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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Even that I know it's snarky and somewhat dumb, I always wind up returning to the same thought experiment with regard to free will - how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows. I am aware of various explanations for this and it's possible that I'm just too slow-witted to fully grasp them, but they really do just seem like pure sophistry to me.

how do the people that believe in pure determinism (or determinism plus stochastic randomness) react to a physical threat? If someone stands in front of them and says, "if you deny free will, I will punch you in the face", do they behave as though they believe that there is no free will to be exercised on the part of either party, that everything that follows is a mere consequence of the state of the universe with possibly a roll of the dice to determine the outcome? Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows.

Your scenario doesn't really seem to prove anything at all? I don't believe I'm writing this comment by some kind of libertarian free will, that is to say I my writing of this comment was always destined to happen from the very moment of the big bang down to the edits and spelling errors. Making it meta and putting the question of determinism into the scenario really just serves to confuse. I would react probably similarly to any other scenario where someone threatens to hit me if I don't lie with maybe some variation because it's a stranger than average lie to demand.

They do have a choice; just their choice flows from their nature, the environment, etc.

I choose the way I do because I'm me, which is based on things, not some product of randomness.

So yes, people will obviously make decisions about what to do in those situations, but the decisions that they make will ultimately be based on factors—what they were worried about, what they found compelling, etc.

I think no one can predict what they'll do perfectly, even if an action is quite possible physically. To build willpower, to the extent to which it's possible, is to increase the chances of following through with the things you feel like doing, and perhaps to increase the chances of wanting to do what you'd be ready to follow through.

Would it really bother me that my actions are deterministic/stochastically deterministic if I don't know what I'm going to want in the next second, let alone do?

Many will affirm that they do, in fact, believe that, but pretty much no one would be willing to bite the bullet and say that neither individual has a choice in what follows

The word ‘choice’ obscures the actual situation, though. So you think you’re about to be punched, so your brain - trained on your experiences and memories - decides to try to dissuade the other guy, so you say ‘man, you punch me now, you know cops are gonna see that on the CCTV over there’, then the other guy’s brain takes that input, runs it through his own predictive language model based on his own experiences, and decides that the most effective course of action is to back down.

‘Choice’ or ‘freedom’ here isn’t about determinism, because all of the above is ultimately deterministic, it’s about parameters for action. Say the other guy has a low opinion of the police’s ability to solve the crime. Say he has extremely high time preference and low inhibition, his language model is a little different. In that case, he decides to punch you anyway. We’re deterministic machines, but that doesn’t mean our behavior is predictable by us, because our multi-modal inputs vary, because our minds are always updating their predictive models with new information, and because our actions are (as such) bounded not just by what is desirable but what is possible, or what we think is possible, and because we don’t have the compute to run the predictions.

That's the counterargument I hear and it just sounds like unfalsifiable bunk to me. I flatly don't buy that whether I hit a guy or not is just stochastically determined by parameters plus randomness, I believe that it's actually a product of me electing to do so or not. My claim is also pretty obviously unfalsifiable bunk, but then we're just stuck at whose sophistry is more compelling.

I flatly don't buy that whether I hit a guy or not is just stochastically determined by parameters plus randomness, I believe that it's actually a product of me electing to do so or not.

There's no contradiction here. You are (some of) the parameters.

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