It's not obvious that a determiistic system, such as a billiard ball, is in control of its actions just because it is deterministic.
I believe the billiard ball to be a meaningless analogy because billiard balls have no minds, make no considerations over futures, and have no preferences over futures either. As such billiard balls do not "choose" and do not have wills (free or otherwise).
Control is making choices between possible courses of actions.
By "making choices between" do you mean just "having a conscious preference between" or do you mean "affecting the probability (positively or negatively) of each possible action occuring, according to said conscious preferences"?
If a system is deterministic, the possibilities it considers are merely hypothetical, it if is indeterministic, they are real possibilites that could actually happen.
Consider the configuration space of the preferences of a conscious mind A, and the configuration space of action B. For A to control B means for the various possible configurations in the preferences of Mind A to constrain differently the various probability weights in the configuration space of action B.
E.g. if the configuration of my mind is that I'm a "Fringe" fan, this makes it directly more likely that I'll watch the Fringe series finale. So I have control over my personal action of watching the series.
On the other hand I can't control my heartbeat directly. It is still deterministic in a physical sense (indeed more so than me watching Fringe), but its probability is unconstrained by my preferences. So again my conscious mind's state A doesn't constrain the configuration space of B, and I don't have control over my heartbeat.
Lastly, let's consider an effectively indeterministic system like e.g. dice (use quantum dice for the nitpickers). I can throw the dice, and I can hope for a particular number, but "indeterministic" pretty much means by definition that their result aren't determined by a previous state, which includes my preferences. So I have no control over the dice's outcome, no matter how I would prefer one possible state over another.
So, yeah: determinism by itself isn't sufficient -- the core of the issue is how much my preferences determine the probability weights in the configuration space of actions.
I believe the billiard ball to be a meaningless analogy because billiard balls have no minds, make no considerations over futures, and have no preferences over futures either. As such billiard balls do not "choose" and do not have wills (free or otherwise).
That's kind of what I was getting at.
...By "making choices between" do you mean just "having a conscious preference between" or do you mean "affecting the probability (positively or negatively) of each possible action occuring, according to said conscious preferences&
I'm participating in a university course on free will. On the online forum, someone asked me to summarise Eliezer's solution to the free will problem, and I did it like this. Is it accurate in this form? How should I change it?
“I'll try to summarise Yudkowsky's argument.
As Anneke pointed out, it's kinda difficult to decide what the concept of free will means. How would particles or humans behave differently if they had free will compared to if they didn't? It doesn't seem like our argument is about what we actually expect to see happening.
This is similar to arguing about whether a tree falling in a deserted forest makes any noise. If two people are arguing about this, they probably agree that if we put a microphone in the forest, it would pick up vibrations. And they also agree that no-one is having the sense experience of hearing the tree fall. So they're arguing over what 'sound' means. Yudkowsky proposes a psychological reason why people may have that particular confusion, based on how human brains work.
So with respect to free will, we can instead ask the question, “Why would humans feel like they have free will?” If we can answer this well enough, then hopefully we can dissolve the original question.
It feels like I choose between some of my possible futures. I can imagine waking up tomorrow and going to my Engineering lecture, or staying in my room and using Facebook. Both of those imaginings feel equally 'possible'.
Humans execute a decision making algorithm which is fairly similar to the following one.
List all your possible actions. For my lecture example, that was “Go to lecture” and “Stay home.”
Predict the state of the universe after pretending that you will take each possible action. We end up with “Buck has learnt stuff but not Facebooked” and “Buck has not learnt stuff but has Facebooked.”
Decide which is your favourite outcome. In this case, I'd rather have learnt stuff. So that's option 2.
Execute the action associated with the best outcome. In this case, I'd go to my lecture.
Note that the above algorithm can be made more complex and powerful, for example by incorporating probability and quantifying your preferences as a utility function.
As humans, our brains need the capacity to pretend that we could choose different things, so that we can imagine the outcomes, and pick effectively. The way our brain implements this is by considering those possible worlds which we could reach through our choices, and by treating them as possible.
So now we have a fairly convincing explanation of why it would feel like we have free will, or the ability to choose between various actions: it's how our decision making algorithm feels from the inside.”