It does not bother me at all, since it doesn't actually address any of the factors that are relevant to my compatibilist position on free will.
The first part to understand is that I see the term "free will" as having a whole range of different shades of meaning. Most of these involve questions of corrigibility, adaptability, predictability, moral responsibility, and so on. Many of these shades of meaning are related to each other. Most of them are compatible with determinism, which is why I would describe my position as mostly compatibilist.
The description given in this post doesn't appear to be related to any of these, but with mere physical correlation in a toy universe simplified beyond the point of recognizability or relevance. Further questions would need to be answered in order to even begin to consider whether the agent in this post's question has "free will" in any of the relevant senses. For example:
In a fairly "central" example, my expectation would be:
In this case I would say that this agent (singular, due to the third answer) has free will in most important respects (mostly due to answer 2 but also somewhat due to 1), can be said to choose CA or CB, influences FA or FB but does not choose them, and likewise does not choose HA or HB.
If you have different answers to those questions, my answers and the reasons behind them may change.
Thanks. One clarifying question: When you say that the agent "can be said to choose CA or CB, influences FA or FB but does not choose them, and likewise does not choose HA or HB", do you mean that they influence but do not choose HA or HB, or that they neither influence nor choose HA or HB? (My guess is the latter, because you would restrict 'influence' to forward-in-time causation, but I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding.)
I think the reason my little scenario seems irrelevant to you is related to disagreement over this:
...I see the term "free will"
It doesn't bother me, because I'm me, with the propensity to make the choices I'm determined to make. If I had chosen otherwise, I would not be me.
Suppose I love chocolate ice cream and hate vanilla ice cream. When I choose to eat chocolate ice cream, it's an expression of the fact that I prefer chocolate ice cream. I have free will in the sense that if I preferred vanilla instead, I could have chosen vanilla, but in fact I prefer chocolate so I won't choose vanilla.
I believe that Eliezer's analysis of "free will" answers your question. Free will (he says) is neither outside of an otherwise lawful universe, nor incompatible with a lawful universe, nor merely compatible with a lawful universe, but requires a lawful universe. He dubs this position "requiredism".
I find this not merely convincing, but obviously right. What do you think?
This is somewhat dated in the sense that LW-style decision theory later converged on treating agents-that-make-decisions as abstract algorithms rather than as their instances embedded in the world, see discussion of "algorithm" axis of classifying decision theories in this post.
Requiredism holds that determinism is an advantage to fee will because the connection between a decision and the resulting action is deterministic. Randomness, or at least, too much randomness in the wrong place, would prevent me from acting reliably on my decisions Of course, determinism also removes the elbow room, the ability to have decided differently, that is of such concern to libertarians. Determinism is only an overall advantage to free will if elbow room is unimportant or impossible, so Requiredism needs compatibilism as a starting point.
I don't...
If 'lawful' just means 'not completely random' then I agree. But I've never been convinced that there's no conceivable third option beside 'random' and 'deterministic'. Setting aside whether there's a non-negligible chance that it's true, do you think the idea that consciousness plays some mysterious-to-us causal role -- one that isn't accurately captured by our concepts of randomness or determinism -- is definitely incoherent?
I think what you may be seeing on LW is a reluctance to use the term "free will". I hope it is, since I think it's a terribly confusing term. I don't think "free will" is a coherent concept in an intuitive definition of the phrase. What would such a thing mean, and would you want what you've defined?
I think what people are usually thinking of as "free will" is better called self-determination; the ability to determine one's own future according to one's preferences. (This might include changing one's preferences, if one prefers to do that when finding certain types of new evidence.) This is the only type of "free will" I've ever thought or heard of that's worth wanting (see Dennett's book of the same name).
If we assume that I know about HA or HB, my choice of FA or FB is self-determination. If HA and HB is the person I'm dealing with having stolen money in the past, and FA and FB are me choosing to do business with them or not, I want my beliefs about how to treat people to be the determining cause of my actions.
I'd say that I do have control of the future, because my brain, and specifically the parts that implement my beliefs about ethics and game theory, is what links the past HA to the future FA, just as I prefer to see such states linked.
I wouldn't say this is necessarily a compatibilist position; it's more of a position of "Are you sure you know what you mean by free will? You say it like it's something worth wanting, but I can't see how it would be if it's not compatible with determinism".
LIke most philosophical questions, it boils down to defining the question. If you say exactly what you mean by free will, you'll have your answer.
Or at least an approximate answer, with details to be filled in by empirical observations. I actually disagree with Dennett that we have "all of the free will worth wanting". I think our cognitive biases prevent us from acting based on our beliefs an awful lot of the time. I'd say we have something like 50% of the self-determination worth wanting.
No, I don't think it bothers me and I'm not sure why it should.
When I'm making a choice CA I indeed reveal that I'm in a universe where I'm choosing CA, and HA that lead to this, had happened.
If I lived in a universe with an omniscient God who knew my every choice, then when I make a choice, I determine the knowledge of such God.
Maybe I'm missing something. Could you explain why it bothers you?
From the responses I'm getting, I think I failed to communicate anything that doesn't quickly boil down to the usual crux(es) between compatibilists and incompatibilists. But to try to answer your question:
I think 'free will' in its usual sense requires some capacity to influence the future via choice-making. I thought that one of the standard compatibilist positions was that we do influence the future via our choices; both may be fully determined by initial conditions and physical laws, but when the chain of causation between past state X and future...
It seems to me that your confusion is contending there are two past/present states (HA+A / HB+B) when in fact reality is simply H -> S -> C. There is one history, one state, and one choice that you will end up making. The idea that there is a HA and HB and so on is wrong, since that history H has already happened and produced state S.
Further, C is simply the output of your decision algorithm, which result we don't know until the algorithm is run. Your choice could perhaps be said to reveal something previously not known about H and S, but it doesn't distinguish between two histories or states, only your state of information about the single history/state that already existed. (It also doesn't determine anything about H and S that isn't "this decision algorithm outputs C under condition S".)
Indeed, even presenting it as if there is actually a CA and CB from which you will choose is itself inaccurate: you're already going to choose whatever you're going to choose, and that output is already determined even if you have yet to run the algorithm that will let you find out what that choice is. The future states CA and CB never actually exist either -- they are simulations you create in your mind as part of the decision algorithm.
Or to put it another way, since the future state C is a complex mix of your choice and other events taking place in the world, it will not actually match whatever simulated option you thought about. So the entire A/B disjunction throughout is about distinctions that only exist in your mental map, not in the territory outside your head.
So, the real world is H->S->C, and in your mind, you consider simulated or hypothetical A's and B's. Your decision process resolves which of A and B you feel accurately reflects H/S/C, but cannot affect anything but C. (And even there, the output was already determinable-in-principle before you started -- you just didn't know what the output was going to be.)
It seems to me that your confusion is contending there are two past/present states (HA+A / HB+B) when in fact reality is simply H -> S -> C. There is one history, one state, and one choice that you will end up making. The idea that there is a HA and HB and so on is wrong, since that history H has already happened and produced state S.
I guess I invited this interpretation with the phrasing "there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in". But what I meant could be rephrased as "either the propositions 'HA happened, A is the curre...
Let's look at the mechanism closer:
"My future is FA, because my current state is A." This is standard causality: A causes FA by a sequence of steps that follow the laws of physics.
"My history was HA, because my current state is A." This is anthropic reasoning: technically, it was HA causing A by a sequence of steps, but if we ask "given that I am currently A, how does this limit my possible histories?" the answer might be that only such history is HA.
These two are not the same, but an exact explanation would require explaining exactly what is the difference between the past and the future, how the arrow of time works, etc., which I am not really sure myself how it works, and would probably involve making statements about quantum physics and other complicated things.
It might also work differently in different universes. For example, imagine a deterministic universe of the Game of Life, assuming that it can contain intelligent beings similar to us. For a current state A, there is only one future FA. But there could have been multiple different histories HA that resulted in A. (Or perhaps there was no such history, and the universe was created just now.)
The short version is that for practical purposes, the future and the past, causality and anthropic reasoning, seem to work differently.
Nobody, including me, can know for sure what the choice is until I make it, and the choice depends on chaos. Even if it's technically deterministic, it depends on how I resolve the noise that is emitted from chaos. If there's true randomness in the world then that additionally helps me be the origin of the choice, rather than deterministic noise, but even with only noise from chaos rather than randomness, the rest of the universe cannot possibly know my choice until I stabilize on it because sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that the details that determine how my brain will wiggle around through neural consensus space are unobservable to any other system no matter how superintelligent, and the choice gets to depend on input from my entire brain. In this sense, my brain is still the causal bottleneck through which my choices depend, and my entire brain is the bottleneck; noise from chaos means that if I might have chosen a way that mismatches my full network of preferences, my neurons get a chance to discuss it before settling. Biases and shortcut reasoning bypass this partially, of course.
As a result, even if technically my choice is strictly a logical consequence of my brain state, that logical consequence is not written to the universe until I resolve it, and the chaos means that every physical system besides my brain must retain logical uncertainty about my choice until it is resolved which way my neurons discuss and settle. In a fully deterministic universe, free will is logical hyperstition.
Some interesting resources on the topic. I have watched the videos, but I only skimmed the search results. Bulleted summaries via kagi.com's universal summarizer in 'key moments' mode.
If it's new to you, I'd also suggest an overview of chaos theory:
Or if 10 minutes is a bit long, here's a 1 minute animation showing divergence among chaotic trajectories that start out coherent; there's a moment at :26 where the pendulums lose sync, briefly all at the same edge of stability; however, this is not a chaotic system which seeks the edge of stability, and the pendulums quickly fall in different directions off the saddle point. in contrast a system at the edge of chaos is on a saddle point at almost all times!
What compatibilists standardly mean by a free choice is a choice that is not forced or hindered. Neither of your choices is clearly free in that sense.
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future.
Ok, but that could be zero., in both cases. Controlling the future, in the sense of being able to steer towards different possible futures, is specifically whats missing from compatibilist as opposed to libertarian free will.
I think what most people are trying to point at when they talk about free will is something along the lines of ‘ability to do otherwise’ in the sense that, when looking at a choice in retrospect, we would say a person ‘had the ability to do otherwise’ than they actually did.
Compatibilism is only able to account for CHDO in the weak sense that you weren't being forced to do one particular thing by another agent. Nonetheless, only one decision was ever possible, given determinism.
What compatibilists standardly mean by a free choice is a choice that is not forced or hindered. Neither of your choices is clearly free in that sense.
To clarify: I meant to refer to a choice that is free from the kinds of hindrance or coercive influence that would render it 'unfree' in the compatibilist sense.
Ok, but that could be zero., in both cases. Controlling the future, in the sense of being able to steer towards different possible futures, is specifically whats missing from compatibilist as opposed to libertarian free will.
Are you a compatibilist y...
LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question:
That's not been my impression. I would have summarized it more as "LW (a) agrees that LFW doesn't exist and (b) understands that debating compatibilism doesn't make sense because it's just a matter of definition"
Personally, I certainly don't consider myself a compatibilist (though this is really just a matter of preference since there are no factual disagreements). My brief answer to "does free will exist" is "no". The longer answer is the within-physics stick figure drawing.
Perhaps what's really going on to give me that impression is:
Which doesn't actually imply that a high proportion would identify themselves as compatibilists. (I thought there would be survey results to clear this up, but all I could find with a quick search was a very old one with only hard-to-decode raw data accessible.)
I am not a compatibilist, so not my answer, but Sean Carroll says, in his usual fashion, that free will is an emergent phenomenon, akin to Dennett's intentional stance. This AMA has an in-depth discussion https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/05/13/ama-may-2021/. I bolded his definition at the very end.
whether you’re a compatibilist or an in compatibilist has nothing at all to do with whether the laws of physics are deterministic. I cannot possibly emphasize this enough. What matters is that there are laws. Whether those laws are deterministic or not makes zero difference to whether you’re a compatibilist or an in compatibilist. You both believe that there are laws, okay.
Whether you believe the fundamental laws are a pilot wave theory of quantum mechanics or a spontaneous collapse theory of quantum mechanics, one of which is deterministic and one of which is not, who cares? That doesn’t affect whether you’re a compatibilist or not, so don’t label yourself a hard determinist, that is not the point. You would still be anti-free will if you’re an incompatibilist, even if the GRW theory of quantum mechanics or Penrose’s theory turns out to be correct, even if determinism is not there. It’s the fact that there are laws that matters.
The compatibilist, what are you compatible about? You’re saying that the belief in free will, that describing human beings as agents that make decisions, that make choices, is compatible with human beings being made of either neurons or elementary particles or whatever you want that obey the laws of physics. A compatibilist says you can describe the world in different ways that are compatible with each other, even though they use very different vocabularies.
One way of describing the world is sort of at the microscopic level where you’re made of a bunch of particles. They’re obeying the laws of physics, whatever those laws, are deterministic or indeterministic, and there’s no free will there. Free will does not enter the Lagrangian for the standard model of particle physics, okay. No one thinks it does. And then there’s another level, there’s a biological level, and then there’s finally a human level where you have people, okay, and the compatibilist says, people make choices, this doesn’t seem like a very controversial thing to say, but apparently it is.
So here’s one way of thinking about it. Alice and Bob are in a car. Alice is driving, Bob is navigating with his Google Maps and they’re looking for a restaurant, and Bob says, oh, turn left up here at this intersection, the restaurant will be right there once we turn left. Alice turns left and there’s no restaurant there. And Alice says, what’s going on? You told me to turn left. I turned left because you told me to turn left. And Bob says, yeah, no, I knew the restaurant wasn’t there, but the laws of physics said that that would be what I would say, and that’s what you would do, so I’m not really to blame for anything that happened.
Nobody in their right mind talks that way. Everyone in the world who is not crazy says Alice made a choice to turn left, why? Because Bob told her to turn left and she trusted that Bob was going to give her the correct information, right? Bob made a choice to tell Alice something, why? Well, I don’t know, there’s something perverse in Bob’s mind that made him play a little game or something like that. Literally nobody refuses to talk that way in the real world. Now, there are people who pretend to not talk that way, they will say, oh no, Alice and Bob didn’t make any choices, but when it comes right down to it, these people are constantly trying to convince you to choose to not believe in free will.
So you can’t act that way, you can’t live in the world, because it’s not a good description of the world at the human level to act as if human beings don’t make choices. The reason why compatibilists think that it’s sensible to talk about human beings as agents that make choices is because that’s the best theory we have of people, and it literally is everyone’s theory. There’s no one who doesn’t have that theory, because it works, it’s true. And I did the podcast with Sam Harris a long time ago, so to be, that’s a little frustration that comes out from me, and I will vent my frustration here, and it’s not just Sam Harris, it’s many other people.
I don’t think I have ever met an incompatibilist who could correctly describe to me what compatibilists think. There’s… Only straw compatibilists live in the mind of incompatibilists, and the incompatibilists seem to think that if they really… If you really believe in the laws of physics, they can construct a logical cage to get you to admit that we are made of particles that obey the laws of physics. But I admit that, and the discussion with Sam was incredibly frustrating, ’cause that’s what he was trying to do, he was trying to say like, okay, if I knew all of the laws in all of the particles and I was Laplace’s demon, and he’s pushing against an open door. I admit all that.
If you describe the universe as microscopically in the laws of physics, then it obeys the laws of physics, and there’s no free will there, that’s just not the point from the point of view of a compatibilist. And this is why it’s very important to realize that Laplace’s demon doesn’t exist, and none of us is anywhere close to Laplace’s demon. Now, there are interesting questions to talk about that are not that question. The interesting questions are, and this gets into some of the questions here, what about the edge cases where it becomes less and less useful to describe people as agents making choices based on good reasons? Like what if you are a drug addict or you have some brain damage or something like that, and you’re just… You’re under a compulsion that forces you to do something.
And then I would say, indeed, it becomes less and less useful to describe that person as an agent making rational choices. And we do… We don’t describe those people as robustly as agents making rational choices, so that discussion, the practical level discussion about how to treat people who suffer in different ways from an inability to be a completely rational agent, which we all do, none of us are completely rational, there are degrees of it, so how do you deal with that in the real world? That’s an interesting discussion to have.
But this whether or not to label it free will discussion is to me the most boring thing in the world, because there aren’t people who don’t talk about other people as choice makers in my mind. And if you are someone who believes in the laws of physics deep down, but you say, but I will, of course, in my everyday life, I will talk about people making choices, then there’s a word for what you are, it’s called compatibilism. That’s what you are.
whether you’re a compatibilist or an in compatibilist has nothing at all to do with whether the laws of physics are deterministic.
Yes. It's a conceptual issue to do with what "free will" means ... and a physicist would have no special insight into that.
You’re saying that the belief in free will, that describing human beings as agents that make decisions, that make choices,
"Making choices" is setting the bar very low indeed. I don't think Carrol undestands libertarians too well.
There are a number of main concerns about free will:
Concerns about conscious volition, whether your actions are decided consciously or unconsciously.
Concerns about moral responsibility, punishment and reward.
Concerns about "elbow room", the ability to "have done other wise", regret about the past, whether and in what sense it is possible to change the future.
And this is why it’s very important to realize that Laplace’s demon doesn’t exist, and none of us is anywhere close to Laplace’s demon.
Which has no bearing at all on the existence of determinism, or free will.
Determinism also needs to be distinguished from predictability. A universe that unfolds deterministically is a universe that can be predicted by an omniscient being which can both capture a snapshot of all the causally relevant events, and have a perfect knowledge of the laws of physics.
The existence of such a predictor, known as a Laplace's demon is not a prerequisite for the actual existence of determinism, it is just a way of explaining the concept. It is not contradictory to assert that the universe is deterministic but unpredeictable.
If you are unable to make predictions in a deterministic universe, it is still deterministic, and you still lack the ability to have done otherwise in the libertarian sense, so the existence of free will still depends on whether that is conceptually important, which can't be determined by predictability. Predictability does not matter in itself, it matters insofar it relates to determinis m.
Even if you are not compatibilist, there are certainly some non-free choices (maybe by non-humans or whatever is your criteria) and they would exhibit the same problem.
Could you give an example? (I'm not trying to be a smartarse, just trying to make sure I understand the point you're making.)
For example, there is a rubber ball, and the world could be in two states:
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, the ball will fly up, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, the ball will fall down, future FB will happen.
When ball moves, it chooses/reveals which of those two states of the world are reality. Which seems to give the ball just as much control over the past as it has over the future.
The confusion is resolved if you realize that both A and B here are mental simulations. When you observe the ball moving, it allows you to discard some of your simulations, but this doesn't affect the past or future, which already were whatever they were.
To view the ball as affecting the past is to confuse the territory (which already was in some definite state) with your map (which was in a state of uncertainty re: the territory).
Thanks. I get what you mean now, and while I instinctively want to respond that it's a bit beside the point, when I think it through it probably does cut to the core of why a compatibilist would be unbothered by this.
I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question:
Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3]
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
When I make my choice (CA or CB), I'm choosing/revealing which of those two states of the world are (my) reality. They're package deals: CA follows from HA just as surely as it leads to FA, and the same holds for state B.
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future. In whatever sense I 'exercise free will' to make CA real and bring about FA, I also make it the case that HA is the true history.
My question is: Does this bother you at all, and if not, why not?[5]
Yes, I've done my own reading, though admittedly it's been a while. I never found a satisfying (to me) answer to this question, and to the best of my recollection I rarely saw it clearly addressed in a form I recognised. If you want to link me to a pre-existing answer, please do, but please be specific: less 'read Dennett' and more 'read this passage of this work'.
Maybe no real choice is truly binary, but for the sake of simplicity let's say this one is. I don't think that changes anything important.
For simplicity I'm taking the physical laws as a given. I don't think that matters unless free will involves in some sense choosing which set of physical laws holds in reality.
Not necessarily in every sense in which you might want to use the word 'control'; you might define that word such that it only applies to causal influence forward in time. But yes in the sense that whatever I can do to make my world the one with FA in it, I can do to make my world the one with HA in it.
If your answer involves the MWI or something like it, I would appreciate if you explained (the relevant bits of) how you conceive of personal identity and consciousness within that framework.