The reason why it feels that you have made this decision of your own “free will” is that you cannot detect the overwhelming evidence against it. The mysterious, rapid, unconscious core brain activity that structures your conscious qualitative experience is unavailable to you.
That is, unavailable to my conscious mind.
What you say is similar to Sam Harris’s arguments. Both have two principle problems: that the argument depends on an implicit definition of free will, that it is a conscious choice; and an implicit claim about selfhood, that the conscious mind is the self,and the unconscious mind is not.
The compatibilist definition of free will is concerned with whether you are able to act on your desires … not on whether your desires are conscious or unconscious.
The libertarian definition of free will is concerned with whether your decisions are free of external determimation, or unpredictable in principle… not on whether they are conscious or unconscious. If the unconscious processes that lead to decisions, and about which you know nothing, are indeterministic, then the case for libertarian free will is strengthened, not weakened.
What you do not remember, because it happened too quickly or unconsciously, was the process by which that selection occurred. Or the operations underneath that
You don’t observe them, so you don’t observe them as deterministic. And in fact, you don’t know that they are determinustic , because that would require empirical investigation which neither you nor Yudkowsky have performed. An assumption of determinism has been smuggled in by a choice of language, the use of the word “algorithm”.
The issue of conscious control over decision making is interesting and important as well, but it is at best one third of the whole issue.
One of the disconnects between Yudkowsky’s original post and several of the comments here is that his post was concerned not primarily with making a philosophical case for one position or another, but instead for shifting the debate from philosophy to cognitive psychology. Why, on an anatomical and information processing level, does it feel like a debate about free will vs. determinism makes sense to have in the first place?
Even if we can dissolve or resolve the philosophical question, this psychological question remains in full force.
Since several people seem to have missed this point (unless it’s ME who’s missing a point!), I clearly should have reiterated his question more clearly at the top of this post!
There’s potentially a cognitive explanation for every other debate including coke versus pepsi. But that doesn’t explain away anything—it’s just a finer level of description of the same thing.
I don’t think Yudkowsky saw himself as making a psychological point that leaves the philosophical question unanswered, I think he himself as answering the one and only real question, and most of his readers see things the same way.
That is, unavailable to my conscious mind.
What you say is similar to Sam Harris’s arguments. Both have two principle problems: that the argument depends on an implicit definition of free will, that it is a conscious choice; and an implicit claim about selfhood, that the conscious mind is the self,and the unconscious mind is not.
The compatibilist definition of free will is concerned with whether you are able to act on your desires … not on whether your desires are conscious or unconscious.
The libertarian definition of free will is concerned with whether your decisions are free of external determimation, or unpredictable in principle… not on whether they are conscious or unconscious. If the unconscious processes that lead to decisions, and about which you know nothing, are indeterministic, then the case for libertarian free will is strengthened, not weakened.
You don’t observe them, so you don’t observe them as deterministic. And in fact, you don’t know that they are determinustic , because that would require empirical investigation which neither you nor Yudkowsky have performed. An assumption of determinism has been smuggled in by a choice of language, the use of the word “algorithm”.
The issue of conscious control over decision making is interesting and important as well, but it is at best one third of the whole issue.
One of the disconnects between Yudkowsky’s original post and several of the comments here is that his post was concerned not primarily with making a philosophical case for one position or another, but instead for shifting the debate from philosophy to cognitive psychology. Why, on an anatomical and information processing level, does it feel like a debate about free will vs. determinism makes sense to have in the first place?
Even if we can dissolve or resolve the philosophical question, this psychological question remains in full force.
Since several people seem to have missed this point (unless it’s ME who’s missing a point!), I clearly should have reiterated his question more clearly at the top of this post!
There’s potentially a cognitive explanation for every other debate including coke versus pepsi. But that doesn’t explain away anything—it’s just a finer level of description of the same thing.
I don’t think Yudkowsky saw himself as making a psychological point that leaves the philosophical question unanswered, I think he himself as answering the one and only real question, and most of his readers see things the same way.