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

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Sometimes I feel, for a moment, that I understand some aspect of the argument you-guys are having and then I want to participate.  Without knowing jack-squat about neural networks, it just seems to me that coherence is something that a neural-net could be designed to care about.  And so, if I do something, and, as a consequence, learn something about contingencies I did not know before, it would seem to me that a network might go about reorganizing in terms of the new information and that THAT is what we might mean by "regret."  "Did that once; ain;t going to do it again."

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of ? u?l?
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 8:37 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] falsifying the lost opportunity updating mechanism for free will

Well, first, I'm not making a claim, only tossing a wet noodle mechanism at the wall to see if it'll stick.

I think canalizing flow is missing 2 key components of the mechanism I proposed: 1) composition and 2) dampening edits or negative reinforcement. (1) is less important. I think I could steelman your weaker form of composition well enough say it's a member of this class of mechanisms. But (2) is important. Canalizing flow is positive reinforcing. But the point of a feedback loop (and iteration as opposed to instantaneous composition) trying to capture *lost opportunity* is to lower the chances of following the same path next time and raise the chances of following a different path next time.

To map back to a vernacular "free will", this mechanism implements it by *regret* and post-hoc rationalization. So, to coerce it into some kind of canalization, at a bare minimum, the mechanism would need some force for mixing or heat, some way to scramble *against* positive reinforcement. But that would only be a force for neutral distributions ... e.g. "If I had the chance to do it all over again FRESH". That doesn't go far enough. To capture lost opportunity and regret, we have to have "If I had the chance to do it all over again KNOWING WHAT I KNOW NOW".

This is why I included the scaffolding for pattern matching and iteration. The mechanism has to be able to exhibit negative feedback.

On 6/20/20 9:31 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Glen's Claim:
> a) a mesh of parallel processes evolving in time
> b) each process has a local branching structure
> c) these branches (and the events that walk them) compose
> d) that composition is monitored and remembered within some scope
> e) that monitor/memory is used by a controller to edit the branching 
> structures
> 
> Heraclitus says: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's 
> not the same river and he's not the same man."
> 
> From the Eulerian perspective, fluid flowing through a river delta has 
> many of the characteristics of Glen's theory. We can imagine the river 
> delta as a mesh of composed local branching structures, whose /events/ 
> are the ensemble particles of the flow (a,b,c). The flow /monitors/ 
> the river delta directly, it experiences the changes in gradients and shear (d1).
> The flow /memories/ the river delta by acting on the delta directly, 
> it frees sediment at one stage only to deposit it at a further stage 
> (d2). Through time, the flow's monitoring and remembering /edits/ the 
> branching structure of the river delta, giving rise to phenomena like 
> distributaries and important to our /free will/-discussion delta switching (e).


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