Thread by @ben_rosenbaum

I'm a big fan of @thisamerlife, but the recent segment on Free Will, introduced with an apology for being sophomoric, is, well... sophomoric.

1/

I think the big problem is that they decided to just talk to physicists.

I love physicists (Dad's one) but they are not philosophers.

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Physics is the science where reductionism works; so physicists think that, understanding particles, you understand everything. #HiDad

3/

Thus the segment's "show me a neuron that can decide anything!"
Uh... show me a single diode that I can watch Doctor Who on.

Decision-making is an emergent property of many neurons, like being an LCD is an emergent property of many diodes, except more so.
4/

Along with reductionism, the segment suffers from No-True-Scotsmanning the definition of "free will".

To illustrate, a dialogue:

5/

"My God, Jones, you barely survived!"
"Nonsense, Smith, I was never in any danger!"
"But those bullets whizzed inches past your nose!"
"Pish tosh, Smith, there's no such thing as a 'near miss'. The courses of those bullets were set by a causal chain the age of Creation."

6/

"But they could have hit you!"

"Of course they couldn't have, because they didn't. There's no danger of dying until I actually die."

7/

Who has a more useful definition of 'danger', Smith or Jones?
Should we be transfixed with stoner wowdom at the illusion of 'near miss'?

I would argue that when we say 'this could have happened', we are saying 'this hypothetical universe closely resembles our own.'

8/

And since we believe patterns are predictive, its resemblance is relevant, and hypotheticals are useful.

More dialogue:

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"Well, I wish you wouldn't be so rash, Jones. After all, I chose to come along on this trip of my own free will."
"No you didn't."
"What? Of course I did. No one made me. I came because I wanted to."
"Exactly! 'Wanted to'! Your brain made you do it. No choice there!"
10/

"Whatever do you mean? It was me that wanted to."
"You only 'wanted to' because of external forces! Like my chiseled chin and biceps."
"To be sure, Jones: but the desire they sparked in me was *my* desire."
"No, if it was caused by observing my chin, it wasn't your own."

11/

"Jones, you mean to say any desire borne of any external input is not my own? What then would ever count as my own desire?"
"Nothing!"
"So free will isn't when I do what I want?"
"No, free will only counts when utterly acausal and divorced from physics."
"I... see."

12/

Who is right about the definition of "desire" and of "choice": Smith, or Jones?

Whose definition is useful and coherent?

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When people trip out about how we don't have free will, my reaction is always: oh, sweetie. It's okay. It's okay that we're meat.

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Obviously the useful definition of 'deciding' is when a complex system arrives at an output by a nonlinear, complex process.

Obviously the useful definition of 'free will' is when that system unconstrained enough to express its true nature in that choice.

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When I say "I", I am drawing an arbitrary border around some atoms.

And when I say "I chose freely", I mean that those atoms are the primary place to look for the complex, nonlinear process which transformed input to output.

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When I say "I was coerced", I mean that the complexity was elsewhere, constraining & simplifying the process in "me", reducing my usual rich, complex, nonlinear process to a crude binary of compliance or resistance.

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I feel like the ancients knew this.

The hero of Greek tragedy fully chooses an utterly foreordained path, because "fully chooses" simply means that the choice is a function of their true nature, expresses them truly.

"It's what I would do" is the hallmark of freedom.

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Why would you WANT some random neuron in your brain to be utterly decoupled from external input -- only a source, never a sink?

Doesn't that reek of Essene or Platonist hatred of the corrupt body and the world? Of body-estranged toxic masculinity?

19/

What is this thing you're mourning -- this incoherent fantasy of being not part of the world, never subject to it, never in reaction to it?

How is that "freedom"?

20/

When we imagine life as a choose-your-own-adventure with branching choices, imagine that we could have gone back and chosen otherwise, we are engaged in a totally coherent and useful metaphor.

Because what we learn by such rumination WILL apply "the next time around."

21/

Only a pedant (or a physicist) would refuse "the next time around" because it won't have EXACTLY the same subatomic confuguration!

The exact-position-and-velocity-of-all-the-quarks-and-leptons is not a useful or interesting level for considering moral agency.

22/

Yes, to say "Had I chosen otherwise" is, at bottom, to say "had different conditions obtained after the Big Bang". Sure.

23/

So? If I'm going to draw an arbitrary border around some atoms and call it "me" -- always an imaginative exercise! -- then I'm obviously going to draw that border in time as well as in space. To go back to the beginning of time is no more or less arbitrary than "birth".

24/

If "me" means anything, it means "me and my antecedents" -- the origins of "my choices" are pre-expasionary quantum fluctuations. Sure.

So? Why is calling that part of "me" any weirder than calling this particular cloud of atoms "me"?

25/

In other words, if you think "free will" is an illusion, it's because you've decided to draw the border of "you" to make it so.

Actually "you" is the illusion. Once you accept "you", there's nothing incoherent about "free will".

26/

And it's bizarre to look at a glorious machine CLEARLY MADE FOR DECIDING (evolution having squandered a luxurious overabundance of neurons on us!) and decide that it can't decide... because of your nostalgia for an impossible not-machine you can't even coherently describe.

27/

In the longing for a magical not-machine "decider out of nothing" soul, the terror of being subject to causality. I think the fear that's really being expressed is the fear of being simple enough to be predicted.

28/

We imagine some smarter-than-us thing that can predict exactly what we are going to do (there's a moment of this idea played out as a horror story in @doctorow and my "True Names", cf feedbooks.com/book/3511)

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But this is where the reductionism matters. We are RICHLY COMPLEX.

The recent story of AI developlment is telling here.

Back in the 50s or the 80s, we thought that making AI would allow us to create an intelligence we truly understood.

The joke was on us.

30/

We thought 'we'll understand it -- we programmed it!'
Turns out, to get close to human-like behavior, you have to give up understanding.
You have to start using messy evolutionary and learning techniques that yield results that are opaque. Already we have bots that dream.

31/

We don't understand why our AIs make the decisions they do. Look at chess! We thought that we'd build our rules of chess into AIs, and then we'd understand thinking, and be able to understand ourselves. Ha!

Instead, AIs taught us we don't understand chess!

32/

If even these tiny, baby AIs are so bewildering to their creators, I really don't think you have to worry about being a "machine."

It's going to be okay, sweetie.

You are richly complex, you are deeply original, you are unpredictably emergent, you are magic.

33/

Reductionism is a lie.

Your deep causal interconnection to the universe doesn't deny you freedom; it's the source of your freedom.

Being radically cut off from the universe, a self-author with no antecedents, wouldn't make you sovereign. Just isolated & alone.

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Your freedom means being what you are -- expressing your being through your interconnection with your inputs and your outputs.

The path on which you evolve, as you evolve, is fully yours. It is causally *given*, not "determined".

It's a dance, not a forced march.

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In taking responsibility for your choices, you take responsibility for the quantum fluctuations at the beginning of time.

Go for it!

Why not? "You" is a game anyway.

Play a bigger game.

(@dkestenbaum, if you're listening, please see above, there's your answer.)

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