Free Will: Randomness

[packbat]

[Poll #1058418]

(No, "something"-made-it-happen ain't an option. I already said that no thing made it happen.)

Edit: Note that the scenario described involves causal indeterminism, not predictive indeterminism.

I raise this hypothetical for a simple reason: one of my fellows in my PHIL282 class just told me that he believes it would not be random. And that, for me, finally makes free-will libertarianism make sense.

See, in class, we've basically just started talking about the second half of what these individuals must prove. For the record, people holding this position state two major claims: that determinism, were it true, would imply that no free will exists; and that indeterminism, which is true, allows free will to exist.

In fact, the naive example of the libertarian position (which does not make it false, only naive) is simply that free will looks like the hypothetical in the poll.

Many people, of course, balk at this - in fact, there's a name for the noises they make when they do: the Luck or Arbitrariness Objection. This counterargument, in fact, is barely more than pointing at the scenario and saying, "that's not what a free choice looks like". Further, a lot of philosophers - e.g. Daniel Dennett (whose stance I prefer), Robert Kane (whose textbook is assigned for this class), the professor - are inclined to accept the force of this objection. Some of them - Kane - choose to argue around it. But until I talked to this guy from my class, I had no gut knowledge that a person could simply reject it.

"Yeah, that is what free will looks like," these people say. "If it were caused by anything - if anything made it so the other one didn't happen - it wouldn't be free," these people say. And however you cut it, that's it - there's nothing left to say.

Comments

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I picked "It was random" because as a former theoretical chemist I am convinced of the existence of true chance within this universe, and dubious about ascribing special powers to actors (which is what your "something"/"someone" distinction does). But that's not really what I think; I would have preferred to respond "It could have been true chance, or it could have been caused by a process which is not predictable at the abstraction level of physics but potentially predictable at some other level, e.g. psychological." Do you see the distinction there between "true chance" and "not predictable at X level of analysis"? I'm not sure I can explain it any better.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I believe I do - you're implying something nonreductionistic, right? I'm pretty sure "it was random" is still the right answer for you.

If I'm reading your example rightly, then you are proposing that the laws of the universe aren't "fundamental" in the way of the current consensus in physics. Instead, they act on a series (or continuum) of levels, from "electrons move around like this" to "people deliberate choices like this" (and possibly beyond). As a result, physicists watching electrons in a brain will see oddities in their results that they will never be able to explain by their methods because the higher-order laws of psychology (and whatever else) are affecting the flows - in order to get a true prediction, they need to take into account these unpredictable-at-the-electron-level effects.

(Rereading, I see that I'm making a few assumptions about the details here - the point I want to convey is my comprehension of is the general 'laws of physics subject to laws of psychology' bit.)

The thing is, though, that all the levels of universal-law-action are included in the past, present, and laws of a universe of that kind. In the example, I don't say that Laplace's demon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon) thinks it could go either way in this scenario - it really could go either way, even knowing the psychological history of every being in the universe and every other factor the laws of the universe know. And, as far as I can tell, what you're saying is just that psychological laws like you suggest would bollix the work of a reductionist, not refute causality.

So, it's not just something that the narrating predictor doesn't know. The example really is about the thing I think you call "true chance".

[zwol.livejournal.com]

...physicists watching electrons in a brain will see oddities in their results that they will never be able to explain by their methods because the higher-order laws of psychology (and whatever else) are affecting the flows - in order to get a true prediction, they need to take into account these unpredictable-at-the-electron-level effects.

That's not what I meant, though I can see how you got that from what I said. Let me try again with more detail. I want to deny predictive, but not causal, reductionism; I want to draw a distinction between being able to predict what will happen and what would happen if.

Suppose you grant arguendo that the behavior of actors is totally determined by the movement of fundamental particles within their bodies. I think this has a better than even chance of being true but I don't think we have conclusive evidence either way. Furthermore, we assume there is no true chance in the universe (i.e. that at the level of fundamental particles the laws of interaction are deterministic). I think this has been conclusively disproven, but we need it for the thought experiment.

And still further, we assume that it is possible for an entity to exist which has perfect knowledge of the laws of interaction of fundamental particles, perfect knowledge of fundamental particle state at some point in time, and a super-Turing machine with the capabilities required to simulate the entire universe without any risk of rounding error, faster than the actual universe operates. That entity is Laplace's demon, and it can say with perfect accuracy what will happen. However, this does not give it the ability to say what would happen if, unless the premise of the conditional is another snapshot of the universe.

For example, suppose that the demon is installed at Delphi and Croesus shows up and asks what will happen if he attacks the Persians. The demon runs its simulation and discovers that Croesus will not attack the Persians. It is now hosed, because it does not know what to change in its particle-level simulation so that the simulated Croesus makes a different decision.

Now let's say that instead we install Benedict of Amber at Delphi and Croesus asks him the same question. Benedict has no way of being certain what Croesus will eventually do. However, he does have optimal knowledge of military strategy and tactics, and that means he will be able to say what will happen if Croesus attacks the Persians with the army he has right now — and precisely what Croesus should do to improve his odds, assuming that the army he has won't be sufficient. His understanding is on the correct level to address the hypothetical.

To drag it back around to the free will thing: The situation you described is a logical impossibility in a universe for which Laplace's demon can exist. Such a universe has one and only one future. And I would say that there is no free will in that universe. However — and I think this is where I part ways with the free-will libertarians — the nonexistence of true chance and the behavior of actors being totally determined by fundamental particle interactions are not sufficient conditions for the existence of Laplace's demon. You also need to be able to build that super-Turing machine and seed it with a perfect simulation program and perfect knowledge of the universal state at time zero. And if you can't do it, you can't predict what will happen, the universe might have more than one future, and free will is back.

Now, what I was trying to get at when I started talking about psychological laws is that you might be able to be Benedict of Amber in a universe in which you can't be Laplace's demon. You might be able to make perfect predictions about some subset of possible events by virtue of knowing contingent laws about that subset. These laws are not of universal applicability and so they don't threaten free will; but in practical terms they're much more useful, because they let you answer would happen if questions.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

...I think I almost see what you mean. In your example, despite determinism, there are multiple futures in the free will entailing sense, and this is because no being can work out with true certainty what happens before it happens. Am I close?

In the poll hypothetical, though, there distinction is irrelevant, since the event was causally undetermined.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

In your example, despite determinism, there are multiple futures in the free will entailing sense, and this is because no being can work out with true certainty what happens before it happens. Am I close?

Yes, that's what's going on in my example. I was also trying to say some other things with it, but they're tangential.

In the poll hypothetical, though, the distinction is irrelevant, since the event was causally undetermined.

I'm now realizing I misunderstood the example all along. If I had understood it properly, I would still be saying it's a false dichotomy, but for rather different reasons. I see three possibilities, none of which excludes any of the others, and any of which is sufficient to explain the phenomena.

First, we could have true chance: the laws of the universe include an element that is purely probabilistic. For instance, the only difference between future A and future B might be that in A, one atom of carbon 14 decayed at some time T, and in B, it didn't.

Second, we could have an entity in the universe whose behavior is undetermined by universal law but not random. This encompasses your someone did it; perhaps animal (including human) behavior can be demonstrated to depend on homununculus particles, which are indivisible, present in all brains and interacting electrically with neurons, and there is no way of predicting their behavior with certainty but it is clearly not random. (The His Dark Materials setting seems to work like this.) It doesn't have to be about life, though; suppose that cosmic rays turned out to be caused by spontaneous particle creation, and that the distribution of inbound rays was nonrandom, but we were completely unable to discover a cause for it.

Finally, some component of the universe could be experiencing a force whose origin is external to the universe. A miracle, if you like. I suppose the cosmic ray example could just as easily be about that case.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Excluding the outside-influences example (I neglected to specify that the universe was closed to outside causes), I'm not sure I understand how your proposed "homunuculus particles" could be both unpredictable re. the laws of the universe and nonrandom.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Random is a particular sort of nondeterminism; it's actually rather predictable. You can write down the probability distribution function and controlling parameters for the radioactive decay of carbon 14, and you can't say exactly which atoms in a lump of the stuff will have decayed in 5730 years, but you know that half of it will be gone, sure enough to set your calendar by. Same goes for any quantum process; you don't know which way the wave function will collapse, but you can write down all the possible outcomes and say exactly how likely each of them is.

The homununculus particles, though; the hypothetical there is that they can somehow be detected in the brain, and if you set up a controlled experiment where people have to make nearly the same decision over and over, they are observed to move at key points in the ERP decision-making sequence, and the motion is correlated with the actual decision made. (ERP = Evoked Response Potential = EEG studies of brain waves in response to stimuli.) So that it seems like the component of human behavior that is not explained by bog standard stimulus-response can be explained by the response of these particles to the stimuli. There's no well-defined probability density function for what they do, so they aren't random, but it's also clear that they don't always do the same thing in response to the same micro-environment. (Maybe someone's managed to pull one out of a rat brain and put it in a quantum trap and poke at it with photons and electric fields.)

Basically I'm trying to take your "someone did it" and put it on a more concrete footing.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

All right. I don't buy it - it seems a bit like an appeal to mystery - but I know a number of people hold theories like that of will.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is the way the real world works either, but we're so far into hypothetical land already, all that matters is that it's a logical possibility.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Also, if we had observations like that in the real world, I guarantee you people would be trying like mad to come up with a theory of the particles' behavior that made them fit into either the "deterministic" or "random (quantum sense)" boxes.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Oh, and ignore that 'universal' bit in there. I'm willing to include universes with varying natural laws in the hypothetical, too.

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

I think I understand zwol's argument; it's similar to one I was going to make. I'm just gonna approach it from a different angle.

As a humanist, a certain faith in free will is necessary. As a hobbyist-scientist, I understand that the more we know about the universe, the fewer accidents and coincidences there are. Reconciling these two has been a challenge.

At the moment, the notion of free will rests upon the idea that it's impossible for us to know everything, to perfectly predict what will happen next. We can't, for example, predict the weather patterns in Boston two years from now, because we're missing too much information, both in the way weather patterns work now, and in the way they've worked throughout history. How, then, could we possibly understand the combination of events throughout a person's life that contributes to the decisions they make? You would have to have a total knowledge of that person -- their history, their genetics, the influences of their environment. At the moment, science says that's impossible. So, free will?

But, what if it were possible? What if you could look at someone, and know them better than they knew themselves, to the point that you could predict every decision that they were about to make before they made it?

Well, just because you're able to predict their decision, doesn't mean that they aren't making one. It's still free will; that person still has the ability to make a decision, for themselves. That decision will be based and influenced on everything about that person leading up to that moment, but it's still a decision.

I think that's partly the nature of consciousness, too. A person can be aware of the things that influence their decisions, they can be aware of the fact that they are making a decision, and they can choose to change their decision. Maybe you could predict that, too, but they're still making that decision themselves.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much how I think about free will. It means not being ultimately responsible for your actions, but I can live with that.

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

(Incidentally, after re-reading zwol's posts, my argument was utterly different. My bad.)

It means not being ultimately responsible for your actions, but I can live with that.

I don't agree with that.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

...actually, I'm not sure of it either. I guess I'm thinking about manipulation situations - e.g. when someone was raised in such a way that it is impossible for them to have any desires other than those chosen for them.

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm cooler with that. I think that ultimately every person still has that decision that they can make, and a person can still choose to do good, or do bad. I might predict their choice based on their circumstances, but it's still a choice.

I'm also willing to accept a lot of mitigating circumstances surrounding a choice.

You killed a person. That's bad.
That person was about to kill my daughter.
Well, OK, then.

Or,

You're addicted to drugs.
I was born into it before I knew any better. I can't just stop.
Well, OK. But you have to try.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Right, that's it. I can believe that this killer and that addict are less blameworthy for the actions - that the actions are less likely to indicate properties of their characters going forward - because they are performing them under such extreme circumstances. It's like when a teacher gives an exam with so much material the average grade is a 16%: even someone with a comprehensive grasp of the material will not do 'well' by absolute standards.