Thanks Seth, yes, I think we’re pretty aligned on this topic. Which gives me some more confidence, given you actually have relevant education and experience in this area.
I’m not sure it’s fully satisfying. I’m afraid someone who’s really bothered by determinism and their lack of “free will” wouldn’t find this comforting at all
I absolutely agree, which is why I followed this section up with the caveat
Now, I’ll admit this is not very satisfying, in terms of understanding how our intuitions relate to physical reality
The reason for including this was because it can be an end-of-argument claim for hard determinists. I was meaning only to highlight that an intuition is being smuggled in to an otherwise reductionist argument. I get that this will not be satisfying to believers in free will, as it’s not a positive argument for free will, and is not intended to be. Reducing anything to its component parts can remove intuitive meaning from anything and everything, and if an argument can be used to undermine anything and everything, it is self-defeating and essentially meaningless.
I did a whole bunch of work on exactly how the brain does exatly that process of conscious predictions to choose outcomes
This looks fascinating. I should add that I’m aware that prediction is not only involved in internal processes but is also active while taking actions, where we project our expectations on to the world and our consciousness acts as a sort of error correction, or evaluation function. But for the purposes of not over-complicating the logic I was trying to clarify, I omitted this from the model.
So my response to people being bothered by being “just” the “continuation of deterministic forces via genetics and experience” is that those are condensed as beliefs, values, knowledge, and skills, and the effort with which those are applied is what determines outcomes and therefore your results and your future.
I agree, I had implicitly included beliefs, values etc in my ‘model of self’, and also emphasise effort (or deliberation) as the key “variety of free will worth having”. I’m not, in the slightest, concerned that my desires and intentions are not conscious decisions (I’ve never believed this to be something I was in control of, and when people ask “but are you really in control” at this level, I believe they are accidentally arguing against a straw-man)—although I think desires and intentions can be consciously reviewed, to check their consistency with other values, just like any other aspect of life through the same internal iterative process.
Thanks again for your thought provoking comment, I’m chuffed that you thought the post was worth engaging with.
Thanks Seth, yes, I think we’re pretty aligned on this topic. Which gives me some more confidence, given you actually have relevant education and experience in this area.
I absolutely agree, which is why I followed this section up with the caveat
The reason for including this was because it can be an end-of-argument claim for hard determinists. I was meaning only to highlight that an intuition is being smuggled in to an otherwise reductionist argument. I get that this will not be satisfying to believers in free will, as it’s not a positive argument for free will, and is not intended to be. Reducing anything to its component parts can remove intuitive meaning from anything and everything, and if an argument can be used to undermine anything and everything, it is self-defeating and essentially meaningless.
This looks fascinating. I should add that I’m aware that prediction is not only involved in internal processes but is also active while taking actions, where we project our expectations on to the world and our consciousness acts as a sort of error correction, or evaluation function. But for the purposes of not over-complicating the logic I was trying to clarify, I omitted this from the model.
I agree, I had implicitly included beliefs, values etc in my ‘model of self’, and also emphasise effort (or deliberation) as the key “variety of free will worth having”. I’m not, in the slightest, concerned that my desires and intentions are not conscious decisions (I’ve never believed this to be something I was in control of, and when people ask “but are you really in control” at this level, I believe they are accidentally arguing against a straw-man)—although I think desires and intentions can be consciously reviewed, to check their consistency with other values, just like any other aspect of life through the same internal iterative process.
Thanks again for your thought provoking comment, I’m chuffed that you thought the post was worth engaging with.