Schopenhauer: "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."
I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration:
In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed.
In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice.
There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't.
To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.
As someone with a lifetime of fighting with the executive dysfunction end of ADHD, I very much understand what Schopenhauer has saying. I can know what I need to do and have the willpower to do it, but the door to the cupboard where the willpower resides is locked, unlocks randomly, and nobody knows where the key is.
> I can know what I need to do and have the willpower to do it, but the door to the cupboard where the willpower resides is locked, unlocks randomly, and nobody knows where the key is.
Best description of this situation that I have ever seen, many thanks.
I have to wonder how interest can be affected by some conditions. For example, specific interests are frequently described as a trait of autism spectrum disorders. However, the idea that some types of people express interest in different ways could be hard to swallow, especially if genetics are involved.
I can easily imagine ADHD & Autism being broken out into more specific disorders, because there is very much an overlap. How long that'll take is almost certainly 20 years longer than I think it should.
I very recently discovered this muscle and I'm in the process of training it. My life was very passive until a year ago when my parents divorced and the amount of responsibilities I had increased. Everything felt so unbearable and I couldn't do anything unless it was a solid requirement for something else, or an official matter.
An agent has free will iff it engages in action<->reflection cycles.
Also:
An agent A "could have taken" action X vs Y: ActX(Env|CharA) vs ActY(Env|CharB) in the sense that there is a graph "of some sort" linking their CharA to the CharB which could realise ActY.
Eg., Bob can either steal the money or return it. Bob chooses to steal it. Bob is morally responsible for this act because there is a realisable "action<->reflection" path from bob's actual character to the one he should have had. If bob had had this character, he would not have stolen.
This is a very interesting definition of "free will" and not one I would expect most philosophers to agree with, but more measurable and useful than most would propose. In this case "free will" reduces to self-modifying action with randomness injected by the environment, which feels more like a stochastic model than genuine self-determination. That said, the existence of a "reflection" function is still the primary determinant of any moral responsibility.
It's really just a restatement of compatibilism, which has been the major position in philosophy for a long time. And I think, in practice, what most people actually think.
Only somewhat recently have philosophers intuitions changed a little more to incompatibilism.
A good response to people like Schopenhauer is: "Not everyone has an ordinal complex, Mr Freud, just you."
Willpower is absolutely a muscle that needs to be cultivated over the long term, as is every other character trait.
I don't think people realize this, but it only takes about 2-3 months of hard, conscious effort to build a habit. On the scale of a lifetime, that is such a short time to make a change in your character. Unfortunately, it can take as little as 2 weeks to break a habit.
I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against.
I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself.
You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe [1]
I shared because maybe someone can suggest some reading material along these lines from someone much smarter than me. But for now, I enjoy the idea that I have complete freedom in a very ordered universe.
1: there are some interesting corollaries to this idea. One among them is that the interaction between other entities with similar free will (other people) increases the complexity even further. We are agents of chaos.
> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic.
Physics don't have to be deterministic in order to be at odds with free will. Whether neurons fire due to a predefined pattern, or they fire with some probabilities do not change the equation for "how can a biological machine have free will?" Choice is at odds with both predefined rules and drawing from a random variable.
> You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing anything rewires your brain. Some say even thought is able to rewire your brain. The number of possible brain states at T+n increases exponentially. So our constant reconfiguration of the brain is our way out of determinism. That is, free will does exist in a completely deterministic universe.
I completely fail to see how you ended up at that conclusion from that argument. A recursive function, that mutates itself is still bound by it's rules for mutation and recursiveness. Choice doesn't grow out of an exponentially growing number of possible states.
You’re starting from a definition of free will that is a modern outlier compared to the historical use of the term in Western culture.
That our will is not completely free is obvious to a child: they can’t always get they want. They can’t will an ice cream cone into existence.
“Free will” never meant freedom from physics, so it’s a tautology to say it’s not free because of physics.
> A recursive function, that mutates itself is still bound by it's rules for mutation and recursiveness.
It doesn’t matter. If the recursive function results in all possible outcomes within a boundary (as many do), then anything operating entirely within that boundary is not constrained by the function.
There are a lot of things denied to human will by physics. I can’t will myself up into the air or will myself to live forever without food.
Inside those boundaries, my behavior cannot be said to be constrained by physics. I don’t violate the standard model of quantum physics by declining dessert because I’m trying to lose weight. Which is the sort of banal decision that “free will” has historically referred to.
> Choice doesn't grow out of an exponentially growing number of possible states.
This is backward. The right way to say this is that many human choices are not constrained by the number of available states.
> “Free will” never meant freedom from physics, so it’s a tautology to say it’s not free because of physics.
I don’t understand all your points but let me give a go at answering this one:
If we follow a markov-graph with rules between each point on the graph, until we reach a node with a decision, then hopefully we can agree that your choice is not free will, but just a rule set.
If we introduce a pair of dice to help navigate the decision graph, that doesn’t introduce free will either.
If we write down a set of rules for how to mutate the graph on each move, we still haven’t introduced free will. We are still following sets of rules blindly by the constraints of the rules and the rolls of the dice.
If we substitute the markov graph with _any_ computable, self modifiable, stochastic function, we don’t change the essence of the above argument.
If the brain is a biological machine that self-mutate following rules set in its structure, guided by the randomness inherited by nature, it is still just a function.
So where is the free will? Where does it fit in?
If it’s “well, you’re not a slave. You have the freedom to say and think what you want” then shouldn’t we consider GPT-3 to have free will? It says what it wants.
If its pseudo rng isn’t good enough to qualify we can hook it up to some decaying radioactive isotopes.
We can even hook it up to update its weights every time it receives human input, if free will require constant mutations of its function.
So I don’t agree with your argument. I think a reasonable critique of free will is that it doesn’t fit into our understanding of physics, unless we want to bestow free will on simple computer programs.
You're trying to start with our fundamental physical theories and calculate your way to free will. And you're right that we can't do that. But we can't calculate our way to a rose, or a tree, or a squirrel, or a human, or Mt Everest either. We can't even calculate our way to folding proteins.
How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map.
The best we can do is observe complex phenomena and look for contradictions to fundamental physical theory. I can observe a beetle and see if anything about it contradicts quantum mechanics. So far, no. And observations of free will do not either.
This only disproves free will if you carefully define "free will" in advance as a quality that contradicts fundamental physics. But why would you do that? Free will has historically meant the quality that allows people to make decisions in the course of everyday life, not a quality that allows them to do fantastic feats like generate infinite amounts of energy or some other violation of physics.
As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions.
> But we can't calculate our way to a rose [..] How complex phenomena emerge from the fundamental laws of the universe is a blank spot on the map of human understanding. You're looking there and saying "I don't see a road to free will through here." You think this says something about free will, but all it really does is say something about the map.
I think this is a very good argument and I think I will use it myself in the future.
But I can see that our current understanding of physics can have a road to a rose, even if I can't see the road.
I can't see how our current understanding of physics can have a road to decision making that is different from an artificial neural network or an ensemble of boosted trees.
So where I am stuck on the free will question is: Either my computer has free will, or humans don't. And we generally consider computers to not have free will, because they follow their programming. So what is it that humans do, that is fundamentally different from following our programming?
> As long as our ability to freely make decisions doesn't violate our understanding of physics, you can't say that our understanding of physics excludes our ability to freely make decisions.
My argument is that we are not making decisions freely, but we are a complex system, running entirely on reactions following the laws of physics in fundamentally the same way that water doesn't make a decision about where to flow, it just flows.
Of course I can't say what free will "really means," which is a bit of a rhetorical trap.
I can say that historically, free will as a concept was invented by people to explain their observations of themselves and others making decisions.
As a concept it has historically been scoped to our lived experiences. A person can choose to sin (or not), choose to commit a crime (or not), choose how to react to their stimulus and base motivations. A hungry person can choose not to eat, and go on a hunger strike. An irate person can choose not to be violent toward the object of their anger. An aroused person can choose not to have sex with the object of their desire.
Which of these decisions violate our understanding of physics? None of them. A person on hunger strike will eventually die of malnutrition or lack of energy, no matter how strong their will to live on. In that way it is (and has been) a concept which is strongly constrained by physical reality, not a metaphysical free-for-all.
In that case, by "free will" they mean "the feeling of free will".
In which case it's completely besides the point, since the original argument is about how can free will arise from deterministic/random universe. If the rebuttal is "well I feel like I have free will" there is nothing anyone can do to refute that, since the feeling is real, to them.
But that doesn't mean free will itself is real. He's not really choosing to decline dessert just for the sake of it - he has a motivation behind it: losing weight. Now, one could say "well I could decline dessert just for the sake of it" to prove a point, but then "proving a point" would be the motivation for declining dessert. There's just no way out.
Free will is a fundamentally ill-defined concept, just like consciousness. We all "feel" it, but nobody can put it into words precisely enough to enable any kind of rigorous discussion.
I have tried to answer to your last paragraph in 2 or 3 different ways but it's such a complex argument I don't think I'm smart enough to express simply and eloquently in a forum comment.
But I very much appreciate the food for thought and input you've given me.
> I completely fail to see how you ended up at that conclusion from that argument. A recursive function, that mutates itself is still bound by it's rules for mutation and recursiveness. Choice doesn't grow out of an exponentially growing number of possible states.
Not if you add a few random variables. Radioactive elements disintegration seems random. May other things could be as well.
Your description of rewiring the brain is an extra feedback loop, makes the system more complex but doesn't break determinism.
Regardless, even if the world isn't deterministic through e.g. quantum mechanics, throwing dice to decide your next turn isn't "free will" and doesn't make the case for free will any stronger.
Suppose there are n number of hidden, indeterminate variables in your environment... "You," the individual observer, are free to choose the important variables to navigate life. Your "mind" is the thing which assigns value to hidden variables in your environment but "the mind" is not you... the "mind," from my perspective, is the mirror upon which we witness/experience every day reality/waking life, etc.
If you think rolling dice is important, it is. If you think randomness will effect and experiment, it will. If you don't think randomness is important, it probably is... (a thing is defined by what it is not.)
When you assign an indeterminate (X) value to randomness, this is chaos. If/when you think or realize chaos is an important part of free will... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Are you personally unable to select new variables or assign different "weights"? If so, I contend, you don't exist.
> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic.
IMO, this is the prime example of theory vs practice. In my opinion, our universe is deterministic at a theoretical level, but will never be practically deterministic.
* Everything is likely made of a fundamental building block that can be predicted and modeled. In isolation, there is a small enough system that can be represented deterministically.
* The universe is far, far too complex to apply determinism in any meaningful way.
* Any device able to model the determinism of the universe at a fundamental would itself be non-deterministic. That devices would either (1) need to model itself - which would be infinitely recursive since the model of itself would also need to model itself (2) isolated from the universe - which is currently impossible and also implies that our universe is a simulation within another system (3) operate on abstractions/simplifications - which leaves room for error.
* Finally, determinism is only practically useful if it can be used to (1) repeatedly generate the same results for the same inputs (2) or, predict the results based on knowing the inputs.
* 1. This will never be possible because we operate within the system being modeled. That system progresses forward and the same inputs can never be utilized more than once (some variable somewhere would be different).
* 2. We are so incredibly far from modeling determinism that it's still impossible to predict results for known inputs. There will always be unknown in a model that leads to error.
Precisely, and very well said. My understanding is that our will is still deterministic, but cannot be determined within the bounds of our universe. So effectively, in this universe and within this universe, our free will cannot be simulated nor predicted over even a pretty short amount of time.
Not to get too much into the 'quantum woo' territory, but my naive understanding is that the physics is only somewhat deterministic, b/c non-deterministic quantum events can have macroscopic effects?
Say you decide for whether you'll eat a dinner, if a particle with half-time of 1 second will split within the next second.
This you wouldn't be able to predict, even if you knew momenta of all particles within your local light-cone (of 1 light-second), no?
The problem is quantum effects are random. Even if they impact our behavior, RNG is not what most people think of when they say "free will".
In my opinion, any coherent definition of "free will" implies a supernatural force - since it must be non-random yet not bound by deterministic chemical and physical processes. At this point it becomes a matter of faith/religion whether we have free will or not.
I think I can give some sufficient conditions for a case in which I would consider someone to have “ceased to have free will”.
If someone X with some manner of advanced brain altering technology was able to temporarily force someone Z’s actions to be whatever X specified into the machine, with afterwards Z remembered the experience as their taking these actions for whatever reasons X specified in the input (where this is achieved by influencing whatever is going on in Z’s head at the time, not via altering memories),
then, during that duration, I think it would make sense to say that Z “did not have free will” for that duration.
As for sufficient conditions for someone to have “free will”, I suppose I don’t have a great description.
However, “what/who we are is the primary explanation for what we do (and so in particular, no external influence/manipulation is a primary explanation)” seems, like it has at least something right towards the goal of a good definition.
The weakness of the perfect determinism model is nothing would ever happen if it were true. The leap to bacteria to mitochondrion to humans was not pre-determined, randomness is part of the equation.
I could buy that will isn't free in an absolute sense, but neither is it entirely deterministic. The question is whether the confounding factor for the latter has anything to do with the individual, but you can't divorce it from nature. There's no meaningful difference between "you chose x" and "your brain chose x".
There's also a socio-cultural reason I dislike pure determinism which is that it's used as bludgeon to absolve one of responsibility, justify inaction, bad behavior, or Socialism.
While I don't think the universe is deterministic, the existence of evolution isn't proof of this. It's possible that what we perceive as "randomness" is actually just the result of variables and things happening that we're not able to perceive.
Take rolling a dice: which number comes up is determined by the starting conditions, the force you throw it with, what it lands on and any external forces acting during the throw. It's not random at all, just hard to predict.
Well you can't conflate the banality of rolling dice with evolution. Based on what I've read, randomness has been a necessity for it's fruition, but of course this isn't my field.
My point was we call both “random” but, when you think deeply about it, you know that rolling a dice isn’t really random, we just can’t reliably predict the outcome.
There’s no reason the “random chance” in evolution is any different. It can just contain a million times more complexity in its determinism.
To prove determinism one way or another, we need to prove the fundamental building blocks of the universe are deterministic (or not).
Even without quantum effects, determinism doesn't enable us to do much with it, except statistical ensemble predictions. We can never know the initial state of a system to infinite precision, as is needed to predict its trajectory. [0]
[0] Light-ish reading on nonlinear dynamics: James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
I'm pretty sure the answer to "do we have free will" is "no", and the much more interesting question is "why do we feel that we have free will?" which I don't know the answer to.
It opens itself up to interesting interpretations ;). god(s) aka the simulation developer(s) playing with outcomes of quantum events in order to manipulate your/my behavior, punish the bad, reward the good, make the bushes burn etc.
Since quantum events can have macroscopic outcomes, this should be possible? :)
It's probably due to artefacts and signal noise coming from the outer-system that contains our universe and/or the machine running our simulation, rather than God.
To the best of our ability we haven't been able to detect any signs of any strings which might point to a puppet master or any mechanism by which anything as potentially informationally massive as randomness could be transferred to 'our' universe.
Not quite: there are millions of people who claim the existence of a God(s), or claim to have had "experiences" with the same. However, to those raised in secular environments, these claims "have" "no" validity, but this is actually just the model of reality built by the mind (what "is", in "reality"), which is heavily influenced by the metaphysical framework one was raised/trained on, or exists within.
Philosophy (logic, epistemology, etc) has more appropriate tools and techniques for dealing with such questions, but if one (one's mind) has been trained that only the scientific method can provide knowledge, they are kind of stuck at a local maxima (inside a "simulated reality dome") that they are unable to see out of, or typically even want to see out of.
I think people do not deny those religious experiences because there are experiments to trigger them and the experiences can be observed for instance using brain scans.
But what scientists deny is that we see any prove that these experiences have any supernatural cause.
> I think people do not deny those religious experiences because there are experiments to trigger them and the experiences can be observed for instance using brain scans.
Some people, sure....but many people deny the validity/genuineness of them, or the potential existence of the supernatural all the time - it's practically a sport on Reddit, not all that uncommon right here on HN, and something I have experienced many, many times with real scientists in zoom meetings. Let's not forget: scientists are first and foremost humans.
> But what scientists deny is that we see any prove that these experiences have any supernatural cause.
Some scientists practice strict/disciplined epistemology, and others do not (I have observed it with my own eyes) and go on to assert/imply that it is a fact that there is no God(s), and that these experiences are only [in fact] delusions, the drugs, social/psychological conditioning (ironically), etc.
And if one is to ask them some pointed questions, the response typically descends rapidly to rhetoric and personal attacks. You can even explicitly point out to people what they are doing, but they are not able to stop - often, they will act as if they did not even see the text pointing out their behavior, even if that phenomenon is pointed out in subsequent messages!
I truly believe that there are certain topics that throw even the most powerful minds into a state of disarray. Extra interesting: it seems like most can acknowledge that they are subject to bias, logical fallacies, etc if the topic of conversation is directly about these psychological phenomena....but if the topic is not that, but rather from a particular subset of special ideas (culture war topics, certain instances of the unknown), this knowledge and ability vanishes.
I think it would be rather hilarious if this phenomenon is actually a very big deal (with regard to affairs on Earth), but people are unable to address it (or even manifest curiosity) because of the phenomenon. Plausibly, ~success could be within reach, but we are unable to reach out and grab onto it.
Meanwhile: things like climate change "are" (so it is claimed/perceived) "a big deal". So much wasted potential.
I don't want to discount what you say as indeed I would have no way to disprove a metaphysical god. On the other hand given that no proof is provided the other way for the existence it seems wasteful to discuss.
Kind of like UFO sighting reports. Lots of people share their believe but no proof manifested and we don't have reason to believe any UFOs would evade detection if there were any. Same with a god.
Climate change on the other hand is undeniably affecting billions of people in ever increasing negative ways. Indeed a colossal waste that we destroy our planet just because we cannot unify our effort and invest in technologies which don't wreck our planet.
> I don't want to discount what you say as indeed I would have no way to disprove a metaphysical god.
Agreed, but I believe it can be reasonably ~proven that the question is fundamentally indeterminate....which is plausibly inconvenient/uncomfortable for people who run on certain metaphysical frameworks (say, scientific materialism), which tends to be the framework that moist western minds are trained on in the current era, and the training of a neural network tends to have substantial affects on their perceptions.
On top of it, it is also affected by whether an individual runs on binary (True/False) logic or more sophisticated forms like Ternary (True/False/Other) - binary logic does not support Unknown, so if the option is not available the "most likely" option appears to be necessarily/likely true (based on sub-perceptual heuristic cognition).
> On the other hand given that no proof is provided the other way for the existence it seems wasteful to discuss.
How things seem to be (are predicted by the mind to "be", which has a tendency to be translated into how things "are" "in fact") is a function of one's training.
This prediction of what is true may be correct, but it also may be incorrect. What it is in fact, currently, is unknown. However, the mind often seems to not tolerate a state of unknown, so it fills it with predictions about reality, which are often perceived as reality itself. I am quite certain that this is consistent both with scientific study of the mind, as well as "spiritual/mystic" takes on it (Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and others).
> Kind of like UFO sighting reports.
I believe if one was to do an ontological & phenomenological decomposition of the two, there would be far more differences than similarities. But this is not the level of reality that our culture operates at, or is able to operate at, similar to how in historic times our culture operated more on religious narratives vs today's scientific narratives. Humans perceive & "understand" "reality" primarily through epistemically and logically unsound narratives - it is the form most of our communication takes place in, at least for now.
> Lots of people share their believe but no proof manifested and we don't have reason to believe any UFOs would evade detection if there were any.
Opinions vary on what constitutes proof, and double standards (logical inconsistency) abounds - take for example that personal testimony is admissible as evidence in a court of law, and most people have no big problem with it in that scenario, but in other scenarios it is often considered crazy/illogical/necessarily unsound.
> Same with a god.
It is not actually, but as the saying goes: Perception is Reality. It is easy to spot cognitive errors in the members of one's outgroup, but spotting it in oneself and one's ingroup members is far more difficult. Science has a fairly substantial amount of research into this and other aspects of perceptions in humans.
> Climate change on the other hand is undeniably affecting billions of people in ever increasing negative ways. Indeed a colossal waste that we destroy our planet just because we cannot unify our effort and invest in technologies which don't wreck our planet.
Perhaps we should consider developing the ability to not live in a dream world, if even for short bursts of time (1 to 5 minutes seems like a modest and realizable goal for starters). But unfortunately: this notion seems to be disliked by anyone I mention it to.
You don't need hidden variables to have deterministic quantum mechanics (many-worlds is deterministic without hidden variables, and we haven't ruled out global hidden variables or superdeterminism afaik)
Eh, this article touches on something important but 1. the material aspect of determinism is the most boring one, if everything is materially determined then so is our feeling of freedom therefore it doesn't really change anything. Strawson has a nice article about this called "Freedom and resentment" which shows that the thesis of determinism doesn't really change anything about our ethics. 2. the programming lingo seems to me to make the issue more obscure rather than clear but the problem he is mentioning is discussed under the name "second-order desires" and is quite important since it leads to much more interesting problem of determinism - the psychological determinism. Usually we believe we have certain freedom in choosing our beliefs through weighing and choosing our interpretations of what is happening. The issue of psychological determinism is threefold. First proposition is that our beliefs change due to some causes, they don't simply pop into our head. Second proposition is that our given beliefs will dictate what interpretations will make sense to us. Therefore every cause will make us believe what our current beliefs allow. Third proposition is that our actions are driven by combination of beliefs and desires. So ultimately we can't chose our actions since we can't choose our beliefs and the hope for "freedom" is lost. What is left is the will which is not free but driven by beliefs and desires that are outside "our" control.
Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.
This post I think offers some perspective on the whole "Do we have free-will or is it all predetermined?" discussion.
I don't have any science around this, but some Indian wisdom-
What I learned from one of my mentors KN Rao (one of the advisors whose advise was sought by great leaders of India):
The famous grandsire Bheeshma Pitamaha of the Mahabharata was once asked this question regarding fate vs free-will. His answer was to liken it to a man in a boat rowing in a river. The river has a current, however man has effort. I believe his verdict was "effort is greater than destiny".
Perhaps it has to be so, because were it not, then we are just part of the clockwork creation.
PG is trying to go one level deeper in his post. Namely, are we living under the illusion that we have free will, because our free-will (which is essentially our ability to have agency over our environment) is itself a product of our desires, and now the question is are our desires our own or are they themselves determined?
It may not be possible to know the answer to this one. I think it is equivalent to something like the collatz conjecture, to which Erdos replied "Mathematics is not ready for such problems"
I don't think we are ready for such problems either.
There are some hidden assumptions, including the idea that consciousness is a continuous phenomenon and/or experience. Our brain is amazingly good at making up retroactive explanations to match our observations.
Also, our thought processes are sufficiently chaotic that no amount of inspection can catch all the starting conditions, so any model has to be statistical in nature.
You can do whatever you want, but the wanting is the hard part.
Once you realize what something truly requires, the interest usually dries up.
TFA says this is the wrong model, and tries to get closer to something else. But it's right enough that it's helped me to avoid huge amounts of wasted effort and forced me to consider what I truly want.
I struggled a lot with the depression and irresponsible behaviour that arises when you realize that free will can't be reconciled with physics. It seemed like there was no reason to do anything and no reason not to do anything. The level of nihilism I sunk to led to all sorts of unhappy consequences.
I am still prone to those lines of thought sometimes, but with experience, I can also suggest ways to defuse the nihilism and existential angst so they don't continue to lead to suffering for yourself and people around you.
1. Concepts like "free will" are ill-defined, so there is actually no problem to solve. Stop itching at problems which are complete bullshit. Focus on lived experience, not vague distractions.
2. Even if there is no freedom, you can still experience suffering, and it is possible to learn to avoid paths which lead to suffering. The learning might be deterministic, but that doesn't mean you don't experience the results. Or, just continue to suffer if you're too stubborn to learn. Your ... choice, or whatever you want to call it, when you insist on shooting yourself in the foot even after you learned it hurt.
3. Responsibility is not the same as free choice. Responsibility is a contract where you agree to take on the bad consequences if something bad happens, and in return you gain power over what you are responsible for. One of the paths which leads to suffering is to assume you're not responsible for your actions. There are lots of ways people try to abdicate their personal responsibility. Excuses like "it was drugs" or "I was treated badly" or "my brain is controlled by the laws of physics so I can never really choose anything" or "it was so-and-so's fault." Whether or not these things are true, you are still admitting defeat and allowing disempowerment and suffering into your life whenever you say something was not your responsibility. Hemingway was on the right track when he resolved to always honor promises he made while drunk. To do otherwise is to admit that your actions were out of your control; it invites intrusion and censure by those who see you as weak for not being able to take responsibility. Every time you blame someone or something else for a problem, you grant them power which you could have kept for yourself, if only you had owned the problem.
I've had things I wanted to want, but didn't want. They were usually things that would have put me closer to the values of a group I was involved in.
An off-the-top-of-my-head example would be talking with friends about video games, and they start talking about physical art from the game that they bought and enjoy. I don't like having little knick-knacks around the the house, and I don't get enjoyment from them. But I see the joy they get from them, and I want that, too.
So I want to want those things, but I still don't want them.
The brain feels like a quantum alien that took over a biological shell to survive on this planet and is now trying to optimize its casing options. (Deliberately changing the terms for a concept can help us see it in a new light.)
- Some wants damage the casing but feel great to the brain (sugar).
- Some wants take over a portion of the brain's activity and tax it to eternity (addiction), so its best to never ever try them.
- Some wants are very very bad for other brains and casings, so carnivores draw the line making non-carnivorous varieties inferior and thus worth sacrificing (meat consumption).
- Some wants damage the connections and relationships between human brains and thus ability for all of humanity to survive collectively, so religion and laws have stepped in to set the rules of engagement.
- Some wants are psychological and financially a bad idea.
- Few wants are fundamental, and most wants are based on something we've seen others done that we want to try.
- Wanting not to want something is a tax and conflict with our own brain, and just like addiction it can be tackled if the want was caused by exposure to the activity, or exposure to the idea, or the subject/object of want and that exposure is reduced or removed from view.
- If you are the subject of the want (an attractive person, a VC, a Billionaire, a person of influence), all of a sudden your life incurs an overhead and a cost for deterring everyone else's wants towards you.
Psychology/Philosophy may have more insight into whether the origin of bad wants is curiosity, wrongful exposure, greed, or inborn instincts based on biological/genetically ingrained habits.
Economics + Business has the job of satisfying the wants of an increasing number of intelligent agents in the system by encouraging those who want more to make more and increase supply of the the most wanted kinds of objects of want. Government has the job of satisfying the needs of everyone in its jurisdiction, while entrepreneurship has the luxury of picking which wants and needs to serve that are most profitable and desirable to the entrepreneur.
Advertising has the job of involuntarily planting more wants in the brains of everyone.
When I was two I started wondered how I could reconsile my qualia with determinism. But when I was three I read Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant and laid the matter to rest.
It happened to me to think about this (but from another perspective). It seems to me that the sentences "I want [A]", where A is an object outside me, and "I want [to want A]" are essentially different. But the sentences "I want [to want A]" and "I want [to want to want A]" are not really different since both have as object my own will. Or said in another way: wanting to want something is already wanting something.
Moreover an essential differentiation that is not addressed is the difference between desire and will (not easy).
Roger Penrose doesn’t think the universe is computable or a computation. For now, we can’t reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, so I really don’t feel we have very strong evidence that it is—thinking it computable seems like an article of faith as well. We also have Godel’s incompleteness theorem—even if it appears we can model the universe as something computable, I think there’s going to be room for mystery, and human consciousness seems like just the sort of strange self-referentiality eddy where that kind of thing would come in to play. I think a lack of free will be unfalsifiable--you'd have to measure all aspects of a brain, including the quantum state, which would change what you observed--so maybe then you can predict it, but you also had a hand in determining it, which undermines what you want to know, that it was determinable.
On the other hand, free will seems to just refer to the feeling you could’ve made a different choice. But you didn’t. I don’t see why people get so defensive about a junk concept. At some level, it doesn’t really seem like there are separate things, and I don’t feel like there’s a need to invoke some kind of separate individual free will aside from the operation of a universal stoicism type logos/the totality of natural law operating as something like a universal “will”
Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here:
>"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?"
I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest.
Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants.
I actually think PG is exploring something that is at the heart of what it means to be a human being.
Interestingly, the traditional teaching of Original Sin is that we are broken at the level of what we 'want'. The phrase commonly used is 'disordered desire'.
The key idea here is that if you want the wrong things, you are not actually free, even if you perceive yourself as choosing freely. As a corollary, the more you practice the good, the more you desire it, and the freer you become.
As someone that believes in the Quran, which talks about the Adam&Eve tree incident, I agree.
Then there is the whole definition of God being just, and for someone to die for someone else's sin is far from just.
I personally believe in a God that I can ask directly for forgiveness and he forgives. That being said, he wouldn't forgive me for wronging someone else, I will have to settle it with that person in this life, or we'll meet and settle it in the day of judgement.
I don't think the universe is deterministic. Why would you think such a thing? So, if you start from a wrong assumption, the rest that comes is not that interesting.
Are these not at least two possibilities? Furthermore, what kind of heuristic is that? I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability.
I'd say they're kind of a blend - heuristics is what enables the Illusory Truth Effect.
> I don't see people being able to predict the future with much reliability.
Agree, but people seem generally unable to realize this (there is a similar problem with Truth, another thing people predict without realizing - see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593349).
Now, what is the causality of this? Presumably it is a natural consequence/side effect/service of consciousness. But: so (presumably) are things like racism, but because that is harmful, society has deemed it inappropriate and this is socially enforced in various ways. Might the same be possible with clairvoyance and soothsaying, or at least in certain special scenarios/venues? The institution of science seems to have accomplished it, and realized substantial benefits as a consequence - might it have utility in domains other than science (politics, human relations, etc)?
My take at the moment is that each humans are like cells of a human where the human is a civilisation.
We have autonomy but must generally work for the welfare of the whole organism. If some people are not aligned to the general good we try to dissuade them or punish them because if it become too big the whole system collapse in the same way that our organism would if there is too many cancer cells.
Our consciousness operate on the scale of a human life but there is a similar "consciousness" of the civilisation that operate on a much larger timescale, thousand of years, we call those religions.
While we can seek personal gain, it’s much the same as a cell trying to outcompete it’s neighborhoods, it’s misaligned to the more important goal of global welfare. There is something inside us in our soul that know this and won’t make you satisfied of yourself if you are not a net positive for the whole.
Now we have looked everywhere to try to find the God of our stories but didn’t (it's a pattern operating on a different timescale). So we are like cells that rebelled against the organism, discarting all the rules that we had because we don’t understand them. The result will be a sickness of the organism up to a point where we see we have to go back to our ancients rules or the death of the organism (civilisation collapse)
Those rules are:
each must try to align himself with truth and love toward others, must try it’s best, it’s ok to fail, but recognised it and improve.
Those rules are the preconditions for the survival and slow improvement of our civilisation.
Other religions have other rules and other outcomes.
Whenever I think about the universe being deterministic, I get caught up on things like the Monorail episode of The Simpsons. For some reason, that's always the specific example that pops into my mind when I think "does it make sense that the initial position of atoms in the universe would lead ineluctably to the exact state of the world today, without anyone making choices about it?"
The idea that a materialistic universe made of unthinking, unchoosing matter bumping into each other would create the "Monorail" song, with all the specific cultural assumptions built into it, is just so much less likely to me than the alternative that I end up just siding with free will by default.
Neither the free will argument, nor determinism, nor any attempted unification of the two that I'm aware of are fully satisfying. But, the idea that we're just atoms that, for no particular reason, happen to write the words "I call the big one Bitey", and then just happen to create the infrastructure to broadcast that out, and view it, seems like the more absurd of the available options.
The way I think about this is: physical laws lead to the emergence of information processing machines that form big networks together and develop cultural language of ever increasing sophistication. The monorail song is just the production of this large distributed thinking machine.
Maybe I'm the only one who liked it, but I found the essay nice as it gives a simple model to understand ourselves better.
Here's my take on it: there're many things out there (musical genre like classical music, cooking like Indian, French, Ethiopian) and your utility function has coefficients for most of them.
When you don't know the coefficient, you try, and you come with a quick conclusion (like or don't like) that can be further refined by experience (ex: like Indian food, vegetarian Indian food is ok-ish, vegan Indian food nope)
Sometimes you want to alter the coefficient because it can create conflict with your identity (what if you're vegan? what if your parents are Indian?) or other things.
Sometimes you succeed through different methods, sometimes you just can't.
And there're things you like you shouldn't, because of society (taboos, or banned substances) or the consequences on yourself (addictions, risks for your future health) but it's just the same thing: trying to alter the coefficient in your utility function.
It may be worth it (learning something new) or futile (something you just can't change) which leads us to Seneca prayer (the wisdom to separate the two, knowing the battles you can win to avoid wasting effort). And there's another dimension if it's possible: the amount of effort required, which might be measured in years (and what if you're old and bound to fail?)
Personally, I find it simpler to go epicurian and if I find something new I enjoy (right now, Russian rap lol) just enjoy it without asking myself too many questions.
And if I don't like something or have no want for something I should like (Drill rap, Trap rap), I don't force myself but don't exclude it out of my life either: I leave that to serendipity :)
> Randomness destroys the ghost in the machine as effectively as determinism.
I totally agree, and yet my encounter with academic philosophy was that most people with a free-will orientation see that randomness as precisely the origin of free will.
Personally, the only notion of free will that makes sense (and the one to which I personally hold) is the notion of agent-causation[1].
> it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions
The philosophical notion of free will is actually completely irrelevant here. The relevant questions are a) "Is social accountability psychologically effective and altering someone's behavior?" and b) "what sorts of behavior modifications are morally permissble?"
Like many others, I've also thought about few will. By best answer at this point is, we have limited free will but we don't always know how to use it. It's like surfing. You can't do everything you want to do, but you can position yourself to make choices that better leverage the waves of your subconscious.
I don't think this is a very productive direction because it seems like unfalsifiable speculation. Placing the hidden determinism enough "wants" away seems to make it obscure enough that you can think "sure, that's where the magic happens" and it's impossible to be proven wrong.
IMO, the perception of free will comes from our observation of our deliberations and our actions. We observe that we often have choices and uncertainty about what to do, but something always breaks the impasse, because we always continue making choices and going on living. That "something" is what we call free will, and isn't entirely transparent to us.
If you tried to crack open the black box, I think you'd see wants and want-to-wants driving things in there, but I don't think you'd see a clean system of n-th removed want-to-wants determining everything.
> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?
First, accept the fact that "you" are _only_ that machine. No higher "soul".
The machine (you!) has free will in that it decides for itself, through physical processes occurring within it, what it wants - albeit with some outside forces, circumstances and other individuals influencing this anywhere from a bit to a lot.
You are this mostly-independent machine operated by physical forces. Therefore, you have free will.
A secondary question is whether the state of the universe and therefore of you the machine at time T also pre-ordains what you will do and what you will want at time T+1. I think a more interesting question is whether that actually matters in any practical or even metaphysical sense, given that we experience time linearly in the direction we do?
Aspirational desires, like wishing you liked a band your cool friend did so that you could have that in common are real, but the object of desire (what is wanted) is not the band, it's the affection of the friend. You could say, "I wish all these things I had made me happier," but they haven't, and therefore do not.
However, is this just not the logical artifact of the phrase "want to," relating to its subject as a negative counterfactual? To desire to want something is like trying to be funny, where if you are, you aren't - hence to want-to-want, or wish you wanted, means you don't actually want it. Maybe the solution is for each thing I want, to say out loud, I do not want it, and hear which statements give you the most peace?
If many worlds is true, you took all options of every choice (if we assume, as seems likely, a non-zero probability of your neurons firing in a way that actuate each option).
But where does the "wanting" lie? What if it's an experience that is not physical, but real? I.e. it exists and experiences itself, but it does not in any way change our scientific description of the universe. It doesn't change how all of the many worlds are playing out.
Would this "wanting" have to inhabit every branch of the unierse? Perhaps it only exists along the path of choices that it "wanted".
Then everything that can happen, happens, but your consciousness only experiences what it "wanted".
Mechanistic action and free-will are both preserved.
> the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted
That feeling is an illusion. This has been demonstrated with brain scans. By the time you feel like you are making a decision your brain has already made it and you are just becoming aware of it.
It's actually possible to turn off that feeling, to do without the illusion of free will. Your body keeps moving and doing "all the things" but you are totally non-agential, just watching it, along for the ride. It's fun and deeply relaxing once you get used to it.
(Note that this does nothing to resolve the question of free will. Your conscious mind doesn't have free will, but that doesn't mean your unconscious mind necessarily doesn't have it.)
A desire arises in one's mind, prompting us to act upon it. Why such desires arise are due to a multitude of reasons - cultural conditioning, advertising, etc. When such a desire arises, we "want" to fulfill it. So from this perspective, there is little free-will in what we can "want".
Through meditation, when there is the ability developed to detach from the thoughts that arise in one's mind, one can choose to not act on desires that urge action. So, there is then the possibility of freedom.
A common misunderstanding about the human brain is that we think of the higher part to be more or less in control of the rest, like a conductor with an orchestra or a pilot with an airplane.
In the context of startups maybe he's referring to those that want to want something which I take to mean as a poser. It would be like someone starting a club for a favorite color and someone wants to want that favorite color to be their favorite color but the reality is you can't want to want a favorite color, you either want or don't.
Or it could be any number of things being referred to. People wanting to want to work in tech. People want to want control of a social media company.
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger.
This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.
Was just thinking that religion was the one thing that caused me decades of unnecessary anxiety over my natural wants and interests. Would not recommend.
I believe this to be similar to Epicurus' excuse [1]: He couldn't publicly say that there are no gods as creators, because that would have been blasphemy. But he wanted to take away the fear that everybody had of punishment by gods. So he argued that our (human) lives aren't important enough for the gods to mess with.
> He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming
I don't quite understand - you're using our "programming" as an argument that we have free will? Wouldn't our "programming" imply that our will is already deterministic?
In other words, is there any difference between our will being driven by our programming, and driven by God's debugger? We're following orders either way...
You will do what you are programmed to do. "Free will" is an illusion that you don't know what you are going to do before you have computed the outcome. The Matrix said it best:
> Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?
> The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.
I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that. Just looking inwards is enough to convince me that I have no idea what I am going to think next, type next, or how I am even going to finish this sentence. It simply arrives and I am the first (and possibly only) one to experience it. I cannot will the will to will.
As someone who's struggled with addiction most of my life, the idea that free will doesn't exist is worse than useless to me.
The way we experience our lives indicates that we make choices and they have consequences. I don't know what kind of life you would have if you suddenly decided to stop making choices one day, but you would probably end up institutionalized if it didn't kill you first.
Even if my choices are predetermined somehow, I can do an end run around that by flipping coins or rolling dice when faced with multiple options. I have in fact done so on many occasions. At that point I didn't choose, RNG did. You could argue a particular coin flip was predetermined to land on 'heads', but I cannot see how that argument is useful if it doesn't lead to making better predictions.
If thinking about free will causes you suffering. I implore you to not read further. I do not intent to cause any suffering.
>The way we experience our lives indicates that we make choices and they have consequences
Even if we don't "make" our choices, why would that not matter? Experience matter (it's the only thing that matter). It still matters that some unconscious rock fell over your head. It matters that you "decides" to be better because that means that you will experience better life.
I am sorry to hear that you struggled with addiction and I can understand that some knowledge is poison. We do not drill the concept of suffering to our young children every waking minute of their life. That does not mean that any of those things are untrue. If your doctor consistently denies that death is a concept you would rightly be asking for a different one. Truth matters.
I have some addiction problems myself and I think free will is one of the most poisonous concept. It says that the lotus of blame is solely on me. _I_ have to decide to change and actually perform it. But we know better than that, we know that _I_ can be influenced. Therefore we know to avoid things that feeds into our addiction. I can't just "not do it".
>I have in fact done so on many occasions. At that point I didn't choose, RNG did.
You did not choose to follow this through. You could have easily said, "I am going to do the opposite of this to assert my free will! Take that!" and you didn't choose to do this either.
> I used to think that free will existed but now I am surprised we even think that.
How about over a longer time period? For example, say you want to pickup a new good habit and get rid of a bad habit. When you start to intentionally make thousands of little choices over time that all add up to a major change in your life, can't you say that you freely chose that path?
Even if each individual impulse along the way maintains a connection to a more materialist/deterministic set of causes, you can still meaningfully talk about your own free will at this higher level of abstraction. What am I missing?
None of these words make sense. I can't want what I want (author's thesis here). This higher level of abstraction that you talk about is an illusion caused by not paying attention. I can ruminate for years about how I am going to do this and that; but at the end of the day, the impetus to actually do it is still mysterious. I can't want to change. I just change. I just do the little things that shifts my life for the better and then one day just simply stop. I can forge some reasons as to why I change but I could have easily muster my way through it. Can I choose how much will power I have?
Now people will say because free will doesn't exist means that choices don't matter. It absolutely does. The fact that you "chose" to do good things matter. Because experiences matter. Because experience pain/suffering however you wish to define it is not a "good" thing.
I can perfectly understand some issues people have with this concept because it causes them trouble with their addiction/depression. But just because we tell lies like we always do in programming to facilitate discussion/teaching/abstraction does not mean that those things are not real. You don't want to make decisions on a national/scale on lies that you tell yourself to get to sleep.
I am endlessly fascinated by thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. I have observed my brain’s ability to think recursively about its own thoughts many times before and it’s such a cool phenomenon.
This strikes me as very similar, the regex expression is a useful way of explaining his point.
> We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more "want to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding more 9s to a string of 9s following a decimal point. In practice three or four "want to"s must surely be enough.
I think this is just a wordplay that abuses the imprecision of the word 'want'. For example, a drug addict wants (as in has a very strong internal, biology- and subconsious-driven desire for) heroin, but doesn't want to want it (as in when thinks about it consciously).
Are doing and wanting really two different things?
Both start by thinking, and choosing to think about X is certainly in our control¹.
So at the bottom of it, both are just chemical reactions in your brain, willingly set off by your ghost.
¹that is not to say that not thinking about Y is also in our control.
Seems like he's saying that you can't change who you are at the core, which I disagree with.
With each want, however, the meaning becomes more and more frivolous. Who cares what you want to want to want to want to want? That's not recognizable even on a subconscious level.
He should try to rewrite this topic in ketamine and/or other dissociatives and with appropriate combinations of set&setting, otherwise it's just another one biased opinion.
If you're desires are not too weird, you can certainly find a fixpoint such that what you Want-To <repeated n times> Want is the same as what you Want. I'm not seeing any paradox here.
Given the observable order of the universe, I have always found it hard to accept that pausing it, copying it, then resuming both copies could result in two different universes over time.
I saw lots of people criticizing PG's essay, but I really liked it. Free will and agency are interesting philosophical topics to wonder, even if they don't hold much practical value.
I wouldn't go so far as to call this gibberish like other commenters, but I don't get the point. I follow the logic but it feels incomplete. Why does the thesis matter?
the entire film thus far about destiny, fate, making our own paths... and then to pinch a bit of flesh and understand what we are. magnificent and sorrowful, all at once
Basically, there is no free will. Think about it like this: where do your thoughts come from? They appear magically in your head. So you can choose between the set of things you think about, but the set of things you think about is out of your control.
This little piece reminds me of Thomas Hobbes' "Of Liberty and Necessity" (1646, publ. 1654).[1] Hobbes would have very probably rejected the recursive application of "want to" onto itself as nonsense, but uses a very similar structured chain of reasoning as the author when it comes to "necessary causes":
"... But here I must take notice of certain words of his Lordship's in this place, as making against his own tenet. Where all the causes, saith he, being joined together, and subordinate one to another, do make but one total cause, if any one cause, much more the first, in the whole series or subordination of causes, be necessary, it determines the rest, and without doubt maketh the effect necessary. For that which I call the necessary cause of any effect, is the joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause. If any of these, saith he, especially the first, produce its effect necessarily, then all the rest are determined. Now it is manifest, that the first cause is a necessary cause of all the effects that are next and immediate to it, and therefore by his Lordship's own reason all effects are necessary." (p. 261)
This "joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause" is not far away of applying the tactics of a regular expression.
Instead of a chain of "wants", Hobbes speaks of "alternate succession of contrary appetites" and only the last one is what we call "will". In this view, the author's example of the drug adict would have been irrelevant for the problem. An adiction merely describes a (psychological) habit. However, the analysis of "will" is always about a specific, individual event and everything that leads to it, which can often include diverse intentions:
"... I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often." (p. 273)
In Hobbes view a "voluntary action" is an action where somebody was deliberating. Only in this sense the person has a choice. And if the person is "free" to do something, this means that the process of deliberating is still ongoing:
"... I conceive that those actions, which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done apon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing ; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating." (p. 273)
Therefore the freedom of the will is in accordance with determinism ("necessary causes" in Hobbes' terminology), which is itself unavoidable:
"... I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." (p. 274)
Hobbes' argumentation in "Of Liberty and Necessity" has far more interesting details and touches a lot more related topics than I could have presented here. For those who want to delve deeper into the philosophical discussion on the freedom of the will, I highly recommend the text as a basic read.
A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds.
But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors.
If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting.
If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us.
The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them.
We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to.
----
One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors.
So now we can discuss things a little more clearly:
Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want?
There are three answers.
The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience.
The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small.
Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that.
----
If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic.
Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.
"You can do what you want, but you can't want to want what you want."
I've read many of PG's essays, but this one feels like GPT-3 wrote it.
It's borderline gibberish. Like he trained an AI on all his other essays, fed it the essay title, and this was the result. I half-expect a year from now that he'll tell us all his recent essays were written by this AI and it's now the core IP in some recent YC investment.
Not only that, but he got it totally wrong. It's not that people change what they want, it is that they think they want something, but then they discover that they were wrong.
Also, what you want changes over time, but not because you decide to want something new, or to stop wanting something. It just happens. The best example of this is going through puberty, where you develop desires that you didn't have before. This is not a decision that you make.
Figuring out what you want is a process of discovery, not of decision-making.
A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]:
> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before.
PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.
Popularity and power seem to do that to people quite often, don't say? Which is said, especially in PG's case, because I like his older essays a lot. The now ones, well, not so much.
There's a similar thing seen with authors - as they get more famous, apparently editors find it harder and harder to get them to rewrite their works, and later books can swell in size for no real advantage.
As you get richer and more famous, it becomes harder and harder to find an editor/friend you will trust to tell you you're being stupid. You can use the internet at large (that's always full of people to tell you you're stupid) but it can be quite hard to filter.
Or does he have so much free time because of how wealthy he has become through YC that he has lost touch with reality. Now he spends all his free time thinking you can't want to want what you want. Or is it you can't (want to)* want what you want?
Do people still read philosophical writings by the likes of Plato and Socrates?
This piece like quite a few others is a kind of musings which many find interesting and PG doesn't claim it to be scientific.
There are areas of human interests that lie well outside our scientific capabilities. People should be allowed to speculate on them. Reasonable conjectures often precede solid evidence/proofs in math and science.
This reminds me of:
"PhD student, c.2020:
Here’s a limited argument I made based on years of specialized research. Hope it’s OK
Philosopher dude, c.1770:
Here are some Thoughts I had in the Bath. They constitute Universal & Self-Evident Laws of Nature. FIGHT ME."
I was gonna say. This is very much discourse. It's someone's musings. What's so cringy about this? It never claims to be scientific; it never attempts to persuade or even really argue.
My beef with it is that it is a series of opinions stated in the form of facts. If the topic was something like programming, CPU's, etc this approach would not go over so well, but for certain topics it seems like concern for the truth is ~unacceptable.
And why does this matter, at least plausibly? In my opinion, because of this:
I believe that if humans get the idea in their head that they have no free will, it could be detrimental to rising to serious challenges like climate change, inequality, etc.
I can understand that. And I appreciate you sharing your opinion and thoughts on it. I'm not familiar with the Illusory truth effect but will get some reading into today (thanks for the link!)
In speaking. I try to approach things as always mutable. If I put a disclaimer in front of everything I state (when I perceive the I talk about to always be some form of a hypothesis based on the data that I currently have), it tends to slow down discourse and get very messy. In my mind, because I've already accepted the potential for bad data-- that's how I approach others works/papers. There are no absolute truths in anyone's words (or very likely period).
I understand your concerns around this (and at least from my current understanding of our social/political issues) and I agree. It is extremely dangerous and detrimental to hold beliefs like that. However, one could argue that a substantial portion of our society already holds those beliefs. They ignore the free will that they have and operate inside of the system that they perceive.
No real arguments/points here. Just chewing on things/"thinking out-loud". I think it's equally important for people to be able to share thoughts in an unformed state (in the right environment).
Rarely do I get any agreement on these ideas, so many thanks for that.
Unsurprisingly, I am interested in some clarification:
> If I put a disclaimer in front of everything I state (when I perceive the I talk about to always be some form of a hypothesis based on the data that I currently have), it tends to slow down discourse and get very messy.
The domain of science typically involves overwhelming (in a text conversation scenario) amounts of complexity as well....but they realized the problem, found a way to manage it, and went on to produce amazing results. Unfortunately, science does not have mastery over all of reality (confident claims and perceptions to the contrary notwithstanding). Perhaps something similar could be done in other domains.
As it is, it seems to me that thinking on top of approximations of reality that are perceived as reality itself is sub-optimal, and dangerous. I think most people could appreciate this in the case of science, but in other domains it is very often considered absurd.
> In my mind, because I've already accepted the potential for bad data-- that's how I approach others works/papers.
"In my mind" - watch out! :)
> There are no absolute truths in anyone's words (or very likely period).
Disagree - if one has decent skills in set theory, abstraction/decomposition, and tautological framing of ideas, it is not difficult at all to achieve absolute (but vague/non-comprehensive) truth. That's not the finish line, but you can get WAY further down the track than someone who does not have such abilities.
> I understand your concerns around this (and at least from my current understanding of our social/political issues) and I agree. It is extremely dangerous and detrimental to hold beliefs like that.
And as far as I can tell: this is the methodology of the vast majority (90%+++) of people....and some of these are The Literal Experts, or people who believe they know The Way humanity needs to go to solve climate change. What could go wrong!!??
> Rarely do I get any agreement on these ideas, so many thanks for that.
> Unsurprisingly, I am interested in some clarification:
>> If I put a disclaimer in front of everything I state (when I perceive the I talk about to always be some form of a hypothesis based on the data that I currently have), it tends to slow down discourse and get very messy.
> The domain of science typically involves overwhelming (in a text conversation scenario) amounts of complexity as well....but they realized the problem, found a way to manage it, and went on to produce amazing results. Unfortunately, science does not have mastery over all of reality (confident claims and perceptions to the contrary notwithstanding). Perhaps something similar could be done in other domains.
I think using science here was an exceptional example. It's good to note that the scientific process itself has evolved over time. I don't have all the answers, but I'm happy to re-analyze and adjust my processes given new data
> As it is, it seems to me that thinking on top of approximations of reality that are perceived as reality itself is sub-optimal, and dangerous. I think most people could appreciate this in the case of science, but in other domains it is very often considered absurd.
I can agree with that in part. Ideas must come from somewhere though. Sometimes that source is abstract and we don't understand all of the various linkages/connections; sometimes it's a known source and we understand in part all the things they are connected to. I think it's important to enable discourse and "thinking out loud" by labelling/tagging things as such.
>> In my mind, because I've already accepted the potential for bad data-- that's how I approach others works/papers.
>"In my mind" - watch out! :)
I'm comfortable with having my ideas challenged because I'm open to revising them. I should probably change this to 'my methodology is' or something more distinct. Merely attempting to convey here that I (try) to use a conscious approach when approaching others works. And I attempt to challenge myself regarding my own ideas on a regular basis.
> Disagree - if one has decent skills in set theory, abstraction/decomposition, and tautological framing of ideas, it is not difficult at all to achieve absolute (but vague/non-comprehensive) truth. That's not the finish line, but you can get WAY further down the track than someone who does not have such abilities.
I would argue that's not an absolute ;)
But instead, I think both of our points, the important thing to identify is that it's not the finish line. It can be modified or adjusted or simply re-analyzed given new data.
Society seems to tend to think of ideas as a binary when there are often various levels of maturity involved. What's important to me in this instance is that the product isn't labelled as final. Change is a constant, even if things don't change directly, our information about them and perception of them do, which requires re-evaluating things often. Science is great at doing this, people (in general) are not. I think that many people would benefit from approaching things in a more scientific and/or philosophical fashion.
> I understand your concerns around this (and at least from my current understanding of our social/political issues) and I agree. It is extremely dangerous and detrimental to hold beliefs like that.
> And as far as I can tell: this is the methodology of the vast majority (90%+++) of people....and some of these are The Literal Experts, or people who believe they know The Way humanity needs to go to solve climate change. What could go wrong!!??
Expert is a dangerous word. An expert to me is someone that can adapt a methodology/approach. Not dogmatic follow something. I'd argue that for someone to be an expert in their field, they need to be able to understand and account for incoming data. I'd agree with you on that point. Many experts spout dogma, sometimes we're just lucky/unlucky that they aren't spouting the dogma we agree with.
> I think using science here was an exceptional example. It's good to note that the scientific process itself has evolved over time. I don't have all the answers, but I'm happy to re-analyze and adjust my processes given new data
Two issues I see here:
a) We lack a sophisticated framework for non-materialistic analysis
b) You're likely better than average, but generally speaking: people's self-assessment of their willingness and ability to reconsider their beliefs is famously not great - politics and social media are just two institutions that capitalize on this bug
> I can agree with that in part. Ideas must come from somewhere though. Sometimes that source is abstract and we don't understand all of the various linkages/connections; sometimes it's a known source and we understand in part all the things they are connected to. I think it's important to enable discourse and "thinking out loud" by labelling/tagging things as such.
I think it would be useful to assemble a collection of techniques and design a framework. Science is exceptional at this with respect to the physical realm of reality, but the metaphysical realm remains a wild west shit show, and most people are only vaguely aware of the phenomenon.
> I'm comfortable with having my ideas challenged because I'm open to revising them. I should probably change this to 'my methodology is' or something more distinct. Merely attempting to convey here that I (try) to use a conscious approach when approaching others works. And I attempt to challenge myself regarding my own ideas on a regular basis.
Some people are quite excellent, and you seem to actually take it seriously, but there are hard limits on what an individual is capable of for evolutionary reasons. I think humanity could benefit from a team work approach.
> I would argue that's not an absolute ;) But instead, I think both of our points, the important thing to identify is that it's not the finish line. It can be modified or adjusted or simply re-analyzed given new data.
For discrete propositions, absolute tautological truth can be easily reached.
But 100% agreement on the finish line part - this is but one technique among many one should have in their toolkit. But as it is, humanity seems to have little realization that they are even involved in a race of sorts, and the clock keeps ticking.
> Society seems to tend to think of ideas as a binary when there are often various levels of maturity involved. What's important to me in this instance is that the product isn't labelled as final. Change is a constant...
Only if viewed as a binary (is some change happening, True/False?), but the rate of change and styles of change are important other variables.
> Science is great at doing this...
In the physical realm, agreed, but for the most part (sociology and psychology being the exceptions), it mostly doesn't even try to grapple with metaphysical matters. Worse: a lot of "scientific thinkers" I encounter on the internet (including right here on HN) believe that metaphysics is "woo woo" or nonexistent, and rarely do I hear anyone from the institution of science saying otherwise. If you ask me, science behaves an awful lot like religion at higher levels of abstraction (which shouldn't be all that surprising if one thinks about it in some depth: in all cases, it is the mind grappling with ideas, though there are some important object level differences).
> I think that many people would benefit from approaching things in a more scientific and/or philosophical fashion.
Less The Science and more Actual Philosophy, please! (Interestingly, in my experience a lot of philosophers aren't great at actually practicing of what they've learned in school, as opposed to memorizing and regurgitating it - for example: try practicing epistemology in a philosophy meetup and watch tempers flare!).
> Expert is a dangerous word.
Agreed - and powerful!
There are many words that have seemingly magical powers, and many of these words can be spotted being deployed on a daily basis by "trustworthy" journalists - no wonder people are so confused!
> An expert to me is someone that can adapt a methodology/approach. Not dogmatic follow something. I'd argue that for someone to be an expert in their field, they need to be able to understand and account for incoming data.
Watch out for binaries! (I do agree though.)
> I'd agree with you on that point. Many experts spout dogma, sometimes we're just lucky/unlucky that they aren't spouting the dogma we agree with.
Unfortunately: despite science tooting its own horn about how good it is at peer review, it seems only when it is explicitly stated as part of a formal methodology do they take it very seriously. (In case it isn't clear: I have a pretty strong "anti-science" bias!)
A more stark example is that of Newton. A true philosopher, by hacker news standards he'd be considered a misguided madman, since he spent 2/3rd of his life on "unproductive" topics such as religion and alchemy. However, the "productive" 1/3rd cannot be separated from the rest.
One must remember that the word "scientist" was coined merely in 1834...the word isn't 100 year old even. Newton saw himself as a philosopher, he studied the ancients intently, etc. The same applies to many of his contemporaries as well.
My overall point is, one shouldn't judge a person too harshly for any particular piece, while ignoring their larger contributions and efforts.
The post doesn't resonate with me either but it's not pseudo-scientific, it's philosophical. It might not be exactly Socrates but I was not aware that there was a bar for a blog post, nor do I think even Socrates produced great ideas only. It might be just a small step in creation of the model a man holds for free will, and he might even wake up tomorrow thinking he was completely wrong today. It's still valid to philosophize and put it in a personal blog.
A cursory reading gives the impression he expresses the ideas behind Sartre's "The Transcendence of the Ego"[1], which I consider one of the most influential texts I read as a teenager.
After a while the speed at which a fan turns in a circle in order to move heated air off a CPU stops being interesting and larger questions that aren't as falsifiable start to seem interesting since they have so many implications to the practical questions that do matter.
For example, "does God exist?" has huge influence on how we think of why wars are caused.
The trouble is that much of philosophy is castles built on sand. The first principles are accepted and then built upon with potentially faulty links from layer to layer until it all starts getting weird. Marxism, Objectivism, Spinozism, etc.
At least for me -- and I'm certain I'm not alone on this -- what makes a question interesting is not the question itself but rather how one approaches it.
To what extent humans and other life forms have agency is a question one can approach with things like neuroscience or with things like vacuous word salad.
> The trouble is that much of philosophy is castles built on sand.
Most serious philosophers would agree with the idea that scientific evidence is a good way to rule out beliefs inconsistent with reality.
Almost zero serious economists are marxists, almost zero serious philosophers embrace Spinoza with no revisions, and please don't read Ayn Rand.
> Most serious philosophers would agree with the idea that scientific evidence is a good way to rule out beliefs inconsistent with reality.
Only for the subset of beliefs that are related to physical reality - metaphysical matters are beyond the physical sciences, although psychology is generally considered a science and contributes some value to the discussion.
> Most serious philosophers would agree with the idea that scientific evidence is a good way to rule out beliefs inconsistent with reality.
And how did they get to that conclusion? The answer of whether or not the mind or the senses can be relied upon as a path to bedrock truth is something that cannot be found with scientific inquiry because it begs the question.
> Almost zero serious economists are marxists, almost zero serious philosophers embrace Spinoza with no revisions, and please don't read Ayn Rand.
It is precisely that these philosophers were so well followed, and presently rejected, that I enumerated them as examples of castles built on sand. The very same thing could be said of Russell. If there were a public event, more apparent than even the nuclear explosions that went off in Japan, that was strong evidence for the First Cause argument much of Russell turns to mush.
That a philosopher is serious or not is a function of time and opinion. Not veracity.
> what makes a question interesting
What makes your response interesting to me is that Russel had the very same counterargument to Solipsism and in my opinion Russel decided that he couldn't find the rock so he built his philosophy on sand.
This question was important to me so I went searching in philosophy and I found some value there, some manners of perception that proved useful, but it, in my opinion, is a largely broken field.
There is a serious claim from a reputable source the impeller design is better than the fan for CPU cooling but the implementation is not widely used perhaps for reason of intellectualization appealing to faith in God at maintaining artificial scarcity.
I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration:
In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed.
In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice.
There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't.
To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.