The scope of "free will" within biology?

I'd like to point you, if you haven't already read it, to Yvain's excellent post on disease. In addition to being a metaphor - "free will" is like "disease" in many ways - it's also pretty directly applicable in this case. The causal arrow, rather than going back to you, your brain, goes to the disease instead, making it "not your fault." There are a couple of logical problems there, but hey that's humans for you.

Consider three possible ways of treating Alex, whose pedophilia appears to be caused by a brain tumor:

1. Lock him up for the rest of his life, far away from any children he might be tempted to assault.
2. Punish him — whether by locking him up for some lesser time, or just by giving him forty lashes with a whip, or taking his stuff away — every time he assaults a child.
3. Remove his brain tumor and check on him periodically to see if it's grown back.

If what you are interested in is preventing children from being assaulted, then either 1 or 3 is clearly superior to 2. Punishment is not reliable at preventing recidivism.

If what you are interested in is restoring Alex to his previous socially positive and non-pedophilic condition, 3 stands far above the other choices.

If what you are interested in is showing to the assaulted children and the public that the evil person who caused them harm is suffering retribution, then 1 or 2 are clearly superior to 3. (Although in the case of 1, you probably have to lock him up forever somewhere unpleasant, not just somewhere without kids.) Free medical treatment is not a clear expression of vengeance.

The impulses of Charles and Alex are not qualitatively different, but this is a case of a quantitative difference being big enough that it amounts to a qualitative one!

Most of us have biologically determined impulses to do this or that, but also the (biologically determined) capacity to override these impulses in cases where it would be inappropriate to give in to them. For instance, we can hold a full bladder for some time if we have more important matters we should deal with - and we can give a fully reductionist account of the terms can and should in such a sentence.

In the cases of Charles and Alex, the underlying intuition is that we could "rewind the tape" a thousand or a million times to the initial conditions (that is, after they acquired the tumor but before they committed whatever act we regard as criminal) and, butterfly effect or not, they would still commit their crimes: their behavior is overwhelmingly determined by an identifiable causal factor, the tumor.

In more "ordinary" criminal cases, we imagine that there has been a "struggle of conscience" in the persons concerned that could have gone either way; that is, if you "rewound the tape" to a point in time after the person acquired whatever dispositions are considered relevant but before they committed their crime, you would find that in some significant percentage of these hypothetical scenarios (or "possible worlds") their "conscience" won out and they refrained from the crimes in question, after taking into account facts known to them such as the severity of penalties should they be caught, the harm caused to others, and so on.

One of the factors influencing behavior in such cases, possibly enough to swing the decision, is the individual's awareness of his society's system of penalties and norms for calculating harms, so it makes sense to make this judicial system as clear, as legible, as well-known as possible so that it becomes the deciding factor in a greater number of such "struggles of conscience". But it's unreasonable to have this expectation in the case of a Charles or an Alex.

Is a brain tumor pushing on your amygdala more akin to prison bars that really do inhibit your free will in a purely physical sense, or just a more intense version of genes that give you a slight disposition toward violent behavior?

It seems as though the issues from society's P.O.V. are whether it wants these folk on the streets, whether deterrence will affect their behaviour, and whether it can effectively diagnose and fix them before (or after) they have offended.

But if we're already committed to the reductionist understanding of free will in the first place, what does this intuition that Charles and Alex are somehow "less free" really mean?

Glib answer: it means your intuition is faulty.

More serious answer: make a testable prediction. What does it look like when someone is "less free", given the reinterpretation of "free will" as "a planning algorithm based on a 'normal' preference ranking of outcomes"? We may just be hiding the question inside the word 'normal' there, but let's run with it.

Here's an example prediction: someone who's "less free" is not susceptible to persuasion. In a standard H. sapiens, strong social pressure can dramatically reorganize a preference ranking. However, I wouldn't expect persuasion to have much effect in these tumor cases.

My prediction has some obvious holes in it. For example, cryonics advocates defy majority opinion because they're convinced that they're correct and the issue is that important. What I'm trying to convey is the technique - if you think a category boundary exists, but you're not sure precisely where to draw it, put your finger on the page and try to feel the contours of the problem.

"Free will" could be described as a matter of whether actions are based on some sort of mental preference calculation the person is at least tangentially aware of, what sorts of factors appear in that calculation, and how much influence particular factors have on the outcome. Punishing someone for behavior when there clearly wasn't any calculation open to influence through negative incentives involved doesn't make much sense. Ideally (if everyone was perfectly rational and perfectly transparent) the only punishment needed would be counter-factual.

The versions of themselves with the tumours would always if able self modify to no longer have the tumours, but the ones without tumours would never self modify into having tumours.

Evolutionary psychologists dislike the distinction between "genetics" and "the environment" on the grounds that the environment is mostly biological, and, therefore, ultimately genetic. They prefer to distinguish between 'closed' biological things which vary only by genetic mechanisms (eg sight), and 'open' biological things which vary with the environment (eg language). A third level of variation could be self-modification. The environment versus genetics debate tends to be framed within the question of what does the determining. However, the ability to self-modify looks like what is needed for a compatibilist faculty of free will, and the ability to indeterministically self modify looks like what is needed for libertarian free will.

ETA Therefore, to say of a neural net that is it is "biological" is missing the point. Is it self-modifiable, environmentally modifiable, or genetically fixed? Environmental modification can be taken for granted, since it would be little use otherwise. So we have free will in some sense if we have self-modification abilitites. And neither how much we have, nor what kind we have is given by the observation that we are "biological".

Isn't this just a question about what we intuitively consider "part of ourselves"? All physical things influence our actions in one way or another, if nothing else through their gravitational pull on the atoms of our brains. Some of them, however, are running algorithms that we consider part of ourselves, such as desire, memory, and logical thought. Usually those parts, ie normally-functioning brains, are the largest influence on our actions. In the case of Alex, a bit that we don't intuitively consider "part of Alex", namely the tumour, has acquired an unusually large influence on him; hence the feeling that he has "less free will". And I am not sure that this is wrong; it really does seem reasonable to consider the tumour as an outside actor with an unusually high degree of influence, and to act in accordance with the wishes of those physical things that we consider internal to Alex - ie the rest of his brain, which presumably wants the tumour gone.

I think you have the beginnings of an answer in your characterisation of free will as "the process of your neural networks operating normally on a particular decision." The keyword being "normally." In both cases you cite the neural networks were functioning abnormally and in the case of Charles (at least) he exhibited some awareness that he was behaving abnormally. Now obviously, normal or abnormal, it's all just biology. The normative component comes in with the concept of free will itself. Generally our cognitive concepts only apply to normal cases - for the obvious reason that they developed to describe normal cases - and there are borderline cases where they begin to break down. It's probably best to think of the concept being inapplicable in those cases rather than imagining a tumour (or whatever) to be somehow infringing on free will.

I have spent some time contemplating same issue for some time and this is what I make of it:

Contra-casual free will is really about certain capabilities, that is being able to see the consequences of you doing X, and act on those predictions. Usually there is no point in applying Justice on small children or the severely mentally retarded because they have no idea what they are doing and in order for justice to be effective the person doing X must understand that doing X will result in punishment, and be able to act upon it. (I guess that you might induce some conditioning by punishing children and the mentally retarded, but I wouldn't refer that to justice). In that sens justice is really pragmatic.

I would say that a person that is "less free" is someone is less able to foresee the consequences of one's actions, and is less able to act according to those predictions. If the tumor-Alex was in fact systematically planing the pedophilia and not of a more compulsive sort, I would deem him guilty in a sens, but since removing the tumor would (hopefully) bring back good ol' Alex, there is really no point in applying any punishment.

Dennett wrote a book on contra-casual-free will that dissolves the question quite nicely: Freedom Evolves if you are interested

'But even under the reductionist conception of free will, it still seems like Charles and Alex are somehow "less free" than "normal" people.'

This is the sentence that really stuck with me. I disagree with the quotation "less free". If I don't believe in free will, then I wouldn't say "less free" in a figurative or literal sense. I would rather say "less normal" than "less free". Because, I think we can all agree, Charles and Alex are NOT normal. Like you said, it's not like they have LESS control than the rest of us, it's more like they're less able to conform to our social norms. It's possible that none of us have no control in what we do or what we think, but we DO ACT and we DO THINK. Our brains are built to learn and if we have had the opportunity to learn, but didn't, that is our responsibility. Responsibility exists whether free will are not mutually exclusive. The illusion of free will may cause some people to think that responsibility doesn't always exist, but the truth is that the issue of responsibility is irrelevant in the issue of free will.

the phrase "your past circumstances determine who you are when you face a choice, you are still the one that decides" holds true for most people, it seems like it doesn't hold true for them.

Alex before and after developing the tumor have different past circumstances so we can regard them as different people if we see personal identity as high-level concept that can be reduced to whatever low-level explanation gives the most understanding. Here it seems to explain your intuition if you see them as different people, or at least not exactly the same person.

Society likes the original Alex and wants to bring him back. Nothing more is gained from punishing Alex if we can restore his original state, unlike a hypothetical pedophile who would molest children irrespective of having a tumor and who needs to be deterred, rehabilitated, or kept away from society. That person's past and future selves would implement more similar algorithms than Alex's past and future selves.

Similarly, in 2000, a man named "Alex" (fake name, but real case) suddenly developed pedophilic impulses at age 40, and was eventually convicted of child molestation. Turns out he also had a brain tumor, and once it was removed, his sexual interests went back to normal. ...

At the very least, it seems like we would certainly be justified in judging Charles and Alex differently from people who don't suffer from brain tumors.

Alex was not punished for the impulses he felt. Rather, he was punished for molesting a child. Judge Charles and Alex differently, if you wish, because you think you understand the causality better. But don't punish them differently. Actions should be punished, not inclinations. Punish because they did a bad thing, not because they are bad people.

If you justify punishment as deterence, you are still justified in punishing Charles and Alex. Feel sorry for them, if you wish, but don't forget to also feel sorry for their victims. Life sucks sometimes.

Do we have a working definition of free will? I thought of a possible one while reading this article, but wanted to know if there already is a defined complexity at which a neural network is considered to have free will.