The Mystery of Free Will: Donald Hoffman

[Music] I would like to thank my collaborators Federico Chris Jatin Robert and Manish each day we make many decisions in some cases our preferences but quite a pressure on our decision I might like chocolate croissants a little bit more than a stick of celery but we still feel that even though our preferences affect our choices there is still some real free will that we exert when we make a choice of course we don't think that we have unbounded freewill I can choose to jump but I can't choose to jump to the Sun so we when we think of freewill we think of a bounded but genuine free will and that's affected by our preferences but my colleagues in the neurosciences and philosophy have a very different view about this they think that we live in a machine world a deterministic world in which all the cogs are doing their thing and in fact free will is an illusion this is put out by for example by Francis Crick the discoverer of DNA the structure of DNA he says your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons and that's called the astonishing hypothesis but to the neurosciences in might the neuroscientists of my field this is not astonishing this is just the received opinion so the idea is that we're not really like that kind of machine that I showed you in the first place is more like a neural machine but you are under all machine you have 86 billion neurons and that's the machine that drives your behavior and there's no free will and one bit of act of evidence for this is that we can predict and this is true experimentally we can predict in careful experiments what you're going to choose to do even seven seconds ahead of when you're consciously aware of aware of having chosen we can predict from your brain activity what you're going to do so your brain activity actually predates your conscious awareness of your choice in some cases by seven seconds there's lots of evidence like this so if you're gonna have a theory of free will you have to understand how it comports with this fact Sam Harris in his book free will says how can we be free as conscious agents of everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware we can't and that is again the received opinion of my colleagues in the neurosciences and and in philosophy so we seem to have free will but we're really being pulled around and the puppet master is our brain and the neurons and behind that the genes that made our brain so we're literally puppets being pulled around by genes working through our brains that's the view as determinists it's not clear by the way even in a Newtonian world whether determinism is true there's something called Norton's dome thought I won't go into but it's just very interesting that even in Newtonian world it determinism may not be true but that's still not a problem for these determinists because they'll say there's also chance right whenever you see probabilities in a scientific theory you're going to have to interpret those probabilities and one way that's commonly interpreted is objective chance so Sam Harris says either our wills are determined by prior causes and we're not responsible for them or they are the product of chance and we're not responsible for them and those are the only talks either they district tournament like causes or they're determine by chance and you're the case you can't take responsibility for it so that's the Ricci opinion I would say 98% of my colleagues there are compatible ists who say yeah our behavior is determined just as we talked about but still you have a notion of free will after all it is your neurons and your genes that are making you do what you do so you have free will most of us that's not quite good enough right line I'm also growing fingernails and in some sense I don't want to think that I'm exercising free will to grow my fingernails so somehow that doesn't quite do it then there are also libertarians and this is the third major view that free will somehow rises above the plane of cause and effect of the physical world and basically no self-respecting neuro scientist or philosopher takes this point of view so it's just not it's not among academics incredible view partly because it's dualist so the theories of free will art determinists compatible lists and libertarians as we just talked about all of them are physicalists and what they're you think is that our brains cause our conscious experiences and our behavior but they have no idea how and in other talks like discuss this issue the hard problem of consciousness there's no theory that a scientist has ever come up with that explains how the neural activity could cause a single conscious experience like the taste of chocolate no one's been able to do it every time a theory tries to start with neural activity and give you the taste of taste of chocolate at the moment the chocolate appears it's really like a rabbit popping out of the Hat no explanation so my team is looking at a different approach let's start with consciousness as being fundamental and we'll try to see if we can start with a mathematical model and get back what we call the physical world as a limiting representation and one aspect of this comes from the theory of evolution it turns out that if our sense is evolved and were shaped by natural selection one can prove because evolution behind have as some mathematics you can actually prove that the probability is zero that our senses would evolve to show us the truth and that means that our perceptions of space and time and physical objects are almost surely probability zero not the truth this just follows from evolutionary thirst this it's very very clear and no one's been able to contradict it it's coming up I've got a book coming out in the summer the case against reality how evolution hid the truth from our eyes where I go through this in great detail so the idea is this this is all a virtual reality the space you perceive around you right now is a 3d virtual world and all the objects tables and chairs are your creation in a virtual real world I see you look you disappear then I create you again and that's what's happening right here we create space we create time we create objects on the fly so the idea is that we start with consciousness and then we have to understand how we create the physical world and also the brain and neurons so I tell my colleagues that neurons do not exist when they're not perceived and neurons have no causal powers and in particular they cause none of our conscious experiences and none of our behavior and they can't laugh me off the stage because I've got a theorem so how do we do how do we start with consciousness being fundamental well as a scientist I want to be precise so I can find out precisely why my theory is wrong so let's assume there's some world and that my country but I'll call a conscious agent has a field of possible experiences these are this is an awareness space and the points of the space are the particular contents that your awareness could have and usually the awareness space is limited try to think of a specific color experience that you've never seen before a specific color you've never seen before do you think happen you're seeing the limits of your awareness space pigeons have four color receptors they're seeing colors you can't even imagine their color awareness space is bigger than yours and then we have a class of actions that we can take and those affect the world so we have this triad the world affecting ours our field of awareness and then but what so that's the world diver W X is the field of awareness and G is the set of your actions and the world affects you by perception I'm calling that P so they pursue the world of X your perceptions so that's a map and it's a probabilistic map for any state of the world there's certain probabilities that you will have certain experiences and then once you have an experience like if I see a chocolate croissant then I can make a decision there's a high probability that I will act to eat the chocolate croissant and a low probability that I will eat act to eat the celery stick so so that's what Diaz it's so for each thing I'm seeing what are the probabilities for the actions I might take and already you can see there's hints of free will here right this is gonna be these probabilities in this model or where I'm gonna get my model of free will and then my actions then affect the state of the world also probabilistically so that's the conscious agent it's that that little triad it's actually got seven components and for mathematicians W X and G our probability space is PDA our markup kernels and ends an integer for the rest of us is just what I said but the point is is precise so that mathematicians can argue on details honest so I can have two conscious agents interacting the actions of one conscious agent can affect my experiences my experiences will affect how I decide my actions will affect the experience the other guy and what we have the idea then is that the universe is a vast social network of conscious agents interacting that's what the fundamental nature of reality is again I'm probably wrong but at least on precise that we can play with this and see where it leads us can we actually understand our spiritual experiences can we get back modern physics can we get it all from this model or not so it's precise so we can find out precisely if we're wrong and that's the mystical of course we're probably wrong but the point is to be absolutely precise so we can figure out where we're wrong and then move on so this leads to a notion of distributed free will there are very simple agents their field of awareness is very very trivial they only have what I call one bit there are two experiences that they could possibly have in their field of awareness so I call those one bit agents but they it turns out the mathematics allows those one bit agents to interact and they in their interaction can create a two bit agent and the two bit agents can create four bit agents and all the way up to infinity and so you get this lattice it's a vast social network and at the bottom are the one bday jhin's at the top are infinite consciousnesses which now we're getting into spirituality so this model allows you to go from us to infinite spiritual situations and each level the agents have their own freewill decisions that they can make but when they combine to make new agents at a higher level those new agents have a new non reductionistic ability to have free will and the free will decisions below influence the decisions above and the decisions above influence decisions below so what we get is this work for scientists this is fun because this is just a fun system complicated system to simulate but it's a very very complex multi-dimensional and dynamical model of freewill and we're working right now to simulate it here's an objection that my colleagues will have to this although Einstein wasn't one one of my colleagues I feel that I will to light my pipe said Einstein and I do it but how can i connect this up with the idea of free freedom what is behind the act of willing to light the pipe another act of willing like words the idea is that free will leads to darkness what is my freedom to to be free how can I choose what I choose and Sam Harris says the same I do not choose to choose what I choose there is a rigorous here that always ends in darkness so they're saying there's an explanatory gap here if you're talking about freewill freewill is just sort of magic so free welders you get this regress it ends in darkness and it's magic well as we said before according to sam harris either a wills are determined by prior causes and we're not responsible for them or their product of chance and we're not responsible for them well it turns out the very notion of cause itself ends in magic when philosophers and physicists try to think about what they mean by causation here's what they end up saying there is still very little agreement on the most central question concerning causation what is it law's counterfactual dependence manipulating transfer of energy we don't have a received opinion of causality it's a tough open question one of the greatest scientists right now working on causal models and he's he's a genius a pioneer judea pearl in his recent book the book of why says in his book any attempt to define causation in terms of seemingly simpler first-run concepts must fail that's why i've not attempted to define causation anywhere in this book that's where we are so cause you can't talk about the cause of a cause what's the cause of the cause you end in darkness just like you can't talk about what do i choose how do i choose to choose so we're not named worse off from the causal people chance well David Hume said chance is a mere negative word and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature we've made a little progress since human um there's a recent book the philosophy a philosophical guide to chance by Toby Hatfield great book and he says at the end of his review of it I recommend that we take an anti realist attitude towards chance in other words it's not real and he says I've reached this conclusion Reid reluctantly but no better opinion is available so the two pillars of modern anti freewill thought our chance and causality and both of them end in a regress that ends in darkness so they're in no better place than those of us who postulate free will the real issue is this do you want to start with a physical world that's unconscious purely unconscious ingredients then you're stuck with causality and chance if you start with the realm of conscious agents where agency is fundamental then whatever you see probabilities is not objective chance it's free will and we're equal in terms of that's where explanation stops but no problem in every scientific theory we have miracles we don't call them that we call them our presuppositions or our assumptions but there are miracles and every theory assumes the miracles and then it explains other stuff so assuming causality and chance is just a much as much miracle as assuming freewill and the Supreme Court has told us to deny freewill is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system Who am I to contradict the Supreme Court but even more to the point to the scientists a very famous scientist Hans Primus said the framework of experimental science requires the freedom of action as a constitutive though tacit presupposition the experimenter has to be free to choose how he's manipulating nature if you don't have that assumption the whole scientific method falls apart so just to do science you require freedom of the experimenter so conscious realism makes it possible to have a limited amount of free will but it's a very interesting huge namaka system we're participating in a vast social network where free will is the coin of the realm thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Science and Nonduality

Views: 158,271

Keywords: Donald Hoffman, determinism, compatibilism, libertarianism, causality, free will, consciousness, physicalism, chance, conscious agent

Id: cT7hf8NOEk4

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019