PG is more and more like a reputation-building farm these days, churning garbage at an impressive rate lol
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What You (Want to)* Want
151–160 of 189 posts
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#152A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds.
But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors.
If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting.
If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us.
The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them.
We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to.
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One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors.
So now we can discuss things a little more clearly:
Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want?
There are three answers.
The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience.
The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small.
Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that.
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If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic.
Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#153If many worlds is true, you took all options of every choice (if we assume, as seems likely, a non-zero probability of your neurons firing in a way that actuate each option).
But where does the "wanting" lie? What if it's an experience that is not physical, but real? I.e. it exists and experiences itself, but it does not in any way change our scientific description of the universe. It doesn't change how all of the many worlds are playing out.
Would this "wanting" have to inhabit every branch of the unierse? Perhaps it only exists along the path of choices that it "wanted".
Then everything that can happen, happens, but your consciousness only experiences what it "wanted".
Mechanistic action and free-will are both preserved.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#154I think that the number of recursions is infinite so that is what gives you free will.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#155Lots of folks pointing out the philosophy 101 nature of the post as PG appears to rediscover the basics of the free-will debate, but I think there's one interesting issue here:
>"How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?"
I think an interesting answer to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1]. How many dots are there on the grid? Weirdly enough more than you can see. When you see an entire image full of color turns out a good deal of that is also made up, as most of that visual perception only ever happens in the center, your brain filling in the rest.
Point being, perception is inherently constructed, and that probably does apply to perception of your own cognition. Elaborate notions of wants and free choice are likely rationalizations just as your mind goes along and does its thing. It puts a sort of empirical limit on your confidence which I think is more productive than these linguistic rabbit holes about wants of wants of wants.
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/HermannG...
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#156I struggled a lot with the depression and irresponsible behaviour that arises when you realize that free will can't be reconciled with physics. It seemed like there was no reason to do anything and no reason not to do anything. The level of nihilism I sunk to led to all sorts of unhappy consequences.
I am still prone to those lines of thought sometimes, but with experience, I can also suggest ways to defuse the nihilism and existential angst so they don't continue to lead to suffering for yourself and people around you.
1. Concepts like "free will" are ill-defined, so there is actually no problem to solve. Stop itching at problems which are complete bullshit. Focus on lived experience, not vague distractions.
2. Even if there is no freedom, you can still experience suffering, and it is possible to learn to avoid paths which lead to suffering. The learning might be deterministic, but that doesn't mean you don't experience the results. Or, just continue to suffer if you're too stubborn to learn. Your ... choice, or whatever you want to call it, when you insist on shooting yourself in the foot even after you learned it hurt.
3. Responsibility is not the same as free choice. Responsibility is a contract where you agree to take on the bad consequences if something bad happens, and in return you gain power over what you are responsible for. One of the paths which leads to suffering is to assume you're not responsible for your actions. There are lots of ways people try to abdicate their personal responsibility. Excuses like "it was drugs" or "I was treated badly" or "my brain is controlled by the laws of physics so I can never really choose anything" or "it was so-and-so's fault." Whether or not these things are true, you are still admitting defeat and allowing disempowerment and suffering into your life whenever you say something was not your responsibility. Hemingway was on the right track when he resolved to always honor promises he made while drunk. To do otherwise is to admit that your actions were out of your control; it invites intrusion and censure by those who see you as weak for not being able to take responsibility. Every time you blame someone or something else for a problem, you grant them power which you could have kept for yourself, if only you had owned the problem.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#157This little piece reminds me of Thomas Hobbes' "Of Liberty and Necessity" (1646, publ. 1654).[1] Hobbes would have very probably rejected the recursive application of "want to" onto itself as nonsense, but uses a very similar structured chain of reasoning as the author when it comes to "necessary causes":
"... But here I must take notice of certain words of his Lordship's in this place, as making against his own tenet. Where all the causes, saith he, being joined together, and subordinate one to another, do make but one total cause, if any one cause, much more the first, in the whole series or subordination of causes, be necessary, it determines the rest, and without doubt maketh the effect necessary. For that which I call the necessary cause of any effect, is the joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause. If any of these, saith he, especially the first, produce its effect necessarily, then all the rest are determined. Now it is manifest, that the first cause is a necessary cause of all the effects that are next and immediate to it, and therefore by his Lordship's own reason all effects are necessary." (p. 261)
This "joining together of all causes subordinate to the first, into one total cause" is not far away of applying the tactics of a regular expression.
Instead of a chain of "wants", Hobbes speaks of "alternate succession of contrary appetites" and only the last one is what we call "will". In this view, the author's example of the drug adict would have been irrelevant for the problem. An adiction merely describes a (psychological) habit. However, the analysis of "will" is always about a specific, individual event and everything that leads to it, which can often include diverse intentions:
"... I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often." (p. 273)
In Hobbes view a "voluntary action" is an action where somebody was deliberating. Only in this sense the person has a choice. And if the person is "free" to do something, this means that the process of deliberating is still ongoing:
"... I conceive that those actions, which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done apon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing ; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating." (p. 273)
Therefore the freedom of the will is in accordance with determinism ("necessary causes" in Hobbes' terminology), which is itself unavoidable:
"... I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing. So that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated." (p. 274)
Hobbes' argumentation in "Of Liberty and Necessity" has far more interesting details and touches a lot more related topics than I could have presented here. For those who want to delve deeper into the philosophical discussion on the freedom of the will, I highly recommend the text as a basic read.
[1] See: https://archive.org/details/englishworkstho28hobbgoog/ [pdf] (pp. 229-278)
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#158I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing…
> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. Physics don't have to be deterministic in order to be at odds with free will. Whether neurons fire due to a predefined pattern, or they fire with some probabilities do not change the equation for "how can a biological machine have free will?" Choice is at odds with both predefined rules and drawing from a ran…
You’re starting from a definition of free will that is a modern outlier compared to the historical use of the term in Western culture.
That our will is not completely free is obvious to a child: they can’t always get they want. They can’t will an ice cream cone into existence.
“Free will” never meant freedom from physics, so it’s a tautology to say it’s not free because of physics.
> A recursive function, that mutates itself is still bound by it's rules for mutation and recursiveness.
It doesn’t matter. If the recursive function results in all possible outcomes within a boundary (as many do), then anything operating entirely within that boundary is not constrained by the function.
There are a lot of things denied to human will by physics. I can’t will myself up into the air or will myself to live forever without food.
Inside those boundaries, my behavior cannot be said to be constrained by physics. I don’t violate the standard model of quantum physics by declining dessert because I’m trying to lose weight. Which is the sort of banal decision that “free will” has historically referred to.
> Choice doesn't grow out of an exponentially growing number of possible states.
This is backward. The right way to say this is that many human choices are not constrained by the number of available states.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#159I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing…
I'm pretty sure the answer to "do we have free will" is "no", and the much more interesting question is "why do we feel that we have free will?" which I don't know the answer to.
Andy Clark, in his book "Surfing Uncertainty", has a pretty convincing explanation, at least to my armchair estimation.
You can read a review of his book at SlateStarCodex to get the gist of the argument.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#160This post I think offers some perspective on the whole "Do we have free-will or is it all predetermined?" discussion.
I don't have any science around this, but some Indian wisdom-
What I learned from one of my mentors KN Rao (one of the advisors whose advise was sought by great leaders of India):
The famous grandsire Bheeshma Pitamaha of the Mahabharata was once asked this question regarding fate vs free-will. His answer was to liken it to a man in a boat rowing in a river. The river has a current, however man has effort. I believe his verdict was "effort is greater than destiny".
Perhaps it has to be so, because were it not, then we are just part of the clockwork creation.
PG is trying to go one level deeper in his post. Namely, are we living under the illusion that we have free will, because our free-will (which is essentially our ability to have agency over our environment) is itself a product of our desires, and now the question is are our desires our own or are they themselves determined?
It may not be possible to know the answer to this one. I think it is equivalent to something like the collatz conjecture, to which Erdos replied "Mathematics is not ready for such problems"
I don't think we are ready for such problems either.