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Here's my contribution to the thread on free will:
I've spent some time trying to reconcile the apparent experience of free will with the knowledge of how the brain works, and in the end I resolved it with a refinement of the definition of free will.
First, let's dispense with the idea that free will is a binary property. Like 'life', 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' it is a continuous attribute covering a spectrum of possibilities from undectable (in the case of a simple rock) to obvious (in the case of most humans) and possibly beyond our current imaginings (in the case of aliens or future AIs or posthumans).
Now let me propose that a system (animal, rock, computer, organization, etc.) has free will to the extent that its behavior is generated endogenously. A rock may display behavior like eroding, tumbling down a hill or stream, arcing through the air as a projectile, but in every case the cause is external to the rock so it has practically zero free will. Animals, at the other end of the known spectrum, are still subject to external forces like gravity and other animals but display a tremendous amount of complex behavior generated internally by their nervous systems (at least animals with nervous systems do).
I think a major advantage of this redefinition is that it conforms very well with out intuitions and every day usage of the phrase. Humans *do* have free will, simpler animals do as well, but less than we do. Inanimate objects have little or none depending on their complexity. Computers might, and definitely have the potential if they run the right software. As an added bonus, we have the potential to achieve more free will by gaining more power over our environment (with technology) and increasing our understanding of how the universe (including ourselves) operates.
I want more free will! Personally I cannot do everything I want. I want to fly like I do in my lucid dreams. I want more control over my desires (Greg Egan explores this possibility in his excellent SF novels). I want more willpower to focus on important goals (like immortality and AI) without being distracted or lazy. I need to exercise more. I need to eat better and less. I would like to read more and faster. There are dozens of interesting fields of knowledge I know almost nothing about, and my stack of books to read is now taller than me. I could go on and on.
I just skimmed Eliezer's answer to the Meaning of Life. He sees the Singularity as the Interim goal, not knowing what the ultimate goal is but confident that the Minds on the other side will have a better chance of discovering or creating it, and achieving it. In the same sense I see achieving more free will as a personal interim goal. Gaining knowledge and power will no doubt help achieve all other goals, no matter what they are.
Do you agree?
« Last Edit: 2002-06-21 13:03:15 by David Lucifer »
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #1 on: 2002-06-21 20:48:58 »
Interesting. Just a few thoughts.
Quote:
I want more free will! Personally I cannot do everything I want. I want to fly like I do in my lucid dreams. I want more control over my desires. [...] I want more willpower to focus on important goals (like immortality and AI) without being distracted or lazy.
It looks like you already have the "free will" for flying, and what is missing is making it possible, i.e. an available option. So, human "free will" seems to include options which are conceivable but not available, and this seems to be a very important attribute. The will for more "free will" seems to be something similar.
What does "more free will" mean? The easy case is "more willpower" -- we could call this attribute "depth" or maybe "focus" of free will. There is also the case of increasing the options -- the "width" of free will. This one seems more complicated, because there are the "available options", which can be increased by technology, social evolution, self-improvement, or even emigration, and the "conceivable options", which can be increased by learning, speculation, intuition etc.
In my understanding your missing the point greatly. A rock has no free will, it has no capacity to exert anything on the external world. A plant can "choose" which direction to grow in, although it's mostly an automatic or instinctive decision. An animal is subject to many instincts, while it has the ability to move it's limbs etc in any way it wishes, it is still going to bow down to it's instincts and obey them in many situations. A human is less driven by instinct, but we still only have the ability to move our body in ways it is physically capable. We are still driven by many instincts (I am always reminded of this at the least opportune moments). But we *basically* do nothing we don't wish to. Of course there are always things we wish to do we can't. We as humans are capable of constructing thoughts of things we can't do. Some animals probably can as well. The fact we can't do things we want to isn't a lack of free will. Being forced to do things is a lack of free will.
Of course this is all how I see it. Your milage may vary.
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #3 on: 2002-06-22 12:09:39 »
[redcane] The fact we can't do things we want to isn't a lack of free will. Being forced to do things is a lack of free will.
[rhinoceros] Ok, being forced to do things is a lack of free will (reduced options). Being forced *not* to do things is also a lack of free will (reduced options). The fact that we can't do some things may be interpreted as being forced (by nature, society etc) not to do them (currently unavailable options --> reduced options).
So, our working hypothesis about increasing our free will, so that we are not only something more than rocks, plants and animals, but also something more than what we are today still stands. And we could say that is what people have always been doing in the past (increasing their options).
Sorry, I was disagreeing somewhat with the idea that because we can't do something it's a lack of free will.
Hmm. I can see your point, that we have overcome our lack of flying ability with hang gliders/planes, but in my mind that is a different direction.
Overcoming the physical limitations of our bodies is not an issue of free will as I see it. At least not in a physical universe. A lack of free will would mean we wouldn't be able to decide we wanted or did not want to fly. Whether or not we can fulfil that want is a different matter I think.
As I understand it the issue of free will is more a question of do we have it or not? Do we make our own decisions, or are they preset and we just arrive at the conclusions we were destined to?
I hope I'm actually getting my explanation across here, and not just rambling.... I apologise if I haven't shown you why I have the ideas I do...
Some examples: Without free will, we may still feel the urge to fly. But it was somehow determined that we would feel the urge to fly (or come to the decision it was something we wanted to do) beforehand, or outside of our control. We may still feel it was our decision, even though we were always going to decide that way. Whether or not we can then turn our urge to fly into reality is not a lack of free will as I see it, it's a lack of our bodies.
With free will, we may decide we don't feel the urge to fly, or we do. It is completely up to us. Again, whether or not we can then implement our decision is a different matter.
I think the free will part is the want to do something, as in a will to do it, not whether we can achieve it. Just as the rich explorer guy wishes to balloon around the world (as dictiated by his free will), but may never manage the feat. It is still his free will that makes him try. I don't think it makes our will more free if we can achieve anything we want.
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #6 on: 2005-04-23 21:26:02 »
Free will is a really important topic. I was happy to read your posts on it and see your perspectives. Here's mine, as grim as it is: I don't think anyone or anything has freewill. It certainly seems like it but that is an illusion. The reason i think this is that we can not decide who and what we are. It is impossible to change our natures, and every act that is imagined to be consciously chosen is mandated from the constraints on our brains and environments. Your genes and memes were not chosen by you, they just happened to and around you. The resulting behavior from an imagined choice is in fact simply a natural process playing itself out. Everything obeys physical laws, inside and outside our bodies. Inductively, the brain obeys the laws of chemistry without any elbow room. Fate has wound her clock and we can only flow through it 1 way. Every move is a forced one.
I hope I'm wrong about this, and i hope someone can convince me of it. I think that it follows inductively that predictable laws governing the universe rule out any power in us, for our obediance to these laws is total.
I hope I'm wrong about this, and i hope someone can convince me of it. I think that it follows inductively that predictable laws governing the universe rule out any power in us, for our obediance to these laws is total.
Why does that rule out free will? Who is making your decisions if not you?
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #8 on: 2005-04-27 13:50:53 »
Quote:
Why does that rule out free will? Who is making your decisions if not you?
Decisions just happen. They aren't your will, you don't have power over what you want, or what you're willing to do to get it. My decisions get made without my consent. The body is full of reflexes that are quite predictable, whether they are mental emotional or physical. I'm not just talking about man. Every other creature does the best it can do with its environment and genes.
Alright free will in this discussion appears to have a few different definitions. 1. lucifer's definition which says that free will is the actions generated by the subject in question and 2.the more common not so easy for your brain to deal with definition that says that free will is one's ability to act completely of one's own volition without being affected by any outside force.
I really like lucifer's refined definition because i think it is useful for those of us who dont believe in free will and have a hard time coping with the fact that we have to live as though we do. I think also lucifer's definition brings up a really important point. He said "Who is making your decisions if not you?" and he's right because whether we have either kind of free will or not we are the only ones that can act out the actions that we act out, as funny as that sounds. I think this point really starts to bring the two definitions together, but i want to get to that in a moment. First i wanted to say that i dont think definition 2 free will is possible because no matter how hard i look i cant help but feel like the cause effect rules apply to us as well. Whenever i make a decision it is based on my logic. My logic is based on the things i know. The things i know all depend on my brain to exist in a form in which i can use them. My brain is dependent on existence which is rules by cause and effect. Nothing i choose is not the result of an action before it. I would love to hear logic that could make me believe otherwise like fishsuit because it is quite grim as he said, but i have not heard any as of yet so for now this is my conclusion: that there is no free will in its definition 2 form.
Now i want to go back to lucifer's point and why i think it brings the two definitions together. Though i do not have free will in the def. 2 form, i must act, giving me the kind of free will lucifer talks about. So where does it lead us then if we have free will but we dont have free will? I think what brings these two definitions together is the fact denoted by def. 1 free will which is that there is something obviously wrong with our conception of what the self is, or at least that's what i feel like it showed lol. If we are bound by cause-effect laws, but still make decisions, then this contradiction shows a problem with the self. The truth is that our conception of self is incorrect. There is no self because our self is only a composition of cause and effect relationships. Cause and effect after cause and effect has formed us since birth. The actions that we perform that allow us to have the def. 1 free will are caused by normal causes that happen through us. So the fact that there isnt a self allows our "self" to act, at least in accordance with the laws of cause and effect, but at the same time not act in the def. 2 free will way because that definition uses the idea of the existence of the self meaning a personality that is unaffected by any outside sorce. So lucifer's definition requires that the person using it think of the self as an entity that is unaffected by outside sorces and def. 2 requires that self mean only an effect of the many cause and effect relationships that make us who we are. So both are true because the entity unaffected by outside sorces exists in the only way we can look at the world and because the self that is only a cause and effect thing exists through our logic.My questioin now is: When do we use either of these definitions in life since sometimes one seems useful and sometimes the other appears useful.
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #10 on: 2005-04-30 11:37:08 »
What I think is that the "free will does not exict" idea comes from a confusion between different abstraction layers.
You learn, for example, that the orbits of the planets are produced by the law of gravity, and you go on to say that "orbits of the planets are just an illusion, there is only gravity". Or, you can say that "a chair is an illusion, there are only molecules, atoms, elementary particles, superstrings..."
What's worse, when it comes to the planets we have a definite method to deduce their orbits from the laws of gravity, but when it comes to free will we have no such method to deduce human actions from the universal causal chains which allegedly produces them them. A hopeless model for testing anything...
More specifically, now, a classic argument against the use of the concept of "free will" is that anything must have a cause, and that free will implies that the "self" makes a choice without any cause at all.
This is not necessarily so. It is true that "free will" implies that our "self" makes an intrinsically produced choice, sometimes against external factors. But the "self" -- another oft disputed concept -- is not a transcedental entity. It is a real and material encoding of a person's whole history. It *contains* encoded "causes".
So far, it has been always much easier to use this "self" as a starting point, often venturing into personal stories which made one's self what it is today. Tossing aside the concept of the self and trying to follow the cosmic chain of events which led to a decision or an action is not yet a good bet...
Oh, there is also the idea that everything we do was already determined at the time of the bing bang and we might as well lie down and do nothing... but we won't do that if that was not what was determined... Fun stuff, but not much else.
I dont really understand what it is that you are getting at. First of all what do you mean by abstraction layers? Also you said "when it comes to the planets we have a definite method to deduce their orbits from the laws of gravity, but when it comes to free will we have no such method to deduce human actions from the universal causal chains which allegedly produces them. A hopeless model for testing anything...", do you mean by this that we are unable to absolutely judge between what is a "human action" and what are the causes of those actions? And if so what are you getting at? It is true that there is no fine line separating the two things but i would say that was because free will doesnt truly exist because the self doesnt either meaning all actions are only cause and effect chains. So are you supporting that or am i misunderstanding?
You also said: "More specifically, now, a classic argument against the use of the concept of "free will" is that anything must have a cause, and that free will implies that the "self" makes a choice without any cause at all.
This is not necessarily so. It is true that "free will" implies that our "self" makes an intrinsically produced choice, sometimes against external factors. But the "self" -- another oft disputed concept -- is not a transcedental entity. It is a real and material encoding of a person's whole history. It *contains* encoded "causes".
So far, it has been always much easier to use this "self" as a starting point, often venturing into personal stories which made one's self what it is today. Tossing aside the concept of the self and trying to follow the cosmic chain of events which led to a decision or an action is not yet a good bet..."
Does all this mean that you feel like the "self" concept should not be done away with just because we dont have free will?
And what does this mean? "Fun stuff, but not much else."
I would love for you to explain your ideas a little further for my sake if no one else's at least.Thanks.
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #12 on: 2005-05-04 00:46:47 »
Free will vs. predetermination is probably the oldest philosophical argument in history. Still, it is more important today than ever. It is a paradox that we may never solve. But even if we can’t solve it, we should continue to try. We need to understand the nuanced arguments for and against. For the religious fundamentalists free will is simple. God gave it us so we could either choose him or eternal damnation. For a thinking person it is not so simple at all.
I personally believe in free will. I can’t prove it and I know this smacks of faith, which many will find problematic. Maybe it is like the particle/wave problem in understanding light. When you look at light it behaves either like particles or waves, but it can’t be both at once. In the same way when you look at life you can see free will or predetermination, but not both at the same time. Kind of like an optical illusion.
I believe we have reached a point in human history where free will is a more important issue than ever. We can choose to save the environment or destroy it. We can even choose to direct evolution itself, or we can just inbreed and wait for the rapture.
I think you have to exercise free will in the same sense that you have to exercise your muscles or your mind. That is the way to get more of it! It’s not just about money, or power, or knowledge, but an enlightened use of all your assets.
When I think of free will in terms of religion, it makes me think there probably isn’t any. But when you look at it, you see the people at the top exercising a lot of free will while the masses follow in lock step. I see this as free will used for evil. Free will is inexorably tied up with good and evil; but that is a discussion for another day.
Here is paradox: there are infinite choices that diminish one’s understanding of reality, but the choices that increase one’s understanding always converge on just the one reality: that which is approximately described by science. I posit that making choices that diminish understanding reduces one’s free will, while making choices that improve understanding increase free will. But it always appears to be the opposite: Those with limited understanding actually appear to be freer because they can do whatever stupid thing they want, while those who are enlightened will tend to limit themselves more rational or “better” choices and therefore may appear less free.
Re:Free will and the meaning of life
« Reply #13 on: 2005-05-04 15:28:16 »
“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” Sartre At every turn we are confronted with choices that impact upon the conception of our own identities. Thus we are always in a state of becoming and, in this sense, we are, as the great man said, 'doomed to be free'. A superb paradox - there is no choice but to choose.
I suppose if you could truly solve a paradox then it wouldnt be a paradox at all lol. It seems like a true paradox cannot be solved, but must be worked around, but the only way to find out if its a true paradox or not is to try to solve it so i guess youre right. It looks like you believe in both free will and non free will lol, thats what i do since i think the different beliefs are applicable in different situations. I think you can believe in either at certain times but not at the same time like you said. I have some difficulty with the idea of less and more free will. Unless there is a very open definition of free will being used i dont really think one can say i have more or less free will or whatever. If your thinking of free will as the ability to act of your own choice unaffected by outside sorces i dont think that works. You either have free will or you dont. The only way i can think of where it would be possible to have more or less free will would be something like the definition david lucifer mentioned a little while back, he said
"First, let's dispense with the idea that free will is a binary property. Like 'life', 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' it is a continuous attribute covering a spectrum of possibilities from undectable (in the case of a simple rock) to obvious (in the case of most humans) and possibly beyond our current imaginings (in the case of aliens or future AIs or posthumans).
Now let me propose that a system (animal, rock, computer, organization, etc.) has free will to the extent that its behavior is generated endogenously. A rock may display behavior like eroding, tumbling down a hill or stream, arcing through the air as a projectile, but in every case the cause is external to the rock so it has practically zero free will. Animals, at the other end of the known spectrum, are still subject to external forces like gravity and other animals but display a tremendous amount of complex behavior generated internally by their nervous systems (at least animals with nervous systems do).
I think a major advantage of this redefinition is that it conforms very well with out intuitions and every day usage of the phrase. Humans *do* have free will, simpler animals do as well, but less than we do. Inanimate objects have little or none depending on their complexity. Computers might, and definitely have the potential if they run the right software. As an added bonus, we have the potential to achieve more free will by gaining more power over our environment (with technology) and increasing our understanding of how the universe (including ourselves) operates."
Anyway otherwise you either have it or you dont , absolute or none at all because if you are even affected by one outside source then you have lost all free will because the one source will affect all decisions. Also all decisions you make are affect everything in the end so no act is any more powerful or effective than any other. So those who seem to be in power are not trully any more powerful than anyone else. Unless, that is, you look at it as though we do have free will. Just thought id throw that in to see what i get back.
you said "there are infinite choices that diminish one’s understanding of reality"
I think that the dual views of free will are much like the dual views of reality. You can look at reality as what you personally know or as what lies in AND beyond your knowledge.
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