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18 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 31 March 2014 11:19AM

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Comment author: The_Duck 01 April 2014 06:30:43AM *  1 point [-]

I think this is his conclusion:

...if we want to know which meaning to attach to a confusing sensation, we should ask why the sensation is there, and under what conditions it is present or absent.

Then I could say something like: "This sensation of freedom occurs when I believe that I can carry out, without interference, each of multiple actions, such that I do not yet know which of them I will take, but I am in the process of judging their consequences according to my emotions and morals."

This is a condition that can fail in the presence of jail cells, or a decision so overwhelmingly forced that I never perceived any uncertainty about it.

There - now my sensation of freedom indicates something coherent; and most of the time, I will have no reason to doubt the sensation's veracity. I have no problems about saying that I have "free will" appropriately defined; so long as I am out of jail, uncertain of my own future decision, and living in a lawful universe that gave me emotions and morals whose interaction determines my choices.

Certainly I do not "lack free will" if that means I am in jail, or never uncertain of my future decisions, or in a brain-state where my emotions and morals fail to determine my actions in the usual way.

Usually I don't talk about "free will" at all, of course! That would be asking for trouble - no, begging for trouble - since the other person doesn't know about my redefinition. The phrase means far too many things to far too many people, and you could make a good case for tossing it out the window.

But I generally prefer to reinterpret my sensations sensibly, as opposed to refuting a confused interpretation and then calling the sensation "false".

This sounds pretty compatibilist to me. EY gives a definition of free will that is manifestly compatible with determinism. Elsewhere in that post he argues that different definitions of free will are nonsensical and are generated by misleading intuitions.

But as the quote demonstrates, and as discussed in a different post, EY is less interested in providing a definition for free will and then asserting that people do or do not possess free will, and more interested in explaining in detail where all the intuitions about free will come from, and therefore why people talk about free will. He suggests that if you can explain what caused you to ask the question "do we have free will?" in the first place, you may not need to even bother to answer the question.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2014 02:28:31PM *  1 point [-]

EY gives a definition of free will that is manifestly compatible with determinism.

True, and EY seems to be taking up Isaiah Berlin's line about this: suggesting that the problem of free will is a confusion because 'freedom' is about like not being imprisoned, and that has nothing to do with natural law one way or the other. I absolutely grant that EY's definition of free will given in the quote is compatible with natural determinism. I think everyone would grant that, but it's a way of saying that the sense of free will thought to conflict with determinism is not coherent enough to take seriously.

So I don't think that line makes him a compatibilist, because I don't think that's the notion of free will under discussion. It's consistent with us having free will in EY's sense, that all our actions are necessitated by natural law (or whatever), and I take it to be typical of compatibilism that one try to make natural law consistent with the idea that actions are non-lawful, or if lawful, nevertheless free. Maybe free will in the relevant sense a silly idea in the first place, but we don't get to just change the topic and pretend we've addressed the question.

and more interested in explaining in detail where all the intuitions about free will come from, and therefore why people talk about free will.

And he does a very good job of that, but this work shouldn't be confused with something one might call a 'solution' (which is how the sequence is titled), and it's not a compatibilist answer (just because it's not an attempt at an answer at all).

I'm not saying EY's thoughts on free will are bad, or even wrong. I'm just saying 'It seems to me that EY is not a compatibilist about free will, on the basis of what he wrote in the free will sequence'.

Comment author: The_Duck 02 April 2014 06:11:05AM *  0 points [-]

I don't think that line makes him a compatibilist, because I don't think that's the notion of free will under discussion.

What exactly is the notion of free will that is under discussion? Or equivalently, can you explain what a "true" compatibilist position might look like? You cited this paper as an example of a "traditionally compatibilist view," but I'm afraid I didn't get much from it. I found it too dense to extract any meaning in the time I was willing to spend reading it, and it seemed to make some assertions that, as I interpreted them, were straightforwardly false.

I'd find a simple explanation of a "traditional compatibilist" position very helpful.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2014 03:07:28PM 3 points [-]

Well, I suppose I picked a form of compatibilism I find appealing and called it 'traditional'. It's not really traditional so much as slightly old, and related to a very old compatibilist position described by Kant. But there are lots of compatibilist accounts, and I do think EY's probably counts as compatibilist if one thinks, say, Hobbes is a compatibilist (where freedom means simply 'doing what you want without impediment').

A simple explanation of a version of compatibilism:

So, suppose you take free will to be the ability to choose between alternatives, such that an action is only freely willed if you could have done otherwise. The thought is that since the physical universe is a fully determined, timeless mathematical object, it involves no 'forking paths'. Now imagine a scenario like this, courtesy of a the philosopher who came up with this argument:

Jones has resolved to shoot Smith. Black has learned of Jones's plan and wants Jones to shoot Smith. But Black would prefer that Jones shoot Smith on his own. However, concerned that Jones might waver in his resolve to shoot Smith, Black secretly arranges things so that, if Jones should show any sign at all that he will not shoot Smith (something Black has the resources to detect), Black will be able to manipulate Jones in such a way that Jones will shoot Smith. As things transpire, Jones follows through with his plans and shoots Smith for his own reasons. No one else in any way threatened or coerced Jones, offered Jones a bribe, or even suggested that he shoot Smith. Jones shot Smith under his own steam. Black never intervened.

The thought is, Jones is responsible for shooting Smith, he did so freely, he was morally responsible, and in every way one could wish for, he satisfied the notion of 'free will'. Yet there was no 'fork in the road' for Smith, and he couldn't have chosen to do otherwise. Hence, whatever kind freedom we're talking about when we talk about 'free will' has nothing to do with being able to do otherwise. This sort of freedom is wholly compatible with a universe in which there are no 'forking paths'.

Comment author: shminux 01 April 2014 03:35:06PM -1 points [-]

Having thought about it some more... Eliezer (and Scott Aaronson in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine) agrees that free will is independent of determinism (since being forced to act randomly does not mean that you choose freely), so that's reasonably compatibilist. Here is a quote from the above paper:

Like many scientifically-minded people, I’m a compatibilist : someone who believes free will can exist even in a mechanistic universe. For me, “free will is as real as baseball,” as the physicist Sean Carroll memorably put it. That is, the human capacity to weigh options and make a decision “exists” in the same sense as Sweden, caramel corn, anger, or other complicated notions that might interest us, but that no one expects to play a role in the fundamental laws of the universe.

The introduction to the paper is also quite illuminating on the subject:

In this essay, I’ll sharply distinguish between “free will” and another concept that I’ll call “freedom,” and will mostly concentrate on the latter. By “free will,” I’ll mean a metaphysical attribute that I hold to be largely outside the scope of science—and which I can’t even define clearly, except to say that, if there’s an otherwise-undefinable thing that people have tried to get at for centuries with the phrase “free will,” then free will is that thing! More seriously, as many philosophers have pointed out, “free will” seems to combine two distinct ideas: first, that your choices are “free” from any kind of external constraint; and second, that your choices are not arbitrary or capricious, but are “willed by you.” The second idea—that of being “willed by you”—is the one I consider outside the scope of science, for the simple reason that no matter what the empirical facts were, a skeptic could always deny that a given decision was “really” yours, and hold the true decider to have been God, the universe, an impersonating demon, etc. I see no way to formulate, in terms of observable concepts, what it would even mean for such a skeptic to be right or wrong. But crucially, the situation seems different if we set aside the “will” part of free will, and consider only the “free” part. Throughout, I’ll use the term freedom, or Knightian freedom, to mean a certain strong kind of physical unpredictability: a lack of determination, even probabilistic determination, by knowable external factors. That is, a physical system will be “free” if and only if it’s unpredictable in a sufficiently strong sense, and “freedom” will simply be that property possessed by free systems. A system that’s not “free” will be called “mechanistic.”

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2014 04:16:19PM *  0 points [-]

Thanks, that is very illuminating. I think with this in mind I can refine what I'm trying to talk about a bit more. So lets similarly distinguish between freedom and free will.

By 'freedom' lets stipulate that we mean something like political freedom. So one has political freedom if one is not prohibited by law from doing things one ought to be able to do, like speaking one's mind. Likewise, freedom in general means not being constrained by thugs, or one's spouse, or whatever.

Let's take up Aaronson's understanding of 'free will': first, your actions are determined by you as opposed to arbitrarily pursued (they are willed), and second, your actions are determined by you alone (they are freely willed).

I don't think Aaronson's point about skepticism is a good one. I don't think the skeptic could always deny that the decision was really yours, so long as we agreed on what 'yours' means. They could deny that an action was yours on the basis of, say, it's appearance to a third party, but we shouldn't worry about that. I also don't think past confusion or disagreement about free will is a good reason to get discouraged and abandon the idea.

So maybe this will be helpful: in order for an action to be freely willed in the primary case, it must follow from reasons. Reasons are beliefs held true by the agent and related to one another by inferences. To give a simple example, one freely wills to eat a cookie when something like the following obtains:

1) I like cookies, and I eat them whenever I can. 2) Here is a cookie! 3) [eating it]

It follows from (1) and (2) that I should eat a cookie, and (3) is the eating of a cookie, so (3) follows from (1) and (2). Anything capable of acting such that their action has this kind of rational background (i.e. (1) and (2) and the inference connecting them) has free will. One acts freely, or exercises free will, when one acts on the basis of such a rational background. If we cannot correctly impute to the agent such a rational background for a given action, the action is not freely willed. I'm taking pains to describe free will both as precisely as I can, and in such a way that I say nothing radical or idiosyncratic, but I may be failing.

I grant, of course, that freedom is consistent with determination by natural law. The question is, is free will similarly consistent. I myself am a compatibilist, and I think free will as I've described it is consistent with a purely naturalistic understanding of the world. But I don't see how EY is arguing for compatibilism.

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