Free will is happening at the boundary of computational irreducibility. When you need to make a decision, there is no shortcut. Sometimes when you’re trying to predict your own decisions, there’s no shortcut. You need to get to the point where you actually make the decision. It’s not freedom in the sense of indeterminism, but freedom in the sense of you don’t know what you are doing.
What is free will? What are we free from?
We have freedom in how we interpret our memories and experiences.
Very little freedom in the short term, but if you consistently apply effort to shape your behaviour towards your values, you’ll eventually see a shift where you are doing more of the things you like to do. You have exerted your free will to mold yourself, to be in accordance with yohr values. Free will is the application of effort towards large scale goals. Free will is discipline. Discipline equals freedom… We are free in our attitude and interpretation of events.At any given moment in time, free will is infinitesimally small. But over time it adds up zo a nonzero quantity.
Link to originalAgency / free will: Instead of being a consequence of action that happen to you, you want to take actions because of their consequences that haven’t happened yet.
effect→cause, instead ofcause→effect
If there is something that is happening at a regular interval, and there is a consequence of that which happens with a little delay, then if the delay happens to be just a little bit less than the period, it ends up looking like cause and effect are the other way round (cartwheel turning backwards due to stroboscopic effect).
→ If you are the right amount of late, it looks like you are a reaction coming before things instead of afterwards.
→ If the world really is a rotation, then B isn’t just appearing to happen before A, but it is happening before A.
→ With a linear notion of cause, agency / free will is always going to be mysterious. With a circular notion of cause, it is possible to let go of a notion of time going in a particular direction, and just accept that these are all part of a cycle and have the same causal power over every other part of the cycle (all points on the cycle have the same info about all the other points on that cylce).
harmonics come naturally in a circular system:
Units in linear systems are arbitrary, whereas with a circle, the fundamental unit simply is a cycle, and all others are multiples of it..
Levin on free will
I once had lunch with a philosopher who said they didn’t believe in free will. The waitress came over, and they said, “hmm, let me see, I think I’ll have…” and I said “whoa — what are you doing — are you choosing a sandwich?! Why don’t you sit back and see what sandwich the universe ordained for you.” The reality is that it’s impossible to actually not believe in free will. People say they don’t believe in free will, but they are mistaken — of course they actually do (if you watch how they live their life) — it’s an aberrant, false belief about themselves in an otherwise consistent cognitive structure.
More importantly, all of the stories about the influences on our life are looking backwards. They are irrelevant. The past is gone. What’s relevant is what you do next. None of those stories about causation help you with that. Robert Sapolsky is right about this part: do not dwell on what you did, what you could have done, what caused what — neither credit nor blame for the past, they are all irrelevant. The only thing that matters is: what next. Do whatever amazing thing you were going to do, before you heard about all this free will stuff. The “no free will” frame is destructive and unhelpful; it’s all about explaining things that have already been done; it stymies creation. And realize that to be free of your own preferences, your past experiences, etc. is to wipe away your individuality — randomness and “blank slate” are not what we want out of free will. The one useful sense of free will is what you exert over a long term of effort to change the things that determine your behavior — your environment, your memories, your skills, your personality traits. You can change it, by concerted effort, little by little, every day. Like a curve in calculus — infinitesimal, infinitely small acts of effort, summed consistently over time, results in targeted changes in your likely behaviors and experiences. That’s the useful sense of free will. It will never be entirely free, and you don’t want it to be entirely free (of your own unique properties) — what you want is to be as free of others’ agendas as you can be, to take charge of your own long-term trajectory by concerted repeated effort toward a goal chosen judiciously.