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