[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Eric Charles]

Late to the party... but jumping in...

"There is a "thing" we call "free will". If the name bothers you so much,
call it pooba or whatever. Who cares what we call it? We can all point at
it ... like porn or being alive. So, if we can all point at something, then
*what* are we pointing at?"
<echarles at american.edu>

Yes, exactly! The way to determine what "free will" *is*, is to take
seriously the pointing, examine what is there, re-check with the pointers
as needed, and thereby come up with a *description* of what similar between
the situations being pointed at. And, when we examine the pointing, we will
find that people are not pointing at things that cannot be detect, or that
do not exist; we will find people pointing to complex (to specify) events,
featuring various arrangements of stuff. "Free will" is a thing we
sometimes see some meatbags do, under particular circumstances,
contextualized in various ways.

Does it have to be "meat" bags specifically? That's not an abstract
metaphysical question to be found by leaning back in our armchairs, it is
an empirical question, to be answered by systematically querying the
pointing.

Once we have the *description*, whatever it may turn out to be, then we can
start trying to explain "free will" using all the types of *explanations*
people available to us (Aristotle or Tinbergen's 4 "whys" or any other
system of explanation you may wish to invoke). But until we know *what *we
are trying to explain, groping at explanations is premature.



On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 2:42 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah, OK. I sympathize. But language doesn't work that way. There is a
> "thing" we call "free will". If the name bothers you so much, call it pooba
> or whatever. Who cares what we call it? We can all point at it ... like
> porn or being alive. So, if we can all point at something, then *what* are
> we pointing at? I couldn't care less about telling people who believe in
> crystal powers, or acupuncture, or God that they're wrong. But I do care to
> find out what they're pointing at when they use those words ... even if
> they don't understand what they're pointing at.
>
> Pieter's assertion that we'll eventually grow things that exhibit what we
> call "free will" or pooba, is the right attitude. And being about to
> construct it (even if with an opaque algorithm) is the minimum requirement
> for understanding it (following Feynman's "What I can't create, I don't
> understand.").
>
> On 4/2/21 11:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > I'm objecting to the idea that recursion could result in anything but
> the distributions that drove it.  (Yes, even recognizing most of the inputs
> won't be measurable or precise.)   The process is not free.   It is a
> specific set of functions that could be written down by an oracle, and to
> say that some other function "should" have been there is just meaningless.
>  The use of the term of "free will" can be noted as a sign of magical
> thinking, not recast into "Oh they really mean Some Sort of Reasonable
> Thing", when they clearly do not.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210405/71a05eae/attachment.html>