Sometimes I wonder if people who obsess over the “paradox of free will” are having some “universal human experience” that I am missing out on. It has never seemed intuitively paradoxical to me, and all of the arguments about it seem either obvious or totally alien. Learning more about agency has illuminated some of the structure of decision making for me, but hasn’t really effected this (apparently) fundamental inferential gap. Do some people really have this overwhelming gut feeling of free will that makes it repulsive to accept a lawful universe?
I used to, as a child. I did accept a lawful universe, but I thought my perception of free will was in tension with that, so that perception must be “an illusion”.
My mother kept trying to explain to me that there was no tension between these things, because it was correct that my mind made its own decisions rather than some outside force. I didn’t understand what she was saying though. I thought she was just redefining ‘free will’ from a claim that human brains effectively had a magical ability to spontaneously ignore the laws of physics to a boring tautological claim that human decisions are made by humans rather than something else.
I changed my mind on this as a teenager. I don’t quite remember how, it might have been the sequences or HPMOR again. I realised that my imagination had still been partially conceptualising the “laws of physics” as some sort of outside force, a set of strings pulling my atoms around, rather than as a predictive description of me and the universe. Saying “the laws of physics make my decisions, not me” made about as much sense as saying “my fingers didn’t move, my hand did.” That was what my mother had been trying to tell me.
I don’t think so as I had success explaining away the paradox with concept of “different levels of detail”—saying that free will is a very high-level concept and further observations reveal a lower-level view, calling upon analogy with algorithmic programming’s segment tree.
(Segment tree is a data structure that replaces an array, allowing to modify its values and compute a given function over all array elements efficiently. It is based on tree of nodes, each of those representing a certain subarray; each position is therefore handled by several—specifically, O(logn) nodes.)
This might be related to whether you see yourself as a part of the universe, or as an observer. If you are an observer, the objection is like “if I watch a movie, everything in the movie follows the script, but I am outside the movie, therefore outside the influence of the script”.
If you are religious, I guess your body is a part of the universe (obeys the laws of gravity etc.), but your soul is the impartial observer. Here the religion basically codifies the existing human intuitions.
It might also depend on how much you are aware of the effects of your environment on you. This is a learned skill; for example little kids do not realize that they are hungry… they just get kinda angry without knowing why. It requires some learning to realize “this feeling I have right now—it is hunger, and it will probably go away if I eat something”. And I guess the more knowledge of this kind you accumulate, the easier it is to see yourself as a part of the universe, rather than being outside of it and only moved by “inherently mysterious” forces.
Sometimes I wonder if people who obsess over the “paradox of free will” are having some “universal human experience” that I am missing out on. It has never seemed intuitively paradoxical to me, and all of the arguments about it seem either obvious or totally alien. Learning more about agency has illuminated some of the structure of decision making for me, but hasn’t really effected this (apparently) fundamental inferential gap. Do some people really have this overwhelming gut feeling of free will that makes it repulsive to accept a lawful universe?
I used to, as a child. I did accept a lawful universe, but I thought my perception of free will was in tension with that, so that perception must be “an illusion”.
My mother kept trying to explain to me that there was no tension between these things, because it was correct that my mind made its own decisions rather than some outside force. I didn’t understand what she was saying though. I thought she was just redefining ‘free will’ from a claim that human brains effectively had a magical ability to spontaneously ignore the laws of physics to a boring tautological claim that human decisions are made by humans rather than something else.
I changed my mind on this as a teenager. I don’t quite remember how, it might have been the sequences or HPMOR again. I realised that my imagination had still been partially conceptualising the “laws of physics” as some sort of outside force, a set of strings pulling my atoms around, rather than as a predictive description of me and the universe. Saying “the laws of physics make my decisions, not me” made about as much sense as saying “my fingers didn’t move, my hand did.” That was what my mother had been trying to tell me.
I don’t think so as I had success explaining away the paradox with concept of “different levels of detail”—saying that free will is a very high-level concept and further observations reveal a lower-level view, calling upon analogy with algorithmic programming’s segment tree.
(Segment tree is a data structure that replaces an array, allowing to modify its values and compute a given function over all array elements efficiently. It is based on tree of nodes, each of those representing a certain subarray; each position is therefore handled by several—specifically, O(logn) nodes.)
This might be related to whether you see yourself as a part of the universe, or as an observer. If you are an observer, the objection is like “if I watch a movie, everything in the movie follows the script, but I am outside the movie, therefore outside the influence of the script”.
If you are religious, I guess your body is a part of the universe (obeys the laws of gravity etc.), but your soul is the impartial observer. Here the religion basically codifies the existing human intuitions.
It might also depend on how much you are aware of the effects of your environment on you. This is a learned skill; for example little kids do not realize that they are hungry… they just get kinda angry without knowing why. It requires some learning to realize “this feeling I have right now—it is hunger, and it will probably go away if I eat something”. And I guess the more knowledge of this kind you accumulate, the easier it is to see yourself as a part of the universe, rather than being outside of it and only moved by “inherently mysterious” forces.