Free will, 7-3-20 meeting

[Eric Charles-2]

In the 7-3-20 FRIAM meeting the "Free will" discussion developed in some interesting ways that I would like to capture. 

• We started with a question about whether we could coherently deal with "the feeling of free will" from an evolutionary perspective, independent of any question about whether free will is "real". As soon as evolution became involved we needed to parse the possibility that said feeling was an adaptation, an exaptation, a spandrel, or simply the result of genetic drift. 
• Nick started by developing the spandrel notion, which led to much confusion, especially when he ultimately stated that he was doing all that just to set up an argument that it was, in fact, an adaptation. 
• He argued that we have agency-detection mechanisms because it was adaptive to do so, and a self-vs-other-discriminating mechanisms because it was adaptive to do so, and that it was additionally adaptive for those mechanisms to work together. If all that is true, then there is no mystery about why we might distinguish events caused by our own agency from those caused by the agency of others or by entities without agency. 
• I argued strenuously that we should stop doing arm-chair philosophizing and start to work towards sciencing the problem... because without that we are stuck think about this stuff backwards. Mirror my response to Frank's email about "inner life" in rabbits and dogs, I argued that we ought to identify a bunch of concrete situations in people wanted to invoke "free will", and a bunch where they don't, then compare and contrast those situations for as long as we have to do identify the crucial parameters that distinguish them. No one seemed to want to go that route. Throughout the conversation I tried to argue that we couldn't possibly be talking about anything sensible that couldn't be studied perfectly well with rats in mazes. Unclear if anyone agreed... even Nick. 
• There was a lot of discussion about how we would figure out if an individual situation involved free will, or the behaviors in question were caused by mechanisms at various levels of analysis (physics-level, biology-level, psychology-level). 
• Basically, whenever someone said "X has freewill" Bruce said, "Well, but there are causes of that behavior. For example, A, B, C." At some point it seemed as if we were on the verge of defining freewill as "something that happens, and there are no reasons why it happened." Nick thought we were risking diving into a discussion of quantum woo, which never seemed to get us anywhere. I pointed out that if "free will" was synonymous with "not caused in any fashion" then we were defining it as magic, which seemed like a bad way to go. 
• Bruce gave the solid example of his preferring chocolate to vanilla ice cream, as a situation in which many might say he can choose icecream freely, but he doesn't feel like there is anything free about it, because those preference as simply built into him. I asked if mattered that we could do a bunch of things to alter what our preferences would be in the future. Bruce said he for sure didn't think that changed anything, but others thought maybe it did. (I didn't have a prefered answer, I just thought it would be a crucial differentiator of how people were thinking about the issue, and that seemed true.) 
• Steve suggested that there was an issue of what sort of causes we were talking about, there was a sidebar about what "mechanical causation" meant, and eventually the conversation shifted to talk about degrees of freedom and the ways those can be constrained. 
• When the degrees-of-freedom issue came up, Steve started trying to articulate a distinction between when degrees-of-freedom were constrained by membership in a higher-order structure (I'm probably not doing it full justice, but that's close). 
• We ended up trying hard to distinguish two differet issues that are at play in Steve's model, using several different metaphors, out of which "joining the clergy" metaphor ended up seeming the best. 
• Issue 1: Were you free to join the clergy? This seemed to be most of what were talking about before we got this point in the discussion, and I introduced it mostly to try to get us to stop talking about that, and to focus on the second issue. 
• Issue 2: Does joining the clergy entail a reduction of free will? This seemed (to me) to be the interesting new issue Steve had introduced. If I say that I have subsumed my own will to the will of The Church (which is what joining the clergy entails), then either I have fewer degrees-of-freedom now than I did before, or I am lying about my current state (i.e., I have not come to embody my pledge). 
• At some point after that distinction became clear, Steve asked for a steelman of his position. I claimed that I was producing the steelman, under one additional condition: We need to acknowledge that - for Steve's issue-2-focused model - "has less free will" is a description of the state of the individual who is now a clergy member; it is not an explanation for that state. Similarly, a person who leaves the clergy might "have more free will" as a result; and again that would be a description of his state, not an explanation. More work would still be needed to hammer out how transitions between those states could be explained, and what things being-in-a-given-state might, in turn, be able to explain... but simply agree that Steve's position was aimed primarily at describing degrees-of-free-will would do a huge chunk of the work to steelman his position. 

Alas... I couldn't develop that line further because my phone battery died... which means I left the conversation by other than my own free will... and I don't know what happened next. 

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[thompnickson2]

Thanks, Eric, for doing this.  What a great summary! After you left, we went on to discuss many things, but right now, I cannot remember a single word.  Perhaps somebody else can help.  I think there was quite a lot of LaGrangian talk.  Or was that ANTI-LaGrangian talk. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2020 11:12 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] Free will, 7-3-20 meeting

 

In the 7-3-20 FRIAM meeting the "Free will" discussion developed in some interesting ways that I would like to capture. 

 

• We started with a question about whether we could coherently deal with "the feeling of free will" from an evolutionary perspective, independent of any question about whether free will is "real". As soon as evolution became involved we needed to parse the possibility that said feeling was an adaptation, an exaptation, a spandrel, or simply the result of genetic drift. 

• Nick started by developing the spandrel notion, which led to much confusion, especially when he ultimately stated that he was doing all that just to set up an argument that it was, in fact, an adaptation. 
• He argued that we have agency-detection mechanisms because it was adaptive to do so, and a self-vs-other-discriminating mechanisms because it was adaptive to do so, and that it was additionally adaptive for those mechanisms to work together. If all that is true, then there is no mystery about why we might distinguish events caused by our own agency from those caused by the agency of others or by entities without agency. 

• I argued strenuously that we should stop doing arm-chair philosophizing and start to work towards sciencing the problem... because without that we are stuck think about this stuff backwards. Mirror my response to Frank's email about "inner life" in rabbits and dogs, I argued that we ought to identify a bunch of concrete situations in people wanted to invoke "free will", and a bunch where they don't, then compare and contrast those situations for as long as we have to do identify the crucial parameters that distinguish them. No one seemed to want to go that route. Throughout the conversation I tried to argue that we couldn't possibly be talking about anything sensible that couldn't be studied perfectly well with rats in mazes. Unclear if anyone agreed... even Nick. 
• There was a lot of discussion about how we would figure out if an individual situation involved free will, or the behaviors in question were caused by mechanisms at various levels of analysis (physics-level, biology-level, psychology-level). 

• Basically, whenever someone said "X has freewill" Bruce said, "Well, but there are causes of that behavior. For example, A, B, C." At some point it seemed as if we were on the verge of defining freewill as "something that happens, and there are no reasons why it happened." Nick thought we were risking diving into a discussion of quantum woo, which never seemed to get us anywhere. I pointed out that if "free will" was synonymous with "not caused in any fashion" then we were defining it as magic, which seemed like a bad way to go. 
• Bruce gave the solid example of his preferring chocolate to vanilla ice cream, as a situation in which many might say he can choose icecream freely, but he doesn't feel like there is anything free about it, because those preference as simply built into him. I asked if mattered that we could do a bunch of things to alter what our preferences would be in the future. Bruce said he for sure didn't think that changed anything, but others thought maybe it did. (I didn't have a prefered answer, I just thought it would be a crucial differentiator of how people were thinking about the issue, and that seemed true.) 
• Steve suggested that there was an issue of what sort of causes we were talking about, there was a sidebar about what "mechanical causation" meant, and eventually the conversation shifted to talk about degrees of freedom and the ways those can be constrained. 

• When the degrees-of-freedom issue came up, Steve started trying to articulate a distinction between when degrees-of-freedom were constrained by membership in a higher-order structure (I'm probably not doing it full justice, but that's close). 

• We ended up trying hard to distinguish two differet issues that are at play in Steve's model, using several different metaphors, out of which "joining the clergy" metaphor ended up seeming the best. 
• Issue 1: Were you free to join the clergy? This seemed to be most of what were talking about before we got this point in the discussion, and I introduced it mostly to try to get us to stop talking about that, and to focus on the second issue. 
• Issue 2: Does joining the clergy entail a reduction of free will? This seemed (to me) to be the interesting new issue Steve had introduced. If I say that I have subsumed my own will to the will of The Church (which is what joining the clergy entails), then either I have fewer degrees-of-freedom now than I did before, or I am lying about my current state (i.e., I have not come to embody my pledge). 
• At some point after that distinction became clear, Steve asked for a steelman of his position. I claimed that I was producing the steelman, under one additional condition: We need to acknowledge that - for Steve's issue-2-focused model - "has less free will" is a description of the state of the individual who is now a clergy member; it is not an explanation for that state. Similarly, a person who leaves the clergy might "have more free will" as a result; and again that would be a description of his state, not an explanation. More work would still be needed to hammer out how transitions between those states could be explained, and what things being-in-a-given-state might, in turn, be able to explain... but simply agree that Steve's position was aimed primarily at describing degrees-of-free-will would do a huge chunk of the work to steelman his position. 

Alas... I couldn't develop that line further because my phone battery died... which means I left the conversation by other than my own free will... and I don't know what happened next. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

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Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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