By the way, the far more impactful application of this principle is as a solution (imho) to the problem of free will.
Most people intuitively hold that free will is incompatible with determinism, because making a choice feels unconstrained. Taken in the extreme, this leads to Penrose and others looking for quantum randomness to save their models of the mind from the Newtonian clockwork universe.
But we should have some unease with this, because choices being a random roll of the dice doesn’t sit right either. When we make decisions, we do so for reasons. We justify the choices we make. This is because so-called “free will” is just what a deterministic decision making process feels like from the inside.
Philosophically this is called the “compatibilist” position, but I object to that term. It’s not that free will is merely compatible with determinism—it requires it! In a totally random universe you wouldn’t be able to experience the qualia of making a free choice.
To experience a “free choice” you need to be able to be presented with alternatives, weight the pro and con factors of each, and then make a decision based on that info. From the outside this is a fully deterministic process. From the inside though, some of the decision making criteria are outside of conscious review, so it doesn’t feel like a deterministic decision. Weighing all the options and then going with your gut in picking a winner feels like unconstrained choice. But why did your gut make you choose the way you did? Cause your “gut” here is an unconscious but nevertheless deterministic neural net evaluation of the options against your core principles and preferences.
“Free will” is just what a deterministic application of decision theory feels like from the inside.
Sure thing.
By the way, the far more impactful application of this principle is as a solution (imho) to the problem of free will.
Most people intuitively hold that free will is incompatible with determinism, because making a choice feels unconstrained. Taken in the extreme, this leads to Penrose and others looking for quantum randomness to save their models of the mind from the Newtonian clockwork universe.
But we should have some unease with this, because choices being a random roll of the dice doesn’t sit right either. When we make decisions, we do so for reasons. We justify the choices we make. This is because so-called “free will” is just what a deterministic decision making process feels like from the inside.
Philosophically this is called the “compatibilist” position, but I object to that term. It’s not that free will is merely compatible with determinism—it requires it! In a totally random universe you wouldn’t be able to experience the qualia of making a free choice.
To experience a “free choice” you need to be able to be presented with alternatives, weight the pro and con factors of each, and then make a decision based on that info. From the outside this is a fully deterministic process. From the inside though, some of the decision making criteria are outside of conscious review, so it doesn’t feel like a deterministic decision. Weighing all the options and then going with your gut in picking a winner feels like unconstrained choice. But why did your gut make you choose the way you did? Cause your “gut” here is an unconscious but nevertheless deterministic neural net evaluation of the options against your core principles and preferences.
“Free will” is just what a deterministic application of decision theory feels like from the inside.