There is a particular sub-branch of compatibilistic free will (if it has a name, I don't know what it is) that holds that free will is a sort of consequence of ignorance: although human action supervenes on biology and physics all the way down to the subatomic level, making it ultimately deterministic modulo (irrelevant) quantum effects, there is some kind of complexity barrier in place such that any level of supervenience beneath "apparently freely acting, internally-motivated agent" is too complex to factor into real-time human decision making and behavior, so it is at that level that our theories of mind naturally stop recursing -- and the result is what we observe to be free will.
I am inclined to agree with this view and so this paper caught my eye today.
Philosophically I don't think this paper is especially innovative, because it is essentially an unpacking of the above concept. What is interesting, however, is the attempt this paper makes to put the informal intuitions about the superveniences in question on mathematical footing by way of computability theory. In a two-page excursion into (very accessible, undergraduate-level) computability theory, the author makes a plausible argument that a time-limited universal computing device (if the Church-Turing thesis is true, which the author presupposes, then you can substitute "human brain") always takes longer to predict what it will decide than it does to actually make the decision in the first place.
This is a plausible filler for the ambiguous appeal to intuition that is the "complexity barrier" in the above -- here is a rigorously-established complexity barrier which (if the author is right about it) does the trick.
So there are several possible debate topics here:
Is this particular variety of compatibilistic free will tenable?
Does the paper actually get all the way to its intermediary conclusions?
Does it go all the way -- that is, do the intermediary conclusions successfully underwrite free will? (One issue that sprang to my mind: okay, so it takes longer to simulate a decision than to make it -- is this actually enough? The standard computability theory used in the paper gives us that decisions can be simulated; who cares how long it takes? Is free will by these lights just another word for "computational laziness?" That is in a sense consistent with the typical unpacking...)
I agree with everything here, but I am kind of wondering what the point of this paper is when it restates a bunch of things its readers probably already know.
I am still waiting for an essentialist/non-compatablist/whateverist to define "free will" in a way that illustrates why it is incompatible with determinism, computational intractability aside. All I can find is more of the same explanation-by-definition
Incompatibilism claims that free will is incompatible with a deterministic world: since all events, including our decisions, were determined long ago, there is no space for freedom in our choices. Compatibilism, by contrast, asserts that free will is compatible with a derministic world.
So is it a question of nomenclature, or a question of fact? Is anyone seriously still advocating for some kind of spiritual essentialism? Or am I missing some more fundamental philosophical intuition?
The more I think about this, the more it seems apparent that the question doesn't need to be answered, but dissolved. We have no reason whatsoever to believe anything we think or do arises from anything but physics, and yet, concepts like "freedom" and "will" and "decision" are still very useful, effectively describing and accurately predicting real patterns and events that happen around us at the macroscopic scale. So does it come down to the question: Are we "free" from physics? Well we are physical systems, what would it even mean for us to be free of that? When is a thing not itself?
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I am inclined to agree with this view and so this paper caught my eye today.
Philosophically I don't think this paper is especially innovative, because it is essentially an unpacking of the above concept. What is interesting, however, is the attempt this paper makes to put the informal intuitions about the superveniences in question on mathematical footing by way of computability theory. In a two-page excursion into (very accessible, undergraduate-level) computability theory, the author makes a plausible argument that a time-limited universal computing device (if the Church-Turing thesis is true, which the author presupposes, then you can substitute "human brain") always takes longer to predict what it will decide than it does to actually make the decision in the first place.
This is a plausible filler for the ambiguous appeal to intuition that is the "complexity barrier" in the above -- here is a rigorously-established complexity barrier which (if the author is right about it) does the trick.
So there are several possible debate topics here:
Is this particular variety of compatibilistic free will tenable?
Does the paper actually get all the way to its intermediary conclusions?
Does it go all the way -- that is, do the intermediary conclusions successfully underwrite free will? (One issue that sprang to my mind: okay, so it takes longer to simulate a decision than to make it -- is this actually enough? The standard computability theory used in the paper gives us that decisions can be simulated; who cares how long it takes? Is free will by these lights just another word for "computational laziness?" That is in a sense consistent with the typical unpacking...)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
I am still waiting for an essentialist/non-compatablist/whateverist to define "free will" in a way that illustrates why it is incompatible with determinism, computational intractability aside. All I can find is more of the same explanation-by-definition
So is it a question of nomenclature, or a question of fact? Is anyone seriously still advocating for some kind of spiritual essentialism? Or am I missing some more fundamental philosophical intuition?
The more I think about this, the more it seems apparent that the question doesn't need to be answered, but dissolved. We have no reason whatsoever to believe anything we think or do arises from anything but physics, and yet, concepts like "freedom" and "will" and "decision" are still very useful, effectively describing and accurately predicting real patterns and events that happen around us at the macroscopic scale. So does it come down to the question: Are we "free" from physics? Well we are physical systems, what would it even mean for us to be free of that? When is a thing not itself?