Clearly, clear thinking is opaquely difficult. The future is not random, Roland, the future is just unknown. The future will have about as much structure as the now has, but we do not yet know all the details. This can possibly be construed as "randomness" in our thinking, but it is not randomness in the world. Another POV would call this "randomness in our thinking" as uncertainty. Roland "don't fall into this trap" means don't let determinism dertermine you - or worse - let Roland determine what you are determined to do. Maybe the Don't Panic button would be better and thusly your future was.

That was interesting, but I think you misunderstand time as badly as you expect us to misunderstand non-time

In regular time, the past no longer exists -- so there's no issue of whether it is changing or not -- and when we talk about the future changing, we're really referring to what is likely to happen in a future that doesn't exist yet.

A person living in a block universe could mistakenly think they have time by only perceiving the present. On the other hand, a person living in a timed universe could mistakenly think they live in a block by writing down their memories and expectations in a little diagram.

Re: "Even without timeless physics, Special Relativity outlaws any global space of simultaneity".

Absolute time is like absolute space. The most we can say is that we haven't detected it yet. If it is ever detected, relativity will break - and what things it outlaws will no longer matter.

Yudowsky, I'm just applying parsimony/ockhams razor. If the configuration space is all that is needed to explain the next step, why do we also need to say, "a human controls the next state" as well. You are multiplying entities needlessly, going above the minimum message length, etc....

I'm trying to see exactly where your assertion that humans actually have choice comes in.

I also have a question of my own, regarding the rock-hill-system:

If you isolate a subsystem of reality, like a rock rolling down hill, then you can mathematically define the future-in-isolation of that subsystem; you can take the subsystem in isolation, and compute what would happen to it if you did not act on it. In this case, what would happen is that the rock would reach the bottom of the hill.

Will, Hopefully: When you say "the configuration space" you have the human. The human is part of the configuration space. It's not multiplying entities to have a human and his hand or a hand and the hand's figures. A different configuration space, one that differed only in that it contained a different human rather than this human, would cause a different future.

Tim: The wheel of science doesn't roll backwards. We know why we thought we had absolute time at a level of abstraction that encompasses those situations in which we had apparent evidence for absolute time. What would it even mean, at this point, to say that we had discovered absolute time. What would the experiments have to look like? Do you think that we might find out that there is "real heat", not just thermal motion, too?

From what I understand the configuration space adds up to humans controlling the next state. This reminds me of when Eliezer was speaking about how one can separate out all the bones, tendons and ligaments of the hand and understand each one in turn but you still have to add them all up to a hand for them to function in their purpose as a hand..A bunch of bones, tendons and ligaments laying around separately may be useful in certain situations but they can't be a hand unless you combine them.

Sebastian, Michael, Cassandra, you seem to be side-stepping the central question. It seems reasonable to me that "choice" is an illusory experience in the same way that much of what we experience visually is illusory.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-illusion

I'm trying to understand where Eliezer's expressions of certainty that human are capable of choice (rather than the illusory experience of choosing) comes from?

If probability is always a part of decision-making algorithm, embedded within physics, what does it mean to attach probability to timeless physics? How can global causality be described probabilistically? What is the decision that is being considered?

If your mind contains the causal model that has "Determinism" as the cause of both the "Past" and the "Future", then you will start saying things like, "But it was determined before the dawn of time that the water would spill - so not dropping the glass would have made no difference".

Nobody could be that screwed up! Not dropping the glass would have been no option. =)

About all that free-will stuff: The whole "free will" hypothesis may be so deeply rooted in our heads because the explanatory framework of identifying agents with beliefs about the world, objectives, and the "will" to change the world according to these beliefs and objectives just works so remarkably well. Much like Newtons theory of gravity: In terms of the ratio of predictive_accuracy_in_standard_situations to operational_complexity Newton's gravity kicks donkey. So does the Free Will (TM). But that don't mean it's true.

Unknown, your comment strikes me as a good way of looking at it.

The "me of now" as a region of configuration space contains residue of causal relationships to other regions of configuration space ("the past" and my memories of it). And the timeless probability field on configuration space causally connects the "me of now" to the "future" (other regions of configuration space). Just because this is true, and -- even more profoundly -- even though the "me of now" configuration space region has no special status (no shining "moment in the sun" as the privileged focus of a global clock ticking a path through configuration space), I am still what I am and I do what I do (from a local perspective which is all I have detailed information about), which includes making decisions.

Our decisions are based on what we know and believe, so an acceptance of the viewpoint Eliezer has been putting forth is likely to have some impact on decisions we make... I wonder what that impact is, and what should it be?

All the ideas expressed in this post, as well as the "timeless physics" one, seems amazingly obvious to me, and has for all of my adult life, and compared to a lot of OB posters, I am not that bright. Since I normally find many of Elizer's posts extremely counterintuitive and/or hard to grasp, I've got to ask the question: am I missing something here? Is Elizer saying something so mind-boggling out of this world that I do not even realize he is saying it?

Eliezer, you're spot on with the "Determinator." The modern free will debate has its roots not in the clockwork universe of Newtonianism but the supposed problem of God's omnipotence and omniscience. The problem of free will was originally formulated in terms of a Determinator - God - who chose and imminently caused the future. The question was "How can we also have free will?" and free will was, of course, also an important concept in Christian theology (we're made in God's image and therefore chose and cause our futures just like God does). As is often the case in philosophy the current debate is just a secularization of the theological debate; they just switch "God" for "Universe", "soul" for "essential property," etc, and carry on having the same arguments.

And second, you can't compute the Future from the Past, except by also computing something that looks exactly like the Present; which computation just creates another copy of the Block Universe (if that statement even makes any sense), it does not affect any of the causal relations within it.

I'm not sure that statement does make sense. It sounds a bit too mystical to me. But it'd be interesting to look at it from a thermodynamic perspective. You can't predict the future from the past without doing work in the present. Perhaps the work needed would always be greater than or equal to that required for the system you're predicting to just play out regardless?

Wibby:

After all, I know I like to think that I'm the only determinator in my choices, but that would ignore my thoughts on the current situation, the outcomes of similar choices made in the past, and what has happened to me recently.

Hand is to fingers as "I" is to "my thoughts on the current situation, the outcomes of similar choices made in the past, and what has happened to me recently".

A hand has more to it than fingers, but still, the relation is whole to part, not inside to outside.

Sebastian:

How does this isolation work? Do you assume that the forces acting on the system from outside stay constant (in some undefined fashion), without explicitly modeling the outside?

That would save on computing power, yes. If you were playing a game against someone else, you would probably model yourself, the opponent, and "the hill plus the rest of the universe" but you wouldn't actually think of the whole universe, just the parts that affected the hill. You would think of gravity but not Earth, and so on. If you think as though the whole goal is to save on computing power, and that the brain is actually fairly good at this (it has to be), then you won't go far astray.

The defenses of non-illusory human capacity to make choices, as presented in this thread after my last post, seem weak to me.

1. Uknown, it's not clear to me that choice is something humans "do" as opposed to have an illusory experience of doing. Like how when we experience our eyes locking on an object, they're actually making complex saccades in order to construct our visual representation of that object. I think this conversation would be very different if the participants had better grounding in findings from neuroscience. I'll try to recommend introductory reading -probably try wikipedia and free online textbooks and lectures.
2. Hirsch, once again, I think a good place to start is the ways demonstrated by neuroscience research that conventional wisdom on human ability to engage in non-illusory choice is often wrong. I don't see your analogy of the conventional wisdom on non-illusory choice to newtonian physics. It seems to me the place to start is the best science on this topic, not conventional wisdom/popular beliefs.
3. Bambi, you wrote "I am still what I am and I do what I do (from a local perspective which is all I have detailed information about), which includes making decisions." Like in pretty much every post here, that seems to me to be asserted, not demonstrated (here I specifically mean the 'making decisions' part). If people can be transparent and say this is what they want to believe, but they don't think the evidence favors their believe that they have a non-illusory capacity to make decisions, I can understand that. I don't understand the raw assertion divorced from the best evidence on this topic, though.
4. Doug, I don't think what you're writing is what I mean by illusory. Specifically, I think the evidence suggests that from cradle to grave we may not have the capacity to make any actual choices. Whether or not we drop a glass of water, make an overcoming bias post, 'spontaneously' break into a merry jig, may all be functions of configuration space (even factoring probability, randomness, etc.). Just like our experience of feeling like we have choices, and make them, may also be functions of configuration space. Neuroscience already demonstrates how rich we are in such cognitive illusions, and how unclear it is to us currently why we experience so many of these illusions. This isn't to say I think there's conclusive evidence that choice capacity is illusory. But from what I've seen, including reading the arguments here, the evidence favors a hypothesis that all human choice capacity is illusory.
5. poke, introducing religion here seems to me to be a bit of guilt by association fallacy. It doesn't seem necessary to the discussion. I think we're on more useful grounding our discussion in what the best science (including neuroscience) informs us on this topic. 3.

"In Thou Art Physics, I pointed out that since you are within physics, anything you control is necessarily controlled by physics."

I could just as easily argue since I'm within my past self's future light cone, anything I control is/was necessarily controlled by (a younger) me. In both cases we are playing with words and muddying the waters rather than learning or teaching.

I don't see why you can't just reverse the logic and claim that since everything in my mind is controlled by physics, thought is an act of my free will. I don't believe in strong free will. But I do believe by the time a toddler can form ideals (desires ice cream) that aren't real, some free will is already at work. The theory (math is not subject to General Relativity and thus "deterministic" is this description has nothing to do with the "deterministic" used to describe human actions)of MWI may be deterministic, but playing with English language words suggests actors can't choose their world-lines by using the physics of their minds to cascade synchronized neural firing patterns that activate the parts of our brains producing minds. Maybe there is no free will, but I'd need to see a convincing theory of consciousness absent circular reasoning. The Plinko disc make fall determinalistically, but if the Plinko chip had a human CNS and accurate memories of past drops, I bet it might try to rotate in a preferred fall path, and if the Plinko chip based its decision on reflected ideals, I'd say there is some free will there (neuron firing seems at a small enough scale to harness some of the quantum-spooky-stuff that causes universes to split off, for instance. I think our brains can control the % of world-lines that decide whether to binge eat ice cream. Equating a block universe to MWI assumes there is an end state where the total ratio of all time-space co-ordinates is known. in reality, this end state does not exist (as time breaks down outside reality, like when forming the mathematical concept of a block universe). There are many random events that control which world-line an individual experiences, but I don't see why volitions can't be among the cases. I doubt few people defending free will really mean to defend their right to bring about their own birth.

Er, to try to simply my above point: in my model, energy (say, an atom) at time-sequence t1, sums up all its interactions with the rest of its local universe (such as a CNS if it is a brain atom), and this "calculation" affects the weighting of sick-of-ice-cream t2, t2a, t2b, world-lines. In claiming MWI is a block universe, you are accepting t1 ping-pongs to the subsequent split world-lines t2, t2a, t2b, without any "calculation" as described.

Ultimately it is a question of what limits are imposed on the splitting off of new world-lines in the multiverse. The speed-of-light, yes. I don't see why the physics of mind couldn't also qualify.

Eliezer:

If you think as though the whole goal is to save on computing power, and that the brain is actually fairly good at this (it has to be), then you won't go far astray.

I'm with Phillip Huggan here.

I also noticed along with "Poke" that this is a common religious discussion, but I would remark that it is not respective to Christianity. I live in a Muslim country and this a common topic debate amongst Muslims themselves. It is not really Christian. It is an attempt to explain reality for all people.

It seems a little out of reach to try to understand the relationship of time and the block universe. Should we really expect it to be simple? Is everything understandable? Could the block universe be other than you described?

Philosophy can imagine all sorts of logical things that are not based in reality. Maybe it is explainable by determinism, but does that mean that determinism is true?

Have a few questions though.

What rules govern the block universe?

What if there were multiple block universes?

HA: How come you think I defend any "non-illusory human capacity to make choices"? I am just wondering why the illusion seems so hard to get rid of. Did I fail so miserably at making my point clear?

Eliezer:

Although the I chose bits that were part of the whole, I think they are useful to consider how parts inform the whole, and use the parts-to-whole relation to—at least crudely—model the outer-to-inner relation.

HA:

What I was attempting to say is that the human mind appears to me to be a chaotic system. While it may be entirely deterministic, the outcome can be radically changed by small inputs.

The usage of the word 'illusion' as I am interpreting it is akin to "since all things are made up of a small amount of atoms and a large amount of space, the sensation of solidity is an illusion." This, I suppose, is true, but it leaves out a rather large bit about the fundamental forces. Saying choice is an illusion appears to me to leave out the rather large bit of the workings of the brain.

Frank, Demonstrated instances of illusory free-will don't seem to me to be harder or easier to get rid of than the many other demonstrated illusory cognitive experiences. So I don't see anything exceptional about them in that regard. Doug, that's where "choice of the gaps" comes into play in my opinion. Some commenters, maybe you included, are saying "a lot of what goes on the brain is unknown. Therefore let's call 'choice' or 'free will' a subset of that unknown part." It's very analogous, in my opinion, to "god of the gaps" arguments. Non-illusory choice/free will may end up being something that many of our brains want to believe exists, like a creator god, but doesn't seem to be backed by our better empirical methods for observing and modeling reality.

The nature of time has been covered by many great minds from a religious viewpoint, as mentioned by nick. It is also an active research topic among mainstream universities. I'm not particularly interested in the question, but the best analysis I've read comes from a few N.Bostrom papers, and a book I once read called "Time Machines". The book supposes a block universe, but states very clearly that this may not be the way the universe operates. From what I understand, this means the opposite of what EY wrote. It means the Copenhagen determination (that magic causes wavefront collapses) is a block universe. From my understanding, MWI means the universe would only be deterministic if there were no tachyons (I'm not sure, but I think these are predicted in most GUTs), otherwise there would be feedbacks. Even if no tachyons, the universe would only be deterministic in a past direction. The real question is what causes universes to split off. This is deep physics. There are papers on this topic. If someone were to suggest one, I would read it. The whole point of Tipler's "The Physics of Immortality", was to use shearing forces in a collapsing universe (universe strongly appears to be open, unfortunately), as an energy source. Where would a never ending universe fit when viewed through block universe goggles? Once again I ask, don't tachyons eliminate the block universe concept for all energy except photons travelling at c?

I'm not discouraging discussion. But there are some topics where this may be a cutting edge dialectic, such as the nature of minds, the computational power limits if any to recursive AI software programs, and AGI/AI controls. But this debate is inferior to mainstream university research. Keep it up, but the real question is how much money to spend on particle accelrators and observatories, that might resolve these basic physics questions. The money people use mainstream physicists as their info sources. These mainstream physicists have written papers. If EY's "block universe" hypothesis were correct, we wouldn't experience time. Simple anthropic reasoning disproves it. Time exists. The future is more important than the past. If anyone takes the time to find papers that deal with splitting off universes, I'd attempt to read them and discuss. I hope if mildly recursive software AI systems are built in the decades ahead and the human brain/mind is modelled by IBM or whoever, that those interested here in AI/AGI will keep up with these findings and not continue to discuss "inferior" content. Maybe I'm just pissed because I realize blogs where GUT amateurs talk about time, have limits.

Off-topic, but I suggest EY's idea of an AGI using mixed chemicals to form a mobile robot (and assumedly hack the internet), is now dated. With rep-rap and ink jet polymers, rapid plastics prototyping...a far more likely scenario is that an AI would hack a printer and output some sort of shape-memory device or conducting plastic as an origami crane. Normally this is a moot point, but there may be real defenses that could be dreamed in these sorts of discussions. If it is not known whether AGI is possible with a 2000BC Egyptian wooden abacus, or needs a computer from 10000000AD, but we know people may try to use the same sort of technologies and/or hacking procedures as weapons, why not diversify one's fields-of-expertise? If I were to suggest AI/AGI prescriptions to cyber police, I'd suggest cracking down on Eastern European, Russian and Chinese virus writers and better funding the good guys.

HA, Dennett's a compatibilist, so his analogy is meant to demonstrate that making a choice is not an illusory experience. That's the part I was talking about when I said we can meaningfully discuss the choices it makes.

For example, we can analyze the game and say, "The algorithm blundered in this move -- it ignored a line of play which leads to a significant disadvantage," or perhaps, "This move was excellent -- the algorithm decided to sacrifice material for much greater activity for its developed pieces, allowing it to dominate the board; it will probably be able to force a win." The fact that we can get into the guts of the code and point to the heuristics and evaluating functions that led to these plays does not invalidate the fact that the algorithm really did make choices. For conscious beings, the content of the experience of making a choice is in the evaluating and the acting, not in the exercise of some kind of "free will" that requires the essence of choice to exist outside a deterministic physics.

Given this framework, I'm not really seeing any danger in calling choices non-illusory.

Cyan, by that logic you could say that about a fire "it made a good choice to burn here, a bad choice to burn there" given that the spread of the fire would be as determined in your model as the development, existence, performance, and persistence of the chess-playing algorithm, or the human.

If the alogorithm was determined, it seems to me that claiming directions it went were "choices" is about as accurate as claiming the directions a fire goes are "choices". I think we can discuss phenomena like an algorithm playing chess against something else, and the results (win, loss, stronger position, weaker position) without using the word "choice" just like we can describe a fire's interaction with its environment without ascribing "choice" to the fire. To selectively use that word may prey on a common bias that we're susceptible to.

I'd write more to make my thoughts on this more clear, but I'm tired and I think my previous writing in this thread holds up pretty well.

HA, your analogy fails to hold because the fire isn't performing a computation, and hence cannot be said to be evaluating the outcomes of any actions.

Cyan, I'm not sure you about assertion that the fire isn't performing a computation. For example, we could structure the fire's environment such that in burning it performs a computation. But then one could look at any "natural" environment a fire burns in as something it is similarly performing a computation of. Also, any example you'd give of computations to distinguish them from fires burning may be viewable as energy passing through structured and/or "natural" environments.

I'm sure people smarter and more expert than I am have put good thought into this, for example in information theory.

Frank, Demonstrated instances of illusory free-will don't seem to me to be harder or easier to get rid of than the many other demonstrated illusory cognitive experiences. So I don't see anything exceptional about them in that regard.

HA, I do. It is a concept I suspect we are genetically biased to hold, an outgrowth of the distinction between subject (has a will) and object (has none). Why are be biased to do so? Because, largely, it works very well as a pattern for explanations about the world. We are built to explain the world using stories, and these stories need actors. Even when you are convinced that choice does not exist, you'll still be bound to make use of that concept, if only for practical reasons. The best you can do is try to separate the "free" from the "choice" in an attempt to avoid the flawed connotation. But we have trouble conceptualising choice if it's not free; because then, how could it be a choice? All that said, I seem to remember someone saying something like: "Having established that there is no such thing as a free will, the practical thing to do is to go on and pretend there was.".

HA, I think you're right that fires can be said to be performing computations (in a deterministic universe). What the chess algorithm does that makes it different from a generic computation is goal-oriented actions driven by an explicit evaluation of possible outcomes. (Computation is necessary but not sufficient for this; I took a wrong step in bringing up generic computation.)

I'll steal another analogy from Dennett. Your constituent molecules are not alive, but you are. Likewise, your constituent parts considered at a low level may not make choices, but you do. Both "life" and "choice-making" are properties of the arrangements of the bits you're made up of. Being aware of making choices is another such property.

In my view, the worthwhile things to talk about when discussing a particular choice someone or something made are (i) the information available to the choice-maker, and (ii) the evaluation function it used to rank the available actions. I strongly reject the idea that such a discussion would be invalidated or made meaningless in a deterministic universe, which is where I think the "it's dangerous to reify illusory choice" position takes us.

Frank Hirsch wrote: "Having established that there is no such thing as a free will, the practical thing to do is to go on and pretend there was.".

I would agree with this, similarly for everything else in normality ™.

Unknown wrote: "Eliezer's point (a quite justified one) is that the word "choice" is a name for something that human beings do, just as the name "apple" is a name for something human beings find in the world. Whatever you think an apple is, if you say it is only an illusion, then you're not talking about apples, but something else. Likewise, whatever you might think a choice is, if you say it is only an illusion, you're not talking about choices, but something else. For choice just means one of the things that people actually do in the real world, so it is quite real, not an illusion."

And I am saying it is a mistake to mix up this thinking with fundamental physics such as controlling the width of the worlds or other many world concepts. This is the stuff of the laplacian demon and it needs no concepts of "apple", "choice" or "human" to predict the universe. Admittedly it probably has to be outside this universe as we know it (i.e. we are in a simulator or something).

Michael Vasser: "When you say "the configuration space" you have the human. The human is part of the configuration space. It's not multiplying entities to have a human and his hand or a hand and the hand's figures. A different configuration space, one that differed only in that it contained a different human rather than this human, would cause a different future."

How do I know I have a human or not in a configuration space. Please transmit a program for determining whether I have human or not with a description of the configuration space and rules of the system. Do not increase the size of the program above one that only has the configuration space, or tell me what more having the human detection part would allow me to predict about the future state of the configuration space.

"Having established that there is no such thing as a free will, the practical thing to do is to go on and pretend there was."

The thing to do is go on and ignore the question altogether. When I deliberate, I'm not wracked with anxiety about whether I have Free Will. I just go about deliberating. "I deliberate" means I deliberate -- whatever else that means; thinking about the else won't make me a more effective deliberator.

For "I did A but could have done otherwise" I see two coherent meanings:

1) My mind produced A from the local conditions, but a conceivable different mind with otherwise identical local conditions would've produced not A. My mind is therefore a crucial causal factor in the reality of A.

OR

2) From my limited knowledge, I cannot trace the causal steps to A that precede my decision well enough to determine, from those steps alone, the decision I make which leads to A.

...actually, probably both.

So, the causal steps to A include my decision (and A is inconsistent with certain decisions that differ from my real one), but I cannot trace the causal steps of my decision precisely enough to have precluded those differing decision (without already knowing the reality of my decision.)

Alternatively: if we work from full knowledge of the causal path to A, except that we treat my cognition as a black box whose outcome we don't know, we could not conclude A even with unlimited processing power.

This post really knocks it out of the park. The diagrams are very appropriate and clear. If the book of sequences is still a (re-)work in progress, I strongly encourage making this part prominent.

One must avoid mixing up timeless and timeful thinking. E.g., trying to have "Determinism" acting on things before they happen. Determinism is a timeless viewpoint, so it doesn't mix well with words like "before".

I was going to write something quite similar in my own blog - and I might still - but I thought, "I didn't read the whole free will sequence, I wonder if EY mentioned the block universe?" My thunder done been stole! Well, mostly.

Let's say there was some way to change a single moment of time.

We would then need some kind of meta-time over which time could "change".

The lamp's state would need to change from "OFF at 7:02am at 3:00meta-am" to "ON at 7:02am at 3:01meta-am".

But wait!  Have you ever seen a lamp change from OFF at 7:02am at 3:00meta-am, to ON at 7:02am at 3:00meta-am?  No!  A single instant of meta-time never changes, so you cannot change it, and you have no control.

"Have you ever seen?" refers to a state of a (mere) time computer. Your memory is time-caused so it is not reliable evidence about meta-time mechanics. It is an important obliviousness result for chronal beings. It might not be holeless. I don't know about more general settings but with "propagation" (meta-time change being local in (normal) time), even a chronal mind in the proximity of CTL could occasionally (with some appriciable fraction of meta-time) notice things that are not compatible with a totally frozen timeline (this does need recurring meta-time switching back and forth to not be infinidesimal (in the setting that I know CTL can also provide such a meta-time switching source)).

So with two lamps with different meta-time wire lengths (essentially different proper times) you could have all four states of "A on, B on", "A on, B off", "A off, B off" and "A off, B on" cycle and have corresponding chronal observer experience each. None of them see the lamps change in (normal) time, but it still takes place.