I tend to see Knightian unpredictability as a necessary condition for free will
But it’s not. (In the link, I use fiction to defang the bugbear and break the intuition pumps associating prediction and unfreedom.) ETA: Aaronson writes
even if Alice can’t tell Bob what he’s going to do, it’s easy enough for her to demonstrate to him afterwards that she knew.
But that’s not a problem for Bob’s freedom or free will, even if Bob finds it annoying. That’s the point of my story.
“Knightian freedom” is a misnomer, in something like the way “a wine margarita” is. Except that the latter at least contains alcohol, something one usually wants from a margarita. Sometimes it’s good to be predictable (coordinating with friends); sometimes it’s bad (facing enemies). But at no time is it crucial to freedom. Prediction isn’t control.
None of this is to deny the potential interest of Aaronson’s arguments regarding the feasibility of brain scanning, etc. But calling this Knightian unpredictability “free will” just confuses both issues.
“But calling this Knightian unpredictability ‘free will’ just confuses both issues.”
torekp, a quick clarification: I never DO identify Knightian unpredictability with “free will” in the essay. On the contrary, precisely because “free will” has too many overloaded meanings, I make a point of separating out what I’m talking about, and of referring to it as “freedom,” “Knightian freedom,” or “Knightian unpredictability,” but never free will.
On the other hand, I also offer arguments for why I think unpredictability IS at least indirectly relevant to what most people want to know about when they discuss “free will”—in much the same way that intelligent behavior (e.g., passing the Turing Test) is relevant to what people want to know about when they discuss consciousness. It’s not that I’m unaware of the arguments that there’s no connection whatsoever between the two; it’s just that I disagree with them!
Sorry about misrepresenting you. I should have said “associating it with free will” instead of “calling it free will”. I do think the association is a mistake. Admittedly it fits with a long tradition, in theology especially, of seeing freedom of action as being mutually exclusive with causal determination. It’s just that the tradition is a mistake. Probably a motivated one (it conveniently gets a deity off the hook for creating and raising such badly behaved “children”).
Well, all I can say is that “getting a deity off the hook” couldn’t possibly be further from my motives! :-) For the record, I see no evidence for a deity anything like that of conventional religions, and I see enormous evidence that such a deity would have to be pretty morally monstrous if it did exist. (I like the Yiddish proverb: “If God lived on earth, people would break His windows.”) I’m guessing this isn’t a hard sell here on LW.
Furthermore, for me the theodicy problem isn’t even really connected to free will. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, even if there is indeterminist free will, you would still hope that a loving deity would install some “safety bumpers,” so that people could choose to do somewhat bad things (like stealing hubcaps), but would be prevented from doing really, really bad ones (like mass-murdering children).
One last clarification: the whole point of my perspective is that I don’t have to care about so-called “causal determination”—either the theistic kind or the scientific kind—until and unless it gets cashed out into actual predictions! (See Sec. 2.6.)
It’s worse than I thought. Aaronson really does want to address the free will debate in philosophy—and utterly botches the job.
Aaronson speaks for some of his interlocutors (who are very smart—i.e. they say what I would say ;) ):
Suppose that only “ordinary” quantum randomness and classical chaos turned out to be involved: how on earth could that matter, outside the narrow confines of free-will debates? Is the variety of free will that apparently interests you—one based on the physical unpredictability of our choices—really a variety “worth wanting,” in Daniel Dennett’s famous phrase [27]?
and answers:
As a first remark, if there’s anything in this debate that all sides can agree on, hopefully they can agree that the truth (whatever it is) doesn’t care what we want, consider “worth wanting,” or think is necessary or sufficient to make our lives meaningful!
Uh, so: the truth about the modal number of hairs on a human foot, for example, doesn’t care what we want. But, if I were to claim that (a good portion of) a famous philosophical debate amounted to the question of how many hairs are on our feet, you could reject the claim immediately. And you could cite the fact that nobody gives a damn about that as a sufficient reason to reject the substitution of the new question for the old. Sure, in this toy example, you could cite many other reasons too. But with philosophical (using the next word super broadly) definitions, sometimes the most obvious flaw is that nobody gives a damn about the definiens, while lots care passionately about the concept supposedly defined. Dennett rightly nails much philosophizing about free will, on precisely this point.
Interlocutors:
But if the event is undetermined, it isn’t “free” either: it’s merely arbitrary, capricious, and random.
Aaronson:
An event can be “arbitrary,” in the sense of being undetermined by previous events, without being random in the narrower technical sense of being generated by some known or knowable probabilistic process.
But this doesn’t address the point, unless Knightian-uncertain “actions” somehow fall more under the control of the agent than do probabilistic processes. The truth is the opposite. I have the most control over actions that flow deterministically from my beliefs and desires. I have almost as much, if it is highly probable that my act will be the one that the beliefs and desires indicate is best. And I have none, if it is completely uncertain. For example, if I am pondering whether to eat a berry and then realize that this type of berry is fatally poisonous, this realization should ideally be decisive, with certainty. But I’ll settle for 99.99...% probability that I don’t eat it. If it is wide-open uncertain whether I will eat it—arbitrary in a deep way—that does not help my sense of control and agency. To put it mildly!
Finally, Aaronson has a close brush with the truth when he rejects the following premise of the Consequence Argument (section 2.9):
(ii) The state of the universe 100 million years ago is clearly outside our ability to alter.
Aaronson replies:
there might be many possible settings of the past microfacts—the polarizations of individual photons, etc. [...] our choices today might play a role in selecting one past from a giant ensemble of macroscopically-identical but microscopically-different pasts.
Only one microscopic past is consistent with our choice today. But the same can be said of the whole past on a classically-determinist scientific picture. As Carl Hoefer says in the Stanford Encyclopedia
they can be viewed as bi-directionally deterministic. That is, a specification of the state of the world at a time t, along with the laws, determines not only how things go after t, but also how things go before t. Philosophers, while not exactly unaware of this symmetry, tend to ignore it when thinking of the bearing of determinism on the free will issue.
And that’s a mistake, as Hoefer indicates in his conclusion. The physics of deterministic theories (and also, I would add, any probabilistic quantum theory that gives sufficient probabilistic weight to our beliefs, desires, and reasoning in producing action) supports strong compatibilism, not Aaronson’s weak version.
I agree with you on unpredictability not being important for agency, but I don’t understand the last third of this comment. What is the point that you are trying to make about bi-directional determinism? Specifically, could you restate the mistake you think Aaronson is making in the “our choices today might play a role” quote?
Sorry, I was unclear. I don’t think that’s a mistake at all! The only “problem” is that it may be an understatement. On a bi-directional determinist picture, our choices today utterly decisively select one past, in a logical sense. That is, statements specifically describing a single past follow logically from statements describing our choices today plus other facts of today’s universe. The present still doesn’t cause the past, but that’s a mere tautology: we call the later event the “effect” and the earlier one the “cause”.
our choices today utterly decisively select one past, in a logical sense
That’s not necessarily true if multiple pasts are consistent with the state of the present, right? In other words, if there is information loss as you move forward in time.
Indeed. Those wouldn’t be bi-directional determinist theories, though. Interestingly, QM gets portrayed a lot like a bi-directional determinist theory in the wiki article on the black hole information paradox. (I don’t know enough QM to know how accurate that is.)
But it’s not. (In the link, I use fiction to defang the bugbear and break the intuition pumps associating prediction and unfreedom.) ETA: Aaronson writes
But that’s not a problem for Bob’s freedom or free will, even if Bob finds it annoying. That’s the point of my story.
“Knightian freedom” is a misnomer, in something like the way “a wine margarita” is. Except that the latter at least contains alcohol, something one usually wants from a margarita. Sometimes it’s good to be predictable (coordinating with friends); sometimes it’s bad (facing enemies). But at no time is it crucial to freedom. Prediction isn’t control.
None of this is to deny the potential interest of Aaronson’s arguments regarding the feasibility of brain scanning, etc. But calling this Knightian unpredictability “free will” just confuses both issues.
“But calling this Knightian unpredictability ‘free will’ just confuses both issues.”
torekp, a quick clarification: I never DO identify Knightian unpredictability with “free will” in the essay. On the contrary, precisely because “free will” has too many overloaded meanings, I make a point of separating out what I’m talking about, and of referring to it as “freedom,” “Knightian freedom,” or “Knightian unpredictability,” but never free will.
On the other hand, I also offer arguments for why I think unpredictability IS at least indirectly relevant to what most people want to know about when they discuss “free will”—in much the same way that intelligent behavior (e.g., passing the Turing Test) is relevant to what people want to know about when they discuss consciousness. It’s not that I’m unaware of the arguments that there’s no connection whatsoever between the two; it’s just that I disagree with them!
Sorry about misrepresenting you. I should have said “associating it with free will” instead of “calling it free will”. I do think the association is a mistake. Admittedly it fits with a long tradition, in theology especially, of seeing freedom of action as being mutually exclusive with causal determination. It’s just that the tradition is a mistake. Probably a motivated one (it conveniently gets a deity off the hook for creating and raising such badly behaved “children”).
Well, all I can say is that “getting a deity off the hook” couldn’t possibly be further from my motives! :-) For the record, I see no evidence for a deity anything like that of conventional religions, and I see enormous evidence that such a deity would have to be pretty morally monstrous if it did exist. (I like the Yiddish proverb: “If God lived on earth, people would break His windows.”) I’m guessing this isn’t a hard sell here on LW.
Furthermore, for me the theodicy problem isn’t even really connected to free will. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, even if there is indeterminist free will, you would still hope that a loving deity would install some “safety bumpers,” so that people could choose to do somewhat bad things (like stealing hubcaps), but would be prevented from doing really, really bad ones (like mass-murdering children).
One last clarification: the whole point of my perspective is that I don’t have to care about so-called “causal determination”—either the theistic kind or the scientific kind—until and unless it gets cashed out into actual predictions! (See Sec. 2.6.)
Downvoted for extremely uncharitable reading of the paper.
Upvoted for being one the very few downvoters who explains why. Without feedback there’s no improvement.
It’s worse than I thought. Aaronson really does want to address the free will debate in philosophy—and utterly botches the job.
Aaronson speaks for some of his interlocutors (who are very smart—i.e. they say what I would say ;) ):
and answers:
Uh, so: the truth about the modal number of hairs on a human foot, for example, doesn’t care what we want. But, if I were to claim that (a good portion of) a famous philosophical debate amounted to the question of how many hairs are on our feet, you could reject the claim immediately. And you could cite the fact that nobody gives a damn about that as a sufficient reason to reject the substitution of the new question for the old. Sure, in this toy example, you could cite many other reasons too. But with philosophical (using the next word super broadly) definitions, sometimes the most obvious flaw is that nobody gives a damn about the definiens, while lots care passionately about the concept supposedly defined. Dennett rightly nails much philosophizing about free will, on precisely this point.
Interlocutors:
Aaronson:
But this doesn’t address the point, unless Knightian-uncertain “actions” somehow fall more under the control of the agent than do probabilistic processes. The truth is the opposite. I have the most control over actions that flow deterministically from my beliefs and desires. I have almost as much, if it is highly probable that my act will be the one that the beliefs and desires indicate is best. And I have none, if it is completely uncertain. For example, if I am pondering whether to eat a berry and then realize that this type of berry is fatally poisonous, this realization should ideally be decisive, with certainty. But I’ll settle for 99.99...% probability that I don’t eat it. If it is wide-open uncertain whether I will eat it—arbitrary in a deep way—that does not help my sense of control and agency. To put it mildly!
Finally, Aaronson has a close brush with the truth when he rejects the following premise of the Consequence Argument (section 2.9):
Aaronson replies:
Only one microscopic past is consistent with our choice today. But the same can be said of the whole past on a classically-determinist scientific picture. As Carl Hoefer says in the Stanford Encyclopedia
And that’s a mistake, as Hoefer indicates in his conclusion. The physics of deterministic theories (and also, I would add, any probabilistic quantum theory that gives sufficient probabilistic weight to our beliefs, desires, and reasoning in producing action) supports strong compatibilism, not Aaronson’s weak version.
Missed it by (fingers close together) that much!
I agree with you on unpredictability not being important for agency, but I don’t understand the last third of this comment. What is the point that you are trying to make about bi-directional determinism? Specifically, could you restate the mistake you think Aaronson is making in the “our choices today might play a role” quote?
Sorry, I was unclear. I don’t think that’s a mistake at all! The only “problem” is that it may be an understatement. On a bi-directional determinist picture, our choices today utterly decisively select one past, in a logical sense. That is, statements specifically describing a single past follow logically from statements describing our choices today plus other facts of today’s universe. The present still doesn’t cause the past, but that’s a mere tautology: we call the later event the “effect” and the earlier one the “cause”.
That’s not necessarily true if multiple pasts are consistent with the state of the present, right? In other words, if there is information loss as you move forward in time.
Indeed. Those wouldn’t be bi-directional determinist theories, though. Interestingly, QM gets portrayed a lot like a bi-directional determinist theory in the wiki article on the black hole information paradox. (I don’t know enough QM to know how accurate that is.)
Not bad at all :)