BRETT HALL
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Blog

Free will...again!

6/15/2018

3 Comments

 
All sorts of unconscious phenomena enter into our considerations , decisions and choices. If you are waiting for the 9:47am bus and it fails to arrive - this event enters into your consciousness unbidden by you. You had no control over it. But now you are thinking “Oh no, I may be late.” At that moment a taxi approaches. Again: unbidden by you and more thoughts, also that you did not author, enter your mind. You now consider “should I hail the taxi?”. You deliberate. You try to create a good explanation.

Was your meeting to be at 10:30am or 11:30am? Maybe you’ve time enough for the next bus. But maybe you shouldn’t risk it and take the taxi.

Parts of this process are unconscious. Much indeed. But parts are conscious as you think and reason to form (create!) a good explanation of what to do next. You have choice before you. The world need not be one way or another. “Bus or taxi?” you must think quick. You must choose. The meeting is at 11:30am you recall in a few milliseconds. “I’ll just wait”. You’ve chosen by reason. Nothing has forced your hand. The decision was a free choice. And exercise of your free will.

Had a terrorist come behind you and pressed to your side a gun that you could see and said “Get that taxi” then new information would come. Now, I would say, when you obey this is different. Certainly you might object - but really you are doing OTHER THAN YOU WANT. Other than you desire. Other than you would have chosen. You are being COERCED. When there is coercion it is not the exercise of FREE WILL. It is something else. It is a decision under duress. Your creativity is being impeded. It is subservient to your survival and emotion and fear especially. You aren’t thinking clearly.

Now in the scenario of the late bus and you just wait peacefully for the next notice that this account has required: creativity, choice and free will. I don’t think we can easily remove any of those. Or if we can they simply “pop up” as another mystery. You may deny free will or even choice. But surely creativity is something you cannot deny. But what are we creating? Explanations. Why one explanation rather than another? We desire - surely. But why? Why desire anything? Do we just slavishly obey impulses or is there deliberation? What is this deliberation? An illusion? So it doesn’t matter if we deliberate? Surely it does matter if we take time to reflect. Surely we create better things? Make better decisions? And isn’t that decision to take time itself something that can be learned? And doesn’t it become a choice? And isn’t choosing to do so a free choice? You aren't being coerced?

What makes people unique? What is this thing? Is it creativity alone? There is something there - something fundamentally different about humans compared to other animals. Whatever it is seems to allow us to break free of our genes and our instincts. Cities, computers, our languages - in short our explanatory knowledge is not encoded in our genes. So that stuff we accomplish that is not encoded in our genes is being generated by our minds by a process we barely understand. We call it "creativity". But it's a thing we direct. We choose to direct our attention, and thus our creativity to this or that thing. And that conscious act of direction is an exercise of free will. What we're often creating is knowledge about how to solve our problems. But what knowledge to create isn't something that is in our genes and it's not "in" the laws of physics. But somehow it nonetheless is "in" the universe - it's part of reality. So when we choose to use this creativity of ours it is a parsimonious technique to simply call this an exercise of our free will.

3 Comments
Robert Spanell
6/27/2018 12:05:49 pm

I'm failing to see the connection between coercion and free will. How is being coerced any different from taking the taxi because you reasoned that it was the only way to make it to your meeting? One is a choice between being on time or late, the other between being on time or permanently late (i.e. dead). Only the available choices have changed. Is it the introduction of another's will (the terrorist's)? Wouldn't the will of the bus driver, let's say, to depart your stop ahead of schedule, thus no longer being there when you arrive, not be the same sort of thing? The only difference would be related to the other's intention, not to their existence as a cause. Both are just bits of information you need to take into consideration when making your decision.
I do like the idea of equating creativity and free will. It provides some clarity to the concept, although I'm not sure it provides more than additional intuitive support for its existence.

Reply
Brett
7/9/2019 11:14:51 pm

Hi Robert. I’m quoting you below and responding.

“I'm failing to see the connection between coercion and free will. How is being coerced any different from taking the taxi because you reasoned that it was the only way to make it to your meeting?”

One takes away your ability to be creative and turns you into a slave – the other does not.

“One is a choice between being on time or late, the other between being on time or permanently late (i.e. dead). “

No, wrong. YOU are forcing additional fiction into the hypothetical. Real life is never like that. In reality we always create new choices. Hence the connection between free will and creativity. If someone takes a gun and says “do what I say” it would appear you really do have a lack of options (if you want to live). But in the former case – when you’re just trying to get to a meeting on time – everything turns on your ability to solve the problem. Now, in my piece, I’m just giving an overview of two options: bus or taxi? But in reality? The options are literally unlimited. Uber or steal a bike that’s not chained up. Run or hitchhike. Call a friend or call the people at the meeting and tell them to wait. Realise you don’t even want to go to the meeting and go for a coffee. The options really are unlimited and what you decide to do is determined by your own creativity.

“Only the available choices have changed.”

In the latter – the man with a gun – is making choices for you. On pain of death. So what you do is not free. In the former – with the meeting – the “available choices” cannot be enumerated. You can always create new options. You’re free to do this in a way the crazy gunman will not permit.

“Is it the introduction of another's will (the terrorist's)?”

It’s the introduction of violence for the purpose of eliminating your ability to be creative. Lesser forms of this coercion reduce (without eliminating) our free will all the time. If you are carted off to gaol by the police – there’s a loss right there (but not complete). School is similar. “Obedience” at work and conforming in all sorts of ways to unjust laws or strange fashions are likewise reductions (though not eliminations) of free will. When your creativity has its hand forced in ways it might not otherwise: your will is being denuded of its freedom in some way. But, alone in your own world – perhaps on a walk, at the beach, etc: and then you’re as free as you can be. You can put into practise (will) much more perhaps than otherwise. But there are subtleties lurking here because civilization can give your will more freedom in some ways than being completely on your own (think technology and how it augments your mental abities) - and other people are actually avenues to more creativity and freedom than being utterly alone can be.

“Wouldn't the will of the bus driver, let's say, to depart your stop ahead of schedule, thus no longer being there when you arrive, not be the same sort of thing? The only difference would be related to the other's intention, not to their existence as a cause. Both are just bits of information you need to take into consideration when making your decision.”

You can get off the bus whenever you like. Your catching of the bus and accepting the bus will go where it goes was a choice you made so you could (for argument’s sake) be free to read and listen to music rather than worry about directions or driving and so on. This is, again, unlike the proverbial gunman who has hijacked your mind.

“I do like the idea of equating creativity and free will. It provides some clarity to the concept, although I'm not sure it provides more than additional intuitive support for its existence.”

If you understand my response, you should now understand how coercion tends to restrict or even eliminate creativity. Note that some people have more free will with a gunman than others. A person, trained in say Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Krav Maga or is something like a US Navy Seal or whatever – when *they* have a gun pointed at their head and are ordered here and there that is still, of course, impinging on their free will. But if they want to survive, they have actually in reality more options than the typical person. Why? Because they might know how to get that gun, turn it on the gunman and survive. They can create options that others might be ill advised to attempt. (Just on all that – the actual advice for actually dealing with people with weapons is to obey them unless they want you to go somewhere like “get in this car” or something. You never should. Police end up calling the place where you end up the “primary crime scene”).

As for intuitive support, well - I'm no fan of "support", period: http://www.bretthall.org/general-relativity-a

Reply
Brett
7/9/2019 11:19:27 pm

My own comment got truncated by my own site. Here's some more - that link is http://www.bretthall.org/general-relativity-and-the-role-of-evidence and I also wanted to just observe that my guess aligns with David Deutsch's on this: we have to attribute the qualitative difference between humans and other animals to something. Currently we use words like "creativity" and "universal explainers" and so on. When we understand those things, can program AGI to be creative and understand consciousness, we'll perhaps find out those things - like free will - are all aspects of one deeper phenomenon. I write about some of that here: http://www.bretthall.org/free-will-consciousness-creativity-explanations-knowledge-and-choice.html




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