Month: August 2017

Somewhere on the shelf behind me, I do have Critique of Pure Reason but I was pretty inexperienced in philosophy, 15 years or so ago, when I first (and last) tried to read it. I didn’t get very far. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Kant’s significance, just that I’ve formed my views on Kant from only second-hand readings (so far).

In “Five Books” Nigel Warburton interviews Adrian Moore on his 5 recommended Kant readings, four of which are Kant’s own writings. A seriously heavy-weight recommendation, but fortunately the interview style teases out some summary content.

It’s a good piece, recommended generally, but I wanted to capture this topical point:

We have knowledge only of phenomena — ‘phenomena’ is Kant’s word for appearances — and we [can never have any] knowledge of noumena … how things are in themselves.

Everything is completely causally determined in the phenomenal world. So how can there be freedom in the phenomenal world? The answer to that question is: there can’t be.

We have to regard our belief in our own freedom – [in our real noumenal selves] – as an article of faith.

I subscribe to the phenomenal / noumenal distinction – the world beyond our “experience” can never be “known”. Even though that boundary gets pushed back by prosthetic extensions to our experience of phenomenal properties all we are ever doing is building a better “model” of the noumenal according to the phenomenal and our Reasoning.

What bothers me is that causal determination is based on a Newtonian billiard-balls model, and the article of faith is a doubly convenient way to preserve faith in divine will too.

Whatever the value of what Kant has to say about limits to Reason – logical, ethical, categorical, the lot – what he has to say about free-will really cannot be taken seriously?

Two things I need to write about.

Jared Diamond on Common Sense, in Edge 2017. “common sense should be invoked more often in scientific discussions, where it is sometimes deficient and scorned” Too right.

And “Why do we use reason to reach nonsensical conclusions?” from the New Humanist which I’ve been meaning to respond to since April 2017.

Closed-minded adherence to the technicalities and process of rational – would-be scientific – discourse, is often at the expense of sensible content. Don’t throw your intuitions out just yet.

Just a placeholder to capture and add this to the collection.

Human brains make gender discriminations and judgements rapidly and regardless of prevailing political correctnesses https://t.co/2L0bMKv3hQ pic.twitter.com/AT4KYbPrcB

— neuro.social.self (@neurosocialself) August 26, 2017

Ergodicity is my new favourite word.

Some things are ergodic, some are not, they’re non-ergodic.
And rather than a definition (see also post-note below),
it deserves a riff …

A ubiquitous question is, does the end always justify the means or maybe no end ever justifies any & all means?

You might achieve the same physical state, some “objective” end, but we all know intuitively that sometimes the collateral damage to the rest of the cosmos and collective human psychology might outweigh the (local) objective result. For some things, when it comes to getting stuff done, we already know that the how is as important as the what.

The more complex the situation, the more we may need to consider, maybe also need to be seen to have considered, all the possible options and steps, and the more ingenuity, imagination, skill or craft may be needed to pick a best route to the desired solution.

At the level of society, politics, culture and psychology – the humanities – I doubt that would be considered remotely contentious, probably a given.

But what about physics, science generally, the real world of natural philosophy? Surely “atoms” – the particles of matter and energy – don’t care how they got to some arrangement, do they? The same arrangement is the same result, surely? You’d be mad – it’s inconceivable, impossible – to think otherwise? That’s what an objective, logical-positivist, determinist would say. In reality and in thought experiments, running repeated cases from the same starting condition to the same final state, must achieve the same result, identical in absolutely every way. Indeed, even the thought experiment’s stock-in-trade, “if” the situation was reset to an identical starting state, we can safely ignore questions of how the reset could be achieved conceivably, possibly, let alone tractably or physically, after all it’s only a thought experiment. Physics is deterministic, therefore … all bets on variations beyond statistical uncertainty are off.

Well the objective, determinist, greedy-reductionists, are wrong. Many processes in the natural world exhibit both route-dependent and route-independent properties. The properties of states depend on their histories as well as their arrangements. The net result of their histories cannot be reduced to the arrangements of the component parts in their end states.

Think about that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses Ergodicity in the context of downside risk-management in a chapter he’s pre-published from his forthcoming book Skin in the Game. Where downside risks in probability tails involve not simply cumulative damage but binary all or nothing, dead or alive, result or ruin, success or failure, it makes a hell of a difference how you arrive at a population of cases to derive and interpret your stats. One person taking the same risk many times is quite different from a distributed population of individuals each risking their own skin in their own games. “Average” risk is pretty meaningless in the former case where the sequence of repeated risks clearly matters unlike the latter.

Ergodicity

… a situation is deemed non-ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it ?”and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stuart Kauffman chooses non-Ergodic as the key concept more people really need to understand in his response to the 2017 Edge Question. It’s very brief and profound, so presented with acknowledgement in its entirety here:

Non-Ergodic

“Non-ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept.

Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity. “Ergodic” means that the system in question visits all its possible states. In Statistical Mechanics this is based on the famous “ergodic hypothesis, which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems do not visit all of their possible states. In physics perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is a spin glass which “breaks” ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states, hence exhibits history in a deep sense.

Even more profoundly, the evolution of life in our biosphere is profoundly “non-ergodic” and historical. The universe will not create all possible life forms. This, together with heritable variation, is the substantial basis for Darwin, without yet specifying the means of heritable variation, whose basis Darwin did not know. Non-ergodicity gives us history.

Stuart A Kauffman

I’m pretty sure now I’ve seen Dennett use ergodicity in his evolutionary explanations towards consciousness, and I know now Kauffman must have used it in his Reinventing the Sacred which I’ve read and reviewed before, but it never really registered – as a word – until I saw those two references above within 24 hours yesterday.

There are so many corollaries from appreciating the distinction, that I’d probably better stop and leave the concept as food for thought.

[END]

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[Post Note: Firstly, a “working definition” might be useful:

Ergodicity is a technical concept about the probability of states at the fundamental entropy level, after Boltzmann. Ergodic theory is about the relationship between any one state of a system and all the possible states it might otherwise be in or have been through on its “path” to that state.

Essentially when the probability of a given (outcome) state has no dependency on previous or alternative states – ie they’re all equally likely and independent of any actual path(s) through states to get there – a system is “ergodic”.

Most evolving macro systems are non-ergodic and actual history matters. Obvious to the humanities, not so obvious to greedy-reductionist scientists.]

[Post Note: Below are a growing lists of (very rough) thoughts sparked-off already.
Shout up if you’d like me to elaborate.

Conscious, intentional stuff happening within physics, but not supported by physics ?!?
Because – info underlies both material / energetic physics AND information processing (conscious or otherwise).

Reality. Ontology. Possibility. Conceivability. (Marletto in Edge 2017)
(Spookily, if one substitutes Shakespeare’s original verb “to be” it’s remarkably close to the – objective, deterministic – existential point, but not the reason I posted with that allusive title. Was the Bard on this case already?)

Evolved or Divinely created. Hardly matters to a determinist, ironically, but natural history should be fundamental to normal rational people.

Causal dependency can be backward.
Kauffman reverse causality …. Taleb too points out similar error.

Bayesian approaches look more sophisticated than simple chance, where knowledge gained from earlier choices / chances affect current decisions, but we really need to be aware what kind of ergodic / non-ergodic systems we are dealing with first. Bayes can be as misleading as naive single-choice chance.

Is there any genuinely objective reality (that matters)?
Realities that matter have subjectivity – “skin in the game”

Reversibility. History matters in irreversible incorporation – integration is more than arrangement of components. (Tad Bonicziewski – quality management). Entropy, 2nd Law and probabilistic mechanics are fundamental – ubiquitous – here.

So … Integrated Information Theory?

(Irony of historicity given Taleb / Beard spat? I won’t mention it if you don’t 😉

Think also about those fuzzy areas between “hard” science and “soft” humanities …
(eg Engineering, psychology, statistics and risk?)
Engineering humanities – “Rivets in formation” (Ingenuity is the root of engineering.)
However many things and layers in our ontology, EVERY thing and every interface comes in 3-layers.
Thing <> Interface <> Thing = 3 things
Interface <> Thing <> Interface = 3 things
Difference is simply the choice of edge vs node view in system networks?

Evolutionary design-space (in Dennett B2BnB sense) clearly closely related to evolution not visiting all possible states (in the Kauffman sense above) – directedness of evolution, as opposed to a random walk, is not just an illusion.

Here, Anthony Garrett Lisi, another physicist from Edge 2017 that sees the limits to greedy-reductionist determinism. Emergent objects are better treated as independent of their components parts!?!]

[Post Note August 2018: Taleb’s brutal style is making the running in public consciousness, but this is a real and deep issue:

Ole Peters quietly informing nudgeboy @R_Thaler that his understanding of his own subject matter (probabilistic decision making) is highly deficient. https://t.co/gcBZP0uiov

?” Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 13, 2018

(Boltzmann acknowledged in there too.)
I really do have to create a coherent piece
based on the above rough notes.]

Short and sweet video from Julia Galef on what she / we should mean when we’re talking about rationality. As a self-identifying rationalist, I thought I’d take a peek and report back.

Epistemic –  about justified knowing – how we reason what we believe – explanatory understanding and believing what we understand to be true meaning. Instrumental – about consistent and optimal behaviour towards what matters, what we care about. Generally the two should be aligned, but we all have different strengths & weaknesses, biases & propensities, short-term tactics & long-run strategies.

Completely non-contentious.

In fact her point is to ensure when we talk about rationality, we don’t limit ourselves to some narrow objective definition of rationality. The broadest conception of rationality, not just narrow conceptions of truth being “cold rational” in contrast to more subjective, empathic or emotional feeling.

Hat tip to David Gurteen for the link. Also another video on the good faith principle – topical recently on honesty and charity in argument discourse.

[Post Note – The next video is also a simple visualisation of Bayes Theorem, one of several, caught my attention with the reference to Earl Warren. A good resource, a good speaker / presenter.]

A bookmarking post only. Interesting to me as an one-time fluid-dynamicist, and I’ve mentioned the parallels before between Navier-Stokes et al in Fluid Dynamics and more fundamental physics. Especially point-based (Boscovich), quantum-loop-based (Rovelli) and integrated-information (IIT). Just capturing the link here.

“fluid dynamics, is surprisingly pivotal to understanding some of the most elementary constituents and processes underlying physical phenomena.”

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Post Notes:

Spookily after trawling through the Edge Question 2017 I found Ian McEwan no less, recommending we all get to know Navier-Stokes …. haven’t digested why yet …. but a Edge 2017 is a goldmine. McEwan’s interest is only in celebration of the widest range of fluid dynamics – unsung heros, and a topic beyond the “streetlight” of his own zone of expertise. Someone going off-piste. Meta, but not fundamental.

There was a time when I followed John Brockman’s Edge regularly, it was a great way to pick up relationships between living thinkers you already knew and admired and others you didn’t, from across unlimited intellectual fields. The great thing about the annual Edge Question is that apart from the open question, there is no other agenda or direction and each thinker’s response is independent, even if some may compare notes. (Obviously, for the cynical, the overarching agenda is that Brockman is a publishing agent and they all have books to sell.)

It’s a while since I have, for no reason other than I am perpetually overwhelmed with unresolved references from people and topics I’m already working on, and there are now so many social channels that throw up unexpected links, that it hardly seems necessary to go looking for the unexpected. But I’m glad I did.

I think when I first encountered the Edge, there were maybe 20-odd participants each, to my naive position, already recognised authorities remote from my daily experience beyond their books and TV programmes. In 2017 there are 206 contributors, which still include a pantheon of authorities along with many with whom I’ve interacted in various levels of correspondence. Sometimes Q&A at talks, often blogging and Twitter threads and exchanges, and in several case direct exchange of correspondence and dialogue – still along with dozens I don’t recall previously encountering. Many I’ve written longer pieces of analysis and critique as part of my own project(s).

The choice of responses to the Edge Annual Question often says as much about the thinker as it does about the content of the response they’re intending to communicate. For some – especially those still trying to establish their position – the response, whatever the actual question, is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to reinforce the thesis on which the current state of their career depends. For others, more secure in their tenure, the response may reach further out from within their comfort zone, and for the old hands and mavericks it’s time to go off-piste, it’s party-time away from the day-job. For me this is as fascinating as the actual responses.

Here a selection that caught my eye and imagination:

Carlo Rovelli on Relative Information. Simply information as (any) significant difference at any fundamental level. Carlo zooming in at the root of all things. A man after mine own.

Dan Dennett on Affordances. One of the fruits of cognition, seeing things in the natural world as opportunities for advantage. Dan focussing on one old but easy to forget detail within his overall evolution of consciousness agenda.

Rebecca Goldstein on Scientific Realism. Scientific theories are ontologically committed, that is if we can’t treat a scientific theory as an explanatory part of what really exists, then science has more work to do. Being logically true (or metaphorically and even indirectly, empirically “true”) is not enough. Think Einstein and doubts over quantum’s Copenhagen. (A pet hate of mine is elaborate metaphorical CGI simulations of “science” – that publicly reify a metaphor too powerfully and too fast for the true state of the knowledge of reality. Think Einstein’s pencil sketches of the rubber sheet of curved space-time, or Feynman’s particle behaviour diagrams for simpler days, with three-human-generations timescale for public knowledge evolution.)

Hans Ulrich Obrist on The Gaia Hypothesis. Nice to see a non-naive non-scientist recommendation for Gaia. The earth is not literally “an organism” but we are an organic system. (Some nice name-drops on Lovelock links from Sagan to Margulis.)

Chiara Marletto on the Impossible. “Currently working with David Deutsch” – on constructor theory, as we’ve already noted elsewhere – so maybe no surprise here since I recall Deutsch cautioning that inconceivable might not be the same as impossible, or more starkly, the converse, conceivability is probably the same as possibility. Just think about that – maybe when some cock-sure commentator concludes …. “therefore X is impossible”. (Cf Goldstein above on realism.)

Max Tegmark on Substrate Independence. It’s all about the information, most details of physical embodiment don’t matter. (Tegmark is also on the trail of consciousness – “consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!” – Suck on that, you greedy determinists. Added post note here. Also noted him talking on the AI hype recently?) (Also post note – really need to dig deeper into Tegmark.)

Sabine Hossenfelder on Optimisation. Sabine takes Leibnitz’s “best of all possible worlds” for a spin. Optimisation is the result of natural selection from quantum physics to society at large, including all of science. But who decides what’s optimal? “Science,  doesn’t miraculously self-optimize what we hope it does – we have to decide what we mean by optimal. There’s no invisible hand to take this responsibility off us.”

Bart Kosko on Negative Evidence. Popular belief is that “You cannot prove a negative.” or that “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” – Both claims are false in general.

Jessica Flack on Coarse-Graining. At higher levels, material details don’t actually matter (again). A feature of the 2nd law from an information scientist (again).

Steven Pinker on The Second Law. “people seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them.” (Popper – “all life is problem-solving”.)

Stuart Kauffman on (absence of) Ergodicity. History matters. A concept we intuitively “know” but for which I didn’t know I had a word until yesterday (though Dennett uses it too). In evolved systems the number and sequence of states through which things occur matters, not just the final arrangement – causality is weird, you hard-determinists listening? Yet, I heard the word only yesterday from Nassim Taleb in the context of event ordering in risk-management, and here is Kauffman also ringing the alarm bell. Clearly very significant to so many discourses.

Lee Smolin on Variety. (And Leibnitz’ best of all possible worlds again)

John Naughton on Ashby’s Requisite Variety. Another golden oldie.

Ian McEwan on Navier Stokes. Ditto, but from a fiction writer. With “streetlight” metaphor another golden oldie.

Antony Garrett Lisi on Emergence. A new one to me, another physicist recognising the limits to greedy-reductionist determinism.

Martin Rees on Multiverse. Baffled why such an intelligent man would entertain this particular multiverse concept?Obviously need to digest further.

Nigel Goldenfeld on Scientific Method. About asking the right questions …. not sure that’s science particularly … but he got my goat with this opening gambit:- “… there are no cultural relativists at thirty thousand feet. The laws of aerodynamics work regardless of political or social prejudices, and they are indisputably true …” Er, no. We’ve done this one before with Dawkins.

…..

I could go on, it’s a great collection to dip into, read in batches and look for the connections.

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As a postscript, I couldn’t resist one classic and therefore totally predictable negative example, since it is topical to other recent blogging and social media discourse. I’m about cybernetics – how we use knowledge to govern life’s decisions – and our consciousness and free-will are evidently fundamental to that. Conscious will remains contentious both philosophically and scientifically and there are many camps working on explanations from the metaphysical to the neurobiological via the quantum-psychological and all points in between. My choice of contact points with this year’s Edge crop above no doubt says more about this, but here I give you – Jerry Coyne:

[Topic:] Determinism
[Opening sentences:] A concept that everyone should understand and appreciate is the idea of physical determinism: that all matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics. The most important implication is that is we have no “free will”.

One camp that has stopped working on conscious will at all is the free-will deniers: – Free-will is impossible, so we’re not about to waste effort attempting to explain it – Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. (See every positive example above!)

In fact, the two opening sentences quoted are almost exactly those I used to sum up the denial position in two of my last three posts. Before even taking issue with whether that’s a fair definition of determinism, it’s great to see that I’m not misrepresenting Coyne on that score. Sad however, given the open question in this multidiscipline environment, that Coyne falls into defending the core of his own position in this contentious space. A sign of insecurity if ever I saw one. If that’s confirmation bias, so be it – I’m open to further explanation of the actual position.

It seems we are a long-way from consensus not just on explanatory theory for conscious will, but from agreeing even what we’re talking about. The multiple camps are clustered around individuals and schools around an enormous range of possible ideas and theories in play, overlapping and related in any number of ways, such that no simple taxonomy is even possible. We may be a long way from consensus, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily a long way from a good explanatory theory, and I happen to think – with Rappaport’s charity – we’re very close. Why do so many behave like bulldogs in defence of prejudiced positions?

Does the very word “information” imply a consciousness to be informed by it?

Simple answer is no, but that’s about defining what we mean by information – a language problem – but there are important underlying concepts worth unpicking.

Let’s separate two issues first.

Firstly, in theory – Verb-Nouns – nouns whose root is a verb, in this case a transitive verb – one thing informing another, where our first question is between simple causation and something intentional, interpretation for a purpose, and so on. (Often a good ploy with verb-nouns to take the activity / process view rather than the objectivity of the noun (even when not a transitive verb.) But, more importantly:

In the science of information theory (eg Shannon / Turing et al) we’re detached from subjective questions and the topic is disembodied / free-floating information and the processing is machine-like. That ranges from the simplest temperature change flipping a thermostatic switch, to the most generic computation of a Universal Turing Machine.

Like Shannon, here I tend to use a “significant difference” idea for an incoming “bit” of information – the news – what’s new? In any stream of “data” – anything physical – that which is different from yesterday / existing / expected / predictable / default / steady-state etc. But “significant” already shifts us to questions of meaning – significance. In the machine world it is already normal to suggest information as the input and meaning or purpose as simply the output, however non-intelligent the processing and non-intentional the causation – which is why such theory is important to our understanding, given current AI-hype.

(Note also that this significant – detectable – difference view of information at some fundamental level, is becoming important at an even more fundamental level underlying physics as well as biology – life, the universe and everything – evolution of the cosmos from the energy and particles of the big-bang to “Bach” – that recurring metaphor for the pinnacles of creativity of human consciousness. Information underlies physics AND consciousness.)

Secondly there is a more pragmatic human world of information management in practice – in organisations and systems, in systems that are embodied in technology – where there is a kind of sliding scale, however informally it is recognised:

• Data – the raw detectable “bits” of difference – the information potential of the info-scientists.
• Information – data presented in a form intended for human consumption and interpretation.
• Knowledge – information that embodies some human interpretation in some encoded form.
• Wisdom – aye, and there’s the rub, the stuff that can’t really be codified (if we’re honest).

In practice there is really no private language, so no-one’s definitions can rule the discourse.

Data & Information are probably best thought of as interchangeable unless you’re inside a well defined technical discourse and you know where you are relative to the fundamental science.

Knowledge & Wisdom – remain intuitively distinct, but in lay (and even expert) AI discourse it is all too easy to forget the non-codifiable aspects, where the extreme AI enthusiasts would try to convince us there is nothing that can’t be codified or machine-learned, and the more cautious among us would think “yeah, right”. And to be clear the difference between knowledge and wisdom is not just “context” either – much context is codified and codifiable too. If it is codified, it’s just content – more Information (Data) grist to the processing mill.

These issues are thoroughly in the spotlight right now, not just because of the overreaching claims of AI and Big-Data towards full-blown Transhumanism – beyond humans, not just prosthetically aided humans – but also because a kind of scientism is giving a really hard time to all questions of conscious will and creative intelligence in both philosophy and (say) neuroscience.

[Hat tip to Andy Martin’s piece on Transhumanism and AI in The Independent, but also for the tweeted question in the opening line that prompted this response. Witty read as usual, bringing us all back to earth with the reminder that prosthetic “technology” is as old as flint stone tools and pointed sticks.]

“I already have students in the classroom correcting me, about two seconds after I have come out with some clearly inadequate answer to a tricky question: “But my phone says…” You too can become a transhumanly annoying fact checker.”

@andymartinink Yes, the more prosthetic-AI is algorithmic / rule-based, the more creative possibility of will is squeezed out.

— Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) August 27, 2017

Language / Definitional question. Knowledge yes. Information no. (Could argue data too, but Shannon / Turing level fundamental.) >140 char

— Ian Glendinning (@psybertron) August 28, 2017

Need to dig up that Harari Homo Deus reference.

Here (#3) below is the David Hamill piece from the Free Thought Prophet blog that triggered the two … previous (#1) … posts (#2) as well as a lot of comments and tweets. Most of my earlier thoughts concerned the Jerry Coyne post given as a reference and the linked Dan Dennett Big Think video. In addition to that, we have the inevitable “baying mob” of commenters around Coyne and the various linked YouTube videos on the topic.

To paraphrase innumerable comments, the new-atheist scientistic world and its bulldogs believe:

“The behaviour of all matter and energy in the real world is determined by the laws of physics. Therefore free will does not exist, it is entirely illusory. End of.”

(My own paraphrase. There’s a dogmatic presumption in that “therefore”. And quoted here, these are Hamill’s actual words:

“Free will is an illusion and our actions are fully determined by the laws of physics.”

where the “and” is the “because>/<therefore”).

(#3) Anyway, to the matter at hand. The quoted sections below are the full text of the Hamill piece, with my critique inserted between. I love the irony that a blog dedicated to free-thought is in denial of our freedom of will to think and act. But, let’s go …

Hamill’s text in blockquotes:

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens are often referred to as the ‘Four Horsemen Of Atheism’. They haven’t had too many public disagreements but perhaps the most prominent ongoing dispute, relates to free will. This is a topic that is not unrelated to religion, of course. Most of the world’s faithful are taught that the difference between eternal paradise and eternal agony, lies in how we each exercise our free will.

OK, not unrelated to religion, but there are two separate issues tangled-up since original Cartesian dualism as well as two further separate religious angles. The original reason for seeing “will” as something outside the “physical” world, was partly to give somewhere for will to reside since determinism appeared to have banished it from the natural world, particularly so that God’s will could be saved in this supernatural space. Exactly how the supernatural mental world could act upon the natural physical world is left unexplained – essentially, miraculous. Moral teachings on how we should use our will incentivised by the rewards & penalties in the this life or the next were another artificial religious device. Obviously these are connected, but it is not necessary to bring any religious interest into this human free-will debate, where our interest is really the question “does the natural physical world really banish free will?” The science vs religion wars have thrown the question into the spotlight, and raised the dogmatic stakes for the new-atheists, but …

Either there is free will
in the natural world
or there isn’t.
[This is not (need not be)
a religious question.]

Sam Harris is a strong determinist and he argues that free will is an illusion. That is, since the contents of the human skull are no more immune to the laws of physics than any other matter in the universe, our behaviour is always exactly commensurate with deterministic causality. Dan Dennett agrees that science comprehensively rejects the mind-body dualism on which religious ideas of free will are based. However, as a compatibilist he also argues that free will can be reconciled with the deterministic physical laws.

Fair enough. But the key thing here is the distinction between strong (or hard) determinism and the kind of determinism that might be compatible with free-will. It is a definitional question about what we really mean by determinism, and the kind of free-will whose existence is worth considering. [And in fact, contrary to polular myth, Harris doesn’t actually say that free will is an illusion …. but that will become apparent.]

As it happens, I’m convinced by the determinist argument and I find compatibilist positions to be rather slippery.

No surprise. I’m happy with determinism too, but open to working definitions of what we mean. Clearly with a hard – dare I say dogmatic – view of determinism, compatibilism looks like a slippery concept. That slipperiness simply shows that we have some work to do on agreeing definitions. (Let’s not forget that both philosophically and physically even causation is hard to get a fundamental handle on. Seems to me the slippery concept here is determinism itself.) Working on definitions as part of our discourse, rather than as pre-defined beforehand, is fundamental to Dennett’s ways of argument and explanation by exploration and discovery – the evolution of species of argument.

The conclusion that our decisions are determined by the matter in our brains obeying the laws of physics, rather than by some ethereal mind or soul, is one that is of great import. Since the dualism on which so much of religion depends is false, explaining the implications of that would seem to be a good use of any philosopher’s time. Instead, it seems that compatibilist philosophers quite often prefer to spend their time inventing new definitions of free will, which can accommodate determinism.

Not sure this adds anything to the free-will debate, except to express annoyance at philosophers. Obviously philosophers and theologians can debate the natural vs supernatural dualism of religion too, but our topic here is free-will in the natural world. Rather than “inventing” new definitions, the whole progress of natural science is one of discovering and evolving new definitions and explanations.

I think that a better analogue for our subjective experience of volition, is found not in new definitions of free will, but rather in computational intractability. When discussing this topic, philosophers often like to return to a famous Austin thought experiment involving a golfer.

OK, now we’re getting onto the topic at hand. I personally use the Wegner example of a top-class tennis-player returning a serve, where not only the inevitable-repeatability aspect becomes apparent, but also the largely pre-determined and fine-tuned (supervisory free-won’t) aspects are also apparent.

If a great golfer misses a simple putt, should we consider that she could have holed it, based on some degree of freedom that she had? Alternatively, if every atom in the golfer is returned exactly as it was before the missed putt and the shot is replayed, must she miss it again, as the invariant laws of physics consistently produce the same results?

Not sure this is the key question affecting free-will. Although there appears to be an inevitability of the same deterministic result, everything hangs on the “if” thought-experiment in that second sentence. Not just if every atom, every blade of grass, every spec of earth, but how every atom not to mention every historically if and how of every entangled force and particle in the cosmos. Gödel might have something to say about this too. (I’m not heading to some mysterious “quantum” explanation for proto-consciousness, simply pointing out the enormity of that IF, especially since we’re about to consider tractability.)

Many debates around free will and determinism have considered this question (including the often heated exchanges between Harris and Dennett).

That was true in 2014, but don’t forget that the Dennett-Harris exchange returned to respectful dialogue in 2016.

Considering the issue from the perspective of computational intractability, may allow for a different starting point.

OK. Something new, and the particular point of this Hamill piece. Computational tractability and predictability.

For example, if a rain cloud moved over the golf course, could we calculate which blade of grass will be first to be struck by a raindrop? Certainly, the rain cloud does not have free will, so there will be one blade of grass that will be first to get wet and that will be the result of deterministic laws of physics acting on the relevant atoms and particles. If we were able to observe which blade of grass was struck by a raindrop first, and then replace all of the atoms in the atmosphere exactly as they were before the rain started, what would happen if we then replayed the events?

Of course, since the laws of physics don’t change, the same arrangement of atoms will give rise to the same results.

Hmmm. That’s some claim. Partly again, because of the enormous IF in that repeatable situation, partly because there will be chaotic aspects in predicting patterns of statistical distribution of trajectories of populations of raindrops, not just the same one raindrop, and partly because we are about to come to some tractability questions in any computation to predict the behaviour of raindrop(s).

Quantum indeterminacy can’t deliver free will either. Even if relevant at the scale of the particles and molecules that exist in human brains and rain clouds, quantum indeterminacy would offer some randomness but no free will.

Not sure where we’re headed here? Has anyone ever suggested clouds and raindrops have free-will? Some (Penrose-Hameroff) have proposed quantum-level mechanisms consciousness, but there’s nothing being suggested here by Dennett (or myself).

However, the vast number of particles and interactions involved in rain clouds, and the even greater complexity of human brains, means that any calculation to predict either outcome would be intractable.

I believe that to be true, as noted above, given the scale of variables and degrees of freedom.

Even if we could measure the position and momentum of every relevant atom in advance, there will be no more practical way to see where the raindrops fall, or where the putt comes to rest, than to allow the laws of physics to play out and just watch.

OK, good, so we’re agreed on this. Empiricism rules, and involves the same golfer – body and soul – on any given day, another day when the starting point can only be approximately the same, not the literal particle-level identical re-run. The tractability question applies just as much to that “even if” starting point as to running the computation.

Trying to prove mathematically whether the brain state of the golfer will result in her sinking her putt or not, is tangentially related to Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem). In our case, the decision problem asks if we can analyse the complete configuration of the golfer’s brain along with the laws of physics, and prove in advance whether her putt will be holed or not. Alonso Church and Alan Turing showed that there is no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem (a previous blog on this site discussed Turing’s 1936 paper on the topic, which introduced the Turing Machine).

For example, if we view a rain cloud as a Universal Turing Machine that is configured to calculate the interactions between all of the relevant particles, then we cannot prove in advance which blade of grass will get wet first. The only practical approach is to ‘run the program’ on the machine (the cloud) and observe which blade of grass is first struck by a raindrop.

Similarly, if we consider the golfer to be a Universal Turing Machine, then Turing’s 1936 paper on computable numbers shows that even if we could know her complete configuration in advance, we still could not prove what the outcome of the putt would be.

OK, my preference is to translate Hilbert as “the decidability problem” (it’s about computational decidability, not about a mind making a decision, necessarily), but no issue with any of this.  Dennett too uses UTM machine views of ourselves and our minds, but this is saying nothing about free-will?

Additionally, if the golfer actually wanted to perform the full calculation to work out what kind of putt her brain state would produce, that would take exponentially more time than just taking the putt.

True, but I believe this is irrelevant to how decisions to act are made. Much more stochastic, heuristic, statistical prioritisation of sub-conscious and consciously significant components of making a putt. (As I say, Wegner uses the speed of reaction of the receiving tennis-player to illustrate the enormous preparatory short-cuts to any actual calculation.)

That is, the problem is computationally intractable not just in practice but in principle. The only way to discover the outcome is to ‘run the program’ on the machine (the golfer) and watch where the ball goes.

Again we are talking about the intractable predictability of the problem. What about free-will?

In Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd describes the implications of Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem proof as follows …

“… once we set a train of thought in motion, we do not know whether it will lead anywhere at all. Even if it does lead somewhere, we don’t know where that somewhere is until we get there.”

The reason why we can’t predict the actions of a human being with full confidence, is not because people have free will or an ethereal soul. It is because either under a classical deterministic universe or under a quantum probabilistic universe, the problem is computationally intractable.

OK. This simply says that this unpredictability has nothing to do with free-will. It says nothing about free-will?

Free will is an illusion and our actions are fully determined by the laws of physics.

How does this even remotely follow from the previous statement(s)? This is incidentally the position of all the bulldogs in the Coyne and YouTube comment threads noted above. A prejudiced statement, but no kind of proof or explanation.

The path of a golf ball rolling on an undulating green is also fully determined by the laws of physics and easily predictable.

I doubt that. Determined, but not easily and certainly not fully predictably. More reasonably, to some precision within statistical bounds of predictability and chaotic attractors. Even to build the set of would-be deterministic rules – eg, the possible states of every blade of grass? – would be intractable and need to involve judgemental and empirical short-cuts.

However, Turing distinguishes between some problems that are computable and others that are not. The path of a golf ball on an undulating green is an easily computable differential equation. The proof of a decision problem for the brain state of Austin’s golfer either sinking or missing a putt, is impossible in principle.

Austin’s golfer will miss the putt every time. Even if before each replay, a computer is given her complete configuration in advance, Turing shows that it will still always be impossible to prove the outcome beforehand. Each time we replace every atom in the golfer exactly as it was, we will still need to replay the putt by ‘running the program’ on the machine (Austin’s golfer) and watching her miss.

Even if true, this simply seems to say, she will always miss, even though we can’t prove it. Does it say anything about free-will?

Religion says that god gave man free will,

I think we’re well past this intelligent-design / creationist position in this debate? Anyone rational person who believes in free-will – certainly Dennett – believes it to be a naturally evolved capability of sentient beings.

Turing shows that it only seems like we have free will, because we’re computationally intractable and so we cannot know what we’re going to do next.

No he doesn’t. He simply shows that whatever free-will we do (or don’t) have, the outcomes of our decisions and actions, and all the deterministic processes of physics, are not fully predictable. Free-will or not.

Turing: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

And Turing agrees with me, it seems. How could anyone see free-will as some superhuman capability to direct and predict the entire future locus of every particle (and sentient being) in the universe. Obviously, that kind of free-will doesn’t exist outside some hypothetical omniscient god or thought experiment. It would be a straw man to suggest any rational person ever suggested it did.

The issue left unaddressed here is:

IF the universe is deterministic, how can we explain free-will?

Now that’s an interesting question.

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[Post Note: A new source for me on this is Max Tegmark – on the trail of both AI and Consciousness – here on “Substrate Independence”.

“consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”

Determinism crosses levels and achieves independence from earlier levels (Hofstadterian strange-loopy. Pirsigian too? Woohoo!).]

[Post Note: Another new source Fern Elsdon-Baker at Newman Uni. Confirming even atheist believers in Evolution struggle to accept evolutionary explanations of consciousness (and will) – but as I say that’s because the more extreme “scientistic” struggle to accept consciousness anyway.]

Recasting the arguments from the previous post, it’s comments – and a twitter thread of disagreements.

How this started:

Public tweet – FTP – recommending “Brother Hamill’s great blog”.

Public response – Me – a two word response “[great, but] wrong, though”.

All arguments / debates start with a gap or a point of contention. The content of any possible argument being multiple points, many levels, highly interconnected. My agenda (and Dan Dennett’s) is to get argument going that is dialogue based on shared understanding intended to extend understanding and evolve explanation NOT arguments that simply aim to disprove, by the evidence and logic of existing science, the points or theses of one side or the other. (Necessarily circular, strange-loopy arguments, with poorly defined objects and potentially incoherent initially …. but which evolve by iterations.)

When asked to explain “wrong” – Me to FTP – there “seems” to be a disagreement with Dennett based on a misunderstanding of his position on free-will, determinism and compatibilism.

Hamill responded @me directly, confirming the disagreement …

“Dennett is wrong.
Not least because his reasoning is based on the little people”

…. and we’re off, we have a (possible) dialogue. He also provided – in defence of my suggestion of his misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of Dennett’s position, I supposed – a link to Jerry Coyne citing Dennett’s 2015 Big Think piece and the so-called “little people” argument.

At this point there are many possible threads of discussion, “solicited” by the personal interaction above, all potentially entangled in the terse 140 char interaction up to this point. Some directed to Hamill and Hamill’s specific points, but most directed at the topics and arguments generally. After all, I’d never heard of Hamill until 24 hours ago.

My agenda is epistemology – arising out of practical concern with cybernetics and decision-making controls in human organisations – and an evolving thesis that information is the most fundamental “particle” of (physical) reality. As an evolutionary philosopher with a keen focus on “free-floating” information, Dennett is close to the core of my work, but of course Turing and Shannon are pretty much the godfathers of information and computation in cybernetics. Some of the most obvious topics start with:

(A) Dennett’s position on consciousness and free will. 50 years of work, hundreds of publications, already many in 2017.

(B) Hamill’s piece from his declared position as a (strict) determinist, expressed contrary to Dennett’s “slippery” compatibilist position, but whose main point is an argument claiming Turing’s support for free-will being an illusion.

(C) Dennett’s “Stop Telling People They Don’t Have Free Will” Big Think piece. (And secondarily, Coyne’s interpretation of it also suggesting compatibilism is …. untenable …. and promoting the deterministic Free-will is an Illusion position. ) Both referenced by Hamill, in his piece and individually in his tweeted responses.

Dennett and Free-will run through them all. Given my agenda, I’d very much like to get to constructive dialogue on the information processing fundaments of free-will (and everything else in our naturally evolved world) but there is some ground clearing to do before there is any chance of shared understanding. Since Dennett’s position (and mine) is that free-will is real and naturally evolved I need to unpick any point that “he’s wrong” before we can progress any constructive avenues. Compatibilism is indeed a slippery concept, one I prefer not to use, since free-will either is or isn’t part of the natural world. What more is there to say? It goes without saying, any suggestion Turing, Turing machines and computability can “prove” that consciousness is an illusion, I am going to take issue with by default, until we can clear some common ground.

CAVEAT, arguing the Dennett way, towards increased explanatory understanding, involves constructive and iterative evolutionary dialogue, not simply proving the other guy wrong or being proven wrong by the other guy. Being wrong is something each discovers in order to improve their own position in the shared understanding. Objective facts may not change, though they may change if they turn out not to have been so well-defined objectively in the first place, but more often the interpretations and relationships between information and understandings will be the things to evolve.

I am only responding to “Dennett is wrong” because that is the assertion being made, right from the very first piece. So, focussing first on (C)

(1) “The little people” is an SMBC parody of Dennett’s position on compatibilism and the illusory nature of free will as picked-up by Coyne et al (*). Nowhere in Dennett’s Big Think piece does he use such an argument, nor does he choose to identify as compatibilist. Dennett does of course talk about Surgeons and their patients, Judges and offenders, Researchers and their subjects, like any typical scientific neurosurgeon might. The pejorative suggestion that those with less expert knowledge are “the little people” of this world is a travesty extrapolated from the otherwise fair-game parody. A “ludicrous characterisation” as one of the commenters on the Coyne thread said. Hear, hear, I say.

(2) Notwithstanding the little people slur, what does Dennett say about actual free-will in his piece? Absolutely nothing. Right from the off, it’s a thought experiment in both reality and science fiction, one of his thinking tools or intuition pumps. And, furthermore, even as a thought experiment, it is simply addressing the private and public denial of free-will. In his words – and in the trajectory of the piece:

“A thought experiment” …
“Devised to jangle the nerves of those who claim free will is an illusion”.

It is part of the rhetorical “war” intended to get deniers to stop and think and to honestly consider alternative arguments (*). It contains no attempt to explain what free-will is or how it arises and functions. It is simply part of a rhetorical plea. To suggest Dennett’s scientific and philosophical position of free will is based on the little people argument or on a denial-of-free-will thought-experiment is at the very least misleading, and more a straw-man positively misrepresenting his position on consciousness and free will more generally.

Go. (Do not pass)

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If deniers can stop denying, and trying to prove others wrong, we can switch the focus to what Turing really does tell us about the reality of free will (B) and maybe for those interested, what Dennett’s position on free-will (A) really is. I’m pretty sure we’ll find Dennett’s position (and mine) legitimately – at least debatably – takes Turing into account.

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(*) Appendix.

Argument as warfare – with winners, losers and casualties – is very much the flavour of the millennial new-atheist God vs Science debates and various evidence-based campaigns against potentially anti-science and political-correct positions on public issues. Being introduced as “brother Hamill” suggested to me he was  another brother-in-arms in the science vs religion wars. Trouble is that style of argumentation is dominating would-be science and philosophical topics that should be advancing basic understanding of the natural world more generally. Political campaigning is infecting science itself.

As I said in the previous post “Coyne et al” is simply a symptom of this warlike infection, and having been part of the four horsemen – the least apocalyptic of the four, as Baggini put it – Dennett now disagreeing with Harris and several of Dawkins’ bulldogs finds himself the target of warlike arguments rather than constructive dialogues. For this reason his main thrust has switched from arguing with his critics on their established terms, to simply a plea that his actual position be considered on the terms that might arise, and a bet that if we do so we might learn something new. Life’s too short to do otherwise.

If that sounds patronising, I’m sorry, but I’m serious we need to get to first base before we can pass go. However sincere, it will certainly appear incoherent until we do so.