[link] Scott Aaronson on free will

DanielVarga

Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.

I tend to see Knightian unpredictability as a necessary condition for free will

But it's not. (In the link, I use fiction to defang the bugbear and break the intuition pumps associating prediction and unfreedom.) ETA: Aaronson writes

even if Alice can’t tell Bob what he’s going to do, it’s easy enough for her to demonstrate to him afterwards that she knew.

But that's not a problem for Bob's freedom or free will, even if Bob finds it annoying. That's the point of my story.

"Knightian freedom" is a misnomer, in something like the way "a wine margarita" is. Except that the latter at least contains alcohol, something one usually wants from a margarita. Sometimes it's good to be predictable (coordinating with friends); sometimes it's bad (facing enemies). But at no time is it crucial to freedom. Prediction isn't control.

None of this is to deny the potential interest of Aaronson's arguments regarding the feasibility of brain scanning, etc. But calling this Knightian unpredictability "free will" just confuses both issues.

Downvoted for extremely uncharitable reading of the paper.

15ScottAaronson13y

"But calling this Knightian unpredictability 'free will' just confuses both issues." torekp, a quick clarification: I never DO identify Knightian unpredictability with "free will" in the essay. On the contrary, precisely because "free will" has too many overloaded meanings, I make a point of separating out what I'm talking about, and of referring to it as "freedom," "Knightian freedom," or "Knightian unpredictability," but never free will. On the other hand, I also offer arguments for why I think unpredictability IS at least indirectly relevant to what most people want to know about when they discuss "free will" -- in much the same way that intelligent behavior (e.g., passing the Turing Test) is relevant to what people want to know about when they discuss consciousness. It's not that I'm unaware of the arguments that there's no connection whatsoever between the two; it's just that I disagree with them!

4torekp13y

It's worse than I thought. Aaronson really does want to address the free will debate in philosophy - and utterly botches the job. Aaronson speaks for some of his interlocutors (who are very smart - i.e. they say what I would say ;) ): [...] and answers: [...] Uh, so: the truth about the modal number of hairs on a human foot, for example, doesn't care what we want. But, if I were to claim that (a good portion of) a famous philosophical debate amounted to the question of how many hairs are on our feet, you could reject the claim immediately. And you could cite the fact that nobody gives a damn about that as a sufficient reason to reject the substitution of the new question for the old. Sure, in this toy example, you could cite many other reasons too. But with philosophical (using the next word super broadly) definitions, sometimes the most obvious flaw is that nobody gives a damn about the definiens, while lots care passionately about the concept supposedly defined. Dennett rightly nails much philosophizing about free will, on precisely this point. Interlocutors: [...] Aaronson: [...] But this doesn't address the point, unless Knightian-uncertain "actions" somehow fall more under the control of the agent than do probabilistic processes. The truth is the opposite. I have the most control over actions that flow deterministically from my beliefs and desires. I have almost as much, if it is highly probable that my act will be the one that the beliefs and desires indicate is best. And I have none, if it is completely uncertain. For example, if I am pondering whether to eat a berry and then realize that this type of berry is fatally poisonous, this realization should ideally be decisive, with certainty. But I'll settle for 99.99...% probability that I don't eat it. If it is wide-open uncertain whether I will eat it - arbitrary in a deep way - that does not help my sense of control and agency. To put it mildly! Finally, Aaronson has a close brush with the truth wh

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[link] Scott Aaronson on free will

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[link] Scott Aaronson on free will

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