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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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But that doesn't mean my taste in beer will converge to some value. All it means is that the average of history of my beer wanderings will be somewhere around the middle of the range -- an observation which is quite useless for the free will debate.
The general point I was making is that there is nothing about free will, even if by definition it means you have more than one option in the same physical situation, which gives us a reason to expect a pattern different from determinism with the addition of some randomness. So unless someone can show how those patterns would be different, there isn't any special reason to suppose that our actions couldn't correspond entirely to the laws of physics, without that meaning we don't have free will.
That's heavily underspecified. Most everything can be fit into a pattern of "determinism with the addition of some randomness".
In any case, you started with a specific claim that the choices will converge. Outside of the toy-model setup I didn't think it was necessarily true and I still don't think so.
I meant that the changing average of the choices will converge, in the way I expect to happen in the beer case. I still think this will happen under all normal circumstances.
I, um...
I'm not seeing what that says about free will. If you pick out a selection of numbers from one to a hundred, and you keep going, then the more numbers you pick out the less effect each new number will have on the running average.
I just don't see how this leads to "free will can be explained by deterministic physics plus randomness".
I don't think it proves that. I think it suggests that it may be the case. We already know that deterministic physics plus randomness will result in statistical patterns like that. I am just saying that free will is going to result in statistical patterns as well.
As far as I know, those could be the same patterns, which would mean that free will would be consistent with deterministic physics plus randomness. That is not a proof. I am just saying I don't know of any specific reasons to think those patterns will be different. Do you have reasons like that?
The thing is, the "pattern" you've picked up is a pattern that every series of numbers follows - that every series of numbers must follow. Any hypothesis will result in the same pattern - if I think that free will is controlled by the number of cookies eaten in Western Australia every second Tuesday, and I try to see if it follows the pattern of the average converging to a value as more samples are added, I'll find the same pattern.
If "having the same pattern" is to have any sort of predictive power at all, then that pattern must be a pattern that the data can possibly not have under another hypothesis.
I'm mystified by this discussion. entirelyuseless seems to be saying that if you look at the history of choices someone has made in similar situations, they will show some kind of convergence, which I see no reason at all to believe. And CCC seems to be saying that every sequence of numbers shows this pattern, which I not only see no reason to believe but can refute. (E.g., consider the sequence consisting of one +1, two -1s, four +1s, eight -1s, etc. The average after 2^n-1 steps oscillates between about -1/3 and about +1/3.) And none of this seems to have anything much to do with free will; in so far as the "libertarian" notion of free will makes sense at all, it seems perfectly consistent with making choices that average out in the long run, at least with probability -> 1 or something of the kind, and determinism is perfectly consistent with not doing so, since e.g. the sequence of numbers I just described can be produced by a very simple computer program (at least if it either has infinite memory or has at least a few hundred bits and isn't observed for longer than the lifetime of the universe).
...I had understood "converges" to mean that each successive sample moves the rolling average by a smaller and smaller amount.
Well, that isn't what "converges" means in mathematics (it means there's a particular value towards which one gets and stays arbitrarily close), but with that definition it is indeed tautologously true that wandering around within a bounded region yields "converging" averaged values. (But not if the region can be unbounded. Easy counterexample: One +1, two -2, four +4, eight -8, etc.)
I'm not saying that people's choices converge in the sense of getting closer to a particular value, but that the average converges. You are right to say that this is not a necessary property of every sequence of values (and CCC was mistaken.)
You say that there is no reason to think I am right about this, but your proposed sequence of numbers suggests that I am, namely by showing that the only way the average won't converge is if you purposely choose a sequence to prevent that from happening. Suppose you offer someone chocolate or vanilla ice cream once a week. I think there are very good reasons to think that the moving average would begin to change slower and slower very quickly, and would basically converge after a while. This would happen unless the person used a sequence like the above: namely, unless he chose a sequence with the explicit intention of preventing convergence.
I agree that someone can have this intention, and that this would not refute determinism. In that sense you could say that the whole discussion is irrelevant. But the relevance, from my point of view, is that it makes the question more concrete. The basic point is that you can, if you want, define free will so that it is not consistent with determinism. But then it will be consistent with determinism plus randomness, unless you propose some prediction which is not consistent with the second. And no one had done that. So no one has even suggested a definition of free will which would be inconsistent with being produced by some form of physical laws.
Given that our universe clearly does operate on some form of physical laws, if anyone were to provide such a definition of free will, it should be trivial to show that it's not how our universe works.
Not if the person's preferences are changing gradually over time. That is a real thing that really happens.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I agree that any notion of free will it's credible to think we have is consistent with physicalism.)
Basically I am saying that deterministic physics plus randomness can produce any possible pattern, as you're noting. So it can also produce the pattern produced by free will. Or do you have some idea of what free will would do which is different from deterministic physics plus randomness? If so, I haven't see it suggested yet.
Yes, I agree. It can. Deterministic physics alone can, if you have a long enough list of rules.