My summary of Eliezer's position on free will

What I think he means by "pretend" is: the capacity to pretend that we are choosing different things; i.e., running each scenario in our heads.

This seems to be a much better description of what's going on in my mind when I make a decision. I disagree with Solvent that we have a determnistic alhorithm that has a single outcome.

What we have are conflicting priorities. In the case of running over the squirrel they could be, for example:

Being angry enough to want to hurt something weaker than yourself Not wanting to jerk the steering wheel or brake abruptly while driving, for safety, when a squirrel runs out into the road in front of your car. Wanting to protect animal life.

Other than by experience, you don't know which priority has the greatest weight. Say "Wanting to protect animal life" turns out to have the greatest weight. Then you hit the brakes.

I'd take that, minus the crucial dependence on determinism. A system can contain stochastic elements and yet be compatible with free will.

I think that position your correct (and well put) regardless of what EY may or may not think.

Many people are offended at the thought of being controlled by physics when they are in fact a part of physics.

That answers the more relevant question of "What's all the stupid fuss over this supposed question of free will?" People treat it like it's some big mysterious conundrum, when that feeling of mystery should tell them they are confused and should check their premises.

"If free will means anything, then it must mean our algorithm's ability to determine our actions. Therefore free will is not only compatible with determinism, it's absolutely dependent on determinism. If our mind's state didn't determine our actions, it would be then that there would be no possibility of free will.

Our ability to determine our decisions need not be deterministic. Not all algorithms are deterministic.

If our mind's state didn't determine our actions, it would be then that there would be no possibility of free wil

See two stage theories. The mind/body system has to reliably put a decision into practice once it has been made, but that doesnt imply the decision-making has to be deterministic.

Can I make the choice to run over this squirrel, or does my personality decide what I do?

Who is "I"? What is there distinct from your personality that would be making this decision? There is suspiciously dualistic language throughout this post.

You would probably feel as if it wasn't really you who decided to kill the squirrel.

You would? You'd really feel like some sort of external being took over? I suppose if a person was highly dissociated they might feel like this.

I think it's more likely you just "wouldn't know" (or wouldn't consciously admit) why you decided to make a decision contrary to your evident personality. The truth would probably be that part of your brain actually liked the idea of splatting a squirrel at that particular moment, but justifying one's actions as a slayer of helpless little squirrels is troublesome and so the decision came to be regretted and disowned by other parts of your cognitive machinery.

Since various studies have shown that unconscious decisions actually precede conscious awareness of a decision, it seems likely that the experience of free will simply provides the conscious mind an opportunity to weave an appropriately believable and self-flattering explanation for behavior one has already determined on executing. I'm drawing mostly on Kurzban in using this sort of language....

The "free will" debate is a confusion because, to answer the question on the grounds of the libertarians is to already cede their position. The question they ask: "Can I make choices, or does physics determine what I do?"

Implicit in that question is a definition of the self that already assumes dualism. The questions treats the self as a ghost in the machine, or a philosophy student of perfect emptiness.

The concern of libertaarians is actually that external events determine what they do. They don't mind their actions being caused by neural events in their brain. A libertarian may accept that they are constituted of physics but that is not the same thing as being determined by physics. Being constituted of physical stuff is on the face of it neutral with regard to determinism and libertarianism.

The libertarians imagine that we should be able to make decisions not only apart from physics, but apart from anything.

No. The phrase typicall used is "not entirely determined by".

You mean "libertarian" in the literal sense right? You're not implying that the subject of "free will" has anything to do with politics are you?

Can I quote this on the course forum?

What I was clumsily alluding to there is how we're computing the counterfactual. If we have a (deterministic) decision-making algorithm, it will only ever output one value in a particular situation. However, we have to pretend that it could, so that we can evaluate the outcome of our different actions.

The word "deterministic" is correct in some sense: there are only laws of nature, no magic. But it brings some incorrect connotations. In a usual discussion the possibilities are framed like this:

a) The universe is a big machine with a lot of wheels. The wheels are rotating, and this is all there is and ever will be.

b) The universe is a big playground of dice, randomly rolling. There is nothing to know about the dice, except that they have some statistical properties.

Of course the choices are usually not expressed this way, but I tried to emphasise the emotions behind them. Essentially, both these pictures seem stupid and give no clue how anything non-trivial could happen in such world. Asking whether the world is deterministic is like saying "pick one of these two models". A wannabe smart person could argue that the first model is compatible with classical physics and the second model with (some intrepretations of) quantum physics.

In my opinion this dilemma is completely irrelevant to discussions about consciousness, free will, etc. The true nature of the universe at the micro level is not necessarily relevant for its macro-level events. A complex pseudo-random generator can be built from perfectly deterministic parts. A huge amount of random events can create a fairly predictable Gaussian curve. So the lawfulness or randomness on human level does not trivially follow the lawfulness or randomness of the elementary particles.

The interesting part is how are the complex things constructed from the small things, because some properties appear and others disappear in the process of construction. Magnetically charged particles create a magnetically neutral atom. Atoms join and make molekules; and depending on the structure and energy of the molecules we have gas, liquid or solid stuff on the macro-level. A macro-level structure of X-es can behave differently than X behaves on the micro level. But this is no magic; it's just a consequence of mathematical laws, although such consequences can be hard to guess.

There are two theoretical sources of (perceived) randomness. 1) Due to laws of thermodynamics our mind can never be perfectly synchronized with the rest of the universe, because we are part of the universe and by doing anything (this includes observing and learnining) we inevitably change it. 2) According to the many-worlds interpretation our universe is constantly splitting into many branches and our copies don't initially know which branch they are in.

But I think that these theoretical limits are irrelevant for everyday life; our typical ignorance is many levels higher than the quantum or thermodynamic effects. We don't know most things simply because we don't observe much and don't remember much, because we are very limited by the structure of our bodies.

Yep, everything you've said matches my impression of the "standard" LW view. (Although it gets more confusing when you get quantum physics in the mix.)

but I find that you are making a significant assumption: that people always feel like they have free will.

It sounds to me more like the assumption is that people often feel like they have free will, and usually for the same reason.

"What makes people feel like they have limited or absent free will" is a productive way of rephrasing "why do people feel like they have free will," but I don't think the latter entails a false assumption.

That is incorrect. If I tell you to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 and you start counting, I know by a completely different algorithm that you're going to get 5050. This generalizes: Omega need only prove that the output of your algorithm is the same as the output of a simpler algorithm (without, I may note, running it), and run that instead.

To answer this question we need something like a formal definition of "free will". The position on LW is generally that no such thing can exist, that the concept is confused and that the question "do we have free will?" dissolves into "why do we sometimes think we have something called free will?"

But I think it might be possible to come up with an actual definition, one where "we don't have free will" makes some kind of a testable prediction.

First I'm going to assert that determinism isn't free will, and randomness isn't free will either. The problem is that with a single individual it's hard to imagine any behavior that couldn't be explained as "determined" or "random". So, nothing testable so far.

But what if we have a group of individuals? What about if they suddenly all change their behavior so that they all gather together in the same public place wearing something purple? This won't happen if the behavior is random - it's impossible (or at least extremely likely) for all those people to randomly switch to the same new behavior pattern. What if the behavior is determined? Then we'd expect there to be some identifiable cause - an organized flashmob or something. But if free will exists, it should at least in principle be possible that everyone just happened to decide to do the same thing at the same time.

I haven't even thought this through enough to make it into a LW discussion post, and there are at least two flaws:

• We need a definition of "identifiable cause". Yudkowsky has provided a definition of causality but it's not one that I intuitively grasp yet so I'm not sure if it can be used here
• The free willers can just change their definition so that people's behavior can be divided into a causal component and a random/uncorrelated component and still there's room for free will there somewhere
• Also I haven't even Googled to see if someone's come up with something like this before and/or refuted it

By "goals," do you mean goals the system currently has? Or goals the system could in principle have? Or something else?

If the first, it follows that I can increase a system's freedom by installing in that system additional satisfiable goals. Which is perfectly internally consistent, but doesn't quite seem to map to what we ordinarily mean by freedom.

If the second, it follows that if you and I can each achieve N items from that set, we are equally free, even if my N items include everything I want to do and your N items include nothing you want to do. That, too, is perfectly internally consistent, but doesn't quite seem to map to what we ordinarily mean by freedom.

I conclude that our confusions about what we ordinarily mean by freedom aren't quite so readily dissolved. Although it's possible you have some third option in mind that I'm not seeing that eliminates these issues.

"Outside circumstances" including what? Your definition is too vague.

As far as I've been able to tell, the question is confused. Before you ask what it is, first you must define what free will is, in a rigorous and exclusive manner; your definition shouldn't include things you don't want it to include, nor should it exclude things you don't want to exclude. You've managed to include everything you want included, but your definition fails to exclude things you don't want included - namely, your definition includes Eliezer's definition.

Because Eliezer isn't describing how we could experience free will even where free will doesn't exist, he's offering a definition of what free will is. Once you use Eliezer's definition, the confusion goes away - the question becomes meaningless.

But Yudkowsky's approach to Free Will is not ananlogous, because there is no side of the debate that unknowingly defines FW as the feeling of being able to make choices as opposed to the ability

The problem is that one side unknowingly defines "choices" as the ability for a person to make choices and at the same time have the universe not determine those choices, as if the person isn't a subelement of the universe.

Once you realize that the person is a subelement of the universe and that each choice determined by the person is therefore necessarily determined by the universe, the question of free will is dissolved. Yes the past state of the universe determines everything, but that doesn't reduce the extent that the person determines something because the person isn't outside the universe.