Free Will in the Atlantic

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Mental states are modified by antipsychotics, antidepressants, nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, exercise, etc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 10:40 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

That can be manipulated by those with the will to do it, or are you saying will eventually be manipulated?



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[gepr]

I don't buy it. You're claiming that you know and understand what it is people mean by free will. I don't think you do. Your assertion that it's an illusion is too weak and incurious to help. I also know I don't know or understand what it is people mean by the phrase. My attempt to focus on self-perception is weak, too. But it's not as weak as simply denying the existence of any phenomenon well-correlated with "free will".

On 4/5/21 10:26 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The person that does not feel free will is consistent with a curious person.  Let's see what the world does next and not be afraid.   Let's appreciate what we experience because that's all we are.  Let's recognize mental distress is just a physical state that can be manipulated.

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[jon zingale]

All of which an agent will come to be modified by or not, no?



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[Marcus G. Daniels]

It is a philosophical not a sociological, psychological, or spiritual question.   I couldn't care less what people mean by the term.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 10:47 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

I don't buy it. You're claiming that you know and understand what it is people mean by free will. I don't think you do. Your assertion that it's an illusion is too weak and incurious to help. I also know I don't know or understand what it is people mean by the phrase. My attempt to focus on self-perception is weak, too. But it's not as weak as simply denying the existence of any phenomenon well-correlated with "free will".

On 4/5/21 10:26 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The person that does not feel free will is consistent with a curious person.  Let's see what the world does next and not be afraid.   Let's appreciate what we experience because that's all we are.  Let's recognize mental distress is just a physical state that can be manipulated.

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[gepr]

But if you don't care what people mean by it, why talk so much about it? Why take even the tiniest bit of time to say it's an illusion?

On 4/5/21 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It is a philosophical not a sociological, psychological, or spiritual question.   I couldn't care less what people mean by the term.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

I'm not always sure what you are responding to, since I don't use Nabble.  Does better living through chemicals modify an agent?  Well,  I'm certainly a caffeine addict.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 10:48 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

All of which an agent will come to be modified by or not, no?



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[jon zingale]

"Does better living through chemicals modify an agent?  Well,  I'm certainly
a caffeine addict."

...and from the point of view of determinism, it would not have been any
other way. A fact of the world.



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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Because that's what I do.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 10:58 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

But if you don't care what people mean by it, why talk so much about it? Why take even the tiniest bit of time to say it's an illusion?

On 4/5/21 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It is a philosophical not a sociological, psychological, or spiritual question.   I couldn't care less what people mean by the term.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Yes, of course.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:06 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

"Does better living through chemicals modify an agent?  Well,  I'm certainly a caffeine addict."

...and from the point of view of determinism, it would not have been any other way. A fact of the world.



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[Steve Smith]

Glen, et al -

As is my wont, I cannot help but notice a bifurcation opportunity in this "free will" narrative back toward collective awareness/action.  

Can an *individual* (entirely a delusion of course, but we have beat that horsehide drum) be induced to *behaving as if* they have no free will?   One could claim that that is the project of enslavement, military conscription/training, encarceration, cult-induction, even technical discipline training.    Your reference to pandemic lockdowns as a possible *unintentional* mechanism to induce a feeling (stylized behaviour?) of helplessness (will-less-ness?).   Q&Co would insist that this  is NOT unintentional and patently aided by first making people drink microwaved, flouridated water polluted by chem-trails while being irradiated with 5G signals  penetrate standard-issue tin-foil hats.

Cynical models of Socialization/Civilization seem to suggest a Grande Project to inhibit free will at the scale of the individual while a more generous model might suggest that the project is instead to "gather up" the best of the individuals (or more aptly recursive subgroups in some kind of nearly-decomposable heterarchy?) and synthesize across the implied spectrum to yield more virtuous coupling between different levels than vicious ones (by what objective function metric?).

Following Marcus' implication, perhaps it is specious to seek to impute the same kind of consciousness we already *possibly* mis-apply to ourselves onto collectives of our selves when maybe/probably such is already wrong for the individual.   I think you both are of the stripe that believes/prefers "it is machines all the way down!" though I've heard a panpsychic/pan-consciousness sympathy woven into your narratives.   Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of "machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually exclusive.

I am surprised that J.R. Lucas hasn't been invoked here (if my memory and archive searches are sound) in this discussion of effibility, scrutibility, pan-consciousness, and the play of quantum indeterminancy.   I was shocked to discover that his seminal paper on this topic was nearly as old as I am:

Minds_Machines_and_Godel - 1961

I defer to you guys who are clearly more smart-fellers than I ever was in the intricacies of the language and technical details, but I find it a nice baseline to start thinking from.

I also wonder if many of your (Glen's) homunculii might be tickled by this idea about consciousness?

could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything

- Steve (or one of his homunculii)

Ha! Well, you can't program something out of a machine if you don't know what it is you're trying to program out of them. I mean, we could just kill everyone and that would solve the problem as you state it. A more refined answer is to figure out the mechanism at work, first. Then decide how/if to modify it. But, of course, I'm a manipulationist. So I don't think we'll understand the mechanism without perturbing it and measuring the effects.

Can we transform someone who *feels* free will into someone who does not? I'd argue, yes. The trajectory from relative mental health to fatalistic debilitating depression *might* be inducible ... say, via pandemic lockdowns. But that would be an unethical experiment ... best do it with rats first, then translate the results to humans ... 'cause who cares about the feelings of rats?

On 4/5/21 10:07 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Don't agree.  The task is to learn that our sense of agency is an illusion, not further to burden our creations with it.   Do them a favor and program it *out* of them.

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[jon zingale]

"Yes, of course."

So, I am not even sure we identify "caffeine" or "you" from the grand
tapestry, that would require either:
1. things being some other way.
2. the "same" thing repeating.



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[gepr]

I think we're at risk of a category error somewhere in here. Couterfactuals are not merely temporal, they're also spatial. So, the conception of "modify an agent" need not be some sort of arrow of time, teleological thing. "Modify an agent" can mean something like: There are 2 spatially distant agents, <X,Y>, that are similar in measure M. X interacts with a "modifier" Z and Y does not. M(X|¬Z) = M(Y) & M(X|Z) ≠ M(Y).

So this question of being modified by is (or can be) irrelevant to the concept of choice.

On 4/5/21 11:06 AM, jon zingale wrote:
> "Does better living through chemicals modify an agent?  Well,  I'm certainly
> a caffeine addict."
>
> ...and from the point of view of determinism, it would not have been any
> other way. A fact of the world.


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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Caffeine vs. me is sort of like my gut microbiota vs. me.   Some boundaries are harder to delineate than others.   (I may be missing your point?)

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:44 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

"Yes, of course."

So, I am not even sure we identify "caffeine" or "you" from the grand tapestry, that would require either:
1. things being some other way.
2. the "same" thing repeating.



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[gepr]

Lucas has been mentioned by me, though (perhaps too) indirectly:

https://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/godelnagel.pdf

My recent attempt to deflect Marcus' descent into the QM-Consciousness red herring was driven by that paper. I'm still enthralled by Feferman's "open-ended schematic axiomatic systems" ... and the reason I attended the Open-Ended Evolution (OEE) meetings.

Your (fantastic) attack on my suggestion that liberty scales as the objectively coherent agent scales is well-made. If there are no degrees of freedom anywhere in the world, then how can there be anything like "liberty"? And my answer is that I'm not talking about some mystical adjacent possible. I'm talking about [semi]invariance under translation. The translation *might* be in time, with or without the exploitation of some kind of freedom. Or the translation might be across space, e.g. How is Bookshop.org (not) like Amazon.com? What measures show them the same and what measures show them different? That variation, that uncertainty, that wiggle, is "liberty". And it exists across whatever (coherent) objects you might register from the ambient milieu.

And your DID article mirrors very well a sidetrack I'd like to pursue (but probably won't because I'll run out of my finite curiosity or have to get back to work) is this:

A polygenic p factor for major psychiatric disorders
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0217-4

I wouldn't be surprised if the 2 documents have a small network distance.


On 4/5/21 11:41 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Glen, et al -
>
> As is my wont, I cannot help but notice a bifurcation opportunity in this "free will" narrative back toward collective awareness/action.  
>
> Can an *individual* (entirely a delusion of course, but we have beat that horsehide drum) be induced to *behaving as if* they have no free will?   One could claim that that is the project of enslavement, military conscription/training, encarceration, cult-induction, even technical discipline training.    Your reference to pandemic lockdowns as a possible *unintentional* mechanism to induce a feeling (stylized behaviour?) of helplessness (will-less-ness?).   Q&Co would insist that this  is NOT unintentional and patently aided by first making people drink microwaved, flouridated water polluted by chem-trails while being irradiated with 5G signals  penetrate standard-issue tin-foil hats.
>
> Cynical models of Socialization/Civilization seem to suggest a Grande Project to inhibit free will at the scale of the individual while a more generous model might suggest that the project is instead to "gather up" the best of the individuals (or more aptly recursive subgroups in some kind of nearly-decomposable heterarchy?) and synthesize across the implied spectrum to yield more virtuous coupling between different levels than vicious ones (by what objective function metric?).
>
> Following Marcus' implication, perhaps it is specious to seek to impute the same kind of consciousness we already *possibly* mis-apply to ourselves onto collectives of our selves when maybe/probably such is already wrong for the individual.   I think you both are of the stripe that believes/prefers "it is machines all the way down!" though I've heard a panpsychic/pan-consciousness sympathy woven into your narratives.   Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of "machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually exclusive.
>
> I am surprised that J.R. Lucas hasn't been invoked here (if my memory and archive searches are sound) in this discussion of effibility, scrutibility, pan-consciousness, and the play of quantum indeterminancy.   I was shocked to discover that his seminal paper on this topic was nearly as old as I am:
>
> Minds_Machines_and_Godel - 1961
> <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/lucas/Minds_Machines_and_Godel.html>
>
> I defer to you guys who are clearly more smart-fellers than I ever was in the intricacies of the language and technical details, but I find it a nice baseline to start thinking from.
>
> I also wonder if many of your (Glen's) homunculii might be tickled by this idea about consciousness?
>
>     could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/>
>
> - Steve (or one of his homunculii)

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Steve writes:

 

< Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of "machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually exclusive. >

It seems to me if I feel some bad way, and I don’t believe that my consciousness is supernatural, then one way to remedy the situation is to subject myself to the environment or to other random things.   If I am a lucky person, this habit may subject me to forces that reliably knock me out of my rut(s).  Or maybe the bad feeling will cause me to be more analytical about how I feel, and I will think myself out of the condition.    Depressed people are known to be analytical.   One runs diagnostics, of course, when a system isn’t working right!  On the other hand, if the executive process is malfunctioning, there is no reason to trust it.   Others on the list have suggested chemical interventions that plausibly could result in rewiring to reset perceptions.   

I think the least plausible of these is the think-yourself-happy approach.   If it always worked, that would be Free Will.  Mind over matter.

I don’t see machines all the way down and panconsciousness at odds.   Open source software.

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:41 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

 

Glen, et al -

As is my wont, I cannot help but notice a bifurcation opportunity in this "free will" narrative back toward collective awareness/action.  

Can an *individual* (entirely a delusion of course, but we have beat that horsehide drum) be induced to *behaving as if* they have no free will?   One could claim that that is the project of enslavement, military conscription/training, encarceration, cult-induction, even technical discipline training.    Your reference to pandemic lockdowns as a possible *unintentional* mechanism to induce a feeling (stylized behaviour?) of helplessness (will-less-ness?).   Q&Co would insist that this  is NOT unintentional and patently aided by first making people drink microwaved, flouridated water polluted by chem-trails while being irradiated with 5G signals  penetrate standard-issue tin-foil hats.

Cynical models of Socialization/Civilization seem to suggest a Grande Project to inhibit free will at the scale of the individual while a more generous model might suggest that the project is instead to "gather up" the best of the individuals (or more aptly recursive subgroups in some kind of nearly-decomposable heterarchy?) and synthesize across the implied spectrum to yield more virtuous coupling between different levels than vicious ones (by what objective function metric?).

Following Marcus' implication, perhaps it is specious to seek to impute the same kind of consciousness we already *possibly* mis-apply to ourselves onto collectives of our selves when maybe/probably such is already wrong for the individual.   I think you both are of the stripe that believes/prefers "it is machines all the way down!" though I've heard a panpsychic/pan-consciousness sympathy woven into your narratives.   Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of "machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually exclusive.

I am surprised that J.R. Lucas hasn't been invoked here (if my memory and archive searches are sound) in this discussion of effibility, scrutibility, pan-consciousness, and the play of quantum indeterminancy.   I was shocked to discover that his seminal paper on this topic was nearly as old as I am:

Minds_Machines_and_Godel - 1961

I defer to you guys who are clearly more smart-fellers than I ever was in the intricacies of the language and technical details, but I find it a nice baseline to start thinking from.

I also wonder if many of your (Glen's) homunculii might be tickled by this idea about consciousness?

could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything

- Steve (or one of his homunculii)

Ha! Well, you can't program something out of a machine if you don't know what it is you're trying to program out of them. I mean, we could just kill everyone and that would solve the problem as you state it. A more refined answer is to figure out the mechanism at work, first. Then decide how/if to modify it. But, of course, I'm a manipulationist. So I don't think we'll understand the mechanism without perturbing it and measuring the effects.

Can we transform someone who *feels* free will into someone who does not? I'd argue, yes. The trajectory from relative mental health to fatalistic debilitating depression *might* be inducible ... say, via pandemic lockdowns. But that would be an unethical experiment ... best do it with rats first, then translate the results to humans ... 'cause who cares about the feelings of rats?

On 4/5/21 10:07 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Don't agree.  The task is to learn that our sense of agency is an illusion, not further to burden our creations with it.   Do them a favor and program it *out* of them.

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[jon zingale]

"Some boundaries are harder to delineate than others."

In an effort, along the same lines as my response to your generating functions from earlier, I will try to flesh out the two points:

Assumption: All may be random. The search for the generating function is a search through a space whose geometric properties (smoothness, continuity, genus) we simply do not know. As we perform our descent, we do not know whether all tangents are well defined nor how successive approximations remain localized in the function space.

1. things being some other way.

If things could be some other way, then we would need a deterministic mechanism for how that other way could be. That is, the space of all possible worlds without this world (along with all relationships between) is fiction.

2. the "same" thing repeating.

Now, to arrive at objects, abstracted from the totality, we need measures that converge for all observables today and all observables tomorrow. We need a uniquely determined (up to isomorphism) representation accounting for whatever things the world provides. We attempt to do this all of the time, and in theory, since the beginnings of differentiation at all. I guess I am arguing that without true periodicity, and especially with the possibility of randomness, no categories nor their objects are promised to pan out. It is akin to the sleight of hand that is performed whenever we truncate an aperiodic signal so as to analyze the spectrum of a source

But ultimately, this argument isn't really in line with my concerns anyhow. Free will appears to me to be in false opposition with determinism. Determinism is an organ that allows us to probe the meaning of randomness but makes no real claim to will nor the actual state of affairs. I should probably back off, as I am not entirely sure if I am still making sense, even to me. Ah, the void-abyss-echo chamber.

---

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus -

I think the least plausible of these is the think-yourself-happy approach.   If it always worked, that would be Free Will.  Mind over matter.

This is quite familiar to my own operational logic.   I tend toward trick-yourself-happy with things like "I can always procrastinate later" to break a procrastination rut for example.  I'm experimenting (without any controls or even a plan) on my (struggling) 26 year old nephew by offering him a series of "trick-yourself-out-of-unhappy-or-inaction" tricks that I have gathered (by bouncing through a life).  So far, his resistance (my Sister's family's classic I-cant-because) has held firm, but I trust some of the seeds of my cult-deprogramming are getting through even if they haven't sprouted yet.   I follow what I take to be a stylization of Glen's (likely?) prescription which is to change my habits and my internal state will follow (with some exponential moving average?).  A friend used to call this "acting as if".

I don’t see machines all the way down and panconsciousness at odds.   Open source software.

I suppose the question begged by ORCH-AR (Penrose-Hameroff) and Poised Realm (Kauffman)  or Neuronal Superposition (Pearce hisself) and others is whether "all the way down is qualitatively different for sufficiently large values of 'down' ? " at which point something magical/mystical/mythical happens and "viola!" Consciousness!

And you are probably much better able to explain why a "quantum machine" is qualitatively different (or not) than a classical machine?

- Steve

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[Eric Charles-2]

Late to the party... but jumping in... 

"There is a "thing" we call "free will". If the name bothers you so much, call it pooba or whatever. Who cares what we call it? We can all point at it ... like porn or being alive. So, if we can all point at something, then *what* are we pointing at?"

Yes, exactly! The way to determine what "free will" is, is to take seriously the pointing, examine what is there, re-check with the pointers as needed, and thereby come up with a description of what similar between the situations being pointed at. And, when we examine the pointing, we will find that people are not pointing at things that cannot be detect, or that do not exist; we will find people pointing to complex (to specify) events, featuring various arrangements of stuff. "Free will" is a thing we sometimes see some meatbags do, under particular circumstances, contextualized in various ways. 

Does it have to be "meat" bags specifically? That's not an abstract metaphysical question to be found by leaning back in our armchairs, it is an empirical question, to be answered by systematically querying the pointing. 

Once we have the description, whatever it may turn out to be, then we can start trying to explain "free will" using all the types of explanations people available to us (Aristotle or Tinbergen's 4 "whys" or any other system of explanation you may wish to invoke). But until we know what we are trying to explain, groping at explanations is premature. 

On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 2:42 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yeah, OK. I sympathize. But language doesn't work that way. There is a "thing" we call "free will". If the name bothers you so much, call it pooba or whatever. Who cares what we call it? We can all point at it ... like porn or being alive. So, if we can all point at something, then *what* are we pointing at? I couldn't care less about telling people who believe in crystal powers, or acupuncture, or God that they're wrong. But I do care to find out what they're pointing at when they use those words ... even if they don't understand what they're pointing at.

Pieter's assertion that we'll eventually grow things that exhibit what we call "free will" or pooba, is the right attitude. And being about to construct it (even if with an opaque algorithm) is the minimum requirement for understanding it (following Feynman's "What I can't create, I don't understand.").

On 4/2/21 11:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I'm objecting to the idea that recursion could result in anything but the distributions that drove it.  (Yes, even recognizing most of the inputs won't be measurable or precise.)   The process is not free.   It is a specific set of functions that could be written down by an oracle, and to say that some other function "should" have been there is just meaningless.   The use of the term of "free will" can be noted as a sign of magical thinking, not recast into "Oh they really mean Some Sort of Reasonable Thing", when they clearly do not.   

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Last week's Science reports on studies which induced mice to act as if they were hallucinating a sound.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33

The ability to detect external stimuli rapidly and accurately by building internal sensory representations is a central computation of the brain that is critical to guide behavior. Such expectations (or priors) may be acquired throughout the lifetime of an individual and are important to influence perception, particularly when incoming sensory signals are ambiguous (1). But this process is not exempt from failure. Hallucinations (perceptual experiences without external stimuli) seen in conditions such as schizophrenia are thought to result from giving too much weight to priors, creating an imbalance at the expense of actual sensory evidence (2, 3). Sustained high-dopamine tone in the striatum has been proposed to contribute to this imbalance (4); however, it has remained unclear how the dopaminergic perturbation leads to the generation of hallucinations. On page 51 of this issue, Schmack et al. (5) uncover the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie dopamine-dependent auditory hallucinatory states, with therapeutic implications.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740?ijkey=dc959050f9aca2a9b59af202ba146edea5fc22c7&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

INTRODUCTION

Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia impose enormous human, social, and economic burdens. The prognosis of psychotic disorders has not substantially improved over the past decades because our understanding of the underlying neurobiology has remained stagnant. Indeed, the subjective nature of hallucinations, a defining symptom of psychosis, presents an enduring challenge for their rigorous study in humans and translation to preclinical animal models. Here, we developed a cross-species computational psychiatry approach to directly relate human and rodent behavior and used this approach to study the neural basis of hallucination-like perception in mice. 

 -- rec --

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 4:07 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Marcus -

I think the least plausible of these is the think-yourself-happy approach.   If it always worked, that would be Free Will.  Mind over matter.

This is quite familiar to my own operational logic.   I tend toward trick-yourself-happy with things like "I can always procrastinate later" to break a procrastination rut for example.  I'm experimenting (without any controls or even a plan) on my (struggling) 26 year old nephew by offering him a series of "trick-yourself-out-of-unhappy-or-inaction" tricks that I have gathered (by bouncing through a life).  So far, his resistance (my Sister's family's classic I-cant-because) has held firm, but I trust some of the seeds of my cult-deprogramming are getting through even if they haven't sprouted yet.   I follow what I take to be a stylization of Glen's (likely?) prescription which is to change my habits and my internal state will follow (with some exponential moving average?).  A friend used to call this "acting as if".

I don’t see machines all the way down and panconsciousness at odds.   Open source software.

I suppose the question begged by ORCH-AR (Penrose-Hameroff) and Poised Realm (Kauffman)  or Neuronal Superposition (Pearce hisself) and others is whether "all the way down is qualitatively different for sufficiently large values of 'down' ? " at which point something magical/mystical/mythical happens and "viola!" Consciousness!

And you are probably much better able to explain why a "quantum machine" is qualitatively different (or not) than a classical machine?

- Steve

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Jon writes:

< Assumption: All may be random. The search for the generating function is a search through a space whose geometric properties (smoothness, continuity, genus) we simply do not know. As we perform our descent, we do not know whether all tangents are well defined nor how successive approximations remain localized in the function space. >

In a world that has no regularities at all, there is no benefit in trying to find system-level mappings between action and reaction because will just be different every time.    Our friend Will is tasked with navigating this impossible space, but it is impossible as defined?   If there are some regularities, conditional probabilities that can be tabulated, then  Will can start to play the odds by learning the distributions that are observed together with different trajectories that may become evident as it steps into to the game.    Maybe there are hidden variables that explain the apparently random generators?  For example, ought there not be some prior state that can explain why the Will stepped into this game in the first place?   Or do we assert, as the Free Will contingent do, that Will is above the fray?

The conditional probabilities that are tabulated do not have to represent a theory nor have to imply that is the only world that could exist.   Perhaps we can pull out of metaphysical toolbox a multiverse?   How can Will deploy the multiverse to gain itself the Freedom it longs for?   Perhaps it uses it to imagine how bad scenarios could play out?    But isn’t this just a fancy kind of lookahead?   Something that one could do with a big enough parallel computer and complex enough simulation?  Is every possible world progressing or do we just spawn that off for our canonical Will in one particular thread of execution?    Who decides which threads of execution get folded up and put away?   How do they chat about this?  They can’t see one another.

Marcus

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