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Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

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Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#241

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

legacynl wrote: post #135
karmakaze wrote: post #128

In what way is being unpredictable considered "free will"? Of course it's just being clickbaity but worth mentioning. I've seen this better used to show that humans are poor sources of randomness. Is there a difference between non-determinism and a free will choice? The latter seems to be a contradiction. A choice implies a reason which would be a cause, thus determinism. This test is asking to make random 'choices'.…

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making. The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experienc…

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made.

There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and comparison of the brain activity clearly shows deciding to press, many milliseconds before the participant experiences deciding. Therefore, the participant does not have free will, is it not so? Since the decision is done before it is known to be done by the subject.

The retort is simple. The leap to "no free will" ignores that consciousness itself is a processing: the brain component that reconciles the internal input and renders it for externality takes time to do its work. The decision is still made by the participant. The subjective experience is behind the objective activation simply just as the signal for a television screen must pass through the wire before it is translated for pixels.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#242

Post by The5thElephant »

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #241
legacynl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making. The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experienc…

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made. There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and compari…

You have to define free will first, and that is essentially impossible. What is happening in that "processing" though? That is not free will, your will is being determined by the state and context your brain is in. In fact any thing that is not a purely random choice is not a free will, and a purely random choice is not a will at all. The very concept of free will as most people understand it is absurd.

The only definitions of free will that work are deterministic ones.

To elaborate on your TV signal analogy, the TV does not get to "choose" what it shows next no matter the technical reason for the awareness of the choice coming later or not. These are physical deterministic processes.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#243

Post by Izkata »

cal85 wrote: post #224
scblock wrote: post #222

As accurate as a coin flip. Not particularly interesting in the end.

For most people it's a bit higher than 50%. If you got it down to 50%, congratulations, you outsmarted the algorithm.

And if you get it much below 50%, congratulations, you've outsmarted yourself.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#244

Post by nocman »

withinboredom wrote: post #152
lupire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? If I can reliably lose every basketball game, that doesn't make be perfect at basketball. To put it more plainly: if you were wagering on the outcome, would you rather win 50% of the time (EV=0) or 100% of the time (EV=max)? 100% misprediction is only relevant if a 3rd party adversary is observing the game. In the absence of such an adversary, being reliably wrong it worthless.

You are comparing to things that don't even make sense in the current context. You have two choices. I predict correctly or I predict incorrectly. If I'm randomly guessing, I will be right 50% of the time (effectively, this is a coin flip). If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice. If I always guess correctly, then I'm correctly guessing the correct choice. I'm trying to explain…

> If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice.

No, you aren't, because you aren't saying that it is the incorrect choice. You are saying it is the correct one.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#245

Post by withinboredom »

nocman wrote: post #244
withinboredom wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing to things that don't even make sense in the current context. You have two choices. I predict correctly or I predict incorrectly. If I'm randomly guessing, I will be right 50% of the time (effectively, this is a coin flip). If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice. If I always guess correctly, then I'm correctly guessing the correct choice. I'm trying to explain…

> If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice. No, you aren't, because you aren't saying that it is the incorrect choice. You are saying it is the correct one.

Another way to put it is that there obviously exists an algorithm that can predict what you will choose. It just isn’t this one, but the opposite. The entire point of this exercise is to prove that you have free will. If there obviously exists an algorithm that can predict what you will do, you don’t have free will, do you?

Thus “random,” aka, 50% is the target: this algorithm cannot predict what you do; you have free will.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#246

Post by arcastroe »

afiodorov wrote: post #240

I've long been very curious how one would generate a reasonably good source of randomness in a practical way without using a computer. Perhaps one could think of a song and then try to deduce randomness from the first letter of each word. I haven't found a way yet, any ideas? I occasionally want to use a reasonably good source of randomness when e.g. picking a board-game player or picking a random item on a menu.

Ask a friend to pick a number (unbounded). They usually give something in the thousands or ten thousands. Whatever number they give you, divide it by the number of choices and take the remainder. Mod 2, mod 3, mod 4, mod 5, and mod 6 are pretty easy to do in your head.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#247

Post by mensetmanusman »

aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #162
lupire wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define free will?

Even a Turing machine has free will. You can’t find out what it will do without running it, in a way beyond all questions of technical capability. Mechanistic attacks on free will died with godel.

Yes, if you define an array of transistors to have free will, it certainly does!

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#248

Post by withinboredom »

jtbayly wrote: post #194
brvsft wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I get you. And you're right, if I pitted a 'random' program against this site, the outcome would tend toward 50%.

Yes, but... 50% prediction rate would indicate that half of the time you are predictable, meaning you don't have much free will. 0% prediction rate would indicate that you have 100% free will. Randomness is not a good measure of free will.

There really isn’t a “yes but” here, this is stats 101. Welcome to the class.

A 0% prediction rate means that you are 100% predictable by simply taking the opposite of the algorithm’s input or output. Thus, you have no free will (according to this tool).

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#249

Post by karmakaze »

legacynl wrote: post #135
karmakaze wrote: post #128

In what way is being unpredictable considered "free will"? Of course it's just being clickbaity but worth mentioning. I've seen this better used to show that humans are poor sources of randomness. Is there a difference between non-determinism and a free will choice? The latter seems to be a contradiction. A choice implies a reason which would be a cause, thus determinism. This test is asking to make random 'choices'.…

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making. The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experienc…

> able to dictate and direct our thoughts

All the test does is show that humans are bad at bookkeeping historical choices and make ones that don't follow patterns. We are wired to make and follow patterns. Machines are much better, but they certainly don't have more/any free will.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#250

Post by ACow_Adonis »

lupire wrote: post #145
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, I've done some of these before. Ive gotten up above 200 key presses at ~50% before getting bored. my secret was decidedly less sexy than free will though. i just had XX years of working as a statistician and having a better intuition as to what random strings and numbers actually look like :/

How fast can you do those key presses? Do you have a memorized random string? It's easy to be random if you have memorized random (or normal) data that your adversary isn't focused on. For example, early digits of pi work in most cases. Or use a generator to create a sequence to memorize.

quite slow and considered actually. i doubt i could pump them out rapid fire, but maybe i should try. i don't have anything memorised and just go off of feel of runs of numbers.

i have considered trying to memorise some algorithm, but never done it.

i assume that if anyone tried to get me to do these things with a non- uniform distribution I'd probably be screwed, but never tested it.

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