GISTS.docx WAS RE: alternative response

[thompnickson2]

https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=23B87700BB29489B%211716&id=documents

 

Thanks, Glen. 

 

I have FINALLY figured out how to make Nabble work for me.  I can put it on list mode and then zoom in on particular messages to try and find the gist of the argument.  Below and above, please find the beginning of that effort.

 

At present, my concern is with understanding this fragment from a message of yours:

 

Well, not really. You'd have to take the hike multiple times for you to have exercised any of your freedoms.

 

Here you seem to be identifying ‘freedom’ with uncertainty (in the information theoretical space) or even “degrees of freedom” in the statistical sense.  Am I getting closer?  I like the idea that the sense of free will is isomorphic with regret.  Please see FROST on that point. The experience of free will is a sort of nostalgia.

 

I have yet to include in the “gists” contributions from Steve, Marcus, Gary, etc..  Please, anybody, if you identify a crucial passage, send to me as such or add it to the document at it’s appropriate location.  Don’t worry about format.  I will redo that. 

 

N

 

So,  Glen wrote :

 

1) There's no need for two of you. You are a steady mesh of choices in parallel, from the tiniest cellular process to picking up the cranberry. And I agree, there's no need for free will there.

 

2) The "two behavioral tendencies" are not *two*. They are a loose collection of many behaviors that *might* group, ungroup, and regroup. The compositional machinery that does the grouping does NOT pit one group of behaviors against another group of behaviors. It mixes and matches behaviors to arrive at a grouping that (kinda-sorta) optimizes for least effort.

 

3) The "first person sense" is the perception of irreversibility. It is the mesh of you clipping the tree of possibilities. In a different post, you asked "freedom from what?" The answer I'm proposing here is: freedom from evaluating/realizing every POSSIBLE next event. At any given instant, there's a (composite) probability distribution for everything that *could* happen in the next instant. Some events are vanishingly unlikely. Other events are overwhelmingly likely. The interesting stuff is somewhere in between, like 50% likely to happen. Within some ε of 50% are the things you sense/feel/perceive. And as the options fall away, you feel/realize the lost opportunity. That is the first person perspective you talk about. Again, no free will is required.

 

4) When you feel that lost opportunity, i.e. when you sense that you've now gone down an irreversible path, for a little while, you can ask "what if I'd taken that path and not this one?" Again, no free will is required, only the ability to *perceive* that there were other paths your mesh/machine could have taken if the universe had been different.

 

5) That cohesive sensing is identical to the compositional machinery in (2) above. There's a storage/memory to that compositional machinery that can remember the historical trace the mesh took ... the "choices" made by the mesh. So, the NEXT time your mesh is on a similar trajectory, your compositional machinery will be slightly biased by your history.

 

(6) That memory of lost opportunities is what we call free will.

 

Ok, so then, Glen, we had the following exchange:

 

I wrote:

 

I am hiking on an E/ W knife-edge ridge, uncertain which route to take down.  I take a step to the north, which encourages another, and so forth.  I am freed of the tendency to descend down the S. side.   One might call this "freed will."  

 

And you replied:

 

Well, not really. You'd have to take the hike multiple times for you to have exercised any of your freedoms. That's a key part of the construction I offered. The first time you take that *particular* hike and the first time you step either way, there is no freedom.

(Now, I included some scaffolding for arguing about whether or not you'd have freedom given a previous hike on a *different* ridge, or even the same ridge but 100 years apart.)

Along the way, Jon tried to mediate:

 

An attempt to steelman via wingman:

The idea that Glen is proposing is to highlight a sweet spot in one's
experience where unfamiliarity competes with habit. Glen advocates for
bracketing questions of a prime mover or that which happens in pathological limits. Instead, he wishes to constrain the scope of free will to a question of free versus bound with respect to some arbitrary component/scale/neighborhood (the free will zone). I will try not to fight this as I still think of this interpretation of *free will* as being a discussion of will, determined or not. For instance, I may be willful and determined.

The value I see in Glen's perspective is that we can develop a grammar for discussing deliberate action, perhaps involving a Bayesian update rule to an otherwise evaporative memory or local foresight. He is advocating to not concern ourselves with whether or not Charles Bukowski was *predestined* to be a drunk, but rather with determining where the *choice* to do otherwise may have been.

 

which I replied:

 

Is the question whether it was "pre-determined?" Or is the question whether it was predetermined by Charles??   I have a neighbor who passes my study window every afternoon at 4pm with his very floppy cocker spaniel.  Is that event predetermined by the dog (who begs to go out at 3.30), by Scott (who welcomes the distraction), by the clock (which he checks to keep the dog honest), or ....

I know this because I used to set out for coffee every afternoon at that
time, and we would often meet on my doorstep and walk together a few paces down the street.  Because of COVID I don't do that any more.  Did COVID determine my change of behavior?  Or did I make a FREE choice.  

I think the freedom of free will is just an ideological matter.  Each of us
is supposed to be a master of our behavior and circumstances.  Indeed, in some jurisdictions, you can be popped in the loony-bin for not being so.  In which case, I think, the loony bin is where we all belong.  Or perhaps are?

Anyway, Glen will accuse me of strawmanning again.  Forgive me.  I have been
tortured by dualists all my life, and now I am visiting my revengte on all
of you.

Nick

 

 

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[gepr]

Very close! But I'm not *identifying* uncertainty with freedom. Freedom is a function of uncertainty. The freedom is the extent to which you can modify what happens NEXT time. It just so happens that if there was a lot of uncertainty the first time, then there's more opportunity to change the probability distribution. It's that "nostalgia", the ability to modify how you'll react next time, the learning you went through, that I'm identifying with freedom.

It's important to read what I'm saying as amenable to BOTH those who believe and don't believe in 'free will'. My intention is not to obviate one position or the other, only to construct a hypothesis that can be falsified.

On June 17, 2020 6:10:17 PM PDT, [hidden email] wrote:
>Here you seem to be identifying 'freedom' with uncertainty (in the
>information theoretical space) or even "degrees of freedom" in the
>statistical sense.  Am I getting closer?  I like the idea that the
>sense of
>free will is isomorphic with regret.  Please see FROST
><https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken>  on
>that
>point. The experience of free will is a sort of nostalgia.
>
--
glen

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