> “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.
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.