“What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about ‘free will’?”
As I understand it, there was no debate on free will before about three centuries ago. Since that time, the idea that we might all be automata has been taken somewhat seriously. In earlier times, it would have been considered absurd to question free will.
So, did our cognitive algorithm change back around the time of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton? Of course not. So how can the algorithm be “blamed” for the existence of a debate? By itself it cannot. So we have to imagine that the debate arises from the combination of algorithm and data. The algorithm is the same, only the data has changed. And clearly the new data which enables the debate is the evidence that the physical universe may be lawlike and deterministic, together with a learned bias toward monism.
Ok, so I think I have improved the question a little, but I have come nowhere close to either answering or dissolving it. So, come at it from a different direction:
My personal tapdance for avoiding the free-will debate is to refuse to see any contradiction between the claims “I have a choice” and “I am an automaton”. Seeing a contradiction there (I claim) is the flaw in our cognitive algorithm. And to make it completely obvious that there is no contradiction, we need to actually construct an automaton with free-will. How do we know when we have succeeded? Well, the automaton simply has to pass the free-will Turing test.
Now here is where it gets interesting. I imagine that a critic will say something like, “Sure, you can build a machine that can fool me. You can fool every one else too. But there is one person you can never fool. Yourself. You, having built the machine, will understand its workings, and hence will know that it doesn’t really have free will.”
Not too bad as an argument against the possibility of AFW (Artificial Free Will). But it gives us the hint that lets us dissolve the original question. We now see that free-will is in the eye of the beholder. To every one else, my automaton is free, to me it is not. Freedom is not a unary predicate. It is a two-place predicate—you need to identify both the candidate automaton/agent and the observer who evaluates it. One observer sees the device as determined, another observer sees it as free. And they can both be right. There is no contradiction. The free-will debate is hereby dissolved.
So, pop back to the original question. Why does there seem to be a real debate? Well, obviously, it is because there seems to be a real contradiction. So, what feature of the algorithm makes it seem that there must be a contradiction here? If my analysis is correct, it is the gizmo which biases us against concepts which are “subjective” (i.e. observer dependent) and in favor of an illusion of objective reality. A metaphysics that says “An agent is either free or it is not”.
As I understand it, there was no debate on free will before about three centuries ago.
This is quite incorrect. Determinism (as opposed to the default folk psychology of free will) has been long debated; from Wikipedia:
“Some of the main philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d’Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and, more recently, Victoria DiMarco, John Searle, Suraj Manjunath, Jai Ramachandran, Ted Honderich, and Daniel Dennett.”
This is a very incomplete list, which omits people like the Stoics such as Chrysippus; the other article mentions later the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
In Eastern tradition, there are many different takes on ‘karma’.
The atheist Carvaka held a deterministic scientific view of the universe, and a materialist view of the mind (although so little survives it’s hard to be sure). I’m not entirely clear on the Samkhya darsana’s position on causality, though their views on satkaryavada (as opposed to the common Indian position of asatkaryavada) sound determinist.
And of course, who can really generalize about all Buddhist schools’ positions? I have no doubt whatsoever that many Buddhist philosophies could be fairly described as completely determinist.
As I understand it, there was no debate on free will before about three centuries ago. Since that time, the idea that we might all be automata has been taken somewhat seriously. In earlier times, it would have been considered absurd to question free will.
So, did our cognitive algorithm change back around the time of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton? Of course not. So how can the algorithm be “blamed” for the existence of a debate? By itself it cannot. So we have to imagine that the debate arises from the combination of algorithm and data. The algorithm is the same, only the data has changed. And clearly the new data which enables the debate is the evidence that the physical universe may be lawlike and deterministic, together with a learned bias toward monism.
Ok, so I think I have improved the question a little, but I have come nowhere close to either answering or dissolving it. So, come at it from a different direction:
My personal tapdance for avoiding the free-will debate is to refuse to see any contradiction between the claims “I have a choice” and “I am an automaton”. Seeing a contradiction there (I claim) is the flaw in our cognitive algorithm. And to make it completely obvious that there is no contradiction, we need to actually construct an automaton with free-will. How do we know when we have succeeded? Well, the automaton simply has to pass the free-will Turing test.
Now here is where it gets interesting. I imagine that a critic will say something like, “Sure, you can build a machine that can fool me. You can fool every one else too. But there is one person you can never fool. Yourself. You, having built the machine, will understand its workings, and hence will know that it doesn’t really have free will.”
Not too bad as an argument against the possibility of AFW (Artificial Free Will). But it gives us the hint that lets us dissolve the original question. We now see that free-will is in the eye of the beholder. To every one else, my automaton is free, to me it is not. Freedom is not a unary predicate. It is a two-place predicate—you need to identify both the candidate automaton/agent and the observer who evaluates it. One observer sees the device as determined, another observer sees it as free. And they can both be right. There is no contradiction. The free-will debate is hereby dissolved.
So, pop back to the original question. Why does there seem to be a real debate? Well, obviously, it is because there seems to be a real contradiction. So, what feature of the algorithm makes it seem that there must be a contradiction here? If my analysis is correct, it is the gizmo which biases us against concepts which are “subjective” (i.e. observer dependent) and in favor of an illusion of objective reality. A metaphysics that says “An agent is either free or it is not”.
My apologies for the length of this comment.
This is quite incorrect. Determinism (as opposed to the default folk psychology of free will) has been long debated; from Wikipedia:
This is a very incomplete list, which omits people like the Stoics such as Chrysippus; the other article mentions later the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
In Eastern tradition, there are many different takes on ‘karma’.
The atheist Carvaka held a deterministic scientific view of the universe, and a materialist view of the mind (although so little survives it’s hard to be sure). I’m not entirely clear on the Samkhya darsana’s position on causality, though their views on satkaryavada (as opposed to the common Indian position of asatkaryavada) sound determinist.
And of course, who can really generalize about all Buddhist schools’ positions? I have no doubt whatsoever that many Buddhist philosophies could be fairly described as completely determinist.