People deny there is free will. I have written about that in a number of places, not least here.
They object on the basis that free will implies a supernatural force. The claim is that if things are determined then this rules out any active intervention by the mind in the world to change events in a way not already determined by the laws of physics acting on matter. And we humans are made of matter. If things are not “determined” then they say that if things were random, this wouldn’t give us free will either. It would just mean that actions are chaotic. I agree: randomness is just a special kind of determinism - one where things are determined by causes which are not regular. It seems determinism is inescapable. And I agree. What I do not agree is that this means there is no room left for free will. If one insists free will must mean: a capacity that is outside the causal chain, then I agree that kind of free will cannot possibly exist. Some people call that kind of free will “libertarian free will” and it is an appeal to the supernatural. So I reject that.
Instead, some of us argue for what is known as a “compatibilist” notion. There are many ways of putting this. I want to suggest the following and the inspiration is largely drawn from the work of David Deutsch in “The Beginning of Infinity”. I am not going to refer to this book from here on in the first part of this piece, except to say I recommend it. The reason is I want to see how my own thoughts have evolved on this since I last read the sections about this question. In another piece I’d like to compare what I’ve said with what is said there.
And so:
The idea here is that free will is little more than the admission that there is a problem before us: why is it that people (and not other animals) solve their problems by creating explanatory theories? What is this strange thing - civilization, technology, science, philosophy, thought, minds - what is it about people that allow for these qualitatively different capacities that people have over any other systems in the known cosmos? Here on this planet we have great apes like gorillas and orangutans. I saw a video recently of an orangutan attempting to fight a bulldozer who was knocking down trees in the forest. Although I have argued here that I do not think other animals, no matter how complex, can suffer (though they may sense pain) this nonetheless gives me pause. Yes: the orangutan is probably “behaviour parsing” - it is doing, instinctually, what its genes compel it to and it’d attack a bulldozer impotently as it would attack any other bigger enemy in its territory. But it is hard indeed not to dissociate yourself from anthropomorphising the ape and thinking “Is it actually *angry* in the knowledge that its home is gone or threatened? Does it feel sad?” It is for this reason, and reasons of the mysteriousness - all those open ended questions in consciousness - that I say: don’t be cruel to animals. We lack good theories. Let’s treat them well.
But why can’t the orangutan solve its problem? What’s stopping it from making a political claim? Creating a bulldozer of its own? Arguing its case? Learning to speak? The answer is often: well it’s not intelligent enough. People are on a spectrum of IQ - and orangutans are just outside of our minimum IQ…so that’s why. I disagree. I don't think it's just quantiatively different. Further along down the "spectrum" so to speak. I think, rather: people are qualitatively different to orangutans. There is a discontinuity. It's not a spectrum. Gorillas, dogs, rats, insects - they're on the continuum. But people are different and special. They do something unique. They can create new explanatory knowledge. Dogs cannot. Dogs act on instinct. The repertoire of possible responses a dog can have is finite. It is limited by what knowledge is encoded in its genes. And its genes are finite in number.
But people are different. Though we people have a finite genome - like a dog - unlike in the dogs genome there is something very special indeed that codes for something that is not finite. A code for a brain that is able to run a mind that is universal in a special way. This universal capacity is the capability to create explanatory knowledge. This is such an important fundamental discovery in philosophy by David Deutsch that its import cannot be overstated. It is as important as it is unnoticed (as of 2018). Why this fact is not informing research programs and AGI institutes and university philosophy departments I do not know. It is as if the philosophical equivalent of the question “What is mass?” has been answered and most physicists have just ignored it.
David has answered “What is a person?”.
Few have noticed. A person is an entity that can create explanatory knowledge. And is universal in its capacity to do so. What universal here means is: there is no problem in principle which a person is incapable of tackling. And the reason for this is that the mind - the software running on the hardware that is the brain - can among it's infinite number of possible tasks it can accomplish also accomplish the task of emulating a universal computer to some degree of accuracy. It is “Turing Complete”. So whatever a universal Turing Machine can do a human mind can do as well, given enough time. But also computers can simulate anything physical and that includes minds. This is provably the case and David also did this. Back in 1985 David, in his seminal paper that laid the foundations of quantum computation, showed that a universal quantum computer could simulate any physical process. The paper is here, among many other places: https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf The thesis is now called the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis.
But minds go a step beyond merely having computational universality. They also understand - and are universal in their capacity to do so. They can comprehend because they can explain. And because all physical processes can be simulated - so the laws describing those processes can be computed (algorithms written and then programmed into a computer) - a creative person could write that algorithm and hence understand those laws and that process. The human mind is universal in its capacity to understand. It is a universal explainer. In principle. In practise people pick and choose a finite number of explanations to explore in their finite lifetimes. But returning to basic computation:
The significance here is that even a classical computer can compute anything that’s computable (but sometimes it will take many times the age of the universe even with switching speeds the speed of light and with the all the matter in the universe acting as a computer) but a quantum computer could do it faster - much faster. Minutes instead of billions of years. Now a human mind can also do anything such a computer can do: it too is a computer that can “simulate any physical process”. And if the mind needs more memory or speed: well that’s what technology is for - to speed things up and act as storage (pen and paper does that too). But if our explanation needs more raw processing speed - well pull out your lap top computer or calculator or whatever other device with a fast clock speed you like to assist in crunching those numbers.
So: there is nothing in the universe - no phenomena in principle - that is *inexplicable*. All explanations are computations - physical processes. If it exists in the physical world, a computer can simulate it. If it can simulate it, then some finite sequence of steps can be articulated (an algorithm) to capture that thing.
Now *other* computers lack something people have. Namely an awareness of their own computations. A Windows or Apple computer, universal though they are, are not aware of their own internal states. There is no subjectivity in a “normal” computer. Because *they lack the software that gives them that capacity*.
But we do not! We, in a real sense, ARE that capacity. We are the software (a mind) that is aware of at least *some* of its own internal computational states.
But why? Why are we special? Well existentially we could get into a metaphysical discussion about how the universe has evolved a way for it to perhaps prevent its own eventual death (in the form of us). We are problem solving machines. Maybe we can slow down the heat death or some such? Yet why be conscious? Well, and here we must consider the nature of consciousness itself - consciousness seems to be a thing we know we - as individual subjects - possess while we have no direct access to that of anyone else. So we do not “know” they are conscious because consciousness is a first person phenomenon. By "know" here I simply mean we lack access to anyone else’s “first person” experience. But we know in other ways they are conscious. (Scare quotes intended and then not intended in all cases there!).
But what do we have access to? Well we have access to other people’s creativity. So we know other people are creative because we notice them solving their problems, inventing things, making decisions out there in the world that are not easy to predict (I’d say impossible mostly, to predict). So we have an objective indication of their creativity. The creativity is a unique thing people have and other animals do not. So we “feel” consciousness in ourselves but we “observe” creativity in others. I postulate:
Creativity (of the kind where people create explanations - create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “consciousness”.
Now consciousness is what we are. It is almost redundant to say “we experience consciousness”. It is more like “we are consciousness”. But the consciousness - the subjective experience of mind - is something that with effort we direct. Now some people say that subjectively we do not control the contents of consciousness. Sam Harris says this that on introspection you do not have subjective control over your thoughts - they come and go.
In the objective world out there I do not control what happens. Fine. Uncontroversial! And in my subjective experience of that world likewise - the contents (the blue sky, the sound of birds) are also not in my control. And my next thought, so it’s argued, arises unbidden. Well if you “switch off” and meditate - that indeed seems to be the case. Parts of your conscious mind decouple from other parts. The thoughts and the awareness of those thoughts divide and one is inclined to think “I am not that stream of thoughts” (this is the insight of the contemplatives like Harris and many others from a Buddhist tradition). Of course that too is an observation of the internal subjective state and is no more an indication of deep subjective truth about the nature of the person than “I am my stream of thoughts” when you are not in such a contemplative state. Both the “lost in thought” and the “Divested of the sense of self” states are equally real subjective states. Sam wants to call one the “True I - when I is lost” compared to the “perpetually lost in thought” state.
What I want to say here is that the subjective experience of the “lost in thought” state is actually very probative of what people are. When “lost in thought” or thinking - just thinking without concern about who you are - in the flow state of thinking one thought and reasoning and concluding what comes next - I do indeed feel capable of deciding. Thinking and deciding. Explaining. I feel actively involved in choices. I feel a subjective sense of free will. This may seem to be too-clever-by-half but I want to say that when paying attention to how you think, while “lost in thought” you can see options arising - being criticised and either surviving the process or not. And, this is key, you can slow things down or not and notice how critical you are being, or not.
Now at this point the free will denier says “Ah, but you did not choose to have the thought “Should I slow down and think more carefully now or not?” - that thought wasn’t given to you. Ok - fine. I do not control all my thoughts. But the choice to slow down or not is mine. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. And not controlling ALL of the contents of consciousness does not mean I do not control some and my conception of free will is only that I control some and not all. It is as if to say “because the state cannot control all aspects of our lives, it controls none and hence does not exist”. That would be absurd. The all-or-nothing conception of free will here is misguided. So free will is that sense that we choose to create one explanation rather than another. We attempt to create.
When a person encounters a problem they seek to find solutions. “Seek” implies the solutions are “out there” in some sense. But this is rare: usually they must come from within - they must be created. By the mind - the creative mind of the individual. Outwardly we see solutions generated by a person. Inwardly we experience the phenomena of consciousness as we encounter the world and construct inside our minds a representation of the outside reality. This act of construction is a creative one. We create that representation and when there is a problem we attempt to solve it. Or we can ignore the problem. These are our choices. There are a literally infinite number of problems we might attempt to solve. But, and this is key, we choose only some to work on. And this is the exercise of free will. If you have a major life decision: should I enter into studying finance or physics at university? I think on this carefully over many months. My mathematical skills are good - I could do either. I like to work with numbers and constrain things qualitatively. Finance seems to be interesting - I could be wealthy and do physics on the side. But then directly working on fundamental problems might be more rewarding than merely earning a high wage. I think and create options. But maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe I just shouldn’t care what I do and not think about it? The choice to think hard on this or not: to decide which knowledge to create (the knowledge about what to do with my life or not) is something I am free to choose to do. Or not.
Free will is the freedom for me to get a good sense of my preferences and act upon them. That is to say: choose. But to know what my preferences truly are (finance or physics) I need to carefully deliberate - solve that problem - create that knowledge. Outwardly, eventually, someone will notice me enrol in a physics and finance double major. But inwardly only I know that I felt many different things: emotions like excitement, or confusion and the thrill at making a new insight. It was all me - or largely me - that contemplated this problem for hours on end. I chose this interesting solution - the double degree - as it helped me satisfy both desires. I was free to do otherwise. To not think about it at all. Or choose one over the other. But no, I chose to do what I did. I did that. Not the laws of physics.
Inwardly it was a conscious sensation of free will. But outwardly it was a choice made to create knowledge in that area. These things are all facets of the one same phenomenon. What it means to be a human and explain the world.
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NB: There is a sad trend among some academics to pour scorn on social media. In particular members of the so-called “intellectual dark web” complain about the “dark web” - in particular Twitter. Indeed there are some obnoxious people who seem unable to have a civil, polite conversation. People’s motives are questioned, people are insulted or the conversation immediately moved away from issues into matters about one’s personal psychology. Yes: such interlocuters are not honestly trying to get at the truth, or to solve a problem out there in the world but rather attempting to defeat one mano-y-mano as though the purpose of philosophical argument was not to learn and solve problems but rather, like in a professional level tennis match or chess competition: win! Winning a philosophical argument about an open problem does not mean a solution is found, is simply means that one side got posed a question the other side was unable to answer. But the open problem remains open and the two people, ostensibly interested in the content of the debate are now “at odds” rather than cooperating in a critical way about an issue. People on Twitter encounter this phenomenon very often. And there is the challenge. The challenge is not to see these failures as failures of the infrastructure or failures of civil discourse but rather a failure of being able to direct ones attention down productive, peaceful tree-lined avenues rather than headlong into dark, dangerous poorly lit and dirty alleys. Twitter has both.
The bright tree lined avenues are places where ideas are discussed and people stroll side-by-side trying to find the fruitful solutions to outstanding problems. There are not accusations that “you” think this or concern that insults will begin to fly. You are both engaged in a quest and that involves one person walking down this side of the street and the other person on the other - in different places, at different positions, posing questions and attempting to find solutions.
As it can be with this whole free will debate. I have found the people of Twitter on this issue to be, typically, amazingly open minded (there are exceptions, of course) and we all lack any good theory about what is going on. Some of us have an intuition that free will simply cannot exist. Others say it must and can be both more simple and complex than other theories generally say. We explore these fruitful places along the avenue and there is rarely animus. We’re walking the same journey. Maybe together we can find a solution. A genuine explanatory theory.
I think this is why people, like Sam Harris who claims he has recently more or less left Twitter, and others like Dave Rubin who claim “Twitter isn’t real life” are missing something important here. I spend many hours in real life conversations each week speaking about these exact same issues. I find those conversations alongside those on Twitter to be important ways to cross pollinate this profusion of ideas. I fear that the “intellectual dark web” people might be going a little dark. Rejecting important ways to flesh out ideas and bounce around interesting notions while at the same time accusing others of being “inside intellectual silos”. I don’t know how the intellectual dark web can be both a voice for the free expression of ideas while at the same time acting as if one of the very places where good ideas are flourishing is some source of skepticism. If we judged all places in the public sphere by their worst visitors and most ridiculous ideas, we wouldn’t be left with many places to find solace. I say: just look for those bright avenues. They’re just as obvious, if you try, as the dark alleyways.
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Script to my video:
We don’t have a theory of consciousness or creativity. If we did, we could program these into a computer. “If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it” says David Deutsch.
Consciousness and creativity are mysterious. This doesn’t mean they are insoluble problems - they must be soluble because they’re just features of our mind. Anything we can do must be the result of physical processes and all physical processes are computable - David proved this mathematically in the same paper that laid the foundation for quantum computation.
This rules out any supernatural explanation for what our minds are doing or what we human beings are. Mysterious things are just problems. That’s all. Questions unanswered. Yet some people deny some problems are even problems. The philosopher Daniel Dennett denies consciousness is a problem. He says it’s an illusion. The philosopher Sam Harris denies free will is a problem. He says it’s an illusion.
In both cases I think they are mistaken and for the same reason. We humans are special creatures. But there is nothing supernatural about us, nothing magical. Yet there is something unique. Why is it people (alone among all animals) solve problems by creating explanatory theories? What is this strange thing that leads to thoughts, minds, solutions, philosophy, science, technology and civilization? What is it about people that allows for these qualitatively different capacities people have over any other system in the known cosmos?
Like a dog or fish we have a finite genome but unlike in a dog or fish something is in that genome that codes for something very special indeed. A code for a brain that is able to run a mind that is universal in a special way. This universal capacity is the capability to create explanatory knowledge. This is such an important fundamental discovery in philosophy by David Deutsch that its import cannot be overstated. It’s as important as it is unnoticed (as of 2018).
Why this fact is not informing and animating research programs and AGI institutes and university philosophy departments I do not know. It is as if the philosophical equivalent of the question “What is mass?” was answered and most physicists ignored it. David answered the question “What is a person?”.Few have noticed.
A person is an entity that can create explanatory knowledge and is universal in its capacity to do so. What universal here means is: there is no problem in principle a person is incapable of tackling. And the reason for this is the mind - the software running on the hardware that is the brain - is a universal computer…and then some.
It is a universal computer that is conscious of its own states, can direct its own future states and, importantly, whose output cannot be specified in advance. And that is key! We cannot specify the output of an general intelligence - artificial or otherwise - unlike for any other program we write. We people are general intelligences. We create new knowledge.
Subjectively we experience consciousness. But do other people? Well, we cannot access the conscious states of other people. We cannot experience their inner subjectivity. Yet how do we know they are conscious? Well what we do have access to other people’s creativity. We know other people are creative because we notice them solving their problems: inventing things, making decisions out there in the world. So we’ve an objective indication, in the form of their creativity, of their inner conscious states. The problems that interest them. The creativity of people we observe in the world is a unique thing people have that other animals do not share.
So while we “feel” consciousness in ourselves we “observe” creativity in others.
So I postulate: creativity (of the kind where people create explanations - create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “conscious”.
Free will is that aspect of consciousness where I am able to obtain a good sense of my preferences and act upon them. That is to say: choose. But to know what my preferences truly are I need to carefully deliberate - solve that problem - create that knowledge. Outwardly, eventually, someone will notice me make a decision. But inwardly only I know that I felt many different things before the decision: emotions like excitement, or confusion and the thrill at making a new insight. It was all me - or largely me - that contemplated this problem for hours on end. I chose this interesting solution rather than another. I was free to do otherwise. To not think about it at all in fact if I desired. If I had that conscious state and followed it. Paid attention to it. Or not.
Inwardly it was a conscious sensation of free will. But outwardly it was a choice made to create knowledge in that area. These things are all facets of the one same phenomenon. What it means to be a human and explain the world. What I do as a person is exercise a free choice in acting on the best explanation I have created. And no, I choose to end this video.
They object on the basis that free will implies a supernatural force. The claim is that if things are determined then this rules out any active intervention by the mind in the world to change events in a way not already determined by the laws of physics acting on matter. And we humans are made of matter. If things are not “determined” then they say that if things were random, this wouldn’t give us free will either. It would just mean that actions are chaotic. I agree: randomness is just a special kind of determinism - one where things are determined by causes which are not regular. It seems determinism is inescapable. And I agree. What I do not agree is that this means there is no room left for free will. If one insists free will must mean: a capacity that is outside the causal chain, then I agree that kind of free will cannot possibly exist. Some people call that kind of free will “libertarian free will” and it is an appeal to the supernatural. So I reject that.
Instead, some of us argue for what is known as a “compatibilist” notion. There are many ways of putting this. I want to suggest the following and the inspiration is largely drawn from the work of David Deutsch in “The Beginning of Infinity”. I am not going to refer to this book from here on in the first part of this piece, except to say I recommend it. The reason is I want to see how my own thoughts have evolved on this since I last read the sections about this question. In another piece I’d like to compare what I’ve said with what is said there.
And so:
The idea here is that free will is little more than the admission that there is a problem before us: why is it that people (and not other animals) solve their problems by creating explanatory theories? What is this strange thing - civilization, technology, science, philosophy, thought, minds - what is it about people that allow for these qualitatively different capacities that people have over any other systems in the known cosmos? Here on this planet we have great apes like gorillas and orangutans. I saw a video recently of an orangutan attempting to fight a bulldozer who was knocking down trees in the forest. Although I have argued here that I do not think other animals, no matter how complex, can suffer (though they may sense pain) this nonetheless gives me pause. Yes: the orangutan is probably “behaviour parsing” - it is doing, instinctually, what its genes compel it to and it’d attack a bulldozer impotently as it would attack any other bigger enemy in its territory. But it is hard indeed not to dissociate yourself from anthropomorphising the ape and thinking “Is it actually *angry* in the knowledge that its home is gone or threatened? Does it feel sad?” It is for this reason, and reasons of the mysteriousness - all those open ended questions in consciousness - that I say: don’t be cruel to animals. We lack good theories. Let’s treat them well.
But why can’t the orangutan solve its problem? What’s stopping it from making a political claim? Creating a bulldozer of its own? Arguing its case? Learning to speak? The answer is often: well it’s not intelligent enough. People are on a spectrum of IQ - and orangutans are just outside of our minimum IQ…so that’s why. I disagree. I don't think it's just quantiatively different. Further along down the "spectrum" so to speak. I think, rather: people are qualitatively different to orangutans. There is a discontinuity. It's not a spectrum. Gorillas, dogs, rats, insects - they're on the continuum. But people are different and special. They do something unique. They can create new explanatory knowledge. Dogs cannot. Dogs act on instinct. The repertoire of possible responses a dog can have is finite. It is limited by what knowledge is encoded in its genes. And its genes are finite in number.
But people are different. Though we people have a finite genome - like a dog - unlike in the dogs genome there is something very special indeed that codes for something that is not finite. A code for a brain that is able to run a mind that is universal in a special way. This universal capacity is the capability to create explanatory knowledge. This is such an important fundamental discovery in philosophy by David Deutsch that its import cannot be overstated. It is as important as it is unnoticed (as of 2018). Why this fact is not informing research programs and AGI institutes and university philosophy departments I do not know. It is as if the philosophical equivalent of the question “What is mass?” has been answered and most physicists have just ignored it.
David has answered “What is a person?”.
Few have noticed. A person is an entity that can create explanatory knowledge. And is universal in its capacity to do so. What universal here means is: there is no problem in principle which a person is incapable of tackling. And the reason for this is that the mind - the software running on the hardware that is the brain - can among it's infinite number of possible tasks it can accomplish also accomplish the task of emulating a universal computer to some degree of accuracy. It is “Turing Complete”. So whatever a universal Turing Machine can do a human mind can do as well, given enough time. But also computers can simulate anything physical and that includes minds. This is provably the case and David also did this. Back in 1985 David, in his seminal paper that laid the foundations of quantum computation, showed that a universal quantum computer could simulate any physical process. The paper is here, among many other places: https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf The thesis is now called the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis.
But minds go a step beyond merely having computational universality. They also understand - and are universal in their capacity to do so. They can comprehend because they can explain. And because all physical processes can be simulated - so the laws describing those processes can be computed (algorithms written and then programmed into a computer) - a creative person could write that algorithm and hence understand those laws and that process. The human mind is universal in its capacity to understand. It is a universal explainer. In principle. In practise people pick and choose a finite number of explanations to explore in their finite lifetimes. But returning to basic computation:
The significance here is that even a classical computer can compute anything that’s computable (but sometimes it will take many times the age of the universe even with switching speeds the speed of light and with the all the matter in the universe acting as a computer) but a quantum computer could do it faster - much faster. Minutes instead of billions of years. Now a human mind can also do anything such a computer can do: it too is a computer that can “simulate any physical process”. And if the mind needs more memory or speed: well that’s what technology is for - to speed things up and act as storage (pen and paper does that too). But if our explanation needs more raw processing speed - well pull out your lap top computer or calculator or whatever other device with a fast clock speed you like to assist in crunching those numbers.
So: there is nothing in the universe - no phenomena in principle - that is *inexplicable*. All explanations are computations - physical processes. If it exists in the physical world, a computer can simulate it. If it can simulate it, then some finite sequence of steps can be articulated (an algorithm) to capture that thing.
Now *other* computers lack something people have. Namely an awareness of their own computations. A Windows or Apple computer, universal though they are, are not aware of their own internal states. There is no subjectivity in a “normal” computer. Because *they lack the software that gives them that capacity*.
But we do not! We, in a real sense, ARE that capacity. We are the software (a mind) that is aware of at least *some* of its own internal computational states.
But why? Why are we special? Well existentially we could get into a metaphysical discussion about how the universe has evolved a way for it to perhaps prevent its own eventual death (in the form of us). We are problem solving machines. Maybe we can slow down the heat death or some such? Yet why be conscious? Well, and here we must consider the nature of consciousness itself - consciousness seems to be a thing we know we - as individual subjects - possess while we have no direct access to that of anyone else. So we do not “know” they are conscious because consciousness is a first person phenomenon. By "know" here I simply mean we lack access to anyone else’s “first person” experience. But we know in other ways they are conscious. (Scare quotes intended and then not intended in all cases there!).
But what do we have access to? Well we have access to other people’s creativity. So we know other people are creative because we notice them solving their problems, inventing things, making decisions out there in the world that are not easy to predict (I’d say impossible mostly, to predict). So we have an objective indication of their creativity. The creativity is a unique thing people have and other animals do not. So we “feel” consciousness in ourselves but we “observe” creativity in others. I postulate:
Creativity (of the kind where people create explanations - create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “consciousness”.
Now consciousness is what we are. It is almost redundant to say “we experience consciousness”. It is more like “we are consciousness”. But the consciousness - the subjective experience of mind - is something that with effort we direct. Now some people say that subjectively we do not control the contents of consciousness. Sam Harris says this that on introspection you do not have subjective control over your thoughts - they come and go.
In the objective world out there I do not control what happens. Fine. Uncontroversial! And in my subjective experience of that world likewise - the contents (the blue sky, the sound of birds) are also not in my control. And my next thought, so it’s argued, arises unbidden. Well if you “switch off” and meditate - that indeed seems to be the case. Parts of your conscious mind decouple from other parts. The thoughts and the awareness of those thoughts divide and one is inclined to think “I am not that stream of thoughts” (this is the insight of the contemplatives like Harris and many others from a Buddhist tradition). Of course that too is an observation of the internal subjective state and is no more an indication of deep subjective truth about the nature of the person than “I am my stream of thoughts” when you are not in such a contemplative state. Both the “lost in thought” and the “Divested of the sense of self” states are equally real subjective states. Sam wants to call one the “True I - when I is lost” compared to the “perpetually lost in thought” state.
What I want to say here is that the subjective experience of the “lost in thought” state is actually very probative of what people are. When “lost in thought” or thinking - just thinking without concern about who you are - in the flow state of thinking one thought and reasoning and concluding what comes next - I do indeed feel capable of deciding. Thinking and deciding. Explaining. I feel actively involved in choices. I feel a subjective sense of free will. This may seem to be too-clever-by-half but I want to say that when paying attention to how you think, while “lost in thought” you can see options arising - being criticised and either surviving the process or not. And, this is key, you can slow things down or not and notice how critical you are being, or not.
Now at this point the free will denier says “Ah, but you did not choose to have the thought “Should I slow down and think more carefully now or not?” - that thought wasn’t given to you. Ok - fine. I do not control all my thoughts. But the choice to slow down or not is mine. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. And not controlling ALL of the contents of consciousness does not mean I do not control some and my conception of free will is only that I control some and not all. It is as if to say “because the state cannot control all aspects of our lives, it controls none and hence does not exist”. That would be absurd. The all-or-nothing conception of free will here is misguided. So free will is that sense that we choose to create one explanation rather than another. We attempt to create.
When a person encounters a problem they seek to find solutions. “Seek” implies the solutions are “out there” in some sense. But this is rare: usually they must come from within - they must be created. By the mind - the creative mind of the individual. Outwardly we see solutions generated by a person. Inwardly we experience the phenomena of consciousness as we encounter the world and construct inside our minds a representation of the outside reality. This act of construction is a creative one. We create that representation and when there is a problem we attempt to solve it. Or we can ignore the problem. These are our choices. There are a literally infinite number of problems we might attempt to solve. But, and this is key, we choose only some to work on. And this is the exercise of free will. If you have a major life decision: should I enter into studying finance or physics at university? I think on this carefully over many months. My mathematical skills are good - I could do either. I like to work with numbers and constrain things qualitatively. Finance seems to be interesting - I could be wealthy and do physics on the side. But then directly working on fundamental problems might be more rewarding than merely earning a high wage. I think and create options. But maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe I just shouldn’t care what I do and not think about it? The choice to think hard on this or not: to decide which knowledge to create (the knowledge about what to do with my life or not) is something I am free to choose to do. Or not.
Free will is the freedom for me to get a good sense of my preferences and act upon them. That is to say: choose. But to know what my preferences truly are (finance or physics) I need to carefully deliberate - solve that problem - create that knowledge. Outwardly, eventually, someone will notice me enrol in a physics and finance double major. But inwardly only I know that I felt many different things: emotions like excitement, or confusion and the thrill at making a new insight. It was all me - or largely me - that contemplated this problem for hours on end. I chose this interesting solution - the double degree - as it helped me satisfy both desires. I was free to do otherwise. To not think about it at all. Or choose one over the other. But no, I chose to do what I did. I did that. Not the laws of physics.
Inwardly it was a conscious sensation of free will. But outwardly it was a choice made to create knowledge in that area. These things are all facets of the one same phenomenon. What it means to be a human and explain the world.
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NB: There is a sad trend among some academics to pour scorn on social media. In particular members of the so-called “intellectual dark web” complain about the “dark web” - in particular Twitter. Indeed there are some obnoxious people who seem unable to have a civil, polite conversation. People’s motives are questioned, people are insulted or the conversation immediately moved away from issues into matters about one’s personal psychology. Yes: such interlocuters are not honestly trying to get at the truth, or to solve a problem out there in the world but rather attempting to defeat one mano-y-mano as though the purpose of philosophical argument was not to learn and solve problems but rather, like in a professional level tennis match or chess competition: win! Winning a philosophical argument about an open problem does not mean a solution is found, is simply means that one side got posed a question the other side was unable to answer. But the open problem remains open and the two people, ostensibly interested in the content of the debate are now “at odds” rather than cooperating in a critical way about an issue. People on Twitter encounter this phenomenon very often. And there is the challenge. The challenge is not to see these failures as failures of the infrastructure or failures of civil discourse but rather a failure of being able to direct ones attention down productive, peaceful tree-lined avenues rather than headlong into dark, dangerous poorly lit and dirty alleys. Twitter has both.
The bright tree lined avenues are places where ideas are discussed and people stroll side-by-side trying to find the fruitful solutions to outstanding problems. There are not accusations that “you” think this or concern that insults will begin to fly. You are both engaged in a quest and that involves one person walking down this side of the street and the other person on the other - in different places, at different positions, posing questions and attempting to find solutions.
As it can be with this whole free will debate. I have found the people of Twitter on this issue to be, typically, amazingly open minded (there are exceptions, of course) and we all lack any good theory about what is going on. Some of us have an intuition that free will simply cannot exist. Others say it must and can be both more simple and complex than other theories generally say. We explore these fruitful places along the avenue and there is rarely animus. We’re walking the same journey. Maybe together we can find a solution. A genuine explanatory theory.
I think this is why people, like Sam Harris who claims he has recently more or less left Twitter, and others like Dave Rubin who claim “Twitter isn’t real life” are missing something important here. I spend many hours in real life conversations each week speaking about these exact same issues. I find those conversations alongside those on Twitter to be important ways to cross pollinate this profusion of ideas. I fear that the “intellectual dark web” people might be going a little dark. Rejecting important ways to flesh out ideas and bounce around interesting notions while at the same time accusing others of being “inside intellectual silos”. I don’t know how the intellectual dark web can be both a voice for the free expression of ideas while at the same time acting as if one of the very places where good ideas are flourishing is some source of skepticism. If we judged all places in the public sphere by their worst visitors and most ridiculous ideas, we wouldn’t be left with many places to find solace. I say: just look for those bright avenues. They’re just as obvious, if you try, as the dark alleyways.
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Script to my video:
We don’t have a theory of consciousness or creativity. If we did, we could program these into a computer. “If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it” says David Deutsch.
Consciousness and creativity are mysterious. This doesn’t mean they are insoluble problems - they must be soluble because they’re just features of our mind. Anything we can do must be the result of physical processes and all physical processes are computable - David proved this mathematically in the same paper that laid the foundation for quantum computation.
This rules out any supernatural explanation for what our minds are doing or what we human beings are. Mysterious things are just problems. That’s all. Questions unanswered. Yet some people deny some problems are even problems. The philosopher Daniel Dennett denies consciousness is a problem. He says it’s an illusion. The philosopher Sam Harris denies free will is a problem. He says it’s an illusion.
In both cases I think they are mistaken and for the same reason. We humans are special creatures. But there is nothing supernatural about us, nothing magical. Yet there is something unique. Why is it people (alone among all animals) solve problems by creating explanatory theories? What is this strange thing that leads to thoughts, minds, solutions, philosophy, science, technology and civilization? What is it about people that allows for these qualitatively different capacities people have over any other system in the known cosmos?
Like a dog or fish we have a finite genome but unlike in a dog or fish something is in that genome that codes for something very special indeed. A code for a brain that is able to run a mind that is universal in a special way. This universal capacity is the capability to create explanatory knowledge. This is such an important fundamental discovery in philosophy by David Deutsch that its import cannot be overstated. It’s as important as it is unnoticed (as of 2018).
Why this fact is not informing and animating research programs and AGI institutes and university philosophy departments I do not know. It is as if the philosophical equivalent of the question “What is mass?” was answered and most physicists ignored it. David answered the question “What is a person?”.Few have noticed.
A person is an entity that can create explanatory knowledge and is universal in its capacity to do so. What universal here means is: there is no problem in principle a person is incapable of tackling. And the reason for this is the mind - the software running on the hardware that is the brain - is a universal computer…and then some.
It is a universal computer that is conscious of its own states, can direct its own future states and, importantly, whose output cannot be specified in advance. And that is key! We cannot specify the output of an general intelligence - artificial or otherwise - unlike for any other program we write. We people are general intelligences. We create new knowledge.
Subjectively we experience consciousness. But do other people? Well, we cannot access the conscious states of other people. We cannot experience their inner subjectivity. Yet how do we know they are conscious? Well what we do have access to other people’s creativity. We know other people are creative because we notice them solving their problems: inventing things, making decisions out there in the world. So we’ve an objective indication, in the form of their creativity, of their inner conscious states. The problems that interest them. The creativity of people we observe in the world is a unique thing people have that other animals do not share.
So while we “feel” consciousness in ourselves we “observe” creativity in others.
So I postulate: creativity (of the kind where people create explanations - create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “conscious”.
Free will is that aspect of consciousness where I am able to obtain a good sense of my preferences and act upon them. That is to say: choose. But to know what my preferences truly are I need to carefully deliberate - solve that problem - create that knowledge. Outwardly, eventually, someone will notice me make a decision. But inwardly only I know that I felt many different things before the decision: emotions like excitement, or confusion and the thrill at making a new insight. It was all me - or largely me - that contemplated this problem for hours on end. I chose this interesting solution rather than another. I was free to do otherwise. To not think about it at all in fact if I desired. If I had that conscious state and followed it. Paid attention to it. Or not.
Inwardly it was a conscious sensation of free will. But outwardly it was a choice made to create knowledge in that area. These things are all facets of the one same phenomenon. What it means to be a human and explain the world. What I do as a person is exercise a free choice in acting on the best explanation I have created. And no, I choose to end this video.