You are kinda using words in a wonky way. I pattern matched to a plausible set of alternate meanings you might be using. While it doens’t have formal connection to what you wrote I am still pursuing that avenue as I think that will more closely match the psychological process behind them better.
When you have that kind of division you have probably made random processes to happen in multitude of ways but each spesific way specified. In contrast if you have system that is underspesified it might behave in any way but not because of some positive statement that allows it to act that way but because there is no negative statement that says it can’t act in that way.
That is you arrive into the division of things into defined system and undefined systems where things that are defined if they are very tracktable they are deterministic. In this way “random” processes are the most general case. You just list all positive things that can happen instead of what can happen. A probabilistic turing machine is defined as the set of allowed state transitions from one state to another. A probabilistic turing machine accepts if there is a transition from the start state to the end state. That is one can pick whatever branch one likes when multiple options exist. For a deterministic turing machine the next state of the machine needs to be a unambigious funciton of the previous state ie the amount of options is always exactly 1. For a given random turing machine one can construct a brute force deterministic turing machine that just tries the paths in order,. This kind of machine will run much longer than the equivalent stochastic step process.
Now what you might not realise is that “free-will” processes don’t correspond to the defined stochastic processes. If you had a statement like “Person A will take the moral high road and save person B in this situation with 90% probability” that would still be as much “autonomy violating” as a “with 100%” kind of thing.
For pure “free-will” process you will have to know little enough that you can’t make even the probability kind of statements. Now I will switch to my own cognitive perpective. Upon pondering this I tried to make it as simple as I could get it. I ended up thinknig about “What kind of things would need to be different about my taste of icecream being a free choice or not?”. Here I have already applied a lot of simplyfying techniques. I take a question that doesn’t have any additional complications. I doesn’t have a great ethical weight nor does it concern an area of decision making that is somehow poorly known. Now granted it’s not the kind of question that makes one wonder about free will but it ought to be one that if free will is handled it should be able to answer this question.
Now for the question to arise whether or not the choice was free we need to spesify what it woudl mean for it not to be free. I settled that if somebody would write into a paper “chocolate” and then independently from the paper I would buy chocolate ice cream that would be a violation of the determination. You could also imagine that some magician would far away demonstrate how he “makes me buy cholocate icescream” by waving a magic wand first at the paper and then at me.
Now someone coudl argue that the magician would not be a valid case of free will autonomy breaking. After all magic tricks dont’ break the rules of physics and arguably they don’t violate any “soul autonomy” rules either. While the magician would like to present that his paper and wand somehow compel me this is just ineffective fluff that doesn’t have any effect on the proceedings. In reality I don’t feel “opressed” by the wand or anything and I can actually be fully ignorant about its existence while buying the icescream.
In reality it’s actually easy to make the magic trick if the magician first asks me what icescream I like. Then it’s actually me compelling the wand instead of the wand compelling me (while it’s off course presented the other way around). Now does the magician need to know why I like chocolate to pull off the trick? Not really.
Now when we go out and do experiements we get data and we can compress that data into formulas. That is kind of like keeping watch over the icecream booth and noting down which icecreams I buy. What we get as a result are natural laws. We can apply those natural laws to get predictions of what will happen in future situations. In order for this to work induction needs to be valid, the “character”, the “nature” of the world should not have switched between data collection and predicted event. This stated (somewhat) formally in the axiom of regularity.
It’s important to note that the laws are descriptive and not normative. If I tell the magician that I like chocolate icecream it doesn’t render him the power to compel me to buy chocolate. And even if it did it would only grant him exactly the same thing that I would have bought anyways so it can’t actually compel me to do anything against my will. Now if I tell the magician that I like chocolate but he somehow understand it to be strawberry the trick will just utterly fail. In the same way when we check whether a law of nature is accurate whether it actually corresponds to the way things actually work. We can also say that “the theory of icecream picking” will be right exactly only when it describes me. Now there might be some cases that are harder to get right. Maybe I will not buy chocolate if I already bought ice cream that day. Maybe days where there is football match I want to have a more sweet flavour to have energy to make jokes about handegg players. A very simple magician migth just prelook one icescream booth visit and take that as my “one true flavour of choice”. If the trick is performed on a football match day a simple magician might have a embarassing failure.
Now some peoples arguemtns could be rephares that its fundamentally not be possible to be a perfect magician, that is the trick is doomed to fail. But this would require that each flavour of icecream to be wrong. That is “What icecream he will buy?” to not have any right answers. But I can buy icecream with the questionhaving right answers (and one could argue that it needs to have a right answer). now off course there is the weaker notion that if the magician didn’t ask for my taste in flavours and did 0 booth supervision trips they will be dependent on their luck to get it right. But even then they can get it rigth by luck (meaning there was a right answer to hit even if it could not be hit reliably)! For example for a television show you could do the trick a bunch of times and only show the ones that work. But how would a knowable will be somehow less free? If I am a simple man and just always buy chocolate does it make my decision making somehow slave to someone else?
What the mental imaginery of the “free will” question almost always is that highly theorethical predictions seem to “dictate” how things are gonig to work out. But this is taking the laws to be normative like laws of man when they really are noticed regularities and thus descriptive. Their only normative component comes from what one ought to believe. If we have “asked a natural phenomenon what their will is” then believing otherwise would leave you with a erroneuos belief on what their “character” is. But this somehow makes some people think that natural phenomena refer to the rules like a normative rulebook. Like they could try do something different and then “be told that they are bad and get told to get back in line”. In reality beliefs are the ones that break and reality doesn’t distort itself to match beliefs. If something counter to a natural law happens it wasn’t a natural law and the “true natural law” was more complicated (ie you need to care whether it’s football day or not). Events have priority in that they are accepted before the natural laws are accepted. Earth didn’t start spinning around the sun when heliocentrism started while the human psychological experience might have been something akin to that.
When you think about it having a undefined will isn’t very usefull or needed. Nobody campaigns for the “right to have undefined icecream preferences”. People could care is sombody forced them to pick some particular icecream flavlour or if some icecream falvour wasn’t available. And such a undefined will wouldn’t not be very potent in creating anything for you. But “unrestricted will” is a nice thing to have. Unfortunately some have taken being defined to be a kind of restriction. It would not be that disasterous to live with a “unrestricted selfdetermined will”. Unfortunately in the terminology this has been become called “unfree will”. When you think about it, not allowing to define your will is a pretty big restriction.
Now what you might not realise is that “free-will” processes don’t correspond to the defined stochastic processes. If you had a statement like “Person A will take the moral high road and save person B in this situation with 90% probability” that would still be as much “autonomy violating” as a “with 100%” kind of thing.
You are kinda using words in a wonky way. I pattern matched to a plausible set of alternate meanings you might be using. While it doens’t have formal connection to what you wrote I am still pursuing that avenue as I think that will more closely match the psychological process behind them better.
When you have that kind of division you have probably made random processes to happen in multitude of ways but each spesific way specified. In contrast if you have system that is underspesified it might behave in any way but not because of some positive statement that allows it to act that way but because there is no negative statement that says it can’t act in that way.
That is you arrive into the division of things into defined system and undefined systems where things that are defined if they are very tracktable they are deterministic. In this way “random” processes are the most general case. You just list all positive things that can happen instead of what can happen. A probabilistic turing machine is defined as the set of allowed state transitions from one state to another. A probabilistic turing machine accepts if there is a transition from the start state to the end state. That is one can pick whatever branch one likes when multiple options exist. For a deterministic turing machine the next state of the machine needs to be a unambigious funciton of the previous state ie the amount of options is always exactly 1. For a given random turing machine one can construct a brute force deterministic turing machine that just tries the paths in order,. This kind of machine will run much longer than the equivalent stochastic step process.
Now what you might not realise is that “free-will” processes don’t correspond to the defined stochastic processes. If you had a statement like “Person A will take the moral high road and save person B in this situation with 90% probability” that would still be as much “autonomy violating” as a “with 100%” kind of thing.
For pure “free-will” process you will have to know little enough that you can’t make even the probability kind of statements. Now I will switch to my own cognitive perpective. Upon pondering this I tried to make it as simple as I could get it. I ended up thinknig about “What kind of things would need to be different about my taste of icecream being a free choice or not?”. Here I have already applied a lot of simplyfying techniques. I take a question that doesn’t have any additional complications. I doesn’t have a great ethical weight nor does it concern an area of decision making that is somehow poorly known. Now granted it’s not the kind of question that makes one wonder about free will but it ought to be one that if free will is handled it should be able to answer this question.
Now for the question to arise whether or not the choice was free we need to spesify what it woudl mean for it not to be free. I settled that if somebody would write into a paper “chocolate” and then independently from the paper I would buy chocolate ice cream that would be a violation of the determination. You could also imagine that some magician would far away demonstrate how he “makes me buy cholocate icescream” by waving a magic wand first at the paper and then at me.
Now someone coudl argue that the magician would not be a valid case of free will autonomy breaking. After all magic tricks dont’ break the rules of physics and arguably they don’t violate any “soul autonomy” rules either. While the magician would like to present that his paper and wand somehow compel me this is just ineffective fluff that doesn’t have any effect on the proceedings. In reality I don’t feel “opressed” by the wand or anything and I can actually be fully ignorant about its existence while buying the icescream.
In reality it’s actually easy to make the magic trick if the magician first asks me what icescream I like. Then it’s actually me compelling the wand instead of the wand compelling me (while it’s off course presented the other way around). Now does the magician need to know why I like chocolate to pull off the trick? Not really.
Now when we go out and do experiements we get data and we can compress that data into formulas. That is kind of like keeping watch over the icecream booth and noting down which icecreams I buy. What we get as a result are natural laws. We can apply those natural laws to get predictions of what will happen in future situations. In order for this to work induction needs to be valid, the “character”, the “nature” of the world should not have switched between data collection and predicted event. This stated (somewhat) formally in the axiom of regularity.
It’s important to note that the laws are descriptive and not normative. If I tell the magician that I like chocolate icecream it doesn’t render him the power to compel me to buy chocolate. And even if it did it would only grant him exactly the same thing that I would have bought anyways so it can’t actually compel me to do anything against my will. Now if I tell the magician that I like chocolate but he somehow understand it to be strawberry the trick will just utterly fail. In the same way when we check whether a law of nature is accurate whether it actually corresponds to the way things actually work. We can also say that “the theory of icecream picking” will be right exactly only when it describes me. Now there might be some cases that are harder to get right. Maybe I will not buy chocolate if I already bought ice cream that day. Maybe days where there is football match I want to have a more sweet flavour to have energy to make jokes about handegg players. A very simple magician migth just prelook one icescream booth visit and take that as my “one true flavour of choice”. If the trick is performed on a football match day a simple magician might have a embarassing failure.
Now some peoples arguemtns could be rephares that its fundamentally not be possible to be a perfect magician, that is the trick is doomed to fail. But this would require that each flavour of icecream to be wrong. That is “What icecream he will buy?” to not have any right answers. But I can buy icecream with the questionhaving right answers (and one could argue that it needs to have a right answer). now off course there is the weaker notion that if the magician didn’t ask for my taste in flavours and did 0 booth supervision trips they will be dependent on their luck to get it right. But even then they can get it rigth by luck (meaning there was a right answer to hit even if it could not be hit reliably)! For example for a television show you could do the trick a bunch of times and only show the ones that work. But how would a knowable will be somehow less free? If I am a simple man and just always buy chocolate does it make my decision making somehow slave to someone else?
What the mental imaginery of the “free will” question almost always is that highly theorethical predictions seem to “dictate” how things are gonig to work out. But this is taking the laws to be normative like laws of man when they really are noticed regularities and thus descriptive. Their only normative component comes from what one ought to believe. If we have “asked a natural phenomenon what their will is” then believing otherwise would leave you with a erroneuos belief on what their “character” is. But this somehow makes some people think that natural phenomena refer to the rules like a normative rulebook. Like they could try do something different and then “be told that they are bad and get told to get back in line”. In reality beliefs are the ones that break and reality doesn’t distort itself to match beliefs. If something counter to a natural law happens it wasn’t a natural law and the “true natural law” was more complicated (ie you need to care whether it’s football day or not). Events have priority in that they are accepted before the natural laws are accepted. Earth didn’t start spinning around the sun when heliocentrism started while the human psychological experience might have been something akin to that.
When you think about it having a undefined will isn’t very usefull or needed. Nobody campaigns for the “right to have undefined icecream preferences”. People could care is sombody forced them to pick some particular icecream flavlour or if some icecream falvour wasn’t available. And such a undefined will wouldn’t not be very potent in creating anything for you. But “unrestricted will” is a nice thing to have. Unfortunately some have taken being defined to be a kind of restriction. It would not be that disasterous to live with a “unrestricted selfdetermined will”. Unfortunately in the terminology this has been become called “unfree will”. When you think about it, not allowing to define your will is a pretty big restriction.
Who told you that?
I do not have any other authority to refer to than myself. Feel free to argue to the contrary if the thought doesn’t seem obvious.