Free will is another word for ignorance
2008-03-21 by julianmorrison
…or, why I slightly disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
E.Y. says that “free will” has no sensible referent in the range between determinism and dice-rolling randomness. I’d add that appealing to “souls” only bumps the question up one recursion. Fair enough. However, in pondering the question, I think I have found a useful referent for “free will”.
An example of a tool which achieves solutions in a search space for which all the rules are known is an arithmetic engine. There are relatively few ways of doing 1+1=2. With those few choices hard-coded (to best suit hardware, etc) the solver becomes fully deterministic. To any one search target it will have only one path.
An example of a tool which achieves solutions in a search space with unknown facts and rules is an intelligent mind. There are many ways of looking for solutions to the problems humans run across. Often there are red herrings and traps. The right path is uncertain and must be adaptively sought. We gather evidence and update our beliefs, but in the end we are forced to make stochastic choices. Those choices be predicted from any simpler theory than simulation. They are “incompressible decisions”. This is free will.
Free will means the uncertainty in our knowledge of the search space. You could consider it as a sum over the possible paths in search space with non-negligible expected utility. (For future study: are paths in search space discrete from one another or continuous?)
Another way of putting it: free will is ignorance. When we know, we no longer have a choice of the right way to solve it. Extrapolating: total free will is total ignorance and undirected thrashing-around. Total knowledge means zero free will - we are back to our arithmetic solver. (This is not quite true. Total knowledge can still leave decision paths completely equivalent, never reducing down to one deterministic path.)
Corollary: as we gain knowledge (and later, as we gain intellect), our understanding will grow and our choices will narrow. We will have less free will — unless our targets grow and our search space expands, in which case we will be back to being ignorant about larger and more complex things. But the trend is away from freedom and towards determinism.
A person who understands that mind is an optimization process will recognize that more of this sort of determinism is good. It’s called “converging on a solution”.
Surely there are times when we are faced with choices and we know the right decision to take, the correct choice but we decide to take the other option. For example salad or chocolate? Water or beer? Loyalty or adultery? The fact that we often over ride the rational decision proves free will. Yes or no?
Eve, you’re talking about society’s idea of right, whereas “utility” is about what serves your personal goals. When that conflicts, there’s a priority ordering implied by your actions — you prefer the chocolate to being thin.
Often this utility is more-or-less imposed by your body. Three billion years of hungry ancestors demand the chocolate and you are powerless to resist. Overriding the rational decision here is hardly self-willed!
However to demonstrate the sort of will I think you’re referring to, you wouldn’t have to override the rational decision but the utility decision. Say you really wanted some food and had no good reason not to buy it (suppose it’s allowed by your diet). You have enough money. Instead you decide to throw the money on the ground and go hungry. Why on earth would you do such a thing? Isn’t it obviously self defeating and a loss with no gain? You could do that to prove your self-will, but that would be serving a gain (proving something you wanted proved). But if you didn’t even want to prove that, if you didn’t have any reason at all (good, bad or crazy), would you do such a thing? No, of course not. Deterministically not.
The more you knew, the more decision-branches would come to seem like throwing your money on the ground: a pure loss. You deterministically wouldn’t do any of those things — and so your choices would be narrower.