[FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring?

Tue Jun 10 16:32:24 EDT 2025

J.

This continues to be a very slippery/tenous project for me... not 
surprising as there seems to be no persuasively concluding "opinion" 
anywhere, no matter how assertive some (e.g. Sapolsky) seem to be in 
support of their position.

I really appreciate the Schopenhauer quote you offered up... it very 
much fits my own self-reflection.

I do agree that we (humans and perhaps a few other species/entities) do 
seem to have the ability to *imagine* a future and experience the fact 
(illusion) of our actions leading to some reasonable facsimile of that 
future?  Sometimes I can recognize in myself for this closed loop 
(intention->action->results->perception) to be confirmation bias... it 
feels as if I have *predicted something* based on a *planned action* 
which then *appears* to come true. Other times it feels excruciationgly 
real that my intention->action yielded a result (perfectly?) aligned 
with my intention.

My recent fascination with Friston Free Energy and Markov Blankets and 
Active Inference has provided me with something *like* an intuitive 
bridge between the mechanistic and the experiential as well as a 
mechanism for potentially extending (an analog to) what I experience 
around this loop of intention->results which might apply to AI/ML in a 
vaguely convincing way?  I think there would have to be some 
meta-meta-levels involved which of course feels a bit like "hand 
waving"...  the jury (in my overfull head) is still out.  It also aligns 
well with my (lame?) understanding of Hawkin's 1000 brains/cortical 
column theory of brain (cortex) functioning.

On 6/10/25 2:05 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>
> You argue "free will is a pattern, a relentless stubbornness in 
> doing". It fits to Robert Sapolsky who says it is all wired and 
> (pre-)determined and there is no free will. And to Schopenhauer's 
> pessimistic view "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he 
> wants" ("Der Mensch kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, 
> was er will")
>
>
> To me it looks like free will is the opposite: we are the only animals 
> which have the ability to break the patterns that govern our behavior. 
> You have the freedom to choose what you want to be on fire about - at 
> least in principle
>
> https://youtu.be/4vtVOJB2r4Q
>
>
> J.
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
> Date: 6/10/25 1:47 AM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever 
> wiring?
>
> I am overwhelmingly happy to take a position on free will for Marcus:
>
> You don’t have it, I don’t have it. George doesn’t have it. Will is 
> not the sort of thing that can be had. It is a pattern, a relentless 
> stubbornness in doing.
> Sent from my Dumb Phone
>
> On Jun 9, 2025, at 2:36 PM, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> 
> On 6/9/25 12:25 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>> Why do you call ChatGPT George? I must have missed it. Or who was George?
>>
>> We have a bar named George R in Berlin by the way, in the quarter 
>> where I live. It is named after George Remus, an American bootlegger 
>> during the Prohibition era
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Remus
>
> someone might add an extra R in homage to our own George R.R. (Martin)?
>
> I'm surprised the "George" reference slipped by you, I don't know if 
> it was Stephen or Nick who first started making the reference to GPT 
> (any version) in that mode, but it was a variant on another personal 
> name I think Stephen used for a while with "Gupta" as the surname?   I 
> think it was intended to suggest a serious collaborator, but somehow 
> (d)evolved to George?  If I weren't so lazy, I'd go dig through the 
> archives... I think someone with a higher fidelity memory or 
> implicated in that origination will pile on here?
>
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