[FRIAM] free will

[Marcus Daniels]

This just seems to speak to foolishness of modeling overly complex things, not whether complex things can choose their physical basis and could do otherwise. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2025 12:43 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will

Well, i'm not really talking about scientists. I'm talking about, e.g., connectome components modeling each other, following on the Laird & Mitchell content previously mentioned. Each component "models" the components it interfaces with. And it's those models that will always have a natural truncation error. And then the composition of those truncation errors culminates in the unpredictability of something large like a mouse or human.

But if we must analogize to humans doing the modeling, then I'd rather use an engineer than a scientist. The scientist (prolly) wants to get at The Truth. The engineer simply wants to meet requirements. If the requirements is a big fat ball, then she leaves the ball big and fat. It's wasteful to make it smaller. My proposition is that we (living organisms, as opposed to non-living LLMs) comprise little engineers, not little scientists.

I don't understand the Poised Realm thing at all. Reading about it feels just like it did while reading about the Church of Contradiction ... nauseating word salad to my weak little mind.

On 2/26/25 11:34 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Let's say that understanding neural enzyme catalysis is vexing because the molecular modeling is too expensive.   Does the scientist hide behind computational complexity or devise experiments to tighten the hyperdimensional ball radius?
> It seems to me the burden needs to be on the person making the unusual claim like a Poised Realm to illustrate how it works.  If they can't then why do they write popular science books about it, when they can just as well go to church?
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2025 11:00 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
> 
> Right. But no matter how falsified the model, making all models perfect won't be possible (unless the modeling component is The One perfect inferencer in the universe, ala Wolpert). So there will always be a truncation error on all (or the overwhelming majority of) models. And how the modeling component handles that error is where the choice lies.
> 
> On 2/26/25 10:12 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> The philosophy of free will depends on having a hard minimum threshold radius on that high dimensional ball.  Empirical evidence can then drive past that threshold to falsify models that assume such a threshold.  For illustration, one might ablate the Anterior Cingulate Cortex of an objectionable politician usinghigh-intensity focused ultrasound.
>>
>> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of glen 
>> <gepropella at gmail.com>
>> *Date: *Wednesday, February 26, 2025 at 9:43 AM
>> *To: *friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] free will
>>
>> There is a type of rule related to error (as opposed to randomness) 
>> or precision. One part may approximate another part if there's some 
>> rule about how accurate is accurate enough. As long as the wiggle 
>> (random or not) is within some high dimensional ball, the model's good enough.
>> Slight variations in the modeled part's mechanism might produce a 
>> result outside the ball versus inside the ball, leading to a choice 
>> by the modeling part. (And that includes methods for escaping race 
>> conditions. So there are layers of modeling and modeled and layers of 
>> rules for modeling.)
>>
>> This is what I think leads to a philosophy of free will. Any unmeasurable/untestable metaphysical posturing around whether randomness actually exists is useless. What matters is where choice happens, where error obtains, the perception of unexpected variation, where equivalence classes obtain (e.g. anything inside the ball is the same for all practical purposes).
>>
>> In this context the multiple modes is important because the modeler might have 1 tolerance for variation in that mode and another tolerance for variation in another mode. And the fusion/resolution of multi-modal error may be pathological and idiopathic.
>>
>> On 2/26/25 8:20 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> I don't think that multi-mode input is important to the discussion.  I was just trying to get that out of the way as a valid topic of discussion.  Literally just a different way to use symbols.
>>> One of the objections to superdeterminism is the impossibility of science, supposedly due to a lack of statistical independence in experiments.   People that advocate free will introduce another obstacle to science:  The impossibility of such laws.   To model and predict things we need rules that explain how things work.  Whether the rules are probabilistic or not doesn't really matter, they are one way and not another way.   Cognition must be subject to these rules.   Cognition is thus constrained as much as any machine.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Santafe
>>> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2025 2:05 AM
>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> <friam at redfish.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
>>>
>>> This was in a way the point I was arguing a while back, and the reason I repeated it now.
>>>
>>> Marcus asked (two days ago) in rhetorical mode whether, if the MLs 
>>> didn’t only exchange characters of text, but also had cameras and 
>>> some other modes of input, what wouldn’t we grant them?  (It was 
>>> more than that, but I am hurrying.)
>>>
>>> The argument to which I was returning was that at least a part (and 
>>> I think a good part) of the pragmatics and vocabulary around 
>>> language of free will is in spirit legalistic.  There are actors who 
>>> do stuff, under the operation of control systems that are partially 
>>> localized and partially delocalized, and highly stochastic at all 
>>> scales (the thing Dennett abstracts away with his deterministic 
>>> “avoiders”).  For such control systems, there will be conflicting 
>>> signals all the time, within the internal, and across the internal 
>>> and external.  (And we can define “internal” and “external” in terms 
>>> of sufficient statistics and proper names rather than rigid 
>>> boundaries, if we like, to get around unnecessary niggles about what 
>>> constitutes an “individual”, but that is another conversation….)
>>>
>>> The question of what gets rewarded for being “law”, meaning the conventions for the signals and forces and other things that the members of the population enact on each other, how those are tagged as legitimate within the intra- control systems of individuals in concepts like “personal responsibility”, etc., will be some reinforcement-learning-type outcome of what stabilizes the partition of tasks among internal and mutual control-system architectures and protocols.  Then, when the members coordinate states of mind by talking to each other about life, this will be one of the things they talk about, and the language that gives synchronization cues regarding it, should come out having a lot of the features of our free-will-talk.  That’s not to say our free-will-talk will be a “model” (in the sense we would want from a scientific description) of the whole dynamic that arrived at that control architecture, though it certainly could have mutual information with such a model.  We get ourselves into tangles when we reason from the premise that there must be a model of the whole dynamic somehow “within” the free-will-talk; a mistake we make with respect to many modes of speech IMO.
>>>
>>> So I don’t want to downplay the multi-mode input that Marcus mentions, or interoception in its own right as Glen mentions, as essential elements that DO shape what comes out as free-will-talk; I just don’t worry that those are being neglected already.  They seem always present in these discussions.  I harp (official instrument of heaven) on specifically the enteroception of conflict between endogenous and exogenous control signals, just to make the bid that these are essential and non-fungible to the topic.
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Feb 25, 2025, at 5:16 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Nah, no way that's true. Even non-social fish have enteroceptive circuits. Granted their "philosophy of free will" would be much simpler than ours. But that's only because they have shorter and less complicated such circuits.
>>>>
>>>> On 2/25/25 1:42 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>>>>> Well said: "They just do what they do, and then do the next thing, and such questions [about a philosophy of free will] don’t come up". I have the impression that most people are just like that - except FRIAM folks of course.
>>>>> -J.
>>>>> -------- Original message --------
>>>>> From: Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu>
>>>>> Date: 2/25/25 3:03 PM (GMT+01:00)
>>>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>>> <friam at redfish.com>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
>>>>> I think I know, rather than repeating things I have said before, what I would like to ask specifically to break away from simply repeating this question in a circle that grants common-language usage more self-contained “meaning” than I believe it has.
>>>>> Probably the answer to whatever I say next is already in Nick’s and Laird’s papers, which I have not had time to read.  I don’t have a Claude account, or else I would know that Claude already has the answer to this too.
>>>>> I raised my objection a few weeks ago to ways of using language, and I think Marcus responded right on the point, about an LLM’s handling of conflicts between entrainment in whatever trajectory it had been on, and inputs through its interface that pushed in some different direction.
>>>>> Anyway, the question:
>>>>> Since specific lesions can occur anywhere in the brain… and to the 
>>>>> extent that we interpret fMRI data as “locating” conflict-handling 
>>>>> in human thought in or around the amygdala and anterior cyngulate cortexes… we could do a cross-sectional study of patients with lesions in these areas, and a differential comparison of their handling of either the language or the responses to language in word-clouds associated with framing of free-will concepts.  This would of course be confounded, because all these things are learned over a lifecourse.  So adults who got lesions (from, e.g. strokes) after having learned the patterns of usage, would be some odd mix of learned habits and autonomously-driven motives in the use of such terms and concepts.  It would thus be helpful to do differential comparisons of late-lesion patients with any children who evidenced congenital abnormal or impaired formation of these regions that then affected their receptiveness to all subsequent usage templates that the culture gave them for such terms.  Those cases, too, of course, would be confounded, probably monstrously so, since neurodevelopment can use the same mechanics in many areas.  So a “clean” impairment of amygdala or AC in an otherwise-modal brain is probably an oxymoron, developmentally speaking.  But, one could start with such analyses, and see in how far they seem to admit interpretations that stay clustered around these terms and concepts (as opposed to just requiring that we throw up our hands and say “whole diffierent world for these people”).
>>>>> I have this image that, for example, non-social fish would never develop a hand-wringing philosophy of free will.  They just do what they do, and then do the next thing, and such questions don’t come up. If one could limit further to parthenogenic cases, it would be even cleaner, because they would never have to engage in the negotiations associated with mating.  A purely solipsistic life.
>>>>> Eric
>>>>>> On Feb 24, 2025, at 6:27 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If a LLM had constant inputs from cameras, microphones, chemical sensors, and sensiomotor feedback, and was continuously training and performing inference, could it have free will?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
>>>>>> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2025 1:08 PM
>>>>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>>>> <friam at redfish.com>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Actually I don't care much about views or traffic. I don't think many people read it except the ones from this list. But I like discussions about interesting topics. I mentioned the blog post here because I wasn't sure if I have (maybe unconsciously) stolen an idea from one of you. Humans often forget where they have first seen or heard an idea. Daniel Dennett mentions in his book "I've been thinking" that he was afraid of plagiarism (on page 61-63) and describes it as the great academic sin.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I believe LLMs work like humans in this respect: they are like money laundering machines for copyrighted ideas who wash away the copyright. They also tend to hallucinate, like we do in dreams at night. And they are excellent in predicting the next word in a sentence (or action in a sequence), similar to the motor cortex. They are in many ways similar to us. It is fascinating and a little bit frightening what these LLMs and AIs can do already today.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> To come back to the question of free will: I am not sure if free willed actions are only those that are caused by conscious thoughts. I believe conscious thoughts can be used to prevent actions that we do not want. The first steps to a free will is to become aware of all the hidden influences that try to control it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We have an "Influenceable will". When we become aware that our will is influenced by ads or propaganda or some kind of marketing, we can take steps to reduce this hidden influence for example by making the conscious decision to stop doing what the ads ask for (for example stop buying McDonald's Big Macs although the ads promise us happiness and joy if we do it).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -J.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -------- Original message --------
>>>>>> From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
>>>>>> Date: 2/23/25 11:59 PM (GMT+01:00)
>>>>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>>>> <friam at redfish.com>, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net>
>>>>>> Subject: free will
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I put a comment Jochen's blog.   Why dont we carry on over there and help him generate traffic.  I have attached here a couple of papers that support the view that people are lousy predictors of their own behavior.  If we [and only if] we take free willed actions to be those that are caused by conscious thoughts, then surely we must know what we are going to do before we start to do it and be much better at making such predictions than are the people around us.
>>>>>>
>>>>
> 
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