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shminux comments on Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand - Less Wrong Discussion

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

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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: 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.