It’s not clear to me what the concept “free will” is intended to mean here. I have never in my life been able to figure out what that term means. Can you please explain how you are using it?
PBR suggests physics reasoning has to be conducted from something’s perspective, instead of a “god’s eye view” or “view from nowhere”.
Call this thing at the perspective center “self”. From this perspective, the world around can be physically described/analyzed based on the interactions with the self. This means to physically analyze something we have to reason from the perspective of something else that interacts with it. It cannot be done from its own perspective. This is the reason why “observers” are not covered by quantum physic btw.
The self is not within the scope of physics. Instead, the reason behind its actions can be interpreted as conscious choices. This is what I meant by “free will”.
E.g. if we take an outsider’s perspective and physically analyze Bill Gate’s body, brain included, we can in theory analyze it as a machine to deduce its output. The concept of “free will” or “conscious choice” never applies. If we reason from our natural first-person perspective, then the reason behind our decisions is our choices.
Human bodies are nothing special. If we reason from the perspective of a Galton board, how it arranged the balls shall be interpreted as conscious choices too. Even though physically analyzing it, from another perspective, would reveal nothing of that nature.
To summarize, PBR suggests consciousness and free will are inherent properties to the thing at the perspective center. Or the first-person perspective presupposes them. (first-”person” is a misnomer here, doesn’t has to be a human being.)
This is self-contradictory. There can be only one true explanation for any given event. But you are positing two separate co-occurring explanations: one (mysterious, undefined “free will” which somehow relates to what you “choose” to do) from the inside point of view, and one (brain states and their transformation over time) from the outside point of view. Either these are the same thing, meaning “free will” isn’t free and is just the way a certain computation feels from the inside, or there are too many causes.
And claiming that this is why “observers aren’t covered by quantum physics” puts you near crackpot “I understand QM better than actual physicists!!” woo territory.
Steelmanning your argument, the best interpretation I can come up with is “Conscious minds have free-willed choices in the sense that it is impossible to put a probability distribution on their actions (due to the I stuff), and whenever two conscious minds interact, their separate subjective timelines coalesce into a shared timeline mediated by matter arranged in a way that perfectly mirrors their subjective experience. Mind comes first, matter is the external representation of mind used in shared universes for communication between minds, and the apparent history of the particles making up a mind is a result of its sequence of (totally inexplicable, like the splitting experiment) choices resulting in its being the specific entity that it is, which causes it to manifest in the apparently-physical shared universe in the specific way it does.” Is this close to your actual view?
There can be only one true explanation for any given event
This is a quite complex claim depending on what you mean by truth and explanation. I see no reason why to accept it.
I can explain the fact that I slept well on some days by saying that I was too warm. I can also explain it by saying that the walls of my flat radiated too much energy. Both explanations can be true at the same time.
And claiming that this is why “observers aren’t covered by quantum physics” puts you near crackpot “I understand QM better than actual physicists!!” woo territory.
This is an ad hominem that has no good place at LessWrong. You should also remember that part of the sequences are posts about quantum mechanics and many worlds where Eliezer does argue that he thinks his understanding is superior to that of physicists.
You should also remember that part of the sequences are posts about quantum mechanics and many worlds where Eliezer does argue that he thinks his understanding is superior to that of physicists.
Arguments from authority are no better than ad hominem arguments. I don’t see why I should care what Eliezer thinks, except to the extent he has evidence and good reasoning to back it up. (Having not read the quantum mechanics posts recently I shall have to suspend judgment about that.)
Also I wasn’t making an ad hominem argument; a better way to express what I meant is, “My prior for claims about quantum physics made by people who are not themselves quantum physicists is very low.”
I can explain the fact that I slept well on some days by saying that I was too warm. I can also explain it by saying that the walls of my flat radiated too much energy. Both explanations can be true at the same time.
Those are the same explanation worded differently. My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique. And it is redundant and contrary to Occam’s Razor to posit some special extra cause beyond what is necessary to explain the facts, as it feels like dadadarren is doing here.
If you want to talk to a community and caring for the norms and assumptions of the community matters a great deal. It tells you a lot about which assumptions it makes sense to make in a community without explicitly defending them. Things are not true because they are written in the sequences but if you make an assumption that disagrees with the sequences it’s on you to explain why you think differently.
My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique.
That sounds like a naive and unreflective claim for which you do no work of backing it up. If you engage with the literature about causality from Judea Pearl you learn that causality is inherently about counterfactuals. The total set of causal influences, therefore, depends not only on the facts in the world but also on what counterfactual scenarios you have in your model. Models that include looking at different counterfactuals both can be valid.
It seems to me that you have an intuition that making claims about Quantum Physics is something that should only be made by people who not only read the relevant literature but are experts in it while you make big claims about things like causality and assume them to be true because they feel so intuitively but haven’t read the relevant literature.
My first instinct is to experience this as a personal attack—more specifically, an attempt to make yourself look smarter at my expense in order to win status points—and get angry. I am going to try to make myself believe that this instinct is wrong, or at least unhelpful for the purpose of increasing my reputation within this community.
My second instinct is to feel despondent, stupid, incapable, unworthy of being here, and to start talking about how I’m just not as smart as you people and never will be and wish I’d never said anything. Getting myself to believe that this instinct is also wrong is more of a challenge.
Even though I’ve expressed those two facts, thus getting them out of my head and possibly clarifying my thinking a bit by openly recognizing them as traps (at least, according to the unemotional logic other people here use, which I have a hard time trusting but am trying hard to in order to fit in), I nonetheless still have no idea how to respond to this comment in any sensible-sounding way that would rehabilitate my loss of face as a result of your claim that I am naive and unreflective etc.
So, instead of responding to the topic itself, which, you’re right, I probably cannot effectively speak about due to lacking whatever background you have on it, I’m going to just show this sequence of thought patterns and try to analyze my own thinking out loud, to give you a sense of what I’m dealing with whenever I try to communicate here, and why it’s difficult for me to do so in a useful way.
My credence for that first instinct was roughly 80%, then dropped to maybe 50% as the second instinct rose to replace it, and now it’s somewhere around 20%. This isn’t Reddit but I still wouldn’t put it past rationalists to be condescending on purpose to put a newbie in their place or whatever, because they’re humans and my prior for humans being kind is quite low.
My second instinct peaked at a sufficiently high value, at least 70%, that I had to “pull back on the reins” so to speak to stop myself from impulsively going to my profile and deleting my account. After writing them both out and committing myself to share them, I felt like I had been sufficiently epistemically virtuous as to renew my own faith that I’m capable of getting along here, at least to some extent, so P(“I’ll never fit in on LessWrong”) is now something like… I’m not very calibrated, maybe 25%? It’s hard to say. All these numbers are pulled out of nowhere but that’s how I have to do it for now.
What all this tells me is that as a result of my extreme emotional shifts I massively overestimate the quality of evidence that has emotional implications and I probably also hallucinate “evidence” that isn’t there. I knew this already, of course, but emotional-me doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded every single time. These mood swings are particularly driven by an intense fear of social rejection and abandonment which evokes a trigger response of trying to devalue and abandon the other person or group first, preemptively, to deflect the shame of being unworthy onto them.
Now, on to trying to actually respond to your comment. I do not think I can actually directly address anything you said as it still has a “this must not parse in order to avoid pain” aura around it making my mind come up completely blank when I reread it, but I can say that my initial response to dadadarren was not rooted in any kind of forethought, but rather in intuition trained over a long time of hearing and reading New Agers invoking quantum physics and consciousness to explain and provide “evidence” for their beliefs.
This evoked a kneejerk response of disgust and distrust, wherein I felt as if something simply must be terribly wrong in his reasoning and he must be trying to manipulate me into believing something false and dangerous to my sanity, because it fit the regex for “woo”. I then confabulated an explanation for what that wrong thing must be. My response to him was more like a frantic attempt to get a slimy creature off of me than an actual reasoned reply. Same sort of pattern as my first instincts when replying to you—I just had the sense to notice what was happening this time. (It’s this exact paranoid pattern of thinking and communicating that has gotten me banned from so many discord servers and subreddits.)
This is been somewhat exhausting. But <sarcasm> at least now I can virtue signal about how self aware I am. Look at me, critiquing the ways my emotions override my rationality! I’m smart, right?! I’m good enough, right?! Please like me again!!! </sarcasm>
Do you think there is a causal reason why you are MSRayne? Meaning why you are experiencing the world from that particular physical person’s perspective? Instead of you being Bill Gates, or an astroid, or a quark?
There can be only one true explanation for any given event. But you are positing two separate
I dont see why. Explanations aren’t the sort of map feature expected to be in one to one correspondence with something in the territory. Explanations relate to human interests, such as how to stop something, how to reproduce something, whom to blame for something, and so on. You can see this is in court cases, where the physical cause of a murder is a different issue to who is the guilty party...for the purposes of culpability, guns never kill people.
“There can be only one true explanation for any given event” is actually what I am challenging. PBR supposes reasoning and physical descriptions have to be based on a prespecified perspective. And there is no one “true explanation” that transcends all perspectives.
By PBR’s logic, the perspective center being not physically describable is to be expected. That’s what I meant by “why quantum physics does not cover the observer” because physics actually shouldn’t. I am not claiming I know more than physicists. If you are interested in quantum interpretations proposed by actual physicists, that work well with the idea of PBR, I suggest RQM by Carlo Rovelli.
Btw, the steelmaning portion is not my argument. “whenever two conscious minds interact” is ontologically impossible per PBR. The “conscious mind” is inherent to the first-person, or more generally inherent to the thing at the perspective center. There cannot be two conscious minds in any given analysis. For example, reasoning from my first-person perspective and conducting physical analysis would not conclude or infer that you are conscious. You are just a complicated machine in this analysis. Whatever your actions are, they can be physically deduced. Alternatively, we can conduct the analysis from your perspective instead of mine. But then you will be the conscious self, and I will just be the complex, yet physically-reducible machine.
We can also conduct the analysis from the perspective of some other thing, then neither you nor I would be conscious. However, we shouldn’t conduct the analysis with “a view from nowhere” or “god’s eye view” that transcends all perspectives that think in terms of the “true nature” or “absolute reality” of things.
As ever, you can look up standard definitiions. But I still don’t know what dadadarren means.
Perspective-based reasoning presupposes free will. For thinking from someone’s perspective to be meaningful at all it is a necessary presumption. It should be noted like consciousness, free will is also a first-person concept.
What does it mean to say free will is not a third person concept? That everyone’s actions are predictable in principle to outside observers? But if first person free will can’t manifest as free, undetermined, action ,how does it manifest?
It’s not clear to me what the concept “free will” is intended to mean here. I have never in my life been able to figure out what that term means. Can you please explain how you are using it?
PBR suggests physics reasoning has to be conducted from something’s perspective, instead of a “god’s eye view” or “view from nowhere”.
Call this thing at the perspective center “self”. From this perspective, the world around can be physically described/analyzed based on the interactions with the self. This means to physically analyze something we have to reason from the perspective of something else that interacts with it. It cannot be done from its own perspective. This is the reason why “observers” are not covered by quantum physic btw.
The self is not within the scope of physics. Instead, the reason behind its actions can be interpreted as conscious choices. This is what I meant by “free will”.
E.g. if we take an outsider’s perspective and physically analyze Bill Gate’s body, brain included, we can in theory analyze it as a machine to deduce its output. The concept of “free will” or “conscious choice” never applies. If we reason from our natural first-person perspective, then the reason behind our decisions is our choices.
Human bodies are nothing special. If we reason from the perspective of a Galton board, how it arranged the balls shall be interpreted as conscious choices too. Even though physically analyzing it, from another perspective, would reveal nothing of that nature.
To summarize, PBR suggests consciousness and free will are inherent properties to the thing at the perspective center. Or the first-person perspective presupposes them. (first-”person” is a misnomer here, doesn’t has to be a human being.)
This is self-contradictory. There can be only one true explanation for any given event. But you are positing two separate co-occurring explanations: one (mysterious, undefined “free will” which somehow relates to what you “choose” to do) from the inside point of view, and one (brain states and their transformation over time) from the outside point of view. Either these are the same thing, meaning “free will” isn’t free and is just the way a certain computation feels from the inside, or there are too many causes.
And claiming that this is why “observers aren’t covered by quantum physics” puts you near crackpot “I understand QM better than actual physicists!!” woo territory.
Steelmanning your argument, the best interpretation I can come up with is “Conscious minds have free-willed choices in the sense that it is impossible to put a probability distribution on their actions (due to the I stuff), and whenever two conscious minds interact, their separate subjective timelines coalesce into a shared timeline mediated by matter arranged in a way that perfectly mirrors their subjective experience. Mind comes first, matter is the external representation of mind used in shared universes for communication between minds, and the apparent history of the particles making up a mind is a result of its sequence of (totally inexplicable, like the splitting experiment) choices resulting in its being the specific entity that it is, which causes it to manifest in the apparently-physical shared universe in the specific way it does.” Is this close to your actual view?
This is a quite complex claim depending on what you mean by truth and explanation. I see no reason why to accept it.
I can explain the fact that I slept well on some days by saying that I was too warm. I can also explain it by saying that the walls of my flat radiated too much energy. Both explanations can be true at the same time.
This is an ad hominem that has no good place at LessWrong. You should also remember that part of the sequences are posts about quantum mechanics and many worlds where Eliezer does argue that he thinks his understanding is superior to that of physicists.
Arguments from authority are no better than ad hominem arguments. I don’t see why I should care what Eliezer thinks, except to the extent he has evidence and good reasoning to back it up. (Having not read the quantum mechanics posts recently I shall have to suspend judgment about that.)
Also I wasn’t making an ad hominem argument; a better way to express what I meant is, “My prior for claims about quantum physics made by people who are not themselves quantum physicists is very low.”
Those are the same explanation worded differently. My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique. And it is redundant and contrary to Occam’s Razor to posit some special extra cause beyond what is necessary to explain the facts, as it feels like dadadarren is doing here.
If you want to talk to a community and caring for the norms and assumptions of the community matters a great deal. It tells you a lot about which assumptions it makes sense to make in a community without explicitly defending them. Things are not true because they are written in the sequences but if you make an assumption that disagrees with the sequences it’s on you to explain why you think differently.
That sounds like a naive and unreflective claim for which you do no work of backing it up. If you engage with the literature about causality from Judea Pearl you learn that causality is inherently about counterfactuals. The total set of causal influences, therefore, depends not only on the facts in the world but also on what counterfactual scenarios you have in your model. Models that include looking at different counterfactuals both can be valid.
It seems to me that you have an intuition that making claims about Quantum Physics is something that should only be made by people who not only read the relevant literature but are experts in it while you make big claims about things like causality and assume them to be true because they feel so intuitively but haven’t read the relevant literature.
My first instinct is to experience this as a personal attack—more specifically, an attempt to make yourself look smarter at my expense in order to win status points—and get angry. I am going to try to make myself believe that this instinct is wrong, or at least unhelpful for the purpose of increasing my reputation within this community.
My second instinct is to feel despondent, stupid, incapable, unworthy of being here, and to start talking about how I’m just not as smart as you people and never will be and wish I’d never said anything. Getting myself to believe that this instinct is also wrong is more of a challenge.
Even though I’ve expressed those two facts, thus getting them out of my head and possibly clarifying my thinking a bit by openly recognizing them as traps (at least, according to the unemotional logic other people here use, which I have a hard time trusting but am trying hard to in order to fit in), I nonetheless still have no idea how to respond to this comment in any sensible-sounding way that would rehabilitate my loss of face as a result of your claim that I am naive and unreflective etc.
So, instead of responding to the topic itself, which, you’re right, I probably cannot effectively speak about due to lacking whatever background you have on it, I’m going to just show this sequence of thought patterns and try to analyze my own thinking out loud, to give you a sense of what I’m dealing with whenever I try to communicate here, and why it’s difficult for me to do so in a useful way.
My credence for that first instinct was roughly 80%, then dropped to maybe 50% as the second instinct rose to replace it, and now it’s somewhere around 20%. This isn’t Reddit but I still wouldn’t put it past rationalists to be condescending on purpose to put a newbie in their place or whatever, because they’re humans and my prior for humans being kind is quite low.
My second instinct peaked at a sufficiently high value, at least 70%, that I had to “pull back on the reins” so to speak to stop myself from impulsively going to my profile and deleting my account. After writing them both out and committing myself to share them, I felt like I had been sufficiently epistemically virtuous as to renew my own faith that I’m capable of getting along here, at least to some extent, so P(“I’ll never fit in on LessWrong”) is now something like… I’m not very calibrated, maybe 25%? It’s hard to say. All these numbers are pulled out of nowhere but that’s how I have to do it for now.
What all this tells me is that as a result of my extreme emotional shifts I massively overestimate the quality of evidence that has emotional implications and I probably also hallucinate “evidence” that isn’t there. I knew this already, of course, but emotional-me doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded every single time. These mood swings are particularly driven by an intense fear of social rejection and abandonment which evokes a trigger response of trying to devalue and abandon the other person or group first, preemptively, to deflect the shame of being unworthy onto them.
Now, on to trying to actually respond to your comment. I do not think I can actually directly address anything you said as it still has a “this must not parse in order to avoid pain” aura around it making my mind come up completely blank when I reread it, but I can say that my initial response to dadadarren was not rooted in any kind of forethought, but rather in intuition trained over a long time of hearing and reading New Agers invoking quantum physics and consciousness to explain and provide “evidence” for their beliefs.
This evoked a kneejerk response of disgust and distrust, wherein I felt as if something simply must be terribly wrong in his reasoning and he must be trying to manipulate me into believing something false and dangerous to my sanity, because it fit the regex for “woo”. I then confabulated an explanation for what that wrong thing must be. My response to him was more like a frantic attempt to get a slimy creature off of me than an actual reasoned reply. Same sort of pattern as my first instincts when replying to you—I just had the sense to notice what was happening this time. (It’s this exact paranoid pattern of thinking and communicating that has gotten me banned from so many discord servers and subreddits.)
This is been somewhat exhausting. But <sarcasm> at least now I can virtue signal about how self aware I am. Look at me, critiquing the ways my emotions override my rationality! I’m smart, right?! I’m good enough, right?! Please like me again!!! </sarcasm>
Do you think there is a causal reason why you are MSRayne? Meaning why you are experiencing the world from that particular physical person’s perspective? Instead of you being Bill Gates, or an astroid, or a quark?
I am unable to rationally engage in this conversation, see my response to ChristianKI above. I’m sorry if I insulted you.
That’s quite alright, none taken. All I was getting at was a uniquely “physically real” analysis is actually an additional assumption.
I dont see why. Explanations aren’t the sort of map feature expected to be in one to one correspondence with something in the territory. Explanations relate to human interests, such as how to stop something, how to reproduce something, whom to blame for something, and so on. You can see this is in court cases, where the physical cause of a murder is a different issue to who is the guilty party...for the purposes of culpability, guns never kill people.
“There can be only one true explanation for any given event” is actually what I am challenging. PBR supposes reasoning and physical descriptions have to be based on a prespecified perspective. And there is no one “true explanation” that transcends all perspectives.
By PBR’s logic, the perspective center being not physically describable is to be expected. That’s what I meant by “why quantum physics does not cover the observer” because physics actually shouldn’t. I am not claiming I know more than physicists. If you are interested in quantum interpretations proposed by actual physicists, that work well with the idea of PBR, I suggest RQM by Carlo Rovelli.
Btw, the steelmaning portion is not my argument. “whenever two conscious minds interact” is ontologically impossible per PBR. The “conscious mind” is inherent to the first-person, or more generally inherent to the thing at the perspective center. There cannot be two conscious minds in any given analysis. For example, reasoning from my first-person perspective and conducting physical analysis would not conclude or infer that you are conscious. You are just a complicated machine in this analysis. Whatever your actions are, they can be physically deduced. Alternatively, we can conduct the analysis from your perspective instead of mine. But then you will be the conscious self, and I will just be the complex, yet physically-reducible machine.
We can also conduct the analysis from the perspective of some other thing, then neither you nor I would be conscious. However, we shouldn’t conduct the analysis with “a view from nowhere” or “god’s eye view” that transcends all perspectives that think in terms of the “true nature” or “absolute reality” of things.
As ever, you can look up standard definitiions. But I still don’t know what dadadarren means.
What does it mean to say free will is not a third person concept? That everyone’s actions are predictable in principle to outside observers? But if first person free will can’t manifest as free, undetermined, action ,how does it manifest?