Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
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Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Thought for the day
I read an interesting article on free will vs determinism.
Here it is if you are interested
Poscast intreview
What is your position on the dichotomy of free will vs determinism?
I don’t agree with the scientist in this case, but it did get me thinking about it. It isn’t like the guy is a kook, he makes some very salient points; there are some unambiguous things were there is no “free will” even though most people think there is; but the premise that these are mappable onto all things thereby leading to the conclusion that free will is an illusion, doesn’t really sit well with me. I don’t have great data to back this view, beyond personal experience, I feel that I have free will, and maybe that is enough.
It’s a bit of a glass half full vs. half empty / chicken vs. the egg sort of thing.
If one [believes that one lacks free will], one will behave in an entirely different manner compared to believing that one [does have free will]. So the belief in free will, or lack thereof, will ironically have a massive impact on the course of our lives.
This is the same argument for inflation expectation. If one believes there will be high inflation, one drives inflation by their actions.
Any of the big questions in psychology and philosophy are always difficult; there are always swings in ideas and fashionable ideas…I’m not sure if one lacked the belief in free will; as someone who thinks we do have free will; what or how they would behave.
No, I don’t think so. Living as if you don’t have free will would be impossible, you’d never get anything done. We have to ignore a lot of interesting philosophy in order to function.
Sam Harris and Jay Garfield have a great podcast about free will. Saint Augustine came up with the idea of free agency in order to get God off the hook for Eve’s fall. Fascinating stuff.
If you’d asked me 5 years ago before I started meditating, I would have thought that of course we have free will. But meditation has shown me that we are not standing on the riverbank of consciousness looking into the flow, we simply are the flow. There is no self standing separate from experience.
Plus, possessing this magical quality of free agency would require us to break the law of causality. There is no evidence for free will in any branch of science.
This is a interesting point, but from my point of view, we don’t need to break causality to have free will. All it requires is that the systems are chaotic in nature rather than purely probabilistic.
This popped up in my feed this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-will-by-robert-sapolsky-review-the-hard-science-of-decisions
I think his view is extreme and drives engagement; it has shown up in a bunch of places for me.
You seem to be suggesting that instead of believing in determinism, you believe in a mix of determinism plus some randomness. Where is the free will in chaos? Fundamentally, there is nowhere in your being for a separate self to reside that could be making these decisions separate from causality. You can’t even choose which thoughts you think. Thoughts bubble up and disappear without us being able to pre-select them.
Sam Harris uses a simple example of this - name a movie title. Any movie. Pay close attention to what happens when you decide on a title. How many options did you have to choose from? Why didn’t you choose Spirited Away? Was Spirited Away an option your thoughts gave you? You must know thousands of them, but only a few options bubbled up. You had a severely limited set of options to choose from. If there’s no free will there, where is it?
My interpretation comes down to chaotic systems.
I’m assuming you don’t have a good grasp of chaos math. But I’ll use a classic example to explain it.
Assume you have 2 objects orbiting each other; you have all the information you need to predict the motion of those objects (current position, mass, distance, radius and the vector describing the motion of the objects); with this information you can perfectly predict the positions of the object into the future for any time length.
I can write a formula that will give me the precise positions of the bodies; for any time length. 10 minutes or a billion years, it doesn’t matter.
Now add a third object into the mix; again we have perfect information about the initial state. In this 3 body system, we cannot know where the objects are going to be in the future there is no general formula for calculating this because it is a chaotic system.
What we can do is solve it “numerically”; basically we solve the motion of the system for very small time jumps (depends on how fast the bodies are moving), over and over to get to the future positions. If I want to know what the system will look like in a billion years, I need to solve the equation 100 billion times.
The more complex the system is the harder it is to even write equations to solve for small time jumps. If you have 100’s or 1000’s of interacting inputs, it is completely possible to look back in time and see what changes eventually led to the current system, but that gives you no predictive power going forward.
My issue with the model put forward by Robert Sapolsky; is that it is post-hoc a rationalization of a chaotic system. It provides no predictive power, and thus the free will part I see is that even if you knew perfectly all of the inputs you still cannot predict the output beyond providing a probability space (range of possibilities) of decisions that may be taken.
This is about as philosophical as it gets, I think. Before deciding if you have free will, you have to decide what “free will” means.
You can decide you want pizza or a burger. But your decision will be based on your genes and what you are more familiar with, your past experiences with pizzas and burgers, how recently you had one or the other, and a multitude of other factors leading up to that moment. Do we say you don’t have free will because you picked pizza since you had a burger yesterday when your partner picked what to have and therefore that made your decision for you?
It’s really just the argument that your genes and experiences make up who you are and theredore what decisions you make, and those genes are outside your control while your experiences are either outside your control or based on decisions you made using factors that are either outside your control or themselves based on your experiences. Basically the interconnectedness of all things.
I think there’s a strong philosophical argument that free will doesn’t exist. But in practical terms, does that matter? Does the distinction between true free will and decisions based on prior experiences that when it comes down to it are all based on chance, does that distinction actually matter in practical terms? It’s just definiting what “free will” means in a way that shows you have no free will. You can easily define free will in a way that means you have free will as well.
I would argue that if you need to dig down into every piece, such that you disassemble each choice to its components, and each component into its components, then “free will” is impossible. But it’s purely philosophical, because it doesn’t matter.
After listening to the podcast; a lot of his argument boils down to the lack of a “causeless cause” and thus no free will can exist, because every decision was caused by something, which in turn was caused by something else…etc
There could be a very compelling argument about free will being the emergent property of incomputability; as you say if you boil every decision down to the constituent parts then nothing is truly causeless, but precisely by not doing that we get the chaotic interaction of factors that look a lot like free will; chaos is not random but by definition it is not computable.
In this model decisions become probability spaces rather than absolutes.
It’s a bit like asking if solid walls exists. You say of course I can see one right there, but then I say but the walls are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are mostly just empty space. Therefore the wall isn’t really there, just empty space with nuclear forces acting to prevent us moving through that space.
Does it matter that everything is made of quarks which are probably just energy and that when you dig into the components walls and the air are the same? Or does the illusion of the wall fulfilling the purpose of a wall mean that walls are real?