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elfsJulian Sanchez has a blogpost up, The Illusion of The Illusion of Free Will, in which he points out that arguments about "The Illusion of Free Will" are often categorically wrong-- that is to say, the argument is about two different things, the internal experience of willfullness and the external experience of coercion. He compares to the difference between atomic theory: books are made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space, but the experience of the solidity of a book can be asserted every time we throw one at the wall.
Sanchez's article, which is a few months old, addresses issues now arisen in a series of articles, including the Time article "Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again." Conservative pundit Dr. Helen Smith responds with a concern that all of this is about the left's will to control people (as if the right hadn't been showing its own, scarily reptilian desire to control the tribe, mostly in classic Soviet fashion, with purges).
I find Smith's handwringing laughable. Her conservative political and religious systems are nothing but attempts to apply culturally organizing principles in such a way that they appeal, either postively or negatively, to individuals in a way to create a social order in which she feels comfortable. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass" is no less a nudge than anything Cass Sunstein dreams up. From my perch, Smith's article is tribal politics, nothing more: "our nudges are better than their nudges."
What worries me about Sanchez's argument is that it encourges a kind of willful ignorance. Sanchez writes that it's absurd to conflate epistemic uncertainty about our free will with our experiential uncertainty of what we're going to have for breakfast, and when people conflate these two kinds of uncertainy they're engaging in a (sometimes willful, sometimes not) deliberate confusion of kinds of knowledge.
However, as we become more and more knowledgeable about why people choose, as the article in Time points out, the closer and closer these two questions become.
In the brilliant Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Daniel Dennet re-introduces the audience to the idea of cybernetics. The fundamental definition of cybernetics is about control: agent A can be said to control agent B if agent A can constistently drive agent B into whatever state agent A desires. (Forget all the stupid "cyberspace" stuff: the basics are about robotics: cybernetics is about electrons marshalled through silicon causing real-world effects, about affecting the external world.)
As we get better with techniques and technologies, we stop worrying about forcing an individual's arms and legs to move a'la a a classic Star Trek episode. Instead, we start worrying about moving an individual's mind in such a way that not only does he act as other agents would have him act, but forevermore the individual insists that his actions are wholly consistent with his self-identity at the time.
Sanchez, Smith, Sullivan, and even Time magazine never answer the question, "What is Free Will?" Dennet offers the classic defintion: "Free will is that capability that, having been confronted with a situation and chosen one way, were I confronted with that situation again I would have chosen differently." This definition is fatally flawed, Dennet says, because you will never be confronted with that situation again. Time has moved on. You have learned from past experiences. You are a different person. The environment is not just the situation: you are part of the environment, you affect the state just as surely as the state affects you. Of course your influences will be different, and of course you may choose differently.
The question is, why do you choose at all?
To me, the answer seems simple: there are rules. Just as a video game is dependent upon programmatic rules for its function, and those rules are dependent upon electronic rules to exist, and those rules are dependent upon the laws of physics to operate (and who knows, maybe it really is turtles all the way down), there are rules by which our brains make choices: rules by which they learn, self-organize, self-program, dependent upon biological and evolutionary necessity (those who fail, after all, aren't here: their lines died out, being failures), experience and contingency. Either there are rules, probabilistic rules surely but still rules, about how the brain processes inputs, or there are not: a system without rules is simply random.
Human beings are not random. We may be subtle, and have an incredibly large array of responses to any stimuli, but we are not infinite, nor are we utterly unpredictable.
Smith and Sanchez seem to be encouraging a certain lne of thought, but for different reasons: Smith wants to fight back against governments using the growing knowledge that the probabilities of individual decision making can be tilted one way or another by the environment, but she has no idea how: she just wants you to know that it's a bad thing. Sanchez, I'm sure, doesn't want to hand over the keys to our minds to other individuals, but he seems to be discouraging a willful engagement with the relationship between what we choose and why we choose it.
In the end, I'm afraid Peter Watts is probably right, and we're no more than a few decades away from this:
Ultimately, everything about us, our will to live, our sexuality, our sense of good and evil, is encoded in material form somewhere in our brains, just as the best artwork is encoded in paint and plaster, and the most subtle video game is encoded in metallic particles on disk platters and CPUs, and ultimately we'll be able to reach in and change those things at will-- and that will itself exists in a material form iterating with every tick of a clock. When Sanchez discusses "The Illusion of the Illusion of Free Will," he is engaging in an illusion himself: that these two issues are not growing toward each other with alarming rapidity.
We are not ready for the day they overlap.
Sanchez's article, which is a few months old, addresses issues now arisen in a series of articles, including the Time article "Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again." Conservative pundit Dr. Helen Smith responds with a concern that all of this is about the left's will to control people (as if the right hadn't been showing its own, scarily reptilian desire to control the tribe, mostly in classic Soviet fashion, with purges).
I find Smith's handwringing laughable. Her conservative political and religious systems are nothing but attempts to apply culturally organizing principles in such a way that they appeal, either postively or negatively, to individuals in a way to create a social order in which she feels comfortable. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass" is no less a nudge than anything Cass Sunstein dreams up. From my perch, Smith's article is tribal politics, nothing more: "our nudges are better than their nudges."
What worries me about Sanchez's argument is that it encourges a kind of willful ignorance. Sanchez writes that it's absurd to conflate epistemic uncertainty about our free will with our experiential uncertainty of what we're going to have for breakfast, and when people conflate these two kinds of uncertainy they're engaging in a (sometimes willful, sometimes not) deliberate confusion of kinds of knowledge.
However, as we become more and more knowledgeable about why people choose, as the article in Time points out, the closer and closer these two questions become.
In the brilliant Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Daniel Dennet re-introduces the audience to the idea of cybernetics. The fundamental definition of cybernetics is about control: agent A can be said to control agent B if agent A can constistently drive agent B into whatever state agent A desires. (Forget all the stupid "cyberspace" stuff: the basics are about robotics: cybernetics is about electrons marshalled through silicon causing real-world effects, about affecting the external world.)
As we get better with techniques and technologies, we stop worrying about forcing an individual's arms and legs to move a'la a a classic Star Trek episode. Instead, we start worrying about moving an individual's mind in such a way that not only does he act as other agents would have him act, but forevermore the individual insists that his actions are wholly consistent with his self-identity at the time.
Sanchez, Smith, Sullivan, and even Time magazine never answer the question, "What is Free Will?" Dennet offers the classic defintion: "Free will is that capability that, having been confronted with a situation and chosen one way, were I confronted with that situation again I would have chosen differently." This definition is fatally flawed, Dennet says, because you will never be confronted with that situation again. Time has moved on. You have learned from past experiences. You are a different person. The environment is not just the situation: you are part of the environment, you affect the state just as surely as the state affects you. Of course your influences will be different, and of course you may choose differently.
The question is, why do you choose at all?
To me, the answer seems simple: there are rules. Just as a video game is dependent upon programmatic rules for its function, and those rules are dependent upon electronic rules to exist, and those rules are dependent upon the laws of physics to operate (and who knows, maybe it really is turtles all the way down), there are rules by which our brains make choices: rules by which they learn, self-organize, self-program, dependent upon biological and evolutionary necessity (those who fail, after all, aren't here: their lines died out, being failures), experience and contingency. Either there are rules, probabilistic rules surely but still rules, about how the brain processes inputs, or there are not: a system without rules is simply random.
Human beings are not random. We may be subtle, and have an incredibly large array of responses to any stimuli, but we are not infinite, nor are we utterly unpredictable.
Smith and Sanchez seem to be encouraging a certain lne of thought, but for different reasons: Smith wants to fight back against governments using the growing knowledge that the probabilities of individual decision making can be tilted one way or another by the environment, but she has no idea how: she just wants you to know that it's a bad thing. Sanchez, I'm sure, doesn't want to hand over the keys to our minds to other individuals, but he seems to be discouraging a willful engagement with the relationship between what we choose and why we choose it.
In the end, I'm afraid Peter Watts is probably right, and we're no more than a few decades away from this:
Cunningham looked at her and snorted. "You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet."And Watts (and Helen Smith) are also right about something else: we will only maintain our current free will by banning the techniques that permit ever more precise circumvention of it. In the process, we will either doom the human species to a static existence in the muck and mire of our short, biologically circumscribed lives, or we will have to leave free will– and possibly even consciousness– behind.
Ultimately, everything about us, our will to live, our sexuality, our sense of good and evil, is encoded in material form somewhere in our brains, just as the best artwork is encoded in paint and plaster, and the most subtle video game is encoded in metallic particles on disk platters and CPUs, and ultimately we'll be able to reach in and change those things at will-- and that will itself exists in a material form iterating with every tick of a clock. When Sanchez discusses "The Illusion of the Illusion of Free Will," he is engaging in an illusion himself: that these two issues are not growing toward each other with alarming rapidity.
We are not ready for the day they overlap.
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Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-11 08:14 pm (UTC)Example: Two people go to an all-you-can-eat buffet with 100 different dishes. One is a mechanical engineer, intelligent but ignorant about nutrition, the other is a trained dietitian. The mechanical engineer has factorial[100] possible meal selections. The trained dietitian knows that 20 of the dishes have excessive amounts of sodium, 50 have excessive cholesterol, and so forth, and knows that they should only eat limited quantities of the remaining dishes. They might only have factorial[10] possible meal selections - a difference of 157 orders of magnitude!
This means that outside parties will have an easier time limiting the free will of intelligent, informed people. Minor changes to tax laws, insurance policies, or warranty conditions will therefore have a disproportionate effect on those best able to analyze their impact. Post-singularity, all-knowing electronic intelligences with massively parallel processing power may find themselves locked down to a single optimal course of action.
Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-11 09:02 pm (UTC)At this foundation, there is an emotional base: the fear of existential threat.
one of the things AI people have discovered is that, in order to act human, machines must have an emotional base. One of the hip points in even fundamental web design is: have an opinion and an attitude. Be someone. Let Amazon and Bing be bloodless: Google and Apple have attitude and opinion, and that's why they're so much more interesting, both as web phenomenon and press favorites.
Ultimately, when we make a decision, we must have a basis (not a "reason") for deciding: the tiebreaker. What do you want? Time's article is about modifying the environment such that when your brain makes a decision, the vote among its many constituent parts clamoring for ascension, some get more votes than others in a way favorable to the ones presenting the decision.
A perfectly rational actor would never decide: it would be irrational to cut off decision without considering further inputs.
Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-11 09:43 pm (UTC)Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-11 10:51 pm (UTC)As I recall, a company got sued for a decision that was good for long term stuff but decreased short term profits. The court ruled that the shareholder's interest is short term gains had to be followed.
That decision may well be the death knell of our society...
Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-12 12:13 am (UTC)If I am correctly remembering what I read some years back, 'modern business management' as taught in the US dictates that a new project or initiative needs to pay off in two years, or it either won't be funded in the first place or will be canceled when it doesn't pay off. And people wonder why the US is losing competitively to foreign companies that make plans that will take a decade or more to come to fruition, but have the potential to pay off handsomely for that patience.
Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-12 01:01 am (UTC)I work in a factory that makes stuff. We give the stuff to customers, and they give us money.
We lost some business, and so we're closing down part of the factory. Some equipment is now surplus. Our corporate team is putting a big, expensive piece of equipment into storage, and will be paying the storage company $300 per month.
I found about this, and asked my manager if my team, in another part of the factory, could use this equipment to make more product to earn the company money. It'd earn us $2464 more per month after taxes and operating costs, and save $300 in warehouse fees. We've already paid for the equipment, and it won't wear out any faster if we use it instead of keeping it in a warehouse.
The $300 per month we'll be paying the storage company is after-tax REAL money. The company is taking it out of its pocket and giving it to another company, directly reducing our company's profit by $300.
The $2464 per month we'd like to earn is after-tax REAL money. It will directly increase our company's profit.
Our corporate team says we can have the equipment, but they'll charge our team $5000 per month to use it.
That $5000 per month is FAKE money. The company takes it out of one pocket, and immediately puts it back in another pocket. It has zero impact on our company's profit.
However, if my team gave the corporate team $5000 per month, my team's profit margin would drop below benchmark, and we'd have to fire one of our teammates to make our numbers look better. That would make it harder for us to make things to sell, and that would make us earn less REAL money for the company.
The Corporate team looks bad to the CEO because of all the money they're spending on warehouse fees. If they gave us the equipment for free, that'd save them only $300, and they'd still look bad. If they charge all the profit-making teams a fortune, they look like they're not losing money. They look good to the CEO, and are more likely to get bonuses.
My manager's manager has reluctantly told me that we won't be able to use the equipment. We'll pay another company $300 per month, instead of earning another $2464 per month.
Re: Ignorance is bliss
Date: 2010-07-12 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 01:41 am (UTC)Should a society (our society) reach the point where external control of our agency -- not merely control of our actions, but control of our ability to decide -- is possible, efficient, and routine; and that external-to-the-self control is in the hands of the usual cast of sociopaths that attempt to run the entire race for their personal benefit; what does that society become? What shape does it take, and does it take a form that would be recognizable to us? Would it even be differentiable from the common ant colony? Could this sort of thing happen routinely throughout the galaxy, such that evidence of other civilizations becomes impossible for us to identify?
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 11:51 pm (UTC)*uses free will to decide between two brands of identical-tasting cola-nut-based carbonated caffeinated sugar water*