[FRIAM] falsifying the lost opportunity updating mechanism for free will

[Russ Abbott]

Glen,

That's a fairly complex model. Would you be willing to present some
concrete examples of how it might work? I would find that useful in
attempting to understand it.

Thanks.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:37 AM ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> To restate it, the mechanism consists of:
>
> • a mesh of parallel processes evolving in time
> • each process has a local branching structure for what might happen next
> • these branches (and the events that walk them) compose
> • that composition is monitored and remembered within some scope
> • that monitor/memory is used by a controller to edit the branching
> structures
>
> What we call "free will" is the extent to which, and perhaps the *shape*
> of, the branching structure(s) change over time. It's infeasible to measure
> the branching structures directly, especially 10 years later trying to
> decide if your mom's an alcoholic or not. But we can estimate the wiggle in
> the composite behavior over time and retro-infer whatever branching
> structure monitoring, remembering, and editing might have taken place.
>
> I think to adequately falsify this mechanism, we could implement a few
> (several would be better) versions of it, sweep their parameters and
> classify the results. If none of them exhibit clear components and some
> kind of *sensitivity* in one or more parameters, then the basic mechanism
> can't generate the phenomena we're looking for.
>
> I think the most important parameters would be the scope of the composer
> (which processes to include and which to truncate), the fidelity of the
> monitor, the size of the memory, and the kind of edits (point mutations or
> something more drastic). It would be validating (and pretty cool) if, say,
> with a memory size N, entrainment happens quickly, but with memory size
> N+M, the system flips between 2 behavior/output components. But finding
> something like that would be a negative result. We'd merely have programmed
> in the behavior we *wanted* to see come out.
>
> And it would be interesting to include stochasticity peppered throughout
> to see if that had an effect on the sensitivity or robustness of the output
> components.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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