Julian 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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}