= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ArisKatsaris comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (232)
Eliezer's solution is to say, to give it the strongest interpretation I can, "us being determined by physics doesn't make us not us. Therefore if we seemed to have free will before figuring out physics, we have free will with it too." This is like approaching the heap problem by saying "I know when it's a heap by looking at it, so there's no problem with saying (thing X) is a heap." Approaching the problem from "below" would be an argument like "a deterministic object like a billiard ball doesn't seem to have free will, so we don't either."
Like in the heap problem, there's a fundamental divide that wasn't addressed. Dissolving the problem should involve asking the question "what do we mean when we say "free will?"," and trying to answer as well as Yvain did about disease.
It might be helpful to give away some of my thoughts (and probably someone else's): one thing free will means is "unpredictable." But there's no problem with having unpredictable objects in the real world, and not just by quantum-mechanical randomness, which doesn't seem much like free will. You can have objects where the quickest way to predict them is to just watch them run. Humans are such objects - there's no way to predict a human with 100% certainty except to watch them. Two pieces of metal can also make such an object,so obviously there are a few other parts of the definition of free will. But I think unpredictability is what a lot of people see missing in the real world (or, more philosophically, in a deterministic universe) that causes them to reject free will, so it's a good one to share.
EDIT: Apparently the unpredictable thing may have been thought first by Daniel Dennet, though he seems to use it as a thing by itself rather than one part of a definition. Also, I edited the first paragraph slightly to better translate things into the heap problem.
Edit Two: If whoever downvoted simple stuff like this (or someone who wants to express objections in their stead) wants to reply, that would be nice of them.
If unpredictability is part of free will, then I don't want free will.
I want to be governed by my own purposes - I don't want my behaviour to be random and unpredictable.
Even when playing Paper, Stone, Scissors?
I think that when the word 'unpredictable' is used, it is important to specify: unpredictable by whom?
In "Paper, Stone, Scissors," like in other contests and conflicts, (and same as in humour), you just need to be unpredicted, not really to be "unpredictable". True complete unpredictability is neither good humour ("Two men walk into a bar, then the moon exploded. Why aren't you laughing?"), nor good gaming ("My rocket-launcher defeats your paper, your stone and your scissors"), nor good storytelling ("The killer was this guy that had never appeared, and you could have never guessed at, and which were were never clued about").
Sure, it would be dull if everyone predicted everything everyone else did; but that's different to being capable of being predicted in the theoretical/philosophical sense that was being discussed -- in the sense of existing inside a deterministic universe, and that we theoretically could predict other people's behaviours.
A good analysis.
What I am struggling with here is an intuition that the whole idea of unpredictability in "the theoretical/philosophical sense" is a bad, ill-formed idea. I know roughly what it means to have predictability as a two-place predicate. P(E, A) means that person A (a person equipped with the theory and empirical information that A has) is capable of predicting event E. Fine. But now how do we turn that into a one-place predicate. Do we define:
or is it
or is it
or is it something more complicated, involving light cones and levels of knowledge that are still supernatural.
The thing is, even if you are able to come up with a precise definition, my intuition makes me doubt that anything so contrived could be of any possible use in a philosophical enquiry.
You appear to be conflating random and unpredictable. A double pendulum is not random, in the typical sense, its course is merely unknown. You can be governed by your own purposes and still be unpredictable to someone else, not in the sense that you go out of your way to defy all predictions, but in the sense that such predictions are never totally accurate - the fastest way to find out what a human will do with 100% accuracy is to watch them.
This is logically rude. You must judge on the whole of consequences, and accept or reject any argument only based on its validity, without singling out particular detail.