But it is not obvious where the border lies between brainwashing/indoctrination and simply sharing information. If we are discussing a mutual acquaintance (let's call her Alice) and I tell you that she did some not nice action yesterday, you may have a desire to shun her the next time you two meet. Is that desire "your own"?
One could say that it is because you simply used your knowledge of her past actions to decide for yourself that you should shun her. On the other hand, one could say that I basically am controlling your actions, because me telling you what I said has affected your actions.
You can very easily yourself make lots of other borderline cases like this, and in fact they come up in real life very often. Consider the case where parents "indoctrinates" their kids with their religion. When the kid grows up to follow that religion, was it the kid's own choice? Again, we find that the distinction is not complete. If the kid had not been raised to that religion, he likely would not be following it. But this is how most people in the world got their religion. I doubt that you go around to everyone and say that deep down they don't really believe in it... But that is a separate discussion.
Anyway, what I am trying to say, is that for every desire one has originated, their likely was some (external) reason why they have that desire. Like me telling them how nasty Alice had been, or their parents telling them that god exists. (And maybe Alice was nasty, or maybe she wasn't maybe god doesn't exist or maybe he does, but that has no relevance.) In any case, that desire was caused by the outside factor, which shows that it is not very meaningful to try to separate out which desires where caused by outside factors. (As they all are to some extent or another.)
But it is not obvious where the border lies between brainwashing/indoctrination and simply sharing information.
Lots of borders aren't obvious. Why should that present a special problem in this case?
...One could say that it is because you simply used your knowledge of her past actions to decide for yourself that you should shun her. On the other hand, one could say that I basically am controlling your actions, because me telling you what I said has affected your actions.
Anyway, what I am trying to say, is that for every desire one has originated, their l
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.”