in trying to use logical proof to reason about things that are beyond the limits of logical reasoning and our relatively small human minds. We know from results like the Godel Incompleteness theorem that even mathematics has very real limits on what is provable through human reasoning. The logical paradox of free will and determinism is like the paradoxes used within mathematics to prove its own limits. It is unfortunate but predictable that we cling to the delusion that we can resolve the paradox of free will through logical reasoning. There are some aspects of reality, particularly those dealing with one’s own mind or self, that cannot be reasoned about. It is also a well known open secret that those aspects of reality, while beyond the reaches of thinking and logical explanation, can be directly experienced. The practitioners of various forms of meditation experience have a great deal to report about such experiential knowledge.
> You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled. At a higher level of description, your decisions can be truly open.
They essentially redefine "free will" as "difficult to predict", instead of "truly random" or "magical" or something like that.
I can flip a coin every time I have an opportunity to make certain minor choices. Some of those choices will turn out to have major effects (my whole life changed once because the batteries were low on my Walkman and I tuned into the radio instead of playing a cassette tape like I otherwise would have). Most will not.
The point is, I can do this, and I have. Other times I have chosen not to leave as much to chance. For all practical purposes, to me this indicates sufficient free will for me to comfortable believing I have it.
I agree that believing free-will exists can be advantageous when being confronted with choices and alternative timelines. Believing that you have no autonomy can lead to situations where you don't weigh different possibilties at a given moment in time. In general, it's... deflating?
The problem for me is that there are an innumerable amount of solutions to any given choice. You have to narrow these down subconsciously. Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices that were implicitly ruled out, for me, ends up at birth, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a choice in being born.
> Tracing back all of the reasons why you didn't consider all these choices
It likely varies a lot across individuals.
For me personally, when I do this I see a whole lot of small choices made almost whimsically that led up to very large results. It came down to aesthetics a lot of the time. My values, relationships and knowledge were all inconsistent and in constant flux for many years, and when faced with analysis paralysis, how I forced a decision was often not discernably different from chance.
As I get older, it appears my choices have more weight, but they paradoxically also seem more predetermined. Perhaps it's as simple as that we're more unpredictable in our youth.
Since we are discussing if there is free will or not can I get an answer to who first proposed the solution I describe here [0]. I know I am not the first person to have raised this argument, but I can't find who did.
Substitute "free will" for "God", and it basically seems like a restatement of Pascal's Wager, along with the prevailing (and untrue) belief that atheists (or, in this case, those who reject free will) are incapable of morality or of finding meaning in life.
If some process M behaves according to fixed rules yet no other process can exist that can determine, with certainty, M's behavior ahead of M, then M is still "deterministic" in the physics sense of the word, but is it deterministic enough to claim no free will?
I guess some could say that M is not free because the decisive question is, could have M behaved differently? But I am not sure that question is entirely well-defined.
I don't see how conflating inscrutible with non-deterministic is useful. But this is the argument the author is making. They seem to argue that it is a useful thing to do scientifically. Perhaps philosophers would do well to focus on whether a different person in the same circumstances would be forced to make the same decision. The answer is clearly no. But not because of a lack of determinism.
This is just another false dichotomy theists like to use to argue their case. It's like arguing whether humans are inherently good or evil - no, humans create both of those things. Or whether the universe was created or not. Why make up stories for something we can never know?
As long as the concept of infinity exist it's impossible to say that existence is deterministic or not. It's rather determinism wrapped in indeterminism and that wrapped in determinism so on and so forth.
Does anyone know of a good text that will better help explain the concept of 'free will' and the agruments around it? Kant et al are completely opaque and nearly unreadable.
It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.
1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.
If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.