[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Marcus Daniels]

Glen writes:

< 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? >

It could also be chaotic, or, like a conjugate gradient optimization working in high dimensionality and finite precision, apt to stumble across new subspaces by accident, even though it is just being greedy.   The apparent randomness just comes from evaluating a function against large input vectors that have both known and (mostly) unknown values.   How one could possibly tease out subtle symmetry breaking roles in such a cacophony is unclear to me.   That cacophony could give the appearance of freedom, which makes me suspicious.

Marcus