You don’t have free will, but don’t worry

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/10/you-dont-have-free-will-but-dont-worry.html

by chmaynard • 6 years ago

37 47 6 years ago

backreaction.blogspot.com

"What is really going on if you are making a decision is that your brain is running a calculation, and while it is doing that, you do not know what the outcome of the calculation will be"

acscott• 6 years ago

"Taken together we therefore have determinism with the occasional, random quantum jump, and no combination of these two types of laws allows for anything resembling this intuitive idea that we can somehow choose which possible future becomes real." How do we know that the present moment is deterministic, the whole of the present is only the result of the whole of the past? Don't we have to know/understand everything to draw such a conclusion?

sullyj3• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

justiceforsaas• 6 years ago

I keep reading the same rehearsed arguments: Quantum mechanics, computer-related analogies, yada yada.

Can we just state the obvious about free will: We still don't know if it exists.

Bodell• 6 years ago

"Why am I telling you this? Because I think that people who do not understand that free will is an illusion underestimate how much their decisions are influenced by the information they are exposed to."

I find this sort of ultra deterministic take on things renders articles like these pointless. I mean, what are we supposed to do now, 'choose' to expose ourselves to different information? Isn't too late, in a way before we were ever born kind of way? Wouldn't our "underestimating" be an imperative beyond reproach. Not to mention that free-will is not a factor in our being influenced by information. This is true in both cases, free-will and not.

Personally, I'm a non-compatibilist but believe the jury is still out on determinism. Despite having lots of evidence in support of it, I think there is still a lot of room for conformation bias, simply because the scope of such claims is so large. Overall, it takes a lot of hubris to make the claims stated in this article.

Also as a sort of pseudo-biological question: What would be the purpose be of evolving an illusion of free-will?

admax88q• 6 years ago

what are we supposed to do now, 'choose' to expose ourselves to different information?

Yes? If there is no free will just input and output, the input of this article might change your internal state such that you as a machine process subsequent input differently. Free will or not does not change this. A lack of free will doesn't me we just stop even trying to change how people behave.

Cars are deterministic machines but we still get oil changes and repairs.

EDIT: Or to put it differently, a lack of free will does not mean a lack of internal state. But it might mean that we should pay more attention to that internal state and what we do with it.

amanaplanacanal• 6 years ago

But if we don’t have free will, how can we choose to pay more attention?

albanread• 6 years ago

I think the author underestimates how much this changes things. Assuming we know for certain there is no free will; the way we treat bad behaviour should change - people who behave badly should simply be retrained. There should be no punishment; there is no concept of individual guilt or personal accountability; there are only behaviours that need to be modified to conform with a social norm. There should be no execution of killers; no prison terms, people would be held for as long as it takes (potentially indefinitely) to change unacceptable behaviour. A lot of popular religious concepts also fly out of the window.

luckylion• 6 years ago

the way we treat bad behaviour should change - people who behave badly should simply be retrained

Does this hinge on us knowing/believing that free will doesn't exist? I'd say it's mostly that we cannot "simply retrain" somebody. If we had an injection that we could give people who's violence threshold is too low, we'd give it to them. But we don't, not even close. That's what stops us, not our belief in free will.

vharuck• 6 years ago

I don't see a difference in this regard. In my opinion, punishment that isn't intended to reform the criminal is done so three rest of us can feel good. I consider it sadism, but can understand if others object to that term.

There should be no execution of killers

If they are likely to only be a danger to society, and the society does not hold all lives sacred, the death penalty would fit. In my opinion, this needs to be an extreme case. For example, a drug lord who, despite being in jail, repeatedly finds ways to hire hitmen.

no prison terms

Prisons make perfect sense for some cases, especially violent criminals. It'd be foolish not to separate them from society of they're likely to cause harm again. Also, it would be a good guarantee they would attend behavioral therapy.

people would be held for as long as it takes (potentially indefinitely) to change unacceptable behaviour

This does make me feel unsure of an answer, but luckily I can use a simple cop-out: removing sentencing limits would be too ripe for abuse.

jerry80• 6 years ago

In my opinion, punishment that isn't intended to reform the criminal is done so three rest of us can feel good. I consider it sadism, but can understand if others object to that term.

Punishment is arguably intended first and foremost to be a deterrent to committing crime in the first place, and secondary as a way to take dangerous criminals off the street. Reform of the criminal should probably be considered a bonus, not the primary intention. I think almost no one, aside from direct victims and their families, want punishment purely for punishment's sake (i.e. sadism).

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Assuming we know for certain there is no free will; the way we treat bad behaviour should change

If there is no free will, the word “should” doesn't mean anything, there is only “is” and “is not”.

Barrin923• 6 years ago

And we do not guess, we know, that we can derive from the laws for the constituents what the whole object does. If you make a claim to the contrary, you are contradicting well-established science. I can’t prevent you from denying scientific evidence, but I can tell you that this way you will never understand how the universe really works."

I mean this is just flat out wrong and actually terrible science. Everyone who has taken a class on complex systems is aware of the phenomenon of emergence. You cannot understand the dynamics of a bird flock by breaking it down to the individual birds, and you cannot understand the dynamics of a hurricane by looking at each individual particle. A steering wheel cannot drive, an exhaust pipe cannot drive and a tire cannot drive, but a car can drive. The human mind is of course another important example. You can pry someone's head open and break the brain down to its constituent parts, but you will not find a mind anywhere in there.

Systems can have properties that are not found in any of its parts, because it's the interaction of the parts, not the parts themselves, that produce those properties. That is why reductionism has never been a successful enterprise, and why we indeed do not have a "unified science" (as some of the logical positivists imagined) which explains the totality of all things in one formal language. (i.e. physics).

Supermancho• 6 years ago

Everyone who has taken a class on complex systems is aware of the phenomenon of emergence.

Interactions (any observed results) are side effects of deterministic properties. Not knowing all initial states or the complexity of the intetactions being incomprehensible in aggregate (by humans) is not relevant. Emergence is not incommensurate with determinism. Full stop.

Once you figure out that time is an illusion of local shared human memory (if you travel to nonlocal spacetime you will have a divergent memory), the situation becomes clearer.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M

Wake me up when there's something new to talk about.

elevenoh• 6 years ago

Interactions (any observed results) are side effects of deterministic properties

That's my understanding as well.

I'm trying find utility in the 1st comment, but I don't see the direction of causality - e.g. emergence of culture from physics (bottom up) - is relevant in determining whether something non-deterministic.

maest• 6 years ago

deterministic properties.

Thing is, I don't see this addressing quantum mechanics.

The randomness in QM is _truly_ random, it's not just a deterministic system where we can't learn the initial state. I'm not saying that means there is free will, but it does counter the argument that everything is _deterministic_.

The other wrinkle is that you can have a deterministic system in an infinite space - I'm not sure if that setup still precludes free will.

jffhn• 6 years ago

Everyone who has taken a class on complex systems is aware of the phenomenon of emergence.

Reminds me of some conference (lost the URL) of Robert Laughlin, where he said (if I recall correctly) that rigidity (e.g. of a steel bar) was an emergent property, to which someone in the audience objected that sure enough it should be deducible from quantum mechanics, which he dismissed.

That would mean that emergence can occur even in simple systems (regularly packed atoms), and for quite basic properties.

hackinthebochs2• 6 years ago

There are no uncontroversial examples of non-reductive emergence. Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle. There are practical limits in doing so, but there are no theoretical limits to predicting the behavior of the whole from the parts.

Barrin923• 6 years ago

Of course you could understand the dynamics of a hurricane by analyzing each individual particle

that's actually an article of faith because scientifically speaking we can't. And that's important because it's where reductionism subtly goes from being treated as a scientific method to a sort of belief system.

It's not actually obvious at all that say, complex mind states or intentionality can be reduced to physics. It even seems extremely unlikely, because there's no conceivable way to me how the 'aboutness' of intentional mind states are supposed to be reduced to particles.

Another good example is maybe life itself. Schrödinger in his book What is Life? categorised life as local 'negative entropy', ordering matter at a local level and exporting excess entropy to the outside, in a sense locally 'breaking' the second law of thermodynamics. When our civilisation warms the planet up and produces heat what it really does is exporting disorder, I think it's quite a good description actually.

Aside from the fact that we scientifically haven't proven it, it's hard to imagine how this sort of top-down causal behaviour and complexity is supposed to be reduced to mostly linear particle interactions.

nscalf• 6 years ago

I think it is likely that we do not have free will. However, it is such a complex system, and it would be so incredibly difficult to make meaningful predictions for how humans really are about to behave in any given moment, that we effectively have free will. If it is effectively impossible to predict behavior, it doesn't matter if you're technically right.

aegis4244• 6 years ago

We have free will, at least as a group of apes. Think of the problem from a protons point of view. I once read, a human is a protons way to look at itself. All these protons were stuck in this gravity well, being tossed around this way and that. Until. Voyager. Some of those protons aren't rattling around with us anymore. Because a group of apes willed it so.

ncmncm2• 6 years ago

When you look at yourself, I'm afraid you only see the electrons. The protons are the bones, but we see only the skin.

jecel• 6 years ago

John McCarthy did not consider full determinism incompatible with free will:

http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/freewill.html

whitten• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing this

torotonnato2• 6 years ago

I would go even a step further and question the randomness of the quantum realm, but IANAP and I might be saying something terribly stupid: apologies in advance.

What if the source of quantum randomness is not really random in the Kolmogorov sense? If any finite (computable, as physics seems to be) process has a bounded Kolmogorov complexity, is it correct to assert that infinite complexity can be originated only from an unbounded process? Then what about the constituent parts of that unbounded process? Shouldn't they have unbounded mass/energy and collapse into a blackhole? Equivalenty: shouldn't something with infinite entropy collapse into a blackhole per Bekenstein bound?

Somehow I feel that this cosmic TRNG is as shady as the embedding of the real numbers in the real world.

N.B.: - I don't think this line of reasoning contradicts Bell's theorem. - I reckon that, as digital cowboys, we have a bias for finiteness and discreteness

I'm really curious about this, please contradict me. There must be something beautiful that I'm not seeing.

SamReidHughes2• 6 years ago

With a deterministic universe, you'll need some way to produce discontinuous outcomes.

For example, let's say you're on a walk on a trail in a deterministic universe, and there's a pole in the middle of the path. Let's assume you'll always walk left or right of it, as a function of your initial left/right position across the width of the path, in a bounded time t_max. (We assume there isn't some unstable center position, or set of positions, where you get stuck an arbitrarily long length of time before deciding which side to take, because you're human.) It follows that the laws of physics are discontinuous.

It feels kind of like Arrow's Impossibility Theorem -- in both cases your cleanest way out of this jam is nondeterminism.

SamReidHughes2• 6 years ago

Or, instead of nondeterminism, you have determinism + a separate free will package, which generates the discontinuity. Free will =~ being able to compute a decision in bounded time on a continuum of inputs.

torotonnato2• 6 years ago

I can see your point, but the problem remains. Suppose to have a closed system that contains a random number generator and an observer. The observer can measure and extract (not store) an infinite amount of entropy. Where does that comes from? It seems to me to be unphysical.

Possible way outs of this:

- The randomness source has a state which is huge but finite. The finiteness should clash with the QM assumption that this kind of randomness is absolutely unpredictable

- You can't even take an upper-bound of the Kolmogorov complexity of that bitstream without storing the bits. It's like saying: the universe can cheat because your are not looking (hypothesis that has a strong QM flavor)

- The universe conspires to incrementally build one additional state for every measurement taken (non-sense)

- The randomness source is not immanent in our physical universe (Occam's razor says no)

Regarding your point, there are two options: discontinuous functions can be approximated with truncated series, for instance. Plus: the photoelectric effect doesn't logically need (for what I know) randomness to happen, there are already discontinuities without postulating non-determinism, discreteness suffices.

jassany• 6 years ago

I always believed that the best proof for free well is when we question it

OpieCunningham• 6 years ago

We’re meant to question it.

mnl• 6 years ago

Here's Sabine again stating things without further reasoning. I'm sorry but I have a hard time reconciling Laplacian determinism with quantum physics, I'd like to see more details.

Anyway, I don't think it matters really because as long as I can choose to do the opposite of what I want every time I feel like it just because I can, the philosophical debate about free will doesn't add too much to my own experience of it.

yokaze• 6 years ago

I'm sorry but I have a hard time reconciling Laplacian determinism with quantum physics, I'd like to see more details.

As I understand it, it's not really Laplacian determinism. We still have the chaos and quantum randomness. But the argument is, your "decision", what you perceive as free will is the result of it. Not the other way around.

At a certain scale (time and scope-wise) it can be predicted what you will "decide" before you think you consciously take a decision.

I picture it for myself a bit like a partly covered Pascal's marble run. The upper covered part standing for quantum randomness.

Neurosciences don't make a claim on being able to predict that, but they can (more or less) accurately observe the lower uncovered part and seeing where the marble goes. (Or at least which side)

And then we have the subject of the experiment, which becomes conscious of the marble when it drops, claiming that it willed the marble to drop there.

I hope my picture helps more than distract, as it will have its own flaws.

shannifin• 6 years ago

"What is really going on if you are making a decision is that your brain is running a calculation, and while it is doing that, you do not know what the outcome of the calculation will be. ... So, the impression of free will comes from our self-awareness, that we think about what to do, combined with our inability to predict the result of that thinking before we’re done."

What is the difference between "free will" and "the impression of free will"?

That is, what does "free will" have that "the impression of free will" does not?

Kednicma• 6 years ago

In quantum mechanics some events are truly random and cannot be predicted. Does this mean that quantum mechanics is where you can find free will? Sorry, but no, this makes no sense. These random events in quantum mechanics are not influenced by you, regardless of exactly what you mean by “you”, because they are not influenced by anything. That’s the whole point of saying they are fundamentally random. Nothing determines their outcome.

This is wrong, sorry. Rather, QM is contextual; the response to a measurement is both influenced locally by the measurement's orientation and non-locally by its causal history.

QM gives us indeterminism. Further, if we have free will, then so do subatomic particles. It is neither good or bad, but it is how it is.

mkaic• 6 years ago

At the risk of sounding dismissive...

Who cares? Whether free will is an illusion or not has no practical application to my life, my behavior, or the lives and behaviors of other people.

If an illusion is so strikingly believable that you take it for reality, what separates it from BEING reality?

prmph• 6 years ago

Before we can discuss the question of whether we have free will, we need to properly define and characterize what the "we" here refers to. It is individual particles? Our consciousness? Or something else?

And thus the question of free will is not resolvable without resolving the hard problem of consciousness. I suspect the two questions are facets of the same fundamental problem.

TudorBirlea• 6 years ago

All models are wrong, but some are useful. There's a favourite professor of mine, teaching evolutionary psychology. He always reminds students that there are many models that can explain something - like why did the chicken crossed the road - from chemistry to motivation theories.

This article seems to argue that because we don't have a good enough model to explain the experience of free will, therefore free will does not exist. Pack it up boys. Also - neurology deals with disorders of the nervous system. And when somebody tries to write a scientific article and relies on arguments such as "makes no sense" - just wow.

Note: I research what is called behavioural causality. And in my subjective experience the concept of free will has less and less relevance. As the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded - just try to have the same conversation with somebody on a full stomach or hungry. We may not realise this, most of the time we are unaware. Our will is influenced by our contexts, internal chemistry, stimuli we were exposed to all our lives.

It is arrogant, if not delusional, to think that in an universe where everything is connected, somehow the human mind found a way to break free and be... something else - influencing the world but without being influenced back. Like that doesn't break the laws of physics!

/rant

weare138• 6 years ago

Suppose you have a computer that evaluates whether an equation has a real-valued root. The answer is yes or no. You can predict the answer. But now you can change the algorithm so that if you input the correct answer, the code will output the exact opposite answer, ie “yes” if you predicted “no” and “no” if you predicted “yes”. As a consequence, your prediction will never be correct. Clearly, this has nothing to do with free will but with the fact that the system you make a prediction for gets input which the prediction didn’t account for. There’s nothing interesting going on in this argument.

This is an odd philosophical conjecture. Who created this hypothetical computer and why? Could you willingly create something that negates the premise of free will?

deostroll• 6 years ago

Could you willingly create something that negates the premise of free will?

The author only meant to point out the innate nature of a QM particle.

Why that is the way it is is a different topic.

ccvannorman• 6 years ago

This is a great point.

No, you cannot actually create anything that negates the premise of free will. Even if the Universe is 100% deterministic, it would take a computer the size of the universe to predict anything. Therefore, determinism may or may not be true, but from within the confines of this universe, we will never be able to observe it fully (e.g. there does not exist the possibility for an Oracle who could predict every action).

To prove this consider the opposite: If such an Oracle was able to exist, you could simply ask it whether you would select Red or Blue next, then do the opposite of whatever it predicted.

ncmncm2• 6 years ago

Free Will is the canonical example of a "conceit", a thing we choose to believe in not for any evidence that it is true or meaningful, but just because we want to.

A conceit is fine if it helps you feel comfortable -- it is serving its purpose -- but if you try to make a rational argument out of it you end up with nonsense.

giomasce• 6 years ago

It's pretty strange: it seems that the person writing should be quite advanced in physics and mathematics (though I am not able to comment on her actual scientific merit), but it clearly misses very important and well-known facts.

For example, the fact that it is not true that any differential equation has uniqueness of solutions given its boundary conditions (there are very simple example, which are usually covered in any introductory class not more than half an hour after the concept of differential equation has been introduced, see for example https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1319537/59728). In reality, the proof of uniqueness of solutions is usually a very difficult for every new class of equations being introduced, if it is true at all. There is no general result.

Also, it seems to me a completely non trivial point that the physics is actually governed by (a system of) differential equations. The physical laws we currently know are commonly if not always expressed as differential equations, but every physicist is aware that there are a lot of inconsistencies and holes in our current understanding of the universe. Where do we get the assurance that the "ultimate law" is again a differential equation? Maybe we are not finding it just because we expect it to be a differential equation, but it is not, and we first have to revolutionize the way we think physical laws (maybe more or less as we had to do when we realized quantum physics).

In short, it seems a rather naive position.

amriksohata• 6 years ago

Free will in Hinduism is called "Maya" or illusion.

You don’t have free will, but don’t worry

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