Some rough notes on free will, before I read the “spoiler” posts or the other attempted solutions posted as comments here.
(Advice for anyone attempting reductions/dissolutions of free will or anything else: actually write notes, make them detailed when you can (and notice when you can’t), and note when you’re leaving some subproblem unsolved for the time being. Often you will notice that you are confused in all kinds of ways that you wouldn’t have noticed if you had kept all of it in your head. (And if you’re going to try a problem and then read a solution, this is a good way of avoiding hindsight bias.))
What kind of algorithm feels like free will from the inside?
Some ingredients:
Local preferences:
The algorithm doesn’t necessarily need to be an optimization process with a consistent, persistent utility function, but when the algorithm runs, there needs to be some locally-usable preference function over outcomes, since this is a decision algorithm.
Counterfactual simulation:
When you feel that you “could” make one of several (mutually exclusive) “choices”, that doesn’t mean that all of them are actually possible (for most senses of “possible” that we use outside the context of being confused about free will); you’re going to end up doing at most one of them. But it occurs to you to imagine doing any of them, because you don’t yet know what you’ll decide (and you don’t know what you’ll decide because this imagining is part of the algorithm that generates the decision). So you look at the choices you think you might make, and you imagine yourself making each of those choices. You then evaluate each imagined outcome according to some criterion (specifying which, I think, is far outside the scope of this problem), and the algorithm then returns the choice corresponding to the imagined outcome that maximizes that criterion.
(Imagining a maybe-impossible world — one where you make a specific decision which may not be the one you will actually make — consists of imagining a world to which all of your prior beliefs about the real world apply, plus an extra assumption about what decision you end up making. If we want to go a bit deeper: suppose you’re considering options A, B, and C, and you’re imagining what happens if you pick B. Then you imagine a world which is identical to (how you imagine) the real world, except with a different agent substituted for you, identical to you except that their decision algorithm has a special case for this particular situation consisting of “return B”.)
(I realize that I have not unpacked this so-called “imagining” at all. This is beyond my current understanding, and is not specific to the free will issue.)
Why does that feel non-deterministic?
Because we don’t have any way of knowing the outcome for sure other than just following the algorithm to the conclusion. Due to the mind projection fallacy, our lack of knowledge of our deterministic decisions feels like those decisions actually not being deterministically implied yet.
...Let me phrase that better: The fact that we don’t know what the algorithm will output until we follow it to its normal conclusion, feels like the algorithm not having a definite output until it reaches its conclusion. Since our beliefs about reality just feel like reality, our blank or hazy or changing map of the future feels like a blank or hazy or changing future; as is pointed out in “Timeless Causality”, changing our extrapolation of the future feels like changing the future. When you don’t know what decision you’ll make, that feels like the future itself is undecided. And the fact that we can imagine multiple futures until it’s not imaginary or the future anymore, feels like there are multiple possible futures until we pick one to go with.
Why does the idea of determinism feel non-free?
Well, there’s the whole metaphor of “laws”, to begin with. When we hear about fundamental physical laws, our intuition doesn’t go straight to “This is the fundamental framework in which everything in the universe happens (including everything about me)”. “Laws” sound like constraints imposed on us. It makes us imagine some causal force acting on us and restricting us from the outside; something that acts independently of and sometimes against mental causes, rather than what you see when you look at mental causes under a microscope (so to speak).
That also seems to explain why people think that physical determinism would preclude moral responsibility. When someone first tells you that everything about you is reducible to lawful physics, it can intuitively sound like being told that you’re under the Imperius curse or that you’re a puppet and some some demon called “Physics” is pulling the strings. If your intuition says that determinism means people are puppets, then surely it’s easy to think that implies people cannot be held responsible for their actions, clearly Physics must get the credit or the blame.
(In one sense, yes, physics must get the credit or blame — but only the region of physics that we call “you” for short.)
And there’s the fact that, if it’s explained poorly, the idea of physical determinism can sound about the same as the idea of fate. (Or even if it is explained well, but you pattern-match it as “fate” from the beginning and let that contaminate your understanding of the rest of the explanation.) Of course, the ideas couldn’t be more different, fate is the idea that your choices don’t matter because the outcome will be the same no matter what; and this (rightly) sounds non-free, because it implies that this algorithm you’re running doesn’t ultimately have any influence on the future. Physical determinism, on the other hand, says quite the opposite, that the future is causally downstream from your actions, which are causally downstream from the algorithm you’re running; but given sufficiently confusing/confused descriptions of determinism (like “everything is predetermined”), it is possible to mistake them for each other.
Why does the idea of predictability feel non-free?
The previous bit, on physical determinism feeling non-free, isn’t the whole story. Even when the idea of “lawfulness” isn’t invoked, people still think as though being theoretically predictable is a limitation on free will. They still wonder things like “If God is omniscient, then he must know every decision I will make, so how can I have free will?” (And atheists say things like this a lot to argue that an omniscient god is impossible because then we couldn’t have free will (particularly as an argument against religious traditions that argue (badly) against the problem of evil by saying that God gave us free will). I’m not sure if this is because it’s a soldier on their side or if they just don’t know reductionism. Probably some of both.) This probably goes back to the bit about the mind projection fallacy; if you don’t know what you’re going to do, that feels like reality itself being indeterminate, and if you’re told that reality itself is not indeterminate — that the territory isn’t blank where your map is blank — then, if you haven’t learned to strictly distinguish between the map and the territory, you’ll say “But I can see plainly that the territory is blank at that point!”, and you’ll dismiss the idea that your decisions could theoretically be predictable.
(Tangential to the actual reduction, but: this seems like it could be covered by a principle analogous to the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle. If the thing you think “free will” refers to is something that you’d suddenly have less of if I built a machine that could exactly predict your decisions (even if I just looked at its output and didn’t tell you it even existed), then it’s clearly not the thing that causes you to think you have “free will”.)
Why do we “explain” free will in terms of mysterious substances placed in a separate realm declared unknowable by fiat?
I don’t have the cognitive science to answer that, and I’ll consider it outside the scope of the free will problem in particular, because that’s something we seem to do with everything (as in MAMQ), not just free will.
Some rough notes on free will, before I read the “spoiler” posts or the other attempted solutions posted as comments here.
(Advice for anyone attempting reductions/dissolutions of free will or anything else: actually write notes, make them detailed when you can (and notice when you can’t), and note when you’re leaving some subproblem unsolved for the time being. Often you will notice that you are confused in all kinds of ways that you wouldn’t have noticed if you had kept all of it in your head. (And if you’re going to try a problem and then read a solution, this is a good way of avoiding hindsight bias.))
What kind of algorithm feels like free will from the inside?
Some ingredients:
Local preferences:
The algorithm doesn’t necessarily need to be an optimization process with a consistent, persistent utility function, but when the algorithm runs, there needs to be some locally-usable preference function over outcomes, since this is a decision algorithm.
Counterfactual simulation:
When you feel that you “could” make one of several (mutually exclusive) “choices”, that doesn’t mean that all of them are actually possible (for most senses of “possible” that we use outside the context of being confused about free will); you’re going to end up doing at most one of them. But it occurs to you to imagine doing any of them, because you don’t yet know what you’ll decide (and you don’t know what you’ll decide because this imagining is part of the algorithm that generates the decision). So you look at the choices you think you might make, and you imagine yourself making each of those choices. You then evaluate each imagined outcome according to some criterion (specifying which, I think, is far outside the scope of this problem), and the algorithm then returns the choice corresponding to the imagined outcome that maximizes that criterion.
(Imagining a maybe-impossible world — one where you make a specific decision which may not be the one you will actually make — consists of imagining a world to which all of your prior beliefs about the real world apply, plus an extra assumption about what decision you end up making. If we want to go a bit deeper: suppose you’re considering options A, B, and C, and you’re imagining what happens if you pick B. Then you imagine a world which is identical to (how you imagine) the real world, except with a different agent substituted for you, identical to you except that their decision algorithm has a special case for this particular situation consisting of “return B”.)
(I realize that I have not unpacked this so-called “imagining” at all. This is beyond my current understanding, and is not specific to the free will issue.)
Why does that feel non-deterministic?
Because we don’t have any way of knowing the outcome for sure other than just following the algorithm to the conclusion. Due to the mind projection fallacy, our lack of knowledge of our deterministic decisions feels like those decisions actually not being deterministically implied yet.
...Let me phrase that better: The fact that we don’t know what the algorithm will output until we follow it to its normal conclusion, feels like the algorithm not having a definite output until it reaches its conclusion. Since our beliefs about reality just feel like reality, our blank or hazy or changing map of the future feels like a blank or hazy or changing future; as is pointed out in “Timeless Causality”, changing our extrapolation of the future feels like changing the future. When you don’t know what decision you’ll make, that feels like the future itself is undecided. And the fact that we can imagine multiple futures until it’s not imaginary or the future anymore, feels like there are multiple possible futures until we pick one to go with.
Why does the idea of determinism feel non-free?
Well, there’s the whole metaphor of “laws”, to begin with. When we hear about fundamental physical laws, our intuition doesn’t go straight to “This is the fundamental framework in which everything in the universe happens (including everything about me)”. “Laws” sound like constraints imposed on us. It makes us imagine some causal force acting on us and restricting us from the outside; something that acts independently of and sometimes against mental causes, rather than what you see when you look at mental causes under a microscope (so to speak).
That also seems to explain why people think that physical determinism would preclude moral responsibility. When someone first tells you that everything about you is reducible to lawful physics, it can intuitively sound like being told that you’re under the Imperius curse or that you’re a puppet and some some demon called “Physics” is pulling the strings. If your intuition says that determinism means people are puppets, then surely it’s easy to think that implies people cannot be held responsible for their actions, clearly Physics must get the credit or the blame.
(In one sense, yes, physics must get the credit or blame — but only the region of physics that we call “you” for short.)
And there’s the fact that, if it’s explained poorly, the idea of physical determinism can sound about the same as the idea of fate. (Or even if it is explained well, but you pattern-match it as “fate” from the beginning and let that contaminate your understanding of the rest of the explanation.) Of course, the ideas couldn’t be more different, fate is the idea that your choices don’t matter because the outcome will be the same no matter what; and this (rightly) sounds non-free, because it implies that this algorithm you’re running doesn’t ultimately have any influence on the future. Physical determinism, on the other hand, says quite the opposite, that the future is causally downstream from your actions, which are causally downstream from the algorithm you’re running; but given sufficiently confusing/confused descriptions of determinism (like “everything is predetermined”), it is possible to mistake them for each other.
Why does the idea of predictability feel non-free?
The previous bit, on physical determinism feeling non-free, isn’t the whole story. Even when the idea of “lawfulness” isn’t invoked, people still think as though being theoretically predictable is a limitation on free will. They still wonder things like “If God is omniscient, then he must know every decision I will make, so how can I have free will?” (And atheists say things like this a lot to argue that an omniscient god is impossible because then we couldn’t have free will (particularly as an argument against religious traditions that argue (badly) against the problem of evil by saying that God gave us free will). I’m not sure if this is because it’s a soldier on their side or if they just don’t know reductionism. Probably some of both.) This probably goes back to the bit about the mind projection fallacy; if you don’t know what you’re going to do, that feels like reality itself being indeterminate, and if you’re told that reality itself is not indeterminate — that the territory isn’t blank where your map is blank — then, if you haven’t learned to strictly distinguish between the map and the territory, you’ll say “But I can see plainly that the territory is blank at that point!”, and you’ll dismiss the idea that your decisions could theoretically be predictable.
(Tangential to the actual reduction, but: this seems like it could be covered by a principle analogous to the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle. If the thing you think “free will” refers to is something that you’d suddenly have less of if I built a machine that could exactly predict your decisions (even if I just looked at its output and didn’t tell you it even existed), then it’s clearly not the thing that causes you to think you have “free will”.)
Why do we “explain” free will in terms of mysterious substances placed in a separate realm declared unknowable by fiat?
I don’t have the cognitive science to answer that, and I’ll consider it outside the scope of the free will problem in particular, because that’s something we seem to do with everything (as in MAMQ), not just free will.