Nah, no way that's true. Even non-social fish have enteroceptive circuits. Granted their
"philosophy of free will" would be much simpler than ours. But that's only
because they have shorter and less complicated such circuits.
On 2/25/25 1:42 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Well said: "They just do what they do, and then do the next thing, and such
questions [about a philosophy of free will] don’t come up". I have the impression
that most people are just like that - except FRIAM folks of course.
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Santafe <desm...@santafe.edu>
Date: 2/25/25 3:03 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
I think I know, rather than repeating things I have said before, what I would
like to ask specifically to break away from simply repeating this question in a
circle that grants common-language usage more self-contained “meaning” than I
believe it has.
Probably the answer to whatever I say next is already in Nick’s and Laird’s
papers, which I have not had time to read. I don’t have a Claude account, or
else I would know that Claude already has the answer to this too.
I raised my objection a few weeks ago to ways of using language, and I think
Marcus responded right on the point, about an LLM’s handling of conflicts
between entrainment in whatever trajectory it had been on, and inputs through
its interface that pushed in some different direction.
Anyway, the question:
Since specific lesions can occur anywhere in the brain…
and to the extent that we interpret fMRI data as “locating” conflict-handling
in human thought in or around the amygdala and anterior cyngulate cortexes…
we could do a cross-sectional study of patients with lesions in these areas, and a differential comparison of their handling of either the language or the responses to language in word-clouds associated with framing of free-will concepts. This would of course be confounded, because all these things are learned over a lifecourse. So adults who got lesions (from, e.g. strokes) after having learned the patterns of usage, would be some odd mix of learned habits and autonomously-driven motives in the use of such terms and concepts. It would thus be helpful to do differential comparisons of late-lesion patients with any children who evidenced congenital abnormal or impaired formation of these regions that then affected their receptiveness to all subsequent usage templates that the culture gave them for such terms. Those cases, too, of course, would be confounded, probably monstrously so, since neurodevelopment can use the same mechanics in many areas. So a “clean” impairment
of amygdala or AC in an otherwise-modal brain is probably an oxymoron, developmentally speaking. But, one could start with such analyses, and see in how far they seem to admit interpretations that stay clustered around these terms and concepts (as opposed to just requiring that we throw up our hands and say “whole diffierent world for these people”).
I have this image that, for example, non-social fish would never develop a
hand-wringing philosophy of free will. They just do what they do, and then do
the next thing, and such questions don’t come up. If one could limit further to
parthenogenic cases, it would be even cleaner, because they would never have to
engage in the negotiations associated with mating. A purely solipsistic life.
Eric
> On Feb 24, 2025, at 6:27 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> If a LLM had constant inputs from cameras, microphones, chemical sensors,
and sensiomotor feedback, and was continuously training and performing inference,
could it have free will?
>
> From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2025 1:08 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will
>
> Actually I don't care much about views or traffic. I don't think many people read it
except the ones from this list. But I like discussions about interesting topics. I mentioned
the blog post here because I wasn't sure if I have (maybe unconsciously) stolen an idea from
one of you. Humans often forget where they have first seen or heard an idea. Daniel Dennett
mentions in his book "I've been thinking" that he was afraid of plagiarism (on
page 61-63) and describes it as the great academic sin.
>
> I believe LLMs work like humans in this respect: they are like money
laundering machines for copyrighted ideas who wash away the copyright. They also
tend to hallucinate, like we do in dreams at night. And they are excellent in
predicting the next word in a sentence (or action in a sequence), similar to the
motor cortex. They are in many ways similar to us. It is fascinating and a little
bit frightening what these LLMs and AIs can do already today.
>
> To come back to the question of free will: I am not sure if free willed
actions are only those that are caused by conscious thoughts. I believe conscious
thoughts can be used to prevent actions that we do not want. The first steps to a
free will is to become aware of all the hidden influences that try to control it.
>
> We have an "Influenceable will". When we become aware that our will is
influenced by ads or propaganda or some kind of marketing, we can take steps to reduce this
hidden influence for example by making the conscious decision to stop doing what the ads ask
for (for example stop buying McDonald's Big Macs although the ads promise us happiness and
joy if we do it).
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnicks...@gmail.com>
> Date: 2/23/25 11:59 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>, Jochen
Fromm <j...@cas-group.net>
> Subject: free will
>
>
> I put a comment Jochen's blog. Why dont we carry on over there and help
him generate traffic. I have attached here a couple of papers that support the
view that people are lousy predictors of their own behavior. If we [and only if]
we take free willed actions to be those that are caused by conscious thoughts,
then surely we must know what we are going to do before we start to do it and be
much better at making such predictions than are the people around us.
>
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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