Free will is not an illusion, it is a dream | Joscha Bach and Lex Fridman

you mentioned the elephant and the the monkey riding the elephant and uh consciousness is the monkey and there's some prodding that the monkey gets to do and sometimes the elephant listens i heard you got into some content maybe you can correct me but i heard you got into some contentious free will discussions uh is this with sam harris or something like that not that i know of some people on clubhouse told me you made a a bunch of uh um big debate points about free will well let me just then ask you where where in terms of the monkey and the elephant uh do you think we land in terms of the illusion of free will how much control does the monkey have we have to think about what the um free will is in the first place we are not the machine we are not the thing that is making the decisions we are a model of that decision-making process and there is a difference between making your own decisions and predicting your own decisions yes and that difference is the first person perspective and what basically makes decision-making um and the conditions of free will distinct from just automatically doing the best thing is that uh we often don't know what the best thing is we make decisions under uncertainty we make informed bets using a betting algorithm that we don't yet understand because we haven't reverse engineered our own mind sufficiently we don't know the expected rewards we don't know the mechanism by which we estimate the rewards and so on but there is an algorithm we observe ourselves performing where we see that we made facts and factors and the future and then some kind of possibility some motive gets raised to an intention and that's informed bad that the system is making and that making of the open bet the representation of that is what we call free will and it seems to be paradoxical because we think that's the crucial thing is about it that it's somehow indeterministic and yet if it wasn't deterministic it would be random and of course it cannot be random because it was if it was random if just dice were being thrown in the universe randomly forces you to do things it would be meaningless so the important part of the decisions is always the deterministic stuff but it appears to be indeterministic to you because it's unpredictable because if it was predictable you wouldn't experience it as a free will decision right you would experience it as just doing the necessary right thing and you see this continuum between the free will and the execution of automatic behavior when you are observing other people so for instance when you are observing your own children if you don't understand them you will use this agent model where you have a agent with a setpoint generator and the agent is doing the best it can to minimize the difference to the set point and it might be confused and sometimes impulsive or whatever but it's acting on its own free will and when you understand what happens in the mind of the child you see that it's automatic and you can out model the child you can build things around the child that will lead the child to making exactly the decision that you're predicting and in under these circumstances like when you are a stage magician or somebody who is dealing uh with people that this you sell a car to and you completely understand the psychology and the impulses and the space of thoughts that this individual can have at that moment under these circumstances it makes no sense to attribute free will because it's no longer decision making under uncertainty you are already certain for them there is uncertainty but you already know what they're doing but what about for you so is this akin to like systems like cellular automata where it's deterministic but when you squint your eyes a little bit it starts look like there's agents making decisions at the higher so when you zoom out and look at the entities that are composed by the individual cells even though the there's uh underlying simple rules that uh make the system evolve in deterministic ways it looks like there's organisms making decisions is that where the illusion of free will emerges that jump and scale it's a particular type of model but this jump in scale is crucial the jumping scale happens whenever you have too many parts to count and you cannot make a model at that level and you try to find some higher level regularity and the higher level regularity is a pattern that you project into the world to make sense of it and agency is one of these patterns right you have all these cells that interact with each other and the cells in our body are set up in such a way that they benefit if their behavior is coherent which means that they act as if they were serving a common goal and which that means that they will evolve regulation mechanisms that act as if they were serving a common goal and now you can make sense of these all these cells by projecting the common goal into them right so for you then free will is an illusion no it's a model and it's a construct it's basically a model that the system is making of its own behavior and it's the best model that it can come up with under the circumstances and it can get replaced by a different model which is automatic behavior when you fully understand the mechanism under which you are acting yeah but the another word for model is what story so it's the story you're telling i mean you actually have control is there such a thing as a you and is there such a thing as you have in control it's like are you manifesting your evolution as a entity in some sense the you is the model of the system that is in control it's a story that the system tells itself about somebody who is in control yeah and the contents of that model are being used to inform the behavior of the system okay so the system is completely mechanical and the system creates that story like a loom and then it uses the contents of that story to inform its actions and writes the results of that actions into the story so how's that not an illusion the story is written then or or rather we're not the writers of the story yes but we always knew that no we we don't know that when did we know that i think that's mostly a confusion about concepts the uh conceptual illusion in our culture comes from the idea that we live in physical reality and that we experience physical reality and that we have ideas about it and then you have this dual list interpretation where you have two substances uh res extensor the world that you can touch and that is made of extended things and res cognitions which is the world of ideas and in fact both of them are mental representations one is the representations of the world as a game engine that your mind generates to make sense of the perceptual data and the other ones the world yes that's what we perceive as the physical world but we already know that the physical world is nothing like that right quantum mechanics is very different from what you and me perceive as the world the world that you me perceive is a game engine yeah and there are no colors and sounds in the physical world they only exist in the game engine generated by your brain and then you have ideas that are not cannot be mapped onto extended regions right so the objects that have a spatial extension in the game engine are res extensor and the objects that don't have a physical extension in the game engine are ideas and they both interact in our mind to produce models of the world yep but you know when you play video games i understand that what's actually happening is zeros and ones inside of uh inside of a computer instead of a cpu and a gpu but you're still seeing like uh the rendering of that and you're still making decisions whether to shoot to turn left or to turn right if you're playing a shooter or every time i start thinking about skyrim and elder scrolls and walking around in beautiful nature and swinging a sword but it feels like you're making decisions inside that video game so even though you don't have direct access uh in terms of perception to the the bits to the zeros and ones it still feels like you're making decisions and your decisions are actually feels like they're being applied all the way down to the zeros and ones yeah so it feels like you have control even though you don't direct access to reality so there is basically a special character in the video game that is being created by the video game engine yeah and this character is serving the aesthetics of the video game and that is you yes but i feel like i have control inside the video game like all those like 12 year olds that kick my ass on the internet so for when you play the video game it doesn't really matter that they're zeros and once right you don't care about the vids of the bus you don't care about the nature of the cpu that it runs on what you care about are the properties of the game that you're playing and you hope that the cpu is good enough yes and a similar thing happens when we interact with physics the world that you and me are in is not the physical world the world that you and me are in is a dream world how close is it to the real world though we know that it's not very close but we know that the dynamics of the dream world match the dynamics of the physical world to a certain degree of resolution right the causal structure of the dreamboat is different so you see waves crashing on your feet right but there are no waves in the ocean there's only water molecules that have tangents uh between the molecules that are uh the result of electrons in the molecules interacting with each other aren't they like very consistent we're just seeing a very uh crude approximation isn't our dream world very consistent like to the point of being mapped directly one-to-one to the actual physical world as opposed to us being completely tricked this is like where you have like that it's not a trick that's that's my point it's not an illusion it's a form of data compression yeah it's an attempt to deal with the dynamics of too many parts to count at the level at which we're entangled with the best model that you can find yeah so we can act in that dream world and our actions have impact in the in the real world in the physical world yes to which we don't have access yes but it's basically like accepting the fact that the software that we live in the dream that you live in is generated by something outside of this world that you and me are in so is the software deterministic and do we not have any control do we have so free will is uh having a conscious being the free will is the monkey being able to steer the elephant no it's slightly different basically in the same way as you are modeling the water molecules in the ocean that engulf your feet when you are walking on the beach as waves and there are no waves but only the atoms on more complicated stuff underneath the atoms and so on and you know that right you would accept yes there is a certain abstraction that happens here it's a simplification of what happens in the simplification that is designed in such a way that your brain can deal with it temporarily and spatially in terms of resources and tuned for the predictive value so you can predict with some accuracy whether your feet are going to get wet or not but it's a really good approach it's a really good interface and approximation yes it's like equals mg squared is a good equations are good approximations for or they're much better approximation so to me waves is a really nice approximation of what's all the complexity that's happening underneath basically it's a machine learning model that is constantly tuned to minimize surprises so it basically tries to predict as well as it can what you're going to perceive next are we talking about which is the machine learning our perception system or the dream world the machine world dreamworld is the result of the machine learning process of the perceptual system that's doing the compression yes and uh the model of you as an agent is not a different type of model or it's a different type but not uh not different as in its model like nature from the model of the ocean right some things are oceans some things are agents and uh one of these agents is using your own control model the output of your model the things that you perceive yourself as doing and that is you what about the fact that it's like when you're standing um and with the water on your feet and you're looking out into the vast like open water of the ocean and then there's a beautiful sunset and it well the fact that it's beautiful and then maybe you have like friends or a loved one with you and like you feel love what is that as the dream world or what is that yes it's all uh happening inside of the dream okay but see the word dream makes it seem like it's not real yeah of course it's not real the physical universe is real but the physical universe is incomprehensible and it doesn't have any feeling of realness the feeling of realness that you experience gets attached to certain representations where your brain assesses this is the best model of reality that i have so the only thing that's real to you is the thing that's happening at the very base of reality like yeah for something to be real it needs to be implemented so uh the model that you have of reality is a real in as far as it is a model right it's an appropriate description of the world to say that there are models that are being experienced but the world that you experience is not necessarily implemented you

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 55,797

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, joscha bach, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: JScMumYm6w8

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021