[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

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I'm assuming you meant that what you don't understand is accepting (a) and free will. I'll lay out how I think it can happen. I don't necessarily believe what I'm about to write. But I don't believe anything ... so there's that.

If will is a kind of historic, hysteric, momentous trajectory within one's skin and freedom is a very small scale symmetry between multiple stable trajectories, then free will might be a small scale symmetry breaking that results in large scale trajectory changing. The argument is, then, about whether or not there's some thing, a higher-order process [⛧], that can purposefully break the symmetry, i.e. make a "deliberate" choice about which trajectory obtains. If there is no such higher order process, then that "freedom", that symmetry breaking, is either determined or random and it's irrelevant. If there is a higher-order process, then *what* is it? What's its structure? How do the structures compose and decompose such that the whole mechanism is *more* expressive than without the higher order process?

And, even then, with such a higher order process, the free will believers have to demonstrate it to be a will as well. I.e. the higher order processes have to be wills/trajectories, somehow similar to the lower order trajectories. If they're not, if they violate that "closure", then the freedom, the symmetry breaking, is either determined or random and, again, it's irrelevant. But if the higher order process is a *will* similar to the lower order trajectories, then the higher order will can choose between the lower order wills.

Of course, here we're at risk of an infinite regress (and/or aggress?). Is there a bottom turtle for the wills? That's where panpsychism fractures. Is there a top turtle, the "largest will", God/Nature? And the capping of both those ends, again, might result in either determinism or randomness, at the top and/or bottom.

So for a free will believer to make their argument, they have to suggest a structure in the middle somewhere that's special, where the regression and aggregation stop (or change character in a closure breaking way). Examples of such middle-ground specialness are Robert Rosen and Maturana & Varela. But there are others.

The problem is that most of the free will believers don't (or can't) yet carry their burden of showing how such a stack is built, much less take the extra step required and show why their middle spot is special. But unlike the disbelievers, I think it could happen one day ... just like strong (general) AI or non-carbon life. The free will believers need to work a lot harder than they do, though.


[⛧] I hope it's understood that by "higher order", I mean operating over collections of things. Lower order operates over primitives. Higher order operates over collections of primitives. I don't really mean *levels* so much as various ways to collect things.

On 4/7/21 11:14 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> From a very high altitude perspective, humans are either:
> a) the atoms in our bodies and behavior is the result of complexity that emerges from the interaction of all the different physical components in our body. To quote Yoshua Epstein "if you haven't grown it, you haven't explained it" 
> or
> b) the above plus something more.
> 
> Then there is the question of free will. 
> 
> If you accept (a) above and reject free will, your beliefs are congruent. 
> Also, if you accept (b) and accept free will, your beliefs are also congruent.
> I understand the positions of these two combinations and I can't really argue against either. 
> 
> What I do not understand is the acceptance of (a) and the rejection of free will. It's not that I'm saying it's wrong, it's just that I don't understand how one can reconcile the acceptance that we are the emergent complexity from the interaction of all the components in our system and nothing more with the acceptance of free will.

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