Yes, Determinists, There Is Free Will
nautil.us
nautil.us
And btw this gives a plausible explanation of free will, it is not that the future behavior of the system is not completely predictable from the past, but the fact that to predict it you need to simulate the system faithfully, which is equivalent to that system living and making its own choice.
> This does not necessitate that the world is also deterministic at some higher level of description.
But basically nothing to back it up and if you pretend to know something on a topic that big, you better have more consistent than "Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities.".
Claims are not facts. We are expecting some kind of demonstration here.
Absolutely! It's the mindful algorithms (such as humans) that have it .
> Indeterminism at the level of psychology is required for free will and alternative possibilities. That is entirely compatible with determinism at the fundamental physical level.
Indeterminism at the physical level can't be translated to free will, it could be translated only to randomness, because if say your choice is affected by the way the wave function collapses, it is as much your choice as tossing a coin would be.
But there is one property of complex systems that looks very much like free will:
For simple systems like planets rotating around sun, it is easy to accurately predict the future behavior thousands of years forward by using a formula.
For more complicated systems like weather there is no analytical formula, but a simplified numerical simulation can give predictions for several days.
For truly complicated systems (like brain) accurate predictions are impossible for even short time spans. The only way to make accurate predictions is to have 100% exact simulation.
But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it!
>But since the simulations is exactly the same as the real thing, that means you are not predicting anything, you are simply waiting for the brain to make its choice and tell you about it!
If rerunning the simulation will always give result the same outcome, wouldn't that mean that there is no free will, that the system is deterministic?
And how could any of the reruns possibly give different outcome?
After running the simulation once you know the outcome, but it is simply equivalent to knowing the history. And if even a tiny thing is changed in the initial conditions, you again won't know what choice the system will make.
Basically the system is deterministic, but you do not have any way to know how it will behave based on initial conditions other than letting it live and observing the result.
Me having or lacking means to predict behavior entails nothing about the freedom of will, is is only outcome of my limited knowledge and technical ability. If the system is deterministic it is possible in principal to perfectly predict person's behavior and if that is the case, he has no freedom but to act in the way he does.
> Making different choices would not be free will but absence of will/random choice.
Perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by free will.
Say the system is deterministic, and we have the technical ability to perfectly predict its future. There are several ways to predict that future, for instance for a dropped stone, we simply put a number into a simple formula and get the position, for water flow we have to compute some integrals. In both cases what we do, is not exactly equivalent to the process we are trying to simulate, and we omit all the things that happen during the process. My conjecture is that for a system containing a person, the computation is irreducible, and the only way to predict the future is to simulate it with 100% faithfulness which makes the process of prediction equivalent to that person living an making a choice.
This explains the paradox of god knowing everything, but people making their own choices, because even though all the information about the future exists at current time, the only way to extract that information is to let people live and see what they do.
The system being indeterministic doesn't seem to give a more useful interpretation to the vague definition above. It either doesn't fully describe the person (something from outside the system makes the choice like in games), or adds some randomness to the choice.
Do you know a better definition of free will?
>That is not driven by ignorance on our part, but by the explanatory need to focus on the most salient regularities.
Isn't the need for explanation is driven by our ignorance?
What I agree with is that intentionality and free will are useful concepts to describe how agents behave. There is no need to 'physicalise' things, when description at a higher level is useful for understanding or conduct, and he draws from Dennett who has described the concept of a "useful fiction" like money, which is not physically real, but it makes sense to believe in it nonetheless.
In the beginning of the article the author says that "the practical need for assuming free will is not an argument in itself.", but then every argument that follows draws precisely on the subjective need of humans to assert free will to make sense of something at a high level of abstraction.
But the universe is most certainly _not_ deterministic. Indeterminism is required at the fundamental quantum level. Why it is even a line of argument?
Incredibly obnoxious