Um.
Sometime ago I posted to decision-theory-workshop an idea that may be relevant here. Hopefully it can shed some light on the "solution to free will" generally accepted on LW, which I agree with.
Imagine the following setting for decision theory: a subprogram that wants to "control" the output of a bigger program containing it. So we have a function world() that makes calls to a function agent() (and maybe other logically equivalent copies of it), and agent() can see the source code of everything inclucing itself. We want to write an implementation of agent(), without foreknowledge of what world() looks like, so that it "forces" any world() to return the biggest "possible" answer (scare quotes are intentional).
For example, Newcomb's Problem:
def world():
box1 = 1000
box2 = (agent() == 2) ? 0 : 1000000
return box2 + ((agent() == 2) ? box1 : 0)
Then a possible algorithm for agent() may go as follows. Look for machine-checkable mathematical proofs (up to a specified max length) of theorems of the form "agent()==A implies world()==U" for varying values of A and U. Then, after searching for some time, take the biggest found val...
Please try to write posts that show an awareness of the existing literature on the subject from within Less Wrong.
I generally like this post, and am unsure why it was voted down. However, I think that you need to separate "not useful" from "not true"- while it may or may not be true that neither is particularly useful in real life, under the definitions accepted by LW, both are almost certainly true.
To predict anything really sizable, like for instance, how the earth came to be as it is, or even how little-old-me became what I am, or even why I did a particular thing a moment ago, would take more resources and time than can be found in the life of our universe.
Surely if the universe is deterministic, "the resources and time [that] can be found in the life of the universe" provides an upper bound on what you need to predict anything. Since, after all, the universe is 'predicting' it just fine without exceeding those requirements.
There's plenty of posts to be written on this topic, but this one needs a bit more work. References to the sequences, especially the Reductionism and Mind Projection Fallacy sections and stating what parts you disagree with or are expanding upon is a good idea.
More specific problems with the post:
I don't think "a robust consensus answer" is what I'm hoping for - I'd rather have actual truth (though I appreciate when truth and consensus converge, it can take awhile).
I like the rock analogy a lot, but you don't go far enough. We remove the ro
The illusion of free will is an artifact of the incomplete knowledge of the mind's knowledge of the brain. It is not practical for an organism to evolve a brain to take be aware of its own functioning on the physical level of the decision making. An accurate simulation of a mind need not rely on a brain at all. We hope.
While we can say that actions are a result of purely physical processes, it is necessary to create abstract models of other people's projected actions in order to influence them. In recent years we have developed electromagnetic methods of o...
@ orthonormal
you said- I agree. But I think that there is actually some feature of the (deterministic) act of choosing which leads a person to falsely believe that their choice is nondeterministic, and that by analyzing this we learn something interesting and important about cognition.
Very true. so what do you make of reconciling the two? Do we castigate them both in hopes of finding something out that is hiding in the shadows? The nexus of the matter is "belief" and in order to have a sound belief one should know as many facts about the subject...
@Thomblake sorry about the message thing. Im still getting used to how this site works..
You substantiate analogies with proof. Basically im saying that your analogies don't hold water perhaps i'm using confusing vernacular.
Let me say one thing before moving on. I hate debating just to debate, for me when i involve myself in a debate it is to gain more insight. So i am totally open to your point of view if it sheds some light on this subject, the bottom line is if someone has a solid angle that i'm missing than i welcome it.
Ok that being said. it sounds ...
Ok i finally get the etiquette thing of this system. :)
Sorry i am a straight shooter. I will work on my wording, however i still stand by my claims of conjecture vrs facts.
I think of moral questions as those for which there is no good answer. All courses of action and of inaction are bad in a moral question. Often because the possible answers pit the good of the individual against the good of the group, but also pit different groups and their interests against each other.
What do groups have to do with anything? They don't make decisions, people do. If a particular individual is a consequentialist, they should take whichever action is expected to produce the most utility. The truth or usefulness of determinism and free will might influence how we think about assigning moral blame or praise, but they don't tell us what we should do.
There are two false assumptions in the above: 1) that the universe runs on physical laws does not mean it necessarily runs on deterministic laws.
2) Following from that, since laws are not necessarily deterministic, libertarian free will, does not necessarily involve overriding them. Libertarian free will could be found within an indeterministic (but otherwise throughly physical and material) universe.
We cannot just predict what the outcomes of our decisions will be, we really, really have to go through the whole process of making them. We cannot even pretend that decisions are determined until after we have finish making them.
And what about an AI that can predict it's own decisions (because it knows its source code)?
Also, are you a compatibilist?
Um.
Sometime ago I posted to decision-theory-workshop an idea that may be relevant here. Hopefully it can shed some light on the "solution to free will" generally accepted on LW, which I agree with.
Imagine the following setting for decision theory: a subprogram that wants to "control" the output of a bigger program containing it. So we have a function world() that makes calls to a function agent() (and maybe other logically equivalent copies of it), and agent() can see the source code of everything inclucing itself. We want to write an implementation of agent(), without foreknowledge of what world() looks like, so that it "forces" any world() to return the biggest "possible" answer (scare quotes are intentional).
For example, Newcomb's Problem:
def world():
box1 = 1000
box2 = (agent() == 2) ? 0 : 1000000
return box2 + ((agent() == 2) ? box1 : 0)
Then a possible algorithm for agent() may go as follows. Look for machine-checkable mathematical proofs (up to a specified max length) of theorems of the form "agent()==A implies world()==U" for varying values of A and U. Then, after searching for some time, take the biggest found value of U and return the corresponding A. For example, in Newcomb's Problem there are easy theorems, derivable even without looking at the source code of agent(), that agent()==2 implies world()==1000 and agent()==1 implies world()==1000000.
The reason this algorithm works is very weird, so you might want to read the following more than once. Even though most of the theorems proved by the agent are based on false premises (because it is logically impossible for agent() to return a value other than the one it actually returns), the one specific theorem that leads to maximum U must turn out to be correct, because the agent makes its premise true by outputting A. In other words, an agent implemented like that cannot derive a contradiction from the logically inconsistent premises it uses, because then it would "imagine" it could obtain arbitrarily high utility (a contradiction implies anything, including that), therefore the agent would output the corresponding action, which would prove the Peano axioms inconsistent or something.
To recap: the above describes a perfectly deterministic algorithm, implementable today in any ordinary programming language, that "inspects" an unfamiliar world(), "imagines" itself returning different answers, "chooses" the best one according to projected consequences, and cannot ever "notice" that the other "possible" choices are logically inconsistent with determinism. Even though the other choices are in fact inconsistent, and the agent has absolutely perfect "knowledge" of itself and the world, and as much CPU time as it wants. (All scare quotes are, again, intentional.)
It is not news that, with ingenuity, (apparent) Alternative Possibilities can be accommodated within determinism. It is even less news that Alternative Possibilities can be accommodated (without the need for ingenuity) within indeterminism. The question is why the determinism based approach is seen around here as "the" solution, when the evidence for the actual existence of (in)determinism remains unclear.
For a very long time, philosophy has presented us with two straw men in combat with one another and we are expected to take sides. Both straw men appear to have been proved true and also proved false. The straw men are Determinism and Free Will. I believe that both, in any useful sense, are false. Let me tell a little story.
Mary's story
Mary is walking down the street, just for a walk, without a firm destination. She comes to a T where she must go left or right and she looks down each street finding them about the same. She decides to go left. She feels she has, like a free little birdie, exercised her will without constraint. As she crosses the next intersection she is struck by a car and suffers serious injury. Now she spends much time thinking about how she could have avoided being exactly where she was, when she was. She believes that things have causes and she tries to figure out where a different decision would have given a different outcome and how she could have known to make the alternative decision. 'If only..' ideas crowd into her thoughts. She believes simultaneously that her actions have causes and that there are valid alternatives to her actions. She is using both deterministic logic and free will logic, neither alone leads to 'If only..' scenarios – it takes both. If only she had noticed that the next intersection on the right had traffic lights but on the left didn't. If only she had not noticed the shoe store on the left. What is more she is doing this in order to change some aspect of her decision making so that it will be less likely to put her in hospital, again this is not in keeping with either logic. But really both forms of logic are deeply flawed. What Mary is actually attempting is to do maintenance on her decision making processes so that they can learn whatever is available to be learned from her unfortunate experience.
What is useless about determinism
There is a big difference between being 'in principle' determined and being determined in any useful way. If I accept that all is caused by the laws of physics (and we know these laws – a big if) this does not accomplish much. I still cannot predict events except trivially: in general but not in full detail, in simple not complex situations, extremely shortly into the future rather than longer term, etc. To predict anything really sizable, like for instance, how the earth came to be as it is, or even how little-old-me became what I am, or even why I did a particular thing a moment ago, would take more resources and time than can be found in the life of our universe. Being determined does not mean being predictable. It does not help us to know that our decisions are determined because we still have to actually make the decisions. We cannot just predict what the outcomes of our decisions will be, we really, really have to go through the whole process of making them. We cannot even pretend that decisions are determined until after we have finish making them.
What is useless about freewill
There is a big difference between being free in the legal, political, human rights type of freedom. To be free from particular, named restraints is something we all understand. But the free in 'free will' is a freedom from the cause and effect of the material world. This sort of freedom has to be magical, supernatural, spiritual or the like. That in itself is not a problem for a belief system. It is the idea that something that is not material can act on the material world that is problematic. Unless you have everything spiritual or everything material, you have the problem of interaction. What is the 'lever' that the non-material uses to move the material, or vice versa. It is practically impossible to explain how free will can affect the brain and body. If you say God does it, you have raised a personal problem to a cosmic one but the problem remains – how can the non-physical interact with the physical? Free will is of little use in explaining our decision process. We make our decisions rather than having them dictated to us but it is physical processes in the brain that really do the decision making, not magic. And we want our decisions to be relevant, effective and in contact with the physical world, not ineffective. We actually want a 'lever' on the material world. Decisions taken in some sort of causal vacuum are of no use to us.
The question we want answered
Just because philosophers pose questions and argue various answers does not mean that they are finding answers. No, they are make clear the logical ramifications of questions and each answer. This is a useful function and not to be undervalued, but it is not a process that gives robust answers. As an example, we have Zeno's paradox about the arrow that can never landing because its distance to landing can always be divided in half, but on the other hand, the knowledge that it does actually land. Philosophers used to argue about how to treat this paradox, but they never solved it. It lost its power when mathematics developed the concept of the sum of a infinite series. When the distance is cut in half, so is the time. When the infinite series of remaining distance reaches zero so does the series of time remaining. We do not know how to end an infinite series but we know where it ends and when it ends – on the ground the moment the arrow hits it. The sum of an infinite series can still be considered somewhat paradoxical but as an obscure mathematical question. Generally, philosophers are no longer very interested in the Zeno paradox, certainly not its answer. Philosophy is useful but not because it supplies consensus answers. Mathematics, science and their cousins, like history, supply answers. Philosophy has set up a dichotomy between free will and determinism and explored each idea to exhaustion but not with any consensus about which is correct. That is not the point of philosophy. Science has to rephrase the problem as, 'how exactly are decisions made?' That is the question we need an answer to, a robust consensus answer.
But here is the rub
This move to a scientific answer is disturbing to very many people because the answer is assumed to have effects on our notions of morals, responsibility and identity. Civilization as we know it may fall apart. Exactly how we think we make decisions once we study the question without reference to determinism or freewill seems OK. But if the answer robs us of morals, responsibility or identity, than it is definitely not OK. Some people have the notion that what we should do is just pretend that we have free will, while knowing that our actions are determined. To me this is silly: believe two incompatible and flawed ideas at the same time rather than believe a better, single idea. It reminds me of the solution proposed to deal with Copernicus – use the new calculations while believing that the earth does not revolve. Of course, we do not yet have the scientific answer (far from it) although we think we can see the general gist of it. So we cannot say how it will affect society. I personally feel that it will not affect us negatively but that is just a personal opinion. Neuroscience will continue to grow and we will soon have a very good idea of how we actually make decisions, whether this knowledge is welcomed or not. It is time we stopped worrying about determinism and free will and started preparing ourselves to live with ourselves and others in a new framework.
Identity, Responsibility, Morals
We need to start thinking of ourselves as whole beings, one entity from head to toe: brain and body, past and future, from birth to death. Forgot the ancient religious idea of a mind imprisoned in a body. We have to stop the separation of me and my body, me and my brain. Me has to be all my parts together, working together. Me cannot equate to consciousness alone.
Of course I am responsible for absolutely everything I do including something I do while sleep walking. Further a rock that falls from a cliff is responsible for blocking the road. It is what we do about responsibility that differs. We remove the rock but we do not blame or punish it. We try to help the sleep walker overcome the dangers of sleep walking to himself and others. But if I as a normal person hit someone in the face, my responsibility is not greater than the rock or the sleep walker but my treatment will be much, much different. I am expected to maintain my decision-making apparatus in good working order. The way the legal system will work might be a little different from now, but not much. People will be expected to know and follow the rules of society.
I think of moral questions as those for which there is no good answer. All courses of action and of inaction are bad in a moral question. Often because the possible answers pit the good of the individual against the good of the group, but also pit different groups and their interests against each other. No matter what we believe about how decisions are made, we are still forced to make them and that includes moral ones. The more we know about decisions, the more likely we are to make moral decisions we are proud of (or least guilty or ashamed of), but there is no guarantee. There is still a likelihood that we will just muddle along trying to find the lesser of two evils with no more success than at present.
Why should we believe that being closer to the truth or having a more accurate understanding is going to make things worst rather than better? Shouldn't we welcome having a map that is closer to the territory? It is time to be open to ideas outside the artificial determinism/freewill dichotomy.