Okay, I said I wasn't gonna respond again, but I'd like to give you one last hypothetical, and then ask you a question regarding it.
Alice and Bob are taken by aliens and each (separately) given 4 choices arranged in a 2x2 table.
Column A, Row 1: Carl is promoted to a significantly higher-paying position that he'll also be enjoying more
Column A, Row 2: Carl is (unknowingly to him) implanted with a well-designed artificial heart which will be sure to secure his health against all heart-related issues.
Column B, Row 1: Carl is demoted to a significantly lower-paying position that will also be enjoying less.
Column B, Row 2: Carl is (unknowingly to him) implanted with a badly-designed artificial heart which will be sure to worsen his health in regards to heart-related issues.
"Choose Column and Row for the action you want to take" say the Aliens. "Of the ones you choose, please state also which column or row that will be Definite, and which will be Stochastic"
"What do you mean by 'definite' and 'stochastic'?" ask both Alice and Bob.
"We'll definitely do something in the element which you pronounce Definite, but there's only a 55% chance we'll go with the element you deem Stochastic -- we'll be flipping a non-fair coin to determine that one with your choice corresponding to just the more likely side".
Alice does her calculation. Her values and ethics all deterministically argue in favor of giving primary importance to Column A (the 'good' results) -- she's definite about that, nor can she imagine a recognizable self of hers that would choose column B against a random individual. Then she calculates with significantly less certainty that A2 (the better heart cell) seems better than the A1 cell (the better job cell). "For 'Definite', I pick column A, For 'Stochastic' I pick row 2 -- In short the better heart with 55% probability, and the better job with 45% probability " she tells the aliens.
"Apologies", the aliens say, "but the coin went the other way than your preference. and we'll have to do A1 instead -- give Carl the better job instead of the better heart."
Bob does his calculation. He has very strong ethics against people messing with other people's bodies against their will. Even being given unfairly a worse job pales in comparison to the gross aversion Bob has against unconsented medical procedures. So with great definity following deterministically from Bob's values Bob chooses "Row 1" as his primary column. He's significantly less certain about column 1 or column 2. Promoting or Demoting a random individual he's not aware of -- either could be judged fair or unfair if he had knowledge about Carl which he doesn't. With some uncertainty he goes for A1 rather than B1. "For Definite I choose Row 1 (the jobs row). For Stochastic I choose Column A -- in short give him the better job."
"Congratulations, the unfair coin we flipped went with your choice. A1it'll be."
So, after a decision process with both stochastic and deterministic elements, Alice and Bob both ended up causing the selection of A1. But Alice had "A" as the deterministic element, and Bob had "1" as the deterministic element.
Now here's my question: If you had to estimate their characters, values and personalities, wouldn't you be able to attribute more meaning to the Deterministic element, instead of the one left to partial randomness? The partially random element would indeed completely mislead you in regards to Alice's decision process.
"if it is true elements of the future world can be traced back to my decisions in a way that stops there --whereas under determinist I am just one link in a very long chain."
You assign good connotations to "stops there" and bad connotations to "one link in a very long chain". But when I speak about "meaning", I don't mean 'good meaning' or 'bad meaning', I mean the amount of measurable information we can derive from the choice in question. Meaning as a metric which could theoretically be measurable in bits. And there's 0 bits of information that can be derived from a truly random element. But from "one link in a very long chains" we can derive bits of information about both the past and the future -- what the person may have likely done in the past, what they're likely to choose in the future.
Now I'm hopefully done.
Now here's my question: If you had to estimate their characters, values and personalities, wouldn't you be able to attribute more meaning to the Deterministic element, instead of the one left to partial randomness? The partially random element would indeed completely mislead you in regards to Alice's decision process.
I don't see how any of that is relevant to FW. Firstly, you are not contrasting deterministic decision making by an individual with stochastic decision making by an individual; the stochastic decision is supplied by someone else. It is not ...
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.”