
Free Will - Tomte
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html
======
hyperpape
I'm sad that this article is on the front page of HN. It's clever in a few
places, but makes basic errors. In short, it's not a competent presentation of
the topic.

What he calls the "free will camp" sounds like a weird mishmash of
libertarianism (determinism is false, and we have free will) and hard-
determinism (determinism is true, therefore we don't have free will). It
completely ignores compatibilism
([https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/)).

Moreover, the argument he gives regarding Leopold and Loeb is baffling. That a
jury has no free will to listen to your argument for hard-determinism is
prima-favor irrelevant. A hard-determinist holds that some people are
determined to believe in free will, and moral responsibility, but they're
incorrect. Any graduate student in philosophy would be expected to note these
distinctions.

As for the view that free will is an illusion, he presents one of the
canonical arguments uncharitably. Leaving aside the question of whether the
invocation of NP actually establishes what he says it does (something non-
determined but non-random), the opponent of libertarianism doesn't need the
claim that determinism and randomness are our only options. They just need
(something like) the premise that if our actions don't follow from our
reasons/emotions/volition, they can't be considered free, and that anyone
proposing some status between randomness and determinism needs to account for
the sense in which decisions flowing from that status are free.

~~~
RangerScience
I'm sad your comment seems to be at the top.

The linked lecture is a solid, engaging and informative discussion of an
issue, bringing together many different fields of though, science, and
engineering. That sounds like a great thing to have on the front page.

~~~
WikipediasBad
It's probably in between. It's incredible how he does not talk about
compatibilism in a serious post about different possibilities of free will. I
don't understand how that can be missed on purpose. But, his arguments and
content were coherent and interesting. I don't think it hurts HN to have this
on the front page.

~~~
RangerScience
Can you explain compatabilism, particularly how you see it relating to what
he's talking about? The wikipedia explanation is... underwhelming, and the
next best thing I saw was practically a textbook.

Near as I can tell, from the Wikipedia explanation, compatabilism is an
ethical consideration of free will. Most other philosophy is on a metaphysical
level; Scott Aaronson appears to be talking about free will as a _physical_
phenomenon. It make sense that he would't bring up an ethical framework.

~~~
hyperpape
Have you seen the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Some articles are too
technical to read without a background, but many are good for anyone:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/).

Here's my take, which is slightly different in emphasis than the SEP one
(which I guess means I am probably wrong/idiosyncratic):

Compatibilism is a metaphysical theory. What is counter-intuitive about the
free will debate is that there are two entwined but distinct questions.

The first is (roughly) what is the full
physical/causal/predictive/descriptive* story about human decision making. Is
it deterministic? Almost deterministic but with some random noise? Something
else?

Second, given that description, do we have free will? That is a metaphysical
question, though many people are interested because they believe that there
are ethical implications (compare: whether God exists is a metaphysical or
perhaps empirical question, but it might have some ethical implications).

Compatibilism is primarily an answer to the second question. It says roughly
"you might have thought free will means not being determined, but that is an
illusion. Actually, free will is completely compatible with determinism. It is
something like being able to act on the things that you take to be reasons,
even if it's fully deterministic which things you think are reasons."

Talking about free will as a physical phenomenon (which is not quite what I'd
describe Aaronson as doing) typically indicates that you've assumed some
answer to the second question, so that you're only considering the first.

Btw: one point of view is that the first question makes sense, but the second
doesn't. I don't have a developed opinion, as I didn't really work on this
topic when I studied philosophy, but I lean that way.

* (none of these terms is perfect, and there's lots of debate about the right characterization here)

------
coldtea
> _If free will depends on an inability to predict future behavior, then it
> would follow from that free will somehow depends on our being unique: on it
> being impossible to copy us._

That's similar to the conclusion I came to, too.

That free will is basically the series of singular inevitable outputs of a
computation (the "me-the-person-in-the-universe" computation) that are not
compressible/reducible (they have to be run to come to the output).

And it's free not because it "freely" selects among several choices, but
rather because it's uniquely personal -- as a person, one can ever only
do/will the thing they end up doing/willing (tautologically: one's history is
he/her -- our will defines us), but what that is can only be found out after
the tact.

> _There were some famous experiments in the 1980 's, where someone would
> attach electrodes to someone's brain and would tell them that they could
> either press button 1 or 2. Something like 200ms before the person was
> conscious of making the decision of which button to press, certainly before
> they physically moved their finger, you could see the neurons spiking for
> that particular finger. So you can actually predict which button the person
> is going to press a fraction of a second before they're aware of having made
> a choice. This is the kind of thing that forces us to admit that some of our
> choices are less free than they feel to us---or at least, that whatever is
> determining these choices acts earlier in time than it seems to subjective
> awareness._

Similar to my comment above, I find the ideas drawn from those experiments
(that there's no free will) wrong.

The fact that a choice/action can be known (from neural activity etc) before
the choice becomes conscious to the subject, doesn't necessarily mean that the
subject doesn't have free will. It can just mean that the subject has a whole
beneath-the-surface thing beyond the conscious layer. It's not like the
person's neurons belong to somebody else -- or that we only "live" by
thinking.

~~~
criddell
> It can just mean that the subject has a whole beneath-the-surface thing
> beyond the conscious layer.

But doesn't that mean at some point you can't say effect A was caused by
action B? There has to be some point where there are some number of possible
outcomes but even knowing the entire state, you cannot predict which path will
be taken and that any particular path can be taken reliably.

~~~
naasking
> There has to be some point where there are some number of possible outcomes
> but even knowing the entire state, you cannot predict which path will be
> taken and that any particular path can be taken reliably.

Why? It's not predictable whether any random Turing machine will halt, but
whether that specific machine halts still has a deterministic, well-defined
answer.

~~~
isotropy
>whether that specific machine halts still has a deterministic, well-defined
answer

Really? If there is literally no procedure that can tell the difference
between "machines that will never halt" and "machines that will run longer
than you can afford to wait", you're basically calling for a concept of
"deterministic" where it's ok if a final determination never happens, and in
some cases (which you can't identify), _can 't_ happen. That seems like it's
counter to the spirit of calling something deterministic.

~~~
naasking
Just because there's no general algorithm to determine whether Turing machine
X may halt, does not preclude the existence of specific Turing machines that
can determine whether X will halt. This is part of the difference between
truth and proof. Whether X will halt is true or false regardless of whether to
use can prove it to be true or false in any given logic.

------
fdsfsafasfdas
Ugh, another non-philosopher hacking at straw men with poorly defined terms.
The equivalence of non-determinism and randomness is not at all necessary to
dispel the idea of free will; simply ask someone to define it, and it either
a) turns into vapor or b) turns to abstraction that is equally meaningless,
such as to knowledge. What is knowledge but state? It has nothing to do with
free will, which cannot be differentiated from any other physical phenomenon.

It's also a terribly boring problem. Regardless on you stance on what free
will is, the answer does not mean you are removed from culpability; it rather
means that you are not exempt from defense of your actions as a being with
finite knowledge explaining your state to another being (presumably, a court)
with finite knowledge.

For all the philosophers asking this question, they fail to produce any
instance where the answer is meaningful. Leopold and Loeb managed to persuade
a gullible jury that they can excuse human interactions with philosophy; it is
of interest to pop psychology and flaws in the american justice system, NOT to
philosophy.

The phenomena of consciousness are far more worthwhile concepts because they
don't pigeonhole reality into a dry dichotomy.

~~~
RangerScience
AFAICT, his terms are very well defined; he's using terms specifically from
quantum computing, which combines terms from quantum phyics, classical
computing theory, and adds a few of its own.

He's also doing the thing where he's discussing the issue without a direct
attempt to resolve it, which may be throwing off your comprehension.

~~~
fdsfsafasfdas
"free will" is not a quantum computing term.

------
mh-cx
Lately I tend to think, that talking about “free will“ makes no sense at all.
Our consciousness is the product of physical processes. They lead to the
decisions we make. That's all there is.

Now if you bring a free will into play, where does it reside? Is it somewhere
outside physics? Thats metaphysics then. And out of reach for any
understanding anyway so pointless to reason about.

What I could agree on is to see “free will“ as a metaphor for the essence of
our existence. The part that we probably never can explain.

~~~
Rusky
Alternatively, "free will" is just a name for some part of those physical
processes.

------
725686
I like Sean Carroll's take that free will is an emergent phenomenon:
[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/07/13/free-
wil...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-
real-as-baseball/)

I also liked his book, "The Big Picture".

------
caublestone
Speaking of Bell's inequality, according to Erik Verlinde's theory on emergent
gravity, gravity is an emergent force from the supersymmetry relationship of
fundamental particles across the entirety of space and time. Each particle was
encoded with a quantum memory state before a thermal energy source disrupted
the tiny space and separated the paired particles across the galaxy. If this
is true, I believe the observed violation of Bell's inequality could be
explained by this pre space-time deterministic relationship that causes the
force of gravity to emerge.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02269.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02269.pdf)

~~~
deepnotderp
Has anyone attempted to combine the theories of emerging gravity and emerging
data?

~~~
caublestone
I'm working on this right now with a few. I would love to see more
contributors to that idea.

------
RangerScience
Wow! This is amazing!

I think the biggest answer that's in here to The Question is this one:

 _> For me, the glaring fallacy in the argument lies in the implication Not
Determined ⇒ Random. If that was correct, then we couldn't have complexity
classes like NP---we could only have BPP. The word "random" means something
specific: it means you have a probability distribution over the possible
choices. In computer science, we're able to talk perfectly coherently about
things that are non-deterministic, but not random._

...which, in a way I don't fully grok, seems to be saying there's room between
things being predicable (no free will) and random (nonsensical).

Then later, this bit:

 _> 1) We have the free will to choose in what basis to measure a quantum
state. That is, at least the detector settings are not predetermined by the
history of the universe. 2) Relativity gives some way for two actors (Alice
and Bob) to perform a measurement such that in one reference frame Alice
measures first, and in another frame Bob measures first. 3) The universe
cannot coordinate the measurement outcomes by sending information faster than
light. _

which I also still don't really understand but woah.

As a contribution: I encountered an amazing demonstration of "free will", in
that it was an experience you could go through, draw a box around, and write
"here be free will" on the box.

It's pretty simple: Think of a city, and say it's name aloud.

Now consider what just happened in your mind and brain.

You didn't say the name of a city you've never heard of. You could not do
this; you were "not fee" to make that "choice".

You (probably?) though of more than one city, and then selected on. You could
do this; you were "free" to make that "choice".

This demonstration doesn't really go after the question as to what you
actually have that can be labeled "choice", but it really nicely draws a box
for that label to be applied to.

~~~
Joeri
The way I understand the non-determined != random argument is like this: you
look to your left and will or will not find a briefcase with a million
dollars. It is not determined that you will not find said briefcase, since
there is a probability, no matter how small, that it has materialized there in
some way. However, the presence of the briefcase is not random, because there
is not an even probability of it being there or not. Randomness means equal
probabilities of the outcomes.

~~~
RangerScience
Hmmm I don't think that's it. It sounds more like the "randomness" of Go,
microservice architectures, and the butterfly effect, except based in quantum
interaction theory. That is, the overall complexity is such that the outcome
cannot be determined (or is very hard to determine) prior to the outcome
actually occurring; and then the quantum/relativity stuff makes that more than
just about available computation power.

------
deepnotderp
If anyone's interested on Free Will and Bell's Theorem, I recommend taking a
look at this fine group's experiments:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gnEjOAn...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gnEjOAn9IiUJ:web.mit.edu/asf/www/all_publications.shtml+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Basically, they try to use cosmic "particle selection generators" to try and
circumvent the free-will loophole.

There is also a series of recent experiments on using quantum random number
generators to circumvent the free-will loophole.

------
tbirrell
In my limited understand of philosophy, it seems this entire lecture can be
boiled down to one question (which I didn't think was answered). Does
knowledge of a decision preclude free will?

------
mabynogy
You can discard free will if you believe in science (or its artefacts) because
of the Occam's Razor (don't need it to explain the rest).

~~~
coldtea
You mean if you believe in scientism.

Occam's razor is more a heuristic at the level of epistemology than actual
science (the latter involves the experimental method, not logical posits like
Occam's Razor). And of course it's statistical, not absolute.

Heck, even in everyday life we find cases where Occam's Razor is plainly
wrong. Sometimes the explanation for an event is the more bizarre one rather
than the simpler one.

“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We
are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because
simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every
natural philosopher should be “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” – Alfred
North Whitehead

[http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/wh...](http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/why-
the-simplest-theory-is-alm/)

~~~
mabynogy
> You mean if you believe in scientism.

No. If you believe in science as a practice or a way to explain things or
"operate" things (like someone that switch on a light and that have some
knowledge about electricity).

If you agree with what science explains (how it works thus the Occam's Razor)
and disagree with what science doesn't explain (yet or never), you create a
duality.

The duality can be eliminated with the Occam's Razor and then remains what is
explained by the science (with its hypothesis).

It's not an opinion. It's just a rationale.

Everything that will not fit in that paradigm will probably be rejected sooner
or later (by science).

As writing and science has a beginning in human history, we may discover
something more powerful than science to discover the rest.

------
LoonyBalloony
I think this may be relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw)

There is a part in this documentary that covers a man who had a hypothesis
that human beings are driven to do things by their DNA. I'd link the specific
scene but I have to go to work, maybe later.

------
beagle3
This is a great read.

Also, it's transcription of a lecture, which is much less common than YouTube
videos of them, but a hundred times better IMHO

------
hyliandev
Looks like I'll wake up tomorrow having still never heard a valid
justification for believing in free will.

~~~
rocqua
I'd like to give it a shot (might not make it before tomorrow). Thing is, I'd
need to know how you define free-will.

~~~
hyliandev
Something like: the idea that we are truly in control to any degree higher
than a calculator is in control of what numbers it gives you.

~~~
rocqua
So, agency.

The core of my argument is going to be agency. We are in control because our
actions often arise out of our own agency. This as opposed to there being
another agent being able to decide our actions.

For this argument to work at all, we need to define agency/being an agent and
establish that humans are agents. Moreover, humans must be at least somewhat
unique for having agency. Certainly, we don't want rocks, or calculators to be
ascribed agency.

I'd say an agent needs 2 things: \- Intention \- 'Potency', that is the
posibility to measure and affect things related to those intentiosn. This has
again moved the goalposts, since we now need to establish Intention and
potency. I'd posit that, if humans have intention, they certainly have Potency
and thus only focus on intention.

Intention arose in humans through evolution. Skipping some steps, at one point
organisms started measuring their environment, and responding to it. This is a
huge evolutionary advantage (i.e. move towards the food and away from the
predators). Simple measurement and response isn't quite enough though, but
there is another advantage to be had: modeling. An organism is modeling when
it isn't just measuring the outside world, but also making predictions. Once
these predictions start taking into account possible actions by that organism,
and those predictions start informing the actions of the organism, those
actions have 'intent'.

And that is my argument in short form. Free will arises from choosing actions
based on their predicted effect in some internal model.

There is some stuff to clear up between being an agent, and having agency over
your own actions. It might be some other much more effective agent has more
control over you than your own agency. I don't believe any such powerful
agents exist though.

~~~
hyliandev
What would be the difference in human agency and a calculator's agency?

Or, a human's agency and the agency of a bad guy in a modern video game with
complicated AI?

~~~
rocqua
Neither the calculator nor the bad guy has intention. They lack a feed-back-
loop between potential decision and internal model that evaluates that
decision.

For the videogame UI, there is a massive limitation on agency because it was
fully designed by another agent. That designer agent thus has very large
influence over the AI.

I'd allow for complicated AI with emergent behavior to have agency up to a
point. As a corollary, this means humans could have agency even if they were
created by god.

------
lainon
For something more academic:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/)

[http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/](http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/)

------
Entangled
"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion".- Piter De Vries

Whenever the question of free will comes up, I remember that phrase and side
on the camp of free willers.

~~~
fdsfsafasfdas
Err, isn't that begging the question of free will?

Or am I missing some kind of humor there?

------
HONEST_ANNIE
Quest:

Replace 'Free Will' with the most underwhelming term that is for all intents
and purposes synonymous for free will in the discussion.

~~~
nabla9
non-deterministic reflex

------
coding123
I don't think we can answer this question right now.

------
hprotagonist
I found J.R. Lucas' thoughts on the matter pretty thorough:
[http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html](http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html)

>Unfortunately, I was elected to a tutorial fellowship at Merton, my old
college in Oxford, and was submerged in the pressures of Oxford tutorial life,
so that my Freedom of the Will was not published until 1970. It is not very
different from the original article, but does meet some of the criticisms
first leveled against it, and sets the Godelian argument in a more general
context. Perhaps two points I make in the book are worth reiterating.
Professor Minsky spent some time yesterday criticizing Professor Margenau
saying that he had misunderstood the import of quantum mechanics. I think
actually the misunderstanding was on Professor Minsky's part and that he had
failed to understand the structure of Professor Margenau's argument. Quantum
mechanics is relevant to the problem of the will because it has replaced
classical Newtonian physics which seemed to rule it out. It does not of itself
prove free will - lots of quantum mechanical systems have no free will - but
it disproves a disproof of it. In my book I referred to speculations on
whether quantum mechanics might be replaced by a more determinist theory - a
"Hidden Variable Theory" as it is called, and Von Neumann's argument against
it. Since then the argument has progressed much further. Von Neumann's proof
has been proved and criticized, and a whole series of results have been
obtained - Bell's inequalities, Gleason's Theorem, Kochen-Specher Theorem, the
two-color theorem: and four years ago Aspect concluded some experiments in
Paris, which seemed to rule out any prospect of a hidden variable theory. So
it seems to me that Professor Margenau was quite right to see quantum
mechanics as bearing on the freewill problem, not as proving that it exists
but as, in Plantinga's terminology, defeating a defeater.

further, Lucas proposed the following:

1\. Determinism ↔ For any human h there exists at least one (deterministic)
logical system L(h) which reliably predicts h's actions in all circumstances.

2\. For any logical system L a sufficiently skilled mathematical logician
(equipped with a sufficiently powerful computer if necessary) can construct
some statements T(L) which are true but unprovable in L. (This follows from
Gödel's first theorem.)

3\. If a human m is a sufficiently skilful mathematical logician (equipped
with a sufficiently powerful computer if necessary) then if m is given L(m),
he or she can construct T(L(m)) and Determine that they are true—which L(m)
cannot do.

4\. Hence L(m) does not reliably predict m's actions in all circumstances.

5\. Hence m has free will.

6\. It is implausible that the qualitative difference between mathematical
logicians and the rest of the population is such that the former have free
will and the latter do not.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It seems to me that step 3 requires that the human m have a sufficiently
accurate understanding of themselves. That step seems to me to be
questionable.

~~~
hprotagonist
he's arguing a proof of mere existence there. You don't need to propose an
algorithm, or indeed have any idea how to go about it, you can just assert
that it must exist and that's enough.

it is a bit teeth-gnashing though.

~~~
RangerScience
A physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are in a hypothetical theater
when the stage curtains catch fire.

The physicist makes some measurements as to the volume of curtain, available
air flow, chemical properties of the curtain, flow rate and thermal capacity
of the water hose and water, formulating a precise equation for how much water
is necessary to put the fire out when starting at a given time, and precisely
puts the fire out.

The engineer makes a few quick estimates as the the volume of fuel and air,
uses that to estimate the amount of water needed, doubles it, and puts the
fire out (with safety factor 2).

The mathematician looks at the fire, looks at the fire hose, states: "The
problem is solvable", and exits stage left.

