Thread by @FQXi

Now panel “Intelligence + Agency = Free Will” moderated by Jennan Ismael #FQXi2019

Do we have free will?

Sara Imari Walker: Something is missing in our understanding of physics needed to explain origin of life (my research) and free will. But yes.

David Haussler: No clear point in biology where free will appears. Lots of complex layers.

Jan Wallaczek: After 400 years of the scientific method, only now we are using the scientific method to asses the process of science. #MetaScience Issue of free will comes into scientific method, in a big way.

JW: How can we be free in a causally closed universe? Currently it's mainly parapsychologists doing scientific research into this! (No breakthrough there.)

Sean Carroll: There's no necessary connection between free will and deterministic physics in any way, in my mind (and many others). This is compatibilism. @seanmcarroll

SC: Some people don't like that view because we're trained by literature to believe in prophecy. So the worry is that if the future is determined, we are bound by prophecy. But that's not how it works...

SC: Deterministic physics is not like a crystal ball governing your future. More like an annoying kid who says "I know what you will do next" but won't tell you, and then when you do it, it says, "I knew you would do that!" So what?

Walker: If we do have free will, we want to think about what it gives us that other physical processes don't.

Background on Walker's view: There's an advantage to having FW, gives living entities more options: fqxi.org/community/arti…

Haussler: Can see Darwinian advantage to having Free Will, but that doesn't explain the mechanism of how it works.

Wallaczek: Does Agency require Free Will? When we talk about decision-making, agency needs free decisions. (cf Rovelli's talk earlier.) You can have intelligence and agency without free will. Any living form is an agentic system -- a plant, or a future computer.

JW: But where does freedom come in? Where does what does it mean to be human?

Jennan Ismael: One difference is that there is a first person perspective. Science tells us things from a third person perspective. That seems to be a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Question from David Wallace: These things can be emergent, and in degrees. Not just you have it or you don't. You may have a rudimentary level of free will. The Mars rover could have rudimentary agency and FW, for example.

Question from @tegmark: When is it more convenient to describe something in terms of causal reasoning? And when it is more convenient to think in terms of goal-oriented, optimisation?

Haussler: Biology struggles with teleological explanations. Evolution is blind. But can be convenient to speak in such terms.

Question from Paul Davies: Humans are open systems, so forget about causal closure. And what does it matter if we are free, as long as we feel free?

Also PD: We don't want to be in a deterministic universe, we want to determine our actions.

Carroll: There is a freedom meter which rates different governments around the world based on how free those countries are. It's not about whether we can predict what they will do. It's that if people want to do something, do they have the freedom to do it.

Carroll: The difficulty in predicting what something with do, doesn't equal agency. A perfect random number generator does not have agency. You can't assign blame to what it chooses.

Lloyd: If a computer OS or smartphone makes a decision, it can be shown that it can't predict its own decisions. I don't think the OS is conscious. But might it have free will? Background: fqxi.org/community/foru…. SC answer's "no".