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I think your error is in not being able to define what free will is. My go to approach to "obvious" and "intuitive" statements is to ask to define the opposite. For example, how do you think it feels to have no free will? Can you give a few concrete examples of "not having free will"?
I agree that not to focus on free will first may be a mistake in itself and it makes me ask questions that are irrelevant from the get go.
Just in case you last question is not rhetorical:
In a potentially mistaken model where free will is considered an objective reality then not having free will does not have any feelings and an example is flowing water in a river, it doesn't think feel, or decide, it just flown governed by gravity, etc.
But again, the above answer is useless if free will is an illusion.
I will try your method of defining the opposite first!
Emergent phenomena are like that. You can track them down, but not up.
For example, consider a complicated piece of software. Sometimes it seems to act on its own, or hate you, or something. I swear that one Linux distro I tried had a thing against me personally. And this behavior is usually unintended by the programmers. Often it even appears non-deterministic and hard to duplicate. However, one can usually trace the weird behavior to a bunch of "bugs", rather than attribute agency/free will to a piece of code. But it is nearly impossible to predict the weirdness beforehand. Stuff just happens. Apparently even the term "bug" came about because any non-trivial piece of technology appeared to have gremlins inside just trying to mess with you.
Given that humans are probably just glorified computers evolved out of meat, it seems unsurprising that we have developed a mind of our own.
I think that I have two possible errors in my argument:
- Deterministic processes do not permit free thinking.
- Free thinking needs randomness in its underlying process.
I agree with you that behavior in complex systems seems non-deterministic even though the underlying processes are deterministic (like the software example you give above).
So our perception of consciousness and even the dichotomy "randomness vs certainty" could be a mental illusion.
People are not as random as you may think they are. You can test your own randomness here.
There is no need for true randomness to create random seeming behavior. Famous example is the weather. Even totally deterministic simulations of the weather are chaotic. Even slight changes to the initial conditions will result in totally different outcomes. Or in cryptography hashing functions, which generate random and irreversible strings from an input.
There are a number of examples of this covered in the book A New Kind of Science, but you can only view a few pages online for free without using incognito mode.
I think my possible argumentative error is:
P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.
P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.
C: Therefore physics must include random processes.
I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)
I don't understand the distinction between "consequence of previous events" and "consequence of decision making". If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.
Your decisions should ideally be as correlated as possible with your values and with the information you have. The more random your actions, the less likely they are to result in anything desirable.
And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.
Consequence of previous events: when things pass from state to state as a consequence of a causal chain of actions that are not initiated or continued by a living decision maker that purposely provoked them.
Consequence of decision making: when a living being acted on a chain of physical events and modified them according to its will and therefore the pattern of the sequence is not consistent with random mechanical events.
If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.
I agree with the idea that living things make decision based on the observation of reality and must not initiate actions out of nowhere.
And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.
When I mention free will on my OP I am not referring to the ideological concept,but just my personal opinion that decision making in our brains must obey to some randomness in order to be free of regular certainty in physics.
I don't think that randomness is in our brains,I think there must be randomness in the mechanics of physics.
Note that fundamentally random processes viewpoint and hidden variables viewpoint are equivalent -- they produce the same predictions -- so choosing one is the matter of convenience.
And hidden variables viewpoint is convenient exactly because it allows to think that probabilities is in the mind, that is, probabilities are nothing but a measure of uncertainty. It eliminates the only special case -- fundamentally random processes, thus allowing us to apply our uncertainty-measure concept everywhere. Fundamentally random processes are processes which rely on parameters for which we (fundamentally) can't reduce our uncertainty, and that's it.
So yes, I would agree.
Thx for the complete answer I like your thinking process!
Note that fundamentally random processes viewpoint and hidden variables viewpoint are equivalent -- they produce the same predictions -- so choosing one is the matter of convenience.
I agree that they are equivalent in that they denote a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics, but in the case of randomness, even though it could be an illusion, I still subjectively (naive view) favor the existence of randomness (and probability) in the base physical mechanics because I fail to see a connection between certainty and our brain's apparent non-bound decision making.
Nevertheless I am open to the option that physics is only deterministic and that such a process may recreate our consciousness (I have to think more about that though).
Since when was "physical" a synonym for "deterministic"
I assume they are using the "physics is deterministic" assumption when they tell me our thought process is a physical process.
My OP above questions this and I speculate that there is randomness in base physics (quantum or somewhere else, maybe at macro level too when systems cross certain levels of complexity).
The bottom level is quantum.
I am a physicist , and my views on free will arent naive.
If the bottom level is quantum, is there a space for randomness or non-causal mechanical processes?
You're a physicist? In what field?
EDIT: Also, I was calling the OP's view of free will naive, not yours.
I agree my view is naive, but from the standpoint of knowledge of the matter since I am not a scientist and I am new to rationality overall.
I am not naive in the sense that I support free will just for the sake of it, for political or idealistic reasons. Personally I prefer the truth rather than a "feel good" moment.
I am very open to learn and discuss these issues and I hope LessWrong is a good place for this.
And what makes you think our decisions are "arbitrary", and in need of explanation?
Thx for the good question!
I think that my observation of the existence arbitrary decisions is that as living things we interrupt randomness and cause things to behave in ways that are not the product of free physical mechanics, but the product of what is going on in our minds.
Here we come back to the "what goes on in our minds is also the product of physical processes" argument, and I agree, only that it seems not determined, but "decided".
The fact that I use the word "seems" confirms that it might be an illusion too.
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My question was not rhetorical. But it was unclear. Water indeed doesn't feel, as far as we know.
What would it feel like FOR YOU to not have free will?
Would irresistible voices in your head telling you what to do give you that feeling? Would observing your arm flailing about without your input? Would watching yourself reach for your X-Box despite knowing that you should study for a test? Or knowing that someone else can predict your actions and maybe even thoughts before you aware of having them?
Think about all these very different no-free-will cases and tell me what not having free will means for you. Not for water.
Not to have free will would feel like when I am not conscious of the fact that free will exists. I would actually operate the same way as usual. Free will is just an idea that appears when I think about determinism and randomness in the universe. Also, I think about free will when deconstructing the universe and trying to understand how it works. This is because as a way to compare "dead" physical mechanics to "non-dead" I use as a reference the supposed free will I have in my mind (or the feeling of free will).
Summary: Free will is the name I designate to a group of activities in my mind that result in a decision. But it's not a thing or something that actually exists anywhere, but in my imagination!