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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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You can see free will as
1 d : enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another. There no other person who controls your actions.The next definitions is:
2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itselfI think you can make a good case that the way someone's neurons work is part of their own nature or being.
You ontological model that there's an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic
I think this is a difference in the definition of the word "I", which can reasonably be taken to mean at least three different things:
The totality of my brain and body and all of the processes that go on there. On this definition, "I have lungs" is a true statement.
My brain and all of the computational processes that go on there (but not the biological processes). On this definition, "I have lungs" is a false statement, but "I control my breathing" is a true statement.
That subset of the computational processes going on in my brain that we call "conscious." On this view, the statement, "I control my breathing" is partially true. You can decide to stop breathing for a while, but there are hard limits on how long you can keep it up.
To me, the question of whether I have free will is only interesting on definition #3 because my conscious self is the part of me that cares about such things. If my conscious self is being coerced or conned, then I (#3) don't really care whether the origin of that coercion is internal (part of my sub-conscious or my physiology) or external.
Basically after you previously argued that there only one reasonable definition of
free willyou now moved to the position that there are multiple reasonable definitions and you have particular reasons why you prefer to focus on a specific one?Is that a reasonable description of your position?
No, not even remotely close. We seem to have a serious disconnect here.
For starters, I don't think I ever gave a definition of "free will". I have listed what I feel to be (two) necessary conditions for it, but I don't think I ever gave sufficient conditions, which would be necessary for a definition. I'm not sure I even know what sufficient conditions would be. (But I think those necessary conditions, plus the known laws of physics, are enough to show that humans don't have free will, so I think my position is sound even in the absence of a definition.) And I did opine at one point that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the word "free" in a context of a discussion of "free will." But that is not at all the same thing as arguing that there is only one reasonable definition of "free will." Also, the question of what "I" means is different from the question of what "free will" means. But both are (obviously) relevant to the question of whether or not I have free will.
The reason I brought up the definition of "I" is because you wrote:
That is not my position. (And ontology is a bit of a red herring here.) I can't even imagine what it means for a neuron to "do something that not in their nature or being", let alone that this departure from "nature or being" could be caused by physics. That's just bizarre. What did I say that made you think I believed this?
I can't define "free will" just like I can't define "pornography." But I have an intuition about free will (just like I have one about porn) that tells me that, whatever it is, it is not something that is possessed by pachinko machines, individual photons, weather systems, or a Turing machine doing a straightforward search for a counter-example to the Collatz conjecture. I also believe that "will not with 100% reliability" is logically equivalent to "can not" in that there is no way to distinguish these two situations. If you wish to dispute this, you will have to explain to me how I can determine whether the reason that the moon doesn't leave earth orbit is because it can't or because it chooses not to.
Some people can, and it is not unhelpful to be able to do so.
I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there's no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen. If I misunderstood that you make the argument feel free to point that out.
Given the dictionary definition of "free" that seems to be flawed.
That's an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition. It prevents your statements from being falsifiable. It moves the statements into to vague to be wrong territory.
If I have a conversation with a person who has akrophobie to debug then I'm going to use words in a way where I only care about the effect of the words but not whether my sentences make falsifiable statements. If I however want to have a rational discussion on LW than I strive to use rational language. Language that makes concrete claims that allow others to engage with me in rational discourse.
Again that's what distinguish rational!LW from rational!NewAtheist. If you don't simply want to have a replacement of religion, but care about reasoning than it's useful to not be to vague to be wrong.
The thing you wrote about only calling the part of you I that corresponds to your conscious mind looks to me like subclinical depersonalization disorder. A notion of the self that can be defended but that's unhealthy to have.
I not only have lungs. My lungs are part of the person that I happen to be.
If we stay with the dictionary definition of freedom why look at the nature of the moon. Is the fact that it revolves around the earth an emergent property of how the complex internals of the moon work or isn't it?
My math in that area isn't perfect but objects that can be modeled by nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons might be a criteria.
Nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons can reasonably described as using heuristics to make choices. They make them based on the algorithm that's programmed into them and that algorithm can by reasonably described as being part of the nature of a specific nondeterministic finite automatons.
I don't think the way that the moon resolves around the earth is reasonably modeled with nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons.
No, that's not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.
I actually go even further than that. If I am not reliably predictable, then I might have free will, but my mere unpredictability is not enough to establish that I have free will. Weather systems are not reliably predictable, but they don't have free will. It is not even the case that non-determinism is sufficient to establish free will. Photons are non-deterministic, but they don't have free will.
Well, yeah, of course it is (though I would not call my intuitions an "authority"). This whole discussion starts from a subjective experience that I have (and that other people report having), namely, feeling like I have free will. I don't know of any way to talk about a subjective experience without referring to my personal intuitions about it.
The difference between free will and other subjective experiences like, say, seeing color, is that seeing colors can be easily grounded in an objective external reality, whereas with free will it's not so easy. In fact, no one has exhibited a satisfactory explanation of my subjective experience that is grounded in objective reality, hence my conclusion that my subjective experience of having free will is an illusion.
To the extend that the subjective experience you call free will is independent on what other people mean with the term free will, the arguments about it aren't that interesting for the general discussion about whether what's commonly called free will exists.
More importantly concepts that start from "I have the feeling that X is true" usually produce models of reality that aren't true in 100% of the cases. They make some decent predictions and fail predictions in other cases.
It's usually possible to refine concepts to be better at predicting. It's part of science to develop operationalized terms.
This started by you saying
But the word "free" has an established meaning in English. That's you pointing to a shared understanding offreeand not you pointing to your private experience.Human's are not reliably predictive due to being NFA's. Out of memory Heinz von Förster bring the example of a child answer the question of: "What's 1+1?" with "Blue". It needs a education to train children to actually give predicable answers to the question what's "What's 1+1?".
I think the issue with why weather systems are not predictable is not because they aren't free to make choices (if you use certain models) but because is about the part of "will". Having a will is about having desires. The weather doesn't have desires in the same sense that humans do and thus it has no free will.
I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make even in the absence of them being conscious of the desire creating the choice.
Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn't trival. There are many competing definitions. You can define it over what the human eye perceives which has a lot to do with human genetics that differ from person to person. You can define it over wave-lengths. . You can define it over RGB values.
It doesn't make sense to argue that color doesn't exist because the human qualia of color doesn't map directly to the wave-length definition of color
With color the way you determine the difference between colors is also a fun topic. The W3C definition for example leads to strange consequences.
You're conflating two different things:
Attempting to communicate about a phenomenon which is rooted in a subjective experience.
Attempting to conduct that communication using words rather than, say, music or dance.
Talking about the established meaning of the word "free" has to do with #2, not #1. The fact that my personal opinion enters into the discussion has to do with #1, not #2.
Yes, of course I agree. But that's not the question at issue. The question is not whether we have "desires" or "will" (we all agree that we do), the question is whether or not we have FREE will. I think it's pretty clear that we do NOT have the freedom to choose our desires. At least I don't seem to; maybe other people are different. So where does this alleged freedom enter the process?
I never said it was. In fact, the difficulty of grounding color perception in objective reality actually supports my position. One would expect that the grounding of free will perception in objective reality to be at least as difficult as grounding color perception, but I don't see those who support the objective reality of free will undertaking such a project, at least not here.
I'm willing to be convinced that this free will thing is real, but as with any extraordinary claim the burden is on you to prove that it is, not on me to prove that it is not.
Pretty much everyone perceives himself/herself freely making choices, so the claim that free will is real is consistent with most peoples' direct experience. While this does not prove that free will is real, it does suggest that the claim that free will is real is not really any more extraordinary than the claim that it is not real. So, I do not think that the person claiming that free will is real has any greater burden of proof than the person who claims that it is not.
That's not a valid argument for at least four reasons:
There are many perceptual illusions, so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim. (In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!)
There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion.
It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into existential despair, which is not generally salubrious to reproductive fitness.
We now understand quite a bit about how the brain works and about how computers work, and all the evidence indicates that the brain is a computer. More precisely, there is nothing a brain can do that a properly programmed Turing machine could not do, and therefore no property that a brain have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely do not have free will (if you believe that a thermostat has free will, well, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about that). So if free will is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that have free will from those that do not. I have heard no one propose such a criterion that doesn't lead to conclusions that grate irredeemably upon my intuitions about what free will is (or what it would have to be if it were a real thing).
In this respect, free will really is very much like God except that the subjective experience of free will is more common than the subjective experience of the Presence of the Holy Spirit.
BTW, it is actually possible that the subjective experience of free will is not universal among humans. It is possible that some people don't have this subjective perception, just as some people don't experience the Presence of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that this lack of the subjective perception of free will is what leads some people to submit to the will of Allah, or to become Calvinists.