synthozoic

Excellent! This is just the sort of thing I'm talking about--just the sort of thing I want to see! If they have some way to examine it and test for it empirically, I'm all for it.

As I said to Mr. Grey, I realize that the trouble with my position of hard incompatibility (where free will is incompatible with both determinacy and indeterminacy.) is that it may be too reductionist. Free will may be an emergent phenomena that is not derivable from the behavioral rules followed by components lower down in the hierarchy of systems that compose the largest system you're looking at. For example, mindless genes, just following biochemistry, can indirectly create machines that are conscious. You could study the interaction of all that molecular biology for decades and, while you could get a vague sense that surprising behavior could emerge from it, you won't find the mind anywhere in it. The mind is too many levels removed. You'd have to put aside reductionism and pull back to look at the systems level--to the cell level, to the tissue level, to the sub organ level and finally to the brain. Free will could be just like that. Gerald Edelman might chastise me for attempting to invoke a spook of physics for something--free will--that doesn't need that.

So okay. I chicken out. I took too dogmatic a position without sufficient support for it.

And I agree. In the context of the murder somebody is clearly at fault and for our safety someone needs to be punished. We evolved to have a moral sense and strong feelings of personal responsibility because if we didn't we wouldn't be a social species. We'd be more like very territorial and solitary reptiles or solitary insects.

But when we dig into what caused him or her to make that decision, we find that free will vanishes. We discover causal chains and the interplay of zillions of factors leading all the way back to the Big Bang and perhaps beyond. (And as a brief aside, it's possible that these causal chains don't have to have any beginning. They could be infinite in length.)

Or we can dig down into quantum chemistry and discover that he or she made the decision because of a single neurotransmitter molecule, in that microsecond, having the bulk of its electrons here as opposed to there. So in this case the decision one way or the other was a causal cascade from a single indeterminate system. Again, this really isn't much of a refuge for free will.

However:

See, the problem with my position is that it might be too reductionist to search for the source of free will on the molecular level. It might be that free will is an emergent process that only happens in systems organized as the brain is. If that's the case, we won't find it by looking at the rules followed by components lower down in the hierarchy of systems that compose the brain. This is a version of free will that I can believe in.

However, again, if that's where free will comes from, that means that a wide variety of similarly organized chunks of matter could also have free will. This reconciles free will with the position taking by hard AI.

But as Shadowe points out, I'm taking us very far afield. I apologize.

Asking for a hypothesis for the basis of free will I think is a pretty reasonable scientific request. If we can't put forward a model by which it works, how can we test for it experimentally? If we can't define it rigorously, and propose ways to test for it experimentally, how can we claim it exists?

And actually, I believe in both the determinism of Newton and Einstein and well as the indeterminacy of quantum theory. It's free will I don't believe in. I believe free will is incompatible with both.

Ummmm. hm.

I guess you are reading different books than me. What I was taught is that the universe is both deterministic and indeterministic. I was given the impression that most of twentieth century physics claimed that is was both. It one or the other depending on which scale or context we look at it. The correspondence principle states that the indeterminacy of quantum theory fades into the determinacy of classical physics once we reach the mesoscale.

But if you feel that it has been conclusively proven that the universe is only indeterministic, well--okay. I'm not going to argue the point.

But I want to point out that indeterminacy is not reconcilable with the idea of free will.

Anyway, I agree that I derailed this conversation from Ultimo's original question. I'll stop harping on about it. My apologies.

Well maybe it is a philosophical leap to take but if the multiverse or the universe isn't a time-dependent, closed system, we still know nothing of what exists outside it. I guess my bias arises from the fact that the free will position has done nothing to explain the physical agency the will to choice emerges from.

So perhaps we're at an impasse. If I understand you correctly, you'd say I'm jumping to a conclusion only based on lack of evidence. My theory assumes too much. I'd say in return, until the free will position can put forward some empirically testable model (I hesistate to say "mechanism" because I think free will is not a mechanistic concept.) that generates free will, science must pass it by in silence.

Ah! Yes, I see. I did miss the point.

And in which case, I think I agree. I'd even say that the creature could only stop all suffering by enormously simplifying things into a boring loop. If there are no chances for error, things get really boring very quick because nothing changes.

This seems to suggest to me that underlying the highly complicated idea of evil is the, perhaps, simpler ideas of error and surprise. That's a weird realization to come to. I don't know where to take that.

The specific position I take within the position of hard incompatibilism is that free will is incompatible with both the determinism (Newton's mechanics and Laplace's Demon) and indeterminism (Quantum Theory.). The randomness of quantum theory is no refuge for the doctrine of free will. The sensitivity of nonlinear dynamical systems is also no refuge for free will. To me, free will is a illusion that, once we understand the physics, goes away.

It is fine to imagine the many different histories a universe could follow when we jostle the initial conditions of the Big Bang a slight bit. I have no problem with that. But assuming we specify those initial conditions with infinite precision (Or at least with quantum granularity.), we, like Laplace's Demon, can know the future states of that universe at any stage. Of course this is not practical but it, is in principle, possible.

Those initial conditions can be jostled by quantum randomess. But this randomness, being completely acausal, and completely random is not a very satisfying thing to pin free will on. It's like saying your choices really depend on something even more random than a coin toss.

The free will idea never seems to explain where this mysterious power to transcend the behavior of other forms of matter, which somehow lack this power of agency, comes from.

I also want to make plain that the only chance I believe in is blind chance; the only fate I believe in is blind fate. There is no goal, there is no grand cosmic meaning.

Having said all that, I still believe that having a sense of personal responsibility is a survival trait that is necessary for social mammals to thrive. In some grand sense it's really no one's fault you pulled the trigger to kill that guy but, we wouldn't survive very long if we didn't make you hang for it. Free will is an illusion we had to evolve to have so that we could function as a species. But this doesn't mean the illusion is real.

I don't know if that really clarifies things or not.

The reason I dismissed the problem of theodicy as irrelevent is because, not believing in a god or a grand cosmic purpose to the universe, the problem of evil and pointless suffering doesn't come up for me. And as you may agree, it is possible to develop a system of ethics and morality (And I know those are two different things.) without any reference to the supernatural or spiritual. One of the reasons why I have that first aphorism in my sig is an attempt to point that out. Things are important, not sacred.

But you see, there could be situations where fear, hatred and killing could be useful. In ancient times, sad to say, nature being red in tooth and claw, these impulses were selected for and persisted. Evolutionary pressures drove them into being.

Now our society is radically different from the hunting and gathering days and fear, hatred and the killing urge can extremely dangerous in a world of nuclear weapons or, in the decades and centuries to come, nanoweapons.

So maybe we need to whittle these ancient urges down? Or will it be sufficient to restrain them with laws and international diplomacy and defense policy? I don't know. Our neurological technology is rapidly developing to a point where we will be able to reshape our brains in very subtle and far reaching ways. The question Facade poses we will soon face.

Good line, always a good line.

Me, I prefer Susan Calvin's rather pessimistic assessment of humanity. When asked if robots are different from human beings, she replies, "Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent." But notice what price Asimov's robots have to pay to be decent. They are very fragile creatures, forever breaking over various exceptions to Asimov's rigid three laws.

It's a probably a good thing that artificial life, when it finally does get smart, won't follow its hardwired instincts any more closely than we follow ours. Sapience is perverse. A society of sapients is doubly so. We just have to accept this.

Yeah, I hear you.

On the males that I build I tend dial things for slim or average builds and they still wind up looking like olympic swimmers. So I tend to put a lot of bulky clothing and armor on 'em. I dig that it's a superhero game about cartoonish proportions and they are supposed to look like body builders but it would be nice to open the editor up to some other body types instead inhumanly perfect mesomorphs or thwarted mesomorphs. Just so I can try to defy cliche a few times, just a few.

Almost all the gals I've built, I've perversely built as robots or space critters. With space critters and robots, I've gotten pretty good at dialing, dressing or armoring away all the obvious guy or gal mammal characteristics to make them as machine-like or alien as possible. Aside from the weird arm posture gals have, my gal bots are pretty hard to tell from my guy bots.

(You know what i want? Weird alien and robot hands that don't look like human hands. Some tentacles, pinchers or weirdly articulated twelve fingered hands or something. I know this is hard because then we'd have to redo all the power animations for hands other than human ones. The pirate hook does look pretty silly holding a katana for example.)

And in terms of the grunts? Well it's rather disappointing when your robot or alien sounds so human, let alone steroid-y or girly, but I just ignore it.

I've got only two female characters that are human women.

One is an elderly or middle-aged magician specializing in magic based around arrows and plants. It was hard to make her look her age--not that I was trying to make her look frumpy or something--but I think I pulled it off. She looks sort like Jane Goodall or Susan Greenfield, both beautiful older women in my opinion. Maybe she looks like Susan Calvin, or how I imagine Asimov's Calvin as looking.

The other is a superhuman martial artist. She's young but it was actually pretty easy to give her a uniform that seemed realistic (freedom of movement, yet some protection as well) and didn't make her look like a streetwalker.

Anyway, as a old-fart DIRL, the ratio of my alts is about 75 percent dudes--but even most of those dudes are robots or aliens too--or just silly.