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DonaldMcIntyre comments on Is Determinism A Special Case Of Randomness? - Less Wrong
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Alternatively randomness could be a special case of determinism. Imagine a deterministic universe that branches into two different universes each time someone in the universe flips a coin. In one branch the coin lands head and the other it lands tails. To the people living inside the universe it would appear like a fundamentally random process, but in fact the universe is entirely deterministic.
In any case this doesn't have anything to do with free will. If you let a random number generator make your decisions for you, that's not free will.
My connection between randomness and free will is that I think free will wouldn't be possible in a deterministic system since everything happens as a consequence of previous events rather than as a consequence decision making.
I think that in the two branch universes above it is still random on which side the heads or tails would fall therefore it still seems random together or forked.
I don't understand the distinction between "consequence of previous events" and "consequence of decision making". If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.
Your decisions should ideally be as correlated as possible with your values and with the information you have. The more random your actions, the less likely they are to result in anything desirable.
And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.
Consequence of previous events: when things pass from state to state as a consequence of a causal chain of actions that are not initiated or continued by a living decision maker that purposely provoked them.
Consequence of decision making: when a living being acted on a chain of physical events and modified them according to its will and therefore the pattern of the sequence is not consistent with random mechanical events.
I agree with the idea that living things make decision based on the observation of reality and must not initiate actions out of nowhere.
When I mention free will on my OP I am not referring to the ideological concept,but just my personal opinion that decision making in our brains must obey to some randomness in order to be free of regular certainty in physics.
I don't think that randomness is in our brains,I think there must be randomness in the mechanics of physics.
What makes you think that decision making in our brains is free of "regular certainty in physics"? Deterministic systems such as weather patterns can be unpredictable enough.
To be fair, if there's some butterfly-effect nonsense going on where the exact position of a single neuron ends up determining your decision, that's not too different from randomness in the mechanics of physics. But I hope that when I make important decisions, the outcome is stable enough that it wouldn't be influenced by either of those.
People are not as random as you may think they are. You can test your own randomness here.
There is no need for true randomness to create random seeming behavior. Famous example is the weather. Even totally deterministic simulations of the weather are chaotic. Even slight changes to the initial conditions will result in totally different outcomes. Or in cryptography hashing functions, which generate random and irreversible strings from an input.
There are a number of examples of this covered in the book A New Kind of Science, but you can only view a few pages online for free without using incognito mode.
I think my possible argumentative error is:
P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.
P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.
C: Therefore physics must include random processes.
I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)
P1 is wrong because it's impossible to observe free will. If free will equals randomness, and randomness is indistinguishable from non randomness for all practical purposes, then it's impossible to know if you live in a universe with free will or not.
However defining free will as randomness is really weird, which is what I tried to argue above. If randomness is determining your actions, that's not your will, and the result is meaningless. You don't gain any useful information by watching a coin flip.
I agree, both P1 and P2 are false because free will is unobservable to begin with.
This post and the exchanges with you and others have helped me advance my thinking a lot about these issues.
I am reading the Free Will Sequence too.
How can you know the best way of fulfilling your values if you don't experiment?
Is unpredictability never a value in itself?
People are horrible at being random even when they try. Test yourself here: http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html
What is decision-making but a physical process occurring in your brain? Consider reading Thou Art Physics.
Eliezer wrote:
I agree that decision making is a physical process occurring in our brain, but I think that by calling it "physical" we are also implying that there is certainty in the mechanics of that process and that its just that we can't yet reach it or explain it.
What I was trying to say when I wrote "determinism is a special case of randomness" is that there must be non-certain processes in physics and that would explain, in my mind, why we can make arbitrary decisions that seem to change the determinate course of physical processes.
And what makes you think our decisions are "arbitrary", and in need of explanation?
Thx for the good question!
I think that my observation of the existence arbitrary decisions is that as living things we interrupt randomness and cause things to behave in ways that are not the product of free physical mechanics, but the product of what is going on in our minds.
Here we come back to the "what goes on in our minds is also the product of physical processes" argument, and I agree, only that it seems not determined, but "decided".
The fact that I use the word "seems" confirms that it might be an illusion too.
Presumably, he means we can make decisions in the absence of obvious decision theoretic procedures, or strongly weighted evidence, rather than getting stuck like Burridans Ass.
Right, but that's not a reason to question determinism.
No, its a reason to think tthat not all decision making is prima facie deterministic.
The evidence for indetermimism is something else.
Not obviously deterministic, no. But deterministic at the bottom level? Almost certainly.
Please don't bring up QM. Let's leave the physics to the physicists. (Also, that wasn't my original point. Regardless of whether determinism actually holds, attacking determinism to support naive free will is poorly motivated.)
The bottom level is quantum.
I am a physicist , and my views on free will arent naive.
Since when was "physical" a synonym for "deterministic"
Name one non-deterministic macroscopic process that affects objects on the scale of neurons.
Any process critically dependent on its starting conditions = chaos.
Any microscopic event triggered by a device capable of measuring quantum levels events, eg a bomb hooked up to a geiger counter.
Typical stochastic devices, such as dice.
The brain doesn't do this, so how is this relevant to free will?
Dice are deterministic. Chaotic behavior != indeterminism.
I assume they are using the "physics is deterministic" assumption when they tell me our thought process is a physical process.
My OP above questions this and I speculate that there is randomness in base physics (quantum or somewhere else, maybe at macro level too when systems cross certain levels of complexity).
Some people seem to think that incompatibilist free will is definitionally the ability to transcend physics, although voluntarists don't usually define it that way. It may be a confusions arising from the fact that if physics is determimistic, an override would be needed to get incompatibilist FW.