Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Sam Harris and Jay Garfield have a great podcast about free will. Saint Augustine came up with the idea of free agency in order to get God off the hook for Eve’s fall. Fascinating stuff.
If you’d asked me 5 years ago before I started meditating, I would have thought that of course we have free will. But meditation has shown me that we are not standing on the riverbank of consciousness looking into the flow, we simply are the flow. There is no self standing separate from experience.
Plus, possessing this magical quality of free agency would require us to break the law of causality. There is no evidence for free will in any branch of science.
This is a interesting point, but from my point of view, we don’t need to break causality to have free will. All it requires is that the systems are chaotic in nature rather than purely probabilistic.
This popped up in my feed this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-will-by-robert-sapolsky-review-the-hard-science-of-decisions
I think his view is extreme and drives engagement; it has shown up in a bunch of places for me.
You seem to be suggesting that instead of believing in determinism, you believe in a mix of determinism plus some randomness. Where is the free will in chaos? Fundamentally, there is nowhere in your being for a separate self to reside that could be making these decisions separate from causality. You can’t even choose which thoughts you think. Thoughts bubble up and disappear without us being able to pre-select them.
Sam Harris uses a simple example of this - name a movie title. Any movie. Pay close attention to what happens when you decide on a title. How many options did you have to choose from? Why didn’t you choose Spirited Away? Was Spirited Away an option your thoughts gave you? You must know thousands of them, but only a few options bubbled up. You had a severely limited set of options to choose from. If there’s no free will there, where is it?
My interpretation comes down to chaotic systems.
I’m assuming you don’t have a good grasp of chaos math. But I’ll use a classic example to explain it.
Assume you have 2 objects orbiting each other; you have all the information you need to predict the motion of those objects (current position, mass, distance, radius and the vector describing the motion of the objects); with this information you can perfectly predict the positions of the object into the future for any time length.
I can write a formula that will give me the precise positions of the bodies; for any time length. 10 minutes or a billion years, it doesn’t matter.
Now add a third object into the mix; again we have perfect information about the initial state. In this 3 body system, we cannot know where the objects are going to be in the future there is no general formula for calculating this because it is a chaotic system.
What we can do is solve it “numerically”; basically we solve the motion of the system for very small time jumps (depends on how fast the bodies are moving), over and over to get to the future positions. If I want to know what the system will look like in a billion years, I need to solve the equation 100 billion times.
The more complex the system is the harder it is to even write equations to solve for small time jumps. If you have 100’s or 1000’s of interacting inputs, it is completely possible to look back in time and see what changes eventually led to the current system, but that gives you no predictive power going forward.
My issue with the model put forward by Robert Sapolsky; is that it is post-hoc a rationalization of a chaotic system. It provides no predictive power, and thus the free will part I see is that even if you knew perfectly all of the inputs you still cannot predict the output beyond providing a probability space (range of possibilities) of decisions that may be taken.