The philosophy thread general discussion

I would describe the mind as a program which reprograms itself. A chess program does not have the same degree of free will as humans because it can't really reprogram itself in the way a human mind can.

You mean a degree of self-awareness or sapience.

Basically

The second chess program already has some free will. It would have more if it could evaluate it tactics evaluating methods, and not just it's object level tactics.

"A chess program does not have the same degree of free will as humans because it can't really reprogram itself in the way a human mind can."

What exactly does "reprogram" mean in a human context? I'm not aware that we can redesign our neuro-chemical pathways at will. I suspect that you are using "reprogram" as a more technical sounding synonym for "decide" or "choose", in which case you haven't really addressed my question (what is the program lacking that the human mind possesses that gives us free will), you merely rephrased it. What is it that gives us our ability to "reprogram" (whatever that means)?

The experience of making choices is not evidence of free will.

Well, bacteria certainly don't have free will. They don't have brains.

You know those toy cars you can get where the bumper is a little switch that changes which direction the wheels turn? You wind it up, let it go and if it hits something it reverses and runs backwards until it hits something else, at which point it goes forward again.

That's more or less how a bacterium moves.

edited 30th May '15 10:12:02 AM by Elfive

I would think this was obvious. Humans can for example judge our current behaviors as undesirable a train them out of us with some success. We us course can't always do this. Simply knowing about the conjunction fallacy doesn't let you fix it. An AI with direct script access that had a far better understanding of how it worked, would have more freedom than us.

Nothing is taken as obvious in philosophy.

"An AI with direct script access that had a far better understanding of how it worked, would have more freedom than us."

I dont believe that's true in any meaningful sense (depending on what you mean by "understanding"). An AI that can revise it's own scripts may be more complex that one that cant, but if it's criteria for revision are defined ahead of time, programmed into it by a human, then it's really no more free than a clock. By extension, the same thing could be true of the human mind.

"Humans can for example judge our current behaviors as undesirable a train them out of us with some success."

"Judge" is one of those words like "choose" or "decide". Until you specify where the judgement, choice or decision came from you haven't addressed the objection that anything which is pre-determined cant be free.

edited 30th May '15 2:38:14 PM by DeMarquis

Congrats you defined free will into something I very much don't want to have.

The humans programed it to do that simply by making it exist. If it randomly came into from no where it wouldn't make any difference.

To have the actually useful version, you need to start of as SOMEONE, with Actual preferences, and expectations, and ways of thinking! Clocks don't have any of things.

Your requiring anything with free will to start as a perfectly blamk slate, but that's the freedom of a rock.

The point is that if determinism is true your preferences are also products of past events, which in turn are also caused by past events, and so on. In that sense you're the same as a clock, except more complex.

They were determined at least in the sense that it was you that was brought into existence. This is what I mean about the freedom of a rock.

Do you mean that you brought the clock into existence - in which case you're the clock brought into existence by the circumstances that made you who you are - or that you made your preferences into existence? If you mean the latter you'll have to elaborate. How can someone make their own preferences come into existence?

I'll just pre-empt the most obvious (and obviously wrong) answer: "I wanted to have preference x so I have preference x". Wanting to be something or think or feel something is itself a preference that is caused by another preference, which in turn is caused either by another preference or, ultimately, by some other (ultimately exterior) circumstance.

You can add steps to the process that leads from circumstances to preferences and "decisions" but you'll always end up with a picture that has you completely dependent on circumstances - or rather, as an emergent consequence of them. You can't be independent of circumstance. In that sense you're the same as a clock.

Uh no.

What I mean, is the past events cause you to exist, and this comes with you having certain preferences, because other it wouldn't you.

Being born with innate preferences isn't a denial of freedom it's just being born as someone.

Any kind of free will that has to do with some specific person's will has to start somewhere.

So you and your preferences are the result of past events that are not under your control.

It is a denial of freedom, though, in that you didn't choose those preferences and thus any decision you make because of those preferences is ultimately out of your control.

Once again: that starting point, and all of its implications (the most relevant of which are your innate preferences) are our of your control; and thus anything that results from these preferences is also out of your control. You feel like you're in control but when you examine it more closely you'll find that your preferences were not something you chose, and - well, I'm just repeating myself here.

No it's inside of your control.

No if the past actually never happened and this was the beginning of time, it wouldn't change what would happen from here on. The preset outside of some quantum randomness completely determines the future without any add input from from past.

Our decisions exist there just not magical. If lightning sets a tree on fire would it be wrong to say the lightning did it, or could we only accurately say the big bang did it?

It isnt a question of whether the lightening did it. It's whether or not the lightening was free to do something else, instead. Obviously the lightening isnt. According to strict determinism, neither are you.

You seem to be confusing the issue of whether your self exists with whether or not it's free.

DeMarquis already said the more important bit, but I'll just add that it's also accurate to say the Big Bang did it. That's pretty much the point of determinism.

Creating the world in its present state necessitates only a minor adjustment in my description of the situation. If before I would have said "you past led to the circumstances that made you predisposed towards decision x" I'll now have to cut it to just "circumstances made you predisposed towards decision x". You still end up with no control over the factors contributing to your "decision".

And now you've defined free will as something that can't exist. Seriously ignoring the laws of physics for the moment, is there any imaginable state of of affairs where free will could exists. Because it really seems like we are arguing over nothing not even definitions.

Or imaginable state of affairs where this would matter.

We're not redefining things to kill the discussion or anything - the definitions of determinism and free will, and the framing of this discussion in general, that you've been getting from me and DeMarquis, are the same that are used in philosophy. The question of free will is about whether we can make decisions independently of circumstances outside our control; so it's incompatible with hard determinism, as I and DeMarquis have been saying all along.

The main reasons that this is such an active field in philosophy are the ethical implications of this ("is it wrong to hold people accountable for behaviour fundamentally not under their control?") and the relevance of free will to the fundamental nature of reality ("if we can prove that free will must exist we'll have disproved determinism"). I'm sure there are a couple of other roads that lead to this question, as well, but I think those are the two main ones.

A conceivable state of affairs where free will could exist would be one where the self is an entity in some way independent of its environment. If that was the fundamental truth of the self you could posit that when we are making a decision the framework is provided by the environment, but this non-physical "self" then steps in and makes the final decision from among the choices provided by the circumstances.

This is roughly what our everyday life feels like on a subjective, intuitive level; and it's also - well, if I'm not terribly mistaken - the mainstream opinion as to the nature of free will and the self. Mainstream, that is, among people who are neither philosophers nor specialists in any of the other fields that deal with this question.

You say that this state of affairs where the self really is in control - because it is fundamentally independent of any outside circumstances - is impossible, and could only exist if we were to ignore the laws of physics. This indicates that you hold a materialist (or physicalist) view of the universe. I agree with that view, as I said at the very beginning.

Given the nature of complexity, the answer "both and neither" usually works for me. <shrugs> It generally works for every multifaceted, large and complex issue.

I believe in Free Will, and also in the freedom of every political prisoner, regardless of their name or nationality. Stop being awful people and oppose these tyrants!

"You say that this state of affairs where the self really is in control - because it is fundamentally independent of any outside circumstances - is impossible, and could only exist if we were to ignore the laws of physics. This indicates that you hold a materialist (or physicalist) view of the universe."

I would only add that there is nothing wrong with this- but you shouldn't take it for granted. There are people who do not believe in hard determinism (materialism), and who therefore do not share these assumptions.

Either your original preferences are there for no reason, or because of something outside of your self. You have anymore control in the former than the latter.

The only ways to avoid that would be to not have truly original preferences, circular causation or infinite recursion.

But an agent could make choices the same way independently of it's origins. The recursive chess program I brought up earlier choices exactly as if it did just appear out of thin air. Physical determinism just caused it to exist.

I dont believe that true. I think if you examine a chess program closely, you will find that every "choice" it makes is completely pre-determined. It only appears as if it isn't because of the extra steps involved (it takes inputs from previous games and uses them as inputs to the next ones). There's no freedom involved, because the criteria by which it learns from experience is entirely pre-programmed.

What I mean is that adding information about the past doesn't add anything, besides explaining where the AI came from.

But at this point I'd just say that philosophical free will doesn't exist.

And move on to whether what people do have has the same moral implications. Because i think it does.

There, you are on much more solid ground.