As I said, if one believes in the laws of physics (and as a physicist, I am inclined to do so:-) then everything is deterministic and free will in one sense cannot exist.
Strange way to begin .. if one disbelieves the laws of physics, they still continue to exist and function. And the universe is built on quantum mechanics, which states that everything is random. In which case free will cannot exist. But why is randomness even part of this discussion? Must a system be partially random to have any sense of free will? If a deterministic system lacks free will and a random system lacks free will, how can a combination of these ever have any kind of free will? Perhaps this sense of "free will" comes from somewhere else?
Are human[s] in any defensible sense what you seem to be asserting, semantic decision trees? Personally, I'd have to say no.
As a human yourself, of course you'd say that. But some people consider their computer to have free will based on the times it "chooses" to help vs. hinder. This is an illusion of course, because we know precisely how computer work. But it's understandable given the vast numbers of inputs that affect a computer's state. Perhaps a human's "free will" is equally an illusion?
For one thing, at the hardware level they are NNs, and NNs per se have no idea what the number "seven" is no matter how accurately they can identify it or what they are trained to do with it. Humans, however, can manipulate their OWN NNs to do computations based on the notion of "seven-ness" completely independent of its neural representation or lack (of a unique one) thereof.
This doesn't seem to follow. If humans are neural networks (I assume the meaning of "NN") and humans can be conscious of the meaning of "seven", then by definition neural networks can do the same.
At no point can any NN I've ever heard of be said to comprehend "sevenness".
Sure there is, you've just identified it -- it's your own brain. If you mean you've never heard of a *manufactured* NN with that ability, then that may merely point to the shortcomings of human engineering rather than any intrinsic problem with neural networks.
In the meantime, as I said, in an HI you are stuck trying to explain the decision either heuristically (which fails if you examine it too closely/microscopically) ..
I disagree. Every decision can be ultimately be traced to a fundamental desire that is not based on logic, but is coded into your organic being. You have no choice in these desires; some were programmed into you before you were born, and some developed as you grew.
But perhaps we argue the same point. What you call a "failure" would be decision that exists with no backing logic. But perhaps this "decision" is really just one of your core desires.
My dog is itching itself across the room. A potential decision looms ...
Ok, let's work through this.
... do I a) do something about it; or b) keep typing. Huge semantic trees open out from this simple binary choice, most of which ignore enormous parts of the phase space involved, such as doing neither and getting myself another cold beer instead or farting. The decision is not entirely semantic -- I'm not ever going to work through most of the complete decision tree, any more than a chess master actually thinks about all possible moves and all of the outcomes of all of those moves and (iterate to checkmate). I will prune that tree, instantly and without thinking. How I prune the tree is another decision, but it is not one I can make semantically, or I have a self-referential problem -- how do I decide how to prune the decision tree without considering all of the possible prunings, leading me right back to my original problem?
For some reason you've mystified the entire process of decision making when it's not necessary. Many parts of the decision tree have been worked through by your brain without your knowledge. The parts that were pruned "without thinking" were actually pruned by past thinking -- heuristics you've developed over your life and the dog's life. Chess players do the same thing -- pruning whole chunks of the decision tree based on experience with similar arrangements of the board. Your decision regarding the dog comes down to the weighing of a few desires:
* Repugnance at getting involved.
* Severity of the resulting skid mark.
* Knowledge the situation will likely resolve itself.
* Strong desire to continue writing.
* Other desires as they impose themselves -- beverage, intestinal gas, etc.
And while the dog is here, let me ask -- do animals have free will?
Worse, the actual decision and all of the semantics I use to arrive at it are represented by ...
Knowledge representation in the brain is a completely different puzzle that's not relevant here.
One thing that makes my decision about the dog free is that it is made by my brain ..
Stop right there. The rest of your paragraph merely served to bury this point. You believe you have free will simply because the decision was made inside your own brain? Does this mean my computer has free will when its computation occur inside its own processor?
Can I explain all of this? Of course not ..
Why would you say that, especially just after the paragraph where you explained all this?
Part of the reason my own will is "free" is that my own actions come as surprise after surprise, even to me.
This is a strange revelation, and merely indicates how little you know about yourself. Or maybe it indicates how unstable your brain is. But maybe you should ask your wife how often your decisions surprise her.
It's "magic" where I am at once the man behind the curtain and the audience and manage to be surprised both ways.
If you consign free will to the supernatural, you will never come to any kind of understanding. It's not magic, there are rules, and the better you understand those rules the better you understand yourself.
I've adopted the hypothesis that free will does not exist not because I believe it, but because it's a more useful framework than any other. This should be obvious especially here, at the end of this long message, where we still don't have a definition of free will.
-B
