| > A construct that can react in only one way to any given set of inputs (including its internal state, etc.) intuitively doesn't have 'free will'. Then intuition is wrong, as is often the case. Either the decision is random, or it is mine, or it is somebody or something else's. There can be combinations of those factors, and of course that is actually the usual case. In fact arguably in practice it's always the case. > What you need to really satisfy the intuitive concept of 'free will' is some analytical agency, external to our physical reality, which affects the outcome in some purposeful way. So, basically, a 'soul'. But any analytical agency is going to encapsulate state. Moving that outside our physical bodies is just kicking the can down the metaphysical road but doesn't actually solve anything. If we want to invoke pure randomness, there's always Quantum Mechanics. In fact there's a post on the intersection of quantum mechanics and biology on the front page right now [0]. But of course random input doesn't seem very 'free' either. My point is that 'free will' in the abstract isn't an agency. To have agency there must be an agent and agents have state. When we are talking about free will, we should be talking about the free will of the agent. To the extent that the agent made the decision without undue external influence then they have free will. Can we ever be free of ourselves? Edit: byt +1, good post and I definitely concur with your last point. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12314600 |
Think about it. Isn't there something curious about this (probably innate) way of representing actions that were initiated inside our brains?
There are more examples like these, e.g. in split-brain patients where the speaking side simply rationalizes whatever the non-speaking side does. All of that points toward the same idea: Our feeling of being an entity that can choose in each moment what to do next misrepresents what actually happens inside our brains. Under the hood, every thought and every movement can be tracked back to either noise or to a recurrent control program that in turn was shaped by a reward maximizing mechanism and by learned statistics of real-world dynamics. On top of that there is an episodic self-representation which basically tells a story about itself and which has a bias to represent autonomously moving objects such as the structure it is part of, by a free, self-initiated intentionality. That story it tells itself about itself can of course affect future actions, but again the way it does is fully contingent on the laws of nature, on genetics, on the individual life experience etc.
If someone stopped caring about their life after reading this because they are not in control of their thoughts and movements anyway, then even that is fully contingent on the experience of reading whatever I am writing right now and society might decide to contain said subject for everyone's safety (i.e. to ensure their continued flow of reward signals). This exposes the role of this innate feeling of free agency as a mechanism of behavioral control. We need this representation to be efficient at attributing certain outcomes to certain individuals so that we can correct their behavior.
But we don't need to give up on anything knowing this. We still can do blame attribution. Actually we can probably gain something by improving the representation of ourselves and agents in general: Everybody is deeply shaped by their individual experiences and often it is actually quite insightful to go on 'auto-pilot' and ignore our representational urge to be our own initiator for a while and just see what the recurrent circuitry in ours brain can come up with.