Am I there?
Sometimes in your life you feel the need to ponder the hard questions. Today's, and really the last few months' question has been "Do we have free will?" And the answer is currently "I don't know, but I don't think so". This is my attempt to put some of thoughts on this into words in the hope that it will clear the clutter in my brain a bit.
The topic was really triggered by binge-watching the Alex Garland show DEVS.
DEVS is amazing, as is most of Garland's work. I won't go deep into the plot here, other than to say that Nick Offerman builds Laplace's demon with a quantum super computer and uses it to see the future (and the past). For those who don't know: Laplace's demon is the idea that if you (the demon) know the location and momentum of every atom in a deterministic universe you can use the laws of nature to calculate every future and past state of said universe. As a thought experiment this idea is really powerful. Think of this:
If you see the DEVS machine predict you accidentally walking in front of a bus 1 minute from now, would you be able to avoid doing it?
Intuitively it feels like, "of course I could change my behavior based on something I see!" suggesting to me that either:
- The machine was wrong because the universe is not deterministic, or
- You could never see the output of this machine because it could only exist outside of the universe it is predicting.
Alex Garland went with the answer:
- Only in very special cases can someone do something other than what the machine predicts and everyone else that watches the predictions basically turns into a zombie with no free will.
While I am clearly not completely satisfied with this answer from a philosophical standpoint, I do think it works well in a television show.
To be honest though, there is a third answer that actually feels really intuitive to me, although I am having a hard time justifying it scientifically. And that is:
- The universe is completely causally deterministic for everything except sufficiently conscious beings, i.e. us.
I would list this under the philosophical idea of a Libertarian Free Will.
Obviously this raises a lot of new questions, like:
- When are you sufficiently conscious?
- Does it come with age?
- Can you have partial free will?
- How are consciousness and free will really connected?
- Is this a matter of how we define free will?
And a ton of other questions that I have been pondering but won't list here for brevity sake. For those who are not into the whole brevity thing I might write an even longer post in the future.
We can also just dismiss the intuition of a libertarian free will and call it an illusion. Rationally I'm tempted to do this, but at the same time, I'm not convinced it is correct. My main objection against libertarian free will is really:
How can a brain that consists of molecules inside a universe that is ruled by natural laws somehow be free from these laws to choose one alternative future over another?
I have the feeling, maybe it's more a suspicion, that the answer to this question can be found by deeply studying complex systems, which I think involves reverse-engineering our consciousness. So that is what I will try to do, intensively study complex systems and intelligence research.
Here are some other topics related to the Free Will question that I would love to address in later posts:
- Douglas Hofstadter's Strange Loops and Symballs
- Compatibilism
- Panpsychism
- Moral culpability
- Meaning and analogy
- Joscha Bach: "Consciousness emerges over dimensions of disagreement with the universe"
- Consciousness vs Free Will vs Intelligence
- Does learning to make decisions make you more free?
- Am I not me anymore when I have a behavior-changing brain tumor?
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